Sönke.ehret

Metrics and data. I do computational social science. Work on applied cultural evolution, social norms, strat comms. Views are my own.

[Sönke.ehret @s_ehret]

@cboyack Hilarious

[nxthompson @nxthompson]

This is an amazing quote from Lindsey Graham about when he realized how politics works. https://t.co/sh04ahQOFq

[Ben Judah @b_judah]

I met Lindsay Graham several times.

He mattered to the Foreign Office and the British Embassy as a wise-cracking, reliable friend, committed to maximising Western power in an hour that has lost its allure for the new generation in Congress.

Both in opposition and in government, I had a chance to encounter some two dozen odd Senators and Congressmen, interested in foreign affairs. But really, regardless of Left or Right, I was meeting two generational cohorts: that of the Lindsay Graham the Boomer and that of the Millennial JD Vance.

The foreign policy Boomers, that older, fading, generation, relished being the go between for countries like Britain, France, Israel, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia or whoever the ally of special concern was in their district, when it came to the White House or unlocking the Senate floor.

Graham was a true majordomo of that role. He found personal excitement, real influence and a sense of moral grandeur in his campaigns to mould the world with America power. Allies mattered to him because he saw them as tools, not drains, enhancing American strength.

In this he was quite unlike the Millennial generation, who like J.D. Vance, see allies as mostly freeloaders and the quest for primacy on every continent as a fools errand. Its practitioners undermining American security with their campaigns. And many of those allies, such as Israel or Ukraine, as now essentially suspect to a chunk of one side of the aisle or the other.

Whilst friendly, the foreign policy Millennials in Congress take none of the relish, that Graham did, in acting like a Roman consul, pitching clients, supplicants and expeditions to the Emperor. What the passing of that generation means I found was a subject of some angst to most allied ambassadors from Europe and the Middle East.

In the meetings I joined with Graham, he was focused on pushing sanctions on Russia through MAGA and finding a way forward for Israeli-Saudi normalisation. I was struck by the glint in his eyes of a man who truly lived for this kind of politics. Quite unlike most politicians you meet who, overburdened and overwhelmed — like the dog that caught the car — never give the impression of liking the top that much of that greasy pole.

But what most struck me most was when it came to diplomacy, he had the kind of accumulated experience and contact book that only an imperial Senator could have, not a provincial European legislator. Texting Bibi and MBS and half the EU leaders. A reach way surpassing, on this continent, most of our heads of government. The truth is we simply don’t have that many figures like this in Britain anymore — perhaps Tony Blair comes closest — and they are not in Parliament.

[Mark Z. Jacobson @mzjacobson]

If successful, lithium-air batteries will kick jet fuel out of the sky and bunker fuel out of the ocean.

"Mainstream lithium-ion batteries have an energy density of ~250-270 Wh/kg, while future solid-state alternatives are expected to achieve ~500 Wh/kg. Lithium-air configurations present a theoretical energy density limit of 12,000 Wh/kg, a ceiling that matches the energy capacity of conventional gasoline."

CATL eyes 12,000 Wh/kg theoretical limit lithium-air EV battery to end range anxiety
https://t.co/8r4kkyXTJ2

Air Energy Closes Seed Round to Scale DOE-Validated Solid-State Lithium-Air Battery
https://t.co/N1NorP4IIy

[Hunter📈🌈📊 @StatisticUrban]

One of my favorite Deng anecdotes.

[John H. Boyer @johnhboyer]

anyway here’s the complete works of plato, greek and english side by side, every word parseable, free forever
https://t.co/m4JnhD3aGz

[Puneet Patwari @system_monarch]

Google finds any webpage on the entire internet in 0.3 seconds.

But Windows search can't find a file on your own laptop in under 10.

How is searching the entire internet faster than searching one hard drive?

[Sönke.ehret @s_ehret]

lol

[0xDipper @Dipper_pol]

Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry:

a 10-sigma market crash has odds of roughly 1 in Avogadro's number. by the Gaussian math taught in every business school, it simply can't happen.

"It should never happen. It happens every day, somewhere, to somebody."

October '87? a 23-sigma day. and 10-sigma moves, he says, are "all over the place."

his verdict on the Gaussian risk model taught in every business school: "sheer idiocy."

~70-min lecture, free. the mathematician Taleb calls his master, on why markets break the math ↓

[David Galbraith @daveg]

A/C has been one of the most impotant technologies for improving human wellbeing and mitigating imbalance between rich and poor nations and individuals.
Founder of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew "It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency."

[Andrew Jefferson @EastlondonDev]

I am worried about the future in Europe right now. There are no foundation AI labs here. There are no GPU fabs here (despite having ASML) and no plans to build or upgrade any foundry with sub 7nm capabilities (despite EU CHIPS act). There is no energy policy for the power AI data centers need. There are pockets of excellence but the strategic foundations are totally missing. Doing any work at the technological frontier of tech from manufacturing to robotics to AI is dependent on Asia and the USA (try making an autonomous robot without chips and GPUs from Asia or training one without AI models and compute from USA). Why is Europe so out of the loop (building 12-28nm fabs in Dresden, WTF are we gonna do with these?)? How do we get on track?

[Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior]

I know AI makes test giving harder, but I wish I could redo grad school with AI there to help learn

[Rudi Bachmann @BachmannRudi]

He is finally speaking the truth.

[Hannes Kerber @HannesKerber]

Humboldt University in Berlin: where the home of German classical archaeology is now considered expendable. Two centuries of scholarship sacrificed to budget spreadsheets. Winckelmann would be thrilled.

[Sönke.ehret @s_ehret]

https://t.co/98l98sP6j9

[Mambo Italiano @mamboitaliano__]

Europeans today realizing that Elon Musk will be a trillionaire with wealth bigger than entire European countries

(Sweden, Austria, Norway, Ireland, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Finland, Portugal, Romania, Czech Republic and many others 🚀💸)

[Pedro Santa Clara @psantacl]

Six famous economists — @JosephEStiglitz , @PikettyWIL , @jasonhickel among them — published a manifesto in the @guardian last week: "growth is a doomed strategy." They say they've done the maths.

I checked the maths.

The claim that growth failed the poor is contradicted by the most uncontroversial dataset in economics: extreme poverty fell from 44% of humanity in 1981 to under 10% today — during the very decades they call a failure. China alone lifted 800 million people, not with a UN roadmap, but with growth.

The "92% of excess emissions" statistic? It's one of the authors citing his own paper, without saying so — and it's not a measurement, it's a moral allocation dressed up as data.

The policy toolkit — "public control of strategic assets," "credit guidance" — has a track record: Soviet collectivization, the Great Leap Forward, Venezuela, and Sri Lanka's 2021 fertilizer ban, which starved the poor it claimed to serve within eighteen months.

What worries me most: degrowth is being marketed to young people who feel locked out — telling them their stagnation is virtue. It's a swindle. The young aren't victims of too much growth. They are the first victims of its absence.

Growth is the only anti-poverty program that has ever worked.

[Arvind Narayanan @random_walker]

This is how so many data-driven companies screw their users and shoot themselves in the foot. My guess is every time Uber runs a 2-week A/B test where they give some users accurate time estimates and other users deceptive time estimates, the deceptive arm wins — many people probably compare Uber and Lyft time estimates and pick one, so lying about wait times increases the number of trips booked in the short run. But what the data won't show is that people gradually catch on to the deception over a period of months or years and lose trust in the company or the sector altogether, and use the app less or quit entirely.

[Sönke.ehret @s_ehret]

@Handre But the glorious beauty of it is more than enough compsation

[Machiavelli Bot @UnmodernmanBot]

A person’s morality changes when desire enters the picture. The loyal become flexible, the honest become selective, the disciplined become poetic, and the wise suddenly find exceptions. Appetite is the great editor. It rewrites principles people say they never betray.