Looking Ahead.
Evaluating the shift in my thinking over the previous year and how that shift has impacted my outlook on the year ahead.
Time is one of those things whose value we do not understand unless we reflect on it.
Upon brief reflection of the past year—that truly chaotic year— I had deemed it to be rather short. It was only March of the previous year when I decided to start this newsletter.
I started this newsletter with a mailing list of precisely 0. Today, I have hundreds of you viewing the weekly newsletter, reviewing some of the biggest future-oriented stories of the week. Others, genuinely interested in the sometimes haphazard ideas I post. For this I am grateful.
I went through the numerous articles that I had written— some great, many breathtakingly awful. It was only then, that I had realized that this past year was far from brief.
I noticed an evolution of my views, my aspirations, my curiosities, my focus. This change while not uncommon to me—I change my mind quite a bit— had been really dramatic. This I attribute to the sudden change in social life this pandemic brought about.
The world around us has changed.
Crises force us to reevaluate the world around us. While we may be far from rational agents, the world demands that we get certain decisions right or blunder so spectacularly that it may take us decades to recover.
Sometimes we never do.
To act ever so rationally however briefly or intermittently that may be, demands that we adjust our views, expectations, and actions so we may get the right outcome.
As I evaluated my “priors” I wanted to share with you some of the ways my thinking had changed on certain issues as the previous year progressed.
I now value centralization.
I started this year reading heavily into the work of Hayek and even posting my review of his magnum opus “The Road To Serfdom”. While I didn’t agree with all that it said, I finally came to understand that the decentralization we see within institutions especially in the west today, came about due to the desire to prevent authoritarian rule.
Some saw the rise of Nazi Germany and the USSR and believed that the delegation of governance to markets would be the best way to prevent authoritarian entities like these from arising again.
Upon further reflection upon that point as well as the values that 2020 had instilled in me, I realized that it was this very mechanism, this decentralization that resulted in the desire for centralization and authoritarianism.
When you have a fractured government that proceeds so slowly to the needs of a population, people simply desire progress and any means with which that could occur. As such populism was the powerful force it was. It was in this realization that I acknowledge and advocate centralization in an already heavily decentralized world.
This isn’t to say that I advocate a world in which a government has full monopolistic power over each and everything. But I finally understand why society tends towards centralization.
Throughout history, humankind has delegated its most pressing desires to supposedly omnipotent beings. This delegation has been shown to bring about some amount of serenity in the hearts and minds of believers. Modernity has seen a dramatic decline in such a belief. The church and other institutions of faith, including the individual as a religious entity, have seen a dramatic decline. Many can attribute this to the fact that a lot of the basic needs have been fulfilled.
The question is, by whom?
Today it is institutions that have taken the role of a god. But in many ways, they are the best we’ve come towards domesticating the conception of a god.
We want the benefits that a god provides us, without the sacrifices that a god demands we make.
In a modern society that may mean ceding certain “freedoms” to institutions with the hope that many will be spared an ill fate.
This desire for a centralized entity whom we may delegate our desires shows itself especially in all technology where many of us are ardent in our beliefs for decentralization.
Not too long ago, I remember Thiel making the point that AI is fundamentally communist, and that Cryptography was capitalist— with “communist” implying the heavy centralization of resources. That it was for this very reason that the CCP valued AI. laughed at this, knowing it to be wishful thinking.
The truth is that ALL technology is centralizing.
What we perceive as decentralization in many cases merely happens to be a shift in the concentration of power. Remote Work will mean talent isn’t sourced in one location. It does however mean that already dominant companies have a wider pool of talent to vet from. The rise of cryptocurrencies merely means that we will have another asset that breeds a different sort of wealth. But dreams of decentralization will soon vanish when governments find a way to make use of the technology powering it. But this isn’t necessarily bad, that is if we are conscious of what is going on.
The value of centralization lies in the fact that it allows not merely an action to be taken on pressing issues, but that it enables mass convenience. Many of us knowingly sigh about the freedoms we have given away to Big Tech companies. But when google temporarily went down, few of us may have realized how dependent we were on a single company for so many tools. Few dared ask why we would give them—and mostly willingly— so much control over our lives. The answer to this lies in the fact that it was convenient.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight back against the degradation of our privacy. We should if anything call for far more transparency in the ways these companies manage our data. But the near-monopolistic control over tech has allowed certain coordination of resources that has indeed made our lives far easier. Google and Microsoft alone have made significant progress concerning AI research. Centralized Institutions enable this sort of progress.
We open a Gmail account which in turn allows us to easily sync Youtube on various devices as well as provides us with great email services. We take this convenience for granted. But I consider it a sort of sorcery that I can close Youtube on my PC and continue watching a video I had closed at nearly the same spot at which I had closed it, on my phone. It’s seamless and efficient.
If we widen our scope onto larger society, we see competence emerge in countries that largely favor centralized institutions that happen to be somewhat open in the way they operate.
Take Taiwan for example, whose Covid response could largely be attributed to the government’s coordination with civic hackers. The Government sets priorities but allowed the general public to participate in the contribution to certain priorities which in turn returned a benefit to society at large.
Covid has yet to rear its head there the same way it has in the west.
Many who largely advocate supply-side economics in the US have lauded Israel’s rapid pace of vaccination while languishing on the slow pace of their own country. It’s also why it’s disappointing that instead of advocating the reemergence of at least some amount of US State Capacity to facilitate coordination, the best they got is, “why don’t we leave this up to Amazon?”. It also happens to be that these people will praise the efficacy of Singapore’s efficient government. I may not be fond of its illiberal democracy, but one could easily argue that Singapore is a competent functioning state in every definition of the word. Education, Housing, and various essential amenities are within arm’s reach for every citizen. It is upon the satisfaction of these essential needs that progress despite its mechanisms for occurrence, flourishes.
If 2020 taught me anything, it is that decentralization is mere “recentralization”. That in any case, the best form of governance is a centralized democratic form of governance with strong state capacity. The neoliberalism of the 1970s that had insisted on a delegation of matters of importance to businesses, had also in part given up on any sort of shared goals in the West. This revealed itself in the lackluster pandemic response by a lot of the US and many European nations.
In this regard, Singapore, Taiwan, Chinese state capitalism, and New Zealand— all different in their final mode of governance, reveal a shared emphasis on the necessity of state capacity to tackle truly significant problems.
On Science and Tech.
Tech pulled through in that it helped us deal with the pandemic’s effect on social institutions. Zoom and other video conferencing apps allowed us to maintain education, the operation of businesses, and many other functions that are vital to social functioning. This would in turn see the dramatic shift towards remote work, especially amongst knowledge workers.
Amazon and many e-commerce companies would prove themselves essential to many of us who had the means to stay at home and abide by social distancing requirements. To others on the frontline, there was very little shielding them.
It is for these people I believe that the technology of the future should be working.
We also saw Big Pharma— an industry hated by many for the right reasons— procure a vaccine in record time. We saw GPT-3 light up our imaginations of a world in which coding seems even more magical than it is right now. We saw Deepmind make significant inroads in the solution of the protein folding problem. We saw SpaceX come even closer towards making casualized interstellar travel and a global internet a reality. All these conspired to remake a Techno-optimist out of me.
I learned that the government is crucial to innovation. Some may view regulation as an impediment to innovation, and it very well could be in some cases. But I would learn that wherever big breakthroughs have occurred, the government had a significant role in their occurrence. That Google wouldn’t be the behemoth it is today had it not been for its cooperation with National Defense operatives; that every component in the initial iPhone was the result of governmental initiative. In this regard, the work of Mariana Mazzucato helped me become more Schumpterian in my outlook. Public-Private partnership is the key to tackling big problems very quickly.
The past year also had me constantly reevaluating my views on Venture Capital. On the one hand, Venture Capital has helped bridge the gap in innovation dropped by the decline of Big Corporate Research. But this has only applied to computing which has had largely low risk. Where it has failed to show itself relevant is in areas of high significance, high risk, and high uncertainty such as Biotechnology. Venture Capital will have to reinvent itself, proving itself to be not merely about opportunism. It will have to show that it is willing to bet on truly aspirational projects that are far more “Knightian” in their nature.
Through all this, it was worth noting that there will forever be problems that technology will not be able to solve; problems whose integration with technology may further compound said problems. To these, it is worth knowing that democracy is a participatory process, and that we owe it unto society to create the conditions that help its institutions flourish; that we may, in turn, be able to tackle these seemingly impossible but very human problems.
I’m going to be reading way less.
Lastly, I came to find a new perspective on my reading habits. Early readers of this newsletter would observe me post a book review almost every week. I enjoyed the process of reading. I enjoyed the process of writing about what I had learned. However, I rarely enjoyed the feeling that came with treating the first opening of a page down to the last written word of a review as a process of production.
I accidentally fell into the trap of believing that “reading 100 books a year is great”. I would become a person who had read widely. But I had come to ask myself if I could truly synthesize ideas in a way that wasn’t merely a rehashing of some idea someone had already spoken of.
How deeply do I engage with the material in a book? How do I gain the most benefit out of reading a book? How do I apply more consistently that which I have learned? These are all questions I asked myself and whose answers I found insufficient.
Investors and other thought-leaders have encouraged an environment that allows for the superficial engagement of ideas with none of the depth that comes thereof. They’ve encouraged an environment that has made dilettantes of many of us. I was not immune to this culture. The fast-paced information culture has created a sort of FOMO amongst many of us concerning books. But if many were asked if they could remember far more in-depth a particular occurrence within a book, many would not be able to do so.
I realized this as the previous year was reaching its end.
This year, I hope not merely to read books, but to master them. I hope to make the time I dedicate towards the few books I read, worth it. I also hope this leaves me far more time to properly digest the effort spent into making certain works a reality in a way that justifies the effort put into writing them.
On The Year Ahead.
There’s much to be grateful for even when looking back at the previous year. There is also much to look forward to concerning the year ahead.
On a personal note, I hope to write far more sparsely, but also far more deeply than I already had in the previous year. I will also be launching a newsletter centered around the concept of “learning how to learn” in which I detail my various attempts at learning. I have also considered introducing a subscriber version of the newsletter.
On a broader level, I see the year ahead to be one in which many nations reevaluate the fragility of their institutions and become far more experimental with policies to help make them more antifragile.
If the pace of technological innovation stays the same, we may be up for some truly groundbreaking stuff especially in the area of biotech; revelations that will be the aftermath of the resources spent on trying to tackle this ongoing pandemic.
“Super Covid” is starting to bother me a bit, but hopefully, the world could start picking up its pace of vaccination.
On that note— despite being slightly late— I wish all of you a happy, prosperous New Year.
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Thanks for reading and till next time.
"In this regard, Singapore, Taiwan, Chinese state capitalism, and New Zealand— all different in their final mode of governance, reveal a shared emphasis on the necessity of state capacity to tackle truly significant problems."
Truth