Sam Enright works on innovation policy at Development Irelandan independent policy center in Dublin, and runs a book called The Fitzwilliam. Most important to us, to him personal bloghe writes popularly link to collect; The following is his abridged version Links for January.
Blogs and short links
1. Henry Oliver in literary celebrations of 2026. Henry looked again hire a student research John Stuart Mill. I hope the intern will discuss Mill’s essays on political economy Indian land and continue limited selective voting me too, which I find more interesting In freedom.
2. From my partner Seán O’Neill McPartlin: In political discussions, high taxes and land prices are often blamed on the ‘realists’, but the use of that term runs much deeper. you are philosophically confused that I can’t help but think that there are many such arguments not even wrong. Peter McLaughlin put it right:
Amazingly clean insight from Seán that I hadn’t seen before: when people blame speculation on high house prices, they often say two completely different practices that would be the opposite results in performance. Sometimes it means hoarding land, refusing to sell and grabbing a better deal; sometimes it means overtrading, selling more often because the houses have money. Yet people still talk as if ‘speculation’ is a single, single (upward) effect on house prices.
3. The ‘single market’ of the European Union to be allowed to wither and die. I mentioned this blog post at a drinks reception recently, and a Dutch man gave me grief for referring to “self-righteous Europeans” in the third person (as if I’m not). Note that some statistics in this post – that EU member states have a de facto 45% prices in goods and 110% in services—there are very misleading.
4. In addition to the Great Firewall, some Chinese provinces they compete to include more investigationsover and above the checks required of them by the central government. Henan is a leader in this area. It is becoming increasingly common for Chinese websites to block access to any IP address based outside the mainland. A friend who is negotiating with international companies for business in China says he never expected his work to have a VPN in the middle to China.
5. About Posted by Tyler Cowen about the utilitarian record of US-backed regime reforms, this the whole page you are crazy:
I can certainly think of ways to remove a dictator with more dignity than a Navy SEAL rick-roll.
6. Congratulations to Jamie Rumbelow for winning ia Sidney Award (at the gate) from David Brooks in his Works in Progress piece about Manhattan’s detailed network of steam tunnels.
7. Polling data: 12% of Americans they say he has a license using a submarine. Is it Lizardman’s always in height?
8. Thomas Nagel, what is it like to be a bat, a poetry program.
9. Sam Mendelsohn’s introduction to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. It really seems like reading one of the illustrated programs is the way to go. A section cut from the last column of my article Notes on Taiwan it contained speculation as to why the Eastern classics are so long compared to the Western ones (I still don’t know). I really like this quote from it AK Ramanujan:
No Indian reads the Mahabharata for the first time
This helpful comments about the Marginal Revolution provides the essence of Indian oral culture.
Music and podcasts
1. From the Works in Progress podcast: Anton Howes on how Henry VIII started by mistake the Industrial Revolution. There is a lot of overlap between the discussion here and Anton’s session on Adam Smith’s conference.
2. Seun Kuti, Egypt 80, It’s Still Heavy (Puts on the Uncrowned Head). My favorite song is this one Dey. I also enjoyed Radiolab’s interpretation of Fela Kuti’s an important role in the history of Afrobeat. And here it is in full 12-part series about Fela quoted from that passage. Egypt 80 (formerly Africa 70) was Fela’s team, now led by his son Seun.
3. Dave Chappelle has the stand-up bit about how, if jobs move from China to America, the iPhone will cost $9,000. He had the right order of magnitude: the only American-made smartphone using ten-year-old technology as well it costs $2,000. Naturally enough, it’s called the Liberty Phone.
4. Charles Lloyd, Zakir Hussain, Eric Harland, Sangam. A very good Indian inspired jazz mix, which I wrote about in January 2025 as a criminal sub-list. Dancing on one foot is a very accessible song. See also Batson’s early forays into Indian classical music.
5. It was Michel Foucault libertarian? Like many questions Rasheed Griffith asks, I suspect that Betteridge’s rule of thumb it works.
Books and Papers
1. Miscellaneous, Beyond the Benefits of Thinking: Reducing Commonly Forgotten Skills with Large-Scale Models of Reasoning. Read my AI journal club, which was in an experimental ‘wisdom of crowds’ mode. We read this paper to reach a collective decision, before seeing the market rate, about what to bet on. The prediction market by Gavin Leech about whether reinforcement learning impairs off-target skills. Right-minded centrist that I am, my answer was 50%.
I think this paper was so much beyond my level that I am still in the “see some words and talk to Claude and what he means” phase. But you can still learn a lot by doing it! Reading computer science papers is a very different concept from reading philosophy, history, etc., in that “learning” is secondary to using the techniques themselves. I’m still a noob at that, although Claude Code helps a lot.
Reinforcement learning is probably one of the easiest areas of computer science for an economist to learn. Basic mathematical mechanics (value functions, dynamic programming, fixed point theorems) will be familiar to anyone who has considered doing an econ PhD in a very difficult department.
‘Reinforcement learning’ is also one of those terms, as well considerationnow the new ‘uns are being used in a confusing way that is the opposite of decades of previous usage. Sometimes I hear people use RL as if it is the same as the entire post-training phase of the LLM. At least in A book by Richard SuttonRL is a set of methods for learning how to maximize the cumulative reward in an environment that can be modeled as Markov decision process. With this definition, it seems arguable that reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) should count as true RL. People also sometimes use ‘RL’ when talking about things like this supervised maintenancewhich is true not RL. So I think my contribution to this group was more like that of a philosopher: arguing that the original question was confused because of its failure to distinguish a semantic distinction that many people find offensive and relevant.
2. Andrew Brown, JD Bernal: Scientist. One of the worst science books I have ever read. I’m sure John Desmond Bernal was one of the great scientific polymaths of the 20th century. I have many thousands of words of notes about this book, and I hope to go and do a profile of his work Asimov Press sometimes.
3. Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, Machine Logic Theory. A paper that grew out of Dartmouth summer workshop in AI. Logic Theorist was an automated theorem proving program that started with programming JOHNIAC at RAND. In this paper, The Logic Theorist is presented with 52 ideas from the second chapter of Russell and Whitehead’s book. Principia Mathematicawhich was able to prove 38. In one case, the evidence is even better than that of Russell and Whitehead themselves. Personally, I find this very surprising; AI has made the first contribution to mathematics – at least in the sense of simplifying existing proofs – since the 1950s! In any case, wasting too much time studying Bertrand Russell last year it has paid off more than I expected.
Films and videos
1. Park Chan-wook, There Is No Other Option (어쩔수시다). From the director of The decision to leave again Old boytwo of my favorite Korean movies. This movie won’t stay with me like Park’s other movies, but it was light and funny, and we had a great time watching it. The central comic tool of making a certain industry seem absurdly bigger than it really is economically works very well.
The Korean Embassy in Ireland should run some sort of commemorative event Kevin O’Rourkemissionary from County Cavan who translated a large portion of Korean cultural literature into English for the first time. He became a professor at Kyung Hee University, an honorary Korean citizen, and the first foreigner in history to receive a doctorate in Korean literature. I used to know some of his family friends from Busan. We really have people everywhere.
2. On YouTube, we turned on Amanda Askell to train Claude’s character and why Opus 3 was so well coordinated. Welch Labs also describes the phenomenon of double down and how it broke the conventional wisdom in mathematics learning theory. Finally, there is Jacob Collier again Esperanza Spalding On NPR’s Small Desk.
You can read the full version of Sam’s links for January here.
[1] I saw someone on Twitter recently describe JS Mill’s style of writing as “a bachelor’s degree with a midnight deadline”, an assessment with which I might disagree with Henry.
[2] Shockingly, “The Henan Cyberspace Affairs Commission could not be reached for comment.”
[3] I found DK an illustrated version of the Mahabharata by my old colleague from Mumebai. Perhaps my fondest memory of that apartment was trading back and forth with oddly translated cultural cues: “I see Gujarati spidermanand I raised you Irish Spongebob.”
[4] Oddly enough, this result is almost entirely driven by a quarter of Hispanic adults (!) who say they know how to use a submarine. Is there a tradition of Latin American pranksterism that I didn’t know about?
[5] I hope this doesn’t come across as annoying; it is truly an amazing feat of engineering.
[6] See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s section 3.5 entry into the philosophy of computing.
