Sam’s Links: January Edition

Sam works on innovation policy at Progress Ireland, an independent policy think tank in Dublin, and runs a publication called The Fitzwilliam. Most relevant to us, on his personal blog, he writes a popular link roundup; what follows is an abridged version of his Links for December.

Blogs and short links

1. I’ve finished my Notes on Taiwan. I have been pleased with the response. It made it to Marginal Revolution, The Browser, and Conor Friedersdorf’s Best of Journalism list.

2. I appeared on Matt Teichman’s podcast.

3. What should middle powers do for compute strategy?

4. The scientific contributions of the Carlsberg beer company. Danish Guinness?!

5. We finally have Goodreads for academic papers.¹ Predictably, Gavin Leech has already joined and makes up a significant fraction of all content on the website.

6. Pitches are now welcome for In Development, a new Works in Progress-inspired magazine focused on the developing world.

7. From The Fitzwilliam: our essay about why most foreign aid never leaves the country, but weirdly, this is fine (for now).

8. The Guardian on the life of Saul Kripke. Can’t a man army crawl in front of a group of undergraduates without it making it into his obituary?

During a seminar in a lecture room he had recently taught in, [Kripke] was seen crawling along the central table, reaching down to grab an umbrella, and crawling back again. He had wanted to be inconspicuous, he said, when questioned about that method of retrieval.

I also note that Kripke was an exception to the general rule that philosophy doesn’t have prodigies:

He had taught himself ancient Hebrew by the age of 6, had finished reading Shakespeare’s complete works by 9 and published his first completeness theorem in modal logic when he was 18.

By pure coincidence, I first learned about Kripke’s causal theory of reference in a philosophy of language class on the day that he died. Later that week, I suffered the greatest burn of my philosophical career, when a tutor told me that, if Saul Kripke had heard the argument I had just made, “he would come back to life, just to die again”.²

9. The beauty of giving things sustained attention.

10. Best of Wikipedia: The Glasgow ice cream wars.

11. Harry Law’s introduction to the history of AI and overview of the legacy of the Dartmouth Conference. It’s so funny that Marvin Minsky was the scientific advisor for HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Music and podcasts

1. Today in non-sequiturs: Why the War on Drugs is responsible for the wide availability of blueberries.

2. Hiromi, Sonicwonderland. Found via her appearance on NPR Tiny Desk Concert. My favourite song is Up. I haven’t had a chance to watch the interview with Rick Beatto yet, but Hiromi’s playing is electrifying. You can also listen to the duet with Chick Corea, whom (if Wikipedia is to be believed) she met by chance aged 17 and was invited to perform with on stage later that day.

3. The Marginal Revolutionaries on their favourite economic models. Listen for a good explanation of why monopoly, a priori, does not imply a lower quality of goods than would be socially efficient. I also wonder how many people in Ireland could correctly explain Harberger’s general equilibrium capital taxation result, despite it basically being the intellectual cornerstone of our economy.

4. Ulkar Aghayeva, Fugue Chahargah. My first time listening to Azerbaijani music. This is a piano fugue inspired by mugham, the traditional microtonal music of Azerbaijan. Ulkar also has a suite for cello and piano and a string trio. She is insanely talented, and I hope to make it to one of her concerts someday soon.

5. Dan Wang on what you should do if you want to become the leader of China. I found this most interesting for Sam Bowman and Pieter Garicano’s discussion of what ails European economies. The extent to which the US has much greater competition in banking is remarkable. I recently tried to open a new bank account, but there were literally only three banks in the country I could choose from. I found the experience so complicated and unpleasant that I eventually gave up. Meanwhile, around 80% of financing for European companies happens via bank lending, compared to around 30% in America – the quality of financial services really matters!

6. Soham Sankaran on building a vaccine company in India. This reminds me of many conversations I have had with Akash Kulgod about his experience scaling Dognosis from Bangalore. Akash would be a great guest for this podcast.

Books and Papers

1. John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Claude Shannon, A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. This document is the first official usage of the term ‘artificial intelligence’, laying out the research agenda that would become the 1956 Dartmouth workshop.³ Is the significance of the Dartmouth conference overrated in the history of AI? Probably yes. Are we privileged to be alive in an era when we can read the original proposal, and ask questions of it using magic boxes that largely solved all the problems outlined in the proposal within a single human lifetime? Also yes.

2. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels. Unless you count graphic novels, plays, poetry, or autofiction, this is the only novel I read in 2025. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to read more fiction. In short, Gulliver’s Travels is A++, and possibly the greatest novel I’ve ever read. For more thoughts, you’ll have to wait for my Irish Enlightenment post.

Liberty Fund is hosting a virtual reading group on Gulliver’s Travels on March 4, 11, 18, and 25 from 4:00–5:00 p.m. EST. You can find more information here.

Films and video

1. Greg Kohs, The Thinking Game. A documentary about Demis Hassabis and the story of Google DeepMind. You can watch the full thing for free on YouTube. The main new thing I learned about was Demis’s role in developing the 1994 video game Theme Park.

This made for strange viewing. OpenAI, Anthropic, and ChatGPT are never mentioned. You could watch this entire film, and be under the impression that AlphaGo-era reinforcement learning is still the dominant paradigm. Significant sections of it could equally have appeared in the 2017 documentary about AlphaGo, which is one of the greatest documentaries of all time.

I was also disappointed that Demis’s side gig as the world’s fourth-highest-rated player in the world of the board game Diplomacy wasn’t mentioned.

2. Edward Yang, Yi Yi (一一). My first Taiwanese film, found by asking Claude Opus 4.5 “What is the greatest Taiwanese film of all time?” This was Yang’s last film, and is a major part of the Taiwanese New Wave. The title means ‘one by one’, and, when written vertically, looks like the Chinese character for the number 2.

I think this is one of the best films I have ever seen. It captured the ‘relentlessness’ of mundane family life better than any other visual media I can think of. I later learned this is one of the few times Scott Sumner has given a perfect score to a film:

At one point a character says something to the effect that movies triple the size of our lives. We experience far more than otherwise. This film is certainly a good example. Like almost all of the greatest films of the 21st century, it came out at the beginning of the millennium. Not a good sign.

I loved how wide an age distribution the main characters have. The scene toward the end of the father and daughter going on parallel, stilted dates is a masterpiece.

You can read the full version of Sam’s December links here.

[1] Thanks to Anuja Uppuluri.
[2] No, I can’t remember what my argument actually was.
[3] I also learned that the Dartmouth conference was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

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