If you believe this, you’re a fucking idiot.

There is something deeply wrong with a political system that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal U.S. Senator.

"Biotech needs money to solve big problems" "Here is $3b" "Biotech needs Nobel prize level talent" "Granted" "err......."

🇧🇪 Brussels 1955: 95% native Belgian background 2025: 21% native Belgian background 🇬🇧 London 1955: 97% native British background 2025: 36% native British background 🇳🇱 Amsterdam 1955: 98% native Dutch background 2025: 40% native Dutch background 🇩🇪 Berlin 1955: 98% native German background 2025: 57% native German background 🇦🇹 Vienna 1955: 95% native Austrian background 2025: 51% native Austrian background 🇸🇪 Stockholm 1955: 97% native Swedish background 2025: 65% native Swedish background

I recently spent some time with former colleagues from academia. All of them brilliant, peak human capital. Almost all of them fundamentally unable to plug into the economy, inoculated against productivity by a youth spent experimenting in laboratories instead of building wealth for society. Dealing with real people in the real world. 90% of them have left academia in the last 10-15 years, and 90% of those are functionally unemployed. Grad school does a lousy job of training scientists to be professors (since most of them don't get the good postdoc or tenure track position) and an even worse job of preparing people for real life. We complain that our societal infrastructure is collapsing, our state capacity is low, our incumbent industries are faltering. Where are the next generation of leaders that can push us forward? A huge fraction of them were conveyor-belted into academia by schooling systems that have no mechanism to channel ambition and 99+%ile competence, and our universities are mostly hedge funds with glorified psych wards/academic departments on the side, running an insane pyramid scheme that exists only to prove, over and over again, the Shirky Principle: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. We literally poured trillions of dollars into state-funded research and effectively neutered our elite civilian technical leadership development programs. I recently asked a few academic friends if they were finding AI useful in accelerating their programs of research. You know, to solve the Big Problem their entire field exists to solve? Some were. But most were complaining about how it created pedagogical issues, explaining how their department decided to ban the use of AI, or how it took 18 months to approve an enterprise account, or how they tried Gemini 2 on a puzzle a year ago and it wasn't very helpful, or repeating nonsense about datacenters and water consumption, or supposed IP theft by model companies, as though that has any bearing on their ability to, eg, accelerate a cure for cancer. Elon sometimes calls AI a supersonic tsunami - a huge wave you don't see coming. I see it coming. But even the people who you'd think have been waiting for this their entire careers are steadfastly looking in the other direction.

Why do I struggle even reading papers that are clearly AI? Writing is a window into another person’s brain, their thinking, values, and outlook. When I read AI text, I mostly feel they shortchanged themselves and me.