Applications Open Summer School for LPE (et al) Early Career Scholars University of Rome 8-10 July (Wednesday-Friday) Approximately 10 scholarships for accommodations; no event fees ysi.ineteconomics.org/event/… EAEPE, in coordination with iGLPE, INET YSI, and LPE-C

The next year...

Happy Halloween

Everything you wanted to know about the 🇷🇸 #serbianelections (but were afraid to ask)! Join us online on November 2 12:30pm ET at carleton.ca/eetn/event/serbi… @EETN_REET @EURUSCarletonU @cuLegalStudies

We are deeply saddened to share the news that Perry Mehrling passed away this morning at the age of 67. Perry was the father of the Young Scholars Initiative. He believed profoundly in young scholars, in their ideas, and in the importance of creating a community in which they could learn from one another and find their own voices. Perry, you leave an enormous hole in our midst. Our hearts are aching, and we will miss you dearly. The YSI community will carry your legacy forward. Your ideas, your generosity, and your commitment to generations of young scholars will remain with us. Thank you for everything, Perry.

Anyone have electronic copy of Kindleberger's essay, 'systems of international economic organisation' (for some reason, University doesn't have access to it nor to the collections I can find with the essay included)?

Anyone have an electronic copy available of Kindleberger's essay, 'systems of international economic organisation'?

Due to contact with the Greeks, devices such as sundials and water clocks had spread to Roman cities. A character from this 2nd-century BC play complains about how the spread of time-keeping devices has regimented life:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” — Viktor E. Frankl

Warren McCulloch, the father of neural networks, talks AI in 1962.

the great david lynch

If you can watch only one video to understand current geopolitics, make it this one by George Yeo, one of Singapore's longest-serving cabinet ministers (23 years!) As Yeo explains, current global geopolitics is fundamentally driven by US "retreat" and "decline", forced by a financial reality that no US administration can reverse: its debt servicing already exceeding its entire defense budget. To Yeo, this explains why the US insists so much that its "allies" in Europe and Asia spend more of their GDP on defense - to basically pick up the tab for an empire America can no longer afford - but it also means that, inevitably, "once your allies begin to have their own military capabilities, they will think differently, and they will not follow you in everything that you want to do." As such, American decline becomes self-reinforcing: the more it asks allies to carry their own weight, the less reason they have to follow its lead. Still, Yeo says that a similar dynamic to one that happened after the fall of Rome could occur where America - like Byzantium did - sheds its empire and consolidates around its own hemisphere, allowing it to remain self-sustaining and powerful for a very long time. He believes it's the direction things are heading - which would also explain Trump's obsession with Canada and Greenland. It remains however obviously an open question whether an American "Byzantium strategy" is even achievable: Canada, for one, clearly wants no part of it. Full video available here: piped.video/watch?v=NY2Vgiuh…

Matthew: "One of the disciples cut a man's ear off." Mark: "One of the disciples cut a man's ear off." Luke: "One of the disciples cut a man's ear off." John: "It was Peter. Lol."

One thing I find striking in the discourse between AI 2040 and its detractors is that the two seem to be locked in to totally incompatible worldviews of how fast and how much of a big deal AI progress is: * In AI 2040, every scenario sees superintelligence of some kind emerging by 2040, unless a herculean effort is made to completely stop it * Detractors say things like "AI 2040 is naive about human coordination ability and a threat to freedom", but don't seem to see any naivety in assuming that the ASI transition will just go well by default, don't seem to see ASI itself as a massive power concentrator risk, and don't seem to feel fear of humanity's "hard power" dropping to zero if ASIs can do literally every task better than we can. This stance makes total sense in a "AI is normal technology" world, zero sense in a world where superintelligence is possible by 2030 and almost guaranteed by 2040 I think my beliefs are: - If I was confident that (present-day-style) AI is normal technology, I would be in the detractor camp - If I was confident that superintelligence is coming in 2030 by default, I would be closer to the AI 2040 camp - it's naive, but every other option is naive squared? But my problem is that I feel great uncertainty and have no idea which of the two worlds (or some other third thing) we're living in? Hence why I continue to be open-minded about slowdowns/pauses, but also I feel very uncomfortable with the "open source bad, the good outcome is the one where our guys have controlling global dominance" push coming from some major AI companies and intellectuals - in a "normal" world that's the sort of thing that triggers every political alarm bell at the same time. A big reason why I have been advocating and trying my best to support the d/acc platform (rapid up-skilling in formal verification, cryptography, secure and open hardware, pandemic resistance and other defensive biotech, food and basic resource security, public epistemics, non-power-concentrating versions of physical security) is that these things are clearly worth doing in both worlds. The 2040 plan is already much more open source friendly (even mandating it! yay). It also includes "mutually assured compute destruction" ideas which (if they work) effectively give one of 2-5 actors the ability to trigger a global compute winter - as opposed to giving 1-5 actors the ability to selectively disenfranchise people they consider baddies while exempting themselves. This is also a big improvement. So I can see the earnest attempts to improve along the dimensions detractors criticize on ("does this concentrate power in big AI labs and superpower governments?"), and I appreciate this. I think many people don't appreciate enough the differences between different "kinds" of pause buttons, and how some concentrate power far more than others. Probably we can think harder and improve even more here. But on the "slowdown/pause or not" topic, there isn't a magic "escape the tradeoff" button. The Hansonian in me says: the winning deal is a deal which, from the perspective of both sides' present-day beliefs and knowledge, both sides would accept, though for different reasons. If the crux is AI progress speed, then identify a set of pre-agreed triggers for "okay, serious shit is happening" [super-pandemics? >25% unemployment? something involving slaughterbots?], and pre-agree that we become much more open-minded to the slowdown or pause thing if enough triggers come to pass within some timeframe. 2040 detractors (who clearly implicitly think that we'll see amazing speedup of progress from AI but think that what I call the "serious shit" category is overhyped) will accept expecting that the triggers don't come to pass, and AI worriers will accept expecting that they will. Pre-agreeing on the specific triggers means that once the triggers either hit or don't hit, there is stronger legitimacy around the idea that one side's worldview turned out more correct and we should be more inclined toward their program. If I were @elonmusk (or zuck, or...) I would re-tool twitter much more heavily into being a platform for helping to identify and make these kinds of grand win-win deals, so that we can bypass big-country governments and big-company CEOs and big nonprofit intellectuals and give more people a voice in the discussion. It's possibly one of the best things that social media _could_ do for humanity if it wanted to. But again, maybe this is also naive. Actually, probably it's naive. But currently, I see zero plans for how to deal with an ASI transition that are not naive. Perhaps humanity is stuck with a choice between naive and naive squared (or maybe even naive squared and naive cubed), so I feel inclined to cut some slack to people who are trying.

piped.video/wCph7znDieU?si=zHNP… What is capitalism, why it requires spiritual study, how religious texts can be used for geopolitical forecasting, and some directions to action.

Manchester Law and Technology Initiative (MLaTI) Annual Conference Program - 2 July 2026 - Open to Public

Para quem ainda não viu, e para quem quer rever, a inauguração da Basílica da Sagrada Família, em Barcelona, ontem, foi um espetáculo de fé, arte e esplendor. Uma obra erguida em pedra e luz, que eleva nosso olhar para o eterno, aquietando a alma e convidando à reverência.