🏵️ Judgment > Generation, & a question about Roman swords

The spread of human technology & knowledge throughout history is a fascinating, perennially relevant topic.

Please read the following headings to the tune of On the First Day of Christmas as I embark upon a small (dare I say, Tiny?) experiment for helping me stay on top of sharing neat stuff with y’all.

🎓 3 Links I Learned From

• Thanks to the Webb telescope, scientists found water ice around a distant star for the first time. This isn’t that exciting — it was pretty much a given that ice exists in other solar systems, ice is a lot less rare than liquid surface water like Earth has — but the implications for finding habitable plants are interesting. More importantly, it’s a small reminder that scientific advancement is still happening, and that not everything is falling afoul of socio-political infighting and the replication crisis.

• One of my hobbyhorse topics is how it is difficult to classify the ‘identities’ of Mediterranean peoples in the ancient world — finding the lines between Phoenicians vs. Carthaginians, for example. Complicating the project is new genetic research revealing that that Carthage's founders may not have actually been Levantine Phoenicians. Instead, most were apparently more Greek. It’s not surprising that the region is full of complex cultural identities. Sailing and travel shaped the area, resulting in diverse local interactions, significant demographic shifts, and the integration of various populations over centuries. This vertical map of the Mediterranean really rams home how interconnected it all was, for me at least.

• I learned a lot about the Beatles, nonfiction, fiction and the nature of larger-than-life relationships from this article by

  Aled Maclean-Jones
  . Small tales, generally of love, is a lovely way to think of the project of storytelling, and I think Aled is absolutely right that the authenticity and love that flows from a passion project is what makes something actually enjoyable to read.

🌼 2 Recent Highlights

I’ve always had the sense that the stock market is more like gambling than investing, but I’ve never been much of a quant and the American government incentives stocks so much that it’s hard for someone like me to avoid putting money in. Matt Levine is one of the most well-known finance writers in the world, and I’ve learned a lot from him over the years.

So I felt pretty vindicated when, in the May 15 edition of his Bloomberg newsletter (which is accessible as an email but paywalled on web), he said:

There is a ton of overlap in skills and techniques and personnel between sports gambling and “traditional finance,” and there are things (event contracts, meme stocks, memecoins, crypto generally) that somewhat blur the lines between them, and for like 20 minutes this year it looked like you could bet on the Super Bowl in your Robinhood brokerage account.

A lot of my personal sense of excellence lies in identifying bottlenecks, then worming my way around them. Some folks I know are better at brute-forcing them, just doggedly running them down like a terrier. Personally, I’m a big fan of the idea that being able to identify bottlenecks and bothering to do something about them is as critical to knowledge work as snaking a drain is to a plumber.

Scott Werner

&

Tyler Cowen

have been talking a lot lately about how LLMs, Agenetic AI, machine learning, and all the other information-age level-ups are going to upend the nature of knowledge work. The most thought-provoking insight I’ve seen is the following, from The Coming Knowledge-Work Supply-Chain Crisis:

AI excels at production but always ends up with humans as a critical bottleneck dealing with a mountain of tasks to evaluate, approve, or modify what it creates.

Generation skills are getting a lot less important than judgment, and (s)he who can stay on top of a deluge of data and not only use it but direct it appropriately is obviously going to get more out of AI than someone more optimized for implementation. The sucky part is that staying on top of (and judiciously editing) a deluge of information is a lot less enjoyable for most of us than creating things from scratch.

📸 & A Photo From My Office

I love digital note-taking and e-ink reading, but sometimes my best insights come when I’m cozied up with an analog book. Here’s a snapshot of a note from Empire of Horses by John Man, so you can see what my process looks like offline…

…and I can shamelessly ask if anybody knows why the Roman sword changed the nature of warfare. I asked o3, but its explanation is at the level of “stabs kill faster than slashes,” which my good judgment tells me is more banal than relevant. Similarly, “it could be mass-produced and standardized” was equally true of elephant tusk weapons.

We have evidence of humans mass-producing bone tools (presumably for trade) as far back as the Paleolithic era. Elephant long bones were systematically broken to make blanks appropriate for shaping tools in what amounts to a Neolithic factory efficient enough to drive Paleoloxodons to extinction. As Scott Alexander pointed out in his recent article about progress, humans are excellent at manufacturing things en masse. The Romans weren’t the first ones to come up with that…

so what’s the deal with the Roman sword? Does anybody know?