Five Things: EV, Political Superintelligence, Smartphones, Oura, Edifice Complex
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
What a week.
Our son turned 20 this Saturday. It’s amazing how he has developed in the last year, how many challenges he took on and how he has grown. I love him dearly.
Our middle daughter had surgery on her feet on Thursday and they removed the screws that were put in 3 years ago. Those things are huge (and look like from IKEA). She’s a trooper and the surgery went really well. I brought her a home-cooked dinner twice into the hospital, so I am sure I played some role in the healing process.
And now it’s Easter Sunday. I am not religious, but I do like hardboiled eggs (and marzipan eggs for that matter..). We went to an Easter bonfire, which is one of those Christian tradtions rooted in heathen rituals. I like it when the air smells like bonfire in the city.
Enjoy these Five Things! Happy Easter! 🪺
Maybe you should have bought an electric car
The price of oil, and thus the price of gas, is extremely vulnerable to supply shocks. Oil demand is very inelastic in the short run. If there’s a small disruption to supply, it’s very hard for lots of people to stop driving to work, or moving things by truck and ship and plane. Oil is also an indispensable input into plastics, which are necessary for much of the modern economy. So when there’s some sort of supply disruption — for example, the Strait of Hormuz getting shut down by the Iran war — a few people can switch away from oil, but most people just desperately offer to pay more and more. So the price shoots up very quickly.
This is why even though only 20% of global oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting much of that supply caused oil prices to almost double. As I wrote the other day, this isn’t apocalyptic, especially for America (which is a major oil producer). But it could send inflation creeping up and curb economic activity a bit. And for people who drive gasoline powered cars, it’s a major headache.
And it’s a headache that’s going to happen again, and again, and again.
I am driving a hybrid and I wonder why politicians talk about ways to mitigate the oil price hikes, but miss the obvious one: move away from fossil fuels as fast as possible.
Also, why do people get so emotional when they talk about a combustion engine? Have you ever felt the acceleration in an EV? That is sooo much cooler.
Building Political Superintelligence
How do we build political superintelligence? This is the political science question of our time. By political superintelligence, I do not mean a system that magically solves politics for us; I mean tools that help citizens, representatives, and institutions perceive reality more sharply, understand tradeoffs, contest power, and act more effectively.
Based on thousands of years of experiments in governance, I think there are three key tasks ahead of us to achieve this goal: we need to use AI to make us smarter; we need it to represent us faithfully; and we need to govern it effectively.
This.
Really, why aren’t we doing this?
Is There Life After Smartphones?
And yet it seems simultaneously clear that when it comes to all smartphone users, including members of older generations but particularly those users raised on a smart device, a major reckoning is finally at hand. Since 2023, more than 30 states have instituted partial smartphone restrictions or so-called bell-to-bell bans that forbid the use of smartphones when school is in session. Overseas, Australia’s government has gone so far as to ban social media for children under 16. (More than half a dozen countries are considering similar measures.) And in Silicon Valley, tech titans like Meta, Google and Snap are facing a barrage of lawsuits — thousands in all — accusing them of deliberately preying upon vulnerable kids. “These companies built machines designed to addict the brains of children,” Mark Lanier, a plaintiff’s attorney, has said in a case against Meta and YouTube. “And they did it on purpose.” (A jury found both companies negligent.)
Regulation is finally kicking in, it has been long overdue. At the same time I think we should be able to learn from our usage patterns and get the best out of our smartphones. Also, we need to learn to ignore things and turn off alerts.
The Tyranny of the Oura Ring
It could be the sign of some hidden immunological superpower. Or a sign of the power the ring had over me. Why, like the person who believes the weather app over what’s visible outside the window, had I believed the ring over my body? The ring’s elusive AI wasn’t sharing the answer.
But the aftereffects lingered. For days, the Oura had urged me to take it easy. I’d obeyed and failed to hit my Activity Goals for several days. My Readiness score plummeted. My Resilience shifted from “thriving” to “needs care.” I was no longer optimal.
Was I wearing this ring or was it wearing me?
I love my Oura ring. Wearing it helped me sleep more, train better and drink almost no alcohol anymore. Also, the app has a tendency to interepret the data totally wrong every once in a while…
Hitler’s Edifice Complex
He wanted it big. He wanted lots of gold, lots of marble. He wanted visitors awestruck by his architectural expansion of the country’s symbolic seat of power. “They should sense the strength and grandeur of the German Reich as they walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Adolf Hitler told his chief architect, Albert Speer, outlining his plans for an extension to the old Reich chancellery, at Wilhelmstrasse 77 in Berlin.
The new annex, connected to the chancellery by a marble corridor hung with crystal chandeliers, was part of Hitler’s ambitious plans to align the Berlin cityscape with his vision for the future of the country. Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He wanted an “Avenue of Splendor” for military parades. “The Champs-Élysées is a hundred meters wide,” Hitler told Speer. “We will make our avenue twenty meters wider.” A planned Volkshalle was to accommodate 180,000. The Eiffel Tower could fit beneath its cupola. This “Hall of the People” was to be topped by the largest swastika on Earth. Berlin itself was to be rechristened as Weltstadt Germania, “Capital of the World.”
No idea why this suddenly reminded me of the orange madman in the White House.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico