Five Things: Old Politicians, Petty Tyrants, Karl Popper, AI Wives, Recursive Self-Improvement
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things! Enjoy these Five Things!
I am writing this while watching ESC, so there is constant flashing on the big TV screen, which is just a tad distracting while writing. Anyhow, I love ESC. Not because I am exited about the musical performances or the length of the show, but because it is wonderful that a whole continent is watching one big tv show on a Saturday evening. And at the end they all agree that the German performer should not win.
Speaking of Europe, on Thursday we went up to Copenhagen for a quick Father’s Day trip. No one knows what Ascension Day is about, so it has been turned into Father’s Day. Copenhagen really is one of my favorite cities and it is just 4 1/2 hours away from Hamburg. We went up to Louisiana on Thursday, which is a fantastic museum of modern art and then spent Friday strolling around Strøget, the large pedestrian shopping area in the heart of the city. And of course I had a Hot Dog with the OG rød pølse, which were a lot brighter when I was a kid.
The Old Guard
The prevalence of aged politicians is almost certainly increasing the mass abstention of the young from political participation. The older the politicians, the less credence younger constituents give to the idea that their votes matter. They may even start to doubt the basic worth of the political system and let it fail. A study comparing different countries, including the United States, concluded that the bigger the age gap between people and their politicians, the weaker the population’s confidence in democracy.
In short, it’s not just that our politicians are old. It’s not just the cognitive or bodily decline they suffer. What’s most important is that such leaders represent an aging constituency that controls the political system. They are also the visible face of the elderly’s domination of private forms of power, chiefly wealth: aging Americans control the biggest bank accounts and stock portfolios, partly as a result of living long enough to accumulate more and more without giving much away. The government is bought and paid for by members of the oldest generation, and it is organized for their sake. There is no way to separate the age of our elites from their ascendancy.
While I am not saying that old men per se are unfit to govern for the people, I do think that they simply do not grasp many technological developments that have happened in the last few decades. And this ruins all of us.
The Rise And Fall Of ‘Petty Tyrants’
The rise of a petty tyrant requires a dramatic failure of the opposition. This happens because the opposition has become factionalized, focused on narrow issues or ideological ambitions, rather than the actual concerns of the majority. The bad leader takes advantage of the resulting discontent to come to power legitimately. Then comes the costliest mistake: the failure of the opposition to refocus their combined energies on the existential goal of maintaining the democracy.
Exposing reality is the opposition’s most effective strategy. The petty leader recognizes this and responds accordingly. When Napoleon was called out by Victor Hugo, the Emperor ordered his arrest, imprisoned his sons, shut down his newspaper and banned his work. Hugo published his “Napoléon le Petit” pamphlet from exile, and copies were smuggled into France in small formats and false covers that were easy to conceal.
The playbook still works. Until it doesn’t anymore.
How the Philosophy of Karl Popper Can Cure Our Political Sickness
Efforts to erode our institutions by the Trump administration and fill them with irrational sycophants is one step towards the chaos and violence of irrationalism. In America, conspiracy theories are nothing more than an orgy of irrationalism that sows distrust in the institutions and thus harms the rational framework and the Open Society as a whole.
Popper does not think institutions are gods, in fact, this is why he says that central to rationalism is the idea that one might be wrong. However, to see that one is wrong and to engage in conversation about it, both parties must be rational and agree to rationalist principles. Today, this is hard to find. I am not closing this work with much hope to share other than an encouragement to seize the imperative that rationalism makes upon us and to participate in the global liberal network of cooperation and sustained compatibility.
Germany’s late chancellor Helmut Schmidt was a big fan of Karl Popper and I think it is a good idea to revisit Karl Popper. His paradox of tolerance is still something democracts and democratic societies have to embrace.
Meet the Sad Wives of AI
There’s a strange and under-discussed side effect of the AI boom: what it’s doing to family dynamics. By which I mean: how it’s potentially destroying family dynamics. I’m sure this applies to all kinds of families, gay or straight, rich or poor, with any AI-pilled members. The technology is coming, has come, for us all. But for the purposes of this story, I mostly spoke to white-collar heteros in the Bay Area, because that’s where a certain psychological crisis seems most acute. Often it goes like this: He works in AI, and she does everything and anything else. Other times, it’s bleaker: He desperately wants to work in AI—or feels he must work in AI—and she wants him to do literally anything else.
This doesn’t only happen in the Bay Area, it happens in Hamburg as well…
AI Is Starting to Build Better AI
AI researchers have long seen recursive self-improvement, or RSI, as something to both desire and fear. Today, advances in AI are raising the question of whether parts of that process are already underway.
RSI means many things to many people. Some use the idea as a bogeyman to scare up regulation, while others brandish it in marketing. For some, it means a fully autonomous loop, while for others it’s nearly any use of tech to build tech.
Safest to say it’s a spectrum. At its strictest, researchers use the term to describe systems that can improve not just their outputs but the process by which they improve—generating ideas, evaluating results, and modifying their own methods with zero human direction. By that standard, many of today’s systems fall short. They can help build better AI, but they still rely on humans to set goals, define success, and decide which changes to keep. The question is not whether self-improvement exists in some form today, but how much of the loop has actually been closed.
I am currently getting hooked deeper and deeper into agentic coding and it is really fascinating to see how fast everything changes at the moment. I still don’t think RSI is here anytime soon, but I honestly have no idea what kind of time frame “anytime soon” is…
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico