Sam’s Links: February Edition
Sam Enright works on innovation policy at Progress Ireland, an independent policy think tank in Dublin, and runs a publication called The Fitzwilliam. Most relevant to us, on his personal blog, he writes a popular link roundup; what follows is an abridged version of his Links for January.
Blogs and short links
1. Henry Oliver on the literary anniversaries of 2026. Henry is also looking to hire an intern to research John Stuart Mill. I hope that said intern will discuss Mill’s essays on the political economy of Indian land and on ranked choice voting with me, which I find more interesting than On Liberty.1
2. From my colleague Seán O’Neill McPartlin: In political discourse, high rents and land prices are frequently blamed on ‘speculators’, but the use of that term is so deeply philosophically confused that I can’t help but think that many such arguments are not even wrong. Peter McLaughlin put it nicely:
A fantastically neat insight from Seán that I’d never noticed before: when people blame speculation for high house prices, they often mean two completely distinct practices that would have opposite effects in practice. Sometimes it means land hoarding, refusing to sell and holding out for a better deal; other times it means excessive trading, selling too often because housing has become financialised. Yet people still talk as if ‘speculation’ were a unified thing, with a single effect (upward) on house prices.
3. The European Union’s ‘single market’ is being allowed to wither and die. I talked about this blog post at a drinks reception recently, and then a Dutchman gave me grief for referring to “self-righteous Europeans” in the third person (as if I wasn’t one). Note that the specific figures in this post – that EU member states have de facto 45% tariffs on goods and 110% on services—are extremely misleading.
4. In addition to the Great Firewall, some Chinese provinces are competing to put in place additional censorship, above and beyond the censorship required of them by the central government. Henan is a leader in this area.2 It’s increasingly common for Chinese websites to block access from any IP address based outside the mainland. A friend who consults for multinationals on business in China says that never in his career did he expect to have to VPN in to China.
5. Apropos of Tyler Cowen’s post about the utilitarian track record of American-backed regime changes, this whole page is insane:
The U.S. Army turned to psychological warfare [to get Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega to leave the Vatican embassy], blaring disturbing chicken noises at “deafening levels”, gunning the engines of armored vehicles against the [Vatican embassy’s] fence, and setting fire to a neighboring field and bulldozing it to create a “helicopter landing zone”. Reportedly the version of the song “I Fought the Law“ performed by The Clash was played repeatedly along with “You Shook Me All Night Long“ by AC/DC and “Welcome to the Jungle“ by Guns N’ Roses; other songs in the line-up were “Too Old To Rock ‘N’ Roll“ by Jethro Tull, “Panama“ by Van Halen, and “Never Gonna Give You Up“ by Rick Astley.
I can certainly think of ways of deposing a dictator more dignified than a Navy SEAL rick-roll.
6. Congratulations to Jamie Rumbelow for winning a Sidney Award (gated) from David Brooks for his piece in Works in Progress about Manhattan’s elaborate network of steam tunnels.
7. Polling insights: 12% of Americans claim to have a license to operate a submarine. Is Lizardman’s constant on the rise?3
8. Thomas Nagel, what is it like to be a bat, poetry edition.
9. Sam Mendelsohn’s introduction to the Mahabharata and Ramayana. It really does seem that reading one of the illustrated editions is the way to go.4 A section that got cut from the final draft of my essay Notes on Taiwan contained some speculation about why Eastern classics are so long compared to Western ones (I still don’t know). I really like this quote from A.K. Ramanujan:
This useful comment on Marginal Revolution gives further context on Indian oral culture.
Music and podcasts
1. From the Works in Progress podcast: Anton Howes on how Henry VIII accidentally started the Industrial Revolution. There is a lot of great overlap between the discussion here and Anton’s session at our Adam Smith conference.
2. Seun Kuti, Egypt 80, Heavier Yet (Lays the Crownless Head). My favourite track is Dey. I also enjoyed Radiolab explaining Fela Kuti’s critical role in the history of Afrobeat. And here is the full 12-part series about Fela excerpted in that episode. Egypt 80 (formerly Africa 70) was Fela’s band, which is now led by his son Seun.
3. Dave Chappelle has a stand-up bit about how, if jobs moved from China to America, the iPhone would cost $9,000. He had the right order of magnitude: the only smartphone made in America uses decade-old technology and costs $2,000. Naturally enough, it’s called the Liberty Phone.5
4. Charles Lloyd, Zakir Hussain, Eric Harland, Sangam. Excellent Indian-inspired jazz fusion, which I wrote about in January 2025 as a criminally underrated subgenre. Dancing on One Foot is the most accessible track. See also Batson’s first explorations in Indian classical music.
5. Was Michel Foucault a libertarian? As with many of the questions that Rasheed Griffith asks, I suspect that Betteridge’s law of headlines applies.
Books and Papers
1. Various, Beyond Reasoning Gains: Mitigating General Capabilities Forgetting in Large Reasoning Models. Read for my AI journal club, which was in an experimental ‘wisdom of crowds’ format. We read this paper in order to come to a collective judgement, before seeing the market rate, on what we should wager on Gavin Leech’s prediction market about whether reinforcement learning harms off-target capabilities. Fair-minded centrist that I am, my answer was 50%.
I think this paper was sufficiently above my level that I am still at the “recognise some terms and talk to Claude and what they mean” phase. But you can still learn a lot from doing that! Reading computer science papers is such a different paradigm from reading philosophy, history, etc., in that “reading” is secondary to actually implementing the techniques yourself. I am still a noob at that, although Claude Code helps a lot.
Reinforcement learning is probably one of the easier areas of computer science for an economist to learn. The basic mathematical machinery (value functions, dynamic programming, fixed point theorems) will be familiar to anyone who has considered doing an econ PhD at a quant-heavy department.
‘Reinforcement learning’ is also one of those terms, like inference, that is now used by the young ’uns in a very confusing way that is contrary to decades of previous usage. Sometimes I hear people use RL as though it were synonymous with the entire post-training stage of an LLM. At least in the Richard Sutton textbook, RL is a set of methods for learning how to maximise cumulative reward in an environment that can be modelled as a Markov decision process. By this definition, it seems to be debatable whether reinforcement learning by human feedback (RLHF) should count as genuine RL. People also sometimes use ‘RL’ when talking about things like supervised fine-tuning, which is definitely not RL. So I suppose my contribution to this group was very much that of a philosopher: arguing that the initial question was confused because of its failure to parse semantic distinctions that most people find annoying and pedantic.
2. Andrew Brown, J.D. Bernal: The Sage of Science. One of the most underrated science books I have ever read. I’m convinced John Desmond Bernal was one of the great scientific polymaths of the 20th century. I have many thousands of words of notes about this book, and hope to get around to profiling his work for Asimov Press at some point.
3. Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, The Logic Theory Machine. A paper that grew out of the Dartmouth summer workshop on AI. The Logic Theorist was an automated theorem-proving program that ran on the JOHNIAC at RAND. In this paper, the Logic Theorist is given 52 theorems from chapter two of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, of which it was able to prove 38.6 In one case, the proof is more elegant than Russell and Whitehead’s own. Personally, I find this quite astonishing; AI had made an original contribution to mathematics – at least in the sense of simplifying an existing proof – as early as the 1950s! In any case, having spent an inordinate amount of time reading Bertrand Russell last year has already paid off more than I would have expected.
Films and video
1. Park Chan-wook, No Other Choice (어쩔수가없다). From the director of Decision to Leave and Oldboy, two of my favourite Korean films. This film definitely won’t stick with me as much as Park’s other films, but it was light and funny, and we had a great time at the screening. The central comedic tool of making a bizarrely specific industry seem like a much bigger deal than it really is economically works very well.
The Korean embassy in Ireland should run some kind of memorial event for Kevin O’Rourke, the missionary from County Cavan who translated much of the Korean cultural canon into English for the first time. He became a professor at Kyung Hee University, an honorary Korean citizen, and the first foreigner in history to receive a doctorate in Korean literature. A long time ago, I knew some of his family friends from Busan. We truly have people everywhere.
2. From YouTube, we have Amanda Askell on training Claude’s character and why Opus 3 was so well-aligned. Welch Labs also explains the phenomenon of double descent and how it violated conventional wisdom in statistical learning theory. Finally, there is Jacob Collier and Esperanza Spalding on NPR’s Tiny Desk.
You can read the full version of Sam’s January links here.
[1] I saw someone on Twitter recently describe JS Mill’s writing style as “undergraduate with a deadline at midnight”, which is an assessment I probably disagree with less than Henry does.
[2] Shockingly, “The Henan Cyberspace Affairs Commission could not be reached for comment.”
[3] I got the DK illustrated version of the Mahabharata for an old flatmate from Mumebai. Probably my fondest memory in that flat was trading back and forth strangely translated cultural peculiarities: “I see your Gujarati spiderman, and raise you Irish Spongebob.”
[4] Bizarrely, this effect is almost entirely driven by the quarter of Hispanic adults (!) who claim to know how to operate a submarine. Is there a tradition of Latin American pranksterism I was unaware of?
[5] I hope this does not come across as snarky; it’s a genuinely amazing engineering accomplishment.
[6] See section 3.5 of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on computational philosophy.