We will be held accountable for all the permitted pleasures we failed to enjoy.”
—The Talmud
I have spent a decent but not extensive amount of time playing with the current AI models for writing assistance/replacement. One thing that stands out to me is a more or less complete lack of novel thought.
When you think about the raw amount of information that these models ‘know’ then it’s kind of shocking how little novel they seem capable of saying or have discovered.
If an average human had a similar well of knowledge, I would expect many thousands of novel discoveries – new drug product ideas, new ways of thinking about company building, etc.
Broadly, I would say my writing experience is much better with the models. I spend less time coming up with ways to clearly explain existing concepts and more time doing the equivalent of ‘structural editing’ where I am arranging those concepts in a hopefully novel and insightful way.
E.g. I was writing a note the other day about put-call parity in options trading as it relates to selling covered calls and why that’s a useful metaphor for thinking about some other aspects of investing. I stuck in links to those posts was able to get very solid first-draft summaries of them.
However, it was pretty mediocre at extending that and contextualizing it as a frame for thinking about investing more broadly and so I took over at this point.
But, I would like to understand why this is and if it’s likely to change in the future (or maybe is not the case now and I am just bad at using the models). Here’s the best answer I’ve found so far.
Books
Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World
Tara Isabella Burton
One of my favorite genres of books or think pieces is the type that says “these things that all seem very different are actually the same across a dimension you aren’t thinking about.”
One of my all-time favorites, James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State argued that 20th-century communism and capitalism were alike in that they were both fixated on ‘legibilizing’ a fundamentally illegible and messy reality. These grand theories are admittedly never perfect, but they are thought-provoking.
Strange Rites is one such book that looks at the three contemporary movements that most people see as opposed: wokeism, a sort of Jordan Peterson-y atavism, and an e/acc techno-utopianism.
Burton grounds all these movements with an intuitional religious history of America and shows how all these movements have grown out of a focus on the self (rather. than something like God or the divine) as the center of religious authority.
It begins with the First Great Awakening (1730-1750) which promoted explicitly Christian faith, but “privileged the personal, private, and emotional experience of the believer over public and communal observance. They still had firm doctrine and rules of conduct—these “sinners in the hands of an angry God” weren’t exactly being encouraged to “do what feels right to you”—but the emphasis, both practically and theologically, was nevertheless on inward states, not societal structures.”
She traces the history of intuitional religion up through the New Thought, a cult self-help movement that took nineteenth-century America by storm, and The New Age of the countercultural 1960s milieu which emphasized the power of personal spiritual sensibility over what it’s proponents saw as outmoded regulations of organized religions.
The first self-proclaimed New Agers saw themselves as pioneers in a transformative and unprecedented era of human existence—a “new age” of personal fulfillment, in which religion as traditionally understood would become obsolete.
The core belief unifying all these historical movements as well as their present day intellectual descendants is that “humans [are], at the deepest level of their being, not simply good but perfectible. … The newly perfected self was not subject to the same strictures as an ordinary, unenlightened person. It did not require societal rules or stringent sexual mores to limit its dizzying self-expression.”
I had never thought about it in these terms, but you can see this worldview embedded to some extent in all these present-day movements.
Seventy-four percent of American millennials now say that they agree with the statement “Whatever is right for your life or works best for you is the only truth you can know.” It is not too much of a leap to see how a bunch of people going around believing they alone have access to what is right and true makes it hard for them to get along with others who similarly believe the same thing.
There are a bunch of thought provoking examples of this in the book, perhaps my favorite is how similar the product lineups are between Infowars and Goop:
Many of the supplements sold by Infowars’ Alex Jones—including Super Male Vitality and Wake Up America Immune Support Blend 100% Organic Coffee—likewise are all but indistinguishable from more feminine-sounding products like the Sex Dust and Sun Potion sold by Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.”
If there’s anything our modern day influencers can agree on, it’s how good the margins are on supplements. At 90% gross margins, everyone is a true believer.
Knowing a little bit about the supplement industry, I wouldn’t at all be surprised if they were buying from the same suppliers and there would be a certain poetry to the fact.
I’ll leave you with a line from Burton about her work that I’ve been pondering:
Sometimes we think we want something, but, when we get it, we don’t want it because we wanted something else the whole time. Our access to our own internal states is not particularly pure or good. What we want is often … downstream of what we see or stories that we’re told or narratives that we want to fit ourselves into.
And sometimes we might really really want something truly, purely authentically. And either it’s not good for us or it’s not good for someone else. [One thing that is] often troubling about contemporary society is a lack of critical thinking about this question of desire.”
Articles and Podcasts
Brian Jacobs on Bond Myths, Tax Strategies, Home-Ownership and Dynamic Investment Strategies for Today’s Market [Podcast]
The Meb Faber Show
A wide-ranging conversation on investing.
Brian argues bond returns after inflation and taxes have been roughly 0% over the past century, making them less attractive for long-term growth compared to what many believe. I would like to dig through the data, but it’s very much the case that people rarely calculate the compounding impact of tax and inflation and certainly bonds are hurt on both fronts.
They also discuss one of the benefits of ETFs is that they are tax deductible and how REITs, can be replicated using small-cap value, real estate stocks, and AAA corporate bonds.
Victor Haghani – The Last of the Tactical Allocators [Podcast]
Flirting with Models
If this name sounds familiar, Victor Haghani was one of the players at LTCM, a hedge fund that blew up in spectacular fashion in the late 90s. This interview looks at his approach since then of doing a low-cost indexing approach where he uses payout-adjusted CAPE to predict the long-term real arithmetic return for equities and compares it to the real return on TIPS to determine equity risk premium, then adjusts his equity exposure proportionally.
I’m fairly dubious about the ability of using some valuation metric like CAPE as a reliable predictor of future returns but enjoyed the conversation and it’s a topic I’d like to understand better.
National Capitalism & Death of the International Monetary System | Russell Napier [Podcast]
Hidden Forces
A discussion of how China’s rapid ascent and integration into the global economy over the past few decades has potentially impacted asset prices and interest rates.
Napier argues that by becoming a major buyer of US treasuries, China helped decouple the discount rate from the growth rate, depressing global interest rates without negatively impacting growth. This widened the gap between the two rates, boosting asset valuations and incentivizing leverage.
But, Napier points out, tightly integrated economies don’t necessarily eliminate the risk of conflict – in fact, they can intensify the fallout if relations sour. In the early 20th century, the British banking system was heavily intertwined with German manufacturers. When war broke out in 1914, those German debts suddenly looked worthless, nearly bankrupting British banks. He argues we’re seeing similar risks now as the US and China decouple and move towards a system of ‘national capitalism’ where the free movement of capital is more constrained within political spheres of influence with the US and China being the two major players.
Last Updated on May 27, 2025 by Taylor Pearson