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Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1726-81) was a French bureaucrat following Richard Cantillon but preceding Adam Smith who made some brief but remarkable contributions to economic thought. This post focuses on his writings about Laissez-faire/free trade. Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay (1712-59), his mentor in economics, played an influential role in shaping his thoughts. Unfortunately, Turgot’s works were not sufficiently considered by his contemporaries and immediate successors. His political associations also might have dissuaded people from citing him. In the words of Joseph Schumpeter, “It is not too much to say that analytic economics took a century to get where it could have got in twenty years after the publication of Turgot’s treatise had its content been properly understood and absorbed by an alert profession.” ...

Malfoid has gripped the collective imagination of the Harry Potter fanfiction community since its publication about a month ago. The concept of a female Draco Malfoy has exsited for a while, but this time the meme of Malfoid spread like wildfire. Seemingly every Harry Potter channel on Youtube has videos discussing how a female Draco Malfoy serving as Potter’s eventual love interest would fix the story. Such is the power of a well made, well timed, piece of art. See malfoid.com for some related fiction, or if you want to pour money into an AI that gender-swaps any male character (because, of course, such a thing has to exist in this era). ...

If a system allows the following, Darwinian evolution will occur. Random mutation. Differential survival and Darwinian selection (of mutations that enhance fitness). Heritability (that is, the passing down of mutations to the next generation). We are familiar with such evolution happening in the biological substrate. But there is no reason this should just remain within the confines of biology. Ideas can undergo such a Darwinian evolution process too (think of memes). Languages are subject to such processes (1. the “asexual” case where a language slowly mutates over time in the language space over a geographical region, and 2. the “sexual” case, where civilizations interact, exchanging ideas, incorporating foreign words, undergoing changes in pronunciation, etc.) AI should be able to undergo such processes in the silicon layer. Perhaps the laws of physics are also subject to Darwinian evolution at some level, with fitness functions applying to entire universes.

Besides promoting free trade, Turgot argued against taxes and tariffs. Due to the reciprocal nature of trade, Turgot pointed out the absurdity of wanting only to export while not importing. Protective tariffs, set up to discourage imports, were described as war of all against all using state monopoly privilege at the expense of consumers. They led to a system of reciprocal oppression between industries and a balance of annoyance and injustice which made everyone worse off. ...

Turgot regarded industry regulation as a system of coerced cartelization and special privileges conferred by the state. Regulations effectively serve as taxes which increase costs incurred by the producers/sellers, which reduce competition and discourage innovation. Rather than protecting consumers, these regulations compel them to buy inferior products at higher prices. Economic activities involve the use of the particular knowledge in sole possession of individual market participants. It is not possible for a government or a theorist to obtain or use all such such knowledge. The owners of labor and capital are best suited to employ these factors to the most advantageous use with the help of their skills, experiences, and expectations. ...

Antagonistic Pleiotropy (AP) is an evolutionary theory that explains why evolution does not weed out certain mutations that cause harm to an organism later in life. According to AP, these mutations provide other significant fitness advantages earlier in life, thus exerting positive selection pressure; the negative effects manifest after the organism has reproduced. The process of ageing/senescence is explained by this phenomenon. Some other examples of AP in genetics are as follows. ...

I have listened to several discussions on the topic of a possible emergency ushered in by artificial general intelligence. Diary of a CEO : AI Emergency: The AI Labs Are Lying To Everyone, He Says 99% Chance Of Extinction All-In Podcast : Jensen Huang: The Doomer Hoax, Superintelligence is Here, and The Future of AI (ft. President Trump) and many more… My thoughts on the matter at the moment are as follows. ...

The terms agents, agentic AI, agentic development, etc. get used a lot in discussions today. I first paid attention to it after listening to DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux. Then I started understanding what it was after listening to Cal Newport’s discussion of GPT 6. At their core, AI agents are prompt loops. At each iteration, the agent assembles context from available inputs, invokes an LLM to reason and select an action, executes that action, observes the outcome, and feeds the observation back into the next iteration. This process repeats until the task is complete or a defined stopping condition is reached. (Copied verbatim from What is the AI Agent Loop?). This is the perceive → reason → plan → act → observe loop. ...

Bret Weinstein argues that the term ’theory’ should be reserved for only the hypothesis that remains when all competing hypotheses are debunked. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is a theory since all competing explanations for the relationships between species across time (like creationism, Lamarckism, etc.) have effectively been discarded. Thus, there exists a strict criterion for some proposition to be regarded as theory. This is fairly obvious to those with a mathematics background. In mathematics, a theorem is a statement that must be accompanied by a proof, and a theory is a collection of theorems resulting from a set of axioms. The standard for something to be considered a theory is extremely high. ...

The benefit of learning from people you hate is that the lessons stick. It is natural to learn from those you like. But over time, when many of those people engage in distasteful act, or just turn into people you dislike, it can create a form of cognitive dissonance. You begin to question the lessons. You begin to feel embarassed for sharing values with them. Back when I was fourteen I had read a book from an author I admired. The book informed by career path in a major way. Later, it was revealed that the author was running a fraudulent business. I hesistate now to mention his name or the title of the book. ...