The Interesting Times: Why Rome Really Fell

Articles and Podcasts

Why Rome Actually Fell: Plagues, Slavery, & Ice Age — Kyle Harper [Podcast]

Dwarkesh Podcast

Most history tends to be some version of ‘Great Man’ history in which a single person or a small group did some stuff that was the primary cause of some big event.

I tend to be more foxy in my view of history. It’s more often the case that the ‘cause’ is a complex confluence of events not easily distilled into a single narrative.

Typically, the Fall of Rome is told through the lens of bad emperors making bad decisions leading to bad outcomes. Harper makes a more multicausal and environmental case that Rome's fate was decided by volcanic eruptions in the 530s and bacterial evolution in the Central Asian rodent population.

The same urban density and trade networks that enabled unprecedented prosperity also created ideal conditions for pandemic spread. Harper traces how the empire was rocked by three intercontinental disease events.

The Antonine plague (likely smallpox)
The Cyprianic plague (possibly hemorrhagic fever)
The bubonic plague during Justinian's reign.

Because of the interconnectedness of the empire, each pandemic killed huge swaths of the population (estimates ranger from 5-50%).

The Justinian plague is particularly interesting because Justinian seemed to be getting things back in order when the plague struck. It was the worst of the three with the mortality rate estimated at 40-50%. It was also accompanied by a shift in the climate due to volcanic eruptions that caused crops to fail and starvation to spread. At that point, it seemed to transmute from an economic and biological catastrophe into a social and cultural one.

“...apocalyptic thought is one of the principal ways people frame [these catastrophes]. To them, nature is going crazy. You know, huge amounts of the population are dying of this horrible sudden disease and the crops don't grow.”

In this narrative, Rome didn't collapse because of any single factor but a cascade of failures across factors spilling across economic, cultural, political and military dimensions.

When plague decimated urban populations, it reduced tax revenue. When climate shifts disrupted agriculture, it created food shortages that weakened immune systems, making populations more vulnerable to disease. When both hit simultaneously, the empire's ability to respond to external threats, like Germanic tribes, was wiped out.

Rome appeared invincible at its peak precisely because its integrated systems amplified positive feedback loops. But those same tight couplings meant that environmental shocks could propagate throughout the entire system faster than institutions could adapt.

Why I Think AI Take-Off is Relatively Slow [Article]

Marginal Revolution

AI is cool. I use it every day. I oscillate between thinking “everything is going to change super fast” and “shrug, it’s cool.” Compared with most of the internet discourse, I am probably closer to the “shrug, it’s cool” end of the pole and this is a nicer articulation than I have managed of why I think that is. This point stands out most to me:

Human bottlenecks become more important, the more productive is AI. Let’s say AI increases the rate of good pharma ideas by 10x. Well, until the FDA gets its act together, the relevant constraint is the rate of drug approval, not the rate of drug discovery.

This is certainly true of me anecdotally. Given the level of technology, how much of the benefit am I currently getting? I dunno, but would wager a guess of 1-5%. Changing your workflows and habits is slow, and this is especially true at an institutional level where those things tend to be codified as SOPs or regulations or standards.

Of course, this is somewhat lazy thinking. The more interesting questions are where and how it will be most impactful. Ethan Mollick has used the metaphor of a jagged frontier for talking about AI’s capabilities. E.g. Some recent models could flawlessly do graduate-level math but could not figure out how many ‘R’s’ were in the word strawberry. The frontier of impact will be equally jagged, and the interesting question is what that shape looks like.

Also, this is a pretty fascinating factoid: “Historically, GDP growth is remarkably smooth, albeit for somewhat mysterious reasons. North America is a vastly different place than it was in the year 1600, technologically and otherwise. Yet there are remarkably few years when the economic growth rate is all that far from two percent.”

Hmm?

The Societal Machine [Article]

Venkatesh Rao

“The natural and preferred but unstable human condition is mutualism, which is liable to collapse into either individualism or collectivism (which has two major flavors) through the catalytic effects of two kinds of actors who are simultaneously enabled and constrained by the state: Oligarchs and intellectuals. Along with the human constituents of the state itself — autocrats, bureaucrats, and elected representatives — they form a subset of humanity that sees itself as irreversibly alienated from the main body politic, and inclined to drive it away from the threatening mutualism condition.”

Minimum Viable Self [Article]
Kneeling Bus

“Seen from a distance, (other people’s) existence seems to possess a coherence and a unity which they cannot have, in reality, but which seems evident to the spectator. This, of course, is an optical illusion. The distance (that is, the paucity of our knowledge) blurs the details and effaces everything that fits ill into the Gestalt. Illusion or not, we tend to see other people’s lives as works of art. And having seen them this way, we struggle to (make our lives) the same.”

Tree Level Complexity [Article]
The Till

A practical anecdote about home maintenance (which has been occupying an embarrassing amount of my headspace lately) evolves into a meditation on system design, trading algorithms, and the hidden costs of sophistication.

The central insight revolves around what I'd call "complexity debt"—every additional feature, optimization, or improvement creates new maintenance obligations and failure vectors.

There's a persistent temptation to add more indicators, more automation, more sophistication. But every additional layer requires ongoing attention and introduces new failure modes. The question becomes: Are you building a lasting competitive advantage or just creating more surfaces for entropy to attack?

“With every additional system improvement, you introduce risk and tick up the ongoing maintenance. Nature (mother or markets) will grind against the man-made and turn manicured lawns into unruly jungles with crumbling structures.

In constructing an edge, there must always be an eye to durability. If you can’t pay attention to markets to catch every time an indicator drops below X, maybe it can be captured with something automated. And if you introduce automation, you need to monitor technical failures, dependencies, and upgrades.”

I am perhaps something of a luddite in certain ways. I had to buy a new stove and dishwasher last year and actively avoided anything with 'smart' features. The very mild relative benefit of being able to preheat my stover from the grocery store did not outweigh the inconvenience of not being able to use it when the power went out or the chip malfunctioned.

Meet the Billionaire and Rising GOP Mega-Donor Who’s Gaming the Tax System [Article]

Propublica

This article is intended as a takedown for tax avoidance (which very well may be the case), but I read it through the lens of understanding someone who's built one of the most successful trading firms in existence (Susquehanna) and isn't particularly public about it. Two things that jumped out which I find are common themes in these types of stories:

One is the importance of table selection, who you are trading against, as opposed to just how good your trading strategy or approach is in a vacuum:

Asked to describe his approach to trading at Susquehanna, Yass once reached for a poker analogy. “If you’re the sixth-best poker player in the world and you play with the five best players, you’re going to lose,” he said. “If your skills are only average, but you play against weak opponents, you’re going to win.”

The other is how important it is to be in the right place at the right time. In Yass’s case, he graduated from college and started studying options in the late 1970s, just as options trading started to find its feet.

Yass’ college thesis weighed whether the budding market in stock options could be justified as socially useful. “I concluded that it should exist,” Yass later cracked. “I got a B.”

After college, he moved to Las Vegas for a year and a half to play poker professionally. Then he returned to the East Coast and settled in Philadelphia, where he began trading options.

You can make very good money sitting managing an existing asset class, but the metric fuckton of money it takes to be a billionaire usually seems to require getting in early to a new asset class.

Iain McGilchrist Podcast Extravaganza (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

I have been nerd sniped by Iain McGilchrist’s work from reading his book The Master and the Emissary. It is a summary of 30 years of research on brain hemisphere research and its cultural and social implications. The book has flaws and I disagree with some of what it claims, but it is brilliant and thought-provoking. I will forgive much in an author if they achieve those two qualities.

McGilchrist argues that the right hemisphere is better at attention, perception, judgment, emotional and social intelligence, and creativity. Only apprehension, or getting a hold on a precise and clear idea, is better performed by the left hemisphere.

However, society has evolved to value this very specific trait of the left hemisphere the most and McGilchrist sees this as explanatory of a great deal of social issues across the political spectrum (echoes of one of my favorite books: James Scott’s Seeing Like a State).

I went to iTunes and typed his name in a trio of interviews with Jordan Peterson popped up and I listened to all of them and they were also great. I have a few thousand words of notes, so I’ll just leave some teasers of things they discussed and you can decide if they strike your fancy:

Social and cultural results of left hemisphere dominance.
Three factors are vital for human happiness.
Why the real religious divide lies between fundamentalist believers/atheists and those holding a more nuanced view.
How science actually progresses from intuition, not the scientific method.
Why too much desire for freedom can paradoxically lead to tyranny.
Attention as a moral act.
Logos and mythos as different but equal forms of truth.

And, finally, I’ll leave you with this image McGilchrist brought up, which I’ve been pondering: William Blake’s depiction of Jacob’s ladder as a spiral. There are many religious/self-help ideas of things “coming full circle”, but I much prefer this idea of them “spiraling”

Just making an aside on Jacob's ladder … Mostly the image of the ladder is a straight ladder. But [William] Blake's image is of a spiral, and I think there's an enormous amount of depth in that.

The idea that as you go up and approach nearer to heaven, your process is not just simply linear, but also in a way circular, but not in such a way that you come back to, as Elliot said, the Place where you first started and know it for the first time.

But you actually come back to a position which is similar to where you were, but now on a higher plane. And you can look down and see where you were before, and you can relate these two things. So you can see both the progress and the return in one [image].

Here are a few more things you might find interesting:

Interesting Essays: Read my best, free essays on topics like bitcoin, investing, decision making and marketing.

Consulting & Advising: Are you looking for help with making decisions around scaling your company from $500k to $5 million? I’ve been working with authors, entrepreneurs, and startups for half a decade to help them get more out of their businesses.

Internet Business Toolkit: An exhaustive list of all the online tools I use to be more productive.