Sam Enright is engaged in innovation policy at Progress Ireland, an independent think tank based in Dublin, and he also oversees a publication titled The Fitzwilliam. Most pertinent to our discussion, on his personal blog, he curates a popular link roundup; below is a condensed version of his January Links.
Curated Blogs and Short Links
1. Henry Oliver reflects on the literary anniversaries we can expect in 2026. In a twist of irony, he’s also on the lookout for an intern to explore the works of John Stuart Mill. One can only hope that this intern is up for discussing Mill’s engaging essays on the political economy of Indian land and the merits of ranked-choice voting with me, as I find those topics far more stimulating than On Liberty.
2. Shifting gears, my colleague Seán O’Neill McPartlin notes that in political circles, surging rents and land prices are often attributed to ‘speculators.’ However, this term is so philosophically muddled that I can’t help but think many of these arguments are profoundly misguided. To put it succinctly, Peter McLaughlin aptly summarized the situation:
Seán’s insight is brilliantly simplistic yet astute: when the public blames speculation for escalating house prices, they often conflate two distinct practices that could yield opposite outcomes. At times, this refers to land hoarding—holding onto property for a better deal; other times, it means excessive trading, where properties are sold frequently due to financialization. Yet the term ‘speculation’ is still used as if it has a unified cause, which is rather perplexing.
3. The European Union’s ‘single market’ appears to be on the verge of decay. I recently mentioned this blog post at a gathering, only to be challenged by a Dutch attendee for referring to “self-righteous Europeans” in the third person—because, apparently, I’m not one of them. The figures presented in this post—claiming EU member states have de facto 45% tariffs on goods and 110% on services—are indeed deeply misleading.
4. Meanwhile, in China, certain provinces are stepping up internet censorship beyond what the central government mandates. Henan is taking the lead here. Increasingly, access to Chinese websites is blocked from any IP address outside the mainland. A friend who advises multinationals on operations in China remarked that he never anticipated needing to VPN into China.
5. Apropos of Tyler Cowen’s reflections on the checkered history of American-backed regime changes, this entire page is utterly absurd:
I can think of far more dignified ways to unseat a dictator than with a Navy SEAL rick-roll.
6. Hats off to Jamie Rumbelow for securing a Sidney Award (gated) from David Brooks for his insightful work in Works in Progress about Manhattan’s intricate steam tunnel network.
7. A curious polling statistic: 12% of Americans claim to possess a license to operate a submarine. Is this a sign that Lizardman’s constant is climbing?
8. In a whimsical twist, Thomas Nagel’s existential question, what is it like to be a bat, has been reimagined in a poetic edition.
9. Sam Mendelsohn offers a compelling introduction to the Mahabharata and Ramayana. It appears that the illustrated editions are the way to go. A section that was excised from my essay Notes on Taiwan speculated on why Eastern classics tend to be lengthier than their Western counterparts (a mystery still unsolved). This quote from A.K. Ramanujan resonates with me:
No Indian reads the Mahabharata for the first time
This comment on Marginal Revolution provides additional context regarding Indian oral traditions.
Musical Recommendations and Podcasts
1. The Works in Progress podcast features Anton Howes discussing how Henry VIII inadvertently triggered the Industrial Revolution. The overlap between this conversation and Anton’s presentation at our Adam Smith conference is particularly noteworthy.
2. Seun Kuti and Egypt 80’s latest album, Heavier Yet (Lays the Crownless Head), has stolen my heart. My favorite track is Dey. I also appreciated Radiolab’s exploration of Fela Kuti’s significant role in Afrobeat’s history. For those interested, here’s a full 12-part series about Fela that features excerpts from that episode. Egypt 80 (formerly Africa 70), Fela’s band, is now under the direction of his son Seun.
3. Dave Chappelle’s recent stand-up routine humorously posits that if jobs were to shift from China back to America, an iPhone would cost a staggering $9,000. He was close, at least in terms of magnitude: the one smartphone actually manufactured in America relies on outdated technology and retails for $2,000. Appropriately, it’s named the Liberty Phone.
4. The collaboration of Charles Lloyd, Zakir Hussain, and Eric Harland in their album Sangam is a brilliant fusion of Indian-inspired jazz, an underrated subgenre I previously discussed in January 2025. The track Dancing on One Foot stands out as the most accessible piece. Also, check out Batson’s initial forays into Indian classical music.
5. The question arises: was Michel Foucault a libertarian? As with many inquiries posed by Rasheed Griffith, it seems that Betteridge’s law of headlines applies here.
Books and Academic Papers
1. Various, Beyond Reasoning Gains: Mitigating General Capabilities Forgetting in Large Reasoning Models. This was the focus of my AI journal club, which utilized an experimental ‘wisdom of crowds’ format. We delved into this paper to form a collective conclusion before checking the market rate on Gavin Leech’s prediction market regarding whether reinforcement learning negatively impacts off-target capabilities. As a fair-minded centrist, I estimated the likelihood at 50%.
This paper might be above my current understanding, placing me in the phase of recognizing terms and discussing them with Claude. Yet, there is much to learn through that process! Engaging with computer science literature is a different paradigm compared to philosophy or history, where “reading” often takes a backseat to practical implementation of techniques. Admittedly, I am still a novice in this area, though Claude Code has been quite helpful.
Reinforcement learning is arguably one of the more approachable fields in computer science for economists. The fundamental mathematical concepts (value functions, dynamic programming, fixed point theorems) should be familiar to anyone contemplating an economics PhD in a quantitatively rigorous department.
The term ‘reinforcement learning’ has been adopted by younger generations in a manner that often diverges from its original meaning. I sometimes hear it used interchangeably with the entire post-training phase of an LLM. According to the Richard Sutton textbook, RL refers to a set of strategies aimed at optimizing cumulative rewards in an environment modeled as a Markov decision process. By this definition, one could argue whether reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) qualifies as true RL. Moreover, the term is often mistakenly applied to processes such as supervised fine-tuning, which is decidedly not RL. Thus, my contribution to the discussion was very much philosophical: arguing that the initial question was confused due to its failure to delineate semantic distinctions that many find tedious.
2. Andrew Brown, J.D. Bernal: The Sage of Science. This book is one of the most underrated works on science I’ve come across. I firmly believe John Desmond Bernal was among the great scientific polymaths of the 20th century. I have amassed thousands of words of notes on this book and plan to profile his work for Asimov Press in the future.
3. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, The Logic Theory Machine. This seminal paper emerged from the Dartmouth summer workshop on AI. The Logic Theorist was an automated theorem-proving program that operated on the JOHNNIAC at RAND. This paper recounts the Logic Theorist proving 38 out of 52 theorems from chapter two of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, achieving a level of elegance superior to that of Russell and Whitehead themselves in one instance. It’s quite astonishing; AI was making original contributions to mathematics—at least in terms of simplifying existing proofs—by the 1950s! My extensive reading of Bertrand Russell last year has certainly paid off more than I anticipated.
Film and Video Selections
1. Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice (어쩔수가없다) is a recent offering from the director of Decision to Leave and Oldboy, both favorites of mine. While this film may not linger in my memory as strongly as his others, it provides a light-hearted, comedic experience, and we thoroughly enjoyed the screening. The film’s clever approach to making an obscure industry seem far more economically significant than it is resonates well.
The Korean embassy in Ireland could consider honoring Kevin O’Rourke, a missionary from County Cavan who was the first to translate much of the Korean cultural canon into English. He became a professor at Kyung Hee University, earned honorary Korean citizenship, and was the first foreigner to receive a doctorate in Korean literature. Years ago, I was acquainted with some of his family friends from Busan; it’s remarkable how interconnected we all are.
2. On YouTube, Amanda Askell discusses the training of Claude’s character and the alignment of Opus 3. Welch Labs also delves into the concept of double descent and how it challenges traditional notions in statistical learning theory. Lastly, you can catch Jacob Collier and Esperanza Spalding performing on NPR’s Tiny Desk.
You can read the complete version of Sam’s January links here.
[1] A Twitter user once described JS Mill’s writing style as that of an “undergraduate racing against a midnight deadline,” a characterization I find myself agreeing with more than Henry does.
[2] Oddly enough, “The Henan Cyberspace Affairs Commission could not be reached for comment.”
[3] I once gifted a DK illustrated version of the Mahabharata to an old flatmate from Mumbai. One of my fondest memories was trading strangely translated cultural quirks: “I see your Gujarati Spiderman and raise you Irish Spongebob.”
[4] Curiously, this phenomenon is largely driven by the quarter of Hispanic adults who claim to know how to operate a submarine. Is there some hidden tradition of Latin American pranksterism I’ve missed?
[5] I hope this comes across as genuine; it truly is an impressive engineering feat.
[6] Refer to section 3.5 of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on computational philosophy.
