A Physicist’s Approach to Democracy
Ditch the takes and neat narratives.
This week, we’re talking:
Why all of these election “takes” are doing more harm than good 🫷🥺🫸
How a well intentioned Harvard President broke America 🎓🤕🇺🇸
The government already has a police-state spy apparatus — the only question is how the next admin will use it 🕵🏻♂️ 👀
Justice Department wants to force Google to sell Chrome ⚖️ 🔍
When Google’s CEO called Trump to congratulate him, guess who was on the line? 👨🏽📞👱♂️
There’s a new AI bot in town — she’s trained after your grandma and she’s making life hell for scammers 👵🤖
My No-Take Take:
Everybody wants a hot take. It seems like everybody has a hot take. Over the past 14 days, I’ve been reading them in newspapers and text threads with elites, hearing them in meetings, and discussing them over drinks with friends.
We went too l:ft! We went too r:ght! America is rac:st! America is sex:st! America is elitist! Anti-incumbency on a global scale! The price of eggs is too high! The l:ft ignored and isolated young men! America is sick of the Dem0crats’ milquetoast rhetoric and r@ce/g;nder identitarianism!
There’s probably a few kernels of truth in some of these takes—but offering a smug, certain answer mere weeks after we all agreed this thing was a total toss-up feels precarious at best. In my day job, I steer clear of situations and people where the certainty-to-knowledge ratio is too high. I'm going to apply that principle here, too.
We’re all grasping for an easy answer to something that, for most of us, feels unanswerable.
I thought we mostly agreed on core principles like constitut:onal order, the rule of law, and separat:on of powers. I thought there would be natural consensus that a twice-impeached, convicted felon—liable for sexu@l ass@ult and an attempted c0up—shouldn’t occupy the 0val again.
I was wrong. Totally wrong.
And while it would be especially easy to lean into the rage and condescension I feel toward the people who v0ted him in, that doesn't get me any closer to the kind of country I’d like to live in (to be honest, the kind of country I thought I was living in all along).
In the past 14 days, I’ve been asked for my take more times than I can count. I only have one: be wary of takes. If you seek answers, it’s going to require curiosity, nuance and time.
The solution, I think, is to make like a physicist and enter a maximum entropy state. To embrace uncertainty. To resist the urge to latch onto any single take or explanation too quickly. A maximum entropy state is one with no assumptions and zero priors—where we allow for all possibilities, honor the complexity of the issues at stake, and hold space for nuance.
In physics, systems naturally tend toward maximum entropy because it’s the state of greatest equilibrium and potential. Perhaps we, too, should resist the rush to collapse this moment into a simple narrative. Instead, let’s lean into the discomfort of ambiguity. Let’s keep our minds open, our questions big, and our answers provisional.
Maybe the democrat!c value proposition isn’t something we “reframe” overnight. It’s something we reimagine together, slowly and deliberately. Not with hot takes, but with hard work. Not with certainty, but with curiosity.
The next chapter of this American experiment depends on it.
Must Read:
How the Ivy League Broke America via The Atlantic 🎓🤕🇺🇸
Success in school is not the same thing as success in life. University administrators in the Conant mold assumed that people who could earn high grades would continue to excel later in their career. But school is not like the rest of life. Success in school is about jumping through the hoops that adults put in front of you; success in life can involve charting your own course. In school, a lot of success is individual: How do I stand out? In life, most success is team-based: How can we work together? Grades reveal who is persistent, self-disciplined, and compliant—but they don’t reveal much about emotional intelligence, relationship skills, passion, leadership ability, creativity, or courage. In short, the meritocratic system is built on a series of non sequiturs. We train and segregate people by ability in one setting, and then launch them into very different settings.
Around the Web:
The Technology the Trump Administration Could Use to Hack Your Phone via The New Yorker 🕵🏻♂️👀
In September, the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) signed a two-million-dollar contract with Paragon, an Israeli firm whose spyware product Graphite focusses on breaching encrypted-messaging applications such as Telegram and Signal. Wired first reported that the technology was acquired by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—an agency within D.H.S. that will soon be involved in executing the Trump Administration’s promises of mass deportations and crackdowns on border crossings. A source at Paragon told me that the deal followed a vetting process, during which the company was able to demonstrate that it had robust tools to prevent other countries that purchase its spyware from hacking Americans—but that wouldn’t limit the U.S. government’s ability to target its own citizens… “It’s just so evident—the impending disaster,” Emily Tucker, the executive director at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, told me. “You may believe yourself not to be in one of the vulnerable categories, but you won’t know if you’ve ended up on a list for some reason or your loved ones have. Every single person should be worried.”
U.S. Proposes Breakup of Google to Fix Search Monopoly via NYTimes ⚖️ 🔍
The Justice Department and a group of states asked a federal court late Wednesday to force Google to sell Chrome, its popular web browser, a move that could fundamentally alter the $2 trillion company’s business and reshape competition on the internet. Beyond the sale of Chrome, the government asked Judge Mehta to give Google a choice: Either sell Android, its smartphone operating system, or be barred from making its services mandatory on phones that use Android to operate. If Google broke those terms, or the remedies failed to improve competition, the government could force the company to sell Android at a later date.
Musk Joined Call Between Trump, Google CEO via The Information 👨🏽📞👱♂️
When Google CEO Sundar Pichai called Donald Trump to congratulate the President-elect on winning the election, an unexpected guest was on the line: Elon Musk.
A new AI granny is fighting digital scammers via Semafor 👵 🤖
“Daisy” is an AI with the voice of a grandmother, developed for a British telecoms company: Using technology similar to ChatGPT Voice, it keeps fraudsters on the phone to “waste as much of their time as possible,” telling meandering stories about her family and handing out fake personal information. It has kept frustrated scammers on the phone for up to 40 minutes, and shows that like any new technology, AI is dual-use: While it will make scamming easier, it can provide tools for fighting it, too.