Cowboys & Conquistadors vs. Indians

 Here's Charles Mann's short version of his book 1491 delivered as a lecture. Highly recommended.

 

 

How to Master Life

From X/Twitter: 

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived. 

Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear. 

His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range." 

The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence. 

Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it. 

Chess works that way. Most things do not. 

Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who  quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read. 

There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on. 

A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked. 

The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different. 

Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore. 

He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport. 

The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers. 

The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them. 

The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career. 

Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding. 

Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science. 

The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway. 

Match quality matters more than head start. 

A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose. 

The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath. 

The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was. 

If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in. 

You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.

The Healthcare Update

 

The USA has been left behind because they kneeled to the billionaire class. They don't give a fuck about you. pic.twitter.com/svQ15smLAH

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) April 27, 2026

"Gambling is a tax on ignorance." - Warren Buffett

 

Warren Buffett, in his first sit-down since stepping down as Berkshire CEO, gave the cleanest indictment of legalized gambling in a decade. He called it a tax cut for the wealthy. The math proves him exactly right.

Americans wagered $165 billion at legal sportsbooks in 2025.… pic.twitter.com/edLe9hAO2Z

— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) April 26, 2026

An Italian Economist: Why Capitalism Isn't Natural or Inevitable, It's Enforced.

 

Jail Talk

(c) by Mark Dempsey 

A "listening session" for the Sacramento County Jail Master Plan (PSJA@saccounty.gov) just occurred. It sought to shape the jail's future, and a presentation, eventually, to the County's Supervisors. The county is motivated to change because it lost the Mays Decision, a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of mistreated prisoners.

The Mays Decision itself doesn't request bigger facilities; jail personnel are the problem. Public comments said this remains unchanged, and jailers remain abusive, even denying inmates their medication.

In fairness to the County, the jail is full. However, the County did not mention that 60%-80% of the prisoners are not convicted of anything except being too poor to afford bail. The US and the Philippines are the only two countries that require cash bail. Illinois and Washington, D.C., have abandoned it for selected crimes without bad consequences. The public, not the County, brought up eliminating cash bail.

The US incarcerates at five times the world's per-capita average, seven times more than Canada, and Canadian crime rates are lower. Prisons do not prevent crime.

The only prisoners described in the County's presentation were mentally ill or addicted. There was no mention of anything to address the poverty that prevents prisoners from posting bail. That's despite the largest homeless population since the Great Depression--driven primarily by poverty, not mental illness; in a country where 40% of the population can't afford a $400 emergency, and 60% of workers live check to check.

Santa Clara County has Destination: Home, which supplies emergency funds to those on the verge of homelessness. It took the public, not the County, to bring this up.

Will the "listening" produce any change in the County's willful ignorance about poverty driving people to desperate behavior like crime? Let's just say I'm not holding my breath.

From William Murphy here:

The United States does not have a “crime problem” in the way it’s usually framed. It has a social organization problem—a system that reliably generates the conditions under which crime becomes rational, predictable, and, in many cases, unavoidable. ....

When large sections of a population face economic precarity, unstable housing, inadequate healthcare, and underfunded education, those conditions shape behavior. Not in a simplistic, deterministic way—but in a probabilistic one. The more pressure you apply to a system, the more predictable its outcomes become.

In the U.S., those pressures are intense:

• Wages that lag far behind cost of living
• Housing markets that function as speculative assets rather than human necessities
• Healthcare tied to employment or priced out of reach
• Education systems stratified by zip code
• A labor market that oscillates between exploitation and exclusion

 Under those conditions, “crime” is not an anomaly. It is one of several adaptation strategies.

The key point: these outcomes are not bugs in the system. They are features.....

And it leads to a fundamental contradiction: the same system that produces the conditions for crime also deploys force to contain its consequences. ...



Under capitalism, certain social conditions are not just tolerated—they are functional:

• Cheap labor requires economic vulnerability
• High rents require housing scarcity
• Private healthcare profits require limited access
• Consumer markets thrive on debt and instability

These dynamics generate inequality. And inequality, in turn, generates crime.

At the same time, entire industries profit from the management of crime:

• Private prisons
• Surveillance technologies
• Security services
• Insurance markets

This creates a feedback loop where the system has no structural incentive to eliminate the root causes of crime. It only has incentives to manage and monetize its effects.

 
If the problem is structural, then the solution has to be structural. Not cosmetic reforms, not rhetorical shifts—material changes.

Here’s what the evidence shows works:
1. Economic Stability - Cash transfers, wage increases, and employment programs consistently reduce property crime and, in some cases, violence.

2. Housing as a Right - [Also] Lowers overall system costs

3. Universal Healthcare Mental health issues and substance use are deeply intertwined with crime, particularly at the street level.Treating these as criminal issues rather than health issues produces predictable results: cycling people through jails without addressing the underlying causes.

4. Education and Youth Investment - These are not quick fixes. They are long-term investments.

5. Community-Based Violence Reduction - ...don’t rely on coercion. They rely on legitimacy.

6. Justice System Reform The current system often exacerbates the very problems it claims to solve.

• Ending cash bail for low-level offenses
• Reducing excessive sentences
• Expanding parole and reentry support
• Using restorative justice where appropriate

The goal is not to eliminate accountability—but to make it constructive rather than purely punitive.

7. Redefining the Role of Police - Not every social problem requires an armed response.
  At the same time, accountability for use of force must be real, not symbolic.

The Real Question ...The deeper question is this: What kind of society are we trying to build? One that manages inequality through force? Or one that reduces inequality so that force becomes less necessary?

.... Crime is not an isolated pathology. It is a system output.

Update:

Finland gave every homeless person a house and within 6 months 85% had a job and were financially independent.

Less crime, less hospital visits, less suffering and even including the cost of the house, LESS COST than the UK/USA method of abandoning them on the streets. pic.twitter.com/G7hnCGa9bO

— BladeoftheSun (@BladeoftheS) April 24, 2026

War is the priority

 

The spending on police is the domestic version of this. See 

Public Safety Is Not a Police Problem. It’s a Political Economy Problem.

How structural insecurity and capitalist waste turn public safety into an expensive system of crisis management instead of prevention

Excerpt: "We’re told the U.S. has a 'crime' problem, but most of what gets policed is just poverty in motion. If you actually removed the economic pressure producing survival crime, you wouldn’t need half the policing apparatus we currently fund. The real question isn’t how to police better—it’s why we’ve built a society that manufactures instability and then pays billions to contain it.

"The United States treats policing like a technical issue: more funding, better training, smarter deployment, new tech. But that’s like treating a flooded house by buying better mops.

"The real driver of 'crime' in the U.S. is not individual pathology—it is structural insecurity produced by the economic system itself. When people are priced out of housing, buried in medical debt, and trapped in precarious labor markets, survival begins to reorganize itself outside formal legality. What gets labeled 'crime' is often just the informal survival logic of a stressed society."