Gio Lodi's Blog

Lords of the Cosmos — Highlights

Lords of the Cosmos by and Chipkin is a much-needed injection of rationality in the current discourse. It explores the history of ideas and how they affect societies, explains why popular doctrines like environmentalism and relativism are threats to civilization, and introduces the theories that can propel us forward.

At a time when anti-progress thought is rampant, we need more voices like Arjun’s and Logan’s. Authors who can argue with straight logic against nihilism and in favor of human prosperity.

Here are some passages that stood out.

Humanity finally kicked into high gear during the Enlightenment, when we realized that progress was both possible and achievable, when ideas that fostered creativity and criticism began to replace those that suppressed them, when we sought to explain the world around us with rigorous theories, both scientific and otherwise.

The pursuit of knowledge is an egalitarian enterprise—whether one is rich or poor, male or female, slave or king, no one’s ideas enjoyed privilege over another’s for any reason other than that they contained superior arguments.

The growth of knowledge is the fundamental driver of progress, the primary weapon in the fight against our problems. With this understanding in mind, we can see in clearer terms precisely why all of the ideologies we discussed are, in fact, Enemies of Civilization: They slow the growth of knowledge and wealth (wealth being the set of all transformations we know how to cause).

For most of our history, our cultures were static. Then, with the philosophical advances of the Enlightenment, the West figured out how to make continuous progress—it became a dynamic society. While the Enemies of Civilization had dominated static societies of the past, they continue to hamper progress to this day. All of them fail to appreciate that problems are due to lack of knowledge—and, therefore, that speed, creativity, and freedom are necessary for progress, rather than political and intellectual tyranny, reducing resource consumption, and ridding the Earth of humanity.

You may laugh at those environmentalists who throw paint at art, but they’ve been effective at halting the development of nuclear power, a potential source of abundant energy that we’ve known how to build for decades. We can’t calculate how much suffering could have been ameliorated had we been free to build nuclear power plants across the Earth.

Relativism might seem open-minded and fair, but it is neither. For it is not open to the possibility that one party is in the right, the other in the wrong.

If left unchecked, [environmentalism, relativism, and other anti-rational memes] could come to dominate our dynamic society and revert it back to the static societies of old. We therefore have a duty to not only recognize them for the threat that they are, but to do everything in our power to eradicate them entirely.

It’s taken a few centuries, but we’ve come back to the ancients’ view of the relationship between people and the cosmos. While we’ve rightly abandoned the majority of their beliefs, they were right about this much—to understand Nature at its deepest, we have to acknowledge the special role people play.

If we so choose, we can continue to make the world, the solar system, the galaxy, and the rest an infinitely better and more beautiful place. Human knowledge—our values, scientific theories, political ideals, and culture—can come to be the predominant cause of every physical structure in the cosmos.

The fate of the cosmos depends on the future history of knowledge.

I had the fortune of reading a pre-release version, then preordered the paperback as soon as it was available on Amazon. I want it where I can see it on my bookshelf, next to other inspiring works such as The Ascent of Man, The Rational Optimist, and, of course, The Beginning of Infinity, to serve as a reminder that we can all contribute to the fate of the cosmos.

I hope you’ll give Lords of the Cosmos a chance. If you do, get in touch and let me know.

Patience and Frustration

Welcome to Monday Dispatch, a bonus edition for paid subscribers. Thank you for your support—it means a lot and helps me keep writing.

This week, a personal reflection on patience, purpose, and the tension between internal and external metrics.

The last post, Depth Takes Time, was an invitation to push against the modern instinct of instant gratification and take the time to go deep.

The anecdote from Popper’s intellectual journey that prompted that reflection also made me think about patience and the purpose of writing.

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Depth Takes Time

It takes time to go deep. Sounds obvious, I know, but it’s easy to forget.

The internet has given us unprecedented access to information. We have libraries at our fingertips, with tools to search and summarize them. When any question can be answered with a few clicks, it’s easy to fool ourselves into believing we understand the complex topics that make up whatever the current thing is.

From this false sense of understanding comes an entitlement to have an opinion, and, of course, to post it online. But there is a wide chasm between the thumbnail sketch one gets from a couple of internet searches and actually understanding a topic.

I was reminded that deep understanding takes time when reading Karl Popper’s intellectual autobiography, Unended Quest. Popper built his arguments by first understanding other people’s theories to the point where he could elevate them to their strongest version. Only from that vantage point, he went on to criticize them, and, at times, demolish them.

The Open Society and Its Enemies is an example of Popper’s method directed towards Platonism and Marxism. His work was so thorough that Marx’s biographer Isaiah Berlin described it as “the most scrupulous and formidable criticism of the philosophical and historical doctrines of Marxism by any living writer.”

One cannot reach such depth overnight. It requires years of reading and thinking.

Seventeen-year-old Popper encountered communism and Marxism in 1919. As he recounts in Unended Quest, he was initially suspicious but was eventually won over by the propaganda. His infatuation didn’t last long, though. When “a shooting broke out during a demonstration by unarmed young socialists who, instigated by the communists, tried to help some communists to escape who were under arrest in the central police station in Vienna” resulting in the death of several people involved, Popper was horrified. But it wasn’t just the brutality of the police that struck him. As a communist, he felt complicit because of the implications of Marxism, with its demand that class struggle intensify and become ever more violent.

From there began a long process of reflection:

It took me some years of study before I felt with any confidence that I had grasped the heart of the Marxian argument. […] But it was not till sixteen years later, in 1935, that I began to write about Marxism with the intention of publishing what I wrote. As a consequence, two books emerged between 1935 and 1943—The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies.

When we hold a book, or engage with any other work of creativity, we interact with a finished product. We can access the work in its entirety and without delay. It’s easy to gloss over the fact that it didn’t materialize all of a sudden.

We are used to getting everything we need instantly, be it a ride home with Uber or an item with Amazon, a movie with Netflix or a meal with DoorDash. This craving for instant gratification is also visible in entertainment apps like Instagram and TikTok, with their short videos that get swiped away unless they hook viewers within a few seconds.

But there is no same-day-delivery system for understanding.

Knowledge comes from within. It’s a lattice we weave one connection at a time, sequence after sequence of conjecture and criticism.

Complex ideas take time to digest. They cannot be summarized in 30-second soundbites.

Popper spent years grappling with the Marxist doctrine, and even longer thinking and discussing with friends, before sitting down to write its obituary.

To push back against reductionist narratives and bring nuance back into our discourse, we need to remember that depth takes time.

Substance Over Status

As Peter Thiel said: Value substance over status.

Status is given by others. Substance is earned, by yourself, for yourself.

Because status is given, it can also be taken away. No one can rob you of substance. What you’ve learned stays with you, and so do the things you create.

Higher status might open doors—your network is your net worth—but only substance gives you the tools and agency to solve your problems.

You don’t need others to tell you when you’ve done something of substance. You can just tell.

You gain status by pleasing others. You build substance by pleasing yourself.

RIP Charlie Kirk

When people stop talking, really bad stuff happens. When marriages stop talking, divorce happens. When civilizations stop talking, civil war ensues.

When you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to want to commit violence against that group.

What we as a culture need to get back to is being able to have reasonable disagreement where violence is not an option.

— Charlie Kirk, 1993 - 2025

Those words hit harder today, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

Some saw him as a champion of the free exchange of ideas, others as a “dishonest huckster.” Regardless, his murder is an unjustified tragedy.

Before today, I only knew him from the viral clips that made their way on my feeds from time to time. I didn’t know how popular he was or the influence of his Turning Point organization.

You cannot form an opinion about someone from a sample of clips edited for virality, but take the one from which I took the quote at the start of the post. In it, I see echoes of Popper’s description of rationalism:

Perhaps I am wrong and you are right; anyway we can both hope that after our discussion we will both see things more clearly than before, just so long as we remember that our drawing closer to the truth is more important than the question of who is right.

— On Freedom, from the All Life Is Problem Solving essays collection.

What makes Charlie’s death even more tragic is the vicious callousness of the reaction in certain corners of the internet. Sickening. Despicable. Morally rotten.

At such an emotionally charged moment, it’s crucial to remember that those celebrating are a vocal but tiny minority. Most people are recoiling, including Charlie’s political opponents.

Once again, I return to Popper: “It might be well for all of us to remember that, while differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.”

fears Charlie’s death will be a turning point for the worse, “tonight feels like some sort of invisible line has been crossed that we didn’t even know was there.”

If this horrible death marks a turning point, my hope is that it will be a return to an honest, earnest, polite exchange of ideas. Let it be the moment we all say enough with the nonsense, and bring back the nuance.

Let’s go back to talking instead of shouting.

Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.

Against AI Mandates

The last post argued that good technology needs advocates that convince, not mandates that coerce. The contrast between advocacy and enforcement, between convincing and coercing, is topical at this time of AI hype.

According to Business Insider, Julia Liuson, president of the Microsoft developer tools division, shared a memo encouraging managers to consider AI as “part of your holistic reflections on an individual’s performance and impact.”

Microsoft is heavily invested into the AI game, so it’s no surprise they push hard for it internally. But they are not the only ones.

Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lutke considers using AI efficiently “a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify,” and plans to “add AI usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire.”

The sensationalist media has capitalized on leaders pushing AI with headlines such as “No AI, no job” but Tobi’s mandate, and I’d like to think those of most other leaders, is far more nuanced.

The e-commerce giant’s CEO wants his employees to explore what he considers a promising opportunity together. “Learning to use AI well is an unobvious skill,” Tobi writes, “My sense is that a lot of people give up after writing a prompt and not getting the ideal thing back immediately. Learning to prompt and load context is important.”

It’s one thing to advocate for AI literacy, it’s another to essentially mandate people change their workflows to introduce AI. Tobi says employees are “welcome to try” opting-out of learning how to integrate AI in their craft, but when performance reviews explicitly include questions about AI usage, what choice do they really have?

For sure, it’s a leader’s job to set the company’s technological direction. 37 Signals CEO David Heinemeier Hansson caught heat online for requiring employees to transition from macOS to Omarchy, his bespoke Linux distribution. His response to critics is that picking technologies to bet on and invest in is “literally the job description.” “Omarchy is our distribution,” David explained on the Rework Podcast, “It was born at 37 Signals, it was born from me pouring 37 Signalness into it.” Going all in on Omarchy is a bet on a development environment the company controls and can tailor to its needs, like it already does with Ruby on Rails, Kamal, Hotwire, and other non-negotiable tools.

David’s mandates at 37 Signals, from Omarchy to Ruby on Rails, set environmental constraints that focus development. Can we say the same about mandating AI use?

Leaders who push for AI adoption believe it will help with a variety of tasks. Many critics have argued the promised productivity increase has yet to materialize, but let’s assume it’s just a matter of time, a combination of tools maturing and people learning how to use them. If that’s the case, it will soon be pretty easy to identify who uses AI well: they will be the most productive teams and individuals.

If overall productivity is what businesses care about, does it matter how a person or team becomes more productive? A good employee delivers what they promised within the timeframe they agreed upon. If they can improve output quality or delivery time, does it matter if that’s done by using AI or by, say, improving their work environment to reduce distractions?

My concern is that adding AI usage to performance reviews distracts people from useful work. On top of “build great products” they now have to “prove you use AI.” This will inevitably result in a lot of theater, with folks showcasing how they use AI, instead of actually using AI to solve problems.

I get that leaders, especially at big companies, have the long-term interests of the business in mind. By pushing teams to master a new promising technology, they are laying the groundwork for remaining competitive in the future. But what we need is convincing, not coercing.

If a new tool or workflow helps people do more with less, those who are committed to their craft will naturally adopt it. The only thing they need is for someone to show the benefit and demonstrate the adoption cost is worth it. No mandates required!

Leaders who want to bet on the revolutionary effects of AI should invest in teaching employees how to use it well. Incentivize learning by rewarding those who demonstrate how integrating AI in their work made them more productive. Adding AI usage metrics to performance reviews does the opposite: It penalizes those that don’t use AI—regardless of why they don’t.

Mandates also make me question the trust leadership has in their teams and the hiring process that got them on board. Who doesn’t want to automate toil in favor of higher bandwidth for applying their creativity? Trust your teams will appreciate the benefits and do all they can to take advantage of them.

A good leader sets a bold vision for the future. A great leader trusts teams to make the best decisions to turn that vision into reality.

I benefit daily from using AI tools, but am skeptical of AI mandates. They seem a misguided way to promote AI usage. Mandates might result in AI adoption, but it will be in a performative way, one that proves compliance over generating leverage.

What about you? What’s your company’s expectation on AI usage?

Does Useful Tech Need Advocates?

, left a thought-provoking comment on ’s post, The Rage of the AI Guy:

The AI cheerleaders seem to be forgetting that when a technology is truly useful, valuable, and enjoyable, people will adopt it of their own free will. No one had to force anyone to buy an iPhone or to install GPS in their cars.

Mari contrasts the organic mass adoption of GPS and iPhones with the failure of AR devices, from Google Glass to Vision Pro.

Mari’s comment feels right, but one should be skeptical of feelings when forming an opinion. Is it actually true that if a technology is truly useful, people will naturally adopt it?

A few counter examples. Nuclear power is the best energy source we’ve implemented so far, yet it’s actively banned in many countries. Vaccines are among the greatest health innovations of the 20th century, yet there are vocal groups of people that reject them. Genetically modified crops produce more food with less land, yet the European Union has various regulations curtailing them.

What nuclear, vaccines, and GMOs have in common is that their opposition is in large part ideological. Clearly, doing more for less is not enough; a new technology also needs to fit into the user’s value system.

Advocates promote adoption by explaining how a new tech aligns with people’s values. At times, the advocate’s work is less about promoting the tech itself and more about changing people’s worldview. See, for example, ’s The Ecomodernist.

So, yes, technology needs advocates, especially when a new technology requires a paradigm shift. A good advocate helps bridging the gap between the status quo and the future that new technology enables.

Looking back at Mari’s observation, I guess what resonated was not the implicit critique of cheerleaders the but the proviso “of their own free will.”

Convincing is always better than coercing.

There is a huge difference between advocating from the bottom and mandating from the top.

If a technology is useful, a good advocate will be able to showcase its benefits and plant the seed for people to change their mind about rejecting it. A top-down mandate, no matter how well intentioned, does not explain why the new technology should be used.

Sometimes, we need to be shown how something is better to understand why we should use it.

The problem is not with cheerleaders, but with mandates, bureaucracy, and regulations. Technology needs advocates, not enforcers.

It’s No Surprise The Media Got AI So Wrong

Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, is one of the long-time AI skeptics that are being vindicated in the wake of GPT-5’s flop.

In a recent monologue, Ed shares his frustration at journalists and editors who have been boosting the AI narrative over the past couple of years, forfeiting their intellectual integrity and journalistic commitment to dig beneath the surface.

I share Ed’s frustration. As I wrote back in AI Does Not Need Welfare, too many journalists accept exceptional claims without asking for exceptional evidence—or explanations.

Unfortunately, the explanation-less pattern does not stop with AI. We see it at play, for example, in the reporting on the Gaza conflict, where prominent outlets share victim counts published by Hamas, a terrorist organization that boasts of using human shields and propaganda. We saw it during the final years of Biden’s presidency, when we were assured the president was fit and lucid despite it being visibly not the case.

The problem is not limited to the so-called “legacy media.” Many of the independent podcasters and writers that filled the trust void left by traditional publications are no better. They might be worse, actually. In rejecting the attitude of established outlets, some also reject rigor, fact-checking, and accountability.

For sure, I’m not accusing all journalists of having lost their way, but the recent flip on AI is a clear example of an overall preference for sensationalism and narrative in favor of truth-seeking.

I don’t pretend to have a good explanation for this complex phenomenon, but perhaps the diagnosis Neil Postman offered in his 1985 Amusing Ourselves To Death could be a good place to start.

As television became ubiquitous in the West, discourse and information morphed into entertainment. But entertainment is not an exercise in truth seeking. Television’s aim, Postman wrote, is “applause, not reflection.”

Television’s paradigm reshaped discourse across all other media. Social media, with its algorithms promoting the most engaging content with no regard for depth or correctness, fits perfectly within TV’s framework.

With a media landscape that incentivizes engagement, is it any surprise that those working in it chase emotion-inducing partisan headlines?

How off the mark do all those interviews by Ezra Klein and others on the imminent collapse of education and white-collar work look now, after GPT-5’s disappointment?

But also, how predictable. Doomerism is more engaging than grounded optimism. Nuanced discussions on trade-offs and how much work still needs to be done are plain and boring compared to stories of impending ruin and injustice, never mind how unfounded.

If you’ve been seeking explanations below the flashy headlines, only to be left wanting, then you won’t be surprised that so many news outlets got it so wrong. They haven’t been in the business of looking for truth for a long time.

We Need More Tech Billionaires

In recent years, tech billionaires have gotten a bad rep.

They are ruining the environment with their private jets, scheming to replace us with AIs, and — worst of all — bending the knee to Donald Trump. They have a dark agenda. They are screwing us all. They should be abolished.

For many, tech billionaires, with their unbounded wealth, their excesses, and their nefarious plans are the new enemies of humanity.

Wrong!

Poverty is the enemy. Not wealth.

I’m not here to defend the current crop of tech billionaires. Think of them whatever you like. But wealth and wealth creation are good things.

Wealth creation is not a zero-sum game — it’s net positive.

Profit is proof of service. Money is a neutral indicator of value. Acquiring wealth requires creating something useful in the world.

Let people solve problems, sell their solutions, and get rich doing so. The more problems get solved, the better off we all are for it.

The issue is not that some people are incredibly wealthy, it’s that not enough people are given a chance to become wealthy.

That’s not because of the already wealthy conspiring to prevent access to their cabal. It’s a result of errors in politics and philosophy that have accumulated over time. Those errors can be corrected, little by little. Problems are soluble.

Don’t abolish billionaires. Abolish poverty!

This post is an extension of a comment I left on ’s excellent post Beggars or Billionaires: Who Would You Rather Get Rid Of?

Monotony, Politics, and Problem Solving

In Reject Performative Busyness, I argued that an unfortunate amount of work in knowledge organizations is performative busyness, activities that appear productive while producing little of value.

The Popperian business consultant Bart Vanderhaegen offers an alternative and more actionable way of categorizing work. In episode 167 of his podcast, Seeking Good Explanations, Bart defines three working modes:

Monotony

Politics

Problem solving

Monotony is operating on routine work. It’s executing an already proven solution. This work might generate useful output, but it can’t sustain a company in the long run. Problems are inevitable and today’s solutions are unlikely to work for tomorrow’s problems.

Politics is navigating the inevitable social dynamics that emerge when people collaborate. This mode requires creativity, but it directs it toward winning zero-sum games that improve your position or that of your tribe instead of improving the customer’s life.

Problem solving is the quintessential creative mode. It consists of generating, exploring, criticizing, and testing ideas. This mode is the opposite of performative busyness: every minute spent in it is productive. Operating in problem solving mode is the only way to progress.

The other modes are not necessarily wasteful, but the results they produce will at best make existing processes run more smoothly. That might be okay in the short term, but for a business to remain viable — and for people to feel they have an impact — progress is required.

Compared to “let your best people cook,” thinking in terms of Bart’s work modes has the advantage of being applicable to any role in an organization, regardless of how directly involved they are in creating the product. Whether in engineering or HR, design or middle management, everyone benefits from a working environment that optimizes for problem solving over monotony and politics.