2024-12-21 00:49:06
Today’s article is a bit more technical than usual. It goes into the details of climate and geography of the US to understand its regions. We needed this as background for the next two articles. If you’re into hardcore geography, you’ll enjoy it! Otherwise you can skip and enjoy the next ones.
2024-12-20 00:28:45
I’ll be in Dubai around New Year’s Eve. If you know anybody from the government or businesses who can speak of the past, the present, and the future of Dubai, and / or you can make an intro, please let me know in the comments or by replying to this email!
So this happened a few weeks ago:
You are now among over 100,000 people who have chosen to belong to the Uncharted Territories community. Normally, the newsletter is typically read 80,000 to 100,000 times, showing that you are really engaged. Many of you also manifest this by leaving thousands of comments, participating in my polls, emailing me directly, taking my course, and in many other ways. That tells me we’ve created something special here.
Several of you have written to ask about giving Uncharted Territories as a Christmas gift. Here’s the link:
It’s a good time to reflect on what we’ve done this year, and what’s coming in 2025.
As always, we’ve spent a bunch of time thinking about GeoHistory. In terms of countries, we learned:
Poland is really two countries, because of how it was split by its neighbors, with ramifications that can be felt to this day. These are Poland’s priorities today.
Why Hungary is so small, after a thousand years as a larger empire. Also, why it’s been so brilliant in history, with an inordinate amount of Nobel Prize and Olympic gold medal winners.
Why Jamaica was a pirate capital, why its past is intertwined with rum, why most of the population is Black, why it has a unique culture of reggae and Rastafarianism, and how its past determines its future.
Why Bangladesh is so dense and so threatened by sea level rise.
We took a deep dive into Mexico, as one of the biggest countries in the world, with its close proximity to the world’s superpower, the US. We looked at why 80% of the country is empty, why it’s poorer than the US, 25 fascinating facts about the country, what’s the country’s future, what it was like before Europeans arrived, and how the Aztecs rose and fell so fast.
Given the events in the Middle East, we looked at why Lebanon could be rich, but is and will continue to be a mess.
And of course, we looked at what’s happening in Syria, and how that impacts the plans of different superpowers.
In terms of cities and regions, we explored:
What makes Madrid a complete outlier among capitals: It’s a very recent city! Why this is the case is fascinating.
How the Internet and Remote Work are blurring the limits of cities, and how this has enormous implications on how we will live in the future, with countries already starting to fight for remote workers.
Why California is the way it is: Why SF is such an important city, why the capital is Sacramento, why LA surpassed both in terms of population…
Why Atlanta is so big and located where it is.
Why Texas is a triangle formed by Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Houston.
Why Budapest is the way it is, and what you should visit if you go.
How Tenochtitlan became Mexico City, and why it is the way it is today.
We also looked at some more fundamental factors that determine where humans live and thrive, like:
The Rain Shadow Effect, which explains why there are deserts near lush forests in many places.
How the disappearance of an ocean was fundamental to the birth of human civilization.
Some of the other consequences of that ocean’s disappearance, like why Africa is poorer than Europe, why Southern Europe is poorer than Northern Europe, why Greece was the cradle of European civilization, how that ocean’s disappearance was crucial for the Industrial Revolution to start, and more.
How humans have shaped rivers through history, and vice-versa: How rivers have shaped humans and their states. River behavior is so important that, at one point, a river’s behavior nearly got the presidents of the US and Mexico killed.
Most of the public debate is about how there are too many people on Earth, how we’re destroying the environment, and how a world with fewer humans would be better. I disagree with that: I believe the Earth could easily hold 100 billion humans.
We’ve analyzed many of the obstacles we could face on that path:
Water won’t be a limitation, because we can desalinate it at a reasonable price, nearly everywhere.
Food won’t be a limitation, because we can produce food more efficiently in greenhouses and vertical farms than on land: Plants are surprisingly inefficient! Today vertical farms are not economically viable, but they will be eventually. And at some point, we’re going to bypass plants altogether.
Energy won’t be a limitation (see Energy & Environment section below): We can produce as much as we want with solar and nuclear.
The environment won’t be a limitation: Pollution shrinks with a wealthier population, and a wealthier population requires a growing population.
Specifically, we can stop global warming whenever we want: Our emissions are about to start falling thanks to solar (and wind) energy, we can grind stones to capture CO2, and in the meantime, we can inject sulfates in the stratosphere with very little downside.
We won’t run out of any element, as this has never happened before, their amount doesn’t shrink (they stay on Earth’s crust), and humans are very good at finding what they need.
So it’s clear we can do it. Not only that, but we should want to do it, because humanity gets better with more people, and it’s morally sound to want a more populated Earth.
Why are some environmentalists so against this idea? Because there are two types of environmentalists. One is the group who believes in technology and knows we can use it to solve all our problems. I call the other group Watermelons: green outside, but red inside. For them, environmentalism is just a cover for anti-capitalism. They just want the world to deindustrialize. We should ignore this group.
In reality, we’re at a critical moment in history: We are moving away from fossil fuels, but there’s a question of how fast the move is going to happen.
We’ve realized that solar power is one of the best sources of energy (better than wind), it’s already the cheapest, and it will keep getting cheaper.
Solar only has three issues at this point:
It doesn’t produce electricity on demand
Its generation is spread over vast areas, and the grid and laws are not designed with this in mind
It takes up a fair amount of land
The first issue is partially solved by the combination of wind and solar, which is a match made in heaven. Whatever we can’t solve this way might be solved by batteries. That is the next article I’ll write about energy.
Laws and the structure of electricity distribution will have to adapt to distributed generation. The combination of these two issues is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for entrepreneurs who can rethink how to produce energy-intensive products such as fuels or cement.
The third issue won’t be a problem any time soon. It might be one in a few decades or centuries, but for now we have more than enough land to fuel humanity with solar energy. If and when supply of land starts becoming a problem, nuclear will be the solution, as it’s one of the best sources of energy: It’s the densest source of energy (little land and fuel give you a lot of energy), and is even more environmentally friendly than solar. It’s just too expensive today.
I’ve been updating you about the progress on AI, and how I fear a deep impact on labor. This will have real consequences for tech workers and investors, especially VCs.
This is why I created an AI-based app that you got to try. You guys loved it! Alas, I didn’t have much time to work on it.
But the impact of AI on jobs is a very short-term thing. In the long term, it might not matter, because it looks like AIs will become superintelligent within 8 years, and that might be the end of the world. How would you change your life if that were true?
As you know, people barely talk about this AI risk, and that’s because they don’t have a good way of thinking of long-term issues. In this article, I explored why AI matters much more than the threat of nuclear war, the fertility crisis, or even the environment.
Given the risk, it’s important that the people with power over AI be morally impeccable, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman is not, so he should go.
I have had this huge draft for five years now: How to Design a Religion. It’s daunting! So I started tackling sides of it instead:
How we’ve lost rites of passage, like coming of age, and how we could reclaim them for the 21st century.
Same thing for birth, hazing, marriage, and death.
How we used to build beautiful buildings like cathedrals, how present-day “cathedrals” are completely different, and what 21st century cathedrals could look like, especially in the Age of Internet.
Why charisma is the same thing as being sexually attractive, fun, and a leader, and how to develop these characteristics.
Why evolutionary psychology predicts family conflicts such as conflicts between mothers and their foetuses, sibling rivalry, parental conflict with children’s partners, and children’s conflict with stepparents.
And more.
It’s an industry that’s moving really fast, finding more and more cures for different ailments. One of the worst is cancer, and we discussed how a virologist likely cured her own cancer. Connecting these two trends: Shouldn’t we be permitted to take more risks and experiment on our own cancers (or diseases in general)?
I already mentioned a couple of articles on AI investing, and on solar investing. But the biggest investment articles I wrote this year are on real estate, why it is no longer a good investment, and what real estate investments are more likely to be safe.
(These articles are not investment advice, just informational.)
We will start discussing Mars settlements in depth in 2025, because the window to launch rockets to Mars opens in 2026. With that in mind, we explored what the ride to Mars will look like.
We disagreed with the pessimists that fear geniuses are disappearing. They’re here, we’re just not looking in the right places.
We should aim for creating more wealth and reducing inequality, but these two goals are structurally at odds, and the best way we know to achieve the best of both worlds is a regulated capitalism.
Freedom of speech can’t be understood without freedom of speech distribution. Who owns the megaphones is a crucial question for the future of humankind.
Back in August, I observed that the Woke pendulum was swinging back, and that we were entering a new phase in this discussion, where the debate would be more nuanced.
I also called into question an accepted myth: that diversity is good. It’s good in some situations. In other cases, it isn’t.
We pushed back on the notion that most of what happens in the world is due to specific humans doing specific things. That is not the case. History is driven by systems, not stories.
I also led two cohorts of my course on how to become a world-class communicator!
Uncharted Territories is about understanding the world of today to navigate the world of tomorrow. And we’re in a great position to do just that in 2025:
This is the biggest topic in the world today, so I will lean more into it. I will start building more AI apps and will share what I learn in the process. Along the way, I’ll share new insights about the singularity, how AI impacts jobs, how it changes the power balances in the economy, and how it affects the power relations between countries.
We’re going to look at batteries to understand how much they will enable wind and solar to take over the world’s energy generation.
If indeed we’re near peak fossil fuel use, a critical geostrategic question emerges: What will happen to all the countries whose finances depend on fossil fuels, like Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, or Iran?
More generally, we’ll explore what a world with cheap, ubiquitous energy will look like.
Of course, I’ll keep writing on ways to fight climate change, including sulfate injection in the stratosphere.
We will continue with GeoHistory, especially when connected to global news. For example:
Why is Argentina not a superpower? Can the current president Milei achieve that?
Why is Iran the way it is, and what will happen with it? What about Saudi Arabia?
Germany’s elections are coming. Why is Germany the way it is, and how does that impact current elections? How are they linked to energy?
Other geographic areas I’ve been considering: Canada, Japan, South Korea, Peru, Australia, African regions… And of course, China. If you share details about a country you want me to look into, I’m more likely to tackle it!
More fundamentally, how has geography impacted humans? Why are people poorer nearer the equator? How has geography influenced institutions? Architecture?
I have some key pieces I’d like to tackle, but they’re so big they’re daunting. Every year I take on a few. Let’s see what I might get to this year:
Are we naturally monogamous?
The future of healthcare
The future of education
How to design a religion
The future of war
The settlement of Mars
The future of fertility
This is my full time job, which I can only do because you support me. If you want to continue that, or if you want to read everything that I write (50% is behind a paywall), subscribe!
And since it’s Christmas, why not give a friend or loved one a year’s subscription? What could be better than helping people better understand and navigate the world?
Thank you for being part of Uncharted Territories. So many of you trust me to help you see the world in a different light, and support me to keep doing it. Thank you for leaving so many comments and sending me emails, always engaging thoughtfully so we can improve together. I feel honored. You are my 100,000 gifts.
Thank you also to Shoni and Heidi, your loyal editors, who jump on your articles sometimes weeks in advance, sometimes at the last minute, because they are dedicated to always giving you clean and readable articles—despite my many typos and sometimes tortured writing.
From now to the end of the year, I will write 2-3 more articles and will take the rest of time to refill my energy for everything that’s coming in 2025.1
I might try writing shorter articles though during that time. Let’s see what inspiration begets. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
I take 4 weeks of holidays a year, and I’ve taken 2 this year so far. These are my final two weeks!
2024-12-13 21:03:10
Last week, we discussed some of the main reasons for the supposed lack of geniuses today: As we innovate, it gets harder to do so in the same field, so most geniuses can be found in newer fields. But it’s not the only reason. Here are a few more.
For a long time, Federer, Djokovic, and Nadal fought each other for the top spot in global tennis. Debates on which was the best of all time raged. If two of them hadn’t existed, the third would have been lauded as the best player in the world, no questions asked. A true genius. But because there were three, it was unclear.
Now imagine there were 20 players at that level. Would we be talking about tennis geniuses? Probably not. Maybe we’d talk about a Golden Age of tennis, but that’s about it. What if instead of 20 there were 100? Then we might just say the overall level of tennis has improved, but there are no geniuses in tennis.
This puts this graph in a different light:
If there were only one genius working on improving our computing capacity, we would laud them as a genius—even if progress would be much slower.
But there are probably thousands of them, so we don’t pay attention to them, and we just see the result: a constant improvement in our computing ability.
So the fact that progress has accelerated in the last two centuries shows that, across the board, there are probably many more geniuses promoting our growth—their names are just drowned among a sea of geniuses.
This is a direct consequence of our booming population: The more people, the more geniuses, the less they stand out, and the higher the standards for the genius label.
There is a similar crowding effect in the arts. In the 1600s, there might have been just 100 serious books published every year in any language, and a genius one might only come up once every few years. Every critic would know and review it, every reader would hear about it and try to read it and discuss it. Geniuses were propelled to the podium of history very fast.
Meanwhile, there are over one million books published every year in the world, and thousands of them are promoted heavily by their authors and publishers to hundreds of millions of readers. How is any book supposed to stand out? It’s very hard. Instead, we have hundreds or thousands of must read books, and as a result a very small percentage is coined a masterpiece.
There were only so many aristocrats who could sponsor the composition of Mozart’s operas. The limit in resources meant a limit in the number of people who could dedicate their lives to the arts or sciences. It’s no coincidence that before the 19th century, most people of science were nobles. The fewer the resources, the fewer the professional artists or scientists, and the easier it was to stand out as a genius.
Compare that to today, when we have eight billion people, and whatever you do, there’s somebody out there who does it better than you!
And it’s not just that we’re eight billion; we’re also hyperconnected. So the competition is global now, meaning it’s even harder to compete, stand out, and be labeled a genius.
Not only that: Since the world is so connected, innovations spread at the speed of light. When somebody comes up with something new, they are immediately copied and remixed. They can’t harvest their innovation across several works that become unique and memorable. By the time somebody has created one amazing thing, 20 others have already improved upon it.
This is completely different from what happened before. Notice, for example, how Mozart became famous because he was able to copy better:
In Italy, [Mozart] heard music by many famous Italian composers. He heard a piece called Miserere by Gregorio Allegri, written for the Pope for the choir of the Vatican to sing. No one was allowed to see the written music, so that no one else could copy and sing it. But Mozart heard the piece once and then wrote it all down from memory.
People, regardless of their field, had a harder time copying back then, so extraordinary people could work for longer without others catching up. This gave them enough time to have a great run of extraordinary output.
As we harvest the low-hanging fruit of science, work moves to more complex fields, like AI alignment or immunology. It’s virtually impossible to be a solo scientist in these fields, as they're way too complex for one single person to handle. You need teams for breakthroughs. This means that the heads of such groups must not be just discipline experts, but also leaders. Leaders are wary of claiming genius, because that would jeopardize the support from their teammates, who feel they are as much part of the project as the leader.
So instead of knowing the names of individual geniuses, we’re now much more likely to see the output of companies and groups.
This doesn’t apply as much in the arts, where many pieces are made by single creators, and even when there are pieces that require cooperation, leaders are credited (like film directors or videogame producers) and even individual contributors (actors, composers). As a proxy, look at the number of authors in arts and humanities papers:
2024-12-11 17:17:48
In the previous article, we saw how many powers are involved in Syria, and how there are winners and losers. Today, we’re going to explore exactly what’s happening on each side: Israel, Russia, Turkey, Europe, Iran, Kurds, and Fundamentalist Sunni Islam.
Syria has been a threat to Israel for decades. Now, Israel is taking advantage of the chaos in Syria to eliminate that threat in the short term and weaken it in the long term. How?
This video shows Israeli attacks on the Syrian port of Latakia:
This is an image of the result of such attacks on Syrian navy ships:
From a Times of Israel correspondent:
Last night, the Israeli Navy carried out a large-scale operation to destroy the former Assad regime's navy fleet in Syria.
Numerous Syrian navy vessels armed with sea-to-sea missiles were destroyed in strikes carried out by Israeli Navy missile boats, at the Minet el-Beida bay and Latakia port on the Syrian coast, according to military sources.
The strikes were carried out to prevent the Syrian navy capabilities and weaponry from falling into the hands of hostile forces, following the collapse of the Assad regime.
And Syria’s air force:
This is a video of a Syrian air force base:
Here’s the Israeli Army Radio:
We destroyed the capabilities of the Syrian army in the largest air operation we have carried out in our history.
All the light blue missile icons on this map are Israeli bombings:
From the Times of Israel correspondent:
The Israeli Air Force has carried out some 300 airstrikes in Syria since the collapse of the regime, destroying advanced weapons and other capabilities that Israel seeks to prevent from reaching hostile forces.
And from this open-source intelligence operator:
The air force destroyed Assad's army: tanks, planes, helicopters, ships, air defense systems, missiles, military factories, intelligence facilities, and everything that the army of the Syrian state has held and built for decades—is being destroyed these days.
If this operation is completed successfully, the new rebel government will have to start from scratch, with M16s and Kalashnikovs, to build their military capabilities as a new state.
All of this will not be enough if Syria rebuilds their forces over time with new sponsors. So Israel is taking steps to secure its border further.
From the Israeli Army Chief Herzi Halevi
“Since last night, we have been engaged in combat on four fronts. Ground troops are engaged in combat on four fronts: Against terrorism in Judea and Samaria, in Gaza, in Lebanon, and last night we deployed troops into Syrian territory."
Ground troops, not just airplanes. Why?
On Google Maps, the border between Israel and Syria has dotted lines. That’s the Golan Heights, highlighted in pink below:
Here’s a zoom in:
Israel took the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War in 1967 (light yellow on the map above), and in 1974 Syria and Israel agreed to a further disengagement zone, the dark grey area north and east of that.
But why did Israel bother? Was it just to have a buffer with Syria? Yes, but this is not a random buffer:
Notice something about the border? Let’s zoom in:
These are mountains! From there, you can easily see the plains of both Israel and Syria. So they’re great for visibility, but also for artillery! Hence why Israel took them over.
You can see in this 3D map:
This is a view of the Syrian Plain from the Golan Heights:
Perfect visibility, perfect place to shell the valley below. I remember going there 15 years ago and being able to see the entire plain in front of me.
This area is so valuable for Israel’s defense that Prime Minister Netanyahu has just declared that the country will never leave the Golan Heights.
But there’s a problem for Israel with these lines. Notice the white point just north of Israel’s occupied Golan Heights?
That’s Mount Hermon.
It’s about 600 meters higher than the highest point in the Israeli Golan Heights.
And it’s just 12 km away.
So as the Syrian army abandoned their positions, the Israelis took over that mount, along with the previous disengagement zone.
Now, Damascus is just 40 km away from Israel, and is within shelling distance.
This has an additional benefit. From this thread:
In the past, Israel’s radars suffered from a significant blind spot, unable to see beyond Mt. Hermon and parts of Lebanon from their position on Mt. Meron. Iran's low-flying drones exploited this weakness, infiltrating Israel time and time again. Once placed on Mt. Hermon, Israel’s radars will see far into both Syria and Lebanon, providing early warning of incoming low-flying jets and drones. Israel’s intelligence can also leverage the peak, placing sensors to conduct surveillance and intercept enemy communications. The mountains also provide the perfect cover for Israel’s special forces and spies, who can now enter Syria more freely, conducting missions under the cover of darkness. As the sun rises, Mt. Hermon casts a shadow over Hezbollah’s stronghold in Southern Lebanon, dominating the main road to their northern stronghold in the Beqaa Valley. Several of Hezbollah’s smuggling routes north of the Hermon have been cut off. Be it ISIS, HTS, Iran, or Hezbollah, a hostile force advancing toward Israel will now be exposed -- at the mercy of Israel’s drones, surface-to-surface missiles, and laser-guided bombs. Residents of north Israel can sleep more soundly knowing that Israel controls this peak.
Some media have reported that Israel is moving towards Damascus with tanks, but I highly doubt that. This is the commentary from the former Prime Minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett:
I don’t foresee Israel doing much more than this: One thing is to take advantage of the situation to take over super valuable positions. Another one is to get into a hot war with a country like Syria.
Unless HTS (more on them below) shows signs of aggression. Which it might:
Whoever follows Assad’s footsteps will end up like Assad did. We won’t allow an extremist Islamic terror entity to act against Israel from beyond its borders… we will do anything to remove the threat.—Israel PM Netanyahu
So that’s for Israel. What about the other groups: Kurds, Turkey, Russia, Europe, and Lebanon?
2024-12-10 05:56:41
Assad’s regime has fallen, leaving a power vacuum. Many rebel groups and foreign powers vie to fill it. This chess game is not just played in Syria, or even in the Middle East. This has global ramifications. Who are the winners of this change? Who will benefit? What does it mean for the future of the world?
This is a political map of the region:
But I don’t find it very insightful. And these other maps found online are very confusing, too:
So how can you understand what’s going on? Here’s a zoom out on what matters:
Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria are all in the Levant, a region that isn’t populated enough to become dominant, but is surrounded by superpowers. This makes the Levant these powers’ playing field. Who are the major players today?
Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Mediterranean powers.1 The thing is each player has different objectives.
Iran wants to project its power all the way to the Mediterranean. This is one of the reasons why it supported Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Assad in Syria:
Also, Iran is mostly Shia, and you also find pockets of Shias in Iraq and Syria. Influencing these countries is natural for Iran.
With this strategy, Iran had secured projection all the way to the Mediterranean:
But of course, Iran and Saudi Arabia are competing for regional dominance.
So since Iran is predominantly Shia and supported Assad, it was natural for Saudi Arabia to support the Sunni rebels. This is what it did for years during the civil war. The weakness of the Assad regime and the external support of Sunni extremists are two of the reasons why the Islamic State emerged in the area a few years ago:
Naturally, the US, being an enemy of Iran, also supported Sunni rebels against Assad. But many of these were extremist, so initially, the US supported extremism. Outside of that, it had no strong group to support—except for the Kurds in the northeast: The US has allied with the Kurds in their fights against both Sadam Hussein and ISIS.
Except Kurds are very inconvenient for both Turks and Iranians, because this is Kurdistan:
Since Kurdistani lands represent 18% of Turkish land, Turkey doesn’t want a Kurdistan nation to emerge, so it did everything it could to prevent its emergence in northern Iraq during the war there, and it’s doing the same now with Syria, opposing Kurdish forces.
But Turkey did not love Assad’s regime either, because it was a proxy for Iran, and Turkey wants its own influence in Syria. For example, it wants the Syrian refugees back home. So Turkey wanted neither Assad nor the Kurds, and was happy to support Turkish rebels in those regions.
Of course, Turkey is part of NATO, which means it’s a military ally of the US, so that’s pretty awkward: The US and Turkey are allies, but they support opposing groups on the battlefield. The US supports Kurds, while Turkey supports Sunni groups.
Meanwhile, since the US was entangled in Iraq and Afghanistan, it didn’t want to entangle itself too much in Syria, so it didn’t invest heavily there to displace Assad. Russia, allied with Iran because they both hate the US, saw an opportunity to enter the fray as a big international player, and helped Iran prop up Assad. It built military bases in Syria, and controls a maritime base on the coast in Tartus.
This was great for Russia because it could finally have a port in the Mediterranean, unimpeded by Turkey’s control of the Bosphorus! This was a key military base to reach into Africa, where Russia has mercenary groups that provide income and political influence.
This is how we ended with a map of Syria like this last year:
Although this doesn’t tell you the parts that matter. This is a satellite map of Syria:
It’s nearly all desertic, except for:
The coast, which is quite green and fertile
The south, which on the western side is populated
The northern border, especially the northeast, which is close enough to mountains to get some moisture
The Euphrates river, which crosses the desert
Which results in this map of population density:
Now, the map of different areas of control in summer of 2023 makes more sense:
Assad controlled most of the areas that mattered: Nearly all the west.
In the middle of the desert, there are remnants of ISIS.
His control in the northeast stopped at the Euphrates River, where Kurdish control began.
Turkey controlled several parts of its border with Syria via its proxies.
Then there’s this HTS group in the northwest, a Sunni militia that used to be part of Al Qaeda.
Finally, the US-supported militia in the southeastern border was basically in the desert. Not much power there. Why then? Because one of only three roads that connect Syria with Iraq crosses there.
This is how we ended up with this evolution of the war for the last 13 years:
Red: Assad
Green: Sunni rebels
Yellow: Kurds
Grey: ISIS
There are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when everything happens. This is one of those weeks. But it’s been brewing for years now. Why did everything move so fast?
Russia had been one of the keys for the Assad regime to maintain control, bombing its enemies with airstrikes. But on February 24th 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. At that moment, nothing really mattered to Russia beyond winning that war. The presence in Syria became nice to have at best, a hindrance of military power at worst.
On October 7th 2023, Hamas attacked Israel. In the following months, Israel proceeded to break Hamas, neuter Hezbollah, and bomb Iran. Without its proxies in the region—especially Hezbollah, just on the border in Lebanon—it was much harder for Iran to support Assad. Its loss of international standing and military projection in the area weakened Iran, and thus Assad. The loss of Hezbollah’s fighters was even worse.
Meanwhile, Israel’s strength and standing in the region has improved. Other Arab countries have aligned themselves further with the country, most notably Saudi Arabia.
On November 5th 2024, Trump won the US election. Trump won’t directly meddle in Syria, but he is an unabashed supporter of Israel, and by extension an enemy of Iran. This made it even harder for Assad to expect support from Iran.
Turkey has grown more powerful over the last decade, and it has pushed from the north against Assad.
So Assad lost Iran’s support, Russia’s support, and Hezbollah’s support, while its Sunni opponents—Turkey and Saudi Arabia—grew stronger, supporting the rebels.
This is the context for the coup de grâce:
This group was a small offshoot of Al Qaeda that controlled a small part of Syria’s northwest. It broke away from Al Qaeda in 2017 and has strived to shed its most radical image since.
HTS controlled Idlib. Then it took Aleppo, then Hama in a matter of days.
Here are the celebrations in Hama:
HTS´s takeover of Hama was so fast, and the support of Assad from Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia so weak, that the rest of the Syrian army abandoned their arms.
So all the Syrian rebel groups took advantage of this to run as fast as they could:
This is how HTS could reach the coast and the capital, Damascus, in a matter of days: completely unimpeded.
Its leader, Al-Julani, arrived in Damascus and gave a sermon in its main mosque:
So what’s the map of the situation now?
You might see maps like this:
But from what I can tell, this is misleading, as it shows more control to the Syrian Free Army and its US backers and more ISIS influence than is accurate. I haven’t found a perfect map, but this gives a good sense:
HTS in grey, Turkish-supported forces in light yellow, Kurdish forces in purple, US influence in blue, US-backed forces in yellow around it, and the Southern Operations Room, controlled by Druze and other rebels in the south (yellow). The part I disagree with here is that it doesn’t show that HTS has control over the coast, but they probably do.
And what’s happening on the ground right now?
So here’s what’s going on:
The Assad regime has completely fallen
HTS is the biggest winner, having taken over the coast and reached Damascus
Druze and other rebels from the south also reached Damascus, and control the south
Turkish forces control a big chunk of the northern border
Kurds control a big chunk of the northeast
Turkish-backed forces are fighting Kurdish forces in the north, most likely to control as much land as possible before the situation stabilizes
The US maintains control of a military base on the border with Jordan. Moderate Sunni rebels from that area, supported by the US, have reached out to take control of land in the desert and towards the capital
Israel is taking advantage of the situation to destroy any military asset it can. In the last 24h, it has destroyed Syria’s entire air defenses, military research facilities, air bases, fighter jets, naval bases, and ammunition storages. It has taken control of the highest points on the border between Syria and Israel, so that a future government can’t threaten it from there
Russia is withdrawing, but sometimes some of its soldiers are left stranded
Here is a map of Israel’s move:
You can imagine this is not a very stable situation. So what will happen next?
Nobody knows, but given the situation, here’s what’s most likely to happen:
Assad is out, for good.
Iran is out of the game completely. It’s the most weakened player in the area.
Russia: It might keep its coastal military bases, at least for now. HTS has no strong interest in taking them now that Russia won’t support Assad. It might withdraw in an orderly manner.
The Turks and Kurds will continue fighting for the northeast. This is important for Turkey as the Kurds are a threat for their country, but it’s existential for the Kurds as they see this land as a future component of a potential Kurdistan.
HTS will try to form and lead a Syrian government.
What would such a government look like? HTS can’t beat the Turkish forces, or the Kurdish forces, or the US forces, or the Druze rebels in the south. It is strong, but has little international backing, and has only reached Damascus because Assad’s forces ran away. It will not inherit many weapons or bases from Assad, as Israel took care of them.
So there are three paths forward. One is letting it play out by force, continuing a civil war until one party prevails.
Another path forward could see an external power decide to heavily influence the balance. Iran and Russia are out. Trump has said he’s out. Israel just wants its own internal security. That leaves Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has not meddled too much here. As long as the Syrian government is pro-Sunni, I don’t expect them to do much—it looks like this will be the case. Turkey, meanwhile, could arguably reach for more influence in the region, although its main priority is fighting the Kurds, and it’s not good friends with HTS, so I’m not sure anything will happen there.
The final path forward is for HTS to negotiate with all the other parties to find common ground. Of course, no other party wants to give up the power they have taken, so that means building a state that is heavily decentralized, with different regions controlled by different autonomous governments.
So what should you expect in the coming weeks?
Russia, Iran, Israel, and the US manifesting their desire to negotiate with all the rebel parties at play.
The US backing up the Kurds on the Euphrates, but not on the northern border.
Turkey pushing for influence in the north, and for Syrian refugees to go back to Syria.
European powers to push for Syrian refugees to go back to Syria.
Talks and sabre-rattling between the different rebel groups in Syria.
Regional governance emerging, with very little centralized power.
HTS becoming stronger over the coming months as it controls all the most populated areas. They might be able to welcome refugees, recruit more fighters, and use the local resources to grow stronger.
In short, Assad’s cruel regime has ended. Russia’s games in the Middle East are done. Iran’s influence towards the Mediterranean is in a coma. Turkey and the Kurds continue to fight. The US gets out. Israel further strengthens its position. HTS tries to form a Sunni Muslim state in Syria. Syrian refugees across the Middle East and Europe can go home, with a big question mark looming over their heads: Will the next stage in Syria’s existence be more peaceful and productive than its past?
Later this week, I’m going to talk about all the other, more hidden consequences of these events. How does that leave Russia? Will Iran topple? Subscribe to receive that premium post.
The Mediterranean Powers in Syria mean the US and Russia.
2024-12-06 21:02:10
Where are today’s Michelangelos? Goyas? Shakespeares? Cervantes? Goethes? Montaignes? Pushkins? Dostoevskys? Balzacs? Mozarts? Where are our Einsteins, our Darwins, our Maxwells, our Newtons, our Aristotles, our Socrates? Why is there no more music as acclaimed as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony? Paintings as important as Las Meninas or the Mona Lisa? Why are there no more discoveries that rewrite textbooks, like the Theory of Gravity or Thermodynamics?
Dozens of thinkers complain that there are no more geniuses. Most just don’t know where to find them.
The most illustrious philosophers were Greek. And they are ancient! Socrates taught Plato; Plato taught Aristotle; Aristotle went on to teach Alexander the Great, who would create the biggest empire the world had ever known.
The Greeks made such great discoveries as the size of the Earth, the distance of the Earth to the sun, the prediction of eclipses, the heliocentric theory, Euclid’s geometry, the nervous system, the cardiovascular system, etc.—Is Science Slowing Down?, Slate Star Codex.
What was in the ancient Greek water?
It probably wasn’t the water as, globally speaking, this was not limited to Greece. Within a few decades of Socrates’ life, the religions of Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, and Taoism emerged. Jews likely compiled the sacred Torah around that time, and Zoroastrianism was at its apogee. But civilization had been growing for millennia after the development of agriculture. Why did so many religions emerge at the same time? And why no golden ages of religions since?
A single person made all of this:
While Cervantes (the most famous Spanish author) was writing Don Quixote, Shakespeare (the most famous English author) was writing or publishing Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear. Cervantes died on April 22, 1616. The following day, it was Shakespeare’s turn. What are the odds that people had been writing for millennia, and would go on writing for centuries more, but the most important authors of two of the most spoken languages wrote their most important works at exactly the same time?
The Spanish Golden Age of literature and plays in the 17th century didn’t just include Cervantes, but also Tirso de Molina, Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Góngora, Fernando de Rojas, Garcilaso de la Vega, Calderón de la Barca… This Golden Age would be reflected in other arts around that time too, with the most famous Spanish painter, Velázquez, being active at the same time. Why such a Golden Age? Why was it never replicated?
Germany had its Golden Age of the humanities about one century later, with Goethe, Schiller, and the Grimm Brothers in literature; Bach, Händel, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert in music; Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel in philosophy…
The 19th century was especially fertile for Russian literature: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov, Gogol… Why?
France has had a more continuous string of famous authors, starting with Montaigne, and continuing with Molière, Racine, Corneille, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Zola, Maupassant, Proust, Camus, Sartre... Which French authors are at their level today? In the last 30 years?
This phenomenon of golden periods doesn’t just appear in the arts, but also in science. The Modern Era has plenty of famous discoverers and inventors: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Lavoisier, Laplace, Maxwell, Darwin, Mendeleev, Mendel, Pasteur… The late 19th and 20th centuries had their own giants, like Einstein, Bohr, Schroedinger, Curie, Turing, Fermi, Szilard, Von Neumann… The discoveries of many of these people forced a rewriting of elementary school science.
We can quantify this with graphs like this one:
From 1930 to 2000, we increased the number of researchers 30x. But the annual growth rate of the economy is the same or lower. Why? Aren’t scientists supposed to accumulate learning—which can be seen in productivity numbers?
We can see the same process in Moore’s Law. Yes, we do double our computing power every 2 years:
But to maintain this, we’ve had to throw ever more researchers at it!
Doesn’t that mean they are less productive per head?
We can see the same trend in agriculture:
We can see the same relationship in healthcare. From the paper that published this data:
Our robust finding is that research productivity is falling sharply everywhere we look.
All this can be crystallized by this:
Say that Beethoven was the greatest musician of all time. Why has there been no one better in the last ~200 years - despite a vastly larger world population, highly democratized technology for writing and producing music, and a higher share of the population with education, basic nutrition, and other preconditions for becoming a great musician? In brief, where's today's Beethoven?
Where's today's Darwin (for life sciences), Ramanujan (for mathematics), Shakespeare (for literature), etc.?
Over the past century, we’ve vastly increased the time and money invested in science, but in scientists’ own judgment, we’re producing the most important breakthroughs at a near-constant rate. On a per-dollar or per-person basis, this suggests that science is becoming far less efficient."
Or the way famed investor Peter Thiel put it:
We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.
This problem is exacerbated because our population has grown so much since these golden times:
And these people have become much richer:
Giving them access to education:
So we have many more people, with much more education, yet for some reason we can’t easily name geniuses in science and arts that revolutionize their fields. Where are our geniuses?
Erik Hoel thinks we’re lacking geniuses because we don’t tutor people one-on-one the way we used to, yet there are many more people now, and a fair share still get personal tutors, just after school or while homeschooled. In absolute terms, we probably have more individually tutored students than we used to.
If individual tutoring were the magical ingredient, Azerbaijanis would win Nobel Prize after Nobel Prize.
Where are the Azerbaijani geniuses?
Others think it’s because the Baby Boomers were anti-intellectual, and the subsequent generation didn’t fight back. As a result, we got a ton of nihilism and politicization of the arts. I guess this is true, but then, Mozart and company were all financed by kings and nobles, so I don’t think they were much less politicized. My guess is that present-day freedom of speech and artistic expression is much higher than it was two centuries ago.
Some think it’s because people focus on managing their careers and bureaucracy. But this was much truer in the past. That’s why it was mostly nobles who could afford to do science. The increase in the share of scientists and researchers had to come at the cost of an increased bureaucratic burden, but the overall capacity we are dedicating to arts and sciences is much higher than it used to be.
So what are the true reasons why we don’t have more geniuses?
A lot of philosophy can be created simply by observing the world around you with a critical eye. It so happens that the Greeks were the first in the Western world to do that and record it in writing, so they get all the credit. From there, every time a new philosopher adds some thoughts, it gets harder and harder to be novel and creative.
Not only that, but you need to know all the philosophy established before you in order to be innovative, so the more time passes, the harder it is to add something new.
This is the concept that ideas are harder to find.
We can see the same in a scientific field like physics. There are only so many physical laws. Once they are discovered, you need to spend a gazillion dollars on a Hadron collider, and even then, you can barely learn anything new.
The days when a doctoral student could be the sole author of four revolutionary papers while working full time as an assistant examiner at a patent office — as Einstein did in 1905 — are probably long gone. Natural sciences have become so big, and the knowledge base so complex and specialized, that much of the cutting-edge work these days tends to emerge from large, well-funded collaborative teams involving many contributors.—Dean Keith Simonton, Scientific genius is extinct.
The same is true for other scientific fields like chemistry. As Scott Alexander puts it in Is Science Slowing Down:
Element 117 was discovered by an international collaboration who got an unstable isotope of berkelium from the single accelerator in Tennessee capable of synthesizing it, shipped it to a nuclear reactor in Russia where it was attached to a titanium film, brought it to a particle accelerator in a different Russian city where it was bombarded with a custom-made exotic isotope of calcium, sent the resulting data to a global team of theorists, and eventually found a signature indicating that element 117 had existed for a few milliseconds. Meanwhile, the first modern element discovery, that of phosphorus in the 1670s, came from a guy looking at his own piss. We should not be surprised that discovering element 117 needed more people than discovering phosphorus.
I think this also explains art fields like literature. Why were Cervantes and Shakespeare contemporaneous? Because of things like this:
And this:
Shakespeare and Cervantes appeared the moment books became a thing. And that was because of the printing press. A new technology opened a new field, creators flocked to it, and the best got to write their name in history. They ate all the low-hanging fruit, and it became much harder to innovate after them.
This has profound implications on where to find geniuses.
It’s extremely hard to innovate in fields like literature, because so many people have written in the past.
But look at cinema, a medium invented 130 years ago. Sure, early cinema had geniuses like Méliès, Orson Welles, Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Kurosawa, Bergman. But there is continuity between these people and Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Lasseter, Tarantino, Cuarón, Iñárritu, Del Toro, Michel Gondry, Kevin Feige, Denis Villeneuve, or Christopher Nolan.
Take Nolan. People imagine storytelling is a very old medium, and that everything has been invented there. Yet something few have explored like he has is the concept of non-linear storytelling. He started with Memento, which Nolan explains in this video, and can be summarized this way:
After Memento, he made Inception, where he explored nested storytelling:
Whereas Inception was complex but accessible for a mass audience, Nolan’s more recent film, Tenet, was not. He played with freaking entropy and time loops, which was so complex that it flew over most people’s heads.
I have no doubt that in 100 years, people will see Nolan as a genius of cinematic storytelling.
And this is a field that is 130 years old! What happens when you have new media, like TV? You get a Golden Age that began just 25 years ago and, I believe, still continues: The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, The West Wing, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones… And for those infidels like you who think we’re done, I present to you the IMDB ratings for Arcane:
One of the creators, Christian Linke, had a pretty standard upbringing and started his career as a data analyst at Riot Games. He worked his way up to getting the rights to make this series. That’s genius.
This is why we’re still minting lots of geniuses in television:
If this is the case, geniuses appear to us in new fields because that’s where there’s room to innovate, so to find geniuses, we just need to look at new fields. This is why the graph above looks up and to the right, while the ones for movies and albums have passed their peaks:
Conversely, if we look at new fields like videogames, we should be seeing many more geniuses alive today. Of course, most of the works of art in videogames are recent:
I used to work in videogames. Of course, a 72-year-old creator like Shigeru Miyamoto, behind games like Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong, will be amongst the most famous, because he was a trailblazer.
But we have much more recent masterpieces in videogames. Neil Druckman and Bruce Straley, behind The Last of Us, will be remembered in 100 years as geniuses of videogame storytelling. Both are in their mid-40s.
The creators of many other games will make history, including those of Mass Effect, GTA, or The Witcher. Some of the scenes from these games still haunt me to this day.
If this is true, new media should see new geniuses.
Casey Neistat trailbrazed vlogs when YouTube arrived. His innovations in scene cutting and editing will be remembered.
But of course the YouTuber par excellence is Mr Beast.
This is no coincidence. He has spent 12 years posting one video every 11 days on average. He has reverse engineered YouTube, one video at a time, and created exactly the type of content that the masses want. In the process, he has created a completely new genre of content, with bombastic shots, absurd premises, and gobsmacking prizes. Is he not a genius?
Naturally, TikTok and its innovation of short vertical videos is a new format, and with it have come new geniuses. 22 seconds can now live rent-free in the heads of hundreds of millions of people:
Tiktok failed to load.If you can’t see it, here’s a YouTube version.
Or reinvent comedy:
Tiktok failed to load.I don’t understand d’Amelio, but over 150M people do. Is she, then, not a genius?
Quietly, we’ve been moving from the offline world to the online world. This is where we find most of the business and product innovation of the last 30 years. Why? Because the physical frontier had been explored for millennia, but the online world was the new frontier, lawless and full of promises of freedom and gold. Genius finds the path of least resistance.
So it’s no surprise that’s where you find geniuses like Mark Zuckerberg, who created an app used by billions of people, and has since been able to fence off enemies like Snapchat and TikTok by taking the best from them, while at the same time innovating on mobile, virtual reality, and AI. Jeff Bezos first built an online shop, then a logistics company, then a servers company, then a marketplace. Sam Altman is no angel, but he brought AI to the masses, raising absurd amounts of money, with a gluttonous hunger for more, accelerating the race to the AI singularity by over a decade.
Geoffrey Hinton just won a Nobel Prize for creating artificial neural networks, the precursors of today’s AIs. Is he not a genius? Demis Hassabis just won a Nobel Prize for his work using AI on biology. We’re now able to predict the shape of most molecules just based on their composition. We will soon be able to create them. We will be able to invent new drugs in days instead of decades. Impossible paths in biology are now possible. Is he not a genius?
Speaking of new fields and AI: AI alignment is probably one of the most important fields in the history of humanity. Our future existence depends on it. Yet the field is small enough that most people in it know each other by name. If you are very intelligent and want a shot at making it in history, this field is probably your best bet. If we survive, Eliezer Yudkowsky will certainly be known centuries from now as the one guy who raised the alarm.
His friend Robin Hanson has broken new ground across several fields, from UFOs to governance. His work on prediction markets and futarchy is not well known, but in big part that’s because these are new fields, like digital governance.
Speaking of which, what about Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of the creator of blockchain technology and Bitcoin? Is he not a genius? Is Vitalik Buterin, behind the Ethereum network, not a genius too?
Some geniuses are so good that they can straddle the worlds of both bits and atoms. Steve Jobs was behind the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and Pixar. After making a fortune with an online business, Elon Musk is reinventing half a dozen hardcore industries. Palmer Luckey brought us virtual reality, and when he was kicked out of Facebook, he went on to revolutionize the arms industry. Are these not geniuses?
Yes, there are plenty of geniuses today. They’re just in new fields, because old ones get saturated.
Today’s Michelangelo is Christopher Nolan.
Today’s Da Vinci is Elon Musk.
Today’s Newton is Geoffrey Hinton.
For me, the primary reason why people don’t find geniuses today is because they look at past geniuses and extrapolate to the present to compare. But past geniuses were in specific fields, and it gets harder and harder to innovate in them! Most of the innovation happens in new fields, so that’s where you will find the geniuses of today.
That said, this is not the only explanation for the drop in geniuses. There are others like snobbery, time, crowding, interconnection, IQ heritability, narrowness, and money. I’m going to cover these in this week’s premium article.
