Weekend Briefing No. 653
Believing Is Seeing -- Move 37 -- The Great Filter
Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
533,000,000 — General Dynamics’ Scranton, PA artillery factory has cost taxpayers $533 million and never produced a single usable shell, yet the Army hasn’t recouped a dollar or held the company accountable.
24.7 — River and canal ships generated 24.7% of global shipping CO2 emissions in 2022, despite these waterways making up less than 1% of the world’s navigable water.
22— The Dallas Cowboys are now worth $15.5 billion, a 22% jump over 2025 that makes them the most valuable franchise in American sports.
Believing Is Seeing
Your brain runs into walls it never saw coming, literally. Neuroscientists have found that the brain doesn’t passively receive sensory data and react, it constantly makes top-down predictions about what should be there, and only flags a problem when reality contradicts the guess, a mismatch researchers call a “prediction error.” This is why you might wave at a stranger you mistook for a friend, or swear the keys aren’t on the table when they’re sitting right in front of you, your mind fills gaps and edits out surprises to keep the picture coherent. Even your deepest beliefs, shaped by an evolutionary craving for safety and stability, work the same way, acting as filters that decide what counts as true before you ever really look. The unsettling upshot is that you don’t see, then believe, you believe, then see, and getting better at decisions starts with catching your brain’s bets before they go wrong. Big Think (6 minutes)
Move 37
A decade ago, one black stone on a Go board convinced the world that AI could think in ways no human ever would. In 2016, AlphaGo dropped a move (move 37) so unorthodox that experts pegged the odds of a human playing it at one in 10,000, and it turned out to be a masterstroke, not a blunder. That same pattern is now everywhere, AI systems have gone from struggling with basic math in 2023 to disproving famous conjectures and acing the International Mathematical Olympiad by 2026, because math’s strict, checkable rules let AI try, fail, and retry at superhuman speed. The catch is that this trick only works in “verifiable” domains like math and code, messier fields like biology and drug discovery still need human intuition to point the way, at least for now. WSJ (6 minutes)
The Great Filter
Do the math and the galaxy should be crawling with advanced civilizations, yet after 65 years of pointing radio telescopes at the sky, we’ve found exactly zero. The Drake equation tries to estimate how many alien societies might be broadcasting signals right now, and while astronomers have nailed down the easy variables, like the fact that our galaxy alone holds over 100 billion planets, the harder questions about how often life evolves into intelligence, and how long a technological civilization survives before wiping itself out, remain totally unanswerable. One unsettling theory, the “great filter,” suggests some step between lifeless chemistry and spacefaring civilization is so difficult that almost nothing in the universe ever clears it, and Earth’s own history is full of one-time-only miracles, like the jump from single cells to complex life, that took billions of years and never happened twice. Maybe the silence isn’t about distance or bad luck, it’s a mirror showing just how improbable our own existence really is. The Guardian (13 minutes)
Salt Beats Lithium
The next battery boom might run on the same stuff sitting in your kitchen cabinet. Sodium-ion batteries swap out rare, China-controlled minerals for ordinary table salt, and unlike lithium-ion packs they can be cooled passively by air instead of expensive liquid cooling systems that eat up 90% of a grid battery’s operating costs. Startups like Peak Energy and Inlyte Energy are racing to scale up US production, with Peak’s new Sacramento gigafactory aiming for 4 gigawatt hours a year and Inlyte building cells so fire-resistant a single overheating unit won’t ignite its neighbors. Morgan Stanley projects sodium could power over a third of the world’s batteries within a decade, and this time, the US is trying to make sure the manufacturing edge doesn’t slip to China again. WSJ (2 minutes)
Solopreneur Nation
A guy selling hats online with “DADDY” printed on them is on track for eight figures in sales this year, and he’s part of a much bigger shift. New business applications in America hit 531,000 in June, nearly double the 2019 average, reversing a century-long slide in self-employment that had fallen from 36% of workers in 1910 to under 10% by 2020. Chatbots now handle the once-daunting parts of starting a business, building a website, navigating local regulations, so much so that the share of founders using AI to launch doubled to 60% between 2023 and 2025. The catch is that most of these ventures aren’t hiring anyone else, AI is filling the gaps that once forced founders to bring on employees, meaning the age of building a company might be giving way to an age of building a one-person empire. The Economist (6 minutes)
The Uni-Context
We used to live in a thousand different rooms, each with its own rules, the classroom, the church, the bar, the family dinner table, and now we live in one giant room with everybody else, all the time. Philosopher Agnes Callard calls this the “uni-context,” and it explains far more than it should: why online discourse skews negative (badness is universal, goodness is local and hard to translate across cultures), why identity has eclipsed character in public debate (identity never changes depending on where you are, character does), and why everything from baseball strategy to school curricula keeps converging on the same playbook once everyone gets measured on the same scoreboard. Even our exhausting new relationship with attention, that nagging feeling we must consciously manage focus instead of just responding to our surroundings, traces back to living inside a screen that never turns off. It’s not obviously good or bad, Callard argues, it’s just where we now live, and the first step is realizing we’re standing in it at all. Derek Thompson (11 minutes)
Time Audit
You can be too busy to notice you’re busy, spending eight sessions with clients in a single day and realizing you haven’t given your own kid 45 uninterrupted minutes in months. The fix, according to psychotherapist Niro Feliciano, is a simple two-list exercise, write down who and what actually matters to you, then track where your hours really go, and the gap between those lists usually reveals a schedule packed with obligations and mindless scrolling instead of the people and hobbies you claim to value. Closing that gap means setting boundaries around the time-wasters, and Feliciano notes that anyone who resists your new limits was probably benefiting from you not having them in the first place. Once you’ve freed up the time, the real work starts, learning to sit in that open space without immediately refilling it, since chasing constant busyness is often just another treadmill for people whose sense of worth is tied to acquisition and achievement. NPR (4 minutes)
Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.
Weekend Wisdom
I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It's just been too intelligent to come here. — Arthur C. Clarke