LRS
Lucky strike
“What happens if, at some point, our luck runs out?” That’s the question Brian Klaas asks of the risk that progress can present: Artificial intelligence, global pandemics, mirror bacteria, and climate change all trigger such dilemmas. If humanity were to die out in a hard-to-comprehend amount of time, like a million years, that would do little to change individual behaviour, but if it were at risk of being eradicated in a matter of generations, one’s choices might change.
Such worries about extinction are “relatively recent in Western thought,” Klaas notes. “However, for too long, little attention was paid to these risks.” There is an alternative to doomerism, though, even if it may seem far-fetched at first glance: Some form of global agreement and regulation of existential risks. “We don’t have to accept reckless courting of existential risk,” he continues. “We have the power to stop it. It’s a choice.”
Conflict resolution
Wars, conflict, and upheaval have differing impacts on countries worldwide — and can be interpreted differently globally. The legacies of the 2011 Arab revolutions in the Western world have been hyper-analyzed, but their consequences on the foreign policies of other nations have been comparatively less studied. The timing of the Arab Spring was critical in particular for China: The country’s leader Xi Jinping came to power soon after, and the lessons Beijing learned from the overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammer Gaddafi, for example, “influenced [its] approach to multilateral diplomacy and conflict resolution,” the China analyst Jesse Marks wrote.
Ultimately, China has softened its insistence on non-interference in other countries’ affairs, a “pragmatism” that has “allowed China to expand its influence in the Middle East by presenting itself as a reliable and impartial partner.” The country may now face a quandary in the region because of its ties to Iran — which has been weakened in recent months by the losses suffered by its proxies — but the “Libyan experience underscored… a lesson that continues to inform its diplomatic engagements across the Arab world.”
Statistically significant
The aesthetics of major American sports are changing, and longtime fans love to blame the most analytically minded analysts: Professional basketball is being redefined by a proliferation in the number of three-pointers, top-flight baseball has seen a slower, but still noticeable decline in the proportion of balls being “put in play,” and (American) football teams are increasingly taking risks such as passing in what had been running situations and “going for it” on fourth down.
But are the sports worse for those changes? That’s far from clear. “Modern analysts may have added different insights, but the goal is and has always been finding better ways to score points for your team and prevent the opponent from doing the same,” Neil Paine, an analytically focused sportswriter, argued in his newsletter. “It’s easy to romanticize a past where sports were ‘freer,’ untethered by optimization and the influence of external strategists. But the truth is, sports have always been shaped by those who innovate.”