Your Personality Is Your Problem
Every month, High Lantern Group gathers a small list of interesting, provocative, and contrarian items that shed light on what makes great strategic positioning and thought leadership. We are happy to share them with you - and hear from you about ideas worth sharing.
Six Ideas That Made Us Think
1. Talking the Talk
Sean Farrell, an Australian data scientist, started playing around with psychometric AI models and stumbled onto something: the way that young basketball players talk correlates to their future NBA success. When Farrel's model reviews only player interviews, it can predict with 63% accuracy who will make it to the NBA. When it also factors in player age, height, stats, and college conference, the accuracy rates shoots to 87%:
Farrell, who never followed the NBA before pursuing this research, may have discovered a new wrinkle in the draft scouting process. For instance, players who used words associated with being honest and non-defensive—such as “realize,” “believe,” and “understand”—were more likely to make it. Those who spoke in longer sentences and used more complex language were actually less likely to make it. The data, Farrell found, favored a clear perspective over articulation. So while athletes who take it one game at a time might sound boring at the podium, they may be on to something.
2. Your Personality Is Your Problem
In her substack, Girlhood in the Modern World, Freya India observes that in modern therapy culture, “every personality trait becomes a problem to be solved”:
Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling too strong—has to be labelled and explained. And this inevitably expands over time, encompassing more and more of us, until nobody is normal. Some say young people are making their disorders their whole personality. No; it’s worse than that. Now they are being taught that their normal personality is a disorder.
3. Come Here, Invent Things
According to a paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, it’s hard to expect more American innovation without more immigrants:
Immigrant inventors are key contributors to innovation in the United States, both through their direct productivity and through the spillover effects of their work with native-born collaborators. While accounting for just 16 percent of all US-based inventors, immigrant inventors produce nearly a quarter of total innovation output as gauged by the number of patents and patent citations and the economic value of the patents.
4. AI Goes to War
Jim Mitre of the RAND Institute forecasts how Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will completely alter national security. One prediction: a weapon that no one can stop.
AGI could enable the sudden creation of a decisive military capability, or "wonder weapon," granting a significant, potentially unassailable, advantage to the first nation that achieves it. This could dramatically shift the military balance through breakthroughs in areas like cyber warfare or autonomous weapons systems.
5. It's Getting Crowded Downtown
Reports on suburban sprawl are familiar. Economic researcher Jess Remington tells another side of the story::
When we look again at [the data], another surprising trend reveals itself: housing construction ticks up in the densest 10 percent of neighborhoods — the downtowns and urban cores often thought to be “too built out.” This pattern is even clearer on a per capita basis. The densest 10 percent of tracts — the downtowns and urban cores — are building more housing relative to their populations than the next 20 percent — the inner-ring suburbs surrounding downtown neighborhoods.
6. Portlandia and the Homeless
A ProPublica study reviews the progress of Portland’s extensive $1.3 billion investment in “public health and safety” for the homeless since 2021. The conclusion is grim:
Although the city spent roughly $200,000 per homeless resident throughout that time, deaths of homeless people recorded in the county quadrupled, climbing from 113 in 2019 to more than 450 in 2023, according to the most recent data from the Multnomah County Health Department. The rise in deaths far outpaces the growth in the homeless population, which was recorded at 6,300 by a 2023 county census, a number most agree is an undercount.
Websites Worth Reading
Word Smarts: State name etymology
Star Gazing Online: For Cloudy Nights
Shah of Iran 1973 Interview: From The New Republic Archives
Feeds We Follow
@TKavulla: Travis Kavulla on the electric grid
@AlexYablon: NYC vote by housing status
@emollick: I develops better ideas for research