Results for “ferrante” 52 found
Behavioral Economics and GPT-4: From William Shakespeare to Elena Ferrante
There is a new paper on LLMs by Gabriel Abrams, here is the abstract:
We prompted GPT-4 (a large language model) to play the Dictator game, a classic behavioral economics experiment, as 148 literary fictional characters from the 17th century to the 21st century.
Of literary interest, this paper analyzed character selfishness by century, the relative frequency of literary character personality traits, and the average valence of these traits. The paper also analyzed character gender differences in selfishness.
From an economics/AI perspective, this paper generates specific and quantifiable Turing tests which the model passed for zero price effect, lack of spitefulness and altruism, and failed for human sensitivity to relative ordinal position and price elasticity (elasticity is significantly lower than humans). Model updates from March to August 2023 had relatively minor impacts on Turing test outcomes.
There is a general and mainly monotonic decrease in selfish behavior over time in literary characters. 50% of the decisions of characters from the 17th century are selfish compared to just 19% of the decisions of characters from the 21st century. Overall, humans exhibited much more selfish behavior than AI characters, with 51% of human decisions being selfish compared to 32% of decisions made by AI characters.
Historical literary characters have a surprisingly strong net positive valence across 2,785 personality traits generated by GPT-4 (3.2X more positive than negative). However, valence varied significantly across centuries. The most positive century, in terms of personality traits, was the 21st — over 10X the ratio of positive to negative traits. The least positive century was the 17th at just 1.8X. “Empathetic,” “fair” and “selfless,” were the most overweight traits in the 20th century. Conversely, “manipulative,” “ambitious” and “ruthless” were the most overweight traits in the 17th century.
Male characters were more selfish than female characters: 35% of male decisions were selfish compared to just 24% for female characters. The skew was highest in the 17th century where selfish decisions for male and female were 62% and 20% respectively.
This analysis offers a specific and quantifiable partial Turing test. In a few ways, the model is remarkably human-like; The key human-like characteristics are the zero price effect, lack of spitefulness and altruism. However, in other ways, GPT-4 reflects unusual or inhuman preferences. The model does not appear to have human sensitivity to relative ordinal position and has significantly lower price elasticity than humans.
Model updates in GPT-4 have made it slightly more sensitive to ordinal value, but not more selfish. The model shows preference consistency across model runs for each character with respect to selfishness.
To which journal might you advise him to send this paper?
Behavioral Economics and ChatGPT: From William Shakespeare to Elena Ferrante
We prompted GPT-4 (an artificial intelligence large language model) to use literary fictional characters to play the Dictator game, a classic behavioral economics experiment. We prompted GPT-4 with 148 characters from the 17th century to the 21st century. Their 888 decisions were used to compare characters over time as well as characters to human players. There is a general and mainly monotonic decrease in selfish behavior over time in literary characters. 41% of the decisions of 17th century characters are selfish compared to just 21% of the decisions of characters from the 21st century. In the Human-AI comparison, Humans are much more selfish than the AI characters with 51% of humans making selfish decisions compared to 28% of the AI characters.
Here is the full (short) paper by Gabriel Abrams (a junior in high school).
The new Elena Ferrante novel, up through p.138 (no spoilers)
Some surprises have come, and I am liking it more. Is it fair to judge it against the Neapolitan quadrology? This book has only one major character rather than two, so is it doomed to be only half as good? Can any current book manage to be half as good? Can we read this one fresh at all? (Is it better to view the Mona Lisa “fresh,” or not?) Should we be trying to discard prior expectations, or not be trying to discard expectations for a book such as this?
You’ll be getting another report soon, please note I am deliberately not reading the book too quickly. Here is my previous post on the book. I agree with the commentator who described the male characters as mostly flat.
The new Elena Ferrante novel, up through p.63 no spoilers
It is a thrill to be dragged into her Neapolitan world of class and romantic intrigue and family strife once again, and the book is clearly Ferrante from the get go. Yet I have some doubts. The plot seems more accessible and less complex, and with fewer layers to be unpeeled. It has not yet moved out of “father-daughter cliché land.” Every page is engrossing, but I am still looking for the surprise.
They have been so stingy with advance review copies that there are still no Amazon reviews.
Emergent Ventures winners, 29th cohort
Dan Rivera, South Carolina, FavorPiedmont, addiction recovery and treatment.
Lukas Bogacz, Utrecht/South Africa, to start a company based on fine-tuning LLMs.
Brian Wang, MIT, Panoplia Laboratories, for DNA-based pan-virus vaccine research.
Gabriel Abrams, Washington, D.C., Sidwell (high school), LLMs and economic research.
Chloe Chia, Berkeley, to pursue computational research about human behavior in dense cities.
Jannik Schilling, 18, Hamburg, Bay Area (?), general career development.
David Siegel, to assist in the education of his son Micah Siegel, Bethesda, MD, to produce a YouTube channel about how to help animals.
Shannon Kim, University of Chicago, biology and the origins of life, “Can prebiotic networks and the spread of chiral information explain the origins of biological homochirality?”
Kyrylo Kalashnikov, mini-robotics, University of Toronto, from Ukraine.
Andrew Nijmeh, Toronto, to study the tech of traffic management systems, 15 years old.
Vinaya Sharma, Ontario, “VoltVision.AI is transforming electric grid fault detection and monitoring with autonomous drones, computer vision, and 3D and thermal imaging, helping embark on cheaper, faster and safer transmission line maintenance.”
Stuart Buck, Houston, Good Science Project, to improve the study of meta science and improve science policy.
Leah Gimbel, Washington, DC, to create a new system to grade principals.
Benjamin Yeoh, London, to organize a London Unconference about home schooling. Also works as a playwright.
Ukraine cohort:
Eugene Shcherbinin, London/LSE/Odesa, general career support, mathematics and economics.
Anna Orekhova, to aid her new company in science education, Kyiv.
Bohdana Pavlychko, Kyiv, venture capital and talent search, The Second Derivative Fund.
Nadia Parfan, Takflix, Ukrainian movies marketed abroad by streaming, Kyiv
Dmytro Marakhovskiya, co-founder and CEO of Rozmova, a Ukrainian tech platform that connects psychotherapists with clients, to expand into Poland.
And yes there are still other winners to be announced, forthcoming…
*Solenoid*
That is the recently published and translated Romanian novel by Mircea Cartarescu. I have just finished reading it, and am pleased to announce that a new major European novel of ideas is upon us. I don’t put it up with Ferrante or Knausgaard, but it is on the next level below. Think of it as a blend of Knausgaard (autofiction), Joyce (Bucharest filling in for Dublin), and the surrealism of Kafka. From the NYT:
It is the journal-cum-antinovel of a schoolteacher reflecting on his youth, his mother, his job, his disturbing dreams and his overwhelming intuition that the anomalies of his life constitute an inscrutable pattern.
GPT has I think read the Romanian reviews, and has a good take:
Cartarescu‘s Solenoid is a sprawling, labyrinthine, and visionary novel that explores the main themes of identity, memory, creativity, and transcendence. The narrator, a frustrated writer and disillusioned teacher in Bucharest, recounts his life story, his dreams, his hallucinations, and his encounters with various eccentric characters and phenomena, such as a giant solenoid, a metal coil that escaping the oppressive and absurd conditions of his existence. He also reflects on his own personal and cultural history, his childhood traumas, his family secrets, his sexual and spiritual experiences, and his artistic aspirations. The novel is rich in intertextual and metaphysical references, ranging from Kafka, Borges, and Proust to Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Eastern mysticism. The novel challenges the conventional boundaries of genre, time, and space, creating a complex and original literary cosmos that blends realism, fantasy, horror, and science fiction.
I have been predicting this will be an amazing year for fiction, most of all fiction in translation, and so far it is off to a wonderful start. You can buy the book here.
The Inflationary Effects of Sectoral Reallocation
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented shift of consumption from services to goods. We study this demand reallocation in a multi-sector model featuring sticky prices, input-output linkages, and labor reallocation costs. Reallocation costs hamper the increase in the supply of goods, causing inflationary pressures. These pressures are amplified by the fact that goods prices are more flexible than services prices. We estimate the model allowing for demand reallocation, sectoral productivity, and aggregate labor supply shocks. The demand reallocation shock explains a large portion of the rise in U.S. inflation in the aftermath of the pandemic.
That is from a new paper by Francesco Ferrante, Sebastian Graves, and Matteo Iacoviello. From the Board of Governors, 3.5 percentage points if you had to say how much. Via Nick Timiraos.
Best movies of 2022
The Lost Daughter, TV but still good, a movie of sorts, based on Ferrante.
Belle, spectacular Japanese anime.
Licorice Pizza, a good normal movie, captured California well.
Compartment Number Six, with a new meaning after the war of course.
Petit Maman, French, short, plays mind games with you, profound.
The Quiet Girl (Irish)
Vesper, Lithuanian, dreamy, Tarkovsky influence but faster-paced, an underrated movie this year.
Tár, really quite good and interesting.
Decision to Leave, Korean crime drama with Hitchcockian twists and inspirations.
The Fabelmans, Ignore the cloying preview.
Saint Omer, French-Senegalese courtroom drama.
Clytaemnestra, Korean movie, one hour long.
EO, Polish movie about a donkey, better than you think.
Overall an abysmal year for Hollywood, a pretty good year for the movies. I haven’t yet seen Oppenheimer or Bardo, so their absence on the list should not be taken as a negative signal.
The best fiction in recent times
Here are my picks, in no particular order:
W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants (1992, maybe not recent?).
Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan quadrology.
Karl Knausgaard, My Struggle, volumes one and two.
Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials.
Michel Houellebecq, Submission.
Min Lee, Pachinko.
Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem.
Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives.
And addended:
Haruki Murakami, IQ84.
Vikrram Seth, A Suitable Boy.
Orhan Pamuk, Museum of Innocence.
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon.
David Grossman, To the End of the Land.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas.
Jose Saramago, Blindness.
China Mieville, The City and the City.
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace.
I do not feel that recent times lag far so behind some of the earlier, more classic literary eras. Which books am I forgetting?
New Year’s assorted links
1. Galbraith on Krugman and price controls, channeled through Kelton. Guess which side I agree with? And PK follow-up.
2. It is appropriable cereal gains that lead to the state.
3. I can’t review it without spoiling it, but The Lost Daughter (Netflix, based on Ferrante) is a very good movie.
5. MIE: “Mothers are memorializing their breastfeeding experiences with stones made from the liquid.” (NYT)
My Conversation with the excellent Ruth Scurr
A fine discourse all around, here is the transcript and audio. Here is part of the CWT summary:
Ruth joined Tyler to discuss why she considers Danton the hero of the French Revolution, why the Jacobins were so male-obsessed, the wit behind Condorcet’s idea of a mechanical king, the influence of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments during and after the Reign of Terror, why 18th-century French thinkers were obsessed with finding forms of government that would fit with emerging market forces, whether Hayek’s critique of French Enlightenment theorists is correct, the relationship between the French Revolution and today’s woke culture, the truth about Napoleon’s diplomatic skills, the poor prospects for pitching biographies to publishers, why Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws would be her desert island read, why Cambridge is a better city than Oxford, why the Times Literary Supplement remains important today, what she loves about Elena Ferrante’s writing, how she stays open as a biographer, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Is there a counterfactual path where the French Revolution simply works out well as a liberal revolution? If so, what would have needed to have been different?
SCURR: In terms of counterfactuals, the one I thought most about was, What would have happened if Robespierre hadn’t fallen at Thermidor and the relationship between him and [Louis Antoine Léon de] Saint-Just had continued? But that’s not the triumph of the liberal revolution. That would have merely been a continuation of the point they had gotten to. For a triumph of the liberal revolution, that would have needed to be much, much earlier.
I think that it was almost impossible for them to get a liberal constitution in place in time to make that a possibility. What you have is 1789, the liberal aspirations, the hopes, the Declaration of Rights; and then there is almost a hiatus period in which they are struggling to design the institutions. And that is the period which, if it could have been compressed, if there could have been more quickly a stability introduced . . .
Some of the people I’m most interested in in that period were very interested in what has to be true about the society in order for it to have a stable constitution. Obviously when you’re in the middle of a revolution and you’re struggling to come up with those solutions, then there is the opening to chaos.
Definitely recommended. And I am again happy to recommend Ruth’s new book Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows.
My favorite fiction of 2021
Marcel Proust, The Mysterious Correspondent: New Stories. Not the very best Proust, but even so-so Proust is pretty superb. These are fragments to be welcomed.
Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary. At least as good as The Martian, and arguably more conceptual.
Judith Schlansky, Verzeichnis einiger Verluste [Inventory of Losses]. Conceptual German novel with roots in Borges, not as good in English.
Patrick McGrath, Last Days in Cleaver Square. Unreliable narrator!
Karl Knausgaard, The Morning Star. The master returns with a full-scale novel, with theology galore.
Anne Serre, The Beginners. Short, French, about relationships, fun.
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You? She is quite the conservative, don’t be put off by the left-wing rhetoric.
Mario Levrero, The Luminous Novel. The best Uruguayan novel of all time?
Domenico Starnone, Trust. The better of the two “Elena Ferrante” novels released in English this year?
As for retranslations of classics, I very much like the new Oedipus Rex trilogy and the new translation of the Kalevala. I hope they are fiction! And kudos to Sarah Ruden’s work on the Gospels, I am not sure where to put them…
Overall I thought this was an excellent year for reading fiction, much better than the few years preceding. My number one pick here would be the Andy Weir, noting that, for purposes of your norming, I do not usually select science fiction for this designation. (Here is my earlier CWT with Andy Weir.)
Note that I just ordered a whole new batch of appealing-sounding novels (FT link), and I will read some before year’s end, so I will give you an update when appropriate, most likely toward the very end of the calendar year. And my non-fiction list will be coming soon. And also note: “missing” titles from this list are very often missing on purpose!
Read more!
What I’ve been reading
1. Carole Angier, Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald. Might Sebald be the only semi-recent writer who can hold a candle to Ferrante, Knausgaard, and Houllebecq? This book is sprawling, and suffers somewhat from lack of access to the author’s family, but it is a true labor of love. And Angier has a deep understanding of Sebald, and also brings out the Jewish-related themes in his work (though he was not Jewish himself). It attempts to be a Sebaldian work itself, and even if it does not always succeed it is the kind of passionate book we need more of. Recommended, but you have to read Sebald first, if need be start with Die Ausgewanderten [The Emigrants].
2. Arthur Herman, The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World. Ignore the subtitle! There have been a number of good books on the Vikings lately, and this is perhaps the most “popular” and big picture of the lot. The early Vikings swept through Europe in a matter of decades, mixing conquest and trade. King Canute was pretty impressive it seems. Specialists may pick nits, but it is very readable and seems to me to give a good overview of the role of the Vikings in European history. This would be the one to start with.
3. Lawrence Rothfield, The Measure of Man: Liberty, Virtue, and Beauty in the Florentine Republic. An excellent introduction to Florence, with some focus on issues of liberty and also civic leaderhip. One should never tire of reading about this particular topic.
4. Howard W. French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World 1471 to the Second World War. Think of this book as a retelling of some standard historical episodes, but with Africa at the center rather than as a recipient of European advances. This is a useful reframing, and I enjoyed the read. But perhaps by the end it was the New World that in my mind was upgraded as a more central spot for the rise of modernity? Too frequently the relevance of Africa has to be rescued by invoking Portugal, as Sweden, Russia, and Turkey simply will not do the trick there.
New out is Diane Coyle, Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be; she is typically wise.
I am happy to see the publication of Calvin Duke’s Entrepreneurial Communities: An Alternative to the State, The Theories of Spencer Heath and Spencer MacCallum.
There is also Kyle Harper, Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History, long and comprehensive.
Saturday assorted links
1. Malcolm Gladwell on Norm MacDonald.
2. Knausgaard cultural recommendations.
3. Rawls on caste and eugenics.
4. Very good interview with Amia Srinivasan.
5. Callard on the Bergman remake and the nature of marital loneliness (New Yorker).
6. Good Steven van Zandt piece on management, his life, and The Sopranos (FT). “As Dante became Tony Soprano’s consigliere, “I was able to use my real-life dynamics with Bruce Springsteen as the basis of that relationship. I knew what those dynamics were — the one guy who didn’t want to be the boss, the one guy who he could trust, the one guy who wasn’t afraid of him.””