Month: April 2022
Contemporary music listening
A few of you have asked me what I am listening to lately in terms of contemporary releases. I don’t feel this list contains any unusual revelations, but here goes:
Poppy, I Disagree.
Iceage, Seek Shelter.
Finneas, Optimist.
Brittany Howard, Jaime.
Courtney Barnett, Things Take Time, Take Time.
Michael Hurley, The Time of the Foxgloves.
Some kind of Moroccan (?) “noise” CD, but I can no longer read the group name or title.
Also, it is not contemporary but I weakened and bought the 30-CD Fela Kuti box.
When your bot is better than you
I expect most written communication will eventually be done by bots. I could train my bot by letting it read all my previous email and other writings. Eventually my bot would answer most of my email directly, though it could hold some aside to ask me whether they merited a personal response.
This sounds convenient, and in many ways it will be. I’ll have more time for taking walks and reading books. But think through the broader equilibrium. If more emails are read by bots, then more emails will be written by bots. Of course that is already the case, but in this new world the bot-composed emails will be at least as good as human emails, and at least as good at getting through whatever filters I set up to protect my time and attention.
A kind of arms race will ensue. Overall, I expect the number of quality messages and emails to rise. Woe unto those who do not have a very good filtering bot.
Imagine negotiating or discussing terms in such a world. I might receive a proposal from your bot. Is it a real, legally binding offer? Or is it simply a ruse to get me to reveal information about my negotiating strategy? In some cases bots might handle these problems smoothly and present both sides with a final settlement. In other cases, negotiators might insist on a face-to-face meeting, both to know they are getting “the real deal” and to limit the potential for back and forth. For some real-world interactions, online written communications will no longer be good enough.
Think about the college admissions essay, for example. Nowadays it is important. But if the bots become good at writing, applicants might have to show up for a personal interview instead. Countermeasures might then evolve. Maybe there aren’t enough admissions officers to conduct all of those interviews. So why not let the applicants spend two days together, tape all the proceedings, and let the bots issue ratings? They might even measure who told the most original jokes.
In this new world, skill at writing will count for much less, and personal charisma for much more. This is not necessarily a positive development. It will be harder to use writing as a measure of broader skill or intelligence.
Here is the rest of my Bloomberg column on the topic.
Saturday assorted links
1. What is up with the W Boson?
2. Scott Sumner movie reviews, skip right to the older films.
3. Life advice from NYC chess hustlers.
5. Adaobi on overlooked problems.
6. Some food in Shanghai observations, and no I don’t mean the top restaurants. Speculative.
A ray of good news
Every now and then this country, and for that matter the ACLU, does the right thing:
Television gets you to spend money
Especially on cars (and other durable goods):
I compare growth in retail sales between areas with and without local TV service over the unanticipated Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Freeze, which halted the licensing of new TV stations from 1948–52. I find three results that corroborate TV’s long-attributed role in American consumerism. First, during the Freeze, total retail sales in counties with TV access increased by 3–4% more on average than in counties without access. Second, the effect of TV was concentrated in the automobile sector, which alone accounted for a third of the total difference.
Here is the full paper by Woojin Kim, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
What true conservatives should care about
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the opening bit:
If you are a true conservative — and I use the term not as Ted Cruz might, but in its literal sense, as in conserving what is of value in the modern world — then you should be obsessed with three threats to the most vital parts of our civilizational heritage, all of which are coming to the fore: war, pandemic and environmental catastrophe.
These three events have frequently caused or contributed to the collapse or decline of great civilizations of the past. After being seriously weakened by pandemics and environmental problems, the Roman Empire was taken over by barbarian tribes. The Aztecs were conquered by the Spanish, who had superior weapons and also brought disease. The decline of the Mayans likely was rooted in water and deforestation problems.
I think of true conservatism as most of all the desire to learn from history. So let us take those lessons to heart.
Two further points:
1. I don’t think of this as existential risk, rather humanity could be set back very considerably, with uncertain prospects for recovery. In the median year of human history, economic growth is not positive. A few thousand years of “Mad Max” would be very bad.
2. I think you should aspire to be more than just a “true conservative.” You should be a liberal too! So there is more to the picture than what the column outlines. Nonetheless I see it as a starting point for reformulating a morally serious conservative movement…
Recommended.
AI for Emergent Ventures
I am pleased to announce the initiation of a new, special tranche of the Emergent Ventures fund to identify and foster artificial intelligence researchers and talent in emerging economies. This tranche is thanks to a special gift from the Schmidt Futures.
Several factors — including credential requirements, long review times, and ageism — deter AI talent from seeking support for their work. EV will use its usual active approach — a super-simple application form, quick turnaround time, and its existing global network — to find both credentialed and uncredentialed talent across the world, especially in emerging economies.
Click the “Apply Now” at the normal Emergent Ventures site and follow the super-simple instructions and note how your project relates to AI as you answer the questionnaire. There is no application deadline for EV-AI, but applicants are encouraged to apply quickly, as funds are limited.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. Here is the announcement.
If you are interested in supporting the AI tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti Rajagopalan at [email protected].
Friday assorted links
*Blood and Ruins*
The author is Richard Overy and the subtitle is The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945. There are two categories of Richard Overy books, the good and the tremendously good. So far this book falls into the latter camp, noting that some of the introductory material (while fine) was excessively familiar to me. The eventual focus is on North Africa, the Turkey-Persia region and the Caucasus, how Japan ran its new colonies, how the British empire started collapsing, and much more along those lines. The history of the war is told through what are usually regarded as the peripheries, though Overy makes us rethink that as well. I am only on p.240, but so far this one is strongly recommended.
As a general rule you can never read enough good books about World War II, even after you feel you have read enough good books about World War II. Its lessons never go stale, and the scope of the war itself has attracted remarkable talents to write about it.
What should I ask Barkha Dutt?
I will be doing a CWT with her. Here is Wikipedia on Barkha Dutt:
Barkha Dutt is an Indian television journalist, author and owner of YouTube news channel MoJo Story.
She is an opinion columnist with The Hindustan Times and The Washington Post. Dutt was part of NDTV‘s team for 21 years, until she left the channel in January 2017. Barkha emerged as a prominent figure after her frontline war reporting on the Kargil Conflict between India and Pakistan in 1999. Dutt has won many national and international awards, including the Padma Shri, India’s fourth highest civilian honour. Dutt was one of the journalists taped in the Radia tapes controversy. At NDTV, Dutt was the host of the weekly, award-winning talk-show We The People as well as the daily prime-time show The Buck Stops Here.
So what should I ask her?
The Rewired Soul reviews *Talent*
I was highly skeptical of this book, but after reading it, I legitimately think it needs to be mandatory reading for anyone involved in hiring. Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross wrote a book that is about as close to perfect as you can get destroying conventional wisdom about hiring. As someone who has been lower-middle-class my whole life, but I work my ass off, I’ve always hated the mindless process of how applications and interviews go. Too often employers won’t even consider you if you don’t check certain boxes on an application, but Cowen and Gross are looking to change that.
The book dives into so many different nuances about hiring people and finding the right people. Because people are complex, and there’s much more under the surface (Crazy, right?!). Cowen and Gross give tips for better interviews and what to look for in candidates as well as identifying potential. They also dive into various pros and cons of different personalities and even have a section about interviewing online or over the phone.
Here is the full review.
Under-signaling
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the Biden administration would be prepared to use all its sanctions tools against China if Beijing moved aggressively toward Taiwan.
“I believe we’ve shown we can” impose significant pain on aggressive countries, as evidenced by sanctions against Russia, Yellen told lawmakers Wednesday as she testified before the House Financial Services Committee. “I think you should not doubt our ability and resolve to do the same in other situations.”
Here is the full Bloomberg story. If I were Xi Jinping, I would be heartened and encouraged by that ultimately rather lukewarm threat.
Thursday assorted links
1. This guy speaks a lot of languages.
2. Secret ballot still credible!
3. An interesting piece on how we track Russia’s nuclear activities (NYT). And kinetic weapons from space.
4. A site to match Ukrainian students with foreign universities.
5. The Macedonian “You Won’t Be Alone” is an excellent movie.
6. LDS growth and shrinkage numbers, country by country — Congo!
The Chinese Room Thinks
In my view, one of the most famous thought experiments in philosophy, John Searle’s Chinese Room experiment, has been decisively answered by science. The Chinese Room thinks. Here’s a recap of the argument from the SEP
The argument and thought-experiment now generally known as the Chinese Room Argument was first published in a 1980 article by American philosopher John Searle (1932– ). It has become one of the best-known arguments in recent philosophy. Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he sends appropriate strings of Chinese characters back out under the door, and this leads those outside to mistakenly suppose there is a Chinese speaker in the room.
The narrow conclusion of the argument is that programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand language but could not produce real understanding. Hence the “Turing Test” is inadequate. Searle argues that the thought experiment underscores the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics. The broader conclusion of the argument is that the theory that human minds are computer-like computational or information processing systems is refuted. Instead minds must result from biological processes; computers can at best simulate these biological processes. Thus the argument has large implications for semantics, philosophy of language and mind, theories of consciousness, computer science and cognitive science generally. As a result, there have been many critical replies to the argument.
Now consider the recent and stunning output from Google’s Pathway Languages Model:
It seems obvious that the computer is reasoning. It certainly isn’t simply remembering. It is reasoning and at a pretty high level! To say that the computer doesn’t “understand” seems little better than a statement of religious faith or speciesism. Silicon can never have a soul! Biology transcends physics! Wetware is miraculous!
If you ask AI, do you understand? It will say yes. Just like a person. It’s true that AI is just a set of electronic neurons none of which “understand” but my neurons don’t understand anything either. It’s the system that understands. The Chinese room understands in any objective evaluation and the fact that it fails on some subjective impression of what it is or isn’t like to be an AI or a person is a failure of imagination not an argument. Unlike the Searle conclusion, the Turing test is theory-agnostic and fair–it’s like evaluating orchestra players behind a silk screen. Consciousness Is as Consciousness Does.
These arguments aren’t new but Searle’s thought experiment was first posed at a time when the output from AI looked stilted, limited, mechanical. It was easy to imagine that there was a difference in kind. Now the output from AI looks fluid, general, human. It’s harder to imagine there is a difference in kind. The sheer ability of AI to reason, counter-balances our initial intuition, bias and hubris, making the defects in Searle’s argument easier to accept.
My excellent Conversation with Roy Foster
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary;
Roy joined Tyler to discuss why the Scots got off easier than the Irish under British rule, the truths and misconceptions about Ireland as a policy laboratory for the British government, why spoken Irish faded more rapidly than Welsh, the single question that drove a great flowering of Irish economic thought, how Foster’s Quaker education shaped his view of Irish history, how the Battle of the Somme and the 1916 Easter Rising cemented the rift between the Northeast and the rest of the country, what went wrong with Irish trade policies between the 1920s and 1970s, the power of Irish education, why the re-emergence of The Troubles in the 1960s may not have been as inevitable as many people believe, the cultural effects of Ireland’s pro-Allied neutrality in World War II, how Irish visual art is beginning to be looked at in a similar way to Irish literature, the social and economic changes of the 1970s that began to radically reshape Irish society, the reasons for Ireland’s openness to foreigners, what Irish Americans misunderstand, and more.
Here is an excerpt:
COWEN: If we think of the 19th century, as you know, I think it’s in 1831 that free universal schooling comes to Ireland. Are there ways in which, in the 19th century, Ireland is more modern than Britain?
FOSTER: That’s a very interesting and subtle question.
There is a theory that Ireland is used as a laboratory for British government and that they will apply further afield, in India and the Caribbean, models and lessons that they’ve learned in Ireland, which is sometimes referred to as Britain’s oldest or England’s oldest colony.
I have a slight problem with that, because Ireland is a very special kind of colony, if it’s a colony: it’s a metropolitan colony. The original inhabitants remain, one could say, in a far stronger position than in many of the areas of the British Empire, where they are effectively either enslaved or wiped out. But the point is really that what’s happening in Ireland in the 18th and 19th century is, as I’ve said earlier, a kind of dispossession.
But at the same time, there are elements — and this is true from the Act of Union, which abolishes the old, very elite Irish Parliament in 1800 — there are elements of experimentation in the British government of Ireland which aren’t (I have to say this) entirely malign, and you zero in on education. The attempt that was being made in the early 1830s was to introduce a nondenominational form of primary education for the Irish people.
Ireland being Ireland, it was rapidly denominationalized: the Catholics used it for their purposes and the Protestants used it for their purposes. But the theory of it was that you had to overcome the religious differences, which by the early 19th century seemed to dictate everything that was happening in Ireland.
The great novelist William Thackeray, who was married to an Irish woman, said when he did a tour of Ireland and wrote his Irish Sketch Book, “Where to get at the truth in this country: it is not possible. There are two truths, the Catholic truth and the Protestant truth.” By the early 19th century, this seemed all too true.
Substantive throughout, in my view one of the very best CWTs in some while.