Month: May 2022

Slovakian Asks Good Questions About American Suburbs

My questions are:

  • What do you actually do? Are you always stuck inside? What did you do when you were a child and couldn’t drive?

  • Why do you have these sorts of strange regulations? Are your officials so incompetent? Is this due to lobbying from car or oil companies? I don’t get it.

  • Why is there no public transport? It seems like the only thing is the yellow school bus, idk.

  • He says there can be only one family houses. Why? Why can’t you have idk a commie block in the middle of such a suburb? Or row houses or whatever.

  • Why are there no businesses inside these? I mean, he says it’s illegal, just why? If I lived in such a place, I’d just buy a house next to mine and turn it into a tavern or a convenience store or whatever. Is that simply not possible and illegal?

  • These places have front and backyards. But they’re mostly empty. Some backyards have a pool maybe, but it’s mostly just green grass. Why don’t you grow plants in your yards? Like potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes or whatever. Why do you own this land, if you never use it?

Originally from Reddit.

Saturday assorted links

1. Thomas Schelling 1963-64 syllabus and final exam.

2. On Srinivasan and sex.

3. Transitioning to post-quantum cryptography?

4. Do insects have culture?

5. There are fewer Karens.

6. “The FDA won’t allow European formulas to be sold here because of inane labeling concerns…

7. “New funding effort will deploy a corps of scientist ‘scouts’ to spot innovative ideas.

8. Biden administration seeking to stymie charter schools (NYT).  #TheGreatForgetting

What I’ve been reading

1. Paul Strathern, The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo.  It is not just Dante and Galileo, there is also Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Giotto, Botticelli, Leonardo, Fra Filippo Lippi, Michelangelo, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and many more, all from one small region of Italy.  This book doesn’t answer how that all happened, but it is perhaps the best survey of the magnitude and extent of what happened, recommended and readable throughout, good as both an introduction and for the veteran reader of books about Florence.  While we are at it, don’t forget Pacioli and the first treatise on double-entry bookkeeping.

2. Geoff Dyer, The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings.  A hard book to explain, mostly it is about how careers end or collapse or implode, only some of it is about Federer.  “De Chirico lived till he was ninety but produced little of value after about 1919.”  Calling a book a “tour de force” almost certainly means it isn’t, but this book…is a tour de force.

3. Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.  One or two-page sections on the work habits of famous artists, the selection of names is intelligent and this book is like potato chips in the good sense of the term.

4. Asa Hoffman with Virginia Hoffman, The Last Gamesman: My Sixty Years of Hustling Games in the Clubs, Parks and Streets of New York.  A fun look back at the NYC chess world of the 1970s and trying to make a living as a chess and Scrabble hustler.  I knew Hoffman a bit back then, and even as a kid I wondered “is this guy happy?”  In the book he says he has largely been happy!  I am still wondering.  Maybe the secret is to play a game many discrete times where your losses are temporary and swamped by rapidly forthcoming wins?  I am reminded of the words of the recently deceased grandmaster and centenarian Yuri Averbakh (NYT): “The main thing was that I never obtained great pleasure from winning,’’ he wrote. “Clearly, I did not have a champion’s character. On the other hand, I did not like to lose, and the bitterness of defeat was in no way compensated for by the pleasure of winning.”

5. Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796.  A good and very useful general introduction to the history of the latter part of the story of Italy.

What should I ask Vaughn Smith?

I will be doing a Conversation with him so what should I ask?  He is a carpet cleaner.  And there is this:

“So, how many languages do you speak?”

“Oh, goodness,” Vaughn says. “Eight, fluently.”

“Eight?” Kelly marvels.

“Eight,” Vaughn confirms. English, Spanish, Bulgarian, Czech, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Slovak.

“But if you go by like, different grades of how much conversation,” he explains, “I know about 25 more.”

Vaughn glances at me. He is still underselling his abilities. By his count, it is actually 37 more languages, with at least 24 he speaks well enough to carry on lengthy conversations. He can read and write in eight alphabets and scripts. He can tell stories in Italian and Finnish and American Sign Language. He’s teaching himself Indigenous languages, from Mexico’s Nahuatl. to Montana’s Salish. The quality of his accents in Dutch and Catalan dazzle people from the Netherlands and Spain.

He also has been:

…a painter, a bouncer, a punk rock roadie and a Kombucha delivery man.

Here is the full profile of Vaughn Smith.  And here on YouTube.  So what should I ask him?

Friday assorted links

1. Umbrex presents Tyler Cowen on Talent.

2. Devon Zuegel podcast with Andy Matuschak on…group message etiquette – peripheral vision – homegrown software.

3. The guys behind the Turkish drones (New Yorker).

4. Nintil review of Talent.

5. Catherine Rampell on the inflation conspiracy theory.  #TheGreatForgetting

6. Nadia on EA and idea machines.

7. Help launch meta-science with J-Pal and Heidi Williams.

Systemic Bias versus Concentrated Bias

Discrimination exists but rather than being systemic Campbell and Brauer argue it’s due to a small number of prejudiced individuals.

Discrimination has persisted in our society despite steady improvements in explicit attitudes toward marginalized social groups. The most common explanation for this apparent paradox is that due to implicit biases, most individuals behave in slightly discriminatory ways outside of their own awareness (the dispersed discrimination account). Another explanation holds that a numerical minority of individuals who are moderately or highly biased are responsible for most observed discriminatory behaviors (the concentrated discrimination account). We tested these 2 accounts against each other in a series of studies at a large, public university (total N = 16,600). In 4 large-scale surveys, students from marginalized groups reported that they generally felt welcome and respected on campus (albeit less so than nonmarginalized students) and that a numerical minority of their peers (around 20%) engage in subtle or explicit forms of discrimination. In 5 field experiments with 8 different samples, we manipulated the social group membership of trained confederates and measured the behaviors of naïve bystanders. The results showed that between 5% and 20% of the participants treated the confederates belonging to marginalized groups more negatively than nonmarginalized confederates. Our findings are inconsistent with the dispersed discrimination account but support the concentrated discrimination account. The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Our results suggest that the Pareto principle also applies to discrimination, at least at the large, public university where the studies were conducted. We discuss implications for prodiversity initiatives.

The cause of discrimination matters because as Hambrick notes writing about this paper in Scientific American:

 In recent years, the view that most people engage in discriminatory acts because of implicit biases has gained widespread public acceptance. In a 2016 presidential debate, Hillary Clinton commented that “implicit bias is a problem for everyone.” Campbell and Brauer’s findings suggest it’s still not clear the extent to which implicit biases explain discriminatory conduct. (Other work has called into question the validity of implicit bias measures for predicting real-world discrimination.) Research aimed at answering this fundamental question will inform the design of interventions that may one day meaningfully reduce levels of discrimination.

….If, for example, a small number of explicitly prejudiced people are responsible for most or all of the discrimination occurring in a company, an intervention that requires all employees to undergo implicit bias training will probably fail to address the problem. Research suggests that interventions that convey the message that nearly everyone engages in discriminatory behavior may even make the workplace atmosphere worse for marginalized employees, because after the training, nonmarginalized employees may avoid interacting with them out of fear of unwittingly discriminating.

Is Sri Lanka becoming a failed state?

The economic crisis is a result of mismanagement by the Rajapaksa administration (and its predecessors) as well as Sri Lanka’s vulnerability to external shocks. The pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have had a devastating impact. The Rajapaksas pursued populist economic policies — including unaffordable fuel and food subsidies and printing money to finance them — that spurred inflation. The president was heavily criticized for a disastrous “100% organic” policy that aimed to reduce the strain on foreign currency reserves by banning the import of chemical fertilizers. The policy resulted in slashed agricultural output at a time when food supplies were already running low and prices were soaring.

Meanwhile, foreign tourism — a key source of jobs, economic growth, and foreign currency — fell after the 2019 Easter bombings and then collapsed during the pandemic. The spike in international commodity prices, which has been exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has piled further economic pressure on Sri Lanka. The country relies heavily on imports of food, fuel, and other essential goods to feed the people and keep the lights on.

Here is more from GZero.

How to make talent scouts work for you

With Daniel Gross, here is a (very much) shortened bit from Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creators, and Winners Around the World, published at a16z, excerpt from the chapter on when to use talent scouts:

It is worth thinking about why the scouting model works in this context [finding supermodels]. First, the relevant talent could come from many different parts of the world, and the number of people to be scouted is very large. It is hard to imagine a centralized process getting the job done. Second, many of the scouts plausibly have a decent sense of who might make a good model. Looks are hardly the only factor behind modeling success, but they are a kind of “first stop,” and expecting the scouts to judge looks well from first impressions is more plausible than expecting the scouts to use first impressions to judge talent well for skill in, say, quantum mechanics. Third, a follow-up investigation to judge the modeling talent of the chosen candidates is not extremely costly. You can have them in for a photo shoot and see how popular they prove in the market without having to invest millions of dollars right away…

Scouting is also becoming more important as the options for self-education are rising. With more people trying their hand at various avocations than ever before, that places more and more burden on talent search. We need to be more open to the accomplishments of self-taught individuals without traditional training, and that holds all the more true for the tech world, where many of the most important founders have eschewed the institutions of traditional education.

There is much more at the link, we also consider when scouting models fail relative to centralized evaluation, and which kinds of incentives should be given to scouts.

Thursday assorted links

1. Megyn Kelly interviews me, after about half an hour we get to Talent; the earlier inflation material will not be new to MR readers.

2. Rene Saenz: “What Cowenism Is,” a short essay.

3. Switzerland pondering whether Liechenstein is really very different, or not.

4. Kevin Kelly on Vanishing Asia.

5. New Vitalik/Glen paper, Puja Ohlhaver too.

6. The new project of Bloomberg UK (NYT).

7. Why are NSF applications down?

Some blurbs for *Talent*, with Daniel Gross

Talent” is what happens when two brilliant and profoundly iconoclastic minds apply their imagination to one of the hardest of all business problems: the search for good people. I loved it.”

–Malcolm Gladwell

“Talent is everything―whether in investing and building startups, or in other creative endeavors. Between product, market, and people, I’ve always bet on the last one as the biggest predictor of success. But while talent may be everywhere, it’s unevenly distributed, and hard to ‘find.’ So how do we better discover, filter, and match the best talent with the best opportunities? This book shares how, based on both scientific research and the authors’ own experiences. The future depends on this know-how.”

―Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz

“The most important job of any leader is to find individuals with a ‘creative spark,’ and the potential to discover, invent and build the future. If you want to learn the art and science of spotting and empowering exceptional people, Talent is brimming with fresh insights and actionable advice.”

―Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Futures and former CEO of Google

“I do not know of any skills more worth developing than the ability to find exceptional undeveloped talent. I have spent many years trying to get good at that, and I was still astonished by how much I learned reading this book.”

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, formerly of YCombinator

“Two of the premier talent spotters working today, Cowen and Gross have written the definitive history of identifying talent. Anyone who is interested in innovation, entrepreneurship, or the roots of America’s start-up economy must read this book.”Christina Cacioppo is CEO and co-founder of Vanta

You can order here on Amazon or here on Barnes & Noble.

Recommended!

Saudi fact of the day

Saudi Aramco has overtaken Apple as the world’s most valuable company after higher oil prices pushed shares of the world’s biggest crude exporter to record levels while a broader tech stock sell-off weighed on the iPhone maker.

The Saudi Arabian oil company’s market capitalisation on Wednesday was $2.426tn, exceeding Apple’s $2.415tn by just over $10bn. It is the first time that Saudi Aramco has regained the top spot since 2020 and follows a broader sell-off in technology stocks since the start of the year.

Apple became the first company to hit a $3tn market cap in early January, although its shares have suffered in recent months as investors reassess lofty valuations in the tech sector in light of a reversal in monetary policy and worries that inflation will weaken consumers’ spending habits.

Here is more from the FT.  It will be interesting to see what a world with higher real interest rates looks like…

Wednesday assorted links

1. “The telltale sign of a successful intellectual life is weirdness – weird in the best possible way.”  Short essay on my approach to things, a good piece I thought.

2. How much did slavery and cotton accelerate U.S. economic growth?

3. Will China build a dam with an army of robots and 3-D printers?  (Would not take entirely at face value this one.)

4. “The New York Times has apologised after the word “fetus” was included as the solution to the day’s Wordle challenge for some players.

5. Are these really Werner Herzog’s favorite eight films?

6. Who measures prices to determine inflation rates? (WSJ)

When were U.S. home prices at their worst?

That of course is only one metric, and it focuses on flows rather than homes as an asset.  It nonetheless puts a number of matters in perspective.  Here it is in words:

1981 was the most unaffordable year for those who need a mortgage, with annual payments consuming a whopping 52% of their income. For comparison, in 2022 mortgage payments require 27% and the absolute lowest point is back in 1963 when only 18% was required. In 2006 (at the peak of the housing bubble), families would need 30% of their income. Thus we can confidently say that 2022 is so far not the worst year in history for those who can’t afford to buy a house without a loan.

Canada and New Zealand seem to be the truly scary places.  Here is the full essay by Nikita Sokolsky.