Month: June 2023
Is growing conference size a problem?
In practice, they [scientists] more so blamed the human organization problems — essentially administrative issues — that they saw all around them. The growing conference sizes made it much more difficult to keep up with adjacent fields and scientific meetings. Seminars began to cater to narrower and narrower sub-branches of work rather than broad ones.
These were the places that many researchers leveraged to actually keep up to date on new work and problems in their fields as well as others. But, as money began to funnel into their field in the post-War era, there were more and more researchers and logistical decisions had to be made on how to do things like run conferences and decide who sits in what seminars.
The following Richard Feynman excerpt — taken from a 1973 oral history interview, which was one of a series of interviews between Charles Weiner and Feynman — goes into why, in the early 1970s, Feynman felt physics conferences had begun to grow far less useful than they were during the initial interviews for the series — where Feynman had told positive stories about the state of conferences as recently as 1956…
The conference size hypothesis almost surely is not the main problem, yet this is a new and interesting set of claims. The discussion of conference size comes fairly late in this piece by Eric Gilliam, plus there is a discussion of poetry toward the very end. For the pointer I thank Henry Oliver.
Orwell Against Progress
Orwell was deeply suspicious of technology and not simply because of the dangers of totalitarianism as expounded in 1984. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell argues that technology saps vigor and will. He quotes disparagingly, World Without Faith, a pro-progress book written by John Beever, a proto Steven Pinker in this respect.
It is so damn silly to cry out about the civilizing effects of work in the fields and farmyards as against that done in a big locomotive works or an automobile factory. Work is a nuisance. We work because we have to and all work is done to provide us with leisure and the means of spending that leisure as enjoyably as possible.
Orwell’s response?
…an exhibition of machine-worship in its most completely vulgar, ignorant, and half-baked form….How often have we not heard it, that glutinously uplifting stuff about ’the machines, our new race of slaves, which will set humanity free’, etc., etc., etc. To these people, apparently, the only danger of the machine is its possible use for destructive purposes; as, for instance, aero-planes are used in war. Barring wars and unforeseen disasters, the future is envisaged as an ever more rapid march of mechanical progress; machines to save work, machines to save thought, machines to save pain, hygiene, efficiency, organization, more hygiene, more efficiency, more organization, more machines–until finally you land up in the by now familiar Wellsian Utopia, aptly caricatured by Huxley in Brave New World, the paradise of little fat men.
What’s Orwell’s problem with progress? He is a traditionalist. Orwell thinks that men need struggle, pain and opposition to be truly great.
…in a world from which physical danger had been banished–and obviously mechanical progress tends to eliminate danger–would physical courage be likely to survive? Could it survive? And why should physical strength survive in a world where there was never the need for physical labour? As for such qualities as loyalty, generosity, etc., in a world where nothing went wrong, they would be not only irrelevant but probably unimaginable. The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain, or difficulty; but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain, and difficulty.
..The tendency of mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard.
I will give Orwell his due, he got this right:
Presumably, for instance, the inhabitants of Utopia would create artificial dangers in order to exercise their courage, and do dumb-bell exercises to harden muscles which they would never be obliged to use.
Orwell’s distaste for technology and love of the manly virtues of sacrifice and endurance to pain naturally push him towards zero-sum thinking. Wealth from machines is for softies but wealth from conquest, at least that makes you brave and hard! (See my earlier post, Orwell’s Falsified Prediction on Empire). Orwell didn’t favor conquest but it’s part of his pessimism that he sees the attraction.
Another of Orwell’s tragic dilemmas is that he doesn’t like progress but he does favor socialism and thus finds it unfortunate that socialism is perceived as being favorable to progress:
…the unfortunate thing is that Socialism, as usually presented, is bound up with the idea of mechanical progress…The kind of person who most readily accepts Socialism is also the kind of person who views mechanical progress, as such, with enthusiasm.
Orwell admired the tough and masculine miners he spent time with in the first part of Wigan Pier. In the second part he mostly decries the namby-pamby feminized socialists with their hippy-bourgeoise values, love of progress, and vegetarianism. I find it very amusing how much Orwell hated a lot of socialists for cultural reasons.
Socialism is too often coupled with a fat-bellied, godless conception of ’progress’ which revolts anyone with a feeling for tradition or the rudiments of
an aesthetic sense.…One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
…If only the sandals and the pistachio coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller, and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!
What Orwell wanted was to strip socialism from liberalism and to pair it instead with conservatism and traditionalism. (I am speaking here of the Orwell of The Road to Wigan Pier).
It’s still easy today to identify the sandal wearing, socialist hippies at the yoga studio but socialism no longer brings to mind visions of progress. Today, fans of progress are more likely to be capitalists than socialists. Indeed, socialism is more often allied with critiques of progress–progress destroys the environment, ruins indigenous ways of life and so forth. A traditionalist socialism along Orwell’s lines would add to this critique that progress destroys jobs, feminizes men, and saps vitality and courage. Thus, Orwell’s goal of pairing socialism with conservatism seems logically closer at hand than in his own time.
Playing repeated games with Large Language Models
They are smart, but not ideal cooperators it seems, at least not without the proper prompts:
Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming society and permeating into diverse applications. As a result, LLMs will frequently interact with us and other agents. It is, therefore, of great societal value to understand how LLMs behave in interactive social settings. Here, we propose to use behavioral game theory to study LLM’s cooperation and coordination behavior. To do so, we let different LLMs (GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4) play finitely repeated games with each other and with other, human-like strategies. Our results show that LLMs generally perform well in such tasks and also uncover persistent behavioral signatures. In a large set of two players-two strategies games, we find that LLMs are particularly good at games where valuing their own self-interest pays off, like the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma family. However, they behave sub-optimally in games that require coordination. We, therefore, further focus on two games from these distinct families. In the canonical iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, we find that GPT-4 acts particularly unforgivingly, always defecting after another agent has defected only once. In the Battle of the Sexes, we find that GPT-4 cannot match the behavior of the simple convention to alternate between options. We verify that these behavioral signatures are stable across robustness checks. Finally, we show how GPT-4’s behavior can be modified by providing further information about the other player as well as by asking it to predict the other player’s actions before making a choice. These results enrich our understanding of LLM’s social behavior and pave the way for a behavioral game theory for machines.
Here is the full paper by Elif Akata, et.al.
The incidence of loans for graduate education
In 2006, the federal government effectively uncapped student borrowing for graduate programs with the introduction of the Graduate PLUS loan program. Access to additional federal loans increased graduate students’ borrowing and shifted the composition of their loans from private to federal debt. However, the increase in borrowing limits did not improve access to existing programs overall or for underrepresented groups. Nor did access to additional loan aid result in significant increase in constrained students’ persistence or degree receipt. We document that among programs in which a larger share of graduate students had exhausted their annual federal loan eligibility before the policy change—and thus were more exposed to the expansion in access to credit—federal borrowing and prices increased.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Sandra E. Black, Lesley J. Turner, and Jeffrey T. Denning. Via Brett.