Month: June 2023
My excellent Conversation with Peter Singer
Here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Peter joined Tyler to discuss whether utilitarianism is only tractable at the margin, how Peter thinks about the meat-eater problem, why he might side with aliens over humans, at what margins he would police nature, the utilitarian approach to secularism and abortion, what he’s learned producing the Journal of Controversial Ideas, what he’d change about the current Effective Altruism movement, where Derek Parfit went wrong, to what extent we should respect the wishes of the dead, why professional philosophy is so boring, his advice on how to enjoy our lives, what he’ll be doing after retiring from teaching, and more.
Peter described it as “like aerobics for the brain.” Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: How much should we spend trying to thwart predators?
SINGER: I think that’s difficult because, again, you would have to take into account the consequences of not having predators, and what are you going to do with a prey population? Are they going to overpopulate and maybe starve or destroy the environment for other sentient beings? So, it’s hard to say how much we should spend trying to thwart them.
I think there are questions about reducing the suffering of wild animals that are easier than that. That’s a question that maybe, at some stage, we’ll grapple with when we’ve reduced the amount of suffering we inflict on animals generally. It’s nowhere near the top of the list for how to reduce animal suffering.
COWEN: What do you think of the fairly common fear that if we mix the moralities of human beings and the moralities of nature, that the moralities of nature will win out? Nature is so large and numerous and populous and fierce. Human beings are relatively small in number and fragile. If the prevailing ethic becomes the ethic of nature, that the blending is itself dangerous, that human beings end up thinking, “Well, predation is just fine; it’s the way of nature.” Therefore, they do terrible things to each other.
SINGER: Is that what you meant by the moralities of nature? I wasn’t sure what the phrase meant. Do you mean the morality that we imply, that we attribute to nature?
COWEN: “Red in tooth and claw.” If we think that’s a matter that is our business, do we not end up with that morality? Trumping ours, we become subordinate to that morality. A lot of very nasty people in history have actually cited nature. “Well, nature works this way. I’m just doing that. It’s a part of nature. It’s more or less okay.” How do we avoid those series of moves?
SINGER: Right. It’s a bad argument, and we try and explain why it’s a bad argument, that we don’t want to follow nature. That the fact that nature does something is not something that we ought to imitate, but maybe, in fact, we ought to combat, and of course, we do combat nature in many ways. Maybe war between humans is part of nature, but nevertheless, we regret when wars break out. We try to have institutions to prevent wars breaking out. I think a lot of our activities are combating nature’s way of doing things rather than regarding it as a model to follow.
COWEN: But if humans are a part of nature flat out, and if our optimal policing of nature leaves 99.9999 percent of all predation in place — we just can’t stop most of it — is it then so irrational to conclude, “Well this predation must be okay. It’s the natural state of the world. Our optimal best outcome leaves 99.99999 percent of it in place.” How do we avoid that mindset?
Recommended. And the new edition (much revised) of Peter’s Animal Liberation is now out.
My new iPad Pro
I am very glad I bought one of these, and not only because my older iPad started to lose charge too quickly (after many years). The new device has for me three special and somewhat idiosyncratic benefits:
1. I don’t type very well on smaller devices such as smartphones.
2. On a very small screen, such as an iPhone, I am not able to read quickly. On the larger iPad screen, my normal comparative advantage in reading speed is restored, with point #3 mattering too.
3. When in a cab, Uber, or on a train (I don’t ride on subways unless I have to), it props up remarkably easy, rather than the older iPad, which I had to hold up. That boosts my reading and also typing speed, and comfort, considerably. This is the one factor I had not considered as important when buying one.
Of course you might have other reasons for liking it too, but the “smart pencil” doesn’t interest me much.
Wednesday assorted links
The Poop Detective
Wastewater surveillance is one of the few tools that we can use to prepare for a pandemic and I am pleased that it is expanding rapidly in the US and around the world. Every major sewage plant in the world should be doing wasterwater surveillance and presenting the results to the world on a dashboard.
I was surprised to learn that wastewater surveillance is now so good it can potentially lock-on to viral RNA from a single infected individual. An individual with an infection from a common SARS-COV-2 lineage like omicron won’t jump out of the data but there are rare, “cryptic lineages” which may be unique to a single individual.
Marc Johnson, a virologist at the University of Missouri and one of the authors of a recent paper on cryptic lineages in wastewater, believes he has evidence for a single infected individual who likely lives in Columbus, Ohio but works in the nearby town, Washington Court House. In other words, they poop mostly at home but sometimes at work.
Twitter: First, the signal is almost always present in the Columbus Southerly sewershed, but not always at Washington Court House. I assume this means the person lives in Columbus and travels to WCH, presumably for work. Second, the signal is increasing with time. Washington Court House had its highest SARS-CoV-2 wastewater levels ever in May, and the most recent sequencing indicates that this is entirely the cryptic lineage.
Moreover the person is likely quite sick:
Third, I’ve tried to calculate how much viral material this person is shedding. (Multiply the cryptic concentration by the total volume). I’ve done this several times and gotten pretty consistent results. They are shedding a few trillion (10^12) genomes/day. What does this tell us? How much tissue is infected? It’s impossible to know for sure. Chronically infected cells probably don’t release much, but acutely infected cells produce a lot more. I gather a typical output in the lab is around 1,000 virus per infected cell. If we assume we are getting 1,000 viral particles per infected cell, that would mean there are at least a billion infected cells. The density of monolayer epithelial cells is around 300k cells/sq cm. A billion cells would represent around 3.5 square feet of epithelial tissue! Don’t get me wrong. The intestines have a huge surface are and 3 square feet is a tiny fraction of the total. But it’s still a massive infection, no matter how you slice it….My point is that this patient is not well, even if they don’t know it, but they could probably be helped if they were identified.
…If you are the individual, let me know. There is a lab in the US that can do ‘official’ tests for COVID in stool, and there are doctors that I can put you in contact with that would like to try to help you.
So if you poop in Columbus Ohio and occasionally in Washington Court House and have been having some GI issues contact Marc!
Hat tip to Marc for using the twitter handle @SolidEvidence.
Effects of the Minimum Wage on the Nonprofit Sector
Too much of this literature emphasizes restaurants, here is another relevant sector:
The nonprofit sector’s ability to absorb increases in labor costs differs from the private sector in a number of ways. We analyze how nonprofits are affected by changes in the minimum wage utilizing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Internal Revenue Service, linked to state minimum wages. We examine changes in reported employment and volunteering, as well as other financial statements such as revenues and expenses. The results from both datasets show a negative impact on employment for states with large statutory minimum wage increases. We observe some evidence for a reduction in the number of nonprofit establishments, fundraising expenses, and revenues from contributions.
That is from a recent NBER paper by Jonathan Meer and Hedieh Tajali. The swing of recent research results really is back in the direction of what traditional neoclassical economics would predict.
Ian Dunt on how Westminster works, or doesn’t
I enjoyed his new book How Westminster Works…And Why It Doesn’t.
Here is one short excerpt:
The continued use of Downing Street is an act of pathological national sentimentality, the product of a country that has come to value tradition over function and its past over its future.
Various attempts have been made to reform it, but they all came to nothing. Powell tried to convince Blair to swap it for open-plan space in the nearby Queen Elizabeth II conference centre, but was twice defeated. In August 2008, Gordon Brown set up a horseshoe-shaped work centre in the chief whip’s office in No. 12 Downing Street. Cameron dropped it as soon as he entered government. Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to Boris Johnson, moved to 70 Whitehall to create a kind of space station information nerve centre, but the project died when he was sacked.
Instead, the British government has simply made do with a physical structure that prohibits it from working effectively.
Dunt defends the House of Lords (!) as one of the most functional parts of British government, calls for proportional representation, and most of all he wants to open up candidate selection to the public.
Here is his summary take on what is wrong:
At the heart of the problem with Westminster is machismo. It’s a sense, deep at the base of our assumptions, about what politics is about and how we conduct ourselves: that we do not need to seek consensus or compromise, that the winner takes all, evidence can be ignored, the government must get with civil servants who are moved so quickly they cannot sensibly advise on what is happening, and would be undermined by a spad caste even if they could.
Spad cast refers to special advisors.
Marc Andreessen on AI safety and AI for the world
So far I have explained why four of the five most often proposed risks of AI are not actually real – AI will not come to life and kill us, AI will not ruin our society, AI will not cause mass unemployment, and AI will not cause an ruinous increase in inequality. But now let’s address the fifth, the one I actually agree with: AI will make it easier for bad people to do bad things.
In some sense this is a tautology. Technology is a tool. Tools, starting with fire and rocks, can be used to do good things – cook food and build houses – and bad things – burn people and bludgeon people. Any technology can be used for good or bad. Fair enough. And AI will make it easier for criminals, terrorists, and hostile governments to do bad things, no question.
This causes some people to propose, well, in that case, let’s not take the risk, let’s ban AI now before this can happen. Unfortunately, AI is not some esoteric physical material that is hard to come by, like plutonium. It’s the opposite, it’s the easiest material in the world to come by – math and code.
The AI cat is obviously already out of the bag.
Here is the full essay, self-recommending…
Tuesday assorted links
1. Is that what French YIMBY looks like? Does building needs its own ideology? Is Brutalism OK after all?
2. Looking back at some key AGI predictions, the core lesson being not to weigh non-proven methods of abstract reasoning too heavily. EY vs. Hanson is the organizing theme. You can talk yourself into a lot of things.
3. Arnold Kling on narrow banking.
4. Some parts of Canada really are worth a whole lot more.
5. Should California allow Sikh motorcyclists to ride without helmets?
7. UFO weird stuff update. And more. Can we go back to talking about YIMBY for Chattanooga now? How about which is the most underrated Wings album?
Apple Vision Pro is receiving strong reviews
But none of them had the advantages that Apple brings to the table with Apple Vision Pro. Namely, 5,000 patents filed over the past few years and an enormous base of talent and capital to work with. Every bit of this thing shows Apple-level ambition. I don’t know whether it will be the “next computing mode,” but you can see the conviction behind each of the choices made here. No corners cut. Full-tilt engineering on display.
The hardware is good — very good — with 24 million pixels across the two panels, orders of magnitude more than any headsets most consumers have come into contact with. The optics are better, the headband is comfortable and quickly adjustable and there is a top strap for weight relief. Apple says it is still working on which light seal (the cloth shroud) options to ship with it when it releases officially but the default one was comfortable for me. They aim to ship them with varying sizes and shapes to fit different faces. The power connector has a great little design, as well, that interconnects using internal pin-type power linkages with an external twist lock…
If you have experience with VR at all then you know that the two big barriers most people hit are either latency-driven nausea or the isolation that long sessions wearing something over your eyes can deliver.
Apple has mitigated both of those head on. The R1 chip that sits alongside the M2 chip has a system-wide polling rate of 12ms, and I noticed no judder or framedrops. There was a slight motion blur effect used in the passthrough mode but it wasn’t distracting. The windows themselves rendered crisply and moved around snappily.
Here is more from TechCrunch. The highly reliable Ben Thompson is extremely enthusiastic as well. I will definitely buy it.
*Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse*
This was one of those “within the first fifteen seconds you know it is going to be great” experiences. Yes the movie is too long at 2 hours, 20 minutes, but what part would you want cut? Every scene and indeed every frame jumps to life immediately and is a joy to watch and behold. It also delivers on soundtrack, Afrofuturism, family values, a good India segment, and it is a wonderful New York City movie to boot. Cinema is vital once again.
Did you catch all the William Kentridge references?
Of course it will make many people dizzy, and they will turn away in despair, but you might have said that about Rite of Spring as well. It is true this movie will hit or maybe even exceed your upper bound on how much information you can absorb, but that is what we’re here for, right?
Big screen and good sound system essential. This is probably the best thing I will see all year, and I don’t just mean cinema.
Evidence from Italy’s ChatGPT Ban
We analyse the effects of the ban of ChatGPT, a generative pre-trained transformer chatbot, on individual productivity. We first compile data on the hourly coding output of over 8,000 professional GitHub users in Italy and other European countries to analyse the impact of the ban on individual productivity. Combining the high-frequency data with the sudden announcement of the ban in a difference-in-differences framework, we find that the output of Italian developers decreased by around 50% in the first two business days after the ban and recovered after that. Applying a synthetic control approach to daily Google search and Tor usage data shows that the ban led to a significant increase in the use of censorship bypassing tools. Our findings show that users swiftly implement strategies to bypass Internet restrictions but this adaptation activity creates short-term disruptions and hampers productivity.
That is from a recent paper by David Kreitmeir and Paul A. Raschky. Via Pradyumna Shyama Prasad.
Apple Vision Pro
What do you all think?
Paul Krugman on AI
Like previous leaps in technology, this will make the economy more productive but will also probably hurt some workers whose skills have been devalued. Although the term “Luddite” is often used to describe someone who is simply prejudiced against new technology, the original Luddites were skilled artisans who suffered real economic harm from the introduction of power looms and knitting frames.
But this time around, how large will these effects be? And how quickly will they come about? On the first question, the answer is that nobody really knows. Predictions about the economic impact of technology are notoriously unreliable. On the second, history suggests that large economic effects from A.I. will take longer to materialize than many people currently seem to expect.
…Large language models in their current form shouldn’t affect economic projections for next year and probably shouldn’t have a large effect on economic projections for the next decade. But the longer-run prospects for economic growth do look better now than they did before computers began doing such good imitations of people.
Here is the full NYT column, not a word on the Doomsters you will note. Could it be that like most economists, Krugman has spent a lifetime studying how decentralized systems adjust? Another factor (and this also is purely my speculation) may be that Krugman repeatedly has announced his fondness for “toy models” as a method for establishing economic hypotheses and trying to grasp their plausibility. As I’ve mentioned in the past, the AGI doomsters don’t seem to do that at all, and despite repeated inquiries I haven’t heard of anything in the works. If you want to convince Krugman, not to mention Garett Jones, at least start by giving him a toy model!
Monday assorted links
2. Average age people in various nations lose their virginity. “Iceland [Malaysia] fact of the day.”
3. The political beliefs of Native Americans?
4. Which are the most expensive license plates and why?
5. “But it’s not a realistic option,” he said, ” to keep moving decoys and buying gallons of [coyote] urine.” Link here, the elk fighting culture that is Oregon. And this: “But apparently, once an elk gets a taste for rhododendrons, it will walk miles back to town to satisfy that craving.”
6. Is processed food the real divide between southern and northern Europe?
8. Starmer now pushing for UK nuclear power.
9. UFO likely fake news but more detailed and credible than usual?
The Growing Market for Cancer Drugs
In my TED talk on growth and globalization I said:
If China and India were as rich as the United States is today, the market for cancer drugs would be eight times larger than it is now. Now we are not there yet, but it is happening. As other countries become richer the demand for these pharmaceuticals is going to increase tremendously. And that means an increase incentive to do research and development, which benefits everyone in the world. Larger markets increase the incentive to produce all kinds of ideas, whether it’s software, whether it’s a computer chip, whether it’s a new design.
…[T]oday, less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population are scientists and engineers. The United States has been an idea leader. A large fraction of those people are in the United States. But the U.S. is losing its idea leadership. And for that I am very grateful. That is a good thing. It is fortunate that we are becoming less of an idea leader because for too long the United States, and a handful of other developed countries, have shouldered the entire burden of research and development. But consider the following: if the world as a whole were as wealthy as the United States is now there would be more than five times as many scientists and engineers contributing to ideas which benefit everyone, which are shared by everyone….We all benefit when another country gets rich.
A recent piece in the FT illustrates:
AstraZeneca’s chief executive returned from a recent trip to China exuberant about an “explosion” of biotech companies in the country and the potential for his business to deliver drugs discovered there to the world….Many drugmakers are tempted by China’s large, ageing population, which is increasingly affected by chronic diseases partly caused by smoking, pollution and more westernised diets….the opportunity lies not just in Chinese patients, but also in the country’s scientists. “The innovation power has changed,” said Demaré. “It is no more ‘copy, paste’. They really have the power to innovate and put all the money in. There’s a lot of start-ups and we are a part of that.”
As I concluded my talk:
Ideas are meant to be shared, one idea can serve the world. One idea, one world, one market.