Month: June 2023
Pristina notes
Imagine a third-tier Ottoman city, accidentally elevated to the status of a national capital, and you have Pristina. Furthermore, that is a pretty good thing! The town is charming, walkable, and has first-rate street and cafe life. There is one good monastery nearby and some quality Brutalist architecture. My favorite site was the National Library of Kosovo:
Here are additional views of the building, is it fair to call it one of the greatest Communist achievements of Yugoslavia? 1982.
Government debt is only about five percent of gdp. I am not sure how accurate is the data, but growth rates are not so bad. The country has about 5k per capita gdp, but about 15k PPP-adjusted, that is a large gap and maybe the truth lies somewhere in between.
Might this be the cheapest country in all of Europe? I had one good meal in a nice restaurant with nice decor for only five euros.
Tiffany served the tastiest and also most representative meal, there is no menu and they simply bring you what they have. The food is in general excellent, though not varied. Be ready for meats, sausage, cheese, tomato, kebab, green and red peppers, and bread. There is pasta too, but few other foreign offerings. I didn’t see any Asian food whatsoever, or any international fast food chains, or any Starbucks.
Throughout the town you find scattered statues, such as the obligatory Mother Teresa, and the others of very masculine heroes, often labeled explicitly as “heroes.” The quotient for sexual dimorphism is reasonably high.
It is quite safe, so more people should visit. In three days I saw zero tourists. It is not a “thrills destination,” but where else can you ponder all the historical reasons why, for so long, a “Greater Albania” has proven impossible?
Cheat sheet of neighboring countries:
Serbia: Feels imperial, “seen better days,” no longer a transport hub, looks toward Moscow.
North Macedonia: Stands a bit apart, closer to Bulgarian culture, less recent historical trauma, more right-wing and pro-U.S., keen to integrate with the West.
Albania: Tenacious, spent decades lost in the wilderness, never been able to “play its hand” on that Greater Albania thing, did it ever recover from the fall of Venetian Albania?
Few parts of the world are more interesting, or unsettling. All of these are great countries to visit.
Population Dynamics and Economic Inequality
Broad movements in American earnings inequality since the mid-20th century show a correlation with the working-age share of the population, evoking concerns dating to the 18th century that as more individuals in a population seek work the returns to labor diminish. The possibility that demographic trends, including the baby boom and post-1965 immigration, contributed to the rise in inequality was referenced in literature before the early 1990s but largely discarded thereafter. This paper reconsiders the impact of supply-side dynamics on inequality, in the context of a literature that has favored demand-side explanations for at least 30 years, and a recent movement toward equality that coincides with the retirement of the baby boom generation, reduced immigration, and a long trend toward reduced fertility. Evidence suggests an important role for the population age distribution in economic inequality, and coupled with demographic projections of an aging population and continued low fertility portends a broad trend toward greater equality over at least the next two decades.
That is the abstract of a new paper by Jacob L. Vigdor. It was part of a recent NBER conference on fertility and demographics, kudos to Melissa Kearney (still underrated as a social force for good) and Philip B. Levine for putting it on.
What should I ask Ada Palmer?
I will be doing a Conversation with her. She is a unique thinker and presence, and thus hard to describe. Here is a brief excerpt from her home page:
I am an historian, an author of science fiction and fantasy, and a composer. I teach in the History Department at the University of Chicago.
Yes, she has tenure. Her four-volume Terra Ignota series is a landmark of science fiction, and she also has a deep knowledge of the Renaissance, Francis Bacon, and the French Enlightenment. She has been an advocate of free speech. Here is her “could be better” Wikipedia page. The imaginary world of her novels is peaceful, prosperous, obsessed with the Enlightenment (centuries from now), suppresses both free speech and gender designations, and perhaps headed for warfare once again?
Here is her excellent blog, which among other things considers issues of historical progress, and also her problems with chronic pain management and disability.
So what should I ask her?
Sunday assorted links
1. From Kyjnghyun Cho, total sanity on AGI risk.
2. The Bible is now banned in some Utah middle and elementary schools, due to violence and vulgarity.
3. “In a new analysis based on the latest telescope data, University of Florida astronomers have discovered that a third of the planets around the most common stars in the galaxy could be in a goldilocks orbit close enough, and gentle enough, to hold onto liquid water – and possibly harbor life.” Link here.
4. “Viable offspring derived from single unfertilized mammalian oocytes.” Not endorsing, but interesting to see.
5. Louise Perry reviews Bryan Caplan on feminism.
7. Good Ross column on where U.S. politics is procedurally at right now (NYT).
How the Russian Revolution boosted Marx’s influence
Karl Marx’s high academic stature outside of economics diverges sharply from his peripheral influence within the discipline, particularly after nineteenth-century developments rendered the labor theory of value obsolete. We hypothesize that the 1917 Russian Revolution is responsible for elevating Marx into the academic mainstream. Using the synthetic control method, we construct a counterfactual for Marx’s citation patterns in Google Ngram data. This allows us to predict how often Marx would have been cited if the Russian Revolution had not happened. We find a significant treatment effect, meaning that Marx’s academic stature today owes a substantial debt to political happenstance.
That is from a new JPE paper by Philip W. Magness and Michael Makovi. Here are ungated versions of the paper.
Where the AI extinction warning goes wrong
There is so much to say about this one, in my view it has been counterproductive for all those worried about AI safety. Here is one excerpt from my latest Bloomberg column:
Sometimes publicity stunts backfire. A case in point may be the one-sentence warning issued this week by the Center for AI Safety: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
…The first problem is the word “extinction.” Whether or not you think the current trajectory of AI systems poses an extinction risk — and I do not — the more you use that term, the more likely the matter will fall under the purview of the national security establishment. And its priority is to defeat foreign adversaries. The bureaucrats who staff the more mundane regulatory agencies will be shoved aside.
US national security experts are properly skeptical about the idea of an international agreement to limit AI systems, as they doubt anyone would be monitoring and sanctioning China, Russia or other states (even the UAE has a potentially powerful system on the way). So the more people say that AI systems can be super-powerful, the more national-security advisers will insist that US technology must always be superior. I happen to agree about the need for US dominance — but realize that this is an argument for accelerating AI research, not slowing it down.
A second problem with the statement is that many of the signers are important players in AI developments. So a common-sense objection might go like this: If you’re so concerned, why don’t you just stop working on AI? There is a perfectly legitimate response — you want to stay involved because you fear that if you leave, someone less responsible will be put in charge — but I am under no illusions that this argument would carry the day. As they say in politics, if you are explaining, you are losing.
The geographic distribution of the signatories will also create problems. Many of the best-known signers are on the West Coast, especially California and Seattle. There is a cluster from Toronto and a few from the UK, but the US Midwest and South are hardly represented. If I were a chief of staff to a member of Congress or political lobbyist, I would be wondering: Where are the community bankers? Where are the owners of auto dealerships? Why are so few states and House districts represented on the list?
I do not myself see the AI safety movement as a left-wing political project. But if all you knew about it was this document, you might conclude that it is. In short, the petition may be doing more to signal the weakness and narrowness of the movement than its strength.
Then there is the brevity of the statement itself. Perhaps this is a bold move, and it will help stimulate debate and generate ideas. But an alternative view is that the group could not agree on anything more. There is no accompanying white paper or set of policy recommendations. I praise the signers’ humility, but not their political instincts.
Again, consider the public as well as the political perception. If some well-known and very smart players in a given area think the world might end but make no recommendations about what to do about it, might you decide just to ignore them altogether? (“Get back to me when you’ve figured it out!”) What if a group of scientists announced that a large asteroid was headed toward Earth. I suspect they would have some very specific recommendations, on such issues as how to deflect the asteroid and prepare defenses.
Do read the whole thing. You will note that my arguments do not require any particular view of AGI risk, one way or the other. I view this statement as a mistake from all points of view, except perhaps for the accelerationists.
Sam Bowman on French success
But Ben Southwood has convinced me that France is rich because it gets the big things basically right. Housing supply there is freer: the overall geographic extent of Paris’s metropolitan area roughly tripled between 1945 and today, whereas London’s has grown only a few percent. Infrastructure is better: 29 French cities have trams, versus 11 here (likely one reason its second-tier cities are much more productive than Britain’s). It has nearly 12,000km of motorways versus around 4,000km here – and French motorways tend to be smoother and better kept (and three quarters are tolled, making congestion much less of a problem). Childcare is cheaper: about half the price per month, in part because they require half the staff. Energy is more abundant, as shown above. Because it gets those big four things right, it can afford to get a lot of other things wrong.
Here is the full essay, mostly on Coasean democracy.
Saturday assorted links
1. Johnny Cash and Josef Stalin.
2. Noah Smith’s current take on libertarianism.
3. New Larry Summers talk on fiscal policy.
4. The business of giving private concerts to rich people (New Yorker).
5. Amitai Etzioni, RIP (NYT).
6. Japan patent fact of the day. Yikes.
7. Kaija Saariaho, RIP (NYT).
8. Legal bank stablecoins from Japan? And a summary of the new U.S. crypto bill.
Who gains from corporate tax cuts?
Goods producers increase their capital expenditure and employment in response to a cut in marginal corporate income tax rates or an increase in investment tax credits. In contrast, companies in the service sector mostly use any tax windfall to increase dividend payouts. We base our conclusions on a novel measure of U.S. firm-specific tax shocks that combines changes in statutory tax rates faced by each firm with narrative identified legislated U.S. federal tax changes between 1950 and 2006.
That is from a new NBER working paper by James Cloyne, Ezgi Kurt, and Paolo Surico.
Why I am not entirely bullish on brain-computer interface
I agree that miracles may well be possible for disabled individuals, but I am less certain about their more general applicability. Here is one excerpt from my latest Bloomberg column:
Another vision for this technology is that the owners of computers will want to “rent out” the powers of human brains, much the way companies rent out space today in the cloud. Software programs are not good at some skills, such as identifying unacceptable speech or images. In this scenario, the connected brains come largely from low-wage laborers, just as both social media companies and OpenAI have used low-wage labor in Kenya to grade the quality of output or to help make content decisions.
Those investments may be good for raising the wages of those people. Many observers may object, however, that a new and more insidious class distinction will have been created — between those who have to hook up to machines to make a living, and those who do not.
Might there be scenarios where higher-wage workers wish to be hooked up to the machine? Wouldn’t it be helpful for a spy or a corporate negotiator to receive computer intelligence in real time while making decisions? Would professional sports allow such brain-computer interfaces? They might be useful in telling a baseball player when to swing and when not to.
The more I ponder these options, the more skeptical I become about large-scale uses of brain-computer interface for the non-disabled. Artificial intelligence has been progressing at an amazing pace, and it doesn’t require any intrusion into our bodies, much less our brains. There are always earplugs and some future version of Google Glass.
The main advantage of the direct brain-computer interface seems to be speed. But extreme speed is important in only a limited class of circumstances, many of them competitions and zero-sum endeavors, such as sports and games.
Nonetheless I am glad to the FDA is allowing Neuralink’s human trials to proceed — I would gladly be proven wrong.
Friday assorted links
2. Russell Hogg and Scott Sumner podcast on Japanese movies.
3. Foundations and Frontiers, some new essays on new technologies, by Anna-Sofia Lesiv.
4. “Meet the one-person team behind Antarctica’s longest-running newspaper, the Antarctic Sun.”
5. Benjamin Wallace-Wells on libertarianism (New Yorker).
6. The excellent Dan Senor podcasts with me.
7. How to keep people chatting.
8. Pentagon now hunting for UFOs with sensors actively built for that purpose.
The international competition heats up
Chinese startup MiniMax, working on AI solutions similar to that of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is close to completing a fundraising of more than $250 million that will value it at about $1.2 billion, people familiar with the matter said.
The deal comes amid a global AI buzz kicked off by ChatGPT that has spread to China, shoring up stocks in artificial intelligence firms and prompting a flurry of domestic companies, such as Alibaba (9988.HK), Huawei (HWT.UL), and Baidu (9888.HK), to announce rival products.
Here is the link. And here is a Chinese professor from Fudan, critical of all the money being poured into LLM research in China, comparing it to Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
You have to be very critical of all sources from China, no matter what they say. Still, in terms of expected value I know what is the correct bet here, namely that China is a current and very active competitor in this arena, even if they are behind America so far.
Then there is the open source model Falcon, which is receiving very good reviews from multiple sources, such as this:
Falcon is a new family of very high-quality (and fully open-source!) LLMs that just made it to the top of the leaderboards.
Here's the "small" 7B version running on my mac with Core ML at ~4.3 tokens per second 🤯 pic.twitter.com/B1y4tyGzXA
— Pedro Cuenca (@pcuenq) June 2, 2023
If you don’t already know, Falcon is from…the UAE. Get the picture?
My excellent Conversation with Seth Godin
Here is the audio, video, and transcript from a very good session. Here is part of the episode summary:
Seth joined Tyler to discuss why direct marketing works at all, the marketing success of Trader Joe’s vs Whole Foods, why you can’t reverse engineer Taylor Swift’s success, how Seth would fix baseball, the brilliant marketing in ChatGPT’s design, the most underrated American visual artist, the problem with online education, approaching public talks as a team process, what makes him a good cook, his updated advice for aspiring young authors, how growing up in Buffalo shaped him, what he’ll work on next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: If you were called in as a consultant to professional baseball, what would you tell them to do to keep the game alive?
GODIN: [laughs] I am so glad I never was a consultant.
What is baseball? In most of the world, no one wants to watch one minute of baseball. Why do we want to watch baseball? Why do the songs and the Cracker Jack and the sounds matter to some people and not to others? The answer is that professional sports in any country that are beloved, are beloved because they remind us of our parents. They remind us of a different time in our lives. They are comfortable but also challenging. They let us exchange status roles in a safe way without extraordinary division.
Baseball was that for a very long time, but then things changed. One of the things that changed is that football was built for television and baseball is not. By leaning into television, which completely terraformed American society for 40 years, football advanced in a lot of ways.
Baseball is in a jam because, on one hand, like Coke and New Coke, you need to remind people of the old days. On the other hand, people have too many choices now.
And another:
COWEN: What is the detail you have become most increasingly pessimistic about?
GODIN: I think that our ability to rationalize our lazy, convenient, selfish, immoral, bad behavior is unbounded, and people will find a reason to justify the thing that they used to do because that’s how we evolved. One would hope that in the face of a real challenge or actual useful data, people would say, “Oh, I was wrong. I just changed my mind.” It’s really hard to do that.
There was a piece in The Times just the other day about the bibs that long-distance runners wear at races. There is no reason left for them to wear bibs. It’s not a big issue. Everyone should say, “Oh, yeah, great, done.” But the bib defenders coming out of the woodwork, explaining, each in their own way, why we need bibs for people who are running in races — that’s just a microcosm of the human problem, which is, culture sticks around because it’s good at sticking around. But sometimes we need to change the culture, and we should wake up and say, “This is a good day to change the culture.”
COWEN: So, we’re all bib defenders in our own special ways.
GODIN: Correct! Well said. Bib Defenders. That’s the name of the next book. Love that.
COWEN: What is, for you, the bib?
GODIN: I think that I have probably held onto this 62-year-old’s perception of content and books and thoughtful output longer than the culture wants to embrace, the same way lots of artists have held onto the album as opposed to the single. But my goal isn’t to be more popular, and so I’m really comfortable with the repercussions of what I’ve held onto.
Recommended, interesting throughout. And here is Seth’s new book The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams.
It was just a simulation run…designed to create that problem
Meaning an entire, prepared story as opposed to an actual simulation. No ML models were trained, etc. It's not evidence for anything other than that the Air Force is now actively considering these sorts of possibilities.
— Edouard Harris (@harris_edouard) June 1, 2023
Please don’t be taken in by the b.s.! The rapid and uncritical spread of this story is a good sign of the “motivated belief” operating in this arena. And if you don’t already know the context here, please don’t even bother to try to find out, you are better off not knowing. There may be more to this story yet — context is that which is scarce — but please don’t jump to any conclusions until the story is actually out and confirmed.
Funny how people accuse “the AI” of misinformation, right?
Addendum: Here is a further update, apparently confirming that the original account was in error.
The art of prompting is just at its beginning
If prompted correctly, even GPT 3.5 can achieve draws against Stockfish 8 (an older but very powerful Chess engine), empirically demonstrating how LLMs are reasoning engines, not just text generation engines. https://t.co/an9eY27Re9
— Siqi Chen (@blader) May 29, 2023
And here are some results for Minecraft. I would like to see confirmations, but these are credible sources and this is all quite important if true.