Where do our best ideas come from?
A correspondent writes to me:
Isn’t it weird that the best ideas we have just…. pop into your head? I have no idea how to trace them. They just show up.
@Tyler any research into this area?
Dean Keith Simonton springs readily to mind, noting he has a new book coming out this year on genius. Here are some overview pieces on simultaneous discovery, and of course those tend to stress environmental factors. Here are some approaches to the multiplicative model of creative achievement. I am a fan of that one. What else?
Thursday assorted links
1. Claims about Tether and Bitcoin (speculative). And the paper.
2. How the internet has changed sex work (more than just the usual).
3. Why business cycles are worse in more complacent economies.
4. “Right now, Second Life resembles a city swiftly evacuated following a radioactive threat.”
5. The plague and the Long Divergence?
6. “Country Time will cover illegal lemonade stand fines and fees this summer.”
Trampoline question
I gave a talk yesterday, and did not have time to get to this question, from Eric S., which we discussed during the dinner hour:
Who could launch themselves higher on a trampoline? LeBron James or Simone Biles?
She is a world class female gymnast, and much lighter (and less strong) than LeBron. The question is assuming that both parties are motivated to win the competition, and have sufficient time to train to achieve their maximum potential in the contest.
Ultimately I settled on Simone as the better answer, mumbling something about small ants being very powerful for their size, and that magnification and extension of muscle spans ends up producing problematic results. The power gain from the extra weight might be more than offset by the “drag” loss on the way up. But I genuinely do not know. Your view?
Addendum: This is an interesting article on animals and elastic springs. And Jason Kottke adds comment, amazing photo too.
Maybe British common law wasn’t so great for colonies after all
Siwan Anderson
More than one-half of all people living with HIV are women, and 80 percent of all HIV-positive women in the world live in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper demonstrates that the legal origins of these formerly colonized countries significantly determine current-day female HIV rates. In particular, female HIV rates are significantly higher in common law sub-Saharan African countries compared to civil law ones. This paper explains this relationship by focusing on differences in female property rights under the two codes of law. In sub-Saharan Africa, common law is associated with weaker female marital property laws. As a result, women in these common law countries have lower bargaining power within the household and are less able to negotiate safe sex practices and are thus more vulnerable to HIV, compared to their civil law counterparts. Exploiting the fact that some ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa cross country borders with different legal systems, we are able to include ethnicity fixed effects into a regression discontinuity approach. This allows us to control for a large set of cultural, geographical, and environmental factors that could be confounding the estimates. The results of this paper are consistent with gender inequality (the “feminization” of AIDS), explaining much of its prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa.
That is from the latest American Economic Review. Here is an earlier version and related material.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Has delegation in American government become much worse?
2. Tankie.
4. The video made for Kim. It’s very effective. And Ross Douthat on North Korea.
Yale Politic interview with me
I enjoyed this one, lots of real questions from Eric Wallach, not “tell us about your book” and the usual snoozefest. Here is one bit:
So you like the idea of pardons– how do you work through that one?
I don’t even firmly believe that punishment is justified morally. Maybe it’s necessary, maybe you just can’t do without it. But the mere fact that someone has wronged another, I don’t think causes them to forfeit their rights in the way that was claimed in classic, early modern political philosophy. Once you think wrongdoers still have their human rights, on what grounds do you punish them? Could be that you simply have to– either the public won’t accept another option and they would overthrow your non-punishment regime and bring in fascism, and something with a lot more punishment would come about.
I get that– I’m not saying you can just toss away the keys to all these jails. But insofar as you have options of not punishing people – who in the cases I’ve read about it seems they’re not going to go out there and continue their serial killing sprees – I think we just simply ought not to punish them. Martha Stewart, again, that seems to me a very clear case. Undo the wrong. If I were a president, I’d consider just only pardoning people and then resigning. I know I couldn’t get away with it forever, but it’s one way to think about the job.
There are other points of interest, new and interesting throughout.
Come on, *Financial Times*…please…?
You know, I love you FT, please do not go this route in your subheaders:
Can new proposed regulation curb the power of big tech companies that now control roughly 80 per cent of corporate wealth?
Here is the link itself, maybe gated for you, but I can assure you it provides no support for this “factoid” whatsoever. There is a reference to “IP-rich companies” controlling all that wealth globally — come on, that “IP-rich” designation could mean anything, and it does not correspond to how most people understand the phrase “Big Tech”…and where does that stat come from anyway? Which large companies would it not count?
Is the reversal of the Flynn Effect environmental?
Maybe so, says a new paper by Be:
Using administrative register data with information on family relationships and cognitive ability for three decades of Norwegian male birth cohorts, we show that the increase, turning point, and decline of the Flynn effect can be recovered from within-family variation in intelligence scores. This establishes that the large changes in average cohort intelligence reflect environmental factors and not changing composition of parents, which in turn rules out several prominent hypotheses for retrograde Flynn effects.
In short, IQ relates inversely to sibling order, and the basic effect is not being generated by a changing composition of married pairs over time.
In other words, we have started building a more stupidity-inducing environment. Or at least the Norwegians have. But of course the retrograde Flynn Effect is starting to pop up in the data more generally, and not just in Norway. From The Times of London:
The IQ scores of young people have begun to fall after rising steadily since the Second World War, according to the first authoritative study of the phenomenon.
The decline, which is equivalent to at least seven points per generation, is thought to have started with the cohort born in 1975, who reached adulthood in the early Nineties.
Have a nice day!
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Indian philosophy of language.
2. New Yorker covers dining in the Faroe Islands.
3. “It is easier to own a tiger than a dog that has been labelled dangerous in the state of Texas, which could have between 2,000 and 5,000 tigers.” You also can buy a tiger on-line.
4. Liberal vs. conservative notions of God?
5. Can your body itself power implantable biomedical devices?
The North Korean summit and deal
Many of you have asked what I think, so here goes:
1. There is a secret (and unenforceable) deal beneath what is reported. You may think this is good or bad, but for heaven’s sake don’t just be judging the press release.
2. If they didn’t actually agree to anything, that is fine.
3. I am reading so much yelping about how Trump “legitimized” Kim. The status quo ex ante simply was terrible, and there is no reason to think this change is for the worse. Trump’s great “virtue” in this regard was simply to be some mix of ignorant/disrespectful of the prior “expert consensus” and approach the problem afresh with a rather direct transactional and person-centered, personality-centered mentality.
4. As I tweeted: “Isn’t the whole point of the “deal” just to make them go visit Singapore? The real spectacle is not always where you are looking. And I hope someone brought them to the right chili crab place.”
The goal is to show the North Korean leadership there is a better way than playing the Nuclear Hermit Kingdom game. We won’t know for some time whether this has succeeded. Here is good FT coverage on this point. There are in fact numerous signs that the North Koreans are considering serious reforms. Of course those could be a feint, but the probabilities are rising in a favorable direction. Economic cooperation with South Korea is increasing at an astonishing pace.
5. The chance that North Korea someday becomes an unruly version of an American client state has gone up. The chance of a kind of faux, “on paper” Korean reunification has gone up too.
6. No, North Korea isn’t giving up its nuclear weapons. The more important question is to what extent they will use those weapons in the future to check China.
7. How is it that Dennis Rodman played in only two All-Star games?
8. In expected value terms, this is the biggest triumph of the Trump presidency. Most of all, however, you should be agnostic. The negative commentary I am seeing is mostly sour grapes, misplaced frustration, and it is weak in the quality of its argumentation. Here is one of Trump’s better tweets.
Washington Metro Qatar markets in everything
Metro significantly relaxed its policies on extended hours for the Washington Capitals’ run to the Stanley Cup Final, including extending service for Thursday night’s series win without ever planning for any cash to change hands, WTOP has learned.
Since last summer, Metro has required a $100,000 deposit for each additional hour of service, and Metro suggested Wednesday that the Capitals’ parent company, Monumental Sports and Entertainment, would cover those costs for Thursday night’s game.
In fact, Thursday night’s extended service was part of a trade between the Caps and Metro that Metro valued at $100,000, Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said in an email…
Revised requirements issued last year normally call for the $100,000 deposit two weeks ahead of an event for each extra hour of service. Instead, Metro is billing each of the other groups that agreed to pay for the extended service for Capitals playoff games after the fact, Stessel said…
The bills being sent to those other groups — Qatar (via the Downtown BID), Comcast and Uber — will already include the discount for any fares paid during extended hours of service.
Here is the bizarre story, via Bruce Arthur. For those of you who don’t get the joke, the D.C. Metro system shuts down too early relative to when many sporting events are likely to end.
From the comments, Vitalik Buterin
Analyst
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I’ll answer this one here in detail because it’s probably too technical for it to be valuable to put a good answer into a Conversation with Tyler.
> 1. In retrospect, was it a good decision to have ethereum bytecodes executed on every single mining node? And if not, would he have selected sharding and plasma or a different solution?
Ultimately the answer is, yes given the knowledge we had at the time, no given what we know today. If I was doing Ethereum back then with the knowledge that I have today, I would obviously shoot straight for exactly the design that the research team is shooting for today (Casper PoS, sharding), and I would have actively encouraged developers to work on state channels and Plasma from day 1. Layer 1 scaling (sharding) and layer 2 scaling (state channels and Plasma) are complementary; gains from the two are multiplicative with each other, so it’s not a matter of A vs B, it’s A and B.
Ultimately, for a distributed validation system to work, you need to satisfy two properties:
1. There are enough (randomly sampled) nodes on average validating any given piece of data that invalid data will under no circumstances get through.
2. There are mechanisms that can ensure that if bad data *does* get through (eg. because of a 51% attack), then clients can detect this. In a sharded system, there is obviously too much data for clients to verify directly, but there are indirect approaches that can be used that can give equivalent assurances with some additional security assumptions (STARKs, fraud proofs, data availability proofs…)> 2. How confident is he that transitioning to proof-of-stake will be successful? What are the risks of proof-of-stake?
Close to 100% confident that proof of stake is possible in principle; many chains are using (crappy versions of) it already. There’s obviously the question of how strong properties we can achieve with PoS though, and there are some edges of that that are still being worked out. The main risks that I see are (i) weird game-theoretic attacks on the specific design that we end up going with, and (ii) pool centralization.
IMO Satoshi’s PoW is really nice in part because of its sheer simplicity; the simplicity helps with decentralization because pretty much anyone can understand how it works, whereas traditional non-PoW consensus algos like PBFT are far more complex. Casper FFG was designed in part to replicate something close to PoW-style simplicity while still having the safety and liveness properties of traditional BFT consensus algos; and I’m obviously interested in minimizing complexity of the sharding design as well.
Here is the link, he offers several other “highly technical” answers in the comments.
My take on why Singapore works so well
That is the topic of my new Bloomberg column, of course I am considering only one small piece of a larger puzzle. Here is one bit:
I view the development of Singaporean civil service culture as one of the world’s great managerial and political success stories of the last 50 years, though it remains understudied and underdiscussed in the West.
Singapore also mixes many of the virtues of both small and big government. The high quality of the civil service means the country gets “good government,” which pleases many liberals and progressives. The high quality of the decision-making means Singapore often looks to market incentives – congestion pricing for the roads is one example of many – which pleases conservatives and libertarians…
Is Singapore a small government or a big government country? The correct answer is both. Government spending is about 17 percent of GDP, which makes it look small and helps hold down taxes, which is good for business and productivity. (And there are no additional state and local governments.) But if you look at stocks rather than flows, the government owns shares in many critical Singapore businesses, plus it de facto controls lucrative sovereign wealth funds. The government claims ownership of the land, although it allows for active markets for transferring rights of use. All of these resources give the government the ability and credibility to get things done.
I even take on the chewing gum caricature…do read the whole thing.
Monday assorted links
1. “We have every right to hate you.”
2. Land Grant colleges were good for the United States.
3. Eric Weinstein video explains the Intellectual Dark Web.
4. How captured is our economy? (CapturedEconomy.com, a new website resource from Lindsey and Teles).
6. North Korean officials explore Singapore.
7. “Thomas Schelling’s medal went on the block May 31 at a Los Angeles auction house, fetching $187,000. His family donated the proceeds to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that fights hate and bigotry and advocates for civil rights through litigation.” Link here. And: “…his widow, Alice Schelling, says the most influential book he ever read was one for children, the 1927 Newbery Medal winner “Smoky the Cowhorse” by Will James.”
What should I ask Vitalik Buterin?
I will be doing a Conversation with him (no associated public event), what should I ask him?
If you have been living under a rock, here is his Wikipedia page. Here is his Twitter account. Here is his personal website.
1. In retrospect, was it a good decision to have ethereum bytecodes executed on every single mining node? And if not, would he have selected sharding and plasma or a different solution?
2. How confident is he that transitioning to proof-of-stake will be successful? What are the risks of proof-of-stake?