Category: Education
Dwarkesh Patel with Patrick Collison
Here is my episode with @patrickc
We discuss:
– what it takes to process $1 trillion/year
– how to build multi-decade APIs, companies, and relationships
– what's next for Stripe (increasing the GDP of the internet is an open ended task, and the Collison brothers are just… pic.twitter.com/Wx52cJI9Ve— Dwarkesh Patel (@dwarkesh_sp) February 21, 2024
Nixonian Politics and Student Debt Cancellations
In the political economy chapter of our textbook, Modern Principles of Economics, Tyler and I discuss how voters appear especially responsive to economic conditions in the year of an election. Politicians who want to be reelected, therefore, are wise to do whatever they can to increase personal disposable income and reduce inflation in the year of an election even if this means decreases in income and increases in inflation at other times.
One of the most brazen examples comes from President Richard Nixon. Just two weeks before the 1972 election, he sent a letter to more than 24 million recipients of Social Security benefits. President Nixon’s letter read:
Higher Social Security Payments
Your social security payment has been increased by 20 percent, starting with this month’s check, by a new statute enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Richard Nixon on July 1, 1972.
The President also signed into law a provision that will allow your social security benefits to increase automatically if the cost of living goes up. Automatic benefit increases will be added to your check in future years according to the conditions set out in the law.
In other news:
President Joe Biden on Wednesday will announce $1.2 billion of student debt relief for nearly 153,000 borrowers — and he’s sending emails to make sure they know whom to thank for it.
…“Congratulations—all or a portion of your federal student loans will be forgiven because you qualify for early loan forgiveness under my Administration’s SAVE Plan,” says the email message from Biden that the Education Department plans to send on Wednesday to the latest group of borrowers receiving loan forgiveness.
“I hope this relief gives you a little more breathing room,” Biden writes in the message.
Note also:
…The administration says that it has now approved loan discharges totaling nearly $138 billion for nearly 3.9 million borrowers through dozens of administrative actions since coming into office.
“Administrative actions,” in other words without Congress passing a law. You may recall that the Supreme Court ruled that the administration did not have the authority to cancel student debt under the HEROES Act (which it obviously didn’t). However:
Hours after the Court issued its decisions in Nebraska and Brown, the Biden Administration announced that it was beginning a regulatory process, called negotiated rulemaking, to consider providing loan cancellation under the HEA rather than the HEROES Act.
Addendum: Do also read my previous post where I noted “…the student loan program, as currently written, is looking to be one of the most costly, inefficient and unwise government programs of the 21st century.”
Random Admissions Above the Bar
Jon Klick, Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School (and a distinguished GMU econ grad), argues that Penn should “abandon the fiction that holistic evaluation is anything more than a way to hide discretion.”
Instead, Penn should set a standardized test score floor and then randomly choose its admittees from the pool of applicants meeting that requirement. That’s it; that’s the application process. Setting a floor helps make sure the matriculating class has the requisite cognitive ability to succeed but otherwise limits concerns about ideology being privileged over academic merit. Random selection (as opposed to just taking the highest test scores) recognizes that standardized tests may be too blunt to make fine distinctions among students and generates a campus population that approximates the population of smart young adults along many more dimensions than we currently consider.
Faculty have largely abandoned the job of admitting students to a professional class of admissions officers. A standardized test floor would simplify the process for universities and reduce the rent-seeking scramble of high-school students to add yet more extra-curricular eye-candy to their highly-crafted personal statements.
Emergent Ventures winners, 32nd cohort
Anson Yu, Waterloo, telemetry devices that can detect compromised hardware devices to protect our electrical grid and other critical infrastructure.
Anshul Kashyap, Berkeley, neurotech and vision, to visit the Netherlands for work and research reasons.
Kieran Lucid, Dublin, Irish videos about YIMBY and aesthetics, at the site Polysee.
Matin Amiri, Antwerp, Afghanistan, and San Francisco (?), building digital clones.
Snowden Todd, USA and Honduras and South Korea, to write a book on South Korean fertility issues.
Anthony Jancso, Accelerate SF, San Francisco, for general career development.
Denisa Lepadatu, Romania and Bremen, trip to Prospera to pursue longevity research.
Jamie Rumbelow and Henry Dashwood, London, British company to ease land rights/permissions.
Anastasia Vorozhtsova, Columbia University, to study Russian education and the Russian state.
Rohan Selva-Radov, Oxford, general career development, and to develop a dating/matching service for young people.
Olga Yakimenko, Vienna, movie-making.
Rucha Benare, Dublin, Pune area, art and biology.
Brooke Bowman, San Francisco, Vibecamp.
Ruxandra Tesloianu, Cambridge/Romania, travel grant and career development, bio space, science, and meta-science.
Ukraine cohort:
Serhii Shadrin, to study at University of Chicago, and to study information manipulation and media.
Le Sallay Academy, school for Ukrainian refugees, including in France and Serbia, Sergey Kuznetsov and Aleka Molokova.
Here are previous winners of Emergent Ventures. Here is Nabeel’s software for querying about EV winners.
A periodic reminder of your pending competitive inadequacy
Many people think “I will do […], AI will not anytime soon do [….] as well as I will.” That may or may not be true.
But keep in mind many of us are locked into a competition for attention. AI can beat you without competing against you in your task directly. What AI produces simply might draw away lots of attention from what you hope to be producing. Maybe looking Midjourney images, or chatting with GPT, will be more fun than reading your next column or book. Maybe talking with your deceased cousin will grip you more than the marginal new podcast, and so on.
This competition can occur even in the physical world. There will be many new, AI-generated and AI-supported projects, and they will bid for real resources. How about “AI figures out cost-effective desalination and so many deserts are settled and built out”? That will draw away resources from competing deployments, and your project will have to bid against that.
I hope it’s good.
Nash’s Contributions to Mathematics
Nash won the Nobel prize in Economics for his 2-page proof of Nash equilibrium, among the slightest of his achievements. Nash’s truly staggering contributions were in his embedding theorems, according to Gromov “one of the main achievements of mathematics of the twentieth century”. In this excellent talk, Cédric Villani gives an accessible guide to these theorems for mere mortals. Villani is a Fields medal winner, a French politician, and a character, all of which adds to the talk.
What should I ask Michael Nielsen?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. No description of Michael quite does him justice, but here is Wikipedia:
Michael Aaron Nielsen (born January 4, 1974) is a quantum physicist, science writer, and computer programming researcher living in San Francisco.
In 1998, Nielsen received his PhD in physics from the University of New Mexico. In 2004, he was recognized as Australia’s “youngest academic” and was awarded a Federation Fellowship at the University of Queensland. During this fellowship, he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Caltech, and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Alongside Isaac Chuang, Nielsen co-authored a popular textbook on quantum computing, which has been cited more than 52,000 times as of July 2023.
In 2007, Nielsen shifted his focus from quantum information and computation to “the development of new tools for scientific collaboration and publication”, including the Polymath project with Timothy Gowers, which aims to facilitate “massively collaborative mathematics.” Besides writing books and essays, he has also given talks about open science. He was a member of the Working Group on Open Data in Science at the Open Knowledge Foundation.
Nielsen is a strong advocate for open science and has written extensively on the subject, including in his book Reinventing Discovery, which was favorably reviewed in Nature and named one of the Financial Times’ best books of 2011.
In 2015 Nielsen published the online textbook Neural Networks and Deep Learning, and joined the Recurse Center as a Research Fellow. He has also been a Research Fellow at Y Combinator Research since 2017.
In 2019, Nielsen collaborated with Andy Matuschak to develop Quantum Computing for the Very Curious, a series of interactive essays explaining quantum computing and quantum mechanics. With Patrick Collison, he researched whether scientific progress is slowing down.
Here is Michael’s Notebook, well worth a browse and also a deeper read. Here is Michael on Twitter. So what should I ask him? (I’m going to ask him about Olaf Stapledon in any case, so no need to mention that.)
What should I ask Coleman Hughes?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, based in part around his new book The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. On Coleman more generally, here is Wikipedia:
Coleman Cruz Hughes (born February 25, 1996) is an American writer and podcast host. He was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, and he is the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman.
Also from Wikipedia:
Hughes began studying violin at age three. He is a hobbyist rapper—in 2021 and 2022, he released several rap singles on YouTube and Spotify, using the moniker COLDXMAN, including a music video for a track titled “Blasphemy”, which appeared in January 2022. Hughes also plays jazz trombone with a Charles Mingus tribute band that plays regularly at the Jazz Standard in New York City.
I saw Coleman perform quite recently, and I can vouch for his musical excellence, including as a singer. So what should I ask Coleman?
How much does status competition lower Korean fertility?
Using a quantitative heterogeneous-agent model calibrated to Korea, we find that fertility would be 28% higher in the absence of the status externality and that childlessness in the poorest quintile would fall from five to less than one percent. We then explore the effects of various government policies. A pro-natal transfer or an education tax can increase fertility and reduce education spending, with heterogeneous effects across the income distribution. The policy mix that maximizes the current generation’s welfare consists of an education tax of 22% and moderate pro-natal transfers. This would raise average fertility by about 11% and decrease education spending by 39%.
Here is the full paper by Seongeun Kim, Michèle Tertilt, and Minchul Yum. Here is the version forthcoming in the AER.
Literacy or Loyalty?
Why does schooling in much of the developing world not result in much in the way of increased skills? Maybe because education bureaucrats in these counties want obedient citizens more than literate, numerate, informed citizens.
In a discrete choice experiment in which bureaucrats in education were asked to make trade-offs between foundational literacy, completion of secondary school, and formation of dutiful citizens, respondents valued dutiful citizens 50% more than literate ones. For many policy makers, the goal is not the production of knowledge, but the fostering of nationalism.
This may sound like an odd set of priorities, but both European and Latin American countries had similar priorities when they expanded their education systems to serve more than a small elite around the turn of the 20th century. The goal was not to produce scientists or entrepreneurs but to inculcate a reliable workforce that would support the state.
…Developing-country schools are trying to achieve much the same ends. Students learn to memorize, to obey, and to not question — but they do not particularly learn to read or write. But then again, that was never the goal — developing countries are following the path trod on by developed countries. Just like developed countries, they will try to “teach ordinary people obedience, respect for the law, [and] love of order.”
I am reminded that if you want to predict which countries invest a lot in education, look at which countries invest a lot in government owned television stations.
The Global Distribution of College Graduate Quality
We measure college graduate quality—the average human capital of a college’s graduates—for graduates from 2,800 colleges in 48 countries. Graduates of colleges in the richest countries have 50% more human capital than graduates of colleges in the poorest countries. Migration reinforces these differences: emigrants from poorer countries are highly positively selected on human capital. Finally, we show that these stocks and flows matter for growth and development by showing that college graduate quality predicts the share of a college’s students who become inventors, engage in entrepreneurship, and become top executives both within and across countries.
That is a new JPE piece by Paolo Martellini, Todd Schoellman, and Jason Sockin.
Student Demand and the Supply of College Courses
From a recent Jacob Light paper:
In an era of rapid technological and social change, do universities adapt enough to play their important role in creating knowledge? To examine university adaptation, I extracted the information contained in the course catalogs of over 450 US universities spanning two decades (2000-2022). When there are changes in student demand, universities respond inelastically, both in terms of course quantity and content. Supply inelasticity is especially pronounced in fields experiencing declining demand and is more pronounced at public universities. Using Natural Language Processing, I further show that while the content of existing courses remains largely unchanged, newly-created courses incorporate topics related to current events and job skills. Notably, at selective institutions, new content focuses on societal issues, while at less selective institutions, new content emphasizes job-relevant skills. This study contributes uniquely to our understanding of the supply-side factors that affect how universities adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape.
John Cochrane offers comment as well, the first half of the post is interesting on demographics also.
What would Anthony Downs say?
You need your harvard ‘key’ account to vote. If you need help getting access to your harvard key account we have been given the following feedback:
1. Visit https://key.harvard.edu/ and click the link “Claim Your HarvardKey.” 2. On the “Select User Type” page, click on the tab that reads “Alumni.” Then click “Continue.” 3. Enter your HAA ID in the first field. Your HAA ID is: <000000000> 4. In the second field, enter your last name. 5. In the third field, enter your degree year. Click “Continue.” 6. This will cause a confirmation email to be sent to the primary email address Harvard has on file for you. We updated your primary email address and you must wait 24 hours to claim your HarvardKey account. 7. Click the link in the email sent to your primary address and enter the 8-character confirmation code. Click “Continue.” 8. In the Login Name field, enter your primary email address to use as your username. Your username does not link to your email, only your recovery addresses are linked to your account. Click “Continue.” 9. Enter at least one recovery email. This will be used should you misplace your password or Login ID. Please do not use an alumni email forwarding address as a recovery email. You should use a real email address with an email inbox as your recovery address. You can use the same email you used for your username as your recovery address. Click “Continue”. 10. Enter and confirm your new password. Click “Submit” to complete the process. 11. If you still have trouble registering or need more detailed instructions, please see our registration help page at http://alumni.harvard.edu/help/site-access/registration. HUIT’s Support Desk staff is available to answer your questions seven days a week. Please call 617-495-7777 or email [email protected]. The Support Desk schedule is: Monday through Friday, 7:30 a.m. – 8:00 p.m. Saturday, 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. Sunday, 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Not a joke, here is the website, which “helps” you to change the Harvard Board of Overseers. Whether or not you have voted (it is now closed), I hope you all adjust your donations accordingly.
And I wonder what the majority of Board members at Harvard think should be the voting requirements for presidential elections. No ID required, right? That would keep some people away from the process, right?
Addendum: Read this 2022 essay, voter suppression Harvard style.
My new podcast with Dwarkesh Patel
We discussed how the insights of Hayek, Keynes, Smith, and other great economists help us make sense of AI, growth, risk, human nature, anarchy, central planning, and much more.
Dwarkesh is one of the very best interviewers around, here are the links. If Twitter is blocked to you, here is the transcript, here is Spotify, among others. Here is the most salacious part of the exchange, highly atypical of course:
Dwarkesh Patel 00:17:16
If Keynes were alive today, what are the odds that he’s in a polycule in Berkeley, writing the best written LessWrong post you’ve ever seen?
Tyler Cowen 00:17:24
I’m not sure what the counterfactual means. Keynes is so British. Maybe he’s an effective altruist at Cambridge. Given how he seemed to have run his sex life, I don’t think he needed a polycule. A polycule is almost a Williamsonian device to economize on transaction costs. But Keynes, according to his own notes, seems to have done things on a very casual basis.
And on another topic:
Dwarkesh Patel 00:36:44
We’re talking, I guess, about like GPT five level models. When you think in your mind about like, okay, this is GPT five. What happens with GPT six, GPT seven. Do you see it? Do you still think in the frame of having a bunch of RAs, or does it seem like a different sort of thing at some point?
Tyler Cowen 00:36:59
I’m not sure what those numbers going up mean, what a GPT seven would look like, or how much smarter it could get. I think people make too many assumptions there. It could be the real advantages are integrating it into workflows by things that are not better GPTs at all. And once you get to GPT, say, 5.5, I’m not sure you can just turn up the dial on smarts and have it, like, integrate general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Dwarkesh Patel 00:37:26
Why not?
Tyler Cowen 00:37:27
I don’t think that’s how intelligence works. And this is a Hayekian point. And some of these problems, there just may be no answer. Like, maybe the universe isn’t that legible, and if it’s not that legible, the GPT eleven doesn’t really make sense as a creature or whatever.
Dwarkesh Patel 00:37:44
Isn’t there a Hayekian argument to be made that, listen, you can have billions of copies of these things? Imagine the sort of decentralized order that could result, the amount of decentralized tacit knowledge that billions of copies talking to each other could have. That in and of itself, is an argument to be made about the whole thing as an emergent order will be much more powerful than we were anticipating.
Tyler Cowen 00:38:04
Well, I think it will be highly productive. What “tacit knowledge” means with AIs, I don’t think we understand yet. Is it by definition all non-tacit? Or does the fact that how GPT-4 works is not legible to us or even its creators so much? Does that mean it’s possessing of tacit knowledge, or is it not knowledge? None of those categories are well thought out, in my opinion. So we need to restructure our whole discourse about tacit knowledge in some new, different way. But I agree, these networks of AIs, even before, like, GPT-11, they’re going to be super productive, but they’re still going to face bottlenecks, right? And I don’t know how good they’ll be at, say, overcoming the behavioral bottlenecks of actual human beings, the bottlenecks of the law and regulation. And we’re going to have more regulation as we have more AIs.
You will note I corrected the AI transcriber on some minor matters. In any case, self-recommending, and here is the YouTube embed:
In Praise of Non-conformity
In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.
I saw this quote on Facebook and thought immediately of my friend Bryan Caplan. Bryan’s book of essays, is an excellent guide not simply to Bryan’s non-conformism but also on how to be a successful non-conformist in a conformist world.