Category: Education
My excellent Conversation with Julia Ioffe
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is from the episode summary:
Julia joined Tyler to discuss why so many of Russia’s great constructivist painters were women, why the tsarist government established women’s medical courses in 1872, changing attitudes towards abortion and birth control in the 20th century, why the Soviet regime turned prudish, how Khrushchev’s plan to “replace the dead” institutionalized single motherhood, Russian superwomen, why Jewish men were a prized commodity amid rampant antisemitism, the cultural significance of flowers, why a few Russian names still dominate, why Russian women think Western feminists have their priorities backwards, how gender attitudes and autocracy feed into each other, three underrated Russian novels, what she wants to write about next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: I’m sure you’ve noticed that quite a few American men will marry Russian or Soviet women, but not so many American women want to marry Russian or Soviet men. It’s a kind of market test, right? Why exactly are the men so bad? Why are they such louts? Maybe that’s a rude way to put it, but surely in one’s mind, one asks that question, right?
IOFFE: It’s a question that a lot of us who were living in Moscow in the late aughts and the teens were asking that all the time. I remember a friend of mine, a male Western TV correspondent, saying, “The women are so gorgeous here, but the men are so ugly and unfashionable.” He had lived all over the place and worked all over the place, and he said, “I’ve never seen such disparity,” and it was true.
The women like me, Western women who were living and working in Moscow at the time, said, “We’ll just wait till we get home.” I think it’s because of what I talked about before, or what you and I talked about before, which is that so many men were killed in the first half of the 20th century, and so few demands were placed on them because they were seen as an endangered species, in general. They were a resource to be fought over and protected.
In 1968, when the West was undergoing a sexual revolution, and women were fighting for more rights, more equality, the Soviets were talking about saving the men, protecting the men, and saying, “We’ve done enough for the women, but our men die young.” That’s after a lifetime of alcohol abuse, smoking, being largely irrelevant in the home, and obviously politically, because it’s a totalitarian system, so let’s work on protecting them.
Soviet men, and then Russian men, became these coddled, spoiled children essentially, where on one hand, so little was asked of them that it’s the bigotry of low expectations. So little was asked of them, and very little was expected of them, and they rose to meet those very low expectations.
On top of that, the idea of what made a man a manly man in Russia is he’s physically strong, but he dies a young death, or he dies an early death. He drinks a lot, he smokes a lot, he’s reckless, he’s careless, and takes a lot of risk, and that usually means an early death. If you have fewer men to begin with, and as a Russian woman, you see them dying early, and you’re fighting over them, what is the impetus for men to take care of themselves, to act better, be better, if there’s always going to be a beautiful, super competent woman to take him if you don’t want him?
COWEN: These points you’re raising, historically, do you feel it’s been quite different for Soviet and Russian Jews or the same?
IOFFE: I think it’s a little bit different. The caveat is, and I hate that I have to say this, Jews are people too, and subject to the same social forces that everybody else is, but culturally, Soviet Jews were more educated as a rule, more urban, and culturally came from a very family-centric tradition. Russian women, actually, for all the intense antisemitism in the Soviet Union, in Russia, Jewish men were actually a prized commodity for Russian women.
COWEN: With ethnic Russian women?
IOFFE: Yes. Ethnic Ukrainian women, you name it, because the cultural stereotype was that Jewish men don’t drink, they don’t hit you, they are family-focused, family-oriented, they’re involved fathers, they bring their money home, they don’t waste it at the bar or on bottles of vodka with their buddies. That’s the kind of man you would want as a husband. Ironically, the same polls that will tell you that Russians would want their daughters to marry a Jew will tell you that they don’t want their president to be a Jew.
One of my favorite episodes of the year, interesting throughout, and I very much enjoyed Julia’s book Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia.
Solve for the (Refine) equilibrium
We’re proud to announce that Refine has signed partnerships with two leading publishers in economics. Both the American Economic Association and the Econometric Society now use Refine’s AI-assisted technical verification as part of their publication processes.
Here is the thread. And more comments here.
Emergent Ventures winners, 57th cohort
Oisin O’Gorman, 15, Dublin, misinformation and fakes.
Karsen Lee Wahal, Stanford, is AI killing the web?, and measuring media slant.
Davy Deng, with Claire Wang (previous winner), whole brain emulation, MIT.
Enerj Grmek, 16, Ljubljana, privacy.
Vladimir Shmelev, Ukraine, Ukrainian children for relief trips to Montenegro.
Nik Verma, Chicago, a legal framework for AI agents.
Emirhan Demir and Çınar Yıldırım, Istanbul area, 19, protection against AI agents.
Midhat Doruk, 14, Ankara, longevity, biology, and skin cosmetics.
Burak Yilmaz, 17, Diyarbarkir, Turkey, browser-native authentication.
Lloyd Strickland, London, to publish the remaining Leibniz papers, including on computation.
Abdul Quyum, 15, Perth, organizing information and data.
Catharine Young, podcast on women in science, science communication tranche, Cambridge/DC.
Emergent Ventures India, 18th cohort
Adithyan Madhu, 14, an independent researcher, received his grant to study early writing systems, applying computational linguistics, pattern analysis, and structural methods to the Indus Valley script.
Aparajeet Shadangi, 17, received his grant to explore conceptual approaches to cosmic expansion and dark energy while continuing his formal academic preparation in cosmology.
Kevin Gibson, a student developer, received his grant for Crsynk OS, a Python-based operating system integrated with an AI assistant and focused on lightweight user interfaces and accessible computing. He is also developing WiseChat AI and an AI Voice Engine.
Vaishnavi Dilip, 13, received her grant to identify fire-resistant plants native to Indian ecosystems and plant them strategically as natural firebreaks in fire-prone areas.
Prince T. Philip, an independent cybersecurity researcher and product architect focused on high-impact, future-facing risks in modern software systems, received his grant to build a security audit tool that surfaces vulnerabilities and design assumptions missed by traditional scanners.
Michaela Cross, a writer and content creator, received her grant for Rose Chasm, a video project on the history of India and its relationship to America and the wider world.
Vivekanand Bhat and Rijesh Panicker received their grant for Pathika, to create immersive, augmented, multilingual onsite guided tours for heritage monuments across India.
Devanarayan, 15, received his grant for Open Horizon Observatory, a small open-access observing setup that produces and freely shares real astronomical data. He is developing low-cost workflows for time-series photometry and open data sharing for students and the public.
Roshan Kumar Gupta, 19, a computer science undergraduate, received his grant for TARS, a deterministic, physics-aware machine-learning pipeline for exoplanet discovery using TESS data. He aims to reduce false positives and identify physically credible habitable-world candidates in noisy observations.
Yajan Adhikari, 19, a materials researcher, received his grant to build an operating system for digitizing and scaling the management of recyclable materials.
Pranet Khetan, 17, received his grant to develop a novel, low-cost architecture for refreshable tactile graphics supporting STEM education for visually impaired students.
Karthik, 18, a space engineer, received his grant to research the use of remote sensing in agricultural insurance.
Alexander Hogeveen Rutter, an energy expert, received his grant for analysis and advocacy of least-cost resource adequacy planning and other market-based measures in India’s power sector.
Akshit Arora, an Engineering Physics student at IIT Delhi, and Bhavey Sehgal, a BITS Pilani student, received their grant for NeuroBridge. It uses eye tracking, computer vision, and AI to predict intent, giving people with ALS fast, confirmation-based speech instead of slow letter-by-letter eye typing, at a fraction of existing device costs.
Cartoonist Sumit Kumar and Vivekananda Roy Ghatak received their grant to advance their animated series Aaapki Poojita and produce short, animated sketches and redesign and relaunch the famous Bakarmax webtoon platform.
Progyan Das, 24, received his grant to develop fault-tolerant systems capable of using consumer devices for large-scale foundation model training.
Yash Chitte, an MBA student, received his grant to build a wall-climbing robot that autonomously cleans glass facades.
Khushi Jain, 23, an aerospace engineer, received her grant for NadirX Space, to build space-grade test infrastructure and hardware-in-the-loop systems that enable reliable testing of advanced space technologies and support future interplanetary missions.
Rishit Kapoor, an AI/ML researcher and engineer, received his grant for Periscopic Labs, which turns systematic reviews into living, AI-native infrastructure that keeps scientific claims traceable, verifiable, and continuously updated.
Koushik Das received his grant to build an explainable clinical decision-support system that helps primary-care doctors interpret complete blood count reports and detect anemia patterns more quickly and safely.
Shashank Sanjay, a medical student, received his grant to develop an affordable coronary stent.
Abrar Shahid, a systems designer using AI to reduce accessibility gaps, received his grant for Project Lumen AI, to build an AI translation layer connecting external eye photographs with retinal fundus scans and make eye-disease diagnosis easier.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth , sixteenth, and seventeenth cohorts. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
And here is Nabeel’s AI engine for other EV winners. Here are the other EV cohorts.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
An experiment for our schools
The aircraft are designed to distract their targets by flashing strobes, blaring sirens, spraying them with pepper gel, or ramming into them at 60 mph.
Here is the full piece. As I have been saying, be long countries where local crime is a major problem.
Reforms to the PhD?
The Trump administration is pairing top universities with corporate giants in an effort to steer traditional PhD programs toward national scientific priorities.
Today, the White House and National Science Foundation are announcing a $47 million pilot program to fund around 250 four-year doctorates in technical fields, starting this fall. Students in the pilot will be placed at an industry partner, where they will spend at least one year doing “practical research” that can go towards their dissertation. NSF’s investment will fund three years of these PhDs, with 31 universities and 20-plus companies funding the rest.
“About the same amount of basic research is done today in academia as in the private sector,” Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told Pirate Wires. “Over time, while the ecosystem has changed and different players have emerged where important scientific work is being done, the institutions which train our next generation of scientists have not really been updated.”
…The pilot represents a small fraction of the more than 45,000 science and engineering doctorates awarded annually — but the administration says it’s a “scalable model” that can expand to more universities and companies.
Here is the full story, I will pass along more details as I learn them.
The AEA presidential election
AEA is the American Economics Association, and a new president is needed, here is the candidate and likely winner:
PINELOPI (PENNY) KOUJIANOU GOLDBERG, William Nordhaus Professor of Economics and Global Affairs, Yale University.
Statement of Purpose: I am honored to stand for President of the American Economic Association. Economics has long contributed powerful tools to understand human behavior, markets, institutions, and public policy, but the environment in which we conduct research, teach, and engage with society is evolving rapidly. New technologies, especially artificial intelligence, are reshaping research methods, classroom instruction, and the evaluation and dissemination of scholarship. These changes create exciting opportunities, but they also raise difficult questions about the future of peer review in our journals, transparency, incentives, and research and teaching standards more generally. The profession also faces broader challenges: maintaining rigorous, credible, and independent research, supporting young scholars in an increasingly uncertain academic environment, and ensuring that economics remains open to diverse perspectives, methods, and global talent. If elected, I hope to use my research, teaching, policy, and editorial experience to help address these challenges, while promoting the core values of our discipline.
Here is the link. Hilarious as always that there is only one candidate allowed (which model predicts this as optimal?), but for the first time I have seen a meaningful statement of purpose that I also like. That said, I would like to see her endorse my core proposal, namely turning over all submissions, referee reports, and revisions (anonymized is fine) to the major AI companies for use as training data. After all, such an act would further the mission of the AEA, right?
The Confucian fertility paradox
Total fertility rates in East Asia have fallen to levels without historical precedent, even though the region’s Confucian heritage long placed extraordinary emphasis on family continuity and large families. We argue that this “Confucian Fertility Paradox” dissolves once we separate two strands of the tradition and recognize that modernization affected them very differently. The pro-natal strand, built on lineage continuity, ancestor worship, and reliance on sons for old-age support, was gradually switched off as child mortality fell, incomes rose, women entered the labor force, and state pensions replaced the family as the main source of security in old age. What survived was the second strand: the veneration of education and of status won through examination success, rooted in the imperial examination tradition. Under modern conditions this surviving strand reverses sign with respect to its effect on fertility. Where the historical examination system rewarded having many sons so that one might succeed, the modern single-ranking tournament rewards concentrating resources on one or two intensively educated children, and the quantity/quality tradeoff turns a once pro-natal culture into a powerful engine of low fertility. Drawing on recent empirical evidence from China and Korea, we show how education competition becomes the channel through which traditional values now suppress childbearing. We explain why standard pro-natalist policies, such as removing birth restrictions or offering cash subsidies, accomplish little when the underlying problem is a competitive equilibrium in parental investment, and we argue that policies aimed at the source of the distortion, such as structural reform of educational pathways, hold more promise.
Here is the paper by Hanming Fang and Chang Liu. Usually I am suspicious of such explanations, as the low birth rates typically apply also to families who do not face such education/career considerations. Thailand? Indians in Singapore? Ethnic minorities in China? But I pass this along nonetheless, due to the importance of the topic. Via Glenn Mercer.
The Rug Belt Atlas and Quiz
I have an amateur interest in Oriental rugs but my eye is untrained. Thus, for fun and learning I created with Fable a Rug Atlas and quiz.
Check it out. Constructive comments welcome.
P.S. The site is in fact safe! Working on getting it recognized.
Emergent Ventures winners, 56th cohort
Audrey London, Los Angeles, to write a book on water in California.
Seyi Oluwasanmi, London, to bring Brits to SF to learn tech.
Thomas Haferlach, Berlin, payments and compute layer for the long tail of AI apps.
Juan Ramón Egea Fernández, Andalusia, tech.
Teo Spiro, Israel, AI and biology.
Amitav Krishna, suburban Ontario, 14, quantum.
Jake Prokopets, 18, Orlando, AI and labor markets.
Wendi Yan, NYC, science and the visual arts.
Luke Peoples, 15, Sydney, to edit the UI directly.
Malwina Lewera, Poland, orbital space debris.
Wilhelm Hedenskog, 18, Gothenburg, Sweden, AI evaluations.
Alex Petropoulos and Max Reddel, Brussels, Preparing Europe for Transformative AI.
Giovanni De Lillo, 17, Naples, multi-agent AI orchestration for regulated enterprise (Hypereum).
My excellent Conversation with Chase Koch
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Chase and Tyler discuss if any of his father’s lessons never stuck, the guilt-trip letter his grandfather wrote three months after Charles was born, why Chase started throwing tennis matches, what Rafa’s grit taught him about stoicism, who he admired most from the 1992 Dream Team, whether the Spurs should jettison De’Aaron Fox, the David Gilmour solo that hooked him at eleven, what drew him to jam bands, how he built a boom-box business out of his parents’ garage, why his father interviewed Snoop on a Zoom call during Covid, why his band is named for the second law of thermodynamics, what it’s like working with MrBeast, how Koch Industries has evolved, what he learned from Marc Andreessen, the philosophy behind hiring the “farm team,” why he is teaching himself to code with Claude at his fourteen-year-old’s urging, where he’s traveling next, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: N.W.A., are they good? I like them.
KOCH: I had my phases. My first business, Tyler, was when I was 15 years old and one of my best friends to this day, Askia Ahmad, he was wiring up car stereos and building custom boom boxes and all that. We basically built a business out of my parents’ garage because they had all the tools and materials and everything. Like, “Let’s build a business out of here. My parents hopefully will pay for the machinery, and then we can sell these boom boxes to our friends at high prices and capture a big margin.” Through that, I learned about the whole gangster rap. Your listeners may be surprised, but it started with me, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Eazy-E, of course—
COWEN: It’s so good.
KOCH: Dre.
COWEN: Snoop.
KOCH: Snoop.
COWEN: You know Snoop, right?
KOCH: It’s so good, so good. Yes.
COWEN: What’s Snoop like?
KOCH: Snoop? Okay. This goes back to what I was mentioning on the power of music to unify people. So I’ve been with Stand Together. For the listeners that don’t know, it’ll give context to your question. Stand Together is an organization that has really a community of like-minded leaders that all believe in one thing, in the power of human potential, and that every human has a gift.
We all know that there’s so many barriers in society that are holding people back, whether it’s barriers in education, barriers in regulation, so you can’t start a business, barriers in our criminal justice system, you name it. What Stand Together does is we have basically a comprehensive strategy that addresses everything from education to policy to bottom-up empowerment in communities to drive real social change. I’ve been a part of this for as long as I can remember.
My father’s been working on social change for 60 years. My passion for music, as you can see from your last line of questioning, with Stand Together and that whole community, we never tapped into culture. When I say culture and what the next generation pays attention to—sports, music, YouTube, entertainment, creators, media. During COVID, I had this idea that we’ve never tapped into music to drive social change.
And on one specific point:
Back to your question on energy, 4 percent of the overall capital consumed at Koch is in refining, which is basically where my grandfather started the company. I think that surprises a lot of people because I think a lot of people are still stuck in this, “Well, you’re this energy company.” No, we’re not. We touch the majority of the economy now, and we’re in everything from forest products, consumer products, software, as I described, glass manufacturing, to energy and fertilizers as well.
Interesting throughout.
*Who Thinks Like an Economist?*
That is the title of a recent book by Beatrice Magistro. Some key results are:
Economic knowledge consistently predicts higher support for welfare-enhancing policies (Eurozone membership, free trade, and EU immigration), independent on whether individuals stand to gain or lose initially from globalization. This challenges conventional self-interest accounts and instead highlights the role of economic knowledge — and potentially time preferences — in shaping globalization attitudes.
Economic knowledge also predicts a lower discount rate, even after adjusting for years of education.
I would say that over the years I have altered my perspective a bit on these issues. I used to think these factors were correlated, in large part, through a kind of wisdom. I now think that more of the effect, however much I may sympathize with it, runs through sociological expectation and perceived obligation, combined with conformity and signaling pressures.
From Prediction Markets to Decision Markets and Beyond!
Arin Dube points to a great illustration of the power of prediction markets. Yesterday due to a new scandal the probability that Graham Platner would drop out of the Maine Democratic primary exploded from 9% to 96% (+87 percentage points). At the same time, the probability that the Democrats would win the election jumped by about 9 percentage points, from 54% to 63%. What does this tell you?
The market is signaling that Platner reduces the Democrats’ chances of victory. We can be more precise. If an 87-point increase in the probability of dropping out gets you 9 points of winning, then a 100% chance of dropping out implies a gain of 9/0.87 ≈ 10.3 percentage points.
Thus the market’s best estimate is that Platner is reducing the Democrats’ chance of winning by about 10 percentage points (compared to an unknown replacement). That’s a pretty big number! Democrats should surely use this information to make better decisions.
Now, I have been a bit loose. We have implicitly assumed that the news mainly moved the probability of Platner dropping out, rather than independently changing the Democrats’ general-election prospects. The issue is we are trying to reverse engineer two conditional prices, P(win|drop) and P(win|stay), from one unconditional price, P(win), and its comovement with P(drop). It works pretty well here as an illustration but Robin Hanson’s idea is that we can do better yet by trading the conditionals instead of inferring them.
Hanson’s decision markets would run contracts of the form “pays $1 if Democrats win, conditional on Platner dropping out — bet refunded if he stays.” Plus the mirror contract conditioned on staying. The refund provision makes the price a conditional probability: a trader pricing the first contract doesn’t need any view on whether Platner drops out, only on how the race goes if he does. With this structure we would get cleaner estimates of the conditional probabilities–in this case whether the Democrats do better with Platner in or out–which is exactly what a decision maker needs.
We were able to plausibly reverse engineer our estimate because the market happened to move 87 points in a single day. But a decision market would have posted the number continuously, no scandal required. In other words, with decision markets in play, not just prediction markets, we could have seen how much Platner was costing the Democrats before the latest scandal hit—which is precisely when the information would have been most useful.
It’s been fun to see prediction markets catch on with the public but the world is still decades behind Hanson’s decision markets—let alone futarchy!
What should I ask Michael Moritz?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him, based around his new book Ausländer: One Family’s Story of Escape and Exile. Mike of course was a pioneering venture capitalist through Sequoia, and before that had a distinguished career as a journalist, which included books on Chrysler, Apple (the first such book I believe?), and soccer coach Alex Ferguson of Manchester United. Here is his Wikipedia page.
So what should I ask him?
A scientific benefit (and cost) of AI innovation
What changed was that the cost of preliminary exploration collapsed. I could sketch an argument, identify the first serious objections, test whether they were fatal, and reach a provisional verdict in an afternoon rather than a fortnight. This sounds like a simple acceleration, and the more profound effect was on what I was willing to abandon. Dropping a question after an afternoon’s work feels nothing like dropping one after three weeks. When the exploration costs are low, the sunk cost attachment disappears, and you find yourself dropping bad questions earlier and more often, which means the questions you keep are better. I explored far more ideas, and my working portfolio became both larger and better curated. I arrived at this outcome not through any deliberate plan but simply through sustained engagement with a tool that changed what exploration cost.
The skill that improved most, and the one I would never have thought to look for, was something I can only describe as question-identification – the ability to find problems that are both tractable and important. This is the thing an academic career is substantially built on and which nobody, so far as I know, has ever tried to teach directly.
I want to be honest about the costs. My ability to hold together a complex position verbally, under pressure, in a seminar or a conversation, has probably not improved and may have declined somewhat. When preliminary exploration is cheap, you spend less time grinding through arguments from first principles, a grinding that builds fluency that shows up in live exchange. Friends have pressed me on this, and they are right to worry.
That is from Carlo Cordasco, and there is more, via Conor Friedersdorf.