Category: Education
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.
Alice Evans on the ideological gender divide
“I suggest,
- Men and women tend to think alike in societies where there is
- Close-knit interdependence, religosity and authoritarianism, or
- Shared cultural production and mixed gendered offline socialising.
- Gendered ideological polarisation appears encouraged by:
- Feminised public culture
- Economic resentment
- Social media filter bubbles
- Cultural entrepreneurs.”
Here is the full piece, currently the best piece on this topic.
What are the actual dangers of advanced AI?
That is the focus of my latest Bloomberg column, 2x the normal length. I cannot cover all the points, but here is one excerpt:
The larger theme is becoming evident: AI will radically disrupt power relations in society.
AI may severely limit, for instance, the status and earnings of the so-called “wordcel” class. It will displace many jobs that deal with words and symbols, or make them less lucrative, or just make those who hold them less influential. Knowing how to write well won’t be as valuable a skill five years from now, because AI can improve the quality of just about any text. Being bilingual (or tri- or quadrilingual, for that matter) will also be less useful, and that too has been a marker of highly educated status. Even if AIs can’t write better books than human authors, readers may prefer to spend their time talking to AIs rather than reading.
It is worth pausing to note how profound and unprecedented this development would be. For centuries, the Western world has awarded higher status to what I will call ideas people — those who are good at developing, expressing and putting into practice new ways of thinking. The Scientific and Industrial revolutions greatly increased the reach and influence of ideas people.
AI may put that trend into reverse.
And on arms races:
If I were to ask AI to sum up my worries about AI — I am confident it would do it well, but to be clear this is all my own work! — it might sound something like this: When dynamic technologies interact with static institutions, conflict is inevitable, and AI makes social disruption for the wordcel class and a higher-stakes arms race are more likely.
That last is the biggest problem, but it is also the unavoidable result of a world order based on nation-states. It is a race that the Western democracies and their allies have to manage and win. That is true regardless of the new technology in question: Today it is AI, but future arms races could concern solar-powered space weapons, faster missiles and nuclear weapons, or some yet-to-be-invented way of wreaking havoc on this planet and beyond. Yes, the US may lose some of these races, which makes it all the more important that it win this one — so it can use AI technologies as a counterweight to its deficiencies elsewhere.
In closing I will note for the nth time that rationalist and EA philosophies — which tend to downgrade the import of travel and cultural learning — are poorly suited for reasoning about foreign policy and foreign affairs.
What should I ask Marilynne Robinson?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is from Wikipedia:
Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of faith and rural life. The subjects of her essays span numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.
Her next book is Reading Genesis, on the Book of Genesis. So what should I ask her?
My Conversation with Rebecca F. Kuang
Here is the audio, video, and transcript, here is the episode summary:
Rebecca F. Kuang just might change the way you think about fantasy and science fiction. Known for her best-selling books Babel and The Poppy War trilogy, Kuang combines a unique blend of historical richness and imaginative storytelling. At just 27, she’s already published five novels, and her compulsion to write has not abated even as she’s pursued advanced degrees at Oxford, Cambridge, and now Yale. Her latest book, Yellowface, was one of Tyler’s favorites in 2023.
She sat down with Tyler to discuss Chinese science-fiction, which work of fantasy she hopes will still be read in fifty years, which novels use footnotes well, how she’d change book publishing, what she enjoys about book tours, what to make of which Chinese fiction is read in the West, the differences between the three volumes of The Three Body Problem, what surprised her on her recent Taiwan trip, why novels are rarely co-authored, how debate influences her writing, how she’ll balance writing fiction with her academic pursuits, where she’ll travel next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why do you think that British imperialism worked so much better in Singapore and Hong Kong than most of the rest of the world?
KUANG: What do you mean by work so much better?
COWEN: Singapore today, per capita — it’s a richer nation than the United States. It’s hard to think, “I’d rather go back and redo that whole history.” If you’re a Singaporean today, I think most of them would say, “We’ll take what we got. It was far from perfect along the way, but it worked out very well for us.” People in Sierra Leone would not say the same thing, right?
Hong Kong did much better under Britain than it had done under China. Now that it’s back in the hands of China, it seems to be doing worse again, so it seems Hong Kong was better off under imperialism.
KUANG: It’s true that there is a lot of contemporary nostalgia for the colonial era, and that would take hours and hours to unpack. I guess I would say two things. The first is that I am very hesitant to make arguments about a historical counterfactual such as, “Oh, if it were not for the British Empire, would Singapore have the economy it does today?” Or “would Hong Kong have the culture it does today?” Because we don’t really know.
Also, I think these broad comparisons of colonial history are very hard to do, as well, because the methods of extraction and the pervasiveness and techniques of colonial rule were also different from place to place. It feels like a useless comparison to say, “Oh, why has Hong Kong prospered under British rule while India hasn’t?” Et cetera.
COWEN: It seems, if anywhere we know, it’s Hong Kong. You can look at Guangzhou — it’s a fairly close comparator. Until very recently, Hong Kong was much, much richer than Guangzhou. Without the British, it would be reasonable to assume living standards in Hong Kong would’ve been about those of the rest of Southern China, right? It would be weird to think it would be some extreme outlier. None others of those happened in the rest of China. Isn’t that close to a natural experiment? Not a controlled experiment, but a pretty clear comparison?
KUANG: Maybe. Again, I’m not a historian, so I don’t have a lot to say about this. I just think it’s pretty tricky to argue that places prospered solely due to British presence when, without the British, there are lots of alternate ways things could have gone, and we just don’t know.
Interesting throughout.
Social improvements that don’t create countervailing negative forces
Let us say you favor policy X, and take steps to see that policy X comes about.
Under many conditions, people who favor non-X will take additional countervailing steps to oppose X. And in that case your actions in favor of X, on average, will lead to nothing. In the meantime, you and also your opponents will have wasted material resources fighting over X.
This argument is hardly new, but most people do not like to consider it much. They instead prefer to mood affiliate in favor of X, or perhaps against X. They prefer to be “fighting for the right things.”
Perhaps visible political organizing is most likely to set this dynamic in motion. Everyone can see what you are doing, and perhaps they can use their actions to fundraise for their own side.
That is one reason why I am not so thrilled with much of that organizing, even if I agree with it. Of course there are other scenarios here. Your involvement on behalf of X might just be flat-out decisive. Or perhaps the group against X is too resource-constrained to respond to your greater advocacy. That said, those descriptors (and others) might apply as well to either side of the dispute, your side included. Scaling up the fight over X might cause you to be the one who simply flat out loses the struggle.
It is worth thinking which kinds of “small steps toward a much better world” do not produce such countervailing effects.
How about “being positive and constructive”? Does it generate an equal and offsetting amount of negativity?
How about “trying to get people to be more reasonable, yet without offering a substantive political commitment bundled with that”? Does that in turn motivate the crazies to work harder at making everyone go insane? I am not sure.
What else might be effective, once these strategies are considered?
Does “refuting people” fit into this category? Yes or no?
Which activities should you be abandoning altogether? Or perhaps trying to do in secret, rather than publicly?