Category: Philosophy
Noah Smith on the vibe shift
My values haven’t become more conservative — my desire for a more economically egalitarian and socially tolerant society has not diminished an iota. You won’t see me bellowing “I didn’t leave my party, my party left ME!!” and storming over to the GOP in a huff. But I have to say that I now doubt the practical effectiveness of some of the policies I embraced in previous years. Others still seem like good ideas, but I’ve been dismayed at their botched implementation where they were tried. And many progressive ideas simply don’t seem like they’ll be able to win majority political support in the near future. It’s looking more and more likely that America is headed for a more conservative decade.
I’m not the only person to have noticed the shift. Dave Weigel recently wrote a post detailing all the ways that Kamala Harris’ campaign is to the right of Biden’s 2020 run, both in terms of tone and rhetoric and in terms of actual policy. Harris and other Dems have touted their tough stances on the border, abandoned big new spending programs, stopped talking about a public option for health insurance, trumpeted their support for Israel, embraced oil drilling, and gone tough on crime. Harris’ policy agenda includes plenty of pro-business and deregulatory ideas. She even brags about owning a gun and being willing to shoot intruders.
Here is the full post. And this, from later on, past the gate:
The sheer range of issues where progressivism seems adrift and directionless leaves me pensive and morose. I believe in the power of wonky technocrats to implement incremental policy tweaks to accelerate the energy transition, fix the immigration system, and make police more effective and less violent. But what’s left to fight for? Other than defending America against the depredations of Trump and the right, what big political goal can mobilize the masses to get out there and vote for left-of-center politicians?
I do see two big bright spots here. The first is industrial policy, which promises not just to restore American manufacturing, but to revitalize whole areas of the country. The second is the abundance agenda and YIMBYism, which promises to provide cheap housing, energy, and transportation for all.
Recommended.
My Conversation with Musa al-Gharbi
I am a big fan of Musa’s work, most of all his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. As for the podcast, here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler and Musa explore the rise and fall of the “Great Awokening” and more, including how elite overproduction fuels social movements, why wokeness tends to fizzle out, whether future waves of wokeness will ratchet up in intensity, why neuroticism seems to be higher on the political Left, how a great awokening would manifest in a Muslim society, Black Muslims and the Nation of Islam, why Musa left Catholicism, who the greatest sociologist of Islam is, Muslim immigration and assimilation in Europe, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Let me give you an alternate theory of the Great Awokening, and tell me what’s wrong with it. It’s not really my view, but I hear it a lot.
So on the Left, there’s some long-term investment in teaching in America’s top universities. You produce a lot of troops who could become journalists, and they’re mostly left-leaning. Then 2011, 2012 — there’s something about the interaction of social media and, say, The New York Times and other major outlets, where all of a sudden they have a much bigger incentive to have a lot of articles about race, gender, Black Lives Matter, whatever. When those two things come together, wokeness takes off based on a background in Christianity and growing feminization of society.
By the time you get to something like 2021, enough of mainstream media has broken down that it’s simply social media out there going crazy. That just gives us a lot of diversity of bizarre views rather than just sheer wokeness — and besides, Elon is owning Twitter, so wokeness ends.
What’s wrong with that account?
AL-GHARBI: For one, I do think that some of the factors that you identified are important for contextualizing the current moment. For instance, a lot of the symbolic professions, like law and consulting, academia, journalism — they are being feminized. I do talk a bit in the book about how this matters for understanding the dynamics in a lot of these institutions. Not just over the last 10 years, but over the last several decades, in part because women and men tend to engage in very different forms of status-seeking and competition and things like that. So that does matter.
Things like social media obviously do change the way interactions play out. But you can see, actually, that things like social media or changes in the media landscape after 2010 — one limitation for using those kinds of explanations to explain the current moment is that it becomes hard, then, to understand how or why it was the case that . . .
There were three previous episodes like this, one in the 1920s through the early ’30s, one in the mid-1960s to the late ’70s, and then one in the late ’80s through early ’90s. In all cases where we didn’t have social media, where the structure of media enterprises was importantly different than it is today, and before you had Gen Z “kids these days” with their idiosyncratic attitudes, or before a lot of these professions were as feminized as they were today.
I think all of those factors you said actually do matter, and they matter in the sense — because each of these episodes, there’s so much in common, an insane amount. When you read the book and I walk through some of these — I think a lot of readers will be troubled, maybe, by how similar these episodes are. But they’re also importantly different. They don’t play out identically. They are importantly different: The role that symbolic capitalists occupy in society changed immensely over the last century. The constitution of these fields has changed immensely. There are a lot more women; there are a lot more nonwhite people in these professions than there were in the past, and so on and so forth.
All of those factors you described: I think they actually do matter, especially for understanding the ways in which this period of awokening might differ from previous episodes, but I don’t think they explain why awokenings happen at all.
COWEN: If “woke” recurs, do you think there’s a ratchet effect where it comes back bigger and stronger each time, a bit like the destructiveness of war? Or is it more of a random walk? Like, the next wave of woke in 37 years might be half as strong as the one we just had. What’s your model?
AL-GHARBI: I think it’s random; that depends a little bit on . . .
What I argue in the book is that the — for instance, when we look at the last period of awokening in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was much less — that was the last time we had these struggles over what they call political correctness, or the PC culture, which we call wokeness today. As I argue in the book, it didn’t last as long, that awokening. It was shorter than most of the others, actually. Shorter than the one in the ’60s, shorter than the one after 2010. It was a little shorter, and it also wasn’t quite as dramatic.
I think there are these kind of contextual factors that significantly inform how severe it is or how long it lasts, how long it’s able to sustain itself or how long it is until the frustrated elites get — enough of them get satisfied that they disengage. My guess is that it’s more of a random walk, but I’m open to persuasion.
Definitely interesting.
Ian Leslie on Olivier Roy and culture
Roy argues that culture in the sense we have understood it is being inexorably eroded. It’s not, as some of his countrymen believe, that one culture is being replaced by another – say, Christianity by Islam. It’s that all culture is being hollowed out by technology, data, globalisation, bureaucracy, and consumerist individualism. Local cultures, in the sense of finely patterned, shared sensibilities, automatically absorbed and deeply felt, are no match for these bulldozing, ‘deculturating’ forces.
We still need shared norms of behaviour in order to function as societies, however. So in place of implicit culture, he says, we have introduced explicit “norms”: rules of behaviour and speech which aren’t felt or intuited but articulated, coded for, and argued over endlessly. Without instinctive standards for behaviour we have to thrash everything out, from the correct use of pronouns to how to behave on public transport or dress for work. “Culture war” implies some kind of profound division between people, but in truth, suggests Roy, our differences are shallow and petty and all the more bad-tempered for it. Scrape away culture and what you’re left with is negotiation. Everything is politics.
Complex, evolved, layered social identities are being replaced by a series of boxes, with freedom consisting of the right to choose your box at any one time (think about the way that sexual identity is coded into an endlessly multiplying series of letters). The oddly shaped flora and fauna of culture have been reduced a series of “tokens” which we buy and display in order to position ourselves versus others. National cuisines, musical genres, styles of dress: these are all just tokens for us to collect and artfully assemble into a personal brand.
Here is the full essay. Here is my earlier post on Roy’s book.
My Conversation with the excellent Tobi Lütke
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Tyler and Tobi hop from Germany to Canada to America to discuss a range of topics like how outsiders make good coders, learning in meetings by saying wrong things, having one-on-ones with your kids, the positives of venting, German craftsmanship vs. American agility, why German schooling made him miserable, why there aren’t more German tech giants, untranslatable words, the dividing line of between Northern and Southern Germany, why other countries shouldn’t compare themselves to the US, Canada’s lack of exports and brands, ice skating to work in Ottawa, how VR and AI will change retailing, why he expects to be “terribly embarrassed” when looking back at companies in the 2020s, why The Lean Startup is bad for retailers, how fantasy novels teach business principles, what he’s learning next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Are Canadians different in meetings than US Americans?
LÜTKE: Yes, as well. Yes, that’s true. It’s more on the side of American, definitely on a minimum quality bar. I think Canadians are often more about long term. I’ve seen Canadians more often think about what’s the next step after this step, but also just low ambition. That’s probably not the most popular thing to say around here, but Canada’s problem, often culturally, is a go-for-bronze mentality, which apparently is not uncommon for smaller countries attached to significantly more cultural or just bigger countries.
Actually, I found it’s very easy to work around. I think a lot of our success has been due to just me and my co-founder basically allowing everyone to go for world class. Everyone’s like, “Oh, well, if we are allowed to do this, then let’s go.” I think that makes a big difference. Ratcheting up ambition for a project is something that one has to do in a company in Canada.
COWEN: Is there something scarce that is needed to inject that into Canada and Canadians? Or is it simply a matter of someone showing up and doing it, and then it just all falls out and happens?
LÜTKE: I don’t know. Inasmuch as Shopify may be seen as something that succeeded, that alone didn’t do it. It would’ve been very, very nice if that would’ve happened. Now there’s another cohort of founders coming through. Some of them have been part of Shopify or come back from — I believe there are some great companies in Calgary, like NEO, that are more ambitious.
I think it’s a bit of a decision. The time it worked perfectly was when Canada was hosting the Winter Olympics, which is now a little bit of ancient history. There was actually a program Canada-wide that’s called Own the Podium. That makes sense. It’s home. We have more winter than most, so therefore let’s do well. And then we did. It’s just by far the best performance of Canada’s Olympic team of all times. I think to systematize it and make it stick — changing a culture is very, very difficult, but instances of just giving everyone permission to go for it have also been super successful.
And this:
COWEN: Say we compare Germany to the Netherlands, which is culturally pretty similar, very close to Koblenz. They have ASML, Adyen. Netherlands is a smaller country. Why have they done relatively better? Or you could cite Sweden, again, culturally not so distant from Germany.
LÜTKE: You’re asking very good questions that I much rather would ask you. [laughs] I don’t know. I wish I knew. I started at a small company in Germany; it didn’t do anything. So, it’s not like people didn’t do this. I came to Canada, again, this time it worked. Then I was head down for a very long time, building my thing because it was all-consuming, so I didn’t pay too much attention to — I wasn’t even very deliberate about where to start a company. I started in Ottawa because that’s where my wife and I were during the time she was studying there. We could find great talent there that was overlooked, it seemed, and gave everyone a project to be ambitious with, and it worked.
I think that if you create in geography a consensus that you’re a company really, really worth working for because it’s interesting work, great work, it might actually lead to something — then you can build it. I don’t quite understand why this is not possible to do in so many places in Germany because, again, Germany does have this wonderful appreciation of craftsmanship, which I think is actually underrepresented in software. I think it’s only recently — usually by Europeans — being brought up. Patrick Collison talks about it more and more, and certainly I do, too.
Making software is a craft. I think, in this way, Germany, Czech Republic, other places, Poland, are extremely enlightened in making this part of an apprenticeship system. I apprenticed as a computer programmer, and I thought it was exactly the right way to learn these things. Now, that means there’s, I believe, a lot of talent that then makes decisions other than putting it together to build ambitious startups. Something needs to be uncorked by the people who have more insight than I have.
COWEN: I think part of a hypothesis is that the Netherlands, and also Sweden, are somewhat happier countries than Germany. People smile more. At least superficially, they’re more optimistic. They’re more outgoing.
LÜTKE: I think it’s optimism.
COWEN: It’s striking to me that Germans, contrary to stereotype — I think they have a quite good sense of humor, but a lot of it is irony or somewhat black. Maybe that’s bad for tech. I wonder: people in the Bay Area — do they have a great sense of humor? I’m not sure they do. Maybe there’s some correlations across those variables.
Definitely recommended. Can you guess which is the one question Tobi refused to answer, for fear of being cancelled?
LLMs are Creative Reasoners
It’s bizarre to me that there are still people claiming that LLMs are not reasoning or are not creative when by any objective measure they are obviously creative reasoners! By objective measure I mean a test that evaluates creativity and reasoning by evaluating outputs not by idle philosophical speculation that rules AIs out by definition. Here’s a good paper, Can LLMs Generate Novel Research Ideas? A Large-Scale Human Study with 100+ NLP Researchers, which illustrates one such test. The authors asked top researchers in the field of natural language processing to propose research ideas which were then presented in a standardized format to a ratings panel of other NLP experts. The AI created ideas were judged more creative than the human ideas.
Now one might argue that the humans weren’t giving their best ideas–some data in the paper suggests they were giving ideas at the median of those for top researchers–and humans might also be looking for ideas that were perhaps easier to get funding precisely because they were less creative but more doable. Either way, however, the AIs are coming up with good ideas that could usefully supplement human generated ideas.
Elite Human Capital Is Not Just IQ
Here is a very good response to readers’ questions essay by Richard Hanania, excerpt:
Although EHC [elite human capital] types can make a lot of mistakes, it’s inevitable that they will rule and it’s mostly a good thing that they do. I think a society where most elites could stomach someone like Trump would have so much corruption that it would head towards collapse. This is why conservatives cannot build scientific institutions, and only a very small number of credible journalistic outlets. Right-wingers are discriminated against in academia and the media, but they mostly aren’t in these professions because they select out of them, since they lack intellectual curiosity and a concern for truth. If it doesn’t make them money or flatter their ego in a very simplistic way — in contrast to the more complicated and morally substantive ways in which liberals improve their own self-esteem — conservatives are not interested.
Conservatives complain about liberals “virtue signalling,” but one way to avoid that is to not care about virtue at all. And only by forsaking any ideals higher than “destroy the enemy” can a movement fall in line behind someone like Donald Trump. As already mentioned, I think that markets are counterintuitive to people, and Western civilization has done a good job of giving the entrepreneur his due. That said, EHC is a necessary part of any functioning civilization, and I see my job as helping to make it liberal rather than leftist. A truly conservative EHC class is something close to an oxymoron, since the first things smart people do when they begin to use reason are reject religion in public life and expand their moral circle.
The piece covers other issues as well.
*Self-Help is Like a Vaccine*, by Bryan Caplan
This is one of the best and most correct self-help books. Bryan describes it as follows:
I’ve been writing economically-inspired self-help essays for almost two decades, Self-Help Is Like a Vaccine compiles the most helpful 5-7% of my advice.
Of Bryan’s recent string of books, this is the one I agree with the most. Bryan offers some further description:
Like my other books of essays, Self-Help Is Like a Vaccine is divided into four parts.
- The first, “Unilateral Action,” argues that despite popular nay-saying and “Can’t-Do” mentalities, you have a vast menu of unexplored choices. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. While most “minorities of one” are fools, cautious experimentation and appreciation of good track records, not conformism, is the wise response.
- The next section, “Life Hacks,” offers a bunch of specific suggestions for improving your life. Only one hack has to work out to instantly justify your purchase of the book.
- “Professor Homeschool” brings together all of my best pieces on teaching my own kids. I have over a decade’s experience: I taught the twins for grades 7-12, all four kids for Covid, and my 10th-grader is working one room away from me as I write. Except during Covid, homeschooling is a fair bit of extra work, but if you’re still curious, I’ve got a pile of time-tested advice.
- I close the book with “How to Dale Carnegie.” As you may know, I’m a huge fan of his classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. Not because I’m naturally a people-pleaser; I’m not. But with Dale’s help, I have managed to make thousands of friends all over the planet. Few skills are more useful, both emotionally and materially.
You can buy the book here.
Solving for optimum U.S. fertility
In this post, we show that under the median estimated elasticity the socially optimal fertility rate is 2.4 in the US, well above today’s 1.7, given that the US should place a value of 14.28x GDP per additional birth ($1.17mn per birth). Furthermore, to achieve this, the US should be willing to spend the equivalent of 3.8% of its GDP ($290K per birth) per birth. For context, the existing child tax credit is worth $2000/year, or $26K present value. We’d like to stress that these figures are highly uncertain, because of both the varying welfare gain from more births, and also varying estimates of how effective subsidising births are. Even still, in the main case, the US government should seriously consider greatly increasing its child tax credits, and explore more creative and ambitious solutions to address this looming demographic crisis.
Here is more from Duncan McClements and Jason Hausenloy. Obviously various assumptions can be debated here…
My dialogue with Aashish Reddy
About ninety minutes, transcript only, almost entirely fresh material. Lots of philosophy. Here is one excerpt:
Tyler Cowen: I think when you read [John] Gray on many people, you get quite a bit of Gray. That’s not a complaint. I love reading John. I like him. I like talking to him a great deal. But I agree with your points.
But what I find more compelling in Mill than Sidgwick is, Mill understood the importance of his intellectual venture in the broader sweep of history in a way where there’s not clear evidence that Sidgwick ever really did. So the Hegelian in me, you could say, becomes much more sympathetic to Mill. You read something like Subjection of Women, which is a philosophical work, though it’s not foundationally philosophical. And I can’t imagine Sidgwick having produced such a work, and that’s why I’m going to elevate Mill over Sidgwick.
Aashish Reddy: I haven’t read much Sidgwick, personally –
Tyler Cowen: A lot of it’s boring! I mean, Methods of Ethics is the go-to place.
Aashish Reddy: – Yeah, I’ve mostly encountered him in the Keynes biography, by Skidelsky. Tangentially, Gray’s book on Hayek contains a funny throwaway line, where he mentions “G.E. Moore’s unfortunate influence on the history of ideas.” Do you agree that Moore has had an unfortunate influence on the history of ideas, especially as it relates to Keynes?
Tyler Cowen: Well, I would say that the much later John Gray has become considerably more Moorean –
Aashish Reddy: Agree, and I think this is bad!
Tyler Cowen: Eh! I don’t know, you have to deal with questions of the aesthetic in some manner, and it’s never going to be quite comfortable because making the aesthetic compatible with liberalism always will be tricky. There’s something quite elitist about the notion of the aesthetic, maybe inescapably so.
Moore has never influenced me. The book bored me. I think a lot of his influence was his physical presence and his roles in Cambridge, member of the Apostles Society, and the like. So I’m not a Moore fan, but so many very, very smart people thought so highly of him, I’m a little reluctant to just dismiss it.
Keynes himself took the aesthetic route. It didn’t make him illiberal, but it gave him some illiberal tendencies.
Aashish Reddy: You think the elitist kind of aestheticism influenced Keynes’ economics in a way that’s unfortunate?
Tyler Cowen: In my opinion. But again, it’s easy to dismiss Moore without specifying, well, how am I going to incorporate aesthetics into my philosophy in a way that’s any better? So that would be my indirect, roundabout defence of Moore.
Interesting throughout, including the Peter Thiel bits at two different parts. Plus I say what I really think about Chomsky, my Bayesian update on God, and who on the internet is a really good writer, among other topics. He and I will be doing a follow-up dialog later in the year.
Rawls Killed Marx
I found this Joseph Heath post very informative. In essence, Marx was about exploitation but when no theory of exploitation without gaping holes could be developed, the analytical Marxists shifted to egalitarianism ala Rawls.
Back when I was an undergraduate, during the final years of the cold war, by far the most exciting thing going on in political philosophy was the powerful resurgence of Marxism in the English-speaking world. Most of this work was being done under the banner of “analytical Marxism” (aka “no-bullshit Marxism”), following the publication of Gerald Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (and his subsequent elevation to the Chichele Professorship in Social and Political Philosophy at Oxford). Meanwhile in Germany, Jürgen Habermas’s incredibly compact Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus promised to reinvigorate Marx’s analysis of capitalist crises in the language of contemporary systems theory. It was an exciting time to be a young radical. One could say, without exaggeration, that many of the smartest and most important people working in political philosophy were Marxists of some description.
So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals. Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs, John Roemer, Allen Buchanan, and Jon Elster – as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School like Habermas, wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as “liberal egalitarianism.” Of course, this was not a capitulation to the old-fashioned “classical liberalism” of the 19th century, it was rather a defection to the style of modern liberalism that found its canonical expression in the work of John Rawls.
If one felt like putting the point polemically, one might say that the “no-bullshit” Marxists, after having removed all of the bullshit from Marxism, discovered that there was nothing left but liberalism.
That’s the opening. Read the whole thing.
What should I ask Musa al-Gharbi?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.
Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He is a columnist for The Guardian and his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other publications.
I am a big fan of his forthcoming book We Have Never Been Woke, which I have blurbed. Here is Musa’s home page, do read his bio. Here is Musa on Twitter.
So what should I ask?
Jake Seliger is Dead
We all knew it was coming but it’s no less painful to learn that Jake Seliger has died. I never met Jake in person but we were pen pals? email pals? blog friends? for well over a decade. We shared an interest in speeding up drug research and development, including FDA deregulation, an interest which long preceded Jake’s cancer diagnosis. But mostly I thought he was a great writer and human being. His essays were always thoughtful and without pretense or sentimentality.
Jake’s wife, Bess Stillman is now 7 months pregnant with their daughter. Bess is an ER physician and a remarkable woman. Here is an interview with her on the infuriating difficulty of getting a patient enrolled in a clinical trial in the United States. Here is How to Say It, her gripping telling on the Moth Radio hour of how she tells people their loved ones have died. If you wonder about the title of this post, that is why. Do read How to Let Go on her last days with Jake. Sigh.
Here is Jake:
One virtue of a prolonged end is that I feel like I’ve said everything I have to say. I don’ t know that I have a favorite, but I’m fond of “I know what happens to me after I die, but what about those left behind?” Same with “How do we evaluate our lives, at the end? What counts, what matters?” I’m tempted to keep citing others, but if you scroll down into the archives you will find them. I meant to turn these essays into a memoir, but that is a project never to be completed by me. Bess assures me that she’s going to complete the project and do her best to get it published. We’ve created so much together in the process of building our life, and Bess says that doesn’t need to stop just because I’m not physically here, and that putting both our baby and our book into the world gives her immediate future the purpose that she’ll badly need.
Though having my life cut short by cancer is horrible, I’ve still in many ways been lucky. Most people never find the person who completes them, I think, and I have. I’ve been helped so much. Numerous oncologists have gone above and beyond. Many people, friends and strangers, have asked if there is anything they can do to help. The #1 thing is to support Bess and our soon-to-be-born daughter, Athena, whatever “support” may mean—the most obvious way is the Go Fund Me, as any remaining funds will go to Athena. I wish she could grow up with her father, but that is not an option. Being a single mom is hard;[1] growing up without a parent is hard; I cannot see what Athena’s future holds, except that I think and hope it will be bright, even though I will not be in it, save for the ways in which friends and family promise to keep me alive for her.
My excellent Conversation with Paul Bloom
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Together Paul and Tyler explore whether psychologists understand day-to-day human behavior any better than normal folk, how babies can tell if you’re a jerk, at what age children have the capacity to believe in God, why the trend in religion is toward monotheism, the morality of getting paid to strangle cats, whether disgust should be built into LLMs, the possibilities of AI therapists, the best test for a theory of mind, why people overestimate Paul’s (and Tyler’s) intelligence, why flattery is undersupplied, why we should train flattery and tax empathy, Carl Jung, Big Five personality theory, Principles of Psychology by William James, the social psychology of the Hebrew Bible, his most successful unusual work habit, what he’ll work on next, and more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: I have some questions about intelligence for you. If we think of large language models, should we let them feel disgust so that they avoid left-wing bias?
BLOOM: [laughs] Why would disgust make them avoid left-wing bias?
COWEN: Maybe we’re not sure it would, but there are various claims in the literature that for people on the right, disgust is a more fundamental emotion, and that a greater capacity to feel disgust encourages people in some ways to be more socially conservative. Debatable, but I don’t think it’s a crazy view. So, if you build LLMs, and you give them, say, a lot of empathy and not much or any disgust, you’re going to get left-leaning LLMs, which you might say, “Well, that was my goal.” But obviously, not everyone will accept that conclusion either.
BLOOM: I wouldn’t want woke LLMs. I think there’s a lot in extreme —
COWEN: You’ve got them, of course.
BLOOM: I’ve got them. I think Gemini is the one, if I wanted to go — the woke LLM of choice. Because I think the doctrine called wokeness leads to a lot of moral problems and makes the world worse in certain ways, but I wouldn’t mind left-wing LLMs.
In fact, I’m not a fan of disgust. You’re right that disgust is often associated with right-wing, but in the very worst instantiation of it. Disgust is what drives hatred towards gay people. It involves hatred of interracial marriage, the exclusion of immigrants, the exclusion of other races. If there’s one emotion I would take away from people, it would be disgust, at least disgust in the moral realm. They could keep their disgust towards rotten food and that sort of thing. That’s the one thing I wouldn’t put into LLMs. I’d rather put anger, pity, gratitude. Disgust is the one thing I’d keep away.
COWEN: So, you wouldn’t just cut back on it at the margin. You would just take disgust out of people if you could?
And:
COWEN: I think at the margin, I’ve moved against empathy more being a podcast host, that I’ll ask a question —
BLOOM: Wait. Why being a podcast host?
COWEN: Well, I’ll ask a question, and a lot of guests think it’s high status simply to signal empathy rather than giving a substantive answer. The signaling-empathy answers I find quite uninteresting, and I think a lot of my listeners do, too. Yet people will just keep on doing this, and I get frustrated. Then I think, “Well, Tyler, you should turn a bit more against empathy for this reason.” And I think that’s correct.
Paul cannot be blamed for doing that, however. So substantive, interesting, and entertaining throughout.
MR and Guinea (Conakry), a short history (from my email)
I will not double indent:
“Dear Tyler,
I am a great fan. I am currently focused on Guinea (Conakry) and wondered what you might have posted about the country over the years. My search for “Guinea” in Marginal Revolution results in 50 posts:
- In 13 of them you are referring to “guinea pigs”.
- In 9 of them you are referring to “Papua New Guinea”.
- In 9 you refer to “Equatorial Guinea”.
- In 5 of there is no explicit mention of Guinea (I assume the reference to Guinea can be found if one follows the links?)
- In 4 you refer to “Guinea Bissau”.
- In 4 you refer to “Guinea”, the country of that name with capital in Conakry
- In 3 the reference is to the broader region (Gulf of Guinea, etc).
- One reference to the island of “New Guinea”.
- One reference to the “guinea worm”.
- One reference to “guineas” as in the coins.
Of the references to the country of Guinea, one refers to Bembeya Jazz (good one!), another to press coverage from that country on the DSK affair in 2011, one mentions Guinea as one of the countries of origin for Africans in Guangzhou, and a final one appropriately mentions it on the topic of “Wikipedia knowledge deserts”.
None of these is a dedicated post to the country, something each of the other Guineas does enjoy on Marginal Revolution. I wondered if you might consider redressing the balance?
If it helps, here I write for the Centre for African Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University on how Asian demand, investment and policies is driving a mining boom in Guinea. Guinea is posed to be one of the top 2 growing economies in the world over the next five years on the back of the $20 billion Simandou iron ore mining project. You heard it here first!
Cordialement,
Bernabé Sánchez”
Dark oxygen: jubiliant for others, cry for yourself and your kin
To summarize the new results:
An international team of researchers recently discovered that oxygen is being made by potato-shaped metallic nodules deep under the surface of the Pacific Ocean. In July, their findings, which throw into dispute the concepts of oxygen production, were published in the Nature Geoscience jonal. The discovery could lead to a reconsideration of the origins of complex life on Earth.
The findings from a team of researchers led by Professor Andrew Sweetman at the U.K.’s Scottish Association for Marine Science, show that oxygen is being produced at around 4,000 metres below the surface of the ocean in complete darkness. This contradicts previous scientific assumptions that only living organisms, including plants and algae, can use energy to create oxygen through photosynthesis, using sunlight for the reaction.
As Julian Gough suggests, most life probably is on icy moons. This means a lot more life! Over a time slice, it could mean billions of additional lives out there. Did you pop up the champagne?
The bad news is that the chance that Robin Hanson’s “Great Filter” lies behind us is somewhat smaller. Which boosts the chance that it may lie in our near future. Did you pull out the tissues?
On net, did this news change your mood at all? Why or why not?