Category: The Arts
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?
My Conversation with the excellent Ami Vitale
Here is the audio, visual, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Ami Vitale is a renowned National Geographic photographer and documentarian with a deep commitment to wildlife conservation and environmental education. Her work, spanning over a hundred countries, includes spending a decade as a conflict photographer in places like Kosovo, Gaza, and Kashmir.
She joined Tyler to discuss why we should stay scary to pandas, whether we should bring back extinct species, the success of Kenyan wildlife management, the mental cost of a decade photographing war, what she thinks of the transition from film to digital, the ethical issues raised by Afghan Girl, the future of National Geographic, the heuristic guiding of where she’ll travel next, what she looks for in a young photographer, her next project, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: As you probably know, there’s a long-standing and recurring set of debates between animal welfare advocates and environmentalists. The animal welfare advocates typically have less sympathy for the predators because they, in turn, kill other animals. The environmentalists are more likely to think we should, in some way, leave nature alone as much as possible. Where do you stand on that debate?
VITALE: It depends. It’s hard to make a general sweeping statement on this because in some cases, I think that we do have to get involved. Also, the fact is, it’s humans in most cases who have really impacted the environment, and we do need to get engaged and work to restore that balance. I really fall on both sides of this. I will say, I do think that is, in some cases, what differentiates us because, as human beings, we have to kill to survive. Maybe that is where this — I feel like every story I work on has a different answer. Really, I don’t know. It depends what the situation is. Should we bring animals back to landscapes where they have not existed for millions of years? I fall in the line of no. Maybe I’m taking this in a totally different direction, but it’s really complicated, and there’s not one easy answer.
And:
COWEN: As you know, there are now social networks everywhere, for quite a while. Images everywhere, even before Midjourney. There are so many images that people are looking at. How does that change how you compose or think about photos?
VITALE: Well, it doesn’t at all. My job is to tell stories with images, and not just with images. My job as a storyteller — that has not changed. Nothing has changed in the sense of, we need more great storytellers, visual storytellers. With all of those social media, I think people are bored with just beautiful images. Or sometimes it feels like advertising, and it doesn’t captivate me.
I look for a story and image, and I am just going to continue doing what I do because I think people are hungry for it. They want to know who is really going deep on stories and who they can trust. I think that that has never gone away, and it will never go away.
I am very happy to have guests who do things that not everyone else’s guests do.
I appear with Nicolas Bejarano on the Art Salon podcast
The Spotify and other links are here, mostly we discuss economics of the arts and thus this differs from many of my recent podcasts.
What should I ask Benjamin Moser?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is one outdated bit from his home page:
Benjamin Moser was born in Houston. He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, and his latest book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, won the Pulitzer Prize.
I am a big fan of his new book on the Dutch painters, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with Dutch Masters. He lives in Utrecht and is also an expert on Brazil. Here is his Wikipedia page. Here are other assorted writings by him.
So what should I ask him?
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.
Miss Information
Miss America, Miss United States and Miss USA are three different people.
2023 CWT retrospective episode
Here is the link, here is the episode summary:
On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year in the show and more, including the most popular and underrated episodes, the origins of the show as an occasional event series, the most difficult guests to prep for, the story behind EconGOAT.AI, Tyler’s favorite podcast appearance of the year, and his evolving LLM-powered production function. They also answer listener questions and conclude with an assessment of Tyler’s top pop culture recommendations from 2013 across movies, music, and books.
And one excerpt:
COWEN: That’s a unique experience. You have a chance to do Chomsky. Maybe you don’t even want to do it, but you feel, “If I don’t do it, I’ll regret not having done it.” Just like we didn’t get to chat with Charlie Munger in time, though he’s far more, I would say, closer to truth than Chomsky is.
I thought half of Chomsky was quite good, and the other half was beyond terrible, but that’s okay. People, I think, wanted to gawk at it in some manner. They had this picture — what’s it like, Tyler talking with Chomsky? Then they get to see it and maybe recoil, but that’s what they came for, like a horror movie.
HOLMES: The engagement on the Chomsky episode was very good. Some people on MR were saying, “I turned it off. I couldn’t listen to it.” But actually, most people listened to it. It did, actually, probably better than average in terms of engagement, in terms of how much of the episode, on average, people listen to.
COWEN: How can you turn it off? What does that say about you? Were you surprised? You thought that Chomsky had become George Stigler or something? No.
Fun and interesting throughout. If you are wondering, the most popular episode of the year, by far, was with Paul Graham.
The new *Pedro Páramo* translation
By Juan Rulfo, first published in 1955. The previous English-language translation was abysmal, so this is perhaps the least read piece of truly great world literature? In the English-speaking world at least. It took me a long time and a lot of effort to read this short novel in Spanish. The vocabulary is not difficult, it is simply difficult in any language to know exactly what is going on. What exactly are the borders between the living and the dead, for instance? Which character is doing what? What is Rulfo telling us about Dante? As first-tier literature should, it strains our capabilities to the utmost. A knowledge of rural Mexico helps, for sure.
García Márquez compared the work to that of Sophocles in import. Carlos Fuentes called it “the essential Mexican novel.” For me it is in the top 25 novels of all time. Susan Sontag thought it was one of the essential works of 20th century literature.
The new Douglas J. Weatherford translation is probably as good as it is going to get. The work is intrinsically difficult to translate, so try the Spanish if you can, or read the two jointly together, switching back and forth. And as they like to say in Haiti, “if you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on.”
Recommended, essential, and kudos to Weatherford for making this available. I’ve addended it to my favorite fiction of 2023 list.
Do I want the Wizards and Capitols to move to Virginia?
No, in short. To be clear, I don’t have any personal NIMBY stake in this, as the new site in Alexandria is about as far away from my home as the old site downtown. The bad news is that there are fewer complementary visits attached to the new site. Under the current regime, the Museum of American Art — which is pretty good — is a mere block away. The National Gallery is walking distance. How about all those meeting opportunities in DC? So you can combine a game visit with many other good activities. I’ll even accept a higher risk of crime for this benefit. What comparable opportunities might we expect from Potomac Landing in Alexandria, VA? A bunch of overpriced corporate-branded taverns nearby? Whom do you think you can meet for that early dinner, before going to the game?
It is also easy to leave the current site and make a clean getaway. You could walk for five or six blocks and catch an Uber without hindrance. Or you could park your car in a garage ten blocks away and drive home without hassles, or needing to deal with post-game traffic. (And is the Metro still running?) A concert or sports venue can be evaluated by a simple rule: if your only options for leaving are the ones they have planned for you, it will be a bad experience.
Ugh. And I haven’t even gone into the well-known bipartisan reality that sports stadium subsidies are inefficient, inegalitarian, and full of rent-seeking opportunities. These have been described as possibly the largest stadium subsidies ever.
At a deeper level, I think it is also better for NoVa if the DC downtown does not collapse altogether. But again you don’t have to get into those points. Even if you could move the stadium at zero cost, the new venue would not create a nominally better experience.
Milei in action
It only took a day into his term as Argentina’s new president for Javier Milei to get rid of the Ministry of Culture. Milei was inaugurated on 10 December, and the following day, the boisterously libertarian economist and former television commentator fulfilled his campaign promise with typical bravado. Also on the chopping block—or, rather, in the path of his chainsaw, which Milei carried throughout his campaign to symbolise his intent to slash government spending—was the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity.
Several other ministries were downsized and recombined into new entities. The Ministry of Social Development, Ministry of Education and Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security will be pared down into a newly formed Ministry of Human Capital, headed by the former TV producer Sandra Pettovello. Meanwhile, the Ministries of Public Works, Transportation, Energy, Mining and Communications will merge into a new Ministry of Infrastructure. (It appears that the Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity will be completely dissolved.)
Here is the full story. Whether or not you favor a Ministry of the Arts in the abstract, I don’t think you should during a fiscal crisis and hyperinflation…
Overcoming Baumol
One way to overcome the Baumol effect is to replace labor with capital. AI and robots are making that possible. Here’s a clip of the Carmelite Monks of Wyoming who are building a monastery in the Gothic style using CNC machines:
CNC machines and robots have unlocked the ability to relatively quickly carve the intense details of a Gothic church. Ornate pieces that used to take months for a skilled carver, now can be accomplished in a matter of days. Instead of cutting out the beauty, using the excuse that it takes too long, thus doesn’t fit into the budget, modern technology can be used to make true Gothic in all its beauty a reality again today.
Bring back the beauty!
My excellent Conversation with John Gray
I had been wanting to do this one for a while, and now it exists. Here is the audio and transcript, here is the episode summary:
Tyler and John sat down to discuss his latest book, including who he thinks will carry on his work, what young people should learn if liberalism is dead, whether modern physics allows for true atheism, what in Eastern Orthodoxy attracts him, the benefits of pessimism, what philanthropic cause he’d invest a billion dollars in, under what circumstances he’d sacrifice his life, what he makes of UFOs, the current renaissance in film and books, whether Monty Python is still funny, how Herman Melville influenced him, who first spotted his talent, his most unusual work habit, what he’ll do next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Do you think that being pessimistic gives you pleasure? Or what’s the return in it from a purely pragmatic point of view?
GRAY: You are well prepared for events. You don’t expect —
COWEN: It’s a preemption, right? You become addicted to preempting bad news with pessimism.
GRAY: No, no. When something comes along which contradicts my expectations, I’m pleasantly surprised. I get pleasant surprises. Whereas, if you are an adamant optimist, you must be in torment every time you turn the news on because the same old follies, the same old crimes, the same old atrocities, the same old hatreds just repeat themselves over and over again. I’m not surprised by that at all. That’s like the weather. It’s like living in a science fiction environment in which it rains nearly all of the time, but from time to time it stops and there’s beautiful sunlight.
If you think that basically there is beautiful sunlight all the time, but you’re just living in a small patch of it, most of your life will be spent in frustration. If you think the other way around, as I do, your life will be peppered, speckled with moments in which what you expect doesn’t happen, but something better happens.
COWEN: Why can’t one just build things and be resiliently optimistic in a pragmatic, cautionary sense, and take comfort in the fact that you would rather have the problems of the world today than, say, the problems of the world in the year 1000? It’s not absolute optimism where you attach to the mood qua mood, but you simply want to do things and draw a positive energy from that, and it’s self-reinforcing. Why isn’t that a better view than what you’re calling pessimism?
And:
COWEN: Under what circumstances would you be willing to sacrifice your life? Or for what?
GRAY: Not for humanity, that’s for sure.
Recommended, interesting throughout. John is one of the smartest and best read thinkers and writers. He even has an answer ready for why he isn’t short the market. And don’t forget John’s new book — I read all of them — New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism.
A Tax Puzzle
Analyze the following four images. For each image, guess what is being taxed. Use only the information in the image.
FYI ChatGPT was not able to solve this question directly, although it was very good at analyzing what was distinctive or odd about each image and thus suggesting some possible answers.
Hat tip: Lionel Page, via Shruti Rajagopalan, includes answers and some variants.
My Conversation with the excellent Brian Koppelman
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Brian Koppelman is a writer, director, and producer known for his work on films like Rounders and Solitary Man, the hit TV show Billions, and his podcast The Moment, which explores pivotal moments in creative careers.
Tyler and Brian sat down to discuss why TV wasn’t good for so long, whether he wants viewers to binge his shows, how he’d redesign movie theaters, why some smart people appreciate film and others don’t, which Spielberg movie and Murakami book is under appreciated, a surprising fact about poker, whether Jalen Brunson is overrated or underrated, Manhattan food tips, who he’d want to go on a three-day retreat with, whether movies are too long, how happy people are in show business, his unmade dream projects, the next thing he’ll learn about, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Thank you. I have some very simple questions for you about the history of television to start with. I grew up in the 1970s and I’ve long wondered, “Why was TV so bad for so long before the so-called Golden Age?” Maybe you could date that to the 90s or the noughties, but why weren’t shows in the 70s and 80s better than they were? Would you challenge that premise?
KOPPELMAN: Well, I also grew up in the ’70s. I was born in ’66. I’m not sure that the hypothesis that it was bad is correct. It certainly wasn’t, in general, as an art form, operating on the level that cinema was operating on or the level that music, in part, was operating on during that time.
But if we look at, say, children’s television, I could argue that Jim Henson and Sesame Street, for what it was and aimed at what it was aimed at, was as important as any television that’s on today. I would say that Jim Henson moved the art form forward. He figured out a use case for TV that hadn’t really been done before, and he created a way of thinking about the medium that was really different.
Then, look, Hill Street Blues shows up in the ’80s and, I think, figures out how to use certain techniques of theater and cinema and novels to tell these TV stories. Like any other business, when that started to connect, then people in the business started to become aware of what was possible.
Yes, it was a function of three channels, to answer your question. Yes, in the main, of course, TV was worse. No doubt about it, but there were high points. I think those high points pointed the way toward the high points that came later. For me, NYPD Blue is the network show that’s fully on the level of any of these shows that came after. David Milch cut his teeth on Hill Street Blues.
There’s a wonderful book by Brett Martin, called Difficult Men, that’s about showrunners. It starts, in a way, with Bochco and Milch in that time period. It’s a great look into how this idea of showrunners created modern television. HBO needing something, all these business reasons underneath it, but how people who came up through, originally, Hill Street were able to go on and start this revolution.
COWEN: In your view, how good, really, was I Love Lucy? Is it just a few memorable moments, like Vitameatavegamin? Or is it actually a show where it’d be good episode after good episode, like The Sopranos?
And from Brian:
I don’t know Wes Anderson. I don’t know him, but I met him once. I love his movies, and I love that his movies are 90 minutes. The one time I met him, we were screening a film. He invited some people who happened to be in town, who he knew were film people, so I got to watch a movie with him. Afterwards, we were just talking about movies, and I said, “These movies of yours — they are 90 minutes,” and he said, “Yes. I found that the concepts I’m interested in don’t really support a journey that lasts longer than that.” He’s an incredibly disciplined filmmaker. I was like, “That makes total sense.”
Recommended, interesting and entertaining throughout.
Behavioral Economics and GPT-4: From William Shakespeare to Elena Ferrante
There is a new paper on LLMs by Gabriel Abrams, here is the abstract:
We prompted GPT-4 (a large language model) to play the Dictator game, a classic behavioral economics experiment, as 148 literary fictional characters from the 17th century to the 21st century.
Of literary interest, this paper analyzed character selfishness by century, the relative frequency of literary character personality traits, and the average valence of these traits. The paper also analyzed character gender differences in selfishness.
From an economics/AI perspective, this paper generates specific and quantifiable Turing tests which the model passed for zero price effect, lack of spitefulness and altruism, and failed for human sensitivity to relative ordinal position and price elasticity (elasticity is significantly lower than humans). Model updates from March to August 2023 had relatively minor impacts on Turing test outcomes.
There is a general and mainly monotonic decrease in selfish behavior over time in literary characters. 50% of the decisions of characters from the 17th century are selfish compared to just 19% of the decisions of characters from the 21st century. Overall, humans exhibited much more selfish behavior than AI characters, with 51% of human decisions being selfish compared to 32% of decisions made by AI characters.
Historical literary characters have a surprisingly strong net positive valence across 2,785 personality traits generated by GPT-4 (3.2X more positive than negative). However, valence varied significantly across centuries. The most positive century, in terms of personality traits, was the 21st — over 10X the ratio of positive to negative traits. The least positive century was the 17th at just 1.8X. “Empathetic,” “fair” and “selfless,” were the most overweight traits in the 20th century. Conversely, “manipulative,” “ambitious” and “ruthless” were the most overweight traits in the 17th century.
Male characters were more selfish than female characters: 35% of male decisions were selfish compared to just 24% for female characters. The skew was highest in the 17th century where selfish decisions for male and female were 62% and 20% respectively.
This analysis offers a specific and quantifiable partial Turing test. In a few ways, the model is remarkably human-like; The key human-like characteristics are the zero price effect, lack of spitefulness and altruism. However, in other ways, GPT-4 reflects unusual or inhuman preferences. The model does not appear to have human sensitivity to relative ordinal position and has significantly lower price elasticity than humans.
Model updates in GPT-4 have made it slightly more sensitive to ordinal value, but not more selfish. The model shows preference consistency across model runs for each character with respect to selfishness.
To which journal might you advise him to send this paper?