Category: Uncategorized
The great Brian Wilson has passed from the scene
One of the true all-time greats. Try this one too. And here is the NYT obituary.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Jon Hartley on inferring multipliers from share price data.
2. Kevin Kelly’s calendar of Asian festivals.
3. Whale vowels are like human vowels? This link too.
4. Economic task replacement potential. And I asked o3 pro to do an 800-word column as I would write it. Not perfect, for instance there is one clear error about unemployment rates, but in general very good and with some touch-up better than what I would have written. It is not hard to do additional rounds and edit/improve, but that is the one shot result.
5. Is Bhattacharya really this dense about autism and autism research?
Equity sentences to ponder
Relative to prior observational methods, the estimates suggest a substantial role for amenity substitution in explaining the gender pay gap—accounting for roughly two-thirds of the observed gap—and little role for amenities in explaining inequalities by race or parent background.
That is from a new paper by Alex Bell, via Daniel.
Are LLMs overconfident? (just like humans)
Can LLMs accurately adjust their confidence when facing opposition? Building on previous studies measuring calibration on static fact-based question-answering tasks, we evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in a dynamic, adversarial debate setting, uniquely combining two realistic factors: (a) a multi-turn format requiring models to update beliefs as new information emerges, and (b) a zero-sum structure to control for task-related uncertainty, since mutual high-confidence claims imply systematic overconfidence. We organized 60 three-round policy debates among ten state-of-the-art LLMs, with models privately rating their confidence (0-100) in winning after each round. We observed five concerning patterns: (1) Systematic overconfidence: models began debates with average initial confidence of 72.9% vs. a rational 50% baseline. (2) Confidence escalation: rather than reducing confidence as debates progressed, debaters increased their win probabilities, averaging 83% by the final round. (3) Mutual overestimation: in 61.7% of debates, both sides simultaneously claimed >=75% probability of victory, a logical impossibility. (4) Persistent self-debate bias: models debating identical copies increased confidence from 64.1% to 75.2%; even when explicitly informed their chance of winning was exactly 50%, confidence still rose (from 50.0% to 57.1%). (5) Misaligned private reasoning: models’ private scratchpad thoughts sometimes differed from their public confidence ratings, raising concerns about faithfulness of chain-of-thought reasoning. These results suggest LLMs lack the ability to accurately self-assess or update their beliefs in dynamic, multi-turn tasks; a major concern as LLMs are now increasingly deployed without careful review in assistant and agentic roles.
That is by Pradyumna Shyama Prasad and Minh Nhat Nguyen. Here is the associated X thread. Here is my earlier paper with Robin Hanson.
o3 pro
It is very, very good. Hallucinates far less than other models. Can solve economics problems that o3 cannot. It can be slow, but that is what we have Twitter scrolling for, right? While we are waiting for o3 pro to answer a query we can read about…o3 pro.
Sam Altman comments on his blog. And Nabeel comments.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Mapping the power elite in Greenland.
2. Did “tanking” work for the 76ers?
3. Scott Sumner on the demise of the penny.
4. Claims from Nievas and Piketty: “A 20% increase in commodities prices from 1970 to 2025 period – very moderate compared to the very low market exchange rates of many global South countries – could turn Sub-Saharan Africa into a larger creditor than East Asia by 2025.” Here are some comments.
5. Extremely life-like dolls in the culture that is Brazil (NYT). Ross Douthat, telephone!
6. Justin Sandefur estimates the foreign lives costs of proposed budgetary changes to foreign aid. Here is a redux of my 2023 column on PEPFAR.
Racial Disparities in Mortality by Sex, Age, and Cause of Death
Racial differences in mortality are large, persistent and likely caused, at least in part, by racism. While the causal pathways linking racism to mortality are conceptually well defined, empirical evidence to support causal claims related to its effect on health is incomplete. In this study, we provide a unique set of facts about racial disparities in mortality that all theories of racism and health need to confront to be convincing. We measure racial disparities in mortality between ages 40 and 80 for both males and females and for several causes of death and, measure how those disparities change with age. Estimates indicate that racial disparities in mortality grow with age but at a decreasing rate. Estimates also indicate that the source of racial disparities in mortality changes with age, sex and cause of death. For men in their fifties, racial disparities in mortality are primarily caused by disparities in deaths due to external causes. For both sexes, it is racial disparities in death from healthcare amenable causes that are the main cause of racial disparities in mortality between ages 55 and 75. Notably, racial disparities in cancer and other causes of death are relatively small even though these causes of death account for over half of all deaths. Adjusting for economic resources and health largely eliminate racial disparities in mortality at all ages and the mediating effect of these factors grows with age. The pattern of results suggests that, to the extent that racism influences health, it is primarily through racism’s effect on investments to treat healthcare amenable diseases that cause racial disparities in mortality.
In other words, much of the discourse on this topic is quite off. That is from a new NBER working paper by Robert Kaestner, Anuj Gangopadhyaya, and Cuiping Schiman.
The great Sly Stone has passed away
There is indeed a riot going on, do listen to the whole album, one of the very best. Here is a NYT obituary.
Monday assorted links
1. The motherhood mental health advantage.
2. “Cape Town residential property prices have risen by 160% since the start of 2010.” (FT)
3. Can taking photos impair your memories of events? (2021)
4. Short Greg Brockman video on the checks and balances in our AI future.
5. Criticism of the capabilities of AI reasoning models. And Kevin Bryan responds. And from Rohit.
7. Jennifer Burns reviews the new William F. Buckley biography (NYT).
Early North America was more agricultural than we had thought?
A new study has found that a thickly forested sliver of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is the most complete ancient agricultural location in the eastern United States. The Sixty Islands archaeological site is recognized as the ancestral home of the Menominee Nation. Known to the members of the tribe as Anaem Omot (Dog’s Belly), the area is a destination of pilgrimage, where remains of the settlement date to as far back as 8,000 B.C.
Located along a two-mile stretch of the Menominee River, Sixty Islands is defined by its cold temperatures, poor soil quality and short growing season. Although the land has long been considered unsuitable for farming, an academic paper published on Thursday in the journal Science revealed that the Menominee’s forbears cultivated vast fields of corn and potentially other crops there.
Here is more from the New York Times. The data came from drone-based LIDAR, which has been possible for only a few years. Most likely, much of the early history of the New World will need to be rewritten, as similar efforts are being pursued elsewhere.
The wisdom of Ezra Klein
What both forms of populism share is a tendency to treat virtue as a fixed property of groups and policy as a way of redistributing power from the disfavored to the favored. When I said we needed “a liberalism that builds,” David Dayen, the editor of The American Prospect, responded that “we need a liberalism that builds power” and that the way to get it is for the government “actively supporting the very groups that have been left out of past economic transitions, building the necessary coalition for long-term transformation.”
Every policy, in this telling, has two goals. One is the goal of the policy or the project; perhaps you’re trying to decarbonize the economy or build affordable housing or increase competition in the market for hearing aids. But the other is the redistribution of power among groups: Does this policy leave unions stronger or weaker? Environmental justice groups? Corporations?
Under the populist theory of power, bad policy can be — and often is — justified as good politics. In California, the California Environmental Quality Act is defended by unions that use it to “greenmail” all manner of projects. CEQA is meant to protect the environment, but the threat of unending litigation can be used to win non-environmental concessions on virtually any building project in California.
Here is the full NYT piece, interesting throughout, for instance:
My view of power is more classically liberal. In his book “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” Edmund Fawcett describes it neatly: “Human power was implacable. It could never be relied on to behave well. Whether political, economic or social, superior power of some people over others tended inevitably to arbitrariness and domination unless resisted and checked.”
Worth a ponder.
Sunday assorted links
1. “Particulate matter local air pollution from road transport is much less due to petrol exhaust than most people think. More is due to brake, tyre, and road wear.” There is some disputation going on here, but at the very least there is something directionally correct in this point.
2. Milei gives Hayek’s Fatal Conceit to the Pope.
3. Walton heirs to start a new STEM-focused university in Arkansas.
4. Mathematicians encounter o4-mini.
5. What will happen to the federal GSA art collection? (NYT…I am, by the way, happy to auction it off).
Ireland fact of the day
Ireland’s population are the most educated in the world — with 52.4% (1.8million) of the population aged between 25-64 having a bachelor’s degree or higher.
While, of course, the whole numbers of people with bachelors degrees may be higher in countries with a higher number of people, percentage wise Ireland is the most educated; beating out countries such as Switzerland (46%), Singapore (45%), Belgium (44.1%) and the UK (43.6%) who round out the top five.
Here is the link. That would not have been an obvious prediction say in the 1970s. Here is o3 on how this came about.
Not hard to geoguess this location…
Of course it is not in the state of Virginia…