Category: Uncategorized
Thursday assorted links
1. There is massive synaptic pruning between birth and adulthood.
2. Some major city populations from 1854.
3. From Samuel Hammond: “The AI boom is doubly upsetting to progressive economic commentators because it a) shows “financialization” was largely a macro story that eventually solved itself, and b) the boom is being driven by AI rather than their hoped-for “green transition”.” Plus it shows the internet and social media really were worth it, and that many tech companies are run by geniuses not superficial idiots.
4. The safety of mRNA vaccines.
5. Do the optimistic live longer?
6. How many people have ever lived in the United States? And what percentage of them are living here now?
7. What is going on with SpudCell? (NYT).
Is Alexander Calder the great American artist?
I am not ready to make this claim, but I wondered this after seeing the marvelous exhibit at Fondation Vuitton. To Calder’s credit:
1. His work is both beautiful and deep. It also can be fun. Unlike many other high-status artists, most Americans like or could like his work.
2. It is immediately recognizable and the body of work has a coherence as a whole.
3. He invented a new form — the mobile — and showed it could be art.
4. His works have iconic placement in many major American cities, namely Chicago, Grand Rapids, New York, Los Angeles, Cambridge, Philadelphia, Houston, Minneapolis, Seattle, and a bunch more. Who else can match that list?
5. He worked in multiple genres with great success, including not just sculpture (of various kinds, including wire sculpture and bronze sculpture) but also painting, works on paper, and jewelry (!). He worked with metal and wood and wire and string in his sculptures. The exhibit is wonderful in showing all this.
6. He built things, a very American endeavor, and he trained as a mechanical engineer. Mobility is also a very American idea.
7. He lived during the major period of American growth and hegemony, namely 1898-1976, very American years to have been on the scene.
I would note that most people think first of his large installations, which to me are his least interesting works. The small sculptures I admire the most? In this regard he remains underrated.
Who else are possible candidates for this designation? A while back Jasper Johns might have been an obvious leader for the title, and he remains in contention. But perhaps it is all a tad too formal and serious?
Rothko and Pollock are too one-dimensional, no matter how much you may admire the dimension. The Hudson River School does not boil down easily enough to a single artist, plus it is mainly just painting. Winslow Homer is a possibility. Warhol is another candidate, as his work is both seminal and “very American,” but currently it feels overexposed? (I am not anti-Warhol but perhaps his influence peaked some while ago.) Roy Lichtenstein did very well in sculpture as well as painting and prints, and he is in the running as well.
But I no longer think Calder is such a crazy choice for this designation. Do go see the show! The people we saw the show with were amazed at how much they had underrated his depth, breadth, and quality.
How to ask for help from a stranger
The next heuristic is to make your request easy to accept. Making something easy to accept largely is about reducing the cost of acceptance. One clear kind of cost is the magnitude. Do ask someone for twenty minutes of their time, but don’t ask them to read your five-hundred-page manuscript in a week. Another is to make it specific: asking for a resource to start with is better than “can I pick your brain?”. When you’ve made your request, make it low friction for them. If you’re asking for an introduction, write a blurb about yourself which they can forward. If you have a question, ask it in writing rather than over a call. And last on cost, make your ask bounded. Don’t ask for recurring obligations like being your mentor for your whole life, but do keep it limited to asking them to read a blog post. If that instance goes well, they’ll gladly read more.
My last heuristic is stranger: make it easy to say no. You might think that the worst outcome is a no, but the worst outcome is a pressured, begrudging yes. Your coercion will have poisoned your relationship with this person while you feel the false glow of a hard-won victory. A person who helps you with gritted teeth is one who will never help you again. And even then, the help will be a half-hearted effort to get rid of the obligation you manufactured. By contrast, help freely given is effortless, the way you’d hold the door open for someone. Help willingly given keeps your conscience clear, free from the burden of having pressured someone. And help, when given from the heart, is the foundation of a relationship where both of you contribute to what you’re building.
Here is more from Pradyumna Prasad.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Florida drivers speed up after a close NFL home team loss. No such comparable effect for the NBA.
3. Ezra Klein and Chris Rufo (NYT).
4. Generating human eggs from stem cells?
5. AI to predict human chess moves?
7. Anthropic on the reconstruction of Fable 5. And Alex Stamos comments.
Civilian supersonic flights are being legalized in the U.S.
For too long, outdated rules based on old technology held back American aerospace innovation. Now, we are updating those rules for the first time since the 1970s. Today @USDOT announced a new proposal to enable civil supersonic flight by replacing speed limits with noise limits, ushering in a new era of safer, quieter, and faster air travel for all Americans.
That is from Michael Kratsios. Here is how the 1973 ban first came about. More details will be forthcoming, here is one concern from Eli.
What I’ve been reading
1. Elizabeth Buchanan, So You Want to Own Greenland? A useful and dispassionate overview of the relevant history and issues. The author is from Australia. I had not known that Norway unilaterally claimed parts of eastern Greenland in the early 1930s, though gave it back to Denmark following a Hague adjudication and ruling.
2. Andrea Wulf, The Traveler: One Man’s Epic Quest for Discover Our Shared Humanity. This book meets her usual high standards. In this case the traveler is George Foster, who sailed with Cook to the South Seas and had relatively sympathetic attitudes toward the indigenous peoples there.
3. James Hawes, The Shortest History of Ireland. From a useful series, even if some of the claims are wrong and the judgments intemperate. Such books force you to think through your own views and interpretations, they serve as refreshers for the basic history, and they do give you conceptual frameworks of a sort. You are more likely to remember the core histories when you read books like this, but caution typically is in order as well.
4. Simon Warrack, Monumental: Great Buildings of the World Through the Hands and Eyes of a Stonemason. An engaging book about the beauties of stonemasonry, with case studies of Venice, Angkor Wat, Lalibela, Zimbabwe and other locales.
5. Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light. Yup. “Earth is long since dead. On a colony planet, a band of men has gained control of technology, made themselves immortal, and now rule their world as gods of the Hindu pantheon.” First published in 1967.
Tuesday assorted links
Prediction markets paragraphs to ponder
The oracle is an elaborate Web 3.0 contraption that combines cryptocurrency, voting and game theory in its goal to produce fair judgments. It’s billed by its creators, a company based in Manhattan called Risk Labs, as a “decentralized truth machine.”
But for all its brainiac complexity, the oracle has proved exploitable. Dozens of livid bettors claim the system has been gamed, the handiwork of a budding tech entrepreneur named Lancelot Chardonnet (his name at birth, he says). A look at the Donk debate, which unfolded over nine rancorous days, illustrates how he did it, and the messy, fractious challenge of divining something as nuanced as truth.
When the Bucharest video was first broadcast on April 11, nobody heard “Donk,” and this bet seemed destined to be won by those who bet “no.” Then someone noticed that the caster, who through sheer phonetic coincidence is known as Dinko, had botched “don’t.”
Dinko might have known about the Donk bet, so it’s at least possible that he said the fateful syllable on purpose. It’s even possible he placed money on the outcome. He might have made what linguistics fans would call a voiceless velar stop slip.
Here is more from the NYT.
Jackson Dahl podcasts with me and Nabeel on aesthetics
Filmed at home, this ran about two hours, and yes that is Nabeel Qureshi, with a cameo from Spinoza toward the very end. From Jackson:
From the episode summary:
Tyler and Nabeel are good friends, and given how prolific Tyler is, I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point and interview them together. We discuss sacred commitments, AI acceleration, mentorship, friendship, and more, but I focused the majority of the conversation on art and aesthetics. Tyler and Nabeel are unlikely aesthetes given their day jobs, but in fact take art deeply seriously. They have a shared love for and similar tastes in art, music, and film, in particular. We discuss strange and beautiful art, aesthetic stagnation, and a wide range of favorites: The Beatles, Mozart, Mondrian, Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Cassavetes, The Sopranos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=wC78q_BeD27XDnLN&v=qPHV-BezoIc&feature=youtu.be
Excerpt:
Tyler: (18:31) I think I’m very mundane in many ways. When Marc Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective, I know he got slammed for that, but I sympathize with that in many ways. I have my work. I focus on it. I want to go see places I haven’t seen before. That really drives me. I feel pretty well motivated. I do think all kinds of deep thoughts, but to me those deep thoughts feel more superficial than my so-called superficial urges to go around doing things. And I’m fine with that.
…Jackson: (23:25) Do you experience art primarily by thinking or by feeling?
Tyler: (23:29) I don’t even know what those words mean. I experience it by looking at it. I don’t think I have very deep emotional responses. I think it’s pleasure and I feel I learn a lot from it. When I go out and look at other works of art or just the world, I see a lot more than people who don’t live with art. I don’t think I feel that much. I’ve never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts of someone seeing a Madonna and weeping, it makes no sense to me. It’s like people who do sports gambling. Why do you do that? There are positive-sum gambles for you. Here are a few.
There is much more of interest, self-recommending!
Monday assorted links
1. The great Scott Wheeler on Stephen Sondheim (Free Press).
2. Is space the most underrated policy area?
3. On the USAID and deaths debate. Hardly the final word, but an injection of sanity into what has been a low quality debate. Here is commentary from GPT Pro. In a few years we might have some accurate estimates.
4. Using LLMs in economic history.
5. Measuring economic growth through the valuation of human life.
6. Brooklyn Coffee Shop showcases my book The Complacent Class.
AI cheating on math econ at Brown
The temptation to use artificial intelligence (AI) to cheat is shaking up elite universities in the United States. Professor Roberto Serrano, who is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, has detected a massive fraud in one of the classes he teaches, ECON 1170, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics. He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League, which brings together the East Coast’s eight most elite private universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth College and University of Pennsylvania.
When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee.
Here is the full story, via Anecdotal.
Will future biomedical advances be low marginal cost?
Most pharmaceuticals involve high upfront costs, to discover and test the drug, and very low marginal costs. Another pill can be printed almost for free.
That cost structure favors health systems, such as that of Britain, that try to pay lower for services. They can end up getting a relatively good deal from price discrimination. After all, they can be served at low marginal cost, at least for those ttreatments.
Now imagine a biomedical future where many more treatments are based on the sequencing of your individual genome, and then the development of specific treatments personalized to you. Obviously it will depend on developments, but very likely those remedies will have relatively high marginal costs.
In that setting the British approach to health care procurement and pricing will work less well. It is the well-capitalized, “overspending” systems, such as the United States, that will have an easier time making the adjustment.
“The rising relative advantage of well-capitalized health care systems” is a neglected trend, because it makes a lot of earlier elite pronouncements about health care economics look a bit off.
Typewriters and fertility
Workplace technological changes were instrumental in creating new tasks for women over the last century. This paper studies the adoption of the typewriter into US workplaces. Exploiting exogenous variation in typist demand across sectors, I document that the typewriter increased women’s labor force participation, leading to lower rates of marriage and fertility. These developments stemmed from a transition of White women from households into office work and an indirect crowding-in effect drawing Black women into household services. Acting as a “meeting technology,” the typewriter reshaped social interactions, enabling White women to marry above their socioeconomic backgrounds and achieve upward mobility.
That is from a recent paper by Myera Rashid. Via Kris Gulati.
Sunday assorted links
1. Why were the Covid vaccine trials so quick?
2. Sumner on Greenspan, Giannis, and more.
3. 100 best books of the 21st century? (NYT).
4. AI and the crisis of classical liberalism.
5. The memory tax, good thing supply is elastic.
6. Is Teortaxes solving for the political equilibrium?
7. Frank Lloyd Wright house for sale in TN for $1.6 million.
Renationalising British utilities
There is talk of this with the pending change in PM, but I would not do it. I am quite aware that a) not all of the privatisations went well, and b) American data indicate that state-owned utilities do not seem very economically different than, or less efficient than, privately-owned utilities. Especially for water, where the natural monopoly elements are especially strong.
Nonetheless massive restructuring will be needed to make all of these companies, no matter who owns them, “AI companies.” That will require capital raises and pay scales that will be difficult for the public sector to pull off. So right now renationalisation would be a mistake.
Most generally, I would say the returns to resource mobility will be rising significantly.