Category: Uncategorized
Tuesday assorted links
Interpreting Polygenic Prediction of Cognitive Ability
The subtitle is Evidence for Direct, Reliable, and Portable Genetic Effects, and the authors are Tobias Wolfam, et.al. The abstract:
The interpretation of polygenic scores (PGS) for general cognitive ability (GCA) remains contested, with concerns about indirect genetic effects, environmental confounding, cross-ancestry portability, and the gap between PGS prediction and twin heritability estimates. Relying on a newly constructed PGS using within-family designs in two independent sibling cohorts (UK Biobank, N=4,642 pairs; ABCD, N=736 pairs), we demonstrate that direct genetic effects account for the large majority of PGS prediction (within-family attenuation Correcting for measurement error in brief cognitive assessments, the within-family association with latent general ability is approximately 0.45, substantially higher than observed-scale estimates. Cross-ancestry portability follows theoretical expectations (66% effect retention in African Americans). Within families, higher PGS predicts greater educational attainment, occupational status, and reduced cardiometabolic disease risk, with no evidence for gene-environment interactions or substantial adverse pleiotropy. These findings replicate using a benchmark predictor based on publicly available data, confirming they reflect properties of cognitive genetic architecture rather than idiosyncrasies of a particular score.
I expect results like this will hold up. Here is commentary from GPT Pro.
Monday assorted links
Does this have implications for higher ed in particular?
Declining fertility and population loss pose significant challenges for state and federal local governments responsible for providing a range of services to citizens, including education, health care, and infrastructure. Indeed, many areas are already experiencing outright population decline, with roughly half of U.S. counties losing population between 2010 and 2020. This paper examines how shrinking and aging populations affect the operations and fiscal sustainability of state and local governments. Preliminary evidence presented in this paper suggests that scaling down educational services is considerably more difficult than scaling up. The estimated per-enrollee cost increases associated with a 10 percent enrollment decline are four times larger than the cost decreases associated with a 10 percent enrollment increase. Regions with contracting populations will face additional challenges as a smaller working-age population bears the burden of funding pensions and retiree health plans for larger aging cohorts. While lower fertility can create a short run fiscal dividend as local governments serve fewer children, that dividend will only be realized if state and local public officials make efficient retrenchment a priority.
From Jeffrey Clemens, via the excellent Kevin Lewis. As I think JFV mentioned lately, we have not done enough thinking about what a society with low TFR really is going to look like after a while.
Auden on Iceland
If you have no particular intellectual interests or ambitions and are content with the company of your family and friends, then life on Iceland must be very pleasant, because the inhabitants are friendly, tolerant, and sane. They are genuinely proud of their country and its history, but without the least trace of hysterical nationalism. I always found that they welcome criticism. But I had the feeling, also, that for myself it was already too late. We are all too deeply involved Europe to be able, or even to wish to escape. Though I am sure you would enjoy a visit as much as I did, I think that, in the long run, the Scandinavian sanity would be too much for you, as it is for me. The truth is, we are both only really happy living among lunatics.
That is from W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland, from 1937, which is one of the better travel books, if indeed that is what it is.
Sunday assorted links
Emergent Ventures winners, 53rd cohort
Elif Ozdemir, Ankara, align satellites.
Lily Zuckerman, University of Austin (and NYC), painting and general career support.
Benjamin Unger, NYC, AI to measure the performance of New York governments.
Maarten Boudry, Brussels, to write a book on who is really for progress, or not.
Allan Wandia, San Francisco, foundation models that learn directly from raw experimental data.
Richard Ng, London, AI agents.
Jordan Unokesan, London, trust scoring for government contractors.
Alexander Griffiths, London, infrastructure policy and decisions.
Pio Borgelt, 17, Osnabruck, AI.
Vedant Agarwal, 18, Cambridge UK, biosciences.
Chris Lee, Murietta, 18, CA, police recruitment.
Broderick Cotter, Austin, 17, finding the best materials for 3-D printing.
Jehan Azad, San Francisco, radar and UAPs.
Marius Drozdzewski, with collaborators, Berlin, German liberal periodical Aevum.
Ethan Galloway, London, 16, AI algorithms.
Keelan O’Carroll, Florida, happiness podcast.
Saturday assorted links
2. Does it help poets to be religious?
4. U.S. prime age employment rate is near an all-time high. For a different perspective, here is NYT on AI and the job market. And new measures of AI task performance from MIT.
5. China’s AI education experiment.
6. Real retail U.S. electricity prices have fallen since 2010.
8. Is Mandarin being Europeanized?
9. 2000 or so additional pages of Leibniz will be published.
How should you change your life decisions if we are being watched by alien drone probes?
I’ve asked a few people that question lately, and get either no answer or very exaggerated answers.
Rep. Burchett recently raised the possibility of being terrified and not sleeping at night if UAPs are aliens. But even if that is your immediate response, you need a more constructive medium-term adjustment to the new situation.
One option would be to pray to the aliens as gods, but I do not recommend that.
Another option is to not change anything, on the grounds that the aliens (probably?) have not been interfering in earthly affairs. Or if they have been interfering, they might be interfering in steady ways which are compatible with you continuing your previous life course.
That is mostly a defensible stance, but it hardly seems a true marginalist should make zero adjustments in light of the new and very radical piece of information. If nothing else, you need to consider that other people will in time respond, and you will in turn want a response to their choices.
A third option is to write more about the aliens, so that when their presence is (partially?) revealed, you will rise in status and influence.
Should you buy more insurance? But against what exactly?
Hold more defense stocks in your portfolio, if you anticipate more defense spending as the pending human reaction to the revelations?
Consume more? Maybe.
The most plausible decision however is to slightly lower your level of ambition. Consider a few of the core scenarios.
If the aliens go rogue on us and end it all, the efforts you might be making now will have been for naught.
If the aliens are here to cap the level of human achievement, for instance to keep us on Earth and prevent us from exploring the galaxy, yet without harm, you also can scale back your ambition a bit. You do not need to invest so much capital in supporting the space program. Most of your more local ambitions however should remain untouched. You might even become more ambitious in keeping the Earth a safe place, since escape hatches are now less likely. Alternatively, you might think the aliens are our “saviors of last resort,” but that too probably makes you less ambitious.
A more general Bayesian update is simply that human efforts, in the broader scheme of things, have lower relative marginal products than you might have thought. The aliens apparently have lots of powers, at least if they managed to get here. That too militates in favor of lowering your ambitions. Conversely, if you start believing we are the only intelligent, agentic beings in the galaxy, arguably you should increase your ambitions. There will be fewer outside forces to stop, limit, or reverse your efforts.
To be clear, in this Bayesian update large numbers of people still should increase their ambitions, since they were not optimizing in the first place. But they should increase those ambitions slightly less than one used to think. And in some areas, perhaps they should not increase their ambitions at all.
Finally, you should not decrease your ambitions a lot. For one thing, you may need an ongoing high level of energy and ambition to deal with the changes that aliens — or even the perceptions of alien presence — will bring to earthly civilization. Furthermore, since any alien-induced uncertainty about the future is very hard to model, most people will do best by simply continuing on their current tracks. It makes no sense to start waving around a sword to scare off the alien drone probes.
Nonetheless, some of your more extreme ambitions should be carved back just a wee bit. Sorry about that.
I guess it is a good thing nobody is watching then.
Addendum: For this post I am indebted to a useful lunch conversation with Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, and Alex T.
Friday assorted links
1. Ben Yeoh on Measure for Measure.
2. How much is a badly damaged Gentileschi worth?
3. Sabine Hossenfelder on UAP evidence. And a bit more.
4. New record as Indian painting auctions for $17.9 million.
6. South Africa banned TV until 1976.
8. How do AI models respond to direct authoritarian requests?
9. Lynne Kiesling on which parts of economics will be repriced, as a result of AI.
10. How replaceable am I? An agent takes on that question. And another Karpathy idea.
Thursday assorted links
1. The most important woman in Kant’s life.
2. Incentives matter? Dealing with Iranian scientists (New Yorker).
5. The next generation of books and publishing?
6. More Scott Sumner movie reviews.
7. How people actually use ChatGPT. A massive new dataset from OpenAI.
8. They added a baby to the end of Tristan!???
9. Results on reproducibility. And a simple visual, comparing different fields. “Education” does not do great. And the Nature link. None of this should come as a surprise.
10. Resilient societies: a Mercatus call for proposals.
11. “There are now ten toilets in space.” (And the aliens?)
12. The anti-data center coalitions and their squabbles.
Lots to read and ponder in today’s links…
Sam Altman’s prediction has come through
From his house in Los Angeles, Mr. Gallagher, 41, used A.I. to write the code for the software that powers his company, produce the website copy, generate the images and videos for ads and handle customer service. He created A.I. systems to analyze his business’s performance. And he outsourced the other stuff he couldn’t do himself.
His start-up, Medvi, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, got 300 customers in its first month. In its second month, it gained 1,000 more. In 2025, Medvi’s first full year in business, the company generated $401 million in sales.
Mr. Gallagher then hired his only employee, his younger brother, Elliot. This year, they are on track to do $1.8 billion in sales.
Here is more from Erin Griffith at the NYT. Maybe Sam said “one person” running a billion dollar company, but if the two are closely genetically related still I will count this.
My very interesting Conversation with Arthur C. Brooks
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Arthur cover how scarcity makes savoring possible and why knowing you’ll die young sharpens the mind, what twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being and why that’s not actually depressing, the four habits of the genuinely happy, the placebo theory of happiness books, curiosity as an evolved positive emotion, the optimal degree of self-deception, why Arthur chose Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy, what the research says about accepting death, how he became an economist via correspondence school, AI’s effect on think tanks, the future of classical music, whether Trumpism or Reaganism is the equilibrium state of American conservatism, whether his views on immigration have changed, what he and Oprah actually agree on, which president from his lifetime he most admires, Barcelona versus Madrid, what 60-year-olds are especially good at, why he’s reading Josef Pieper, how he’ll face death, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: What do you think of the view that books on happiness or the meaning of life, they’re a kind of placebo? They don’t help directly, but you feel you’ve done something to become happier, and the placebo is somewhat effective.
BROOKS: I think that there’s probably something to that, although there’s some pretty interesting new research that shows that the placebo effect is actually not real. Have you seen some of that new research?
COWEN: Yes, but I don’t believe it. Nocebos also seem to work in many situations.
BROOKS: I know. I take your broader point. I take your broader point. I think that the reason for that is that when people read most of the self-improvement literature, not just happiness literature, what happens is that they get a flush of epiphany, a new way of thinking. That feels really good. That feels really inspirational. The problem is it doesn’t take root.
It’s like the seeds that are thrown on a path in the biblical parable. They don’t go through the algorithm that I just talked about, and so not all of these things can be compared. I would not have gotten into this line of research and this line of teaching if I thought that it was just going to add another book to a long line of self-improvement books that make people feel good but don’t ultimately change their lives.
COWEN: Say a person reads a new and different book on happiness once a year at the beginning of the year. Now, under the placebo view, that’s a fine thing to do. It’ll get you a bit happier each year. Under your view, it seems there’s something wrong. Isn’t the placebo view doing a bit better there? You should read a book on happiness every year, a different one. It’ll revitalize you a bit. Whether or not it’s new only matters a little.
BROOKS: Yes. It might remind you of some things that you knew to be the truth that you had fallen away from. One of the things that I like to do is I like to read a good book by one of the church fathers, for example. They’re more or less saying the same thing. It reminds me of something that I learned as a boy and that I’ve forgotten as an adult. It might actually remind me to come back to many of these practices and many of these views.
I think that there are real insights. There’s real value that can come from science-based knowledge about how to live a better life. I think that you and I are both dedicated to science in the public interest and also science in the private interest as well. I think there is some good to be gotten through many of these ideas. Not all. Once again, not all happiness literature is created equal.
And:
COWEN: Why not cram all that contemplation of death into your last three months rather than your last 18 months? Do intertemporal substitution, right? Accelerate it. Ben Sasse probably is facing a pretty short timeline, but he’s done a remarkable job, even publicly, of coming to terms with what’s happening. Isn’t that better than two years of the same?
And:
COWEN: I think it’s fair to say what we call the right wing in America, it’s become much, much more Trumpy. Does this shift you to the left or make you question what the right wing was to begin with, or do you just feel lost and confused, or do you say, that’s great, I’m more Trumpy, too? How have you dealt with that emotionally and intellectually?
BROOKS: Yes. I’ll answer, but you’re going to have to answer after me, will you?
COWEN: Sure.
Interesting throughout.
How Matthias Blübaum can win it all
He is playing in the current Candidates tournament as the lowest-rated player, a mere 2693. It is considered a semi-miracle that he qualified at all, and he is not given much chance of winning the tourney.
And yet a path to the top remains.
First, he has not lost any of his first four games (all are draws), so he is hardly a weakie.
Second, and for my purposes more importantly, the tournament has winner-take-all rewards. So many players will be taking chances to try to move into the lead. Yet in chess positive expected value big chances are hard to come by, so often players, in their determination to top the standings, will take modestly negative expected value big chances, especially in the opening phase of the game.
Now, if you are willing to take a negative expected value big chance, will you prefer to do so against the top players in the tourney, such as Caruana, or the lower-rated players, such as Blübaum? The answer is obvious.
So he will have his chances.
Wednesday assorted links
1. NYT on Morton Feldman. Is he the most important American composer?
2. Transcript and video of Cass Sunstein lecture on Hayek at Mercatus.
3. Baseball cards for talents.
5. Regulating AI agents. And traps for AI agents.
6. How the Iranian government uses patronage to stay in power (WSJ). And how the Iranian economy is surviving wartime pressures (FT).