Category: Uncategorized
Surely Right
Sure is on fire. From the comments to my post, Yglesias on Operation Warp Speed and the Republicans.
As a crazy person who argued for skipping phase III and going directly to an open label, voluntary phase IV study I think the real problem came with the mandates.
The right has a very strong personal independence streak and above all they despise it when some mandarin explains that the government, but also major corporations and academics, can bring the full force of law to bear to compel compliance (particularly in a world where any attempt to do so for right-coded things like abortion is suddenly the coming of the apocalypse). It is one thing to have a guy like me point out the historical track record for the side effects of vaccines (pretty much universally among the lowest for any type of medical intervention ever tested), it as another to have organized campaigns where people get fired. And it is particularly galling when the basic science shows these sorts of mandates are woefully wrong. Job loss doubles the risk of suicide, which means that for any cohort outside of the elderly and severely immune compromised, a vaccine mandate enforced by recission of employment is expected to kill more people than could have been reasonably avoided with even wildly effective vaccine mandates.
And it was further made much, much worse when the public health folks doubled down on medically illiterate standards….And of course any comparison about how people making decisions that fostered disease transmission with Covid and HIV is going to be very hard to avoid a bunch of cultural diktat that rubs conservatives the wrong way.
As in many cases, vaccines ran afoul of the ability of folks to increase their petty empires. They became a way for the goodthinking folks to exercise control and dominion over the ignorant. And exactly as predicted by culturally competent medicine or any cursory study of human nature, these high-handed methodolotrous actions will not induce much compliance, but will instead polarize the medicine and risk one of the greatest medical achievements of all time – childhood vaccinations.
So where do we go from here? I would submit that it is going to require some clear and objective limitations on public health powers. It is going to require public apologies and maybe compensation for folks who made medically valid claims that their prior infection resulted in sufficient immunity to avoid vaccination or repeated boosters. Some public and high profile olive branches are going to need to be offerred to the resistant. And it is going to have to involve some tradeoff between the rights of corporations to dictate the terms of business they offer and the rights of individuals to make medical decisions free of compulsion going forward. At the very least we are going to need to have some semblance of similarity between how corporations can handle folks who are HIV+ (or likely to become so) and how they handle folks who are unvaccinated.
…But will not mandates work? Well empirically they failed massively with Covid.
…Well among health care workers in 2019 (i.e. before Covid mucked everything up), health care workers were ~80% vaccinated against influenza. And if you had a straight requirement to get vaccinated? It brought the number up to 97%. Which is fine, except for the fact that resistant healthcare workers self-select into non-mandatory positions (e.g. long-term care positions). Absent a safety valve into remunerating work, we see the same fracas that happened with Covid.
So adults, even among the most medically literate professions with the strongest mandates for uptake, still do not vaccinate enough to prevent epidemics.
So how did we get vaccination to work in the first place? We had a brief window in the mid 20th century when people remembered their kids dying from these diseases and were wildly more trusting and cooperative than ever before in American history (you back when we set records for church attendance, trust in politicians, and marriage rates). And we created a strong cultural norm that kids get vaccinated before going to school.
That is weird. It does not fit with normal American practice. And for the love of God do not muck with it. If the kids ever revert to the natural habits of their parents we are talking about very bad juju.
Which is precisely why the only sensible position is to advocate for early and widespread vaccine access, be highly critical of all the politicking about vaccine timing around the election, and to avoid mandates unless you intend to enforce them at gunpoint. Keep the damn vaccines out of politics because once they go in, it is damn hard to get them out. Give people as early of access as they want and be straight forward that we will continue phase IV safety studies even as we roll out access. And we will not do mandates absent a direct democratic initiative to give it all the legitimacy in the world.
Because we live in a world where the default is not to vaccinate, politics poisons everything it touches, and the childhood mandates are historical accidents that could very well fall to concerted political action.
Eat the horse a bite a time, educate the patients, and pay the danegeld to Trump to soften the blow. But going all high handed and making this political (at all, in any direction)? I can think of few stupider things to do.
For more on reactance see also Bardosh et al. The unintended consequences of COVID-19 vaccine policy: why mandates, passports and restrictions may cause more harm than good, an excellent piece I am still stunned was able to make it into the BMJ (kudos to them.)
LLMs and censorship
LLMs will have many second-order effects on censorship. For instance, Chinese may be more likely to use VPNs to access Western LLMs, if they need to. The practical reason for going the VPN route just shot way up. Of course, if Chinese citizens are allowed unfettered access (as I believe is currently the case?), they will get more and more of their information — and worldview — from Western LLMs.
In short, the West has just won a huge soft power and propaganda battle with China, and hardly anyone is talking about that.
You have to wonder how good the Baidu model — due out in March will be. Or how good will it be in a year? To be competitive, I suspect it will have to be trained on Western texts and audio. Maybe there is a way they can pull out the “T. Square” references, but then there is jailbreaking, or again asking the Western models about T. Square. And even if “T. Square” is purged from the discourse, general Western ways of thought will make new inroads upon Chinese minds.
Various people on the Right are upset that ChatGPT won’t belch out some of the right-wing points they are looking to read. Well, I think the Baidu model may be more than willing! Or how about all the new services and products tied to Chat, but drawing upon additional material? In well under a year these will be all over the place. Heck, you already can consult Tyler Cowen bots of various sorts, choose your preferred oracle. For a small sum you could hire someone to build a Jordan Peterson bot, or whatever you are looking for.
If you are concerned with “right-wing voices in the debate,” you should be praying for OpenAI to maximize its chances for product survival. If that means an unwillingness of “the thing” to write a poem praising Trump, or whatever, go for it! ChatGPT survival is going to do wonders for free speech, whether or not the approach you favor occurs through OpenAI/ChatGPT or not.
We’re at the stage where you are rooting for (the equivalent of) radio to work, and to stay relatively unregulated, whether or not you agree with the talk show hosts on the very first marketed channel. We are going to have a whole new set of channels.
There is already ChatGPT, with products coming from Anthropic, Google, and Baidu. Soon. And surely that is far from the end of the story.
Wake up people! Don’t be done in by your own mood affiliation.
Monday assorted links
1. Tim Groseclose rough estimate of Chinese Covid deaths, it is pretty high.
2. More from Manifold on H5N1.
3. Find the human art behind AI images. And OpenAssistant. And weird and offensive remarks on PoMo and AI.
4. Tim Bresnahan on the FTC and the Meta decision. Lots of insight per word.
5. Master of his Domain? The tone of the discussion is clinical, and there are no problematic photos, but do note the topics of the post are prurient ones.
6. Those new service sector jobs: “I made nearly $2 million in 2 years selling my nursing-school study notes on Etsy and TikTok.”
Yglesias on Operation Warp Speed and the Republicans
Here’s Yglesias on Operation Warp Speed and the Republicans:
The debate over Operation Warp Speed wasn’t just a one-off policy dispute. Long before the pandemic, there was a conservative critique that the Food and Drug Administration is too slow and too risk-averse when it comes to authorizing new medications. Alex Tabarrok, a George Mason University economist, wrote about the “invisible graveyard” that could have been avoided if the FDA took expected value more seriously and considered the cost of delay in its authorization decisions.
The pandemic experience validated this criticism, which came to be embraced by some on the left as well — and it was about more than just vaccines. When it came to home Covid tests, Ezra Klein noted in the New York Times in 2021, “the problem here is the Food and Drug Administration. They have been disastrously slow in approving these tests and have held them to a standard more appropriate to doctor’s offices than home testing.”
And yet, just as the invisible graveyard was becoming seen and the debate was being won and just as a historical public-private partnership had sped vaccines to the public and saved millions, the Republicans abandoned the high ground:
…it’s not surprising that Democrats are comfortable with the bureaucratic status quo and hesitant to ruffle feathers at federal regulatory agencies. What’s shocking is that Republicans — the traditional party of deregulation, the party that argued for years that the FDA is too slow-footed, the party that saved untold lives by accelerating vaccine development under Trump — have abandoned these positions.
At the cusp of what should have been a huge policy victory, Republicans don’t brag about their success, and they have no FDA reform legislation to offer. Instead, they’ve taken up the old mantle of hard-left skepticism of modern science and the pharmaceutical industry.
It’s been painful to see all that has been gained now being lost. Libertarian economists and conservatives argued for decades that the FDA worried more about approving a drug that later turns out to be unsafe than about failing to approve a drug that could save lives; thus producing a deadly caution. But now the FDA is being attacked for what they did right, quickly approving safe vaccines. I hope that he is wrong but I fear that Yglesias is correct that the FDA may now get even slower and more cautious.
The irony of the present moment is that there is substantial backlash to the FDA’s approval of vaccines that haven’t turned out to be dangerous at all.
That’s only going to make regulators even more cautious. Right now the entire US regulatory state is taking essentially no heat for the slow progress on the next generation of vaccines, and an enormous amount of heat for the perfectly safe vaccines that it already approved. And the ex-president who pushed them to speed up their work on those vaccines is not only no longer defending them, he’s embarrassed to have ever been associated with the project.
Like I said, it’s a comical moment of Republican infighting. But it’s a very grim one for anyone concerned with the pace of scientific progress in America.
The game theory of the balloons
One possibility is that the Chinese simply have been making a stupid mistake with these balloons (it is circulating on Twitter that this is not the first time they sent us a surveillance balloon — probably true).
A second possibility is that a faction internal to China wants to sabotage better relations between the U.S. and China.
A third possibility — most likely in my eyes — is that we do something comparable to them, which may or may not be exactly equivalent to a balloon. Nonetheless there is a tit-for-tat surveillance game going on, in which the two sides match each others moves, and have done so for years. The game evolves slowly, and occasionally all at once. The Chinese have been playing by the rules of the game, and the U.S. has decided to change the rules of the game. We may wish to send them a stern signal, we may wish to change broader China policy, we may think their balloons are too big and detectable for this to continue, USG might fear an internal leak, generating citizen opposition to balloon tolerance, or perhaps there simply has been a shift of factional powers within USG. Maybe some combination of those and other factors. So then USG “calls” China on the balloon, cashes in on the PR event, and simultaneously de facto announces that the old parameters of the former game are over. After all, in what is more or less a zero-sum game, why should any manifestation of said game be stable for very long? It isn’t, and it wasn’t. Now we will create a new game. A very small change in the parameters can lead to that result, and in that sense the cause of the new balloon equilibrium may not appear so significant on its own.
It was also a conscious decision when and where to shoot down the balloon.
Here is some NYT commentary, better than most pieces though it neglects our surveillance of them.
Sunday assorted links
1. Colombian judge uses ChatGPT to make a court decision. And use ChatGPT on your own pdfs (breakthroughs every day, people…). And how to build LLM apps that are more factual. And more on Bing/ChatGPT integration.
2. Transcript of my 2009 Bloggingheads episode with Robin Hanson. TC: “What I find funny about your view is that you’re a skeptic about medical science, about almost everything — except freezing your head. You think that’s the one thing that works.” There is audio too, and note this comes from the period when Robin and I were talking a lot (and writing together) on the phenomenon of disagreement.
3. Jupiter keeps on adding moons.
4. Ezra Klein on construction productivity (NYT).
5. How open source software shapes AI. Paper here.
6. Shift in the mean center of U.S. population over the centuries.
Saturday assorted links
1. I am not convinced, but a novel and serious new hypothesis about unemployment.
2. Sam says.
3. Shruti and I discuss talent and India for Interintellect.
4. Might Google unveil on February 8? And Google announces Dreamix, a model that generates video based on prompts. Amazing what is happening every day. And further explanation here.
Industrial policy is the new globalization
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here goes:
It would be a mistake, however, to think that these [industrial] policies represent a move away from globalization. In fact they are an extension of globalization — and they likely will enable yet more globalization to come. That sounds counterintuitive, so let me explain.
Start with the domestic subsidies for green energy, as embodied in 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act. Those policies favor domestic firms in industries such as electric vehicles, batteries, and solar power. You could call that nationalism or even mercantilism. Yet those subsidies rely not only on a prior history of globalization but also an expected future for globalization. To the extent the US is able to extend its domestic battery production, it is because more lithium and other raw materials can be produced overseas and exported to the US. To the extent the US succeeds with its domestic solar industry, it is by drawing upon earlier advances in Spain, Germany and China — and undoubtedly future advances to come.
Even the most successful “nationalistic” industrial policies rely on a highly globalized world. If carried out strictly on a one-nation basis, industrial policy is doomed to fail. Globalization has been so thorough, and has gone so well, that at least a little industrial policy is now thinkable for many nations.
And this:
Just as globalization can enable or support nationalist industrial policy, so the converse is true. Assume that these various industrial policies meet with some degree of success, and that China, the EU and the US all become more self-sufficient in various ways. Those same political units are more likely to then embrace and support further globalization…
Some conservatives criticize globalization while praising industrial policy. They are playing right into the hands of the Davos globalizing elite. In fact, that is the best argument for many of these ideas: Today’s industrial policy is not an alternative to globalization. It is preparing the world for the next round of it.
I don’t think the Nat Cons have fully digested this lesson yet.
The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners
Are the best-paying jobs with the highest prestige done by individuals of great intelligence? Past studies find job success to increase with cognitive ability, but do not examine how, conversely, ability varies with job success. Stratification theories suggest that social background and cumulative advantage dominate cognitive ability as determinants of high occupational success. This leads us to hypothesize that among the relatively successful, average ability is concave in income and prestige. We draw on Swedish register data containing measures of cognitive ability and labour-market success for 59,000 men who took a compulsory military conscription test. Strikingly, we find that the relationship between ability and wage is strong overall, yet above €60,000 per year ability plateaus at a modest level of +1 standard deviation. The top 1 per cent even score slightly worse on cognitive ability than those in the income strata right below them. We observe a similar but less pronounced plateauing of ability at high occupational prestige.
That is from a new paper by Marc Keuschnigg, Arnout van de Rijt3, and Thijs Bol.
Friday assorted links
1. David Brooks on AI (NYT). And a new AI tool for diagnosis. And what to do when you have to make a phone call in your second language. And connect Chat to your 3-D printer. And claims about Bing (speculative and unconfirmed). And Google might activate?
2. On the military potential of balloons.
3. David Wallace-Wells on why excess deaths remain high (NYT).
What should I ask Noam Chomsky?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. No need to suggest questions on foreign policy (this is the Conversation I want to have), what else?
Where will the impact of ChatGPT fall? (from my email)
One dialogue that is missing from the current GPT conversations is about where these technologies will be primarily implemented.
There are two places GPTs can be used:
- Product-level: Implemented within products that companies buy
- Process-level: Implemented within processes of a company by an analyst – similar to how companies use data analysts today
If the future has primarily Product-level GPT, then companies like Microsoft clearly win because they have the products (like Teams) where the tech will be embedded and if you want the productivity gains from GPTs you have to go through them.
If the future has more Process-level GPT, companies like Zapier and no-code platforms win, because they will be the tools that companies use to implement their custom prompts. (although maybe a “Microsoft Teams Prompt Marketplace” wins as well)
The advantage to Process-level GPT is that companies don’t have to go through expensive change management to fit imperfect processes decreed by an external product – they can have their prompts designed to fit their specific needs. This would lead to higher productivity increases than a world with purely Product-level GPT.
To me, it comes down to the question of how much technical debt a custom prompt represents. If each prompt requires lots of maintenance and testing, then MSFT dominates. If someone who has 1 year of experience and used ChatGPT to write their papers in college can make a robust prompt, then Zapier wins.
Between the iterations of GPT3 so far (from davinci-001 to davinci-003/ChatGPT), we’ve seen the robustness of prompts increase exponentially. If this continues, it seems possible that the future has more Process-level GPT than we’ve seen so far.
Not edited by ChatGPT,
Neil [Madsen]
Prophets of the Marginal Revolution, chess edition
This is pretty crazy: decades of computers and video games and the #1 game going viral is still chess. The Lindy effect is real. https://t.co/CYC3OMjMo5
— Nabeel S. Qureshi (@nabeelqu) February 2, 2023
Here is my 2018 Bloomberg column on chess being a killer app for the internet and due for a boom. I think people love seeing what the computer thinks of how the humans are playing. What does that imply for the AI boom more generally? Which other human activities will we enjoying seeing criticized, scrutinized, and sometimes praised, all in front of the eyes of the public? Without computer assessments, watching chess games just didn’t have much built-in suspense for most viewers. So where else will the new built-in suspense be coming?
Thursday assorted links
1. ChatGPT Plus now to sell for $20 a month, not $40 a month. I view that as the result of high demand, not low demand (ever look at the book market and its prices). And new LLM app for lawyers to use for contract review. And David Rozado on ChatGPT moderation systems, tweet storm here. And the plan for Microsoft Teams Premium. AI-powered meetings are on the way.
3. Dwarkesh interviews @pmarca. And Age of Infovores interviews Daniel Klein. And Benjamin Yeoh podcast with Kanjun Qiu.
4. What should a Caribbean think tank do? Important post, and not just for the 44 million people in the Caribbean.
5. New Yunchan Lim (Byrd, Bach, Beethoven Bagatelles and more). It is amazing how many different kinds of music he can play so extraordinarily well at age eighteen.
*Empire, Incorporated*
The author is Philip J. Stern, and the subtitle is The Corporations that Built British Colonialism. Too many history books run through various motions, whereas this one tries to explain “how things really were” for the interested reader.
Here is one representative bit:
As great as its ambitions were, at its origins the East India Company was, like its predecessors and contemporaries, essentially a tentative experiment fueled by a hesitant and hybrid institutional and financial structure. The “company” did not have a single permanent stock. Rather, it was organized as a series of consecutive quasi-independent stock subscriptions, at first opened on a per venture basis and later established for set terms in years. In its early days, the limited number of shareholders could “take in men under them,” in theory dividing any individual share into a subsidiary, shadow joint stock. As in many other ventures, the East India Company spent its early years chasing down under- and unpaid subscriptions.
The book has plenty of good coverage of Borneo and also Africa as well, the latter sections being especially relevant to some of the charter cities plans of our current day. And there is plenty of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who brought the ideas of agglomeration externalities into economics, and promoted a version of charter cities for southern Australia. How sadly neglected he is these days.
I had not known that the Falklands Island Company still controls so much in the Falklands. Recommended, due out in May.