Category: Uncategorized
Signs of encroaching mental GPT-dom
1. You use the word “token” more than you ought to, for reasons that have nothing to do with crypto.
2. If a friend says something incorrect, you tell them they are “hallucinating.”
3. You phrase your google queries like GPT queries, for instance using question marks.
4. “Please say more” is your new mantra. “Answer step by step” is another.
5. You ask your friends for answers in the third person: “But what would Larry Summers say to that?”
6. You start thinking your friend Claude is a walking encyclopedia, a wonderful and diversely talented literary stylist, and taking psychedelics.
7. When you read or hear “davinci,” your thoughts do not jump to the Mona Lisa.
8. You start imagining all sorts of co-authorships, collaborations and even marriages that simply do not exist.
9. You decide Thomas Pynchon really was underrated after all.
10. You start expecting everyone else to be so eager to please you.
What else?
Tuesday assorted links
1. The Steph Curry practice story.
2. Forthcoming metascience event at AEI with myself, Heidi Williams, others. And Cato job opportunities, including editing their new on-line magazine in the works.
3. The great Barett Strong has passed away, RIP.
4. International trade, value chains, and Austrian business cycle theory.
5. Russ Roberts on Jewish prayer.
6. Percent of large-scale AI results coming from academia, over time.
Fewer Visitors to the US
International travel to the United States is well below pre-pandemic levels, hurting our tourism industries, and embarrassingly long times to get a visitor visa are probably part of the problem.
Hat tip: Alec Stapp.
Alex Epstein’s *Fossil Future*
Bryan Caplan asked me to read this book, and Alex Epstein was kind enough to provide me with a copy of it. The subtitle is Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas — Not Less.
My overall view is this: it is a good rebuttal to “the unrealistic ones,” who don’t see the benefits of fossil fuels. But it does not rebut a properly steelmanned case for a transition away from fossil fuels.
I view the steelmanned case as this: we cannot simply keep on producing increasing amounts of carbon emissions for centuries on end. We thus need some trajectory where — at a pace we can debate — carbon emissions end up declining. I’ve stressed on MR many times that climate change is not in fact an existential risk, but it could be a civilization-destroying risk if we just keep on boosting carbon emissions without end. I don’t know a serious scientist who takes issue with that claim.
In a number of places, such as pp.251-252, and most significantly chapter nine, Epstein denies the likelihood of climate apocalypse, but I just don’t see that he has much of a counter to the standard, more quantitative accounts. He should try to publish his more optimistic take using actual models, and see if it can survive peer review. Why should I be convinced in the meantime? I found chapter nine the weakest part of the book. Maybe he feels he wouldn’t get a fair knock by trying to publish his alternative take through “the standard process,” but as it stands his casual take doesn’t come close to overturning what I consider to be the most rational, consensus-based Bayesian estimate of the consequences of making no transition to green energy.
I am also impressed by how many different kinds of scientists accept these conclusions, and see these conclusions mirrored in their own research. If you ask say the oceanographers, they will give you a broadly consistent account as the climate scientists proper.
Nor is there, for my taste, enough discussion of how much climate risk we should be willing to take on. It is not just about “beliefs most likely to be true.” Note that the less you believe in climate models, the more you should be worried about tail risk. In these matters, do not assume that uncertainty is the friend of inaction.
So I really do think we need to deviate from the world’s recent course with respect to fossil fuels. Now, we can believe that claim and simultaneously believe it would be better if Burkina Faso were much richer, even though that likely would be accompanied by more fossil fuel use, at least for a considerable period of time.
Epstein focuses on the Burkina Faso sort of issue, and buries the long-term risk of no real adjustment. But we do have to adjust. Why could he not have had the subtitle: “Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas for a while, and Then Less”? Then I would be happier. In economic language, you could say he is not considering enough of the margins.
I think he is also too pessimistic about the long-run and even medium-run futures of alternative energy sources. More generally, I don’t think a few book chapters — by anyone with any point of view — can really settle that. I find the market data on green investments more convincing than his more abstract arguments (yes, I know a lot of those investments are driven by subsidies and regulation, but there is genuine change afoot).
I worry about his list of experts presented on pp.29-30. Mostly they are very weak, and this returns to my point about steelmanning.
In his inscription to the book Epstein calls me a contrarian — but he is the contrarian here! And I believe his position is likely to retain that designation. There is a lot in the book which is good, and true, nonetheless I fear the final message of the work will lower rather than raise social welfare.
For another point of view, here are various Bryan Caplan posts defending Epstein’s arguments. In any case, I thank Alex for the book.
Did the Covid housing boom induce the Great Resignation?
Following the Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. labor force participation declined significantly in 2020, slowly recovering in 2021 and 2022 — this has been referred to as the Great Resignation. The decline has been concentrated among older Americans. By 2022, the labor force participation of workers in their prime returned to its 2019 level, while older workers’ participation has continued to fall, responsible for almost the entire decline in the overall labor force participation rate. At the same time, the U.S. experienced large booms in both the equity and housing markets. We show that the Great Resignation among older workers can be fully explained by increases in housing wealth. MSAs with stronger house price growth tend to have lower participation rates, but only for home owners around retirement age — a 65 year old home owner’s unconditional participation rate of 44.8% falls to 43.9% if he experiences a 10% excess house price growth. A counterfactual shows that if housing returns in 2021 would have been equal to 2019 returns, there would have been no decline in the labor force participation of older Americans.
That is from a new paper by Jack Y. Favilukis and Gen Li, via Scott Lincicome.
Monday assorted links
A possible health surveillance breakthrough
Yale researchers have found that testing for the presence of a single immune system molecule on nasal swabs can help detect stealthy viruses not identified in standard tests, they report Jan. 1 in the journal Lancet Microbe.
“Finding a dangerous new virus is like searching for a needle in a haystack,” said Ellen Foxman, associate professor of laboratory medicine and immunobiology and senior author of the study. “We found a way to significantly reduce the size of the haystack.”
…For the new study, Foxman and her team revisited an observation made in her lab in 2017, which they thought may provide a new way to monitor for unexpected pathogens. Nasal swabs are commonly taken from patients with suspected respiratory infections and are tested to detect specific signatures of 10 to 15 known viruses. Most tests come back negative. But as Foxman’s team observed in 2017, in a few cases the swabs of those who tested negative for the “usual suspect” viruses still exhibited signs that antiviral defenses were activated, indicating the presence of a virus. The telltale sign was a high level of a single antiviral protein made by the cells that line the nasal passages.
Here is further information, this is a project funded and accelerated by Fast Grants.
Sunday assorted links
1. Teenage Sonny Rollins had a crush on teenage Faith Ringgold (NYT).
2. GPT trained on MRU takes an MRU exam.
3. Against some recent theories of diet.
4. “The capsule — which is less than a third of an inch long — went missing somewhere along the more than 800-mile stretch of road between Newman and Perth, the department said. It contains cesium-137, a radioactive material used in gauges for mining, one of the main industries in resource-rich Western Australia.” Link here.
Medical markets in everything?
Or will they be thwarted?
To Nina McCollum, Cleveland Clinic’s decision to begin billing for some email correspondence between patients and doctors “was a slap in the face.”
She has relied on electronic communications to help care for her ailing 80-year-old mother, Penny Cooke, who is in need of specialized psychiatric treatment from the clinic. “Every 15 or 20 dollars matters, because her money is running out,” she said.
Electronic health communications and telemedicine have exploded in recent years, fueled by the coronavirus pandemic and relaxed federal rules on billing for these types of care. In turn, a growing number of health care organizations, including some of the nation’s major hospital systems like Cleveland Clinic, doctors’ practices and other groups, have begun charging fees for some responses to more time-intensive patient queries via secure electronic portals like MyChart.
…a new study shows that the fees, which some institutions say range from a co-payment of as little as $3 to a charge of $35 to $100, may be discouraging at least a small percentage of patients from getting medical advice via email. Some doctors say they are caught in the middle of the debate over the fees, and others raised concerns about the effects that the charges might have on health equity and access to care.
Demand curves do slope downward. And yet:
But a recent study led by Dr. Holmgren of data from Epic, a dominant electronic health records company, showed that the rate of patient emails to providers had increased by more than 50 percent in the last three years.
Perhaps there is a smidgen of room for AI here? But not under the current legal regime, I suspect. Here is the full Benjamin Ryan NYT article.
*Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes*
The author is Jerry Z. Muller, and I am sorry I did not have the chance to read this book last year when it came out. Taubes is one of the most underrated deep thinkers, and this is the definitive biography of him. Think of Taubes as a mid-twentieth century Germanic-Jewish but also partly Christian thinker who tried to integrate philosophy, theology, and science, yet without ever committing to a serious enough level of written investigation to have a chance of pulling that off. He nonetheless was capable of depth, and pearls of insight, that few other thinkers can pull off. From the biography, here is one of the more personal excerpts:
Some of Margherita’s friends wondered at the pairing. Some thought her more attracted to women than to men. The partners seemed so different. She had a fashion sense that Jacob lacked. She drove a white Alfa Romeo, while after his move to Berlin, Jacob did not drive at all. She was proper and reserved. Jacob was neither. Jacob was ironic, skeptical, and witty; Margherita more strict and earnest. Jacob had a mind that was explorative and associative, while Margherita did not. She was a dog lover, a not unusual taste among Germans of her background, but foreign to Jacob’s. She owned a small house in the Black Forest, to which she withdrew from time to time, a practice Jacob scorned as “Heideggerei.”
I had not known Susan Sontag was his research assistant. I am less surprised that he hung out with Cioran and Hans Blumenberg (both insufficiently read in the English-speaking world as well). This book is not for everyone (500 + pp. about a thinker you probably have not read), but it is for some people.
Saturday assorted links
1. Forthcoming Netflix movie: “They Cloned Tyrone.”
2. “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” by Roald Dahl 1954.
3. One account of how GPTs hallucinate.
4. More on MusicLM from Google. Yet Google won’t release the model.
5. An AI-generated image? This one is marginally not safe for work, though not at the very extreme.
6. In which Peter Thiel speaks to the Oxford Union and calls Greta Thunberg “complacent.” Good Q&A.
Text-to-4D dynamic scene generation
Find it here, via Ryan Watkins. Further improvement is required, but the pace of current breakthroughs is remarkable.
The educational culture that is New Jersey
For four days, a 29-year-old woman pretended to be a student at a New Jersey public high school. She attended classes, spent time in the guidance office and collected phone numbers from teenagers who helped her find her way through the maze of hallways, according to students and a school official.
She continued to text former classmates days after the ruse was discovered last week, students said.
The woman, identified by the police as Hyejeong Shin, was arrested Tuesday and charged with providing documents that falsified her age to officials at New Brunswick Public Schools, a district with nearly 10,000 students in central New Jersey.
The incident, first reported by New Brunswick Today, has raised concerns about the safety protocols in place to verify student identities — and the woman’s reason for sneaking into a school that enrolls children as young as 15 in the first place.
Aubrey A. Johnson, the school superintendent, told board members Tuesday night that the district would be evaluating “how to better look for fake documentation and other things,” according to a video of the meeting shared on Twitter. Neither school nor police officials offered any information about a possible motive for her behavior.
Here is the full story, via tekl.
Friday assorted links
1. How much can economics explain medieval warfare?
2. Will India lose its oldest Chinatown?
3. What if you could talk to the Bible? (What again does the first Commandment say?)
5. An argument for Effective Altruism, maybe the best one?
6. Generating music from text commands? I know there is a lot of this b.s. going around, but this one is receiving positive reviews.
What should I ask Jess Wade?
I will be doing a Conversation with her, and here is her work:
Wade, a research fellow at Imperial College London, centers her work on Raman spectroscopy, a technique often employed in chemistry to identify molecules, among other uses. She has received several awards for her scientific contributions, and her Wikipedia page is robust with her many achievements.
Here is a good interview with her. And from The Washington Post:
Since 2017, Wade has written more than 1,750 Wikipedia pages for female and minority scientists and engineers whose accomplishments were not documented on the site.
Here is her own Wikipedia page. So what should I ask her?