Category: Uncategorized
*This Beautiful Country*
The author is Edward Cutler and the subtitle is How Italy’s Nature Shaped its Culture and Civilisation. This is an excellent book on how “the Italy you know” has been shaped by its natural environment, such as its mountains, rivers, geology, and so on. Ever wondered why Sardinia is different? The book is good at sticking to specifics. Excerpt:
This extraordinary overlap has made Italy the continent’s botanical crossroads and one of its greatest arboreal sanctuaries. Within Europe, few countries host such a variety of native trees: at least 140 species, more than almost anywhere west of the Balkans. Some, like the Sicilian fir, Lobel’s maple and the Etna birch, are totally unique. The structure of Italy’s forests is equally diverse — dense, high-altitude canopies, open oak pastures, cork scrub and coastal maquis, each shaped by centuries of disturbance and renewal. This is the legacy of a land that sreved first as Europe’s refuge during the Ice Ages and later as its great corridor of return, where northern, eastern and African floras met and mingled in perpetual exchange.
Recommended to all those with an interest in Italy.
Our fascination with screens, demand curves slope downward installment #1637
What we find here is that the quality-adjusted screen time price index is down 39 per cent since 2000, but that change is overwhelmingly a function of improvements in quality, not declines in prices paid for devices, subscriptions and so on. So the steep rise in screen time over the past 20 years has led to a 52 per cent rise in real-terms spending per person on digital technology.
What seemed at first like a story of screen time outcompeting socialising and reading thanks to a widening advantage on cost, now looks more like digital technology winning out through the sheer force of unparalleled convenience and attention capture, even if that comes at a mounting financial (let alone social) cost.
Here is more from John-Burn Murdoch at the FT, wwmas?
The archaeology tranche of Emergent Ventures
- Björn Öste is building Arkhub, an AI-powered platform that analyzes remote-sensing and other archaeological data to identify potential ancient sites in the Amazon and enable further investigation by citizen scientists.
- J. Cameron Monroe is leading the Allada Regional Archaeology Project, using lidar, remote sensing, and archaeological fieldwork to reconstruct the historical landscape of the Kingdom of Allada and strengthen cultural heritage preservation in Benin.
Previously reported grantees include:
- Benjamin Arbuckle is combining archaeology and ancient DNA analysis to reconstruct entire ecosystems of ancient cities, with the goal of understanding how human societies can thrive in balance with their environments.
- Jesse Casana, an archaeology professor at Dartmouth, is developing drone-based radar imaging methods to detect and map archaeological sites buried beneath desert sands. His work combines advanced remote-sensing technologies with efforts to preserve endangered cultural landscapes.
- Leila Character is developing drone-based imaging and AI tools to detect hidden archaeological sites, making discovery faster, cheaper, and more accessible to researchers worldwide.
- Bryce Hoenigman is developing an AI tool to help date ancient cuneiform tablets by analyzing how written symbols evolved over time, with the goal of making archaeological research faster and more accurate.
With thanks to Yonatan Ben Shimon for his generosity in support of this. We do still have funds remaining in this tranche…
Saturday assorted links
1. GLM-5.3 understands Bob Lucas (and then some). It amuses me how many basic principles of economics are being rediscovered in these new contexts.
2. Most famous book tied to every U.S. state. The NJ answer is crazy, how about Roth’s American Pastoral?
3. Adam Tooze on Perry Mehrling.
4. How employment is changing at Anthropic.
5. Susannah Clarke on fantasy writing.
6. Caracas is safe now? (NYT)
Friday assorted links
1. Can Dybantsa (and others) turn around the Wizards? (NYT)
2. Claims about interpretability. I have to say I do not quite “get it”…? Here is some exposition.
3. “90% of Americans’ working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks. That’s our best guess from a new project mapping frontier benchmarks onto the US economy.” Study here.
4. Ross Douthat (The Free Press) on how to survive the robot apocalypse.
5. Jonathan Beauchamp podcast on genonomics.
6. More Bob Hall on monetary economics.
7. Arundhati Roy is upset at AI.
8. Flying car, at least for a bit. And here. As Roon points out, they offer you the characters too!
Thursday assorted links
China fact (?) of the day
A monograph by Yi Fuxian, a University of Wisconsin-Madison demographer and longtime critic of China’s population policies, argues that China’s actual population may be closer to 1.27 billion—not the 1.4 billion officially reported. The gap would be as much as 130 million people, roughly the population of Mexico. And Yi argues the distortion has warped strategic thinking in both China and the U.S., feeding overconfidence in Beijing and anxiety in Washington.
To make his case, Yi points to evidence in the country’s health and education records. Every newborn in China is required to receive a BCG tuberculosis vaccine within 24 hours of birth. Because multi-dose vials must be discarded 30 minutes after opening, each vial yields only about 1.2 to 1.6 usable doses in practice. Between 2018 and 2020, he noted, the government approved roughly 5.8 million vials a year. Yet official statistics claimed more than 14 million births annually. That would mean each vial somehow vaccinated 2.4 babies, which Yi said would be medically and practically impossible nationwide.
Yi also points to discrepancies in the reported size of individual birth cohorts. For instance, the National Bureau of Statistics said 17.7 million babies were born in 2000. But when that cohort reached age 10 in the 2010 census, only about 14.4 million were counted. By the time they graduated middle school in 2015, only about 14.2 million walked across the stage. About 3.5 million people from a single year were unaccounted for.
Yi said he cross-checks census records against school enrollments, hospital births, vaccine batches and household registrations. The picture that emerges, in his analysis, is a pattern of systematic inflation across multiple data sources.
Here is more from the WSJ, via Bob Davis.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Planets more habitable than Earth? (NYT)
2. Those new service sector jobs: “Cambiar de vida: cómo irte a contar pingüinos en la Antártida por hasta 2500 euros al mes.”
3. AI song about the China Shock debate.
5. “Fewer then 5 innovations could return 1920s era growth.”
6. Anthropic is hiring economists and political scientists, to teach their models those topics.
*Plunder: The Last of the War in Europe, 1945*
By Max Hastings, an excellent book, I benefited from every page. One recurring theme is simply how hard the Germans fought on the way down, and how unusual that behavior was. Here is one interesting passage of many:
In World War I, 150 German soldiers were sentenced to death for serious crimes, of which a mere forty-eight were executed. In World War II, thirty thousand death sentences were decreed by military courts, of which two-thirds were carried out, in addition to many more that took place without any judicial proceeding. By contrast the British executed forty men, the French 103, the Americans 146, almost all the condemned Allied soldiers having committed capital crimes as defined in civil law, rather than being sentenced for dereliction of military duty. Meanwhile the Japanese executed 22,253 of their own men, and the Russians at least 150,000, possibly as many as 300,000.
As I like to say, you can never read too many books about WWII.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Jon Hartley on Bob Hall. And Chad Jones on Bob Hall.
2. Nicholas Decker on who might have won the prize.
4. A parallel AI adjudication track?
5. Kevin Kelly on swarm intelligence.
6. What each country read on Wikipedia yesterday.
7. Is MIT economics good at talent evaluation?
Monday assorted links
Okie-dokie, Casey Handmer edition
I’ve been prototyping an automated peer review project. With current models you get human level peer review for about $0.10 of tokens. For $5 you can rederive every result, check every statistical inference, and audit every paper cited in both directions.
There are about 100m papers in the scientific corpus. Most are not important. Many are sloppy. For structural reasons it’s essentially impossible to change published work, even to correct a typo.
For $500m today you can thoroughly audit every paper ever written. Every p-hacked result, every plagiarist, every fabrication, every citation club, everything.
I don’t have $500m so instead I build a tree, focusing on the 1% of papers that carry 99% of the signal, doing a cheap first pass looking for obvious problems. I can find 90% of the nonsense for a few hundred dollars of tokens.
Any guesses where the biggest surprises will be found?
Here is the link.
Sunday assorted links
The economics of agents
From Patrick Collison:
Assorted things I’ve been mulling over regarding agents in the economy:
• Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It’s often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies.
• How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don’t). Taken across the economy as a whole, I’m not sure what the incidence of all of this will be.
• In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you’ve made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won’t people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good!
• If true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It’s often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That’s obviously true, but I think there’s a secondary way in which it’s more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.)
• A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we’ve been subjected to).
• Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. “I’ll click on the first thing I see.” This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It’s not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it’s not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don’t know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big.
• Much of what I’m writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer’s side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it’s true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they’re proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.
In addition to those mechanisms, I might also expect some prices to be more volatile. Suppliers will attempt to use agents to collude, and the law may not have a simple way of stopping this practice, due to illegibility. The practice could be illegible and unintended by the merchants themselves. But collusion of course tends not to be stable. So (some) prices may swoon upwards for a while, and then take sudden dips as either the collusion breaks down or new entry occurs…