Category: Uncategorized
My Conversation with Elijah Millgram
Elijah is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers, here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
Elijah joined Tyler to discuss Newcomb’s paradox, the reason he doesn’t have an opinion about everything, the philosophy of Dave Barry, style and simulation theory, why philosophers aren’t often consulted about current events, his best stories from TA-ing for Robert Nozick, the sociological correlates of knowing formal logic, the question of whether people are more interested in truth or being interesting, philosophical cycles, what makes Nietzsche important today, the role that meaning can play in a person’s personality and life, Mill on Bentham, the idea of true philosophy as dialogue, the extent to which modern philosophers are truly philosophical, why he views aesthetics as critical to philosophy, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Newcomb’s paradox: Are you a one-boxer or two-boxer, and why?
MILLGRAM: I’ve never been able to take a stand on that, mostly because there’s this moment in Robert Nozick’s discussion of the Newcomb paradox. Should we pause to tell the audience . . .
COWEN: No, no. This is not for them; this is for us. They can Google —
MILLGRAM: Oh, this is for us? OK. Nozick said, “Look, here’s what happens when you get a class,” or not even a class. People talk about Newcomb’s paradox. Some people end up having one view and some people end up having the other view. Each side has the argument for their own view, but they don’t have the explanation of what’s wrong with the other argument. Then Nozick says — and I think this is absolutely on target — “It doesn’t help to just repeat your own argument more slowly and more loudly.”
Since I don’t know what’s wrong with the — whichever other argument it is, I don’t have a view.
COWEN: If you don’t have a view, doesn’t that by default put you close to the one-box position? It means you don’t consider the dominance principle self-evident because you’re not sure that in fact you’re getting more by opting for the two boxes. Quantum mechanics is weird; aliens may be weirder yet. You don’t know what to do. Why not just take the slightly smaller prize and opt for one box? Not with extreme conviction, but you would be a default, mildly agnostic one-boxer.
MILLGRAM: Who knows what I would do if somebody turned up and gave me the . . .
But let me say something a little bit to the meta level, and then I’ll speak to the view that I would be a one-boxer. I live in a world where I feel disqualified from a privilege that almost everybody around me has. People are supposed to have opinions about all kinds of things. They have opinions about politics, and they have opinions about sports teams, and they have opinions about who knows what.
I’m in the very peculiar position of being in a job where I’m paid to have opinions. I feel that I can’t have opinions unless I’ve worked for them and I can back them up, and that means that unless I’ve done my homework, unless I have an argument for the opinion, I don’t have it — so I don’t.
Now, going back from the meta level, kind of one level down: let’s stop and think about what’s built into the . . .
When you explain dominance to a classroom, you say, “Look, here are the different options you have,” and I guess the options are used to the column, “and here are the different states of the world, and you can see that for each state of the world this option does better than that option. So you should take . . .”
There’s a lot built into that already. For example, that the world is carved up into these different — the state space is carved up, and your option space is carved up, and you don’t get to rethink, recharacterize — the characterization of the things that you do is already given to you, and it’s fixed. It’s an idealization.
Until the situation arrived and I had a chance to face it and think about it, I wouldn’t know whether to accept that idealization. I know that sounds really coy, but the principled view is that since I don’t have an argument, I don’t have an opinion.
Recommended. And here is Elijah’s home page and research.
What we learned doing Fast Grants
Here is my new piece with Patrick Collison and Patrick Hsu. The title says it all, here is one excerpt:
…we recently ran a survey of Fast Grants recipients, asking how much their Fast Grant accelerated their work. 32% said that Fast Grants accelerated their work by “a few months”, which is roughly what we were hoping for at the outset given that the disease was killing thousands of Americans every single day.
In addition to that, however, 64% of respondents told us that the work in question wouldn’t have happened without receiving a Fast Grant.
For example, SalivaDirect, the highly successful spit test from Yale University, was not able to get timely funding from its own School of Public Health, even though Yale has an endowment of over $30 billion. Fast Grants also made numerous grants to UC Berkeley researchers, and the UC Berkeley press office itself reported in May 2020: “One notably absent funder, however, is the federal government. While federal agencies have announced that researchers can apply to repurpose existing funds toward Covid-19 research and have promised new emergency funds to projects focused on the pandemic, disbursement has been painfully slow. …Despite many UC Berkeley proposals submitted to the National Institutes of Health since the pandemic began, none have been granted.” [Emphasis ours.]
And:
57% of respondents told us that they spend more than one quarter of their time on grant applications. This seems crazy. We spend enormous effort training scientists who are then forced to spend a significant fraction of their time seeking alms instead of focusing on the research they’ve been hired to pursue.
The adverse consequences of our funding apparatus appear to be more insidious than the mere imposition of bureaucratic overhead, however.
In our survey of the scientists who received Fast Grants, 78% said that they would change their research program “a lot” if their existing funding could be spent in an unconstrained fashion. We find this number to be far too high: the current grant funding apparatus does not allow some of the best scientists in the world to pursue the research agendas that they themselves think are best.
And:
Some of the other Fast Grants investments were speculative, and may (or may not) pay dividends in the future, or for the next pandemic. Examples include:
- Work on a possible pan-coronavirus vaccine at Caltech.
- Work on a possible pan-enterovirus (another class of RNA virus) drug at Stanford University that has now raised subsequent funding.
- Multiple grants going to different labs working on CRISPR-based COVID-19 at-home testing. One example is smartphone-based COVID-19 detection, being worked on at UC Berkeley and Gladstone Institutes.
Self-recommending…
A recent common cold may confer partial Covid-19 protection
Initial replication of SARS-CoV-2 in the upper respiratory tract is required to establish infection, and the replication level correlates with the likelihood of viral transmission. Here, we examined the role of host innate immune defenses in restricting early SARS-CoV-2 infection using transcriptomics and biomarker-based tracking in serial patient nasopharyngeal samples and experiments with airway epithelial organoids. SARS-CoV-2 initially replicated exponentially, with a doubling time of ∼6 h, and induced interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs) in the upper respiratory tract, which rose with viral replication and peaked just as viral load began to decline. Rhinovirus infection before SARS-CoV-2 exposure accelerated ISG responses and prevented SARSCoV-2 replication. Conversely, blocking ISG induction during SARS-CoV-2 infection enhanced viral replication from a low infectious dose. These results show that the activity of ISG-mediated defenses at the time of SARS-CoV-2 exposure impacts infection progression and that the heterologous antiviral response induced by a different virus can protect against SARS-CoV-2.
That is a just published paper, supported by Fast Grants, by Nagarjuna R. Cheemarla, Timothy A. Watkins, Valia T. Mihaylova, Bao Wang, Dejian Zhao, Guilin Wang, Marie L. Landry, and Ellen F. Foxman.
Tuesday assorted links
1. What would one-dimensional chess look like?
2. Very high implicit marginal tax rates for poor people (link fixed).
3. Very good Jason Furman thread on inflation uncertainty.
4. The power of median inflation.
5. Buy shares in your favorite musicians?
6. Andreu Mas-Colell is in trouble for secessionary activities. And more from Pol Antras. Hans Peter Grüner says: “It is hard to imagine that someone capable of writing such a wonderful textbook could have done anything that makes him deserve that kind of treatment.”
Roger Scruton Hungarian coffee shop markets in everything
When the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton died last year Boris Johnson called him “the greatest modern conservative thinker”.
It seems that he had an even greater admirer in Viktor Orban, the right-wing prime minister of Hungary, whose allies have poured £1.5 million into a chain of coffee shops in Scruton’s memory. The first opened in November in Budapest and is filled with Scruton memorabilia donated by his widow, Sophie.
More cafés will follow, says John O’Sullivan, a former speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher who now chairs a Hungarian think tank. The £1.5 million investment comes from the state-sponsored Batthyany foundation, which also paid for the historian Norman Stone to write a history of Hungary that praised Orban’s leadership.
Here is the full link from the London Times (gated). For the pointer I thank Jason D.
Monday assorted links
Mission Protocol
Business is the most important way in which human beings cooperate. In his Philosophical Letters, Voltaire explained to his French compatriots how the British had achieved religious toleration by focusing on business:
Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son’s foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn’t understand mumbled over the child, others go to heir church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.
What Voltaire understood is that if diverse people are to cooperate they must focus on their common interest and leave other (important) predilections like religion at home. Unfortunately, the woke movement is bringing religion back into business (and every other aspect of life). The religions have changed but Voltaire would not have been surprised at the consequences, a break down of cooperation and amity. That’s why I am very pleased to see how Brian Armstrong’s mission-focused company principles is growing rapidly:
A handful of founders and CEOs—Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, Jason Fried of Basecamp, Shopify’s Tobias Lütke, Medium’s Ev Williams—have said the unsayable. In the face of shop-floor social-justice activism, they’ve decided, business owners should resolve to stick to business.
No hashtag coders. No message-board threads about anti-racism or neo-pronouns. No open letters meant to get someone fired for a decade-old tweet. No politics. As Armstrong put it in his famous (or infamous) September 27th, 2020 blog post, business should be “mission focused.” A software developer explained that the conciliatory approach has become too costly: “The Slack shit, the company-wide emails, it definitely spills out into real life, and it’s a huge productivity drag.”
In October, a pseudonymous group inspired by Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong came together under the banner “Mission Protocol,” with the aim of getting other companies to start “putting aside activities and conversations” outside the scope of their professional missions. (“Mission focus doesn’t mean being apolitical,” they note. “It means being political about the mission. This mission is what you came together to accomplish, and this mission is what you’re fighting for in your work on the project.”) Paul Graham, a famed venture capitalist and “hacker philosopher,” tweeted his support to 1.3 million followers. Melia Russell, who covers the startup beat for Business Insider, noted that startups were jumping into the Mission Protocol threads “with a hell yes.”
One of the great achievements of the enlightenment was taking religion off the table. The result was peace, prosperity and the industrial revolution. In a similar way, sustaining cooperation among a diverse group of people, operating at a high level of performance is the task of great leaders and it means being mission focused.
Markets in everything Japanese melon pan mask edition
Melon pan is not only delicious, but one Japanese company also thinks it can make a good mask.
Osaka-based experimental think tank Goku no Kimochi The Labo has created “Mask Pan” or “Mask Bread” after college students from Fukuoka and Okinawa decided they want to sniff the smell of bread all the time. What better way to do that than wearing melon pan on your face?
FNN reports that Goku no Kimochi The Labo roped in famed melon pan specialty shop Melon de Melon to bake the bread. For each Mask Pan, the middle is carved out, making space for the wearer’s mouth and nose. As silly as this might seem (and goodness does it ever), the melon pan’s signature crunchy outside supposedly has a degree of effectiveness.
Here is the full story, via Shaffin Shariff.
Sunday assorted links
Emergent Ventures winners, 15th cohort
Emily Oster, Brown University, in support of her COVID-19 School Response Dashboard and the related “Data Hub” proposal, to ease and improve school reopenings, project here.
Kathleen Harward, to write and market a series of children’s books based on classical liberal values.
William Zhang, a high school junior on Long Island, NY, for general career development and to popularize machine learning and computation.
Kyle Schiller, to study possibilities for nuclear fusion.
Aaryan Harshith, 15 year old in Ontario, for general career development and “LightIR is the world’s first device that can instantly detect cancer cells during cancer surgery, preventing the disease from coming back and keeping patients healthier for longer.”
Anna Harvey, New York University and Social Science Research Council, to bring evidence-based law and economics research to practitioners in police departments and legal systems.
EconomistsWritingEveryDay blog, here is one recent good Michael Makowsky post.
Richard Hanania, Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, to pursue their new mission.
Jeremy Horpedahl, for his work on social media to combat misinformation, including (but not only) Covid misinformation.
Congratulations! Here are previous Emergent Ventures winners.
Saturday assorted links
1. Why did WWI take so long to start?
2. More than one layer of signaling in this story.
3. Whether various European countries have exceeded their 2006 gdp per capita highs.
4. It seems robots make us healthier.
5. Should people in academia write more on Wikipedia?
6. Even most Democrats do not favor taxing unrealized gains.
7. El Salvador: “Los intercambios en bitcoin no estarán sujetos a impuestos sobre las ganancias de capital al igual que cualquier moneda de curso legal.” And Bitcoin Beach in ES.
*Ages of American Capitalism*
The author is Jonathan Levy (U. Chicago) and the subtitle is A History of the United States, noting it is mostly an economic history from a left-mercantilist, nation-building point of view. So far on p.95 I quite like the book, here is one excerpt:
Ironically enough, in some respects Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty came to resemble the eighteenth-century British empire. Congress revoked all internal taxes. The military budget was cut in half. A provision of the 1789 Constitution, the Commerce Clause, granted Congress the authority to regulate commerce “among the several states,” forbidding interstate mercantilist discrimination. The result was to check state discrimination, opening up a unitary commercial space and increasing the extent of markets and thus the demand for goods. Empires, while forging common political jurisdiction, accommodate pluralism and difference in rule, often so that different elements in the empire might engage in commerce. In this respect, the Louisiana Purchase, in essence, handed the United States its own version of a West Indies in the lower Mississippi Valley. By 1810 already 16 percent of the U.S. slave population lived in the trans-Appalachian West. New slave-based triangular trades appeared on the North American continent, in a great counterclockwise national wheel of commerce.
741 pp. of text in this one, I am curious to see what comes next. And my colleague Steven Pearlstein wrote a very good review of the book.
What I’ve been reading
1. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1805 edition. Many people who read “the Great Books” never touch this one, because it is a poem, and a long one at that (about 200 pp. in my Oxford edition). Nonetheless a) it is one of the best poems, and b) the experience of reading it is more like reading “a great book” than like reading a poem. I am very happy to be rereading it. Highly recommended, and it is also important for understanding John Stuart Mill, the decline and transformation of classical economics, and how German romanticism shaped British intellectual history.
2. Julian Hoppit, The Dreadful Monster and its Poor Relations: Taxation, Spending and the United Kingdom, 1707-2021. A highly useful fiscal history, the book also has plenty on Ireland and those are often the most interesting sections. There had been a formal union in 1801, but during the Great Famine there was no fiscal risk-sharing with Ireland. At the time, the national government in London also much preferred spending in England to spending to Scotland. At 223 pp. of text it feels short, but is still a nice illustration of how fiscal policy really does show a government’s priorities and throughout history always has.
3. Seamus Deane, Small World: Ireland 1798-2018. Deane passed away only last month, might he have been Ireland’s greatest modern critic? Covering Burke, Swift, Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Heaney, Anna Burns and much more, these essays are especially good at tying together “old Ireland” with “current Ireland.”
4. Robert B. Brandom, A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. I’ve only read the first forty or so pages in this one, and I will read them again. I am not sure it makes sense for me to study this book further, given my priorities. Yet it seems worth the $50 I spent on it. If you wish to imbibe a truly impressive, line-for-line smart and insightful take from a contemporary philosopher, this 2019 book is exhibit A, noting that it serves up 757 pp. of text. I’ll let you know how far I get.
Gene Slater’s Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America is a very good and useful book about the role of realtors and covenants in shaping residential discrimination.
Michael Albertus, Property Without Rights: Origins and Consequences of the Property Rights Gap. I have only pawed through this one, but it appears to be a highly useful extension of de Soto themes with better data and a more systematic approach.
Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization is an argument that our capacity for getting drunk, and indeed the act of getting drunk, enhances creativity, trust building, and stress alleviation. I mostly agree, but…
Friday assorted links
1. Not sure I have been abused for any prediction more than this one, and yet it seems true: “Democratic primary voters have been turning away this year from the anti-elite furies that continue to roil Republican politics, repeatedly choosing more moderate candidates promising steady leadership over disrupters from the party’s left wing.” Here is yet further evidence of ongoing moderation.
2. More on Ivermectin. And very real progress on dengue — yes the biomedical revolution finally is here. More on that from The Atlantic.
3. Chess players ranked by fighting spirit?
4. Can Bollywood survive Modi? (Atlantic)
5. Ross Douthat on @pmarca and “Reality Privilege in action.”
Austin Vernon on El Salvadoran bitcoin acceptance, from my email
Sent this to [redacted, a man of substance] yesterday. LN = Lightning Network, Bitcoins layer 2 scaling solution based on channels:
As far as I understand it, everyone using LN in El Salvador has primarily been using Strike. Classic crypto conundrum in that they had to centralize to get it to work. There is a Twitter thread with the CEO where he shows they had to block their software using most non Strike LN nodes because there were so many failed payments.
https://mobile.twitter.com/JackMallers/status/1291403528116883456
https://strike.me/faq/howitworks
Also looks like you submit USD and they have some kind of centralized payment system to manage the transactions to the Bitcoin layer 1 chain.
I imagine this is a big improvement for people in El Salvador and I’ve heard Strike has already been popular, but I don’t see it as what is being touted as.
Additionally to the email above:
There was an out at the end of the law that says you don’t have to accept Bitcoin if you are too poor. But a basic smartphone with the app means you can accept it. There is a small town where a donor gave the town Bitcoin and forced them to use it as currency and even started doing a private UBI in Bitcoin. Some of the stores started taking it. Strike is only available in the US and El Salvador. So in a truth is stranger than fiction, the idea probably got jumpstarted by a surfer that loved both a beach town and bitcoin. Helps that El Salvador uses the dollar. The legislators would just have to drive to the town to see how it works rather than read about it.
To me this is more like a new kind of bank than some decentralized currency takeover, because Strike is relatively centralized. Being like a bank probably implies some of the same advantages and vulnerabilities of a regular bank. The PR is nice! Not having to get cash at a Western Union that might be far (and where you can get robbed) could have more impact than cheaper fees. It will be a few years before the technology exists to do this in a more decentralized way. Interesting nonetheless.