Category: Uncategorized
Saturday assorted links
Two brutal tests — can you pass them?
We all give people “tests” when we meet them, whether we are consciously aware of it or not. Here are two of mine:
1. The chess test. When I played chess in my youth, I would commonly analyze games with other players. You would then rapidly learn just how much and how quickly the other player could figure out the position and see imaginative variations. Some players maybe had equal or even inferior results to mine (I had a good work ethic and took no drugs), but it was obvious they were greater talents at analysis. Top chess players who worked with Bobby Fischer also attest that in this regard he was tops, not just “another great player.” That was true even before he was good enough and steady enough to become world champion.
When talking ideas with people, the same issue surfaces — just how quickly and how imaginatively do they grasp what is going on? You should put aside whatever they have or have not accomplished. How much do they have this Bobby Fischer-like capacity to analyze? No matter what their recent results have been (remember how Efim Geller used to kick Fischer’s butt in actual games?).
2. The art test. Take a person’s favorite genres of art, music, whatever. But something outside of their work lives. Maybe it can even be sports. How deeply do they understand the said subject matter? At what kind of level can they talk about it or enjoy it or maybe even practice it?
Remember in Hamlet, how Hamlet puts on a play right before the King’s eyes, to see how the King reacts to “art”?
Here we are testing for sensibility more than any kind of rigorous analysis, though the analysis test may kick in as well. Just how deep is the person’s deepest sensibility?
If you are investing in talent, you probably would prefer someone really good at one of these tests over someone who is “pretty good” at both of them.
3. All other tests.
Now, people can be very successful while failing both “the chess test” and “the art test.” In fact, most successful people fail both of these tests. Still, their kinds of success will be circumscribed. They are more likely to be hard-working, super-sharp, and accomplished, perhaps charismatic as well, while lacking depth and imaginative faculty in their work.
Nonetheless they will be super-focused on being successful.
I call this the success test.
Now if someone can pass the chess test, the art test, and the success test with flying colors…there are such people!
And if the person doesn’t pass any of those tests, they still might be just fine, but there will be a definite upper cap on their performance.
Friday assorted links
1. Capybara population ‘wreaking havoc’ in wealthy community in Argentina.
2. Scott Sumner on his new book.
3. New boxed set covers the Beach Boys last creative period (NYT).
4. David Brooks (albeit with other purposes in mind) expresses why I am skeptical about the possibility of ems (NYT).
5. AMA with Vitalik, the lead question is from Elon, I am in there too, as is Alex and many others you might know (only the people he follows on Twitter were allowed to ask). Definitely recommended.
Thursday assorted links
1. John Tomasi to head Heterodox Academy.
2. Browser interview with Applied Divinity Studies.
3. Maxwell T. on start-up cities and the housing crisis. And here is the new Profectus Magazine more generally.
4. A vision of the future inspired by classical antiquity.
5. Florida now 19th for per capita vaccinations.
6. Stupid barter markets in everything how can this kind of stuff happen?
A simple illustration of the benefits of feminization
Fox’s Tucker Carlson, the most important nationalist voice in America, seemed to sympathize with the gender politics of Taliban-supporting Afghans. “They don’t hate their own masculinity,” he said shortly after the fall of Kabul. “They don’t think it’s toxic. They like the patriarchy. Some of their women like it too. So now they’re getting it all back. So maybe it’s possible that we failed in Afghanistan because the entire neoliberal program is grotesque.” (By “neoliberalism” he seems to mean social liberalism, not austerity economics.)
From Michelle Goldberg (NYT), that in a nutshell is the case for the feminization of society, which I see as bringing strongly positive net benefits for both men and women, in most but by no means all cases.
Do note that if you ever see me describing this feminization in not entirely glowing terms, that is part of my desire to give you the entire unvarnished picture, as I would with most other topics. (The most common reading mistake you can make in these parts is to over-infer an entire mood affiliation from a single post.)
When it comes to feminization, I also think sometimes of my grade and junior high school gym teacher, Mr. O (I will omit his full name, but in fact we also called him “Mr. O”). He acted like a tough guy, but in fact was just a…grade school gym teacher. Nonetheless he acted as if he was auditioning for the role of Patton in a Hollywood movie.
He smoked his cigarillos (?) in that kind of plastic thing-y, like the Penguin did on the original Batman show.
If a smaller or less athletic kid took a tough spill, or was picked on by the others, he would say “Suck it up, kid!”, with little sympathy. (If you are wondering, the worst he ever said to me was “That was a stupid foul, kid,” in a fifth-grade basketball contest. So I didn’t bear a personal grudge against him.)
He seemed to love the game of Bombardment, as in fact I did too. (I still remember being one of the last two men standing, but losing to Jimmy Gravelis, who caught my too-weak toss.)
He was a Roman Catholic and a veteran of the Korean War. He seemed to stare too long at the boys entering and leaving the shower, after the exercise period of gym. But no one really questioned this.
Even as a kid, I thought he was a bit…sick and also over the top. In some ways though he was a good teacher and he definitely maintained discipline. Kids were afraid of him. And he toughened them up for the world to come.
Still, at the end of the day I am not wishing to return to the cultural ascent of Mr. O.
I would rather live in a more feminized world, even if I still miss Bombardment. But if you are not a fan of this new arrangement…hey, “Suck it up kid!”
Addendum: You might argue that I had the best of both worlds, namely to grow up in the “tougher” society, but live most of my life in the more feminized society — maybe so!
Toward a theory of Emergent Ventures
Tony Kulesa, a biomedical venture capitalist, has a very nice new piece up about how Emergent Ventures works. He overrates me in particular, but the overall account is quite accurate and insightful, and the piece is based on a considerable amount of detailed research. Here is one excerpt:
Tyler’s success at discovering and enabling the most talented people before anyone else notices them boils down to four components:
- Distribution: Tyler promotes the opportunity in such a way that the talent level of the application pool is extraordinarily high and the people who apply are uniquely earnest.
- Application: Emergent Ventures’ application is laser focused on the quality of the applicant’s ideas, and boils out the noise of credentials, references, and test scores.
- Selection: Tyler has relentlessly trained his taste for decades, the way a world class athlete trains for the olympics.
- Inspiration: Tyler personally encourages winners to be bolder, creating an ambition flywheel as they in turn inspire future applicants.
Self-recommended! The piece is interesting throughout, and has much social science in it.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Is America’s aerospace industry regenerating?
2. Sam Enright’s guide to recreational math videos on-line.
3. “A good start” — they should be working for us, not us for them. And yes I believe in following the science — the science of expected utility maximization. They are the ones who do not really believe in science, just their own status within their own branch of science.
4. What kind of Berkeley protest is this?
What I’ve been reading
1. Anne Serre, The Beginners. What is it like for a woman to go from loving one man to another? This newly translated French novel was fun enough, insightful enough, and direct and short enough for me to finish.
2. Lachlan Goudie, The Story of Scottish Art. Even if you don’t care about art, this is a wonderful way to learn the history of Scotland. My takeaway favorite painters were Allan Ramsey (friends with Smith and Hume), Henry Raeburn, David Wilkie, and John Duncan, more or less consistent with my earlier views but now they are better informed. A good book with a nice blue and yellow cover.
3. Frank Herbert, Dune. For me a reread, I loved it when I was twelve, but how does it stand up? I am struck by how excellent and pathbreaking the best chapters are, including the introductory chapter. The influence on Star Wars is obvious, as is the role of Islam in the story. It strikes me as remarkably cinematic, with the right kinds of transitions to boot — how was this never put successfully on the big screen? I am about two-thirds through it right now, and maybe it 2/3 holds up? But would you want all of the slow pacing of the detail removed?
Carole Hooven, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. Recommended.
Aubrey Clayton, Bernoulli’s Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science. I found this most interesting as a history of probability theory, and with more coverage of Quetelet than one usually finds.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Rating the menus.
2. The Fed takes duration risk.
3. Margaritaville Times Square markets in everything.
4. Brazilian criminal group ties hostages to getaway cars. That was to deter gunfire from the police.
5. The five best Faulkner books?
The capital life extension query
From Arjun Narayan:
Loyal reader here and I’ve been pondering an altered version of your post [the other day] -You have the power to grant 100% more capital (that they deployed in their lifetime) to a person or institution who prematurely ran out of capital too soon. Who do you pick?
It’s worth considering the counterfactual: Elon Musk almost ran out of money in 2008 and was bailed out by Daimler. we would be far worse off on a few dimensions (lithium ion battery production, but also the urgency with which every carmaker is now attacking the transportation electrification problem). Who else should we go back in time and similarly bail out?
My answer is the companies that built the NYC subway which went bankrupt – the BMT, IRT, and IND. After the city takeover in ~1940, construction slowed over a generation, and no infrastructure has been built since. It’s unclear if infrastructure will ever be built in NYC again. It’s clear to me that the only time to build was right then and there, and we should have “overbuilt” to the maximum extent possible when we could.
And in terms of returns to society, what is the value of 10% more efficient subway service (faster/longer/more frequent)? 20? 50%? We could absorb more population (NIMBYs notwithstanding), and as the largest city in the US, the agglomeration effect means it is most impactful here.
I am very curious what your answer would be!
I do not have a better answer than that, unless you start getting into military scenarios. If you are allowed to consider cyclical scenarios, how about more money to bail out U.S. banks in the 1929-1932 period? More funds to limit the German deflation before Hitler, or alternatively to bail out the Weimar government so hyperinflation and later social collapse does not come? But I take those possibilities as beyond the initial question.
Could a cash infusion alone have kept Intel active and successful in the high-quality chips market? Somehow I doubt that. More money for Novavax in 2020-21 as a contender? That could have helped the rest of the world a good deal, given how slow they have been to convert their very important science into an actual product.
Monday assorted links
1. Consumers believe products work better for others.
2. Music sentiments and stock returns (speculative, though in a good journal).
3. My Bloomberg column on Larry Elder.
5. The Biden tax bill is being scaled back (New York).
Don’t shoot the messenger — on the value of human life
Thus, to analysts, picking one such meta-analysis may feel as hard as picking a single “best study.” This paper responds by taking the meta-analysis another step, estimating a meta-analysis (or mixture distribution) of six meta-analyses. The baseline model yields a central VSL of $7.0m, with a 90% confidence interval of $2.4m to $11.2m. The provided code allows users to easily change subjective weights on the studies, add new studies, or change adjustments for income, inflation, and latency.
Which post-1960 creators built their own sonic worlds?
Of course this question is motivated by the passing of the great Lee Perry. Who else might make such an exclusive list? Note here we are not talking about whether you like the style, the melodies, or whatever. Did the creator come up with a fundamentally new way of organizing our musical universe? (Rolling Stones, Paul Simon, ABBA, many other notables don’t come close here, despite their considerable merits.) Here is the list off the top of my head:
Miles Davis
John Coltrane
Ornette Coleman
Sun Ra (Monk I count as pre-1960?)
The Beatles
Brian Wilson
Hendrix and Led Zeppelin?
Rap and electronica, respectively, with arguments as to where the individual credit should go
Funk/JB/Sly/Fela
Brian Eno
Kraftwerk
Velvet Underground
Sex Pistols
Kevin Shields/My Bloody Valentine
Sonic Youth
Philip Glass
Steve Reich
LaMonte Young
Robert Ashley
Xenakis
And of course Lee Perry
Who cares what you like? I would say study them to learn music!
Who else? Kurt Cobain? The Byrds? Someone from MPB? Helmut Lachenmann? Sunn O)))? Others? Anyone else from psychedelic music? Post-1960 Stockhausen and Cage (or did they bloom earlier?)? Scelsi? Can? Bill Evans? Astral Weeks? What else?
Sunday assorted links
1. Angela Hewitt plays The Art of the Fugue.
2. “Er kann Kanzlerin”. And here is Tracey Ullman on Merkel.
3. Good essay on Thomas Bernhard.
4. Israel moves to a three-dose standard. And Covid truth from Singapore.
5. Was the 1889-1891 “Russian flu” actually a coronavirus?
6. And Sokolov playing Partita #1. The only version that might stand up to Glenn Gould’s?
This piece is proving to have legs
We develop a framework to theoretically and empirically analyze the fluctuations of the aggregate stock market. Households allocate capital to institutions, which are fairly constrained, for example operating with a mandate to maintain a fixed equity share or with moderate scope for variation in response to changing market conditions. As a result, the price elasticity of demand of the aggregate stock market is small, and flows in and out of the stock market have large impacts on prices.
Using the recent method of granular instrumental variables, we find that investing $1 in the stock market increases the market’s aggregate value by about $5. We also develop a new measure of capital flows into the market, consistent with our theory. We relate it to prices, macroeconomic variables, and survey expectations of returns. We analyze how key parts of macro-finance change if markets are inelastic. We show how general equilibrium models and pricing kernels can be generalized to incorporate flows, which makes them amenable to use in more realistic macroeconomic models and to policy analysis. Our framework allows us to give a dynamic economic structure to old and recent datasets comprising holdings and flows in various segments of the market. The mystery of apparently random movements of the stock market, hard to link to fundamentals, is replaced by the more manageable problem of understanding the determinants of flows in inelastic markets. We delineate a research agenda that can explore a number of questions raised by this analysis, and might lead to a more concrete understanding of the origins of financial fluctuations across markets.
Here is the link, by Xavier Gabaix and Ralph S.J. Koijen. I worry that the hypothesis implies excess returns from monitoring the trading behavior of others (or even yourself?), but that’s just me. It is in any case one of the more interesting (and ambitious) pieces in finance over the last few years.