Category: Uncategorized
Friday assorted links
A Sentiment Analysis of Cowen, Hanson, Caplan, and Krugman
Supplied by Bryan Caplan, performed by ChatGPT, excerpt:
So Cowen isn’t well described as either “positive” or “negative.” A much better description is:
High appreciation + high concern + very low emotional agitation.
He seems to think there is an astonishing amount of wonderful stuff in the world and an astonishing number of things worth worrying about.
That combination is unusual.
Insightful throughout. And have a nice day!
Predictions for economics, given AI
With math essentially being delegated to OpenAI, here’s what I predict for economics and the social sciences more generally:
The top tier of research will just become better and it will be normal human-led research where AI is used for scale (e.g. conducting qualitative interviews with relevant populations, running behavioral interventions in the field, analyzing massive text data, etc.)
Field experiments will rise in value and generally making “connections” with firms and being able to run stuff (potentially testing AI pipelines) will be in high demand
Research with administrative data will become even more valuable, but the benefits might be concentrated among some prolific authors who are allowed by the government agencies to use local models to analyze the data at scale. PhD students can probably forget about it
Economic history will have a very exciting boom and there will be an enormous race and big rewards for digitizing archives as a source to both identify new research strategies and document new descriptive facts.
Review and verification systems will become massively improved with AI assistance and it will become standard practice to do a 360 review of the paper + code + data at the *submission* stage.
Research that in principle can already be almost completely outsourced to the AI (download and analyze public data, run simple survey experiments, write theory models) is in for a big shock. This would be very bad from the perspective of researchers who depend on this “bread and butter” research, but I think this type of work will just be outsourced to public agencies who can answer their own questions without the need for “peer-reviewed” research.
All of those make sense to me.
Thursday assorted links
2. How the math breakthroughs might matter.
3. Short proof of quasi-Riemann.
4. App for finding art exhibitions.
5. Podcast on African economic growth.
6. New and very good book: The Madrid Model: How Freedom and Openness Created an Economic Powerhouse, by Diego Sánchez de la Cruz.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Palo Alto Networks (cybersecurity firm, check out YTD).
2. OAI doing math again. Quasi-Riemann! And just one metric of import.
3. The AI agents pitching literary magazines.
4. Redux of my 2022 post on the effective altruists.
Why most stereotypes are negative
Stereotypes are a foundational construct in psychological science, often defined as beliefs concerning characteristic group attributes. We present a cognitive-ecological theory of social perception that predicts and explains why such characteristic attributes are likely negative, that is, why most stereotypes are negative. The theory assumes that, cognitively, people characterize groups by attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Ecologically, positive social information is more frequent (i.e., positivity prevalence), and negative social information is more diverse (i.e., negativity diversity. If negative attributes are less frequent and more diverse relative to positive attributes, then they must be more likely to distinguish one group from another. Consequently, the attributes people see as characteristic of a group are likely to be negative. We illustrate the predicted stereotype negativity across two studies and two existing data sets. We then formalize the theory and illustrate it with simulations showing that rare attributes can be highly diagnostic of group membership while applying to only a minority of group members. Thus, the theory explains why most stereotype content is likely negative, despite the well-documented positivity prevalence, and why stereotypes may be diagnostic and comparatively accurate, despite being descriptively inaccurate. The theory explains stereotype negativity without requiring motivational derogation, essentialist group differences, or a general negativity bias, and it clarifies when positive stereotypes should occur. We also discuss the theory’s relation to dimensional models of stereotype content and consequences for interventions aimed at reducing stereotype negativity.
That is from a recent paper by Christian Unkelbach, Anne Irena Weitzel, and Hans Alves, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Brazil election notes (from my email)
From Diego Costa:
“Hi Tyler,
If you’re still interested in the fallout from Brazil’s elections, here are some observations that add texture to the usual narratives:
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Nine of the 10 candidates who received the most votes for the Lower Chamber are under 40. The exception is 41. Their average age is 31.6. They’re all very online and cultural-war centered. Four are pro-woke and six are anti-woke. The biggest vote-winner, anti-woke Nikolas Ferreira, will still be too young to run for president in 2030.
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There is a divergence between evangelical influencers and the big evangelical churches. While evangelical politicians with strong personal followings did well, several major big church machines lost seats, particularly in Rio.
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Brazil is expected to have its most female Senate ever, with 18 of 81 senators, driven by women on the right. All three senators representing the Federal District will be right-wing, including Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle Bolsonaro.
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This might be the end of Lulismo. Lula or his chosen candidate has run in every presidential election since 1989, but he has no obvious successor. If he loses the runoff, his personal presidential record will stand at three wins and four losses. Several historical PT historical figures also lost their bids. And Lula, who began his career with votes from the educated middle class in Brazil’s industrial Southeast, is ending it by leading only in the poorest income bracket and the poorer Northeast region.
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Flávio Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party won 121 seats in the Chamber and should hold 28 in the Senate, a record for any party since the 1988 Constitution. It will nevertheless remain short of a majority in both houses. The Chamber will feature 20 parties, down from the 30 elected in 2018.
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The Bolsonaro family elected two senators (Jair’s wife Michelle and son Carlos) and two federal deputies (his son Jair Renan and brother Renato). His son Flávio is leading going into the presidential runoff, while his other son Eduardo might become minister. That is possibly the highest concentration of national political power in one immediate family since the Brazilian Republic was founded in 1889.
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Lava Jato’s leading figures made a strong electoral comeback. Sergio Moro, the former judge who convicted Lula, won the governorship of Paraná in the first round. Deltan Dallagnol, who led the prosecution, won enough votes for a Senate seat, although his eligibility may be contested in the superior courts.
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Anger over corruption and power grabs by Supreme Court justices was a defining factor in the first-round result. I expect a confrontation between the new Senate and the court over limits on its powers to become a major story in 2027. Brazil’s Supreme Court issued over 100,000 decisions in 2025 alone.”
Tuesday assorted links
1. What is the real rate of Chinese economic growth?
2. An Abundance caucus rolls out a bipartisan agenda.
3. Canada fell to 18th from 9th in global ranking of economic freedom.
4. Will there ever be a Latin Bomb?
7. Seb Krier!
8. Good review of the new Kevin Roose book (NYT).
9. Research taste in foundation models is rising rapidly.
10. “Shares of South Korean cybersecurity companies surged by as much as 30% Tuesday.” (WSJ)
Monday assorted links
China fact of the day
With surrogacy illegal in China, an industry of agencies, consultants and fertility clinics has emerged to connect clients with women overseas willing to carry their children. While there is no data on the number of children born to Chinese parents via surrogacy, a recent study showed nearly a third of intended parents for surrogate babies in the US were international and some 40 per cent of those were from China.
Early demand largely came from couples struggling with fertility. But there was growing interest from younger women physically capable of becoming pregnant but reluctant to accept its impact on their bodies and careers, said consultants, clients and doctors interviewed by the FT…
Other destinations include Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, where packages can cost as little as $63,000.
Here is more from Eleanor Olcott at the FT.
Sunday assorted links
Do the elderly prefer robotic care?
The Japanese elderly, to be clear:
Population aging and shortages of long-term care workers have increased interest in care-giving robots and information and communication technology (ICT). This paper provides novel large-scale evidence on older individuals’ perceptions of such technologies, drawing on a custom-designed internet survey of 4,314 Japanese individuals aged 55 to 75. Respondents choose between two otherwise identical nursing homes: one in which all care is provided by human caregivers, and one in which robots and ICT are used to provide a substantial share of care in one randomly assigned domain (communication, monitoring, or mobility assistance), while other care remains human-provided. A majority of respondents (65 percent) prefer nursing homes where robots and ICT are used. Acceptance differs substantially across care domains: It is highest for mobility assistance, intermediate for monitoring, and lowest for communication. The average willingness to pay (WTP) for a nursing home where robots and ICT provide a substantial share of care is sizable, at 8 percent above the typical nursing home fee. Prior awareness of caregiving robots is positively associated with both acceptance and WTP, pointing to the potential role of information in shaping older individuals’ preferences. Acceptance and WTP are also strongly associated with sentiments toward robots and ICT expressed in attitude questions, providing support for the internal consistency of survey responses. A back-of-the-envelope calculation offers suggestive evidence that the benefits of introducing robots and ICT can be much larger than the costs, in particular for mobility-aid robots.
From a recent paper by Bertrand Achou, et.al.
Saturday assorted links
Friday assorted links
1. How rich was Anglo-Saxon England?
2. New game theory paper on AI races.
3. Scott Sumner movie reviews, please note he is always correct and thus the greatest film critic in the world, at least by that metric.
4. What should the AI safety movement be?
5. The frontier models are beating licensed accountants.
7. Imbue Studios.
What should I ask Tom Griffiths?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Looking at Wikipedia:
Thomas L. Griffiths (born c. 1978) is an Australian academic who is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture at Princeton University. He studies human decision-making and its connection to problem-solving methods in computation. His book with Brian Christian, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, was named one of the “Best Books of 2016” by MIT Technology Review…
Griffiths released The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind in 2026. Siobhan Roberts describes it as “a rigorous and captivating account of how cognition can be modeled via three mathematical frameworks: logic, artificial neural networks (“mathematical systems that emulate the operation of the brain”) and probability theory.”
Here is his research page, here is his new book on Amazon, I thought the book was excellent.
So what should I ask him?