Category: Uncategorized
Tuesday assorted links
1. Brangus on women, the incels need this, noting I do not agree with all the points. But better than the PUA stuff.
2. The monarchy returns in Tonga.
3. Hail the Swiss. 80 percent rejection. And Johann notes to me: “Only two municipalities voted yes on the recent ballot measure for a 50% inheritance tax over 50 million francs: The city of Bern with about 140’000 inhabitants and the village of Schelten with 34.”
4. Woman on a mission to photograph every species of hummingbird.
5. Parties of the Right rising in Honduras, party of the Left plummeting. But when will the ruling party resume the count or make the count public? And it seems the two leading candidates are both ethnically Palestinian?
6. Why many people have trouble with the concept of strong AI or AGI.
7. Is the Mississippi reading miracle in part statistical illusion?
The myth of the $140,000 poverty line
That is my latest piece for The Free Press, focusing on the claims of Michael W. Green. Excerpt:
Most of all, there is a major conceptual error in Green’s focus on high prices. To the extent that prices are high, it is not because our supply chains have been destroyed by earthquakes or nuclear bombs. Rather, prices are high in large part because demand is high, which can only happen because so many more Americans can afford to buy things. I am reminded of the old Yogi Berra saying: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
There are now numerous excellent criticisms of the same piece, for instance by Scott Winship and Noah Smith. As my piece was in the works, Green published this response to some of the criticisms.
Séb Krier
Huge fan of multi agent systems, agent based modelling, and social intelligence – these frames still seem really absent from mainstream AI discourse except in a few odd places. Some half-baked thoughts:
1. Expecting a model to do all the work, solve everything, come up with new innovations etc is probably not right. This was kinda the implicit assumption behind *some* interpretations of capabilities progress. The ‘single genius model’ overlooks the fact that inference costs and context windows are finite.
2. People overrate individual intelligence: most innovations are the product of social organisations (cooperation) and market dynamics (competition), not a single genius savant. Though the latter matters too of course: the smarter the agents the better.
3. There’s still a lot of juice to be squeezed from models, but I would think it has more to do with how they’re organised. AI Village is a nice vignette, and also highlights the many ways in which models fail and what needs to be fixed.
4. Once you enter multi-agent world, then institutions and culture start to matter too: what are the rules of the game? What is encouraged vs what is punished? What can agents do and say to each other? How are conflicts resolved? It’s been interesting seeing how some protocols recently emerged. We’re still very early!
5. Most of the *value* and transformative changes we will get from AI will come from products, not models. The models are the cognitive raw power, the products are what makes them useful and adapted to what some user class actually needs. A product is basically the bridge between raw potential and specific utility; in fact many IDEs today are essentially crystallized multi agent systems.
Here is the link.
*Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect*
By H.S. Jones, an excellent book. For all the resurgence of interest in government and its problems, Bryce has received remarkably little attention. But his theory of low-quality, careerist politcians, combined with imperfectly informed voters, seems highly relevant to our current day. Public opinion is slow, and largely reactive, but potent once mobilized. Leadership can truly matter, and he stresses national character and civic education. In other words, Bryce’s The American Commonwealth is a book still worth reading.
I had not known that Bryce was born in Belfast, or that he was so opposed to women’s suffrage. Or that he was so interested in Armenia, climbed Mount Ararat, and was fascinated by the inevitability of interracial marriage and its consequences (no, not in the usual racist way). He was an expert on Roman law.
Recommended, and also very well written.
Monday assorted links
Meta-analytical effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health
Some of us have known this for some time:
Exposure to economic inequality is widely thought to erode subjective well-being and mental health, which carries important societal implications. However, existing studies face reproducibility issues, and theory suggests that inequality only affects individuals in disadvantaged contexts. Here we present a meta-analysis of 168 studies using multilevel data (11,389,871 participants from 38,335 geographical units) identified across 10 bibliographical databases (2000–2022). Contrary to popular narratives, random-effects models showed that individuals in more unequal areas do not report lower subjective well-being (standardized odds ratio (OR+0.05) = 0.979, 95% confidence interval = 0.951–1.008). Moreover, although inequality initially seemed to undermine mental health, the publication-bias-corrected association was null (OR+0.05 = 1.019; 0.990–1.049)17. Meta-analytical effects were smaller than the smallest effect of interest, and specification curve analyses confirmed these results across ≈95% of 768 alternative models. When assessing study quality and certainty of evidence using ROBINS-E and GRADE criteria, ROBINS-E rated 80% of studies at high risk of bias, and GRADE assigned greater certainty to the null effects than to the negative effects. Meta-regressions revealed that the adverse association between inequality and mental health was confined to low-income samples. Moreover, machine-learning analyses19 indicated that the association with well-being was negative in high-inflation contexts but positive in low-inflation contexts. These moderation effects were replicated using Gallup World Poll data (up to 2 million participants). These findings challenge the view that economic inequality universally harms psychological health and can inform public health policy.
That is now published in Nature, by Nicholas Sommet, et.al., via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Popular music of 2025
Usually I wait until the year passes before dipping too deeply into these offerings, but this year I have been impressed by:
Bad Bunny, ‘DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’.
Geese, Getting Killed.
Rosalia, Lux.
Oklou, Choke Enough.
Saya Gray, Saya.
Fontaines D.C., Romance, late 2024.
Jeff Tweedy, Twilight Override.
Raye, assorted songs.
There will be more, that is my first cut at a list of interest.
Sunday assorted links
1. False claims about China and Japan, but still worth pondering.
2. False claims about birth rates and utility.
3. Can management consultants be literary heroes? (FT)
4. JFV on equilibrium in economics.
5. When does low fertility shatter the social contract?
6. Naturally occurring furin cleavage sites.
7. If somehow you do not know the works of Tom Stoppard you should, RIP, here is the NYT obituary.
Europe’s first elephant sanctuary
Portugal’s Alentejo region is set to become home to a groundbreaking project – Europe’s first sanctuary for elephants that have lived in captivity.
Set across 402 hectares between Vila Viçosa and Alandroal, the vast refuge will welcome its first residents – elephants from zoos and circuses across Europe – in early 2026. The initiative is led by the non-profit organisation Pangea, registered in Portugal and the UK, with support from local councils and national environmental authorities such as Directorate-General for Food and Veterinary (DGAV) and the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF).
The land was purchased in 2023 by the non-profit, which has been busy preparing it for the elephants…
In a statement, Pangea explained that the project consists of creating a natural space for “elephants in a vulnerable situation”, so that the animals can “move freely, feed and socialise, just as they would in their wild habitat”.
Here is the full story. About thirty elephants are slated to end up there. Henry Mance at the FT notes:
The elephants will have 850 acres to roam — more than 200 times the size of Tierpark Berlin zoo’s elephant enclosure or 28 times that of the UK’s Whipsnade Zoo.
And:
The median lifespan for African elephants in a Kenyan national park was three times that of those in European zoos.
Will this prove financially sustainable? Replicable? Finding an area with enough water was one of the major constraints.
Saturday assorted links
Education Signaling and Employer Learning Heterogeneity
An interesting paper based on an idea:
We investigate the implications of heterogeneous employer learning on education signaling and workers sorting across industries. In the equilibrium of our model, higher-ability workers join industries with faster employer learning speeds, resulting in a matching distortion of workers and industries. In addition, our results are robust to varying degrees of asymmetric employer learning, and establish that industry choice itself serves as a signal of worker ability. Finally, our theoretical approach suggests a novel perspective on a heretofore neglected labor market puzzle, i.e., why few of the richest individuals have obtained higher degrees of education.
That is from Yuhan Chen, Thomas Jungbauer, and Michael Waldman. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Best movies of 2025
This was one of the weakest years in my lifetime for movies, and with few that would count as truly great. Here are the ones I liked:
Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat
Flow
I’m Still Here
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Gazer
The Shrouds
Warfare
Oh, Hi
Weapons
Sorry, Baby
Red Rooms (actually 2023 but it deserves a mention anyway)
Hamnet
The Materialists
The Thinking Game
The Secret Agent
What else? I am still waiting for various foreign films to be available online, that will make this list stronger.
*Policing on Drugs*
The author is Aileen Teague, and the subtitle is The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000. I had been wanting to read a book on this topic, and this manuscript covered exactly the ground I was hoping for. Excerpt:
…in 1965, only 4.8 percent of college students in the Northeast had ever tried marijuana. By 1970, that figure jmped to 48 percent of college students from Northeast schools having used marijuana within the last year.
Jim Buchanan was right? Blame the Beatles? Remember when so much of the drug trade was a Turkish-French thing?
If you are wondering, the Mexican drug cartels emerged during the 1970s. Perhaps the author blames more of this on U.S. policy than I think is correct? If Nixon had never cracked down and militarized the issue, I suspect the evolution of the matter would not be so different from current status quo? Unless of course you wish to go the Walmart route.
In any case a good book on a topic of vital importance.
Friday assorted links
What I’ve been reading
1. Thomas Meyer-Wieser, Cairo: Architectural Guide. A picture book, sort of. Reading a book on the architectural history of a place, while intrinsically interesting, is also usually the best way to learn the non-architectural history of that same place. Recommended.
2. Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney. A late 18th English fictional memoir, still underrated and fairly short to boot. Very interesting on Enlightenment culture, what it meant to grow up in a reading culture, and the power of early feminism.
3. Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Usually journals bore me after the first fifty pages. But this lengthy volume is fascinating throughout, and arguably her greatest achievement? At the very least worth a try. She maintained an impossibly high level of writing across these years, plus you see (close up) the shifts in how her life was going, electroshock therapy and all. Recommended.
4. Somerset Maugham, Up at the Villa. Great fun at first, and very short. It ends up “overinvesting” in plot, but still for me a worthwhile read. It is best when at its most psychological.
5. Joel J. Miller, The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Out Future. A paean to reading and its importance, comprised of many historical anecdotes. I wish each part went into more detail, nonetheless this is an important book about a cultural transmission method that is in some unfortunate ways diminishing in its cultural centrality.
6. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas. Why do so few people talk about this piece? It is Woolf writing on feminization and the prevention of war. The argument is dense, and I will give it a reread. She seems to attributing some of the worst aspects of militarized society to the approbational propensities of educated women? She also considers — well ahead of her time — how male and female philanthropy are likely to differ. In any case, there is more here than at first meets the eye.
There is also Keija Wu’s A Modern History of China’s Art Market.