Category: Uncategorized
The economy of Lebanon is collapsing
Here is the opening:
These are among the latest symptoms of an economic implosion that is accelerating at an alarming pace in Lebanon as its government, its banks and its citizens run out of foreign currency simultaneously.
And:
The Lebanese pound has lost over 60 percent of its value in just the past month, and 80 percent of its value since October. Prices are soaring and goods disappearing.
Bread, a staple of the Lebanese diet, is in short supply because the government can’t fund imports of wheat. Essential medicines are disappearing from pharmacies. Hospitals are laying off staff because the government isn’t paying its portion, and canceling surgeries because they don’t have electricity or the fuel to operate generators.
And:
Newly impoverished people are taking to Facebook to offer to trade household items for milk. Crime is on the rise. In one widely circulated video, a man wearing a coronavirus mask and wielding a pistol holds up a drugstore and demands that the pharmacist hand over diapers.
“Lebanon is no longer on the brink of collapse. The economy of Lebanon has collapsed,” said Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. “The Lebanese model established since the end of the civil war in 1990 has failed. It was a house of glass, and it has shattered beyond any hope of return.”
And:
Lebanon’s Western allies long ago made it clear that they won’t help out until the government undertakes efforts to reform the corrupt and bloated public sector. An $11 billion package of loans and investments has been on offer since 2018 — on the condition that the government undertake some limited changes. It hasn’t.
And if you had any doubts:
Staggering amounts are now missing from the banking system — perhaps as much as $100 billion, according to government figures.
Three-quarters of the deposits in the entire banking system were denominated in U.S. dollars, and many ordinary Lebanese may have lost most or all of their savings, said Jad Chaaban, an economist at the American University of Beirut.
Here is the full article by Liz Sly.
Monday assorted links
A highly speculative version of the immunological dark matter hypothesis
The COVID-19 pandemic is thought to began in Wuhan, China in December 2019. Mobility analysis identified East-Asia and Oceania countries to be highly-exposed to COVID-19 spread, consistent with the earliest spread occurring in these regions. However, here we show that while a strong positive correlation between case-numbers and exposure level could be seen early-on as expected, at later times the infection-level is found to be negatively correlated with exposure-level. Moreover, the infection level is positively correlated with the population size, which is puzzling since it has not reached the level necessary for population-size to affect infection-level through herd immunity. These issues are resolved if a low-virulence Corona-strain (LVS) began spreading earlier in China outside of Wuhan, and later globally, providing immunity from the later appearing high-virulence strain (HVS). Following its spread into Wuhan, cumulative mutations gave rise to the emergence of an HVS, known as SARS-CoV-2, starting the COVID-19 pandemic. We model the co-infection by an LVS and an HVS and show that it can explain the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic and the non-trivial dependence on the exposure level to China and the population-size in each country. We find that the LVS began its spread a few months before the onset of the HVS and that its spread doubling-time is \sim1.59\pm0.17 times slower than the HVS. Although more slowly spreading, its earlier onset allowed the LVS to spread globally before the emergence of the HVS. In particular, in countries exposed earlier to the LVS and/or having smaller population-size, the LVS could achieve herd-immunity earlier, and quench the later-spread HVS at earlier stages. We find our two-parameter (the spread-rate and the initial onset time of the LVS) can accurately explain the current infection levels (R^2=0.74); p-value (p) of 5.2×10^-13). Furthermore, countries exposed early should have already achieved herd-immunity. We predict that in those countries cumulative infection levels could rise by no more than 2-3 times the current level through local-outbreaks, even in the absence of any containment measures. We suggest several tests and predictions to further verify the double-strain co-infection model and discuss the implications of identifying the LVS.
That is a new paper from Hagai and Ruth Perets, another link here, via Yaakov.
Sunday assorted links
1. Ross Douthat on meritocracy (NYT). And Caleb Watney on American innovation slowing (Atlantic).
2. Superspreading events. Very good piece.
4. What about single-strip testing yourself every day?
5. Parrondo’s paradox: how a combination of losing strategies (sometimes) can help you win. And an application to pandemics.
6. Too few low-wage jobs after Covid? And rolling 7-day averages for Covid deaths, worth checking that page regularly and don’t forget Sweden.
COVID‐19 Pandemic Imperils Weather Forecast
Who would guess that a virus could reduce the accuracy of weather forecasts? Nevertheless, because of knock-on effects from a reduction in aircraft traffic it appears to be true.
Weather forecasts play essential parts in daily life, agriculture and industrial activities, and have great economic value. Meteorological observations on commercial aircraft help improve the forecast. However, the global lockdown during the COVID‐19 pandemic (March‐May 2020) chops off 50‐75% of aircraft observations. Here, we verify global weather forecasts (1‐8 days ahead) against the best estimates of atmospheric state, and quantify the impact of the pandemic on forecast accuracy. We find large impacts over remote (e.g., Greenland, Siberia, Antartica and the Sahara Desert) and busy air‐flight regions (e.g., North America, southeast China and Australia). We see deterioration in the forecasts of surface meteorology and atmospheric stratification, and larger deterioration in longer‐term forecasts. This could handicap early warning of extreme weather and cause additional economic damage on the top of that from the pandemic itself. The impacts over Western Europe are small due to the high density of conventional observations, suggesting that introduction of new observations would be needed to minimize the impact of global emergencies on weather forecasts in future.
From Ying Chen, COVID‐19 Pandemic Imperils Weather Forecast.
Hat tip: Kevin Lewis. Yes, the excellent one.
How to aid the arts during a pandemic
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. In addition to “the usual,” we might also consider arts vouchers:
The second element of the arts rescue plan would take a different tack. Rather than giving money to arts institutions, the federal government could set aside some amount for a concept known as arts vouchers, originally developed by the British economist Alan Peacock.
Arts vouchers are similar to education vouchers except that they cover the arts. The government would hand them out to each American and allow state and local governments to specify which institutions and individuals would be eligible to receive such vouchers as payment. Unlike direct grants to arts institutions, arts vouchers give consumers a big say in where aid goes. They could be more popular with voters, because they give each one a direct benefit — namely, cash in pocket (yes, they would have to spend it on the arts, but it’s still cash).
Most of all, vouchers would recognize that planning authorities, even at state and local levels, don’t always know which artistic forms will be popular. If some reallocations are inevitable — for instance out of nightclubs and into outdoor bluegrass festivals — vouchers will allow those preferences to be registered quickly.
Obviously, if state and local governments specify a narrow set of eligible recipients, arts vouchers aren’t much different than direct grants. In that case, little is lost. Still, one hopes that vouchers can be used more imaginatively. Imagine the city of Detroit allowing vouchers to be spent not just at the Detroit Institute of the Arts but also on hip-hop, street art and outdoor theatre.
In short, vouchers can allow American artistic innovation to proceed, even flourish, rather than merely preserving everything as it was before the pandemic. Vouchers also serve an important macroeconomic function by maintaining consumer spending and demand, thus addressing one problem area of the broader economy. With direct grants to arts institutions, there is always the danger the funds simply will sit in the coffers of still-closed non-profits while the broader economy remains weak.
Vouchers shouldn’t be the entire plan of arts assistance for at least two reasons: They may not be a sufficient lifeline for small arts institutions that cannot yet reopen, and they may not help the arts sectors that draw in foreign tourists, most of all in New York City.
There is more at the link.
GPT-3, etc.
Here is an email from a reader, I do not really have an opinion of my own yet. Please note I will not indent any further:
“I wanted to draw your attention to something. Are you familiar with “AI Dungeon,” text-based RPG “open world” game running on GPT-2 / GPT-3? Here’s the author’s discussion on medium, or you can play the GPT-2 version for free to get a sense of it directly.
But what I really want to draw your attention to is players who are using custom prompts to open up dialogs with GPT-3 about non-game things.
This result is particularly impressive: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hrx2id/a_collection_of_amazing_things_gpt3_has_done/fy7i7im/
( Following that string of posts is a little hampered by reddit’s format; here are the posts in order: part 1, part 2, part 3)
If the author is to be believed, they’ve had GPT-3 / “Dragon”:
1. write code
2. act as a pharmacology tutor
3. write poetry
4. translate english, french, chinese (the instruction to “balance the intent of the author with artistic liberty” is particularly interesting)
It’s hard to excerpt, I’d recommend reading the whole thing if you have time.
Here’s another user’s eloquent conversation about the experience of being an AI, using a similar mechanism (screencap images of the convo, part 1 and part 2 ), with a sample prompt if you want to converse with GPT-3 yourself via AI Dungeon.
I am increasingly convinced that Scott Alexander was right that NLP and human language might boostrap a general intelligence. A rough criteria for AGI might be something like (i) pass the Turing test, and (ii) solve general problems; the GPT-3-AI-Dungeon examples above appear to accomplish preliminary versions of both.
GPT was published in June 2018, GPT-2 in February 2019, GPT-3 in May 2020.
As best I can tell GPT -> GPT2 was ~10x increase in parameters over ~8 months, and GPT2 -> GPT3 was ~100x increase of parameters over ~14 months. Any number of naive projections puts a much more powerful release happening over the next ~1-2yrs, and I also know that GPT-3 isn’t necessarily the most powerful NLP AI (perhaps rather the most popularly known.)
When future AI textbooks are written, I could easily imagine them citing 2020 or 2021 as years when preliminary AGI first emerged,. This is very different than my own previous personal forecasts for AGI emerging in something like 20-50 years…
p.s. One of the users above notes that AI Dungeon GPT-3 (“Dragon”) is a subscription service, something like ~$6 a week. MIE.”
Saturday assorted links
Why does America have such old leaders?
Since 1950, the average age of heads of government in the three dozen member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has steadily declined, from above 60 years old to around 54 today. The average O.E.C.D. national leader is now two decades younger than Mr. Trump — and almost a quarter century younger than Mr. Biden…
And it isn’t just the American presidency that’s gone gray. The average age of Congress has trended upward for decades. Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, is 80; Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, is 78. The Supreme Court’s nine justices average above 67. Mr. Trump’s cabinet averages over 60, among the oldest in the O.E.C.D.
Here is one (not the only) explanation:
The way countries select their leaders offers a third possibility. In most O.E.C.D. countries, the head of government is a prime minister chosen by fellow lawmakers in the national legislature. Because party members pick their leaders, and can recall them at will, parliamentary systems give political parties significant control over whom to elevate, said Kaare Strom, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. And parties often have strategic reasons to pick younger leaders: to appeal to particular constituencies or to brand themselves behind more telegenic faces.
Presidential systems, by contrast, give parties less control over who from their ranks will run — and which candidate voters will prefer. “The process is more driven by who’s out there, who’s interested, and what kind of resources they have,” said Professor Strom. “There’s not the same kind of institutional control and vetting of those candidates that you have in the European parliamentary systems.”
Accumulated wealth and fundraising connections may matter more too in the American system, also favoring seniority. Here is the full NYT story by Ian Prasad Philbrick.
Friday assorted links
1. Mormonism encourages multilevel marketing companies.
2. Prison population down eight percent during coronavirus outbreak.
3. The world’s cheapest hospital (India) has to get even cheaper.
4. Ultra-black fish (NYT).
5. Music and synasthesia, and Brian Wilson has hardly ever written a song in a minor key.
6. New movie about Chicago Boys in Chile? Is it even new?
7. How can you make maximum profit from a Twitter hack? And an explanatory attempt at what happened, with various questions.
What I’ve been reading
1. Brent Tarter, Virginians and Their Histories. The best book I have read on the history of Virginia, by an order of magnitude. And in turn that makes it an excellent book on race as well, and also on broader American history. If I have to spend the whole year in this state, I might as well read about it. I learned also that 21,172 Virginians have identified themselves as American Indians, and that this movement is more active than I had realized.
2. Diary of Anne Frank. It seems inappropriate to call this a “good” or even “great” book. I had not read it since high school, I will just say it deserves its enduring status, and the reread was much more rewarding and interesting than what I was expecting.
3. Howard Brotz, editor, African-American Social & Political Thought 1850-1920. A fascinating selection from the debates of the time, reprinting Douglass, Booker T., Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Delany, and others. Douglass holds up best, including his critique of colonialism. The weakest argument in the volume was “Haiti is working out fine, so Liberia will succeed as well.” Of greatest interest to me was the extent to which the African-American debates of that time overlapped with opinions about Africa and the Caribbean. Recommended, and excellent background for many of the current disputes.
4. Simone Weil: An Anthology, and Gravity and Grace. Gravity and Grace is the early work. Its ten best pages are superb, but reading it is mostly a frustrating experience, due to the diffuse nature of the presentation (to be clear, overall I consider that a relatively high reward ratio). The former collection is the best place to start, noting again there is a certain degree of diffuseness, but as with Žižek there are insights you just don’t get anywhere else. A good question for any talent selection algorithm is whether it would pick out the teenage Weil and give her a grant to pursue her writing projects. Sadly she died at age 34 in 1943.
George Mason’s critique of the American Constitution
Not long ago someone tweeted this part:
The President of the United States has the unrestrained Power of granting Pardons for Treason; which may be sometimes exercised to screen from Punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the Crime, & thereby prevent a Discovery of his own Guilt.
And that led me to wish to read the whole thing. Mason of course was an anti-Federalist, and in his short piece he lays out why he opposes the proposed new constitution. Here is what I found striking:
1. He feared that the President would become a tool of the Senate or of his own cabinet.
2. He feared the Senate would not be directly accountable to the people. Of course, in due time we changed that through constitutional amendment.
3. He feared the federal judiciary would end up taking over state and local judiciaries.
4. The Senate can excessively legislate through the use of treaties — quite a contemporary objection by the way.
5. The individual states won’t be able to levy tariffs on trade across state borders.
6. Federal and state legislatures won’t be able to pass enough ex post facto laws (the strangest worry to me).
7. He made various claims that ended up being made obsolete by the adoption of a Bill of Rights.
8. The southern states would end up systematically outvoted.
9. The Vice President could end up becoming too powerful through his role in the Senate.
It is striking to me in these early writings how much people worry about the evolution of the Senate, and how little attention they pay to the Supreme Court, which at the time was viewed as not slated to be so powerful.
The problem of “Congress will toss away its legislative and war-making roles, and give up a lot of effective control of the budget” was also nowhere to be found in the words of the early critics, as far as I can tell. Nor did they have much of a notion of the rise of the administrative state.
Mason was a forceful writer, but the broad lesson is simply that the future is very difficult to predict.
Thursday assorted links
1. Markets in everything: selfie masks that look like your face.
2. Orthodox privilege, by Paul Graham.
3. Chess players make bigger mistakes when they are playing on-line (are some of those hand/cursor slips? How much is lack of immersion in the competitive atmosphere of a face to face game?).
4. Derek Lowe on T-cell immunity. And further research suggesting herd immunity sets in much sooner than we used to think (again, these results are no excuse for stupidity and complacency, the urgency to make other good decisions remains).
5. Shootings are rising more than usual and arrests are falling (NYT).
6. Wagner in the parking lot as opera returns to Germany (NYT).
7. The current accelerated Chinese testing of vaccines (NYT).
Oxford’s Jenner Institute to Prepare for Challenge Trials for COVID-19
I am one of the signatories to an open letter from 1DaySooner on challenge trials sent to Dr. Francis Collins at NIH. A major development announced with the letter is that 1Day Sooner and Oxford’s Jenner Institute are collaborating to prepare viral production for use in challenge trials.The Jenner Institute is the creator of the AstraZeneca produced vaccine, the vaccine farthest along in development.
A key goal of the letter is to encourage the NIH to start its own preparation for challenge trials:
The undersigned urge the U.S. government…its allies, international funders, and world bodies (e.g. the World Health Organization), to undertake immediate preparations for human challenge trials, including supporting safe and reliable production of the virus and any biocontainment facilities necessary to house participants.
Among the signatories are 15 Nobel prize winners including Oliver Hart and Al Roth, Molecular geneticist Mario Capecchi, professor of medicine William G. Kaelin and physician Barry Marshall (who knows a thing or two about volunteer trials.)
As I discussed earlier, since challenge trials restrict the volunteers to be young and healthy, you can’t apply their results directly to the sick and elderly (the external validity problem) but “challenge trials could help us whittle down [candidate vaccines]… to the best two to three, substantially speeding up the vaccine discovery process.” You could also use challenge trials to help figure out the right dosing which is unusually important in the current situation because if a vaccine can work with .5ml instead of 1ml that’s equivalent to doubling the available supply. The Director of the Jenner Institute, Adrian Hill, agrees writing:
We see considerable potential in the use of human challenge studies to accelerate COVID-19 vaccine development, down-select and help validate the best candidate vaccines, and optimise vaccination approaches.
You can read the whole letter here.
Self-doubt as a barrier
Nearly half of adults who responded to a national survey said self-doubt is one of the largest challenges they would face if they enrolled in a postsecondary education or training program.
Self-doubt was one of the top three challenges respondents cited, below time and above cost.
The new data are included in the findings from the latest “Public Viewpoints” report from Strada Education Network, which surveyed American adults on their motivations for pursuing more education, as well as the barriers they face.
The importance of mental barriers was one of the findings that stuck out the most, said Nichole Torpey-Saboe, director of research at Strada. It’s yet another layer colleges have to consider when trying to attract people without degrees for enrollment.
Here is the full story. This is what I call a “trivial” blog post. There is nothing startling in the content, and perhaps it is not so interesting to read. The comments on it won’t be very good either. Yet it represents a very important truth, and one that, while it is well-known, is probably not sufficiently emotionally internalized. And the gains would be high if more people understood this.