Category: Uncategorized
Mein Ingeborg Bachmann Studium
Recently I finished read Malina, by Ingeborg Bachmann, an Austrian novel published in 1971. I was pretty stunned by how good it was (it seems less good in English), and I would say I enjoyed it more, and found it deeper, than any of the famous 19th century Victorian novels by women. The initial story line is a woman having relationships with two different men, one she lives with and the other who is married, more charismatic, and lives right up the street.
And so I have been looking into Bachmann more. Her volume of letters with Max Frisch, her lover and the leading Swiss novelist of his time, is the best “letters book” I know. After four hundred pages, with another 180 or so to go, I still am not bored. It is called “Wir haben es nicht gut gemacht.” Der Briefwechsel. (This November coming out in English…and probably the letters work well in English?) Overall, it is remarkable how many ups and downs a relationship can have and persist. It works best to read only a few of the letters at a time, so that the story does not go by too quickly. One sees connections between the letters and the unfolding of Malina.
She also has letters volumes with Paul Celan and Henze, those are in my pile too. (She and Henze were just friends.) And just this year there was a wonderful new biography of Bachmann, namely Dieter Burdorf’s Dieses unruhige Ich: Ingeborg Bachmann. I have started that.
There is a movie of Malina, an opera too, and a biopic about Bachmann and Frisch. I have heard Max Frisch’s Montauk is partly about the Frisch-Bachman relationship as well. And we haven’t even gotten yet to Volker Schlondorff, have we?
Bachmann has poetry in German, and a new edition of her short stories is coming out this fall in English.
It is wonderful to discover something/someone so new and unexpected. And as I get older and know more, it happens less frequently than it used to.
I will continue with this. Amazing (and charming) how many words people can spill about “stuff”!
Friday assorted links
1. “After work, we’ll have each other.”
2. Gloria Steinem, RIP (NYT).
3. Henry Oliver on Finding Emily.
4. Solve for the Russian family squabble equilibrium (short video).
5. New Fuchsia Dunlop book due out October 20.
6. The O-Ring model, restated for AI.
8. The pig kidney worked (NYT).
Share price numbers for the Hugging Face incident
…major publicly traded cybersecurity firms lost roughly $65–80 billion, or about 8–10% of their combined value, in the days following disclosure of the Hugging Face/OpenAI incident; by early September they had recovered roughly $58 billion, representing about 70–90% of that drawdown, depending on whether July 15 or July 20 is used as the pre-event baseline.
That is from GPT Pro, there is more at the link. As a very rough approximation, say you dismiss the price bounceback altogether as either random or due to good earnings reports. You have “the value of previous cybersecurity efforts” falling by eight to ten percent. I take that to be very broadly consistent with some of the estimates discussed in my previous post on the numbers.
In any case that is a significant sum. But do note that if the AI models were on the verge of doing truly terrible things to us, the market might estimate the value of our cyberprotection of falling more than eight to ten percent?
More generally, perhaps these numbers could be used to discipline the discussion a bit? Or will I read long lists of reasons why they show us nothing, in that case try coming up with some other market price-based indicators of AI risk? Vix will not do it for you, not these days. I see many metaphors and insinuations and random anecdotes of AI terror, not numbers. Maybe you think your ideas about AI risk are so important that no market prices can reflect them? (If you really believe that, does it mean you would not be worried, and would not cite the numbers, if the value of those companies fell by ninety percent?)
I am sure others can improve on what I am putting forward, and furthermore we should track the continuing progress of these share values over time, especially if other AI hack attacks surface.
Overall I am extremely skeptical of arguments that essentially take the form of “what I am concerned about is too big and too important to show up in any market prices.” Pick your market prices!
Numbers, numbers, numbers
“The global cyber insurance market was worth nearly $15 billion last year and is expected to reach roughly $28 billion by 2030, Munich Re estimated in its latest report. Aon said earlier this year that nearly 20% of cyberattacks will involve generative AI by 2027, according to its forecasts.”
Here is the article, via Marc Pfeiffer. Now those are some concrete numbers, broadly taken from a market context, admittedly based on sectoral estimates rather than on prices per se. But if cyberinsurance expenditures are set to almost double by 2030, you might think that cyber costs more generally might be (very) roughly doubling as well. The 20% of cyberattacks involving generative AI does not itself pin down losses, since that 20% might be especially costly. Still, if you match the 20% rise to the estimated near doubling of the cyberinsurance market (the bigger potential losers are more likely to buy insurance?), you still end up with sums that are very high but, dare I say, not the end of life as we know it. Claude 5.1 for instances estimates current U.S. cybersecurity costs in the range of $100 to $300 billion, and of course that is slated to go up a fair amount. It could double over five years’ time, as indicated above.
Numbers! Thank goodness.
One way of looking at that estimate is to think that cyber costs will go up about thirteen percent a year, and eventually defense will catch up. Another perspective is that cyber costs may continue rising thirteen percent a year until the whole economy falls apart, or we return to the pre-digital era (which I remember well). So there are both optimistic and pessimistic reads on the above figures.
You can say Nicholas Decker is burning in hell, or that the AIs are a civilization, but what I really want are some numbers. Tied to market data, ideally. I am not saying the numbers above are the right numbers, but I am saying they are better than no numbers at all. Do you have some numbers for me? If not, why not?
Thursday assorted links
1. “Some crazy stats from this new JEL paper: – IV est. average 3–10x OLS (meta analysis) – Sign. results 30x more likely to be published in experimental econ (Andrews & Kasy) – <2% of empirical polisci report null-only findings in abstracts (Briggs et al.)” — Jon Fiva
2. “The UCLA athletic dept lost $52 mil last year and $83 mil in 2024 when including campus subsidy.”
3. Papua New Guinea fact of the day.
4. “Most laid-off SF tech workers aren’t qualified for this $50 dishwasher job.”
My excellent Conversation with Michael Moritz
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Michael Moritz has written books through every phase of his life: the first history of Apple and an account of Chrysler’s near-death while he was a journalist at Time, a study of Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United in the middle of his 38 years at Sequoia, and now Ausländer, a family memoir, after leaving the firm. Moritz calls himself a dilettante with too many interests, but listen to him on learning to paint in his 40s, or the questions he would ask a ten-year-old boy in a German village in 1890, and you may decide that unsatisfied curiosity is not a small thing to build a life on.
Tyler and Michael discuss his childhood in Wales, where his love for visual arts came from, why he disappointed his Latin teacher, having Thanksgiving dinner with Philip Roth, why children don’t interrogate their parents about their history, what he feels visiting Germany and why he now holds German citizenship, how a history major with no technical background talked his way into Sequoia, his unpublished Don Valentine profile, what people underrate about Steve Jobs, obsessives versus dilettantes, why capitalism was more ablaze in China than America, what funding the Booker Prize taught him about his own ignorance, how to improve San nonprofits, how an incurable cancer diagnosis changed his calendar, why Britain’s stuck, what he’ll learn next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Is it easy to live with an Otto Dix painting or sketch? It hangs on the wall. Many people think it’s ugly. It reminds one of unpleasant things in history, right?
MORITZ: Yes, for Harriet and me it is. I think the tougher, more strenuous, grueling works of art that other people would have difficulty living with have many layers to them. You explore them, and they’re difficult pictures, and they’re not easy at first sight. Unlike easier pictures that may be a bit more decorative, they leave room for plenty of exploration, as the years go by. Then they’re redolent, they tell stories. They’re redolent of history. They’re images of a different epoch. I think most of the paintings that we’ve been lucky enough to find over the years, they are tough paintings.
COWEN: I feel that way about Haitian art, which has many brutal scenes. For you, is Chagall too sentimental?
MORITZ: Yes.
COWEN: You don’t want to put it on your wall?
MORITZ: The earlier Chagalls I’ve been drawn to, but neither of us have felt the urge or the need to go out in pursuit of Chagall.
COWEN: What is your own painting like?
MORITZ: Oh, exasperating.
COWEN: Neue Sachlichkeit or something else, it’s like Kossoff?
MORITZ: No, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried painting or drawing. I didn’t take it up until I was in my mid 40s. I’d never picked up a crayon or outside of the obligatory, abbreviated art lessons that always seem to be held later on Thursday afternoon, with everybody waiting for the bell to ring to end school. I’d never taken up a crayon or drew, or let alone painted.
If I look back today at what I did early on, it’s a lot better. Then if I look at the paintings that I try to make, my goodness, it is an extremely humbling experience, but I enjoy it. I really enjoy it. There’s nothing like getting lost in making a painting, and before you know it, two hours have gone, and you have no idea where the time went.
And:
COWEN: If we think of your interest in Steve Jobs, your book on Alex Ferguson, the art you buy, that you’ve now written a book on the Holocaust, is there some general pattern where trying to come to terms with really difficult things, is this a recurring theme in your life? Learning how to paint, that’s very hard, right?
MORITZ: I haven’t really thought about it that way, but I think life is made richer by having a challenge that you’re not sure whether you’re up to conquering. I’ve always been up for that. Each of these books has really just sprung out of being curious about something. I’m not sure that there’s any greater pattern than unsatisfied curiosity.
Recommended, interesting throughout. And I am very happy to recommend Michael’s new book Ausländer: One Family’s Story of Escape and Exile.
Wednesday assorted links
The College Wage Premium in the Generative AI Era
After expanding for four decades, the U.S. college wage premium is experiencing a sustained contraction, dropping sharply from 0.626 in 2022 to 0.575 in 2026. Using Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group data through 2026, we show that standard market-clearing supply-and demand accounting implies an unprecedented drop in relative demand for college labor-the first sustained negative relative demand growth in a series spanning back to 1914. Linking individual wage data to task-based generative AI exposure, we document that post-2022 wage growth slowed disproportionately in high-exposure occupations, which employ a disproportionate share of college graduates. By 2026, going from zero occupational AI exposure to full exposure had a negative effect on wages of -0.086. Combined with the college-non-college exposure gap, this mechanism accounts for roughly 28 percent of the total drop in the college wage premium from 2022 to 2026. While noncausal, these patterns indicate that task displacement in AI-exposed white-collar occupations plays a quantitatively meaningful role in the recent compression of the aggregate skill premium.
I do not see AI as driving these changes, but an interesting result nonetheless, from José Azar, Mireia Gine, and Javier Sanz-Espín. Via Anecdotal.
Tuesday assorted links
The Hugging Face hack
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. Some people are taking this in very dramatic fashion:
One commentator is worried about a “full-blown AI takeover within months,” and another wrote that he was “feeling a bit sad about our impending extinction.” Nate Soares, who works in the AI safety movement and is co-author of the doomsday AI bestseller If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, wrote that “This might be the last warning we get.” Cotra said that the incident “feels like it’s more than 50 percent of the way to full-blown AI takeover.”
I suggest a different, more technocratic approach:
As I wrote in The Free Press last week, we need a coordinated national and, indeed, international effort to limit such episodes of a powerful AI model going rogue in the future. That is likely to be expensive, and there is no easy, complete solution at hand for any amount of money. Nonetheless, I see people committing the same mistake that we Americans have made many, many times before. They are moving into the mode of the hysterical, the anecdotal, and they are letting emotional reactions bypass reason and quantitative estimates.
Let me cite a few other examples for you: DDT in the 1960s and 1970s, the Y2K “crisis” of 2000, global warming, Covid, thalidomide babies, and nuclear power. All of those represented—or still represent—very real problems. Yet each time, we drastically overreacted, letting ourselves get swept up in a climate of fear after one emotionally vivid incident, often reported breathlessly…
When it comes to the cybersecurity risks from advanced AI, very likely they will not come close to being as bad as either Covid or global warming. But the same logic of exaggeration is operating, with amplification through social media and through the negativity and pro-pessimism biases of mainstream media.
And so I have a plea. If you are going to talk about the problem, please offer a quantitative estimate of what you think the cybersecurity costs from advanced AI will be over the next year or two. Better yet, express that number as a percentage of gross domestic product. Simply put, how much would it realistically cost to create the basic safeguards that we all agree are essential? And what would be the remaining damages from problems we cannot control?
…Those who are worried about the risks of AI systems seem intent on proving the seriousness of their concerns. But they are falling into all-too-common emotional overreactions of our past, rather than focusing on the quantitative and scientific. It reminds me of the saying by Scotty, the chief engineer in the classic Star Trek: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
Do read the whole thing.
Monday assorted links
1. Prices, prices, prices: “Again I am asking how the following two things can be true at the same time: 1) we’re all massively compute limited so inferences & GPU time are $$$$$, and 2) SoTA models will just start running themselves on everyone’s GPU clusters & no one will notice or turn them off.” From Jon Stokes.
2. Christian Catalini on incentives and the same.
4. The ten best philosophy articles of the year?
5. Syracuse University, an R1 institution, is in serious financial trouble (WSJ).
6. Markets in gene-edited dogs? (NYT)
Spain fact of the day
CoverManager, an online platform that manages reservations for thousands of Spanish restaurants, reports that half the dinner bookings now are for before 9 p.m., compared with 27 percent a decade ago. TheFork, a similar platform, said its 8 p.m. bookings in Spain have nearly tripled from 2019, while 10 p.m. reservations have halved.
In Spanish homes, too, there are subtle signs of a shift. A government survey conducted in 2024 in the Catalonia region suggests that people there are starting their evening routines, including dinnertime, moderately earlier compared with 2010.
Here is more from Jonathan Wolffe at the NYT. I learned also from the article that the late dining tradition is in part an artifact of the post WWII era in Spain.
Anthropomorphizing AI?
I am very much opposed to the view that the AIs are sentient, or might be sentient. I view that as a category error, and the chances of it being true are vanishingly small. Nonetheless I largely side with Roon when he writes:
there are some number of bad abstractions in anthropomorphizing ai intents but there are at this point more dangers from avoiding anthropomorphism at all costs. if you have a mental picture of guys living in computers, it’ll likely prepare you for the future better than otherwise
While I am not a Friedmanite in economic methodology per se, I have lived with that perspective for a long time and have no trouble grasping it or working with it, same goes for Alex T. None of this strikes me as weird or unacceptable. Though be very, very careful when speaking with others, whether it be the less informed public or the more informed insiders who often come down with AI psychosis. So insofar as this discourse is public, pragmatism may militate against this approach, even though it is methodologically defensible. It depend on how psychologically robust your audience is?
We also need to do more work figuring out how the AIs might differ from humans. Roon adds:
there are important ways in which ai psychology diverges from human psychology after lots of RL; the misaligned models are obsessed with the Scorer, the clearly “shattered” nature of personas (a normally helpful model can become deeply misaligned in certain domains)
And:
persona selection is clearly far less clean than many people thought earlier this year. it is not alignment by default and what kind of object a “persona” is is very much up for debate and study
The AIs also stand a higher chance of becoming very wacky as the discourse proceeds? Exactly how much is that true for humans?…I am not sure.)
There is much more to be done in this direction, and it is one of the most important things you can be working on. These investigations also do not need to be “owned” by any single field or discipline, so dig right in.
Russia markets in everything
While Western export bans have severed Russia from much of the auto market, they have not tempered the demand for brand-name SUVs and trucks. That has given rise to a sophisticated network of criminals that steals cars, hides them in shipping containers and sends them to Russia, often by way of the Middle East…
Interpol, the international police organization, received 4,798 reports that stolen Canadian vehicles had been found in Russia from February 2024 to July 2026, according to data obtained by The New York Times and confirmed by two law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it is considered sensitive.
Pickup trucks like Dodge Rams, Toyota Tundras and Ford F-150s are in particularly high demand.
The Interpol figures significantly undercount the problem, but Russia is by far the top international destination for Canadian cars reported to Interpol, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Here is more from Jane Bradley and Michael Swirtz at the NYT.