Category: Uncategorized
Tricameralism in apartheid South Africa
Yes. South Africa really did have a tricameral Parliament under the 1983 Constitution, in force from 1984 until the democratic transition. But the phrase can mislead, because it sounds more pluralistic than it really was. The system created three racially separate parliamentary chambers: a House of Assembly for whites, a House of Representatives for Coloured South Africans, and a House of Delegates for Indian South Africans. The black African majority was excluded altogether from this Parliament.
The key to how it worked was the distinction between “own affairs” and “general affairs.” Each chamber could legislate for the “own affairs” of the racial group it represented; these included areas such as education, housing, welfare, local government, culture, and recreation. But the central levers of power—“general affairs”—remained matters such as defence, finance, foreign policy, justice, law and order, commerce, internal affairs, and agriculture. Those were handled at the center, not by the separate chambers acting independently.
Formally, then, it was a three-house legislature. In practice, it was a system of segregated representation plus retained white dominance. The constitutional text itself says Parliament consisted of the three Houses. But the white chamber was far larger and more institutionally powerful: the House of Assembly had 178 members, while the House of Representatives had 85 and the House of Delegates 45. The Constitution also vested executive authority in the State President, with different advisory structures for “own affairs” and “general affairs,” which further centralized power above the chambers themselves.
Here is the full GPT discussion, with links as well. As Harrison points out to me, in history tricameralism of any form is extremely rare.
Saturday assorted links
The moralization of artificial intelligence
We started by asking how moralized AI has become in public discourse. Analyzing 69,890 news headlines from 2018 to 2024, we found that AI was moralized at levels comparable to GMOs and vaccines, technologies whose moral opposition has been studied for decades. It ranked above both. The sharpest spike came within weeks of ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022.
When we surveyed representative samples of Americans, a majority of AI opponents said their views wouldn’t change even if AI proved safe and beneficial. That’s consequence insensitivity, the hallmark of moral conviction, not practical calculation. Across art, chatbots, legal tools, and romantic companions, AI moralization loaded onto a single latent factor. A global moral stance, dressed up in whatever practical language is available.
The behavioral data make this concrete: a one standard deviation increase in moralization scores predicted a 42% drop in actual AI usage, even when it would have benefited that person personally. The conviction preceded the behavior by up to 573 days.
The next time someone gives you three different reasons to oppose AI, each one dissolving under mild scrutiny, you’re probably not watching someone think. You’re watching someone feel.
Here is the tweet storm, here is the paper by de Mello, et.al.
Friday assorted links
1. Redux of my 2009 post on my preferred exile. Mexico City now rates much higher, and Germany lower. Madrid would be a serious choice, in the top few. Even Rome falls under consideration. And I want more money for the exile too, which price index shall we use?
2. “In the past three months of the 119th Congress, fully 25% of documents in the Congressional Record are AI-generated.” Note that AI-generated text is about 30% more “progressive,” though that is showing up in the resolutions rather than substantive legislation.
3. The labor market consequences of rapid sectoral shifts.
4. Right now LLMs are “too altruistic” in the Ultimatum game.
5. Companies that should exist but don’t?
6. Piano bars and music popularity. The market test speaks.
7. An Islamic perspective on Sirat. And a very different view on the film.
Thursday assorted links
Wednesday assorted links
The Girl Scout culture that is New Jersey
A New Jersey Girl Scout troop has taken cookie sales to new heights, setting up shop right outside a popular cannabis dispensary.
A South Jersey-based troop recently teamed up with Daylite Dispensary in Mount Laurel to sell their beloved cookies at the cannabis shop this cookie season.
“You use cannabis, you get the munchies,” Daylite Dispensary owner Steve Cassidy told NJ.com “There’s a connection between snacks and cannabis and the fact that we don’t have to pretend that doesn’t exist anymore is really awesome.”
Daylite became Mount Laurel’s first dispensary when it opened in 2023. Cassidy said the idea was proposed back in 2024, but it was turned down by Girl Scouts of Central & Southern New Jersey, the Girl Scout council that oversees troops in the region.
When the idea reemerged ahead of this year’s cookie season, the troop was allowed to sell cookies at Daylite on a trial basis, according to Cassidy.
Here is the full story, via someone else.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Metropolitan Opera is trying to raise money (NYT).
2. How to write a LOTR bestseller (short video, with profanity).
Are the small tax havens really all that safe?
That is the theme of my latest Free Press column, excerpt:
If you are a Dubai resident, the chance that you will die in this conflict is very small. But you no longer can treat safety as something you do not have to think about. And you may face some uncertainty about when and how you can leave the country, a question that formerly was never in doubt. So two major advantages have vanished, even if the current conflict is settled soon. Another problem is that a substantial part of your supply of desalinated fresh water can be taken out by a well-placed missile.
More generally, the war underlines how tenuous the position of a place like Dubai is in the geopolitical order. I have enjoyed my three trips to Dubai, but I never felt entirely safe there on anything beyond a day-to-day basis. I always knew the place relied on protection from the United States and a certain degree of forbearance from its larger neighbors, including Saudi Arabia. Both Dubai and its larger encompassing unit, the United Arab Emirates, are extremely small.
And:
In most daily life, the small tax havens will feel safer than Cape Town. In the longer run, I am not entirely sure. My longer-run plans might be more robust in Cape Town. Or in Brazil. Or in Mexico. Those are all fairly dangerous places that nonetheless seem to have considerable macro stability in the longer run. South Africa has a pre-1930 history of taking in persecuted Jews from Europe and giving them an environment where they can thrive. Even the coming and going of apartheid, in 1948 and 1994, did not change South Africa’s high degree of security from foreign threats.
Dare I suggest that these larger places are more fun and also have more soul?
Worth a ponder.
I would much rather be exiled to Cape Town than to Dubai, all things considered, even assuming away the current conflict in the Middle East.
The trajectories of science and AI
From my podcast with Nebular:
Cowen: Mainly what they have done is tricked people. The Apollo program was a big trick. It was not intended as a trick. I’m pretty sure almost everyone behind it was quite sincere that it would lead to whatever. It was vague all along, but everyone was truly excited back then. I even remember those times, but it didn’t lead to what we were promised at all.
And you see that when you compare science fiction over time. So I think the norm is that new technology comes and people are tricked. Again, it doesn’t have to be a sinister, devious, conspiracy laden thing, but in fact, they’re tricked. And then it happens anyway. And then we clean up the mess and deal with it and move on to the next set of problems.
And that’s what I think it will be with AI as well.
Murphy: What is the trick with AI?
Cowen: It’s the old paradox. When you add grains of sugar to your coffee. Every extra grain is fine, or it may even taste better, but at some point, you’ve just added too many grains. So that’s the way it is with change. People use ChatGPT. It diagnoses your dog. Do I need to take the dog to the vet? What’s with this rash?
You take the photo…You get a great answer. Everyone’s happy. They’re not actually going to be happy at all the changes that will bring. And here I’m talking about positive ones. I’m not saying, oh, it’s going to kill us all. People just don’t like change that much. So they’ll be sold on the immediate, concrete things and end up seeing things happen where they feel there’s too much change because it will devalue their human capital, and we’ll adjust and get over it and move on to the next set of tricks. That’s my forecast.
Murphy: People don’t like change, but also people are bad at long term planning. Yeah. You’ve spoken before about how faith is a key requirement in terms of being able to plan over the long term. How do you bring that idea to policymakers?
Cowen: I don’t know, I think things will get pushed through for myopic reasons, like we must outpace China, which might even be true, to be clear, but it’s a somewhat myopic reason, and that will be the selling point. You know, I’ve read a lot of texts from the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Adam Smith is one of them, but there’s many others, and a lot of people are for what’s going on, they understand they will be richer, maybe healthier.
They do see the downsides, but they have a pretty decent perspective. But no one from then understood. You’d have this second order fossil fuel revolution, say the 1880s where just things explode and the world is very much different. And whether they would have liked that, you can debate, but they just didn’t see it at all.
We’re probably in a somewhat analogous position. I would say that the Second Industrial Revolution was the more important one. It was a very good thing, even though climate change is a big problem, but it really built the modern world. And with something like AI or any advance, there’s probably some second order version of it that’s coming in our equivalent of 1880 that we just don’t see, and it will be wonderful for us.
But if you told us, we’d be terrified. So how should you feel about myopia? I think as an intellectual, you should be willing to talk about it openly and honestly. But at the end of the day, I think myopia still will rule. And I’m not in a big panic about that.
To recap:
We’ve just published the video on YouTube, X, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. We also published some extended show notes and the transcript on Substack.
Monday assorted links
1. What people get wrong about women’s rights (Alice Evans, The Economist).
2. The case against liberal interventionism.
3. More government by GPT (NYT).
4. “In 2013, museum management considered introducing a scheme to suction dust off tourists as they walked down the corridor leading to the Sistine Chapel while blasting them with cold air to reduce their body temperature and perspiration. The plan was aborted, presumably for logistical reasons.” (FT)
5. The ongoing migration of Kiwis.
6. Roger Garrison, RIP. And an obituary.
Iran/Venezuela facts of the day
Iran was once one of the key oil suppliers to the world. No longer. Its exports, constrained by sanctions, amount to less than 2 per cent of global supplies, most of which go to China at discounted prices.
A similar change has taken place in Venezuela. Once a star of world oil and one of the founding members of Opec, today it can hardly even be called a petrostate. It produces less oil than the US state of North Dakota and a quarter as much as neighbouring Brazil.
Here is more from Daniel Yergin at the FT.
Sunday assorted links
2. Adam Smith against hegemony.
3. US median income vs. Europe.
4. The academic papers is a dead format these days (read the whole chain).
Saturday assorted links
A simple way to improve your thought and conclusions
Take some policy, action, or person whom you regard as morally questionable and indeed is morally questionable. That same policy, action, or person does some bad things, bad in conquentialist terms I now mean. Practically bad, utilitarian bad.
The odds are that you overrate the badness of those consequences by some considerable degree.
Even very smart people do this. Sometimes they do it more, because they can come up with more elaborate arguments for why the bad consequences are completely disastrous.
They might overrate the badness of those consequences by as much as 5x or 10x (gdp is a huge mound of stuff!).
So if you want to have better opinions, look for the cases where you do this and stop doing it.
Easy-peasy!
And good luck with that.