Category: Uncategorized
Sometimes it is hard to solve for the equilibrium
Probably you all know about this:
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
According to not yet confirmed but likely true reports, it was shown that model could be jailbroken. The released Mythos already restricted bio and “AI improvement” queries, rather strictly in fact, so now we are back to the model not being available.
Here are a few of the constraints on the U.S. government, not the only ones I might add:
1. It needs for the main companies to stay in business. On top of that, it wants their IPOs to go reasonably well. And it is now much harder for the top companies to recruit foreigners, which is a significant share of their highest quality workforce (Demis, Ilya, Andrej for a start). It is also much harder for the main companies to drum up foreign business in a credible and sustainble manner.
1b. How are American multinationals operating abroad supposed to use top systems, moving forward?
2. It wants to use model access as a tool of both hard and soft power, so model access has to be possible at some level. But it is very hard to control what foreign agents will do with their partial model access, when they get it in the ffuture.
3. The U.S. needs to stay ahead of China in the AI race.
4. The U.S. needs to issue restrictions that are actually enforceable, and “U.S. citizens only” does not fit that bill. Furthermore (markets in everything!) it is easy enough to hire a traitorous American to access tools of wrongdoing, or for matter it is not difficult to fake citizenship in various ways.
5. USG cannot nationalize these companies and then proceed to run them effectively.
6. Chinese and other open source models do in fact improve at some reasonable pace, even if they are right now considerably behind the best proprietary models.
Is the most likely scenario that the government hardens some of its own systems and takes some further precautions, and then allows Mythos to be rereleased? Perhaps with some additional safeguards?
Is there such a thing as a model that cannot be jailbroken at all? I doubt that.
So basically we will be replaying this scenario periodically over time, but with each time the companies and also the government in a weaker and more precarious position.
I am willing to reject the philosophy of “safetyism” and bite various associated bullets. As it stands, these actions will not succeed in making us safer, including for the reasons mentioned above. Our regulatory institutions, attitudes, and approaches simply are not well suited to an era of radical innovation.
In any case these events do not surprise me (they do surprise me in their immediate suddenness however), as this kind of approach is what governments have been about for a long time now, USG included or perhaps USG especially.
Rising in status: Leopold, Aesop, and also Mistral. AI nationalism. Proponents of slow take-off as the likely scenario. Reticent, quiet CEOs. As for China, will they rush into this opportunity, or are they at least as scared as we are?
How did Stanislaw Lem imagine advanced computer intelligence?
…GOLEM’s behavior is unpredictable. Sometimes it converses courteously with people, whereas on other occasions any attempt at contact misfires. GOLEM sometimes cracks jokes, too, though its sense of humor is fundamentally different from man’s. Much depends on its interlocutors. In exceptional casese GOLEM will show a certain interest in people who are talented in a particular way; it is intrigued, so to speak, not by mathematical aptitude — not even the greatest — but rather by interdisciplinary forms of talent; on several occasions it has predicted with uncanny accuracy achievements by young, as yet unknown, scientists in a field which it has it self indicated. (After a brief exchange it informed T. Vroedel, age twenty-two and then only a doctoral candidate, “You will become a computer,” which was supposed to mean, more o less, “You will become somebody.”)
That is from Lem’s Imaginary Magnitude, an extraordinary book in parts, most of all see his Golem IV section on how n AGI (our term, not his) is likely to behave.
Why is America less of a 24/7 society?
It’s deeply odd to me that America is a far less 24/7 hour society today than it was 10, 20, or even 30 years ago. I vividly remember friends from the UK back in 1996 marveling at the fact that in the mid-sized Indiana town where I went college it was possible to buy groceries, clothing, a lawn mower, a snow blower, Lego sets, and bow hunting gear at 3 AM on any given Tuesday of the year. That was peak American Empire, and it’s long gone.
That is from Christopher Kratovil. What are some hypotheses here? I see a few:
1. America is older. True, but this is hardly the main explanation for anything.
2. Due to increasing leisure time, fewer people want to work weird and long hours? Tighter labor markets and the Great Moderation contributed to this.
3. It is stores that are in decline. 24/7 activity has moved into the warehouse, the fulfillment center, the server farm, the delivery network, and the home.
3b. When you can do Doordash at 10:30 p.m., you do not need to go out for snacks at 3 a.m.
4. Shoplifting has become more common? If the drug stores have to lock up their wares in NYC, why should stores try to be open at 3 a.m., when presumably shoplifting risk is higher and the quantity of monitoring labor is lower?
5. Online entertainment is much better, so why go out late at night?
6. More work from home means people are not returning from their jobs at late hours and then wanting to buy things.
I would put most of my money on #3 and #5 — what do you think?
Safety and nation-building in Mexico
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:
Consider the special nature of Mexican politics. First and foremost, Mexico is still not a mature nation-state. By one estimate, drug gangs may control as much as one-third of its territory. That might sound bizarre, but from the standpoint of Mexican history, it is not new or unusual.
Start with the 19th century. When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, what we now call Central America joined the new country only briefly and then split off, even though that land was under the same Spanish jurisdiction. Those cultures and economies were not sufficiently unified to come along.
After independence, the state of Yucatán rebelled repeatedly, almost claiming its independence. In the 1840s, the U.S. declared war on Mexico and took away about half of its territory. Texas already had seceded to become an independent republic. In 1857, Mexico fought a civil war. The French invaded in 1861, and by 1864 they helped install a Habsburg, Maximilian, as emperor. Yet Maximilian never came close to controlling the entire country, and was quickly deposed and executed. The 1910 Mexican Revolution killed about 10 percent of the population by some estimates.
The rest of the 20th century was more peaceful, but much of Mexico never fell under unitary rule as did the U.S. and Western Europe. The more remote areas were mostly on their own, and they regarded the government as a potential oppressor rather than a savior. So when the drug trade heated up in Mexico in the 1990s as Colombian traffickers were partially thwarted, drug gangs were able to operate in many parts of Mexico with impunity. Eventually, they became the de facto rulers of those territories, supplying public goods such as general protection in addition to running their illegal businesses. All for a high price, of course, as extortion is still the ruling principle in those parts of the country. If you buy avocados from Mexico, for instance, there is a good chance that part of your money is going to pay tribute to drug gangs.
Another significant fact about Mexico is the size and power of its central government. It spends just short of 23 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), relatively low for a country of its level of development. By contrast, Brazil, which has roughly comparable living standards, has a central government that spends over 32 percent of that country’s GDP. If the Brazilian government is too large, Mexico’s is too weak and too small, most of all because Mexico cannot beat back its drug gangs by brute force or preempt them in the first place.
Mexico as a topic will never become obsolete, not for the United States at least.
Friday assorted links
1. Is there too much free parking in NYC? (NYT)
2. New Malcolm Gladwell book forthcoming on violence in America. Ready for pre-order.
3. Manufacturing requirements are killing gene and cell therapy.
5. What went wrong with German trains? (FT)
6. Why do people wander in a counterclockwise direction? (NYT)
7. Seb Krier: “Over the past few months I’ve been working on a very exciting project: a new $10m fund for research on multi-agent multi-principal AGI safety! Instead of focusing on single agent alignment and centralized control, we’re looking to support research focusing on multi-agent settings, mechanism design, cooperative AI, and coordination problems.”
A simple reason for skepticism about the iPhones/fertility link
Here is the background to the debate. Here is more from Noah. Here is a thread from researcher Caitlin Myers. And here is some basic information:
In 2008, 1.9% is the share of the mobile-subscribing population with an iPhone wireless subscription. As a percent of all adults that is 1.6%.
In 2009, it is 4.3%. 3.6% of all adults.
In 2010, 6.8%. 5.5% of all adults.
Plus conception to birth takes nine months (give or take!), noting that actual family planning may make this lag far longer. In 2008 fertility rates already were falling pretty sharply. The whole “maybe the iPhone messes up your dating processes” factor also requires some time to operate, especially since iPhones as a network of many many users, and whatever negative effects on socializing you think that might have, was still to lie in the future. And what you could access on the iPhone then was far more limited than today.
So when the authors talk about diffusion explaining 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among American women 15–44, I still do not get how that is supposed to operate.
The explanations I am hearing seem to be parasitic on world intuitions from 2026, not the time period under consideration.
Thursday assorted links
1. Fable 5 describes humanity. And Anthropic policy proposals, including for economics.
2. “Can you build a working chess board which then illustrates and can play the moves of the famous “Evergreen game”?” The response. Much better yet is Fable 5 explaining Riemann.
3. Marcus Nunes on Chile vs. Argentina.
4. In the video world, AI is reasonably popular rather than hated.
5. Solve for the equilibrium! It is not always easy to do.
6. How avocados stopped being seasonal.
7. New Stanford program for AI economic indicators.
8. Music and video for the Pope. Or is it for Gaudi?
My excellent Conversation with Katja Hoyer
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while it bred dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life in the GDR actually was, Tyler’s own bleak day-trip to East Berlin in 1984, the underrated literature of the GDR (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann), whether Good Bye, Lenin! got the era right, why it’s no coincidence that Richter and Polke came from the East, the strange coexistence of communist prudishness and Germany’s nudist culture, what Merkel’s East German background did and didn’t give her as a chancellor, why East Germans remain dramatically underrepresented in leadership positions today, what makes Weimar the cultural and spiritual heart of Germany, why relatively few Jews ever settled there, how much the citizens of Weimar knew about Buchenwald, what actually killed the Weimar Constitution, how she’d rewrite the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler’s citizenship problem, underrated German thinkers, the complacency behind Germany’s current economic decline, which side of the Weißwurstäquator she’d choose to live on, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Why did the Weimar Constitution fail?
HOYER: How much time have I got?
COWEN: Americans typically think it’s that the proportional representation system allowed too many small parties to enter into government. That’s one factor, but what else is there?
HOYER: There are plenty of factors, I think. Some of these are inbuilt flaws, like the proportional representation that you just mentioned. Another one that’s often referred to as Article 48, which was a kind of emergency article that was in the constitution that allowed the president to bypass parliament and the other democratic structures in time of emergency.
If you just follow down this route, then the fall of the Weimar Republic becomes inevitable. If you’re just assuming that there were all these flaws in the constitution already, so therefore it was bound to fail, I don’t think that is the case because when you study this closely, you do see all these kinds of forks in the road as to where things could have gone differently. I don’t think the system was set up to fail. I think these things contributed to the brittle nature of this. I think there was perhaps a degree of naivety there in 1919 to think that you could have this ultra-democratic system without any guardrails.
When you think how long it took the American Founding Fathers to sit there and really work out every angle, and “What if we got a mad president, what do we put in there to try and protect against that?” Those sorts of things. That process is so rushed in 1919 that they just put an ultra-liberal democracy in place, which allows extremists to hijack it. That is part of the reason. I think the other group of reasons is the circumstances under which the system is born. It’s basically born into crisis. It comes on the back of the First World War and then runs into economic trouble very quickly. That never really goes away despite the so-called gilded years in the middle. All of that’s propped up by American money, even the stability years of the middle 1920s. The moment that falls because of the Wall Street crash, you basically get the very economic foundation taken away again.
The subtitle I chose for the book, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, I’m trying to hint at the fact that that’s how a lot of people felt. They were literally balancing constantly for this entire time, really, after 1919, on the edge of their own personal catastrophes. It was always unemployment, hyperinflation, trying to get enough food. People were dying of diseases. There’s the Spanish flu. There’s tuberculosis. It’s always something or other. People don’t feel that the system is giving them stability. I don’t think there ever really is a feeling that this can really work long term.
People do, at the slightest whim, think, “Oh, maybe we just need to go back to a system where someone makes the decisions.” The Weimar Republic actually dies in 1930, three years before Hitler comes into power, as a democracy. He takes over a system, I think, that’s already given up on being a democracy, even at that point. As I say, I could talk about this for two days and still be lining up factors. It is complex.
COWEN: The army is interfering in politics quite early and pretty frequently.
HOYER: Yes. They still think that because of the nature of the Prussian system previously, it’s often been said that “Prussia wasn’t a state with an army, but it was an army with a state.” That intrinsic self-confidence, if you want to call it that, of the army, that they are really calling the shots, that doesn’t really go away.
People also often forget that in the First World War, you have the so-called silent dictatorship, which is basically the army running absolutely everything under Hindenburg’s system, from the economy and culture to newspaper output and everything else. Again, that they don’t just suddenly turn that off in 1919. They do try and make their influence heard ongoingly.
Then the young Weimar Republic has to make a pact with the military because they defend them effectively against communists and also right-wing Putschers. They depend on the military in that way as well for security. They do try and build up a new military, but they never go Stalin-style and purge everybody who was there previously. They keep the existing elites largely in place, so they inherit an army that isn’t loyal to them, that’s still loyal to the old system.
I very much enjoyed Katja’s recent book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe.
What do the AIs think of us?
Asked to answer as a typical human, every cutting-edge model rated us markedly more neurotic, less open, less agreeable and less conscientious than they rated themselves. The gap on Neuroticism alone is 1.69 points on a 5-point scale.
Here is more material of interest. And this:
Across 31 models from those seven labs they answer the personality tests in unison: high openness, low Dark Triad, Universalism on top, Power dead last in every single model.
Wednesday assorted links
1. New edition of Copernicus on money.
2. Denazification of the United States? Denazification actually consisted of: “…dissolution of Nazi organizations, licensing/control of new political organizations, individual classification by denazification tribunals, and temporary or permanent disabilities on voting, standing for office, party membership, officeholding, public speech professions, and public/private employment.”
3. Faster replies increase your chance of being hired.
4. OpenAI Economic Research Exchange.
5. Some new growth estimates from the AI boom.
6- Behavioral economics guide 2026.
7. Damian Clarke has a new microeconometrics textbook out from MIT Press.
8. “So I gave Fable 5 the watchmaker benchmark…” And Taelin.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Birthing a child in South Korea.
2. Those new service sector jobs (NYT).
3. Britain launches AI Economics Institute.
4. House Committee makes effort to speed up clinical trials.
5. Those new manufacturing sector jobs.
6. More comments on phones and fertility.
7. Gordon Wood, RIP (NYT), his books are great.
Sao Paulo notes
The old saw “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be” now seems so wrong. The place feels increasingly conservative, and it is aging rapidly. In the domestic airport you see couples with only a single kid, not two or three kids, never mind four.
Country and Western music, in their Brazilian incarnations, are very popular.
It does not feel like the next Pelé will be coming from Brazil.
Sao Paulo as a city is much improved. The murder rate has plummeted, and the nice neighborhoods are very nice and are growing in size. The business community is strong, interesting architecture abounds, and there is a real arts scene. It is arguably Latin America’s number one city, with only Mexico City as a rival. It has, along with Mexico City, evolved into a “must know” global city, though it is rarely treated that way by outsiders. In the three days I spent there, going around to many places, I did not see a single person who was evidently a foreign tourist. That is crazy, but also a sign there is good value here.
Sao Paulo has food to die for. It is top tier for Brazilian (of course), meat/steak, Japanese, and Italian, and pretty good in many other offerings as well. I had a wonderful fifteen-course omikase for $110 at a Michelin star restaurant. The establishment, Kan Suke, has only eight seats, but I could get a table by inquiring only an hour in advance.
For Italian food it is probably the second best country in the world? For meats it might be number one, at least if you are willing to put aside the small country of Uruguay. For beans it is top two, and the fruits are excellent as well. Chocolate ice cream and gelato abound. All constraints considered, I would rather spend a week dining out here than in London or Paris or Rome, or for that matter New York City.
People are very friendly, surprising few speak decent English, and Brazilian warmth still abounds.
I was very pleased with my stay at Hotel Unique, due to its architecture and also a perfect location.
Observers should be more optimistic about the Brazilian economy. Yes it is overregulated and the government is locked into far too much spending. But hyperinflation is now a distant memory, a reasonable fiscal consolidation occurred in the 1990s, and the country has plenty of its own energy. Keep in mind that for emerging economies, years of negative growth are a major problem. Brazil now has sidestepped most (not all!) of those risks. Slow, steady growth should be able to get them somewhere, albeit at a langorous pace.
My biggest worry about Brazil is demographics and shrinking population. In recent times TFR has been in the 1.3 to 1.4 range, hardly satisfactory. A shrinking population is bad per se, and also it will hurt many regions of the country due to imperfect market integration, both nationally and globally. More importantly, the country does not have an obvious and easy option for pulling in a higher number of desirable immigrants, at least not relative to its size. There is Venezuela and Bolivia, but the former of those may go away as a major source of people.
Will Brazilian fertility tick back up? Will Brazil re-attain its status as a highly influential culture on the world scene, as it was in the 1960s through early 1990s? Unclear. But if the question is “should you go visit?”, the answer is a definite yes.
Monday assorted links
1. It seems Piketty has become a degrowther. And other views. Maybe it is rude to say this, but some of our best-known economists basically have a negative-valued understanding of how the world works. And a bit more.
2. Claims about soil (speculative). Here is GPT Pro analysis.
3. Stepping up.
4. An interactive feature for AI and economic growth.
5. The strange allure of the single-sentence novel. From Totei.
6. Where is the Indian diaspora population?
7. The Pope in Spain cites Salamanca and liberty.
8. “We’re hiring two Research Fellows to study the future of scientific discovery.“
New paper on the iPhone and fertility
The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors. We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone. The U.S. rollout of the iPhone, the first modern smartphone, provides a natural experiment: from June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T’s mobile broadband coverage. Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint’s pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women. Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44. National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.
That is from
Note also that as this study is set up it does not discriminate against the ” the iPhone effect on fertility is mainly a thing of timing” hypothesis. And a Paul Novosad comment.
Sunday assorted links
2. Redux of a 2009 essay by me on poverty and a documentary film.
3. Shruti on AI and copyright law.
4. Will the number of lawyers go up or down?
5. One view on where Somalia stands right now.
6. Alan Riding, RIP (NYT). His Distant Neighbors remains a great book on Mexico.