Category: Weblogs

My excellent Conversation with Mary Gaitskill

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio and transcript.  She is one of my favorite contemporary American writers, most notably in The Mare, Veronica, and Lost Cat.  Here is part of the episode summary:

She joined Tyler to discuss the reasons some people seem to choose to be unhappy, why she writes about oddballs, the fragility of personality, how she’s developed her natural knack for describing the physical world, why we’re better off just accepting that people are horrible, her advice for troubled teenagers, why she wouldn’t clone a lost cat, the benefits and drawbacks of writing online, what she’s learned from writing a Substack, what gets lost in Kubrick’s adaptation of Lolita, the not-so-subtle eroticism of Victorian novels, the ground rules for writing about other people, how creative writing programs are harming (some) writers, what she learned about men when working as a stripper, how her views of sexual permissiveness have changed since the ’90s, how college students have changed over time, what she learned working at The Strand bookstore, and more.

It is perhaps a difficult conversation to excerpt from but here is one bit:

COWEN: You once quoted your therapist as saying, and I’m quoting him here, “People are just horrible, and the sooner you realize that, the happier you’re going to be.” What’s your view?

GAITSKILL: [laughs] I thought that was a wonderful remark. It’s important to note the tone of voice that he used. He was a Southern queer gentleman with a very lilting, soft voice. I was complaining about something or other, and he goes, “People are horrible. They’re stupid, and they’re crazy, and they’re mean, and the sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be, the more you’re going to start enjoying life.”

I just laughed, because partly it was obvious he was being funny, and it was a very gentle way of allowing my ranting and raving and acknowledging the truth of it. Gee, I don’t know how anybody could deny that. Look at human history and some of the things that people do. It was being very spacious about it and just saying, “Look, you have to accept reality. You can’t expect people to be perfect or to be your idea of good or moral all the time. You’re probably not either. This is what it is.”

I thought that was really wisdom, actually.

I am very pleased to have had the chance to chat with her.

The MR bot, John McDonnell working with Bryan Gilbert Davis

by  Tyler Cowen in

From John:

“I actually built a bot to produce “an MR take”:

It’s live here: https://www.vibecheck.network/

Intro video here: https://www.loom.com/share/e307765429db4fe38efd2fc822bb4529

(We applied to the stability AI grant but didn’t get it)

I think the results need to get a bit better (“Are aliens real” is pretty good, “What should I eat in Oaxaca?” is not good). I put some decent queries in the postscript.

Regarding your article I actually think attribution will be really important. AIs have a tendency to confabulate (the term d’art in the literature seems to be “hallucination”). Attribution is what tells you that the information is real and wasn’t just invented or pulled from some other hallucinating AI.

What would you want this world to be like? A couple thoughts I had:

  • I agree that compactness will be desirable, but also “authentic” non-AI content will be valued. Imagine custom briefings about daily trends with a few of the “best” tweets pulled into the briefing.
  • Who do you trust? You don’t want your AI pulling from any old source. There are few universal authorities anymore. I’m imagining that there may be “webs of trust” where e.g. I trust Tyler, he trusts someone else so I trust that other source at least a little. The DSA might publish lists of “approved socialist sources”.
  • How do you want to feel? Can I make you a feed that’s “uplifting”? “Insightful”? Maybe if people can control their own algorithms we get a sort of do-over on social media and people get control of their attention back.
  • “Idea lineage” … can I select the term “mood affiliation” on a recent post and get a lineage of the way the blog uses that term, hopefully get a contextual definition, etc…
  • I’m curious about combining every source in someone’s digital life. What if we could link article, highlights, notes, emails, Slacks, etc? This is sort of huge but could get interesting.

If we were to iterate on Vibecheck are there ideas you’d like to see prototyped?

…PS a few queries that have decent answers:

* What is the Great Stagnation?* What do Russians believe about Ukraine?* Are aliens real?* Should I start a startup?* Should I support the TPP?”

TC again: I am already impressed.  But I think many of you don’t understand what this looks like when hundreds of trillion (yes, trillion) of parameters are brought to bear on the problem, as will someday (soon) be evident.

Emergent Ventures winners, eighteenth cohort

by  Tyler Cowen in

Zvi Mowshowitz, TheZvi, New York City, to develop his career as idea generator and public intellectual.

Nadia Eghbal, Miami, to study and write on philanthropy for tech and crypto wealth.

Henry Oliver, London, to write a book on talent and late bloomers.  Substack here.

Geffen Avrahan, Bay Area, founder at Skyline Celestial, an earlier winner, omitted from an early list by mistake, apologies Geffen!

Subaita Rahman of Scarborough, Ontario, to enable a one-year visiting student appointment at Church Labs at Harvard University.

Gareth Black, Dublin, to start YIMBY Dublin.

Pradyumna Shyama Prasad, blog and podcast, Singapore.  Here is his substack newsletter, here is his podcast about both economics and history.

Ulkar Aghayeva, New York City, Azerbaijani music and bioscience.

Steven Lu, Seattle, to create GenesisFund, a new project for nurturing talent, and general career development.

Ashley Lin, University of Pennsylvania gap year, Center for Effective Altruism, for general career development and to learn talent search in China, India, Russia.

James Lin, McMaster University gap year, from Toronto area, general career development and to support his interests in effective altruism and also biosecurity.

Santiago Tobar Potes, Oxford, from Colombia and DACA in the United States, general career development, interest in public service, law, and foreign policy.

Martin Borch Jensen of Longevity Impetus Grants (a kind of Fast Grants for longevity research), Bay Area and from Denmark, for a new project Talent Bridge, to help talented foreigners reach the US and contribute to longevity R&D.

Jessica Watson Miller, from Sydney now in the Bay Area, to start a non-profit to improve the treatment of mental illness.

Congratulations to you all!  We are honored to have you as Emergent Ventures winners.

Bryan Caplan is starting his own blog

by  Tyler Cowen in

I began blogging for EconLog in 2005.  I hadn’t even published my first book, but Liberty Fund took a chance on me and made me a regular blogger.  After seventeen years and thousands of blog posts, I’m supremely grateful to Liberty Fund, my fellow bloggers, and of course you, dear EconLog readers.

Starting on March 1, however, I have accepted a position running an all-new blog, Bet On It, hosted by the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas.  I will be the chief blogger as well as the editor.  As you may know, I’ve spent about four months of Covid as a visiting scholar at the University of Texas.  It’s been a great home away from home, thanks to Executive Director Carlos Carvalho.  And since the Salem Center is energetically expanding, this was a natural move.  Part of the deal is that I’ll continue to spend several weeks in Austin every year – and work with Salem to recruit other visiting scholars, hold public events, and much more.

The upshot is that this will be my last week as an EconLog blogger.  I sincerely hope you all keep following EconLog, but I’m also hoping that you’ll add Bet on It to your regular reading.

Here is the full post.  The discussion is interesting more generally, mostly about how Bryan has become more pessimistic about many aspects of the world, including economics research.

There is now an Android app for Marginal Revolution

by  Tyler Cowen in

As a Marginal Revolution reader, I wanted an Android App. Then one day I realized, wait a second, I’m a programmer — why not just make one myself? I couldn’t think of a good reason not to, so I did. It went better than expected, and resulted in Fractional. Here are five reflections on the process.

Here is the rest from Lifan Zeng.  This app is not from us, but if it is useful to you — great!

Emergent Ventures winners, sixteenth cohort

by  Tyler Cowen in

Phoebe Yao, founder and CEO of Pareto, “a human API delivering the business functions startups desperately need.”  Here is the Pareto website.  She was born in China, formerly of Stanford, and a former classical violist.  (By my mistake I left her off of a previous cohort list, apologies!)

BeyondAging, a new group to support longevity research.

Sam Enright, for writing, blogging, and general career development, resume here.  From Ireland, currently studying in Scotland.

Zena Hitz, St. John’s College, to build The Catherine Project, to revitalize the study of the classics.

Gavin Leech, lives in Bristol, he is from Scotland, getting a Ph.D in AI.  General career support, he is interested in: “Personal experimentation to ameliorate any chronic illness; reinforcement learning as microscope on Goodhart’s law; weaponised philosophy for donors; noncollege routes to impact.”

Valmik Rao, 17 years old, Ontario, he is building a program to better manage defecation in Nigeria.

Rabbi Zohar Atkins, New York City, to pursue a career as a public intellectual.  Here is one substack, here is another.

Basil Halperin, graduate student in economics at MIT, for his writing and for general career development.

Gytis Daujotas, lives in Dublin, studying computer science at DCU, for a project to make the Great Books on the web easy to read, and for general career development.  Here is his web site.

Geoff Anders, Leverage Research, to support his work to find relevant bottlenecks in science and help overcome them.  A Progress Studies fellow.

Samantha Jordan, NYU Stern School of Business, with Nathaniel Bechhofer, for a new company, “Our platform will accelerate the speed and quality of science by enabling scientists to easily manage their data and research pipelines, using best practices from software engineering.”  Also a Progress Studies grant.

Nina Khera, “I’m a teenage human longevity researcher who’s interested in preventing aging-related diseases, especially those related to brain aging. In the past, I’ve worked with companies like Alio on computation and web-dev-based projects. I’ve also worked with labs like the Gladyshev lab and the Adams lab on data analysis and machine learning-based projects.”  Her current project is Biotein, about developing markers for aging, based in Ontario.

Lipton Matthews, from Jamaica, here is his YouTube channel, for general career development.

My Conversation with Andrew Sullivan

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the overview:

Andrew joined Tyler to discuss the role of the AIDs epidemic in achieving marriage equality, the difficulty of devoutness in everyday life, why public intellectuals often lack courage, how being a gay man helps him access perspectives he otherwise wouldn’t, how drugs influence his ideas, the reasons why he’s a passionate defender of SATs and IQ tests, what Niall Ferguson and Boris Johnson were like as fellow undergraduates, what Americans get wrong about British politics, why so few people share his admiration for Margaret Thatcher, why Bowie was so special, why Airplane! is his favorite movie, what Oakeshottian conservatism offers us today, whether wokeism has a positive influence globally, why he someday hopes to glower at the sea from in the west of Ireland, and more.

And here is one excerpt:

SULLIVAN: Well, and so you get used to real conversations about people, and you don’t mistake credentials for intelligence. You realize that people outside of the system may be more perceptive about what’s going wrong with it than people buried within it. I honestly find life more interesting the more variety of people you get to know and meet. And that means from all sorts of different ways of life.

The good thing about being gay, I will tell you, is that that happens more often than if you’re straight — because it’s a great equalizer. You are more likely to come across someone who really is from a totally different socioeconomic group than you are through sexual and romantic attraction, and indeed the existence of this subterranean world that is taken from every other particular class and structure, than you would if you just grew up in a straight world where you didn’t have to question these things and where your social life was bound up with your work or with your professional peers.

The idea for me of dating someone in my office would be absolutely bizarre, for example. I can’t believe all these straight people that just look around them and say, “Oh, let’s get married.” Whereas gay people have this immense social system that can throw up anybody from any way of life into your social circle.

Interesting throughout.  And again, here is Andrew’s new book Out on a Limb: Selected Writing, 1989-2021.

“Why economics is failing us”

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

Here’s the dirty little secret that few of my fellow economics professors will admit: As those “perfect” research papers have grown longer, they have also become less relevant. Fewer people — including academics — read them carefully or are influenced by them when it comes to policy.

Actual views on politics are more influenced by debates on social media, especially on such hot topics such as the minimum wage or monetary and fiscal policy. The growing role of Twitter doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Social media is egalitarian, spurs spirited debate and enables research cooperation across great distances.

Still, an earlier culture of “debate through books” has been replaced by a new culture of “debate through tweets.” This is not necessarily progress.

To use a bit of economic terminology, economists haven’t fully internalized the lessons of the Laffer Curve. By demanding so much rigor in academic research, they’ve created an environment in which most of the economics people actually see is less rigorous.

There is also a political effect. Twitter is a relatively left-wing social medium, and so the tenor of popular economic discourse has moved to the left.

Recommended, and it is one of those pieces where the reaction to the piece itself confirms the thesis of the piece…