Saturday assorted links
1. A weak LLM, but you can manipulate it in various ways. There will be more of this.
2. Economics Themed Comedy Show in NYC this Wednesday (8/14) at 7pm.
3. “We found that people with more consistent grocery shopping habits are more likely to pay their credit card bills on time. These are people who tend to shop on the same day of the week, spend about the same amount each month, buy similar items across trips and take advantage of deals regularly.” Link here.
4. Rhys Lindmark sent me this very good world music playlist. And here are his podcasts, including with Karl Friston.
Sam Mendelsohn’s Travel Blog
When I travel abroad, I will often get recommendations of where to eat, what to do and what to read and watch from Sam Mendelsohn. Not just a few sentences, as if from a travel guide, but pages of unique and original material. I often have time to pick only one or two recommended items but invariably they are excellent. When I stayed in the Devigarh palace outside of Udaipur, for example, Sam pointed me to the movie Eklavya: The Royal Guard which is set in the palace. Watching the movie added to the stay. Not your usual material.
Sam is now formalizing his notes into a travel blog. He’s starting with some of lesser known places in India but will soon add more. He is also an expert on Thailand. Email him for some out-of-the-ordinary tips.
Every place is its own distinctive world: some combination of intellectual, literary, culinary, musical, sonic, linguistic, spiritual, philosophical, visual, architectural, geographic, botanic, olfactory, and cinematic worlds, and etc, brought together by different cultural and historical currents, and that’s all only a small part of the story of any given place. That such worlds of worlds actually exist, and the planet is full of them, seems underappreciated. Few people have the time or background knowledge to give anything more than a very superficial exploration of any of these while traveling, and I won’t claim to either. Despite my ambitions, I’m quite mediocre. Nonetheless, attempting to get lost in these worlds, however briefly and incompletely, is incredibly stimulating and meaningful for me. I like cities more than most people because they contain more worlds to get lost in, but on a short trip less can be more.
I think crypto performed well in the Monday pseudo-crash
Of course the crypto prices fell first, over the weekend. I think Bitcoin fell by about 15 percent?
You can think of crypto as a hedge against illiquidity, rather than against inflation, or against the decline of America, or whatever. There are not enough liquid assets! So sometimes solvent economies go tails up, because debtors do not have enough liquidity to meet their obligations.
Putting another liquid asset in the mix, in this case Bitcoin, eases that liquidity constraint. You can’t meet your margin call? Just sell some Bitcoin!
Economies will become more resilient to liquidity squeezes, especially from surprise events, for instance the financial volatility in Japan. And the crypto prices falling, when other asset prices fall, is a sign of this mechanism working, not of crypto failing.
Of course it is not entirely so simple. In the longer run, the liquidity of crypto will encourage people to take out more debt. Still, overall, an economy with more liquid assets should (usually) have superior risk-sharing properties.
I don’t see this aspect of crypto discussed very much.
Emergent Ventures India, seventh cohort
Post and selection done by Shruti Rajagopalan, no further indentation:
Krishna Saproo is a BS-MS student at IISER Pune and founder of Maunitva Nirakaran. His research studies the impact of music on the cognitive behavioral system and explores the efficacy of Sangeetha Chikithsa, an ancient Indian therapeutic technique using music, in addressing mental health concerns.
Harshil Naik is a 22-year-old aerospace engineer who, along with his cofounder Kanao R., started Contineu, India’s first AI-enabled construction intelligence platform (using existing CCTV grids and drone feeds) to help drastically reduce decision-making times and material waste on sites due to inefficient communication loops.
Spencer Schneier is a startup founder based in Bangalore working on Commenda.io. He aims to make starting a business anywhere in the world as easy as deploying software. His project, Sling, is an incubator running out of his office and he received his EV grant to create additional workspace for deeptech and nontraditional founders based in (or looking to relocate to) Bangalore.
Rnjai Lamba is researching and developing a product that creates a noise-free environment around oneself. Previously, he led more than a hundred engineers and served as the CTO of a Series B Mexican FinTech.
Sriram Subramanian is a 35-year-old entrepreneur from Mumbai and one of the founders of Clever Harvey – a virtual internships platform to help high school students experience future career paths. His current EV-supported project borrows from highly effective gym training regimens to set up time-bound, cohort-based “incubation programs” with defined outcomes and built-in accountability checks.
Rabeea Raheed is an educator and STEM curriculum developer from Lahore and received her EV grant for general career development.
Vasav Trehan is a 14-year-old tech influencer and founder @technifyedofficial which bridges the tech education gap. He wants to democratize tech education and through his channel he is helping students up-skill by zero-price courses, zero-price certifications, internships and scholarship opportunities and interview preparation to be able to secure a better future. He received his grant to scale his platform technifyed.
Ravindra Guravannavar is a computer science researcher and a former faculty member of IIT Hyderabad and Dr. Shashikant Kulgod is a surgeon. They are the cofounders of Pratibha Poshak, a transformative talent search and nurture program aimed at identifying gifted students in the age group of 14-16. They received their EV grant for identifying students with high potential from remote, underserved rural areas and impoverished urban neighborhoods.
Akshita Sachdeva and Bonny Dave are the co-founders of Trestle Labs, an Assistive Technology company to make education and employment digitally inclusive for everyone against language, literacy and print-disability barriers like blindness, low-vision and dyslexia with their AI-powered patented technology solution, Kibo (Knowledge In A Box). They received their EV grant to help scale Kibo which helps Listen, Translate, Digitise and Audio’tize any kind of printed, handwritten and digital content across 60 global languages including 13 Indian languages.
Abhishek Sethi is the founder of one of India’s best early-stage incubators gradCapital which funds and incubates outlier students by providing them USD40k to scale their backyard science projects. gradCapital founders are also placed in cohorts in Bangalore to integrate them into the start-up ecosystem.
Sandeep Jaykumar is a 42-year-old electrical engineer, interested in complex adaptive systems. He received his EV grant to improve discoverability of information on the web using a market mechanism, and a more transparent ranking mechanism.
Manu Rewal is an award-winning Indo-French filmmaker. He received his EV grant to help write and produce a thriller featuring themes of rule of law and freedom. His films have been covered by the press here.
Bhagyashree Prabhutendolkar is a 19-year-old college student and author in Mumbai. She is the founder and director of Empower, a youth-led media outlet that exists to spark critical conversations among young people.
Karthik Palakodeti is a 17-year-old from Hyderabad who writes and runs a podcast on animal welfare for a blog he created with the aim to unpack the key policy questions in the field. He has also represented India at the World Schools Debating Championships for the past four years.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV India announcement is here. More about the winners of EV India second cohort, third cohort, fourth cohort, and fifth cohort. To apply for EV India, use the EV application, click the “Apply Now” button and select India from the “My Project Will Affect” drop-down menu.
If you are interested in supporting the India tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Shruti at [email protected].
Friday assorted links
Jake Seliger is Dead
We all knew it was coming but it’s no less painful to learn that Jake Seliger has died. I never met Jake in person but we were pen pals? email pals? blog friends? for well over a decade. We shared an interest in speeding up drug research and development, including FDA deregulation, an interest which long preceded Jake’s cancer diagnosis. But mostly I thought he was a great writer and human being. His essays were always thoughtful and without pretense or sentimentality.
Jake’s wife, Bess Stillman is now 7 months pregnant with their daughter. Bess is an ER physician and a remarkable woman. Here is an interview with her on the infuriating difficulty of getting a patient enrolled in a clinical trial in the United States. Here is How to Say It, her gripping telling on the Moth Radio hour of how she tells people their loved ones have died. If you wonder about the title of this post, that is why. Do read How to Let Go on her last days with Jake. Sigh.
Here is Jake:
One virtue of a prolonged end is that I feel like I’ve said everything I have to say. I don’ t know that I have a favorite, but I’m fond of “I know what happens to me after I die, but what about those left behind?” Same with “How do we evaluate our lives, at the end? What counts, what matters?” I’m tempted to keep citing others, but if you scroll down into the archives you will find them. I meant to turn these essays into a memoir, but that is a project never to be completed by me. Bess assures me that she’s going to complete the project and do her best to get it published. We’ve created so much together in the process of building our life, and Bess says that doesn’t need to stop just because I’m not physically here, and that putting both our baby and our book into the world gives her immediate future the purpose that she’ll badly need.
Though having my life cut short by cancer is horrible, I’ve still in many ways been lucky. Most people never find the person who completes them, I think, and I have. I’ve been helped so much. Numerous oncologists have gone above and beyond. Many people, friends and strangers, have asked if there is anything they can do to help. The #1 thing is to support Bess and our soon-to-be-born daughter, Athena, whatever “support” may mean—the most obvious way is the Go Fund Me, as any remaining funds will go to Athena. I wish she could grow up with her father, but that is not an option. Being a single mom is hard;[1] growing up without a parent is hard; I cannot see what Athena’s future holds, except that I think and hope it will be bright, even though I will not be in it, save for the ways in which friends and family promise to keep me alive for her.
My “favorite classical performances” playlist for Rick Rubin
You will find it here. As I note on the list itself: “Here is an idiosyncratic list of some of my favorite classical performances. Some tasks drive you crazy if you think too long about them, and this is one of those — best that I did it quickly!”
My excellent Conversation with Paul Bloom
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Together Paul and Tyler explore whether psychologists understand day-to-day human behavior any better than normal folk, how babies can tell if you’re a jerk, at what age children have the capacity to believe in God, why the trend in religion is toward monotheism, the morality of getting paid to strangle cats, whether disgust should be built into LLMs, the possibilities of AI therapists, the best test for a theory of mind, why people overestimate Paul’s (and Tyler’s) intelligence, why flattery is undersupplied, why we should train flattery and tax empathy, Carl Jung, Big Five personality theory, Principles of Psychology by William James, the social psychology of the Hebrew Bible, his most successful unusual work habit, what he’ll work on next, and more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: I have some questions about intelligence for you. If we think of large language models, should we let them feel disgust so that they avoid left-wing bias?
BLOOM: [laughs] Why would disgust make them avoid left-wing bias?
COWEN: Maybe we’re not sure it would, but there are various claims in the literature that for people on the right, disgust is a more fundamental emotion, and that a greater capacity to feel disgust encourages people in some ways to be more socially conservative. Debatable, but I don’t think it’s a crazy view. So, if you build LLMs, and you give them, say, a lot of empathy and not much or any disgust, you’re going to get left-leaning LLMs, which you might say, “Well, that was my goal.” But obviously, not everyone will accept that conclusion either.
BLOOM: I wouldn’t want woke LLMs. I think there’s a lot in extreme —
COWEN: You’ve got them, of course.
BLOOM: I’ve got them. I think Gemini is the one, if I wanted to go — the woke LLM of choice. Because I think the doctrine called wokeness leads to a lot of moral problems and makes the world worse in certain ways, but I wouldn’t mind left-wing LLMs.
In fact, I’m not a fan of disgust. You’re right that disgust is often associated with right-wing, but in the very worst instantiation of it. Disgust is what drives hatred towards gay people. It involves hatred of interracial marriage, the exclusion of immigrants, the exclusion of other races. If there’s one emotion I would take away from people, it would be disgust, at least disgust in the moral realm. They could keep their disgust towards rotten food and that sort of thing. That’s the one thing I wouldn’t put into LLMs. I’d rather put anger, pity, gratitude. Disgust is the one thing I’d keep away.
COWEN: So, you wouldn’t just cut back on it at the margin. You would just take disgust out of people if you could?
And:
COWEN: I think at the margin, I’ve moved against empathy more being a podcast host, that I’ll ask a question —
BLOOM: Wait. Why being a podcast host?
COWEN: Well, I’ll ask a question, and a lot of guests think it’s high status simply to signal empathy rather than giving a substantive answer. The signaling-empathy answers I find quite uninteresting, and I think a lot of my listeners do, too. Yet people will just keep on doing this, and I get frustrated. Then I think, “Well, Tyler, you should turn a bit more against empathy for this reason.” And I think that’s correct.
Paul cannot be blamed for doing that, however. So substantive, interesting, and entertaining throughout.
What aspiring economists aren’t being taught
From Steve Landsburg in the WSJ:
Here’s an economics brain teaser: Apples are provided by a competitive industry. Pears are provided by a monopolist. Coincidentally, they sell at the same price. You’re hungry and would be equally happy with an apple or a pear. If you care about conserving societal resources, which should you buy?
Most of my sophomore-level economics students can solve this problem, which I posed on an exam. Almost nobody else can. I’ve tried it out on a lot of smart lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs and scientists. Neither can the latest version of ChatGPT.
First I’ll tell you the answer; then I’ll tell you the moral. In a competitive industry, prices are a pretty good indicator of resource costs. Under a monopoly, prices usually reflect a substantial markup. So a $1 apple sold by a competitor probably requires almost a dollar’s worth of resources to produce. A $1 pear sold by a monopolist is more likely to require, say, 80 cents worth of resources. To minimize resource consumption, you should buy the pear.
Agree or not? The entire piece is of interest. Ben Golub is upset, but for an economist at Northwestern he doesn’t have much of an argument, as Robin Hanson points out. Which is in fact the best argument against Landsburg’s claim?
Thursday assorted links
1. Dynamic inconsistency in great apes.
2. New results against HIV. They seem pretty spectacular.
3. Feasibility of keeping Mars warm with nanoparticles.
4. At the bottom of his post, Noah responds on vibes.
5. David Wallace-Wells on Covid vs. bird flu (NYT).
6. Does the Sahm rule apply right now? (Bloomberg)
An Economist Solves the Millennium Prize Problems
In 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could solve any of the seven Millennium Problems. Namely, the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, Hodge conjecture, Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness, P versus NP problem, Riemann hypothesis, Yang–Mills existence and mass gap, and the Poincaré conjecture. Only the Poincare conjecture has been solved.
As an economist, it is clear to me why the Millennium Problems haven’t been solved. Incentives! Due to inflation the $1 million prize is diminishing in value every year. Solving the Riemann hypothesis today, for example, will only net you in real terms about half of what it would have in 2000 (about $565k). Half a million? Won’t even get you a decent house today!
Does the Clay Mathematics Institute want to reduce the incentive to solve the problems over time? Did they calculate that the problems would get easier every year by the rate of inflation? I don’t think so. If instead of offering a nominal prize, the Clay Mathematics Institute has invested the prize fund in the S&P 500 they could today be offering over $4 million to solve each of the Millennium Prize Problems.
At $4 million, I bet the prize problems could be polished off in hardly any time at all. QED.
Walking around Frankfurt
I am here only briefly, and earlier I had visited the city perhaps seven or eight times, typically when passing through. But not within the last twenty years. My main impressions are thus:
1. The city itself has not radically changed in quite a while. Everything seemed familiar, and the types of stores were pretty familiar too.
2. The people walking around Frankfurt are very different. During an early evening walk, it seemed that perhaps 30-40% of the people I saw would classify as “potentially objectionable immigrants,” at least by the standards of anti-immigrant Germans. In earlier times perhaps this would have been five percent?
Do keep in mind my time and location may have embodied selection biases in favor of seeing more immigrants.
The evidence I can find does show that Frankfurt has the highest crime rate in Germany, although perhaps much of that standing comes from the presence of the financial district and the city being such a transport and convention hub, rather than from the immigrants per se.
In any case, if you wish to understand the popularity of AfD — which now seems to be Germany’s #2 political party — I suggest you take a walk around Frankfurt. I didn’t even go near the train station.
3. It is also striking to me, in a limited number of service sector encounters, that the immigrants with jobs have a “hessisch” accent and Germanic mannerisms. Of course there is selection going on here too, but this does show some degree of assimilation. I do not know what percentage of them are assimilating in this fashion, but it seems to be rising. Earlier, immigrants in German service sector jobs more likely seemed “right off the boat.”
4. Frankfurt in 1984 seemed to be on a rough wealth parity with the United States. But now it seems decidedly poorer, and I am not referring to the immigrants, rather the rate of progress on the upside seems pretty low. It just doesn’t feel like a “Luxus-Stadt.”
5. Lots of merchants still encourage you to pay with cash.
Life in Belarus update (from my email, from anonymous)
Just an interesting update:
Chinese cars are rapidly replacing European & American cars in the city. An improvement in terms of comfort. Luxury cars still only European.
Housing prices in Minsk are reaching highs not seen since 2016. Government bodies that deal with the sales of properties are booked out 2 weeks. (Not common)
Subjectively, restaurants have improved immensely in the past few years with the influx of Chinese students and businessmen. Minsk has its first proper Korean restaurant, and Chinese food has become as good as in China. Minskers have a new found taste of spicy food (so says friends in the food industry)
Everyone I know that lost their jobs from sanctions has found something new working for a locally (or CIS) focused company.
Any products that disappeared after sanctions was either replaced by local (or russian) products, or reappeared with a Chinese label.
From my perspective, regarding Chinese, the immigration center I go to every year has become very very crowded with Chinese. It went from maybe 10 people waiting, to over 100 – every day.
Oppositional people have left long ago, people who remain accept or support the Government. . .
There has to be some profound lessons to draw from this, but I’m not sure.
It’s hard to measure & quantify resilience? Sanctions are ineffective with such a global economy? China is in control of this century? Maybe it’s a good thing to produce things locally? GDP is taken too seriously in the public mind?
Have the vibes shifted back?
Noah writes:
I would love an update to this
post, explaining why the vibes have seemingly shifted back!
I don’t think the vibes have shifted back at all, and here is my earlier post. To cite one key point, MZ referred to Trump being “bad ass,” and it still has not created anything close to a scandal. This new world is here to stay, and this kind of toleration is likely to be extended further.
Part of the ongoing shift in vibes is that now the Democrats are trying to win with a “brat” and “vibes only” strategy, and no real policy positions. That is a sign that they too recognize the vibes have shifted. So far Harris has been resisting most of the pressure from the Left. And Walz’s Congressional voting record was to the right of 70% of the Democrats. His recent big speech often felt like Frank Capra. I also predict that his more extreme actions as Governor will not be emphasized, to say the least.
Noah has a very good post on the new vibes of the Democrats, and I agree with his major points. Note that Cori Bush just became the second Squad member to be ousted in a Democratic primary.
It was never about who would win the election, as most economic theories predict this should be close to 50-50. Rather, ideology has changed, voters are (mostly) fed up with Left positions, and of course they are fed up with a bunch of right-wing positions too (note that Vance is not popular and Trump is disavowing the 2025 agenda).
Once you realize that none of this is about “which party wins,” it is obvious that the vibe shift is continuing, not being reversed.
Wednesday assorted links
3. A neoliberal case for Walz? (not necessarily endorsing, I do not yet know enough to say, but some contrarianism is called for here). And ChinaTalk, Tim Walz on China.
4. “Joss Naylor, the English King of Racing Up Mountains, Dies at 88.” (NYT)
5. “On average, when agents can do a task, they do so at ~1/30th of the cost of the median hourly wage of a US bachelor’s degree holder.” Link here.