Results for “YouTube” 1361 found
The Era of Planetary Defense Has Begun
In Modern Principles of Economics, Tyler and I use asteroid defense as an example of a public good (see video below). As of the 5th edition, this public good wasn’t being provided by either markets or governments. But thanks to NASA, the era of planetary defense has begun. In September of 2022 NASA smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid. A new set of five papers in Nature has now demonstrated that not only did NASA hit its target, the mission was a success in diverting the asteroid:
DART, which was the size of a golf cart, collided with a Great Pyramid-sized asteroid called Dimorphos. The impact caused the asteroid’s orbit around another space rock to shrink — Dimorphos now completes an orbit 33 minutes faster than before the impact, researchers report1 today in Nature.
…As DART hurtled towards Dimorphos at more than 6 kilometres per second, the first part that hit was one of its solar panels, which smashed into a 6.5-metre-wide boulder. Microseconds later, the main body of the spacecraft collided with the rocky surface next to the boulder — and the US$330-million DART shattered to bits….the spacecraft hit a spot around 25 metres from the asteroid’s centre, maximizing the force of its impact….large amounts of the asteroid’s rubble flew outwards from the impact. The recoil from this force pushed the asteroid further off its previous trajectory. Researchers estimate that this spray of rubble meant Dimorphos’ added momentum was almost four times that imparted by DART.
…Although NASA has demonstrated this technique on only one asteroid, the results could be broadly applicable to future hazards…if a dangerous asteroid were ever detected heading for Earth, a mission to smash into it would probably be able to divert it away from the planet.
Friday assorted links
My Progress Studies conversation with Jon Baskin of The Point
No, not Nilsson’s The Point, the other one! Here is the piece, here is one excerpt:
JB: What did you learn from reading Plato?
TC: Reading Plato, it struck me—I’m thirteen years old here—but it struck me how much the whole rest of the world is by no means on board with the things I thought were good. So Socrates is constructing his ideal republic, and you can debate whether Plato really favored it, or whether Socrates really favored it, but those ideas are out there. You ban the poets? You want to be like Sparta? Those are big issues.
And even then, when I read Plato, I saw it as a dialogic mode of thinking, rather than believing that Plato was endorsing everything Socrates said. The dialogues are rich and fruitful. And people hold a lot of different points of view. So to try to refine dialogic modes of thinking about progress, and indeed everything: that was the biggest lesson I got from Plato. And then just how smart some of the early people were. And that’s not unrelated to progress studies. In the modern world there are a whole bunch of ways we’re clearly much smarter, like programming computers. Are we smarter in every way? Will we produce our own Adam Smith or Plato? Tough questions.
And:
JB: I want to talk a little bit about Tolstoy. Max Weber, in his famous 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation,” says that Tolstoy is the person who most sharply raises the question of whether the advances of science and technology have any meaning that go beyond the purely practical and technical. And he quotes Tolstoy saying that, basically, for the person who puts progress at the center of their life, life can never be satisfying, because they’ll always die in the middle of progress. How would you respond to this charge from Tolstoy about progress?
TC: I’m pretty happy and Tolstoy was not, would be my gut-level response.
Self-recommended!
The Gift: An Analysis
Anna was excited to open her birthday present from her husband. He had been hinting at something special for weeks, and she couldn’t wait to see what it was. She tore off the wrapping paper and lifted the lid of the box. Inside was a beautiful necklace with a pendant shaped like a heart. It sparkled in the light and looked very expensive.
“Oh, honey, it’s gorgeous!” Anna exclaimed, hugging her husband. “Thank you so much! How did you afford this?”
He smiled and kissed her cheek. “Don’t worry about that. It’s your birthday, and you deserve the best. I love you.”
Anna put on the necklace and admired herself in the mirror. She felt like a princess. She decided to wear it to the party they were going to that night.
At the party, Anna received many compliments on her necklace. She felt proud and happy as she showed it off to her friends. She thanked her husband again for his wonderful gift.
Later that night, as they were driving home, Anna noticed that her husband seemed tense and nervous. He kept checking his phone and looking at the rearview mirror.
“Is everything okay?” she asked him.
He nodded quickly. “Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine.”
Anna shrugged and leaned back in her seat. She closed her eyes and smiled, thinking about how lucky she was.
Suddenly, she heard a loud bang and felt a jolt of pain in her chest. She opened her eyes and saw blood spilling from her necklace. The pendant had exploded.
She looked at her husband in horror. He had a gun in his hand and a cold expression on his face.
“I’m sorry, Anna,” he said calmly. “But I had no choice.”
He pulled the trigger again.
There are religious and spiritual undertones regarding temptation, sin, and mortality in this story. The pendant, the gift, represents the forbidden fruit of knowledge that leads to a fall from grace. The gift made Anna happy but also made her prideful and sinful. The sequence of Anna putting on the necklace, showing it off to other people, and then being killed with it can be seen as a metaphor for pride preceding a fall. The husband manipulates Anna by giving her such an extravagant gift before revealing his violent nature. This reflects how abusers often use a “cycle of abuse”, alternating between kindness and cruelty to reinforce control. The husband wants Anna to understand that she has done something terribly wrong even if she isn’t yet aware of what it is. The husband appears evil but the heart shaped pendant indicates a kind of true love. “I’m sorry,” he said calmly, “But I had no choice.”
Sadly, shortly after she wrote The Gift, the author was lobotomized. Perhaps she knew.
Hat tip: Jim Ward and also Claude for assistance in interpretation.
Saturday assorted links
1. How much did election-denying Republicans suffer in the mid-terms?
2. All the tech companies with names from LOTR.
3. Callard-Hanson Night Owls on the sacred.
4. People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners.
5. The Nigerian demonetisation is going poorly.
6. Claims about black holes (speculative).
Friday assorted links
1. More on Edelman, the Chinese food cost complainer (can you blame him?).
2. Jon Haidt follows up on social media and mental health.
3. In defense of J.K. Rowling (NYT). And Connecticut is considering apologizing for its 17th century witch trials (NYT).
4. A note on Sydney. And another. And a third.
5. Full transcript of the Roose/NYT chat with Bing (NYT). And Gwern on Sydney. In the meantime, it seems that Sydney has been sent to the glue factory.
6. Jeremy Stern interviews me on issues related to Russia and Ukraine.
I never knew this was a Bacharach-David song
Little Red Book, by Love. RIP, Burt Bacharach. His was some of the first music I knew, most of all “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” I don’t even think I knew he wrote that song, but it was in one of the first movies I ever saw in a theater.
Most of all, as a teenager, I thought of Burt Bacharach as “my parents’ music,” in a not entirely positive way. I associated it with muzak, where his compositions were played often. Then one day (long ago) I woke up and realized “Hey, Burt Bacharach is one of America’s great all-time great songwriters!” Which he was and is. It is a good thing in life to have these “Burt Bacharach moments.” They don’t need to have anything to do with your parents. But you should be able to wake up and one day just realize “Hey, that’s great!” Burt Bacharach moments, keep them in mind.
I hadn’t known he was mentored by Milhaud, as mention in this WaPo obituary. He was renowned as a good-looking playboy, leading to this:
His 2013 memoir “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” a title borrowed from one of his hits, revealed his shortcomings as a husband and father. An admittedly “selfish” man much of his life, he invited his ex-wives — Stewart, Dickinson and Sager — to contribute to provide their perspective.
I wonder what their “Burt Bacharach moments” were.
Friday assorted links
1. Back from the autumn, Fraser Nelson interviews me in London.
2. “I’m one of two honey sommeliers in the US.”
3. Herbert J. Wallberg has passed away.
4. How to use ChatGPT to improve your business plans.
5. My podcast on economics growth, and other matters, with David McWilliams of Ireland.
6. Several universities to experiment with micro nuclear power. If there is anything to turn you anti-nuclear…
Richard Hanania on AGI risk
To me, the biggest problem with the doomerist position is that it assumes that there aren’t seriously diminishing returns to intelligence. There are other potential problems too, but this one is the first that stands out to me…
Another way you can have diminishing returns is if a problem is so hard that more intelligence doesn’t get you much. Let’s say that the question is “how can the US bring democracy to China?” It seems to me that there is some benefit to more intelligence, that someone with an IQ of 120 is going to say something more sensible than someone with an IQ of 80. But I’m not sure a 160 IQ gets you more than a 120 IQ. Same if you’re trying to predict what world GDP will be in 2250. The problem is too hard.
One can imagine problems that are so difficult that intelligence is completely irrelevant at any level. Let’s say your goal is “make Xi Jinping resign as the leader of China, move to America, and make it his dream to play cornerback for the Kansas City Chiefs.” The probability of this happening is literally zero, and no amount of intelligence, at least on the scales we’re used to, is going to change that.
I tend to think for most problems in the universe, there are massive diminishing returns to intelligence, either because they are too easy or too hard.
Recommended, and largely I agree. This is of course a Hayekian point as well. Here is the full discussion. From a “talent” perspective, I would add the following. The very top performers, such as Lebron, often are not tops at any single aspect of the game. Lebron has not been the best shooter, rebounder, passer, or whatever (well, he is almost the top passer), rather it is about how he integrates all of his abilities into a coherent whole. I think of AGI (which I don’t think will happen, either) as comparable to a basketball player who is the best in the league at free throws or rebounds.
Thursday assorted links
1. ChatGPT Plus now to sell for $20 a month, not $40 a month. I view that as the result of high demand, not low demand (ever look at the book market and its prices). And new LLM app for lawyers to use for contract review. And David Rozado on ChatGPT moderation systems, tweet storm here. And the plan for Microsoft Teams Premium. AI-powered meetings are on the way.
3. Dwarkesh interviews @pmarca. And Age of Infovores interviews Daniel Klein. And Benjamin Yeoh podcast with Kanjun Qiu.
4. What should a Caribbean think tank do? Important post, and not just for the 44 million people in the Caribbean.
5. New Yunchan Lim (Byrd, Bach, Beethoven Bagatelles and more). It is amazing how many different kinds of music he can play so extraordinarily well at age eighteen.
Saturday assorted links
1. Forthcoming Netflix movie: “They Cloned Tyrone.”
2. “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” by Roald Dahl 1954.
3. One account of how GPTs hallucinate.
4. More on MusicLM from Google. Yet Google won’t release the model.
5. An AI-generated image? This one is marginally not safe for work, though not at the very extreme.
6. In which Peter Thiel speaks to the Oxford Union and calls Greta Thunberg “complacent.” Good Q&A.
Are macroeconomic models true only “locally”?
That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
It is possible, contrary to the predictions of most economists, that the US will get through this disinflationary period and make the proverbial “soft landing.” This should prompt a more general reconsideration of macroeconomic forecasts.
The lesson is that they have a disturbing tendency to go wrong. It is striking that Larry Summers was right two years ago to warn about pending inflationary pressures in the US economy, when most of his colleagues were wrong. Yet Summers may yet prove to be wrong about his current warning about the looming threat of a recession. The point is that both his inflation and recession predictions stem from the same underlying aggregate demand model.
You will note that yesterday’s gdp report came in at 2.9%, hardly a poor performance. And more:
It is understandable when a model is wrong because of some big and unexpected shock, such as the war in Ukraine. But that is not the case here. The US might sidestep a recession for mysterious reasons specific to the aggregate demand model. The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy has indeed been tighter, and disinflations usually bring high economic costs.
It gets more curious yet. Maybe Summers will turn out to be right about a recession. When recessions arrive, it is often quite suddenly. Consulting every possible macroeconomic theory may be of no help.
Or consider the 1990s. President Bill Clinton believed that federal deficits were too high and were crowding out private investment. The Treasury Department worked with a Republican Congress on a package of fiscal consolidation. Real interest rates fell, and the economy boomed — but that is only the observed correlation. The true causal story remains murky.
Two of the economists behind the Clinton package, Summers and Bradford DeLong, later argued against fiscal consolidation, even during the years of full employment under President Donald Trump [and much higher national debt]. The new worry instead was secular stagnation based on insufficient demand, even though the latter years of the Trump presidency saw debt and deficits well beyond Clinton-era levels.
The point here is not to criticize Summers and DeLong as inconsistent. Rather, it is to note they might have been right both times.
And what about that idea of secular stagnation — the notion that the world is headed for a period of little to no economic growth? The theory was based in part on the premise that global savings were high relative to investment opportunities. Have all those savings gone away? In most places, measured savings rose during the pandemic. Yet the problem of insufficient demand has vanished, and so secular stagnation theories no longer seem to apply.
To be clear, the theory of secular stagnation might have been true pre-pandemic. And it may yet return as a valid concern if inflation and interest rates return to pre-pandemic levels. The simple answer is that no one knows.
Note that Olivier Blanchard just wrote a piece “Secular Stagnation is Not Over,” well-argued as usual. Summers, however, has opined: “we’ll not return to the era of secular stagnation.” I was not present, but I can assume this too was well-argued as usual!
Thursday assorted links
1. ChatGPT taking U. Minnesota law exams.
2. The story and background of Scholz.
3. What is going on with PredictIt, and the legal case against them.
4. Macca reviews from 45s from 1967. Lennon does the same from 1965. Both are a bit harsh, but right on, and ruthless with those who will not innovate and progress with their styles.
5. Why is East Asia less happy?
6. Construction Physics on Goolsbee and Syverson on construction productivity. And commentary on some recent gender gap results.
My Conversation with the excellent Rick Rubin
The Rick Rubin. Here is the transcript and audio, here is part of the summary:
He joined Tyler to discuss how to listen (to music and people), which artistic movement has influenced him most, what Sherlock Holmes taught him about creativity, how streaming is affecting music, whether AI will write good songs, what he likes about satellite radio, why pro wrestling is the most accurate representation of life, why growing up in Long Island was a “miracle,” his ‘do no harm’ approach to working with artist, what makes for a great live album, why Jimi Hendrix owed his success to embracing technology, what made Brian Eno and Brian Wilson great producers, what albums he’s currently producing, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Do you think the widespread advent of streaming threatens the economic viability of a successful ecosystem for musical production and sale?
RUBIN: I think it can be. I don’t think it is yet. If you look at the history of recorded music, at the time that the Beatles were making albums, I think they were paid several pennies per album sold. Then over time, the artists got more leverage and were able to negotiate better deals. I think it finally culminated in the old music business with Michael Jackson who was getting maybe $2 per album that was sold, which was much more than everybody else. In the early days of singles, people were paid very little. Every time there’s a new format of music, the rights holders seem to take advantage of that.
Like when CDs first came in, artists got paid less on a CD than they did for vinyl, and it’s been very time. Every time there’s a new format, the artist gets paid less. Now, they only get paid less until their attorneys realize, “Oh, in our next deal, we’re going to negotiate to have better digital rights,” or better whatever it is. Then it eventually evens out because ultimately, the artists have a great deal of leverage.
Like now, for the handful of the biggest artists in the world, they probably make more money through streaming music than anyone has ever made in the physical world of music, but it’s very much of a top-down thing. It’s only the very top percent who have that. Eventually, hopefully, it’ll get more equitable. It always has. In every case, it has so I’m optimist that it will again.
COWEN: Do you worry about the decline in music education in American schools? Does that matter for popular music in the future, or do people just teach themselves? There’s YouTube, there’s streaming, whatever.
RUBIN: I don’t think it matters. I like the idea of learning what you want in school. If you want to learn music, it would be nice to have that option, but I think that people learn the things they love wherever they are, not in school.
And this:
RUBIN: Yes. I listen to The Beatles [satellite radio] Channel all the time. I love The Beatles Channel.
COWEN: As do I.
RUBIN: It was funny one of the things that when I was talking to Paul McCartney, one of the first things I said to him was like, “Oh, yes, you make all the music that’s on The Beatles Channel, right? That’s who you are. You’re the guy who makes the music for The Beatles Channel.”
Interesting throughout, and best experienced as a whole. And here is Rick’s new book The Creative Act: The Way of Being.
Is crypto now underrated?
I appeared on the Bankless crypto podcast, and they sent me these links:
- Youtube – https://youtu.be/ByefgDAFgv8
- Podcast – https://availableon.com/bankless
- Substack Post – https://open.substack.com/pub/banklesspod/p/early-access-why-crypto-is-underrated