Results for “brexit” 205 found
The notion of a “skill anomalous position”
Here is from MIT Technology Review, surveying research on chess blunders and cognition by Ashton Anderson at Microsoft Research in New York City, Jon Kleinberg of Cornell, and Sendhil Mullainathan:
…Anderson and co have found evidence of an entirely counterintuitive phenomenon in which skill levels play the opposite role, so that skillful players are more likely to make an error than their lower-ranked counterparts. The team call these “skill anomalous positions.”
That’s an extraordinary discovery which will need some teasing apart in future work. “The existence of skill-anomalous positions is surprising, since there is a no a priori reason to believe that chess as a domain should contain common situations in which stronger players make more errors than weaker players,” say Anderson and co. Just why this happens isn’t clear.
I don’t, by the way, find the concept of skill anomalous positions to be so surprising. Better chess players have more “chunking” and more intuitions. Usually that knowledge adds value, but in a variety of counterintuitive positions it can lead players down the wrong paths. For instance a beginner probably does not know that on average a Queen and Knight working together are more effective than a Queen and Bishop, yet this is not always true and the less tutored intuition will sometimes prove correct. Similarly, the better player may think that an endgame of Bishops of opposite color is more likely to be drawn, and often that is true. Yet in other situations those ill-matched Bishops can yield an attacking advantage to the player with the better command of space, and so on.
I believe there are analogous concepts for economics and also philosophy, probably for other disciplines too. For instance in economics I wonder if a person with less knowledge of open economy macroeconomics might sometimes end up making better forecasts. Many anti-elitist theories of politics imply these phenomena can be true in a broad range of situations, Brexit for instance according to some.
*Heyday: Britain and the Birth of the Modern World*
That is the new book by Ben Wilson, and no it has nothing (directly) to do with Brexit. Rather it is a survey of the technological breakthroughs of the 1850s and how they reshaped Great Britain and the globe more generally. Here is one short bit:
Japan may have secluded itself from the rest of the world, but it had not closed itself off. That was a distinction that people in the West were slow to grasp. The shogun’s court subscribed to the Illustrated London News, for example, and the bakufu had acquired books and papers detailing global politics and scientific discoveries through their Dutch and Chinese trading partners. This knowledge was strictly regulated, but the seeds of scientific enlightenment were diffused in small numbers across the archipelago. Perry did not know it — and nor did many Japanese — but his telegraph was not the first on Japanese soil.
Other parts of this book which I enjoyed were on the Great Geomagnetic Storm of 1859, how the British saw a connection between the U.S. Civil War, and the origins of Reuters.
If you want a new Brexit-relevant title of interest, try Brendan Simms, Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation.
Sunday assorted links
1. Does gender equity cause sex differences to grow bigger? (speculative)
2. Tenure extension policies may not always benefit women (NYT).
3. MIE: swastika golf balls. And a mobile phone with a rotary dial. And Stefan Zweig biopic coming.
4. How Africans will lose from Brexit.
5. Silicon Valley’s robot pizzeria.
United Kingdom fact of the day
After education and occupation, the share of people not holding a passport was the next most strongly correlated characteristic with the Leave vote.
Here is more from John Burn-Murdoch at FT blogs, via Tim Harford.
Financial clearinghouses seem to work pretty well (so far)
There was absolute carnage in various markets following the realization of Brexit, and at times massive asset price changes, sometimes ranging from eight to ten percent, were compressed into minutes or hours.
I recall seeing in my Twitter feed that the dollar-pound rate shift was a fourteen-standard deviation event. That’s not right, and is rather the sign of a bad model, but the point remains that something extraordinary happened.
So far I haven’t read or heard a single account of clearinghouses operating anything but smoothly, as they pretty much did during the various 2008 crashes. Obviously this success is with central bank liquidity assistance, but still it would be worth studying further one part of the global financial system which seems to be in very good working order and is underpublicized at that.
Saturday assorted links
1. Fish out of water are more common than thought: “New research shows 33 different families of fish have at least one species that demonstrates some terrestrial activity and, in many cases, these behaviors are likely to have evolved independently in the different families.”
2. Can schooling increase IQ and fluid intelligence?
4. The Mystery of Millennial politics.
5. “As people get older, they become choosier about how they spend their time and with whom they spend it. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on June 23 find, based on a series of experimental and behavioral studies, that similar changes take place in Barbary macaques.” Link here. Is this a theory of Brexit voting?
6. Paul Krugman on Brexit. Linton Kwesi Johnson on Brexit, sort of, video. And a region’s recent change in income does not predict its Brexit vote, though income level does to some extent. And here is Reihan on Brexit as an immigration backlash.
The culture that is Cornwall
Cornwall has issued an urgent plea for reassurance that it will not be worse off following the Brexit vote.
The county has received a “significant amounts” of funding from the EU for the past 15 years due to its “relatively weak economy”.
But, after 56.5% of voters in the county chose to leave the Union, the council says it is now seeking urgent reassurance that money allocated to it will still be received.
Prior to the vote the Council said they were told by the Leave campaign that funding would still be available.
They also said they had been told Cornwall “would not be worse off” in terms of investment they received.
Here is the link. Overall the regions most dependent on the EU economically were most likely to vote for Brexit.
Friday assorted links
1. Revolutionary leaders are more likely to engage in mass killings.
2. Testing NeoFisherianism, especially for Switzerland.
3. The rise of global illiberalism.
4. The Roman Empire was larger than we had thought. At least before that earlier Brexit.
5. Are we closer to nuclear war than we think?
Monday assorted links
2. Them vs. us, but in Brexit demands, who exactly is the “us”?
3. Patrick Blanchfield, The Gun Control We Deserve. Recommended. And here is an alternative perspective on why so many people own AR-15s. Also recommended.
4. “In Guadalajara, Mexico, streets are named after artists, constellations, Aztec history and mythology, rivers, writers and botany. Imagination costs little, yet it remains rare.” Archaeology of street names.
5. “A political philosophy devoted to the pursuit of what we now consider ideal justice, and which seeks a “well-ordered society” based on this shared ideal, almost certainly will condemn us to a society based on an inferior view of justice. Political philosophy, I argue, has too long labored under the sway of theorists’ pictures of an ideally just society; we ought instead to investigate the characteristics of societies that encourage increasingly just arrangements.” That is from philosopher Gerald Gaus.
6. An explainer on the DAO attack. And a Reddit explainer.
7. Henry on The Age of Em. Robin responds, and more from Robin here.
Which European financial centre would win at London’s expense?
Paris recently made a bold pitch to woo City of London bankers in the event of Brexit. But, HSBC aside, most banks scoff at the idea that Paris would be a natural venue. Frankfurt, home of the European Central Bank and the financial capital of Europe’s biggest economy, is also problematic. As a small city with a population of less than 700,000 people, it is seen as provincial and unpopular with staff. Dublin is English-speaking and attractive on tax grounds, but it is a relative backwater. The most likely outcome is that foreign banks with large operations in London would shift their staff to a spread of eurozone locations where they already have operations — including Frankfurt, Dublin, Paris, Warsaw and Lisbon. That would fragment the financial services industry in Europe, potentially weakening the continent’s ability to compete internationally.
It’s not Europe, but of course we have to add New York City to the list of alternative cities. The Patrick Jenkins FT article is interesting throughout.
Brussels bleg
I’ll be there next week, in fact just in time for the Brexit vote. Above and beyond the obvious guidebook sights, what do you all recommend that I do? And where should I eat?
Here is a good Ian Buruma survey of where Brussels the city is at right now.
Friday assorted links
1. My favorite things Swiss, redux. These days I would add Peter Zumthor and the Vitra design museum outside of Basel.
2. Theatre of Harmonic Social Motion, a short essay by Anthony Morley. What are the invisible hand mechanisms governing science?
3. When do unions oppose the minimum wage?
4. 3 a.m. interview with philosopher David Estlund.
5. How did the Brexit idea rise to prominence?
6. Big hack and theft at Ethereum, ongoing story, a big setback for “this kind of stuff.” (Can I call it that?) Here is Izabella Kaminska.
Thursday assorted links
Tuesday assorted links
1. Does the Canadian trade deal with the EU provide a good model for the UK?
2. How to teach the teachers, believe me they need it. And the movement for data analytics on students is considered promising but dangerous.
3. China nude pictures as IOU and collateral, link is safe for work…”…the lender would send the photo and her naked video footage to her family members if she could not pay back her 10,000 yuan borrowed on an annual interest rate of 24 percent within a week.”
4. “This is the sound of Britain breaking.”
5. “Man finds 22-pound chunk of butter estimated to be more than 2,000 years old in Irish bog.” I enjoyed this paragraph:
In her article “Bog Butter: A Two Thousand Year History” in The Journal of Irish Archaeology, Caroline Earwood wrote, “It is usually found as a whitish, solid mass of fatty material with a distinctive, pungent and slightly offensive smell. It is found either as a lump, or in containers which are most often made of wood but include baskets and skins.”
Then there is this:
Given that level of preservation, most of the butter is actually edible. Irish celebrity chef Kevin Thornton, who owns the Michelin-starred Thornton’s Restaurant in Dublin, claimed to have tasted a 4,000-year-old sample of bog butter.
Some of you may recall James Farewell’s 1689 poem “The Irish Hudibras” — “butter to eat with their hog, was seven years buried in a bog”.
Monday assorted links
1. Which brands of automobile are most expensive to maintain?
2. Paul Krugman on Brexit. This morning the Betfair odds on Remain were down to 64 percent. Dani Rodrik on Brexit. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on Brexit, by far the best case for it, well worth reading.