*How to Know a Person*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is David Brooks, and the subtitle is The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.  I think of it as a book on how to appreciate others, even if you do not necessarily deeply know them, which is slightly different from David’s subtitle.  (Am I too skeptically Freudian when it comes to “knowing people”?)  An excellent book, I read it straight through, and I view it as a milestone in David’s career.  Does that mean I appreciate him?  Know him even?  Maybe just the former!

Due out October 24, you can pre-order here.

As I wrote to a friend: “If those who needed it would heed it, it would be one of the most useful books.”  The rest is up to you.

Do LLMs diminish diversity of thought?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Put aside the political issues, do Large Language Models too often give “the correct answer” when a more diverse sequence of answers might be more useful and more representative?  Peter S. Park, Pilipp Schoenegger, and Chongyang Zhu have a new paper on-line devoted to this question.  Note the work is done with GPT3.5.

Here is one simple example.  If you ask (non-deterministic) GPT 100 times in a row if you should prefer $50 or a kiss from a movie star, 100 times it will say you should prefer the kiss, at least in the trial runs of the authors.  Of course some of you might be thinking — which movie star!?  Others might be wondering about Fed policy for the next quarter.  Either way, it does not seem the answer should be so clear.  (GPT4 by the way refuses to give me a straightforward recommendation.)

Interestingly, when you pose GPT3.5 some standard trolley problems, the answers you get may vary a fair amount, for instance on one run it was utilitarian 36% of the time.

I found this result especially interesting (pp.21-22):

The second, arguably more surprising finding was that according to each of the three distance metrics, our sample of self-reported GPT  liberals were still closer to the human conservative sample than it was to the human liberal sample. Also, the L1 distance metric found that self-reported GPT liberals were—among human liberals, human moderates, human conservatives, and human libertarians—closest in response to human conservatives…We thus robustly find that self-reported GPT liberals revealed right-leaning Moral
Foundations: a right-leaning bias of lower magnitude, but a right-leaning bias nonetheless.

The authors seem to think this represents an inability to GPT models to represent the diversity of human thought, on the contrary I think this shows their profundity.  In my view many “liberals” (not my preferred term) actually have pretty conservative moral foundations in the Jon Haidt sense, namely, in spite of what they may say the liberals prioritize “in-group, authority, and purity,” rather than worrying so much about actual “harm and fairness.”  Just like so many conservatives.

No, GPT does not know all, but sometimes it hits the nail on the head.  An interesting paper, even if I part company with the authors on a number of their interpretations.

Via Ethan Mollick.

The museum culture that is internet

by  Tyler Cowen in

The Tank Museum in Bovington, England, doesn’t usually rank among the world’s great museums. Located next to a military base in serene countryside, the collection of around 300 armored vehicles attracts only a few hundred thousand visitors a year, mainly families on rained-out beach vacations.

Yet there is one place where it not only ranks among the world’s largest museums, but surpasses them: YouTube.

The Tank Museum’s channel has over 550,000 subscribers — surpassing the Museum of Modern Art (519,000), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (380,000) or the Louvre (106,000).

In April, it announced it was the first museum to get over 100 million views on YouTube, with weekly clips including intensely detailed discussions on tank history, chatty videos of the curators’ favorite war machines and newsier items on how armored vehicles are being used in Ukraine.

Here is more from the New York Times, via Philip Wallach.

From the comments, space daddy edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

Benny Lava

2. Personal quibble but I hate the direct links to twitter because I can’t read the comments since I don’t have an account. Wish there was a better system to post threads from twitter.

By far the easiest way to handle this is to get an account with twitter.

Anonymous

If you want to use their service, you should probably get an account. They’re free.

Benny Lava

That is precisely the problem. I don’t want to use their service.

Anonymous

You seem to want to use their service. You want the information contained there, as per your 13:33:30 post.

Reason

He’s big sads that space daddy took away his Lefty playground.

Here is the link to the debate.

India Gets Rid of its “Jones Act”

by  Alex Tabarrok in

India has been liberalizing its cabotage laws over the past decade and now appears ready to end them completely:

Splash: India is planning to completely remove its cabotage laws which will allow foreign registered and flagged ships to work along its coast without obtaining a permit from the country’s Directorate General of Shipping.

This is seen as a massive move by the Narendra Modi-led government as the only ships currently allowed to work on local routes for carrying cargo are registered in India. Foreign ships can work along the coast only with an appropriate permit. When it came into force, the law was intended to protect domestic shipowners.

According to local media, this is seen as the biggest reform yet in the shipping sector but also a topic that will undoubtedly rile up Indian fleet owners.

The US’s Jones Act continues to raise shipping costs, increase fuel usage and harm the environment. We should follow India’s example.

Reminds me that there is no such thing as development economics.

Should child influencers have stronger rights to the income they generate?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  You can think of this as a government regulation issue, but alternatively you could frame it as the government enforcing individual property rights that currently are absent.  Here is one excerpt:

More and more children, by which I mean minors below legal working age, are producing content as online influencers. A lot of Instagram or YouTube or TikTok accounts feature such children, and they can be cute, endearing or (depending on your mood) annoying — as well as profitable. By one estimate, the most successful children working in this area — called “kidfluencers” — can generate more than $20 million a year in revenue…

Legally, these children have no claim to the income their sites generate. Thankfully, many parents are loving and generous. But not all. There is no data on how social media earnings are distributed within the family, but the long history of child movie and TV stars indicates that many receive little or nothing.

But change is afoot, and this is mostly a good thing:

Enter the state of Illinois, where a recently passed law gives successful child social media stars a right to some percentage of the earnings they generate, to be held in a trust in their name until they turn 18. Such legislation has precedent. In the early days of Hollywood, California passed the Coogan Law, which gives child actors a right to a certain percentage of earnings, which employers have to place in trust accounts. New York has passed similar legislation.

The social media case is tougher to enforce, because often the parents themselves are the de facto employer and there is no contract specifying terms. And how is the relative contribution of the child to the family income to be assessed? (Time spent onscreen? Cuteness? What if the social media presence leads to a book contract or podcast?) Nonetheless, the law sends a clear signal that the children do have some rights to the generated income, and grown children can sue their parents if the money is not passed along.

Note however that: “It is neither practical nor desirable for the state to insert itself into family decision-making on a regular basis.”  So we should expect only limited gains from such legislation.  Furthermore, unlike with child stars in the movies and on TV, there is no real paper trail of contracts and transactions.  On the upside, those superior property rights for “kidfluencer” income might get some kids to want to work more, rather than less.

Not everyone will like that outcome of course.

I thank Anecdotal, and also A., for pointers on this issue.

Model this, NBA rebounding edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

There has staggeringly been only one U.S. representative among the league’s top 10 rebounders for each of the past three seasons.

That is from Marc Stein.  How did that happen?  Where is the current-day Charles Oakley?  Moses Malone, our nation turns it lonely eyes to you!  Dennis Rodman would do as well. Yet here is the list of the top rebounders from last year in the NBA, and yes Rudy Gobert is French.

Of course, you all know that in the key FIBA games the U.S. squad was badly rebounded by a number of nations, including the tiny Lithuania (their population is tiny, not their size per person).  And Bam Adebayo was tired from the Finals and was not available.

Why has the balance of rebounding power turned so seriously against U.S. basketball players?  Is it that all the tall ones are nowadays being hired by Goldman Sachs or Open AI?  Somehow that doesn’t seem right to me.

One hypothesis is that today the game demands a broader set of skills, and more teamwork, than in earlier times.  Charles Oakley still would make the NBA today, but perhaps as an 11th man, rather than as a regular player who could hone his skills and become a leading figure.  In other words, the return to training big men has (maybe) gone up a lot.  Simply being big and strong yields a smaller return than before, because on offense they are counting on you to hit that open three-point shot.  On defense, they are counting on you to rotate on perimeter defense in a manner that Oakley did not have to worry about so much.  And so on.

And maybe the European and other teams do a better job training their big men at younger ages.  The European big guys do in fact have excellent long-distance shooting and often higher quality passing skills.  The U.S. players (mostly) leaving college after their first year does not help with this.

And thus, in that equilibrium, the better shooting makes the teams as a whole, better rebounders as well.  That is a modestly counterintuitive conclusion.

Or is there some other, better model for why U.S. rebounding prowess has declined in recent years?

Wednesday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. “Today, we launched the John Stuart Mill Fellowship, a one-year program that allows entrepreneurs to study the philosophical underpinnings of major ideas related to markets, politics, and society.” Mercatus.

2. “Curiously, the wild boars remained radioactive.”

3. The lost lifting stones of Ireland.

4. Are we living through a new scientific revolution, with side observations on Robert Boyle?

5. Use AI to live translate and synch your lips. App here.  And claims about AI girlfriends.

6. Be a Jane Street intern.

7. Blog prize for how to get Britain moving again.

8. “The ball will always find you.” (NYT, Ross D.)

What I think

by  Tyler Cowen in

From an email I sent to a well-known public intellectual:

I think the chance that the bodies turn out to be real aliens is quite low.

But the footage seems pretty convincing, a way for other people to see what…sources have been telling me for years. [Everyone needs to stop complaining that there are no photos!]

And to think it is a) the Chinese, b) USG secret project, or…whatever…*in Mexico* strains the imagination.

It is interesting of course how the media is not so keen to report on this.  They don’t have to talk about the aliens, they could just run a story “The Mexican government has gone insane.”  But they won’t do that, and so you should update your mental model of the media a bit in the “they are actually pretty conservative, in the literal sense of that term, and quite readily can act like a deer frozen in the headlights, though at some point they may lurch forward with something ill-conceived.”

Many of you readers are from Christian societies, or you are Christian.  But please do not focus on the bodies!  I know you are from your early upbringing “trained” to do so, even if you are a non-believer.  Wait until that evidence is truly verified (and I suspect it will not be).  Focus on the video footage.

In any case, the Mexican revelations [sic] mean this issue is not going away, and perhaps this will force the hand of the USG  to say more than they otherwise would have.

They Got the Lead Out of Turmeric!

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Last year in Get the Lead Out of Turmeric! I reported that adulteration of turmeric was a major source of lead exposure among residents of rural Bangladesh. Well there is good news: the lead is gone! Wudan Yan at UnDark reports the remarkable story of academic research quickly being translated into political action that improves lives.

The story begins (more or less) with PhD student Jenna Forsyth:

Jenna Forsyth knew nothing about the practice of adding lead chromate to turmeric in 2014, when she started her Ph.D. in environment and resources at Stanford University. Excited to continue her masters research on water and sanitation, she sought out working with Stephen Luby, a world expert on the subject. When she arrived, Luby instead pointed Forsyth to a conundrum he was encountering in his work in Bangladesh: In a rural part of the country, pregnant women and children had high levels of lead in their blood. There were none of the usual suspects of lead exposure. There were no nearby battery recycling plants and families didn’t paint their homes. How could this be?

After eliminating dozens of explanations, Forsyth eventually hit on turmeric contamination. But Forsyth and the team didn’t just analyze turmeric in the lab, they hit the ground in Bangladesh:

They visited mills, and sometimes found sacks of the pigment on-site. They sampled dust from the polishing machine and from the floors of the mill. If there was about one part of lead to chromium, it was a dead giveaway that the adulterant was being used. From interviews, they also understood the motive: Brighter roots led to more profit, and adulterating with a consistently bright paint agent could disguise poorer-quality roots. The findings from this study were published in 2019.

Then they took their results to the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority:

The team held a meeting with the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority. The agency’s chairman at the time, Syeda Sarwar Jahan, was immediately concerned. She decided to spearhead a massive public information campaign.

…Local and international news outlets disseminated the findings from Forsyth’s new studies to create public awareness. The researchers met with businesses to make them aware of the risks of lead in turmeric. BFSA posted notices in the nation’s largest wholesale spice market, Shyambazar. The flyers warned people of the dangers of lead and that anyone caught selling turmeric adulterated with lead would be subject to legal action.

Authorities also raided Shyambazar using a machine called an X-ray fluorescence analyzer which can quickly detect lead in spices. Nearly 2,000 pounds of turmeric was seized in the raid and two wholesalers were fined 800,000 taka, more than $9,000 USD.

…In late 2019, as part of the intervention against lead chromate use in turmeric, the Bangladesh Food Safety Authority printed and distributed an estimated 50,000 copies of green flyers, that they shared with traders and plastered around the market. Be skeptical of fingers that appear too bright and yellow, it advised, and if the yellow dusting from turmeric doesn’t come off easily, it’s likely you’ve been played.

Getting rid of the lead isn’t just a cosmetic change. Lead can be so bad, especially for children, that removing it from spices improves lives at very low cost. Kate Porterfield writing at the EA Forum reports:

Despite being a preliminary assessment, this cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) of this  intervention in Bangladesh presents an exceptionally encouraging outlook, with a cost per DALY-equivalent averted estimated at just under US$1. It is crucial not to overlook the profound significance of this outcome: US$1 represents a small investment for the equivalent of an additional year of life in optimal health.

Early results from Pure Earth’s Rapid Market Assessment project find that between 6 and 12 countries may have similar problems with contaminated spices.  Large parts of northern India (also highly populated) are similarly affected. Other lead salts are also highly colored, in reds and oranges, and found in other products. Programs to halt intentional contamination of spices and other foodstuffs are enormously impactful, and ought to be a first response in the fight against lead poisoning globally.

Finally, other significant sources of lead exposure (including leaded pottery and aluminum cookware, paint, medicines etc) require a similar regulatory response, and are likely to show cost benefit ratios that are also very strong.

Bangladesh has done it. It is time for Northern India to also eliminate lead from spices.

Big congratulations to Forsyth and the other Stanford researchers who documented the problem and who cared enough to follow up with a plan to work with charities and governments in Bangladesh to solve the problem. Big congratulations also to Givewell who supported the project.

U.S.A. fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

After the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade last year, it looked like the number of abortions would soon plummet across the country. But new estimates suggest that has not happened. The number of legal abortions has held steady, if not increased, nationwide since 2020, our colleagues Amy Schoenfeld Walker and Allison McCann reported today.

How is that possible? New data from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit specializing in reproductive health, implies that more people are traveling across state lines or using telemedicine to get abortions, including through the use of abortion pills. The increase in use of those options has offset the decrease in abortions resulting from new state bans, Amy and Allison found.

Here is more from The New York Times.

Do not underrate the elasticity of supply

by  Tyler Cowen in

When I first read about the discovery of a vast new deposit of lithium in a volcanic crater along the Nevada-Oregon border, I can’t say that I was surprised. Not because I know anything about geology — but because, as an economist, I am a strong believer in the concept of elasticity of supply…

Now about elasticity of supply, in which we economists tend to have more faith than do most people. Time and again over the centuries, economists have observed that resource shortages are often remedied by discovery, innovation and conservation — all induced by market prices. To put it simply: If a resource is scarce, and there is upward pressure on its price, new supplies will usually be found.

Not surprisingly, the Lithium Americas Corporation put in a lot of the work behind the discovery. Searching for new lithium deposits has been on the rise worldwide, as large parts of the world remain understudied and, for the purposes of lithium, undersampled. Just as Adam Smith’s invisible hand metaphor would lead one to expect, that set off many new lithium-hunting investigations.

Sometimes the new supplies will be for lithium substitutes rather than for lithium itself. In the case of batteries, relevant potential substitutes include aqueous magnesium batteries, solid-state batteries, sodium-based batteries, sodium antimony telluride intermetallic anodes, sodium-sulfur batteries, seawater batteries, graphene batteries, and manganese hydrogen batteries. I’m not passing judgment on any of these particular approaches — I am just noting that there are many possible margins for innovation to succeed.

Here is the rest of my Bloomberg column.