Zakir Hussain has indeed passed away
I saw him perform maybe…a dozen times? I was set to go again this spring, and would have kept on going for as long as possible. His two concerts with Shakti I attended were among the very best of my life. No video clip can do justice to percussion, unfortunately. He also seemed so young, and so alive. He was such a magnet for the talent and efforts of others, and radiated that with every movement and word onstage. If you wanted to study the connection between charisma and talent, he would be Exhibit A. And how many other people have had a plausible claim to be the world’s greatest musician?
I am sad to hear of his passing. He was always in motion, and it seems not exactly right to wish him to “rest in peace.”
Sunday assorted links
1. NoVa Civil War NIMBY buffs vs. new data centers.
2. “We propose a mechanism by which accumulated scientific knowledge determines the capacity of nuclear reactors, and find that some 55 billion tons of CO2 emissions, 2.3 million premature deaths, and 14 trillion USD in health costs could have been avoided, had we displaced fossil fuels with nuclear power.” Link here. This was the environmental movement (and the NIMBYs), right?
3. A new paper on whether competition across AIs helps or hurts cultural diversity in outputs.
4. o1 pro on whether the Fed should subsidize ngdp futures contracts.
5. Weird story involving an economist, sort of.
6. Cass Sunstein on the AI calculation problem.
7. Yup.
Are LLMs running out of data?
Ilya and many other experts say yes. I would not dare to disagree with them about AI per se, but I cannot say I am entirely convinced. Supply is elastic! That is a time-honored economic truth. So perhaps the future for traditional scaling is brighter than many of the experts currently are suggesting. We outsiders don’t know exactly which sources of data have been fed into the current top models, but surely there is plenty left? And for some price perhaps it can be mobilized. That is without even getting into data generated by mobile high-quality, life-sampling robots, which admittedly are still some number of years away.
Tax arbitrage through your business
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
This phenomenon is one reason that many office jobs in Nordic countries seem so pleasant. The workers have nice lunches and the use of comfortable and stylish furniture, which they are not taxed on, though of course their take-home pay may be less.
If you think that such workplace comforts make people happier than cash, then you may approve of such arrangements. And it is one vision for how to make society marginally less competitive.
An alternative model is that, with a proliferation of workplace perks and a diminution of earning power, workers become somewhat less ambitious on the earnings front. Peer norms may change, and the dynamism and innovation of the economy can decline accordingly. There are, in fact, signs of these problems in current-day Europe.
And this:
A recent study looked at some comparable effects in Portugal where the in-kind benefits accrue to a firm’s owners rather than its workers. When people own enough of a firm to control its behavior, they charge some of their personal consumption to the firm. Or, to put it another way: They draw more in-kind income from the firm, and take less cash. That lowers their total tax burden.
For the top quintile of the Portuguese income distribution, once those people are able to control a business, about 20% to 30% of their consumption expenditures are switched to benefits reaped within the firm. For the top 1% of earners, attaining a position of business manager is associated with an almost 18% drop in monthly expenditures. And lest there be any doubt about what’s happening here, the paper notes that “business expenditures on hotels and restaurants significantly increase by 9.8% in the birthday month of the owner-manager and by 6.1% in the birthday month of the owner-manager’s spouse.”
Worth a ponder.
Marriage markets in everything (tax arbitrage!)
Looking to marry someone with $1m+ of short-term capital gains (LA California) for tax savings (I have $1m+ in losses) and split the savings
I (unfortunately) lost a bunch of money this year with some risky gambles and have ~$1.2m of context of capital losses.
I would like to marry someone with very large ($1m+) short-term capital gains and split the difference on the tax savings.
I am proposing keeping ~40c for every $1 of capital losses I provided for myself and offering you the remainder (~10c or so, $120k context if you are at the highest tax bracket). The formal agreement can be formalized with a lawyer in relation to the marriage
Slight preference for females but open to males too (preference is just to avoid having to explain why I (straight male) married a man in the future).
Prefer if you are in the LA / Socal Area as that’s where I’m located.
That is from Reddit, via Stephen J.
Very good sentences
…Corbet can be just as critical of indie movies as he is of studio-backed ones. “Art-house cinema and big tentpole releases are equally algorithmic,” he said. “I’ve seen ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’ remade forty-five times. I know why; it’s an extraordinary film.” Still, he went on, “There’s this kind of faux subtlety, and an allegiance to good taste, that I find really frustrating. It’s the same recipe, regurgitated over and over.”
“American indies have been conditioned to think small,” Dennis Lim, the artistic director of the New York Film Festival, told me. With “The Brutalist,” Corbet has gone full maximalist. The film, which takes place over a span of thirteen years and ends with a coda set two decades later still, promises, from its first moments, to be a capital-“E” Event. To the sounds of orchestral rumbling, a title card announces the “overture.”
That is from an excellent Alexandra Schwartz New Yorker article about the new movie The Brutalist.
Saturday assorted links
1. On taste.
2. The dangers of mirrored life? Eli Dourado is not so worried.
3. How are things going with Fermat’s Last Theorem? And are we documenting mathematics properly?
4. Claims made by some Syrians about free enterprise (speculative).
5. What is the evidence on the five-second rule?
6. Where will the Trump crowd go eat in DC?
7. Civitas Outlook, a new publication from UT Austin and the Civitas Institute.
8. Toward a measure of anecdotal value.
9. Dylan Field: “Still doing evals but feels like AGI is basically here with o1 pro mode”
Ilya’s talk
Twenty-four minutes, sixteen minutes for the core talk, self-recommending.
Jennifer Pahlka on DOGE
An excellent piece, one of the best I have read all year. Here is the concluding paragraph:
We can wish that the government efficiency agenda were in the hands of someone else, but let’s not pretend that change was going to come from Democrats if they’d only had another term, and let’s not delude ourselves that change was ever going to happen politely, neatly, carefully. However we got here, we may now be in a Godzilla vs Kong world. Perhaps we’re about to get a natural experiment in which Elonzilla faces off with Larry ElliKong. One of the things we need to be ready to learn is that Elonzilla could lose. Or worse, since Elon and Larry are friends, the expected disruptive could get co-opted. And what would that say about the problem? Conjuring Elon is not bringing a gun to a knife fight. It was never a knife fight.
Recommended.
The Effects of Gender Integration on Men
Evidence from the U.S. military:
Do men negatively respond when women first enter an occupation? We answer this question by studying the end of one of the final explicit occupational barriers to women in the U.S.: in 2016, the U.S. military opened all positions to women, including historically male-only combat occupations. We exploit the staggered integration of women into combat units to estimate the causal effects of the introduction of female colleagues on men’s job performance, behavior, and perceptions of workplace quality, using monthly administrative personnel records and rich survey responses. We find that integrating women into previously all-male units does not negatively affect men’s performance or behavioral outcomes, including retention, promotions, demotions, separations for misconduct, criminal charges, and medical conditions. Most of our results are precise enough to rule out small, detrimental effects. However, there is a wedge between men’s perceptions and performance. The integration of women causes a negative shift in male soldiers’ perceptions of workplace quality, with the effects driven by units integrated with a woman in a position of authority. We discuss how these findings shed light on the roots of occupational segregation by gender.
That is all from
A new paper on the economics of AI alignment
A principal wants to deploy an artificial intelligence (AI) system to perform some task. But the AI may be misaligned and pursue a conflicting objective. The principal cannot restrict its options or deliver punishments. Instead, the principal can (i) simulate the task in a testing environment and (ii) impose imperfect recall on the AI, obscuring whether the task being performed is real or part of a test. By committing to a testing mechanism, the principal can screen the misaligned AI during testing and discipline its behaviour in deployment. Increasing the number of tests allows the principal to screen or discipline arbitrarily well. The screening effect is preserved even if the principal cannot commit or if the agent observes information partially revealing the nature of the task. Without commitment, imperfect recall is necessary for testing to be helpful.
That is by Eric Olav Chen, Alexis Ghersengorin, and Sami Petersen. And here is a tweet storm on the paper. I am very glad to see the idea of an optimal principal-agent contract brought more closely into AI alignment discussions. As you can see, it tends to make successful alignment more likely.
Friday assorted links
1. Space flight during the 21st century.
2. Cato-suggested DOGE reforms.
3. AI progress is massive but increasingly non-legible.
4. One of the biggest benefits of travel: “IMO one of the biggest benefits of travel is just acquiring a scaffold to hang future knowledge on. Places that had similar embeddings in my mind before I saw them (Chongqing vs Chengdu, Abu Dhabi vs Dubai, Wroclaw vs Warsaw, etc.) become extremely distinct, and future facts become much stickier.”
5. Amazing Kreskin, RIP. Though I feel this NYT obit failed to properly appreciate him?
6. Henry Oliver defends literary criticism.
7. Gemini 2 the streaming API.
8. An innovation agenda for addiction.
9. o1 pro on how USG might be related to the NJ drones. And Sam Hammond offers a hypothesis. Here is what a NJ Senator is reporting. Domestic testing has to be the number one hypothesis at this point.
Zakaria on Rent Seeking
Fareed Zakaria on Freakonomics Radio:
ZAKARIA: You can see it in what happened a day after the election results became clear. You got a flurry of tweets from every major C.E.O. in America — every major tech C.E.O., every bank C.E.O. — fawning over Trump, congratulating him and telling him how much they wanted to work well with him. I think that this is a very sad development that’s happened. It’s not entirely because of Trump. But we have politicized the economy in America. All this industrial policy, these tariffs, these bans. What that does is it suddenly makes Washington a very crucial arbiter to the success of business. You add to it Trump, who personally loves the idea of fining Caterpillar for doing this and Harley Davidson for doing that and Chase for doing — he views it as his job as president to literally dole out rewards and punishments to companies, depending on whether they do what he regards as the right thing or the wrong thing. It’s deeply saddening to me as somebody who grew up in India, where this is business as usual. Every business had to slavishly pander to whoever the prime minister at the time was. And you see it in Musk. Tesla stock, in the two days after Trump won, was up 20 percent or something like that, adding tens of billions of dollars to Elon Musk’s net worth. Nothing fundamental in the economics had changed for Tesla. There was just an expectation, now that he was a friend of Trump’s, that he was going to somehow be showered with federal largesse. You know, there’s a guy in India called Adani who’s Modi’s best friend, and his stocks trade at multiples 10 times that of every other Indian company. Because everyone assumes that at the end of the day, being Modi’s best friend is worth $100 billion or something like that.
DUBNER: That’s probably a pretty safe assumption.
ZAKARIA: It’s a safe assumption in India. What’s tragic is it might even be a safe assumption in America. But it’s not what the American economy was supposed to be about. And I think it’s a very sad trend.
Hat tip: Larry White.
On the Gukesh match (from my email)
- Unusual, relative to other competitions, that the (undisputed?) top 3 players weren’t competing for the title. The quality of play seemed correspondingly lower than other big tournaments.
- Ding really is quite an anomaly. Some massive holds despite admitting in interviews to not seeing some pretty straightforward lines. Huge props for him to reach game 14 the way he did with a win in game 12.
- Very very sad way (for both he and gukesh) to end the match.
- Guskesh will be an excellent champion and ambassador of the game.
- The format looks massively stressful, and I get why Magnus doesn’t play it anymore, but I think the format in a way is actually perfect. It rewards massive amounts of prep with an engine, plus provides a serious psychological battle, which all together actually seems to be a pretty good examination of what chess is in a world where humans are inferior to computers. Rapid is more fun to play, but classical really tests all your mental faculties.
- Next world championship could be a great one. Maybe a last chance for Fabi or Hikaru to win. Also very likely we see an all Indian match.
That is from S., all astute observations.
My Conversation with the excellent Paula Byrne
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Paula discuss Virginia Woolf’s surprising impressions of Hardy, why Wessex has lost a sense of its past, what Jude the Obscure reveals about Hardy’s ideas about marriage, why so many Hardy tragedies come in doubles, the best least-read Hardy novels, why Mary Robinson was the most interesting woman of her day, how Georgian theater shaped Jane Austen’s writing, British fastidiousness, Evelyn Waugh’s hidden warmth, Paula’s strange experience with poison pen letters, how American and British couples are different, the mental health crisis among teenagers, the most underrated Beatles songs, the weirdest thing about living in Arizona, and more.
This was one of the most fun — and funny — CWTs of all time. But those parts are best experienced in context, so I’ll give you an excerpt of something else:
COWEN: Your book on Evelyn Waugh, the phrase pops up, and I quote, “naturally fastidious.” Why can it be said that so many British people are naturally fastidious?
BYRNE: Your questions are so crazy. I love it. Did I say that? [laughs]
COWEN: I think Evelyn Waugh said it, not you. It’s in the book.
BYRNE: Give me the context of that.
COWEN: Oh, I’d have to go back and look. It’s just in my memory.
BYRNE: That’s really funny. It’s a great phrase.
COWEN: We can evaluate the claim on its own terms, right?
BYRNE: Yes, we can.
COWEN: I’m not sure they are anymore. It seems maybe they once were, but the stiff-upper-lip tradition seems weaker with time.
BYRNE: The stiff upper lip. Yes, I think Evelyn Waugh would be appalled with the way England has gone. Naturally fastidious, yes, it’s different to reticent, isn’t it? Fastidious — hard to please, it means, doesn’t it? Naturally hard to please. I think that’s quite true, certainly of Evelyn Waugh because he was naturally fastidious. That literally sums him up in a phrase.
COWEN: If I go to Britain as an American, I very much have the feeling that people derive status from having negative opinions more than positive. That’s quite different from this country. Would you agree with that?
Definitely recommended, one of my favorite episodes in some while. And of course we got around to discussing Paul McCartney and Liverpool…