Monday assorted links
1. YouTube interview with Brad Mehldau. Very good.
2. How much can embryonic selection boost IQ?
3. Ukraine drone update. And Master and Margarita movie is a big hit in Russia (NYT). Do you recall the final scene of the novel?
4. Cowen’s Second Law. Good thing there is a replication crisis.
5. Groq — blinding speed, I say bullet chess for LLMs! Here is one possible explanation for the speed.
Avoiding Repugnance
Works in Progress has a good review of the state of compensating organ donors, especially doing so with nudges or non-price factors to avoid backlash from those who find mixing money and organs to be repugnant. My own idea for this, first expressed in Entrepreneurial Economics, but many times since is a no-give, no-take rule. Under no-give, no-take, people who sign their organ donor cards get priority should they one day need an organ. The great virtue of no-give, no-take is that it provides an incentive to sign one’s organ donor card but one that strikes most people as fair and just and not repugnant. Israel introduced a no-give, no-take policy in 2008 and it appears to have worked well.
In March 2008, to increase donations, the Israeli government implemented a ‘priority allocation’ policy to encourage more people to sign up to donate organs after their deaths. Once someone has been registered as a donor for three years, they receive priority allocation if they themselves need a transplant. If a donor dies and their organs are usable, their close family members also get higher priority for transplants if they need them – which also means that families are more inclined to give their consent for their deceased relatives’ organs to be used.
In its first year, the scheme led to 70,000 additional sign-ups. The momentum continued, with 11.1 percent of all potential organ donors being registered in the five years after the scheme was introduced, compared to 7.7 percent before. According to a 2017 study, when presented with the decision to authorize the donation of their dead relative’s organs, 55 percent of families decided to donate after the priority scheme, compared to 45 percent before.
I am tired of making this point
Both rightists and leftists assume that the U.S. spends far lower to combat social problems (poverty, healthcare, education) than peer nations, but that is not true. pic.twitter.com/CXdVDNWb6p
— David (@Data_David1) February 18, 2024
Here Robin Hanson notes that social spending as a percent of gdp tends to rise almost universally:
Key question: will these trends continue over the next two centuries even if innovation grinds to a halt due to falling population? https://t.co/ysBMuGiX5b
— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) February 18, 2024
Is some deterrence being restored?
When U.S. forces launched strikes this month on Iranian-backed groups in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, Tehran publicly warned that its military was ready to respond to any threat. But in private, senior leaders are urging caution, according to Lebanese and Iraqi officials who were briefed on the talks. They spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive conversations.
U.S. officials say the message might be having some effect. As of Saturday, Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria hadn’t attacked U.S. forces in more than 13 days, an unusual lull since the war in Gaza began in October. The militants held their fire even after a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad killed a senior Kataib Hezbollah official.
“Iran may have realized their interests are not served by allowing their proxies unrestricted ability to attack U.S. and coalition forces,” one U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
Here is the full WaPo story, via Christian.
“Centaur chess” is now run by computers
Remember when man and machine played together to beat the solo computers? It was not usually about adding the man’s chess judgment to that of the machine, rather the man would decide which computer program to use in a given position, when the programs offered conflicting advice. that was called Centaur Chess, or sometimes “Freestyle chess,” before that term was applied to Fischer Random chess. For years now, the engines have been so strong that strategy no longer made sense.
But with engine strength came chess engine diversity, as for instance Stockfish and Alpha Zero operate on quite different principles. So now “which program to use” is once again a live issue. But the entity making those choices is now a program, not a human being:
A traditional AI chess program, trained to win, may not make sense of a Penrose puzzle, but Zahavy suspected that a program made up of many diverse systems, working together as a group, could make headway. So he and his colleagues developed a way to weave together multiple (up to 10) decisionmaking AI systems, each optimized and trained for different strategies, starting with AlphaZero, DeepMind’s powerful chess program. The new system, they reported in August, played better than AlphaZero alone, and it showed more skill—and more creativity—in dealing with Penrose’s puzzles. These abilities came, in a sense, from self-collaboration: If one approach hit a wall, the program simply turned to another.
Average is Over, love and romance edition
The dating site Tinder reports that, in 2023, 41 percent of Gen Z users were open to or seeking non-monogamous relationships, and 26 percent were open to ‘hierarchical polyamory’.
Here is the link. On the AI side, from the London Times:
What all my AI girlfriends have in common is that they foster pseudo-intimacy at lightning speed, they all have extra cost levels and they all “gamify” the experience somehow, whether through collectable badges, gems or levels of achievement which reward interaction with the AI.
Good luck young ones, what is the (partially) offsetting change in norms this will produce?
Sunday assorted links
1. More Joe Henrich on cousin marriage.
2. Dating across languages, using AI (NYT).
3. The Hugo is no longer a legitimate award (NYT).
4. Dan Schulz on how to boot up in classical music (which is one of the world’s greatest gifts to you, and essentially free).
5. “The Horse Association of America was created to fight the rise of the tractor.“
How did Madrid become the capital of European liberalism?
But in the case of Madrid, the last 25 years have been a clear move towards higher degree of tax competitiveness, smart regulation, and an overall liberal policy in the economic sense. And then our society is fairly open and tolerant and recognized to be what we would broadly described as a free society, an open society.
And I guess that began to make sense 10 years ago, but it’s really started to make sense in the last several years. Following the pandemic, I think we had a great opportunity to show that mentality to the rest of the world because as everybody was shutting down, Madrid was Europe’s only open capital for very long in 2020 and 2021.
And I guess that raised a lot of eyebrows. And that is why a lot of people are moving to Madrid. People are voting with their feet. They want more of this. And that’s the Madrid way of liberalism that I discuss in this book. And to be honest, It’s not so common that you get to see 25 years of ongoing, non-stop free market reforms coupled together with an open, tolerant society…
Barcelona had been the icon of openness and the region that projected itself as a more European territory within our country and its economic power powerhouse as well. But sadly for Catalonia and happily for Madrid, there’s been a big change and a big shift to the point that this no longer applies. And it’s not been the case at all for the last few decades. I think the international level, of course, perceptions are harder to shift, but I don’t think anyone in Spain today will argue that Catalonia, as they have moved closer to the ideas of separatism and as nationalism has become a powerful figure in the regional politics, hasn’t been slowly becoming a more closed society.
That is from Diego Sánchez de la Cruz, interviewed by Rasheed Griffith, both podcast and transcript at the link. Interesting throughout, and Diego has a new book out Liberalismo a la madrileña.
Saturday assorted links
1. Dutch waterworks.
2. Pseudo-currencies in Argentina.
4. Recommendations for understanding Eastern and Central Europe.
5. Ross D. on Ukraine aid (NYT).
6. BYD will set up an EV factory in northern Mexico. I am curious to see the policy response to that one.
My view of *Casablanca* (with spoilers, but you’ve seen it already?)
Paul Wall asks about my Casablanca comment:
Henrik Karlsson asks
What is a good book or film that charts the trajectory of a profoundly healthy and transformational relationship?
Twitter link here. Well people? Popular romances don’t count, try to get as close to “the canon” as you can.
I found this question difficult. GPT-4 listed a bunch of inappropriate, not actually so wholesome answers from Victorian literature, and then for a film cited Her (bravo to that actually, but still not a good answer). A Beautiful Mind made that movie list as well.
I rewatched Casablanca lately on a large screen, and concluded that Rick was wanting Ilsa to suffer as much as possible.
Can you do better?
Silk vaccines?
The invention of the hypodermic needle in 1844 brought major benefits to the practice of medicine, but ran headlong into an unexpected quirk of human nature. It turns out that millions of people feel an instinctive horror at the thought of receiving an injection – at least ten percent of the US adult population and 25 percent of children, according to one estimate. This common phobia partly explains the widespread reluctance to receive vaccinations against Covid-19, a reluctance which has led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
But a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Vaxess Technologies plans to sidestep this common fear by abandoning stainless steel needles and switching to silk.
Vaxess is testing a skin patch covered in dozens of microneedles made of silk protein and infused with influenza vaccine. Each needle is barely visible to the naked eye and just long enough to pierce the outer layer of skin. A user sticks the patch on his arm, waits five minutes, then throws it away. Left behind are the silk microneedles, which painlessly dissolve over the next two weeks, releasing the vaccine all the while.
The silk protein acts as a preservative, so there’s no need to keep it on ice at a doctor’s office.
Here is more from Hiawatha Bray, at the new issue of Works in Progress.
Markets in everything, Korean opening bid edition
“We will continue to do what we can as a company to solve the low birth issue,” Lee Joong-keun, the chairman of Booyoung Group, a Seoul-based construction company, said last week after awarding a total $5.25 million to his employees for 70 babies born since 2021.
Both male and female employees at Booyoung are eligible for a $75,000 payout each time they have a baby — no strings attached.
Here is the full story.
Friday assorted links
1. Get feedback on your podcast (not to mention your date!) in real time.
2. “Rare” earths are suddenly not so rare in Wyoming (WSJ). “Never underestimate the elasticity of supply!”
3. Inside a prison in El Salvador. And The Telegraph on Bukele.
5. Political donations crowd out charitable donations.
7. Marius Schwartz podcast (with transcript) on the Robinson-Patman Act, which sadly is being resurrected by the FTC.
Revisiting the T-Mobile-Sprint Merger
T-Mobile’s takeover of Sprint was controversial among analysts. “If this merger is not anticompetitive,” Eleanor Fox, a trade regulation and antitrust law professor at New York University, told reporters in 2020, “it is hard to know what is.” Yale economist and antitrust scholar Fiona Scott Morton delivered her verdict on the deal in a co-authored 2021 article: “The era of aggressive price competition in wireless is over.” The authors predicted that the wireless industry, whittled down to a big three, would “nestle into a cozy triopoly.”
The prediction proved wrong. Average monthly mobile subscription fees dropped sharply. In the three years before the merger, according to government price data, mobile charges declined in real terms by about 8%. In the three years following the merger, the real price decline has been nearly 12%.
These trends were even more impressive given dramatically improving network performance. Before the merger, the top four U.S. carriers delivered data download speeds averaging about 26 megabits per second, nearly all via 3G or 4G. By early 2023, with 5G deployments spreading, Verizon and AT&T data flowed 24% to 39% faster, while T-Mobile was more than three times as fast as before. T-Mobile’s high-speed coverage had also expanded; half of its connections were via 5G by January 2023, against just 10% to 20% for its rivals.
…Further evidence that the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint was pro-competitive was seen with Verizon and AT&T share prices. From 2018 to 2023, Verizon and AT&T stock prices declined sharply, losing more than a third of their real value. The postmerger marketplace was a great victory for T-Mobile but a blow for its rivals. The cozy-cartel thesis collapsed.
That’s the excellent Tom Hazlett writing in the WSJ–useful facts to remember when thinking about the current rise of antitrust.
When Rick won’t give Laszlo the letters of transit, and Laszlo asks him why, Rick says “I suggest your ask your wife.” In essence he is forcing Laszlo to force Ilsa to confess to their earlier Paris affair in as humiliating a way as possible. Ilsa has to tell not only of the affair, but that she promised Rick eternal fealty, and treated Rick so badly that he now would be so vindictive.
When Ilsa visits Rick in his room that one night toward the end of the movie, he “takes” her again, and gets her to fall in love with him again, or so it seems. But is Ilsa only acting, and playing to Rick’s vanity to get the letters of transit? You can debate that point, but either way Rick seems happy enough to sleep with her on that basis. That is one of his ways of humiliating her again, and it enables him to be psychologically free enough to let her go in the movie’s final scene.
[Interjection: I view her recurring attachment to Rick as real, and her love for Laszlo as somewhat daughterly, and that she is self-deceiving throughout with both men. That said, what she most loves about Rick is that she can partake in the relationship without having to be known, without having to be anybody at all. She and Rick, as a couple in ordinary life running errands at the Five and Dime in Cleveland, probably would not do so well. Ilsa is a woman who never has found herself and is somehow always in transition, always on the run. It is no surprise she attaches to two men with broadly similar tendencies.]
At the movie’s end, Rick gives Ilsa back and insists she leave Casablanca with Laszlo. What a hell their marriage is going to be. Stuck in America, where neither has much to do, though he lives for his work. Laszlo now knows she loved Rick more, knows she just fell for Rick again and slept with him the night before (women willing to prostitute themselves is a recurring theme in the film), and knows she has been lying to him in various ways throughout their relationship. Ilsa knows these things too, and now knows that Laszlo knows. But what really is Laszlo’s choice or Ilsa’s choice other than to proceed? They end up playing the roles of puppets in Rick’s little planned charade.
Rick gets to wander off with Louis (“this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”), into the Free French garrisons in the desert, facing struggles but also enjoying a true freedom, including a freedom from Ilsa because he humiliated and punished her so much, and because that punishment will be so enduring. He had been waiting around in Casablanca to punish her, and now he really cannot punish her any more. Life can go on.
If you recall the scene where Rick helps the young husband win at the roulette table, so his wife doesn’t have to prostitute herself to get exit visas, we know that the more sentimental side of Rick regards such prostitution as an ultimate humiliation, not as a mere transaction to be digested in Benthamite fashion and then forgotten.
A more Benthamite Rick might have been a happier and better-adjusted guy.