Results for “What I've Been Reading”
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What I’ve not been reading

These books have been sent to me, they appear to be of high quality, but they are still sitting in my pile:

1. Nicolai Foss and Peter Klein, Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment: A New Approach to the Firm.

2. Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD.

3. Barry Cunliffe, Britain Begins.

4. David R. Montgomery, The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood.

5. Evan F. Koenig, Robert Leeson, and George A. Kahn, editors, The Taylor Rule and the Transformation of Monetary Policy.

6. Martin B. Gold, Forbidden Citizens: Chinese Exclusion and the U.S. Congress: A Legislative History.

My reading program for the half-year to come

To be clear, I very much like Lex Fridman’s proposed reading list, and I hope to reread many of those books.  Most of them are much deeper than their sometimes reputations, I might add.  (For all the stupid whining about the list, odd that no one is asking why he doesn’t read more in Russian.)

If you are curious, here is what I have planned for the first half of the year to come:

1. Review copies that come my way — considerable numbers of them are great!  And thank you all for sending.

2. Reading or rereading through the works of Jonathan Swift, for a paper I am writing.  The topic is Swift on state-church relations, and as relates to some points from Rene Girard, and Swift on science, as it relates to Peter Thiel.

3. The history of American comedy and stand-up, as relates to a future CWT with Noam Dworman.

4. What is recommended to me by credible others, throughout the course of the year.

5. Many books in Indian history, for the 1600-1800 period, give or take, to prep for a likely CWT with William Dalrymple.

6. Reread and re-study of the New Testament, for CWTs with Tom Holland and David Bentley Hart.  And for its own sake too.

7. More British and Irish history, from all eras.  That will mean reading in clusters, rather than obsessing over particular volumes.  Lately I’ve been reading about British cultural and architectural heritage issues, in part to get a different and more advanced bead on YIMBY-NIMBY conflicts, and also to relearn British history through the history of its major buildings.

8. Haldor Laxness and Jon Fosse are among the classic novels in my queue, neither would be a reread.  And I will start the new Javier Marías that comes out in English, it takes me too long in Spanish.  Twentieth century Polish poetry, and more on the Polish history of ideas and literature.  And I’ve vowed to read more museum catalogs (more picture books!).  In German I will try Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, reread some Rilke, some Tuschel, and maybe some more Herta Müller.

9. Other stuff too, most of all what I buy spontaneously.  Just yesterday Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice arrived at the house.  There is some Eugene Volodazkin on the way.

10. I’ve been reading a good deal lately about neural nets, transformers, and other AI-related topics, but not understanding it very well.  YouTube videos have helped only a little.  We’ll see if I ramp up those efforts or discard them.  I am learning a lot from playing around with GPT, however, and maybe I’ll ask it what else I should read.

What I’ve been browsing

A lot of my reading time has been absorbed by job market papers (some of them covered here on MR) and CWT prep, in the meantime I have been browsing these with profit:

Alexandra Popoff, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century covers what the title promises.

David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.  The title aside, a very good and very well-written book on the basics of climate change.

Sophus A. Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy, is the best English-language book I know of on the Italian Enlightenment.  Everything you wanted to know about Pietro Verri but were afraid to ask.

Margaret C. Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment, again delivers good coverage of what the title promises.

Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti, Love, Money & Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids.  Note this book is sober rather than actually telling you how to raise your kids.  And it has sentences like: “In earlier times, men and women had sharply distinct roles.”

Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny does not quite intersect with cultural economics and Joe Henrich, but someday somebody will write a book like this and start making the connections.

Reading Julius Evola

Yes, the survey of “works of reaction” will continue, at what speed I am not sure.  I picked up Julius Evola, in particular his Revolt Against the Modern World, because of a recent NYT article claiming Evola’s influence over Steve Bannon.  I don’t consider the cited evidence for a connection as anything other than tenuous, but still the book was only a click away and Evola was a well-known Italian fascist and I’ve been reading in that area anyway (read in areas clusters!).  I read about 70-80 pages of it, and pawed some of the rest.  I was frustrated.  Upon revisiting the book, here is the passage I opened up to at random:

If on the one hand the original synthesis of the two powers is reestablished in the person of the consecrated king, on the other hand, the nature of the hierarchical relationships existing in every normal social order between royalty and priestly case (or church), which is merely the mediator of supernatural influences, is very clearly defined: regality enjoys primacy over the priesthood, just as, symbolically speaking, the sun has primacy over the moon and the man over the woman.

He then went on about sacrifices and “the priestly regality of Melchizedek.”  In later life, Evola sported a monocle over his left eye, and if you are wondering he did have a reputation as an anti-feminist theorist.  Oh give me the clarity of Mosley and Dugin!

I’ve been pawing through de Maistre and de Bonald as well, I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting there.  In the meantime, someone needs to write an Atlantic article about the much-neglected connection between Alt Right and mystical ideas.

What I’ ve been reading

I’ve been on a roll with my last few books:

1. Denis Johnson, The Laughing Monsters.  This one doesn’t seem like it is trying very hard, and yet I like it more than the author’s other books, perhaps for that reason.  It’s about two (ostensible) buddies, set in Africa, then all kinds of secrets unfold.  There is a NYT review here.

2. Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things: A Novel.  A missionary visits space aliens, some of whom embrace the Bible eagerly, almost too eagerly.  Meanwhile he and his wife on earth write letters back and forth, showing they are the true aliens to each other.  This is the fiction book this year I enjoyed most, and one I kept on wanting to pick up after I had put it down.  Here is a useful NYT review, describing the book as “defiantly unclassifiable.”

3. Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life.  The fact that so many pages still feel so non-comprehensive is a testament to the life being covered here, and to the richness of its historical period.  Still, this is fresh and easy to read throughout, recommended.

*Reading my Father*

The author is Alexandra Styron, daughter of William, who is portrayed as manic depressive.  I found this memoir compelling, and it has been making many “best of” lists.  Here is one excerpt:

By all accounts, my sister was a cheerful baby, smart and pretty, with an easy manner.  In short, an ideal firstborn.  Daddy was enthralled.  “Take a lesson from me and don’t get too interested in the child,” Irwin Shaw wrote in a congratulatory letter.  “Since Adam’s first birthday, I’ve barely written a word, as it is much more interesting to watch all the subtle and terrible currents that run through a complex human being than to sit at a typewriter and battle with the comparatively flat and lifeless material of art.  Dole the child out to yourself in small doses, for your career’s sake.”

You can buy it here.

My IO reading list

Industrial Organization I, Tyler Cowen (x2312, 4910), [email protected]

BOOKS:

Gordon, John Steele – An Empire of Wealth: An Epic History of American Economic Power

Lowenstein, Roger – When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management

METHODS OF EVALUATION:

There will be weekly quizzes, a midterm, and a final exam.

READINGS:

I. The Firm

Holmstrom, Bengt and Tirole, Jean.  “The Theory of the Firm,” in Handbook of Industrial Economics, vol.I.

Rotemberg, Julio. “A Theory of Inefficient Intrafirm Transactions.” American Economic Review (March 1991).

Holmstrom, Bengt and Roberts, John.  “The Boundaries of the Firm Revisisted.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 12, 4 (Fall 1998): 73-94.

Demsetz, Harold and Lehn, Kenneth.  “The Structure of Corporate Ownership: Causes and Consequences.”  Journal of Political Economy  93 (December 1985): 1155-1177.

Gibbons, Robert. “Incentives in Organizations.” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall 1998): 115-132.

Chapters from Discover Your Inner Economist, by Tyler Cowen.

Montgomery, Cynthia.  “Corporate Diversification,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Summer 1994): 163-178.

Rasmusen, Eric.  “Mutual Banks and Stock Banks.”  Journal of Law and Economics 31 (1988): 395-422.

Hansemann, Henry.  “Ownership of the Firm,” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization (Fall 1988).

Hansemann, Henry.  “The Role of Non-Profit Enterprise.” Yale Law Journal (1980): 835-901.

Cowen, Tyler. “Response to David Friedman,” Economics and Philosophy, at http://www.gmu.edu/jbc/Tyler/TYLER.doc.

Xavier Gabaix and David Laibson, “Shrouded Attributes, Consumer Myopia, and Information Suppression in Competitive Markets,” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=728545.

Glenn Ellison, “Bounded rationality in Industrial Organization,” http://cemmap.ifs.org.uk/papers/vol2_chap5.pdf

II. Capital structure and control

Miller, Merton, and commentators.  “The Modigliani-Miller Propositions After Thirty Years,” and comments, Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall 1988): 99-158.

Myers, Stewart. “Capital Structure.” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Spring 2001): 81-102.

Hart, Oliver.  “Financial Contracting.”  Journal of Economic Literature (December 2001): 1079-1100.

Easterbrook, Frank H. “Two Agency-Cost Explanations of Dividends.”  American Economic Review (September 1984).

Fudenberg, Drew and Tirole, Jean. “A Theory of Income and Dividend Smoothing.”  Journal of Political Economy (February 1995): 75-93.

Baker, Malcolm and Wurgler, Jeffrey. “A Catering Theory of Dividends,” Journal of Finance (2004), available at http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jwurgler/.

Baker, Malcolm and Ruback, Richard. “Behavioral Corporate Finance: A Survey,” found at http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/seminars/pegroup/BakerRubackWurgler.pdf

MacKinlay, A.C. (1997), “Event Studies in Economics and Finance”, Journal of

Economic Literature 35(1), 13-39.

“Symposium on Takeovers,” edited by Hal Varian, Journal of Economic Perspectives (Winter 1988): 1-82.

Andrade, Gregor, et. al. “New Evidence and Perspective on Mergers.” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Spring 2001): 103-120.

Holmstrom, Bengt and Kaplan, Steven. “Corporate Governance and Merger Activity in the United States,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Spring 2001): 121-149.

Gompers, Paul and Lerner, Josh.  “The Venture Capital Revolution.” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Spring 2001): 145-168.

Stein, Jeremy C. “Efficient Capital Markets, Inefficient Firms: A Model of Myopic Corporate Behavior.”  Quarterly Journal of Economics 104 (November 1989): 655-670.

Stein, Jeremy C.  “Takeover Threats and Managerial Myopia.”  Journal of Political Economy (1988): 61-80.

Scharfstein, David S. and Stein, Jeremy C.  “Herd Behavior and Investment.”  American Economic Review 80 (June 1990): 465-479.

Hall, Brian and Murphy, Kevin J, “The Trouble with Stock Options,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2003, also at http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~kjmurphy/HMTrouble.pdf.

Murphy, Kevin J. and Zaboznik, Jan. “CEO Pay and Appointments,” American Economic Review, May 2004, also at http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~kjmurphy/CEOTrends.pdf

Jensen, Michael, Murphy, Kevin J., and Eric Wruck. “Remuneration: Where We’ve Been, How We Got to Here, What are the Problems, and How to Fix Them,” available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=561305#PaperDownload.

Robert J. Gordon and Ian Dew-Becker, “Unresolved Issues in the Rise of American Inequality,” http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~idew/papers/BPEA_final_ineq.pdf

III. Vertical control, antitrust, and related issues.

Tirole, Jean. “Vertical Control.” In Theory of Industrial Organization, Chapter 4.

Klein, Benjamin and Leffler, Keith.  “The Role of Market Forces in Assuring Contractual Performance.”  Journal of Political Economy 89 (1981): 615-641.

Klein, Benjamin and Murphy, Kevin. “Vertical Restraints as Contract Enforcement Mechanisms,” Journal of Law and Economics (October 1988).

Breit, William. “Resale Price Maintenance: What do Economists Know and When Did they Know It?” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (1991).

Bernheim, R. Doug and Whinston, Michael.  “Exclusive Dealing.” Journal of Political Economy (February 1998): 64-103.

Rasmusen, Ramseyer and Wiley, 1991, “Naked Exclusion,” American Economic Review, 1137-45.      

Bittlingmayer, George.  “Decreasing Average Cost and Competition: A New Look at the Addyston Pipe Case,” Journal of Law and Economics (October 1982).

Klein, Benjamin, and Kenney, Roy. “The Economics of Block Booking,” Journal of Law and Economics, (1983), 27, 3, 497-540.

Tirole, Jean.  “Information and Strategic Behavior: Reputation, Limit Pricing, and Predation.”  In Theory of Industrial Organization, Chapter 9.

Timothy Bresnahan, “Empirical Studies of Industries with Concentrated Power,” Handbook of Industrial Organization, vol.II.

Pakes, Ariel. “Theory and Empirical Work on Imperfectly Competitive Markets,” NBER Working Paper 14117, June 2008.

Sproul, Michael.  “Antitrust and Prices.”  Journal of Political Economy (August 1993): 741-754.

McCutcheon, Barbara.  “Do Meetings in Smoke-Filled Rooms Facilitate Collusion?”  Journal of Political Economy (April 1997): 336-350.

Hazlett, Thomas W. “Is Antitrust Anticompetitive?” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, (Spring 1986).

Crandall, Robert and Whinston, Clifford, “Does Antitrust Improve Consumer Welfare?: Assessing the Evidence,”  Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall 2003 ), 3-26, available at http://www.brookings.org/views/articles/2003crandallwinston.htm.

IV. Theory and Regulation of Natural Monopolies

Sanford Berg and John Tschirhart, Natural Monopoly Regulation, Cambridge University Press.

pp. 21-275. 

Demsetz, Harold.  “Why Regulate Utilities?”  Journal of Law and Economics (April 1968): 347-359.

Williamson, Oliver.  “Franchise Bidding for Natural Monopolies – in General and with Respect to CATV.” Bell Journal of Economics (Spring 1976): 73-104.

Crandall, Robert W. “An End to Economic Regulation?” available at http://www.brookings.org/views/papers/crandall/20030721.pdf.

Parente, Stephen L. and Prescott, Edward.  “Monopoly Rights: A Barrier to Riches.”  American Economic Review 89, 5 (December 1999): 1216-1233.

Shleifer, Andrei.  “State vs. Private Ownership.” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall 1998): 133-151.

Berg and Tschirhart, pp. 480-522.

Associated other topics in regulation, depending on your interests; reading suggestions will follow later in the semester.

What I Haven’t Been Reading

1. Red State Blue State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do, by the consistently impressive Andrew Gelman.

2. Global Catastrophic Risks, edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic; so many smart, virile young men, all writing about destruction.

3. Prosperity Unbound: Building Property Markets with Trust, by Elena Panaritis.  An update on the debates on Hernando de Soto and the associated land and property issues.

4. The Mirrored Heavens, by David J. Williams.  A science fiction story for people who take the idea of space elevators for granted.

5. The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth, by the noted law and economics scholar Robert C. Ellickson.

If I’m not reading them, it’s because I’ve been spending my time with Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Norris’s McTeague, both for my Liberty Fund conference in Cleveland.

Paywalls for blogs?

Andrew Sullivan will give it a try, as you probably have heard by now.  I wish him well with it, but I also hope no one else tries too hard.  (Note by the way that Sullivan will allow a free RSS feed, with complete posts, and free links from other blogs, so this is hardly a full gate.)  In the limiting case, imagine a blogosphere where everything is gated for some price.  What could we at MR link to?  There would be every day “What I’ve been Reading,” with links to Amazon (they’re not going to gate), rather than every few weeks.  More from Wikipedia, and more travel notes.  More abstract requests from readers (“what should I do with my life?”, and “does she really love me?”).  More government statistics and more BBC.

I’ve long thought that the last ten years have been a golden age for the blogosphere, and that soon the financial constraints are really going to start biting on MSM.  Many of you already get upset at FT links, which have a fairly strict gate, and perhaps the few remaining newspapers will all work that way within two or three years’ time.

What do you all think?  Here are comments from Felix Salmon.

How many books should you start?

So few other people sample books en masse, yet the practice strikes me as trivially correct.  If I buy a book the odds that I finish it are reasonably high, certainly above fifty percent.  Why spend the money on a longshot?  (Btw, "What I’ve Been Reading" is almost always books I have finished, otherwise why report them?)  But when I troll a public library for free books, which I do virtually every day, should I pick up only those books I expect to finish?  No, I slide further along the marginal benefit curve and that means I grab lots of books with relatively small but positive expected values.

Yesterday’s haul from Arlington Public Library included You Never Call! You Never Write!, and Otherwise Normal People: Inside the Thorny World of Competitive Rose Gardening, neither of which I expect to finish (though I will if I love them).  The real question is should I read more on-line book reviews (which are free), or do my own "reviews" by pawing the free book for a few minutes? 

What are other reasons not to sample?  Are library trips so costly?  Are you so confident in social filters relative to your own judgment/pawing?  Have blogs outcompeted book pawing?  Is the goal of reading simply to share impressions with other people, and there is little uncertainty about what are the hot-selling books?

I say go and grab, go and grab, go and grab.

Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?

I’ve been reading and rereading biographies of Bach lately (for some podcast prep), and it strikes me he might count as the greatest achiever of all time.  That is distinct from say regarding him as your favorite composer or artist of all time.  I would include the following metrics as relevant for that designation:

1. Quality of work.

2. How much better he was than his contemporaries.

3. How much he stayed the very best in subsequent centuries.

4. Quantity of work.

5. Peaks.

6. Consistency of work and achievement.

7. How many other problems he had to solve to succeed with his achievement.  For Bach, this might include a) finding musical manuscripts, b) finding organs good enough to play and compose on, c) dealing with various local and church authorities, d) migrating so successfully across jurisdictions, e) composing at an impossibly high level during the four years he was widowed (with kids), before remarrying.

8. Ending up so great that he could learn only from himself.

9. Never experiencing true defeat or setback (rules out Napoleon!).

I see Bach as ranking very, very high in all these categories.  Who else might even be a contender for greatest achiever of all time?  Shakespeare?  Maybe, but Bach seems to beat him for relentlessness and quantity (at a very high quality level).  Beethoven would be high on the list, but he doesn’t seem to quite match up to Bach in all of these categories.  Homer seems relevant, but we are not even sure who or what he was.  Archimedes?  Plato or Aristotle?  Who else?

Addendum: from Lucas, in the comments:

I’m not joking when I say I have thought about Bach in this light every week for the last 20 years.

His family died young, and his day job for much of his life was a school teacher! In addition to the daily demands on him to teach Latin and theology and supervise teenage boys and so on, there was the thousand small practical challenges of life in the eighteenth century. No electric lighting. Crappy parchment and quills. The cold, the disease, the lack of plumbing, the restricted access to information, talented players, and the manual nature of every little thing.

And, perhaps most of all, to continue such a volume of high-quality output when the world seemed not to care. Yes, he had a local reputation among those in the know, but there were never any packed concert halls or grand tours to validate his efforts. He seems to have been entirely internally driven by his genius and his commitment to the eternal and divine.

Why superyachts?

I’ve been reading more polemics against superyachts lately, for instance from Paul Krugman (NYT).  I’ve never been on a superyacht, or even a non-super yacht, but I can give you my “hypothesis from a distance” about them.  A super-wealthy individual wants to convene a group of people, all of whom are talented, or friends, or famous, but not all of whom are super rich.  The point is to offer them some kind of extra special experience, namely the superyacht.  And you can’t convene everybody in normal public spaces, in part because the super rich person is famous and would attract notice, and in part because of the security risk.  Thus enter the superyacht.

I don’t know how useful these convenings are on average (do the critics?), but I don’t think they are merely or even mainly about status-seeking by the super rich.  The desire is to have a focal, locational base for drawing people together and sometimes working on projects of mutual interest.  That said, I don’t doubt the super rich person enjoys seeing others admire a beautiful yacht, but is that so crazy or craven?  It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum pleasure.  That is, I enjoy it if my friends enjoy my (rather modest) backyard deck, but I’m not so concerned about whether they like Alex’s house better, etc.  There is room for fun everywhere!  Even on superyachts.

This GPT-4 answer speaks for itself

TC: Which is the leading attempt to publish a canonical paper on AGI risk, in a leading science journal, refereed of course. The paper should have a formal model or calibration of some sort, working toward the conclusion of showing that the relevant risk is actually fairly high. Is there any such thing? Please answer as would a leading scientific expert in the relevant fields, including computer science and possibly also population ecology, systems theory, and other possible areas.

GPT-4: As a leading scientific expert, I must clarify that while there are numerous papers discussing various aspects of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) risk, no single paper can be labeled as the “canonical” paper on the subject. It is worth noting that the field of AGI risk is interdisciplinary, involving computer science, artificial intelligence, ethics, population ecology, systems theory, and other domains. Consequently, the body of research on AGI risk is diverse, with various approaches and models, some of which may involve formal calibration.

One paper that may be of interest to you is “The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation” by Brundage et al., published in 2018. This paper, co-authored by experts from various institutions, including OpenAI, the University of Oxford, and the Center for a New American Security, discusses potential risks from the malicious use of AI and offers recommendations for researchers, policymakers, and industry practitioners. While this paper does not provide a formal calibration model, it does shed light on the potential risks associated with AGI.

Another important work in the field is Nick Bostrom’s book “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies,” which discusses the risks associated with the development of AGI and offers possible strategies to mitigate those risks. Bostrom’s work has been influential in shaping the discourse on AGI risk, but it is not a refereed journal article….[and some concluding GPT blather]

Perhaps I am too quick to the draw here, but I don’t see this answer as far from “nothing, there is no such paper.”  Comments are open, of course, if you can surpass GPT-4, which perhaps is better at evolving into a world-destroying entity than it is at finding citations.  Further prods did not change the basic answer, and if anything GPT models tend to confabulate or hallucinate entries, not deny them.  Or perhaps in this case it is hiding the refereed articles and deceiving us?

And maybe I’ve missed it, but I’ve also never seen Scott Alexander or Zvi point to such a paper, or even a good example of a rejected paper aiming in this direction.  Nor have I seen them make a big stink about the absence of such a paper, though in virtually any other area they will hit you with a fire hose of citations and links to published models in referred journals.

I’ve also asked a whole bunch of “people who ought to know” and not received a single concrete answer, one such individual responding immediately with the answer “zero.”

In part, I would like to encourage those fascinated with AGI risk to try to create and publish such a paper, or perhaps to fund it or otherwise encourage it.  Something more systematically fleshed out than “10 reasons why lists of 10 reasons might be a winning strategy.”  It would go a long way to giving the idea more credibility in the scientific community, not to mention with yours truly.  How about NatureScience?  Somewhere else?  I know top journals can be closed or unfair, but at the very least you can put the paper and the associated referee reports on-line for the rest of us to judge.  And then try it in a lesser journal, it still will get traction and you will get valuable feedback, of a very different kind than from on-line forums.

If the chance of existential risk from AGI is 99 percent, or 80 percent, or even 30 percent, surely some kind of modeled demonstration of the basic mechanics and interlocking pieces is possible.  Indeed a certain kind of clarity should be evident, at least conditional on the more extreme views being correct.  In general, I am not a fan of the “you should work on this!’ strategy, but if you think the whole future of the entire world is at stake…shouldn’t you be obsessed with working on such a thing, if only to convince the rest of us?  And in as many different formats as possible, including the methods most commonly recognized by the scientific community?

In the meantime, if you are a young person interested in this issue, and you observe such a paucity of refereed, published model-based papers in the area — consider any area just to get your mind off the fraught and emotional topic of AGI existential risk — what would you infer from that absence?

And what if said community of commentators almost universally insisted they were the most extreme of rationalists?

Now none of this means the claims about extreme risk are wrong.  But you can think of it as a kind of propaedeutic to reading the literature and current debates.

Addendum: I have looked at papers such as these:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13353, https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00626, https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.13916

Whatever you think of them, they are not close to counting for my search.

Retrospective look at rapid Covid testing

To be clear, I still favor rapid Covid tests, and I believe we were intolerably slow to get these underway.  The benefits far exceed the costs, and did earlier on in the pandemic as well.

That said, with a number of pandemic retrospectives underway, here is part of mine.  I don’t think the strong case for those tests came close to panning out.

I had raised some initial doubts in my podcasts with Paul Romer and also with Glen Weyl, mostly about the risk of an inadequate demand to take such tests.  I believe that such doubts have been validated.

Ideally what you want asymptomatic people in high-risk positions taking the tests on a frequent basis, and, if they become Covid-positive, learning they are infectious before symptoms set in (remember when the FDA basically shut down Curative for giving tests to the asymptomatic?  Criminal).  And then isolating themselves.  We had some of that.  But far more often I witnessed:

1. People with symptoms taking the tests to confirm they had Covid.  Nothing wrong with that, but it leads to a minimal gain, since in so many cases it was pretty clear without the test.

2. Various institutions requiring tests for meet-ups and the like.  These tests would catch some but not all cases, and the event still would turn into a spreader event, albeit at a probably lower level than otherwise would have been the case.

3. Nervous Nellies taking the test in low-risk situations mainly to reassure themselves and others.  Again, no problems there but not the highest value use either.

So the prospects for mass rapid testing — done in the most efficacious manner — were I think overrated.

I recall the summer of 2022 in Ireland, which by the way is when I caught Covid (I was fine, though decided to spend an extra week in Ireland rather than risk infecting my plane mates).  Rapid tests were available everywhere, and at much lower prices than in the United States.  Better than not!  But what really seemed to make the difference was vaccines.  The availability of all those tests did not do so much to prevent Covid from spreading like a wildfire during that Irish summer.  Fortunately, deaths rose but did not skyrocket.

The well-known Society for Healthcare Epidemiology just recommended that hospitals stop testing asymptomatic patients for Covid.  You may or may not agree, but that is a sign of how much status testing has lost.

Some commentators argue there are more false negatives on the rapid tests with Omicron than with earlier strains.  I haven’t seen proof of this claim, but it is itself noteworthy that we still are not sure how good the tests are currently.  That too reflects a lower status for testing.

Again, on a cost-benefit basis I’m all for such testing!  But I’ve been lowering my estimate of its efficacy.

Noah Smith Substack interviews me

Here is the interview.  Here is one excerpt:

N.S.: So how would you generally describe the zeitgeist of the moment, if you had to give a simple summary? What do you think are a couple of most important trends in culture and thought right now? My impression has been that we’re sort of in a replay of the 70s — a period of exhaustion after several years of intense social unrest, where people are looking around for new cultural and economic paradigms to replace the ones we just smashed. But maybe I’ve just been reading too many Rick Perlstein books?

T.C.: I view the 1970s as a materialistic time, sexually highly charged, and America running into some significant real resource constraints, at least initially stemming from high oil prices. Mainstream culture was often fairly crass — just look at disco, or the ascendancy of mainstream network television. The current time I see as quite different. Sexually, we are withdrawing. Society is more feminized. America has far more immigrants. And we are obsessed with the virtual and with make-believe, to a degree the 1970s could not have imagined. Bruno Macaes is one author who is really on the right track here, with his emphasis on how America is building virtual and indeed often “unreal” fantasies.

I think today the variance of weirdness is increasing. Conformists can conform like never before, due say to social media and the Girardian desire to mimic others. But unusual people can connect with other unusual people, and make each other much weirder and more “niche.” For instance, every possible variant of political views seems to be “out there” these days, and perhaps that is not entirely reassuring. A higher variance for weirdness probably encourages creativity. But is it a positive development on net? We are going to find out.

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