*Who’s Afraid of Gender?*
That is the title of the new Judith Butler book, focusing mostly on trans issues. To be clear, on most practical issues concerning trans, I side with the social conservatives. For instance, I don’t think trans women have a right to compete in women’s weightlifting contests. And I have not been happy with how many schools have been teaching about trans issues, due to social contagion effects that are larger than I would have expected. And yet — when it comes to the grounds of theory I think Butler is more right than wrong. This is a very good book, and in some critical ways a very libertarian book (again to be clear I think Butler is wrong about most other things). But on this issue — why so insist on such a rigid male-female set of binary categories? Why be so afraid of alternative, more flexible approaches? Why restrict our conceptual freedoms and ultimately our life practical freedoms in such a manner? Especially when a minority of people — admittedly a small minority but also much larger than the mere category of “trans” — will suffer greatly from such attitudes and such practices?
So I am happy to recommend this book, noting that not everyone will like it, to say the least. My main criticism is that Butler spends too much time with what I consider to be weaker views (e.g., the Pope), and not enough time with the more difficult problems concerning real and potential harms to children. Her neglect of the latter verges on the intellectually criminally negligent. And yet the key is to see that it is still a good and interesting book.
Maurizio Pollini, RIP
South Korea fact of the day
Model this:
Students born approximately ten months after the World Cup tend to perform significantly worse in school. Moreover, our results uncover a hitherto overlooked aspect: the same students exhibit significantly higher degrees of mental wellbeing.
Here is the full article by Dirk Bethmann and Jae Il Cho, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Sunday assorted links
1. Peter Coy on AI and jobs (NYT).
2. Asgar Farhadi cleared of plagiarism allegations by Iranian court.
3. The Eitan Hersh conservative experiment at Tufts.
4. New Liberty Fund paperback edition of Hayek on Mill.
5. Is Los Angeles leading the way toward a new and better urbanism?
*Star Maker*, by Olaf Stapledon
Now though it was generally assumed in intellectual circles that the best was yet to be, Bvalltu and his friends were convinced that the crest of the wave had already occurred many centuries ago. To most men, if course, the decade before the war had seemed better and more civilized than any earlier age. In their view civilization and mechanization were almost identical, and never before had there been such a triumph of mechanization. The benefits of a scientific civilization were obvious. For the fortunate class there was more comfort, better health, increased stature, a prolongation of youth, and a system of technical knowledge so vast and intricate that no man coul dknow more than its outline or some tiny corner of its detail. Moreoever, increased communications had brought all the peoples into contact. Local idiosyncrasies were fading out before the radio, the cinema, and the gramophone. In comparison with these hopeful signs it was easily overlooked that the human constitution, through strengthened by improved conditions, was intrinsically less stable than formerly. Certain disintegrative diseases were slowly but surely increasing. In particular, diseases of the nervous system were becoming more common and more pernicious. Cynics used to say that the mental hospitals would soon outnumber even the churches.
Here is a recent short essay on Starmaker, first published in 1937.
Applying to Emergent Ventures, and how to get Britain moving again
From the TxP Progress Prize:
But then Tyler asked us, twice in a row, ‘what is your signature product?’ Being honest, we realised even if our pitch was strong at a high level, we’d essentially just submitted a laundry list of ideas for what we wanted to deliver, without much focus. We knew we had to go back to the drawing board.
Then:
The blog prize was designed to advocate solutions, amplify frontier tech, and offer a clear, tractable proposal. We particularly wanted punchy takes that pulled the debate outside the norm and we encouraged people to publish online to prompt discussion. We also rewarded good writing and pointed to pieces we’d been inspired by.
That is from Andrew Bennett and Tom Westgarth. The theme was “Britain is Stuck: How Can We Get It Moving Again?” The winners (EV had no role in this selection) were:
Winner (£5000)
Rian Whitton: Firm Power can reduce Britain’s electricity prices
Runner up (£1000)
Alec Thompson: Open Source the Law
Shortlisted (£750)
Ashna Ahmad: Chilean Telexes and the Allocation Problem
Ben Hopkinson: Britain’s Second Cities are Stuck: Let’s Get Them Moving Again
Daniel Timms: The Case for a New City
At the link you will find further commendable mentions.
*Revolusi*
The subtitle is Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, and the author is David van Reybrouck. An excellent book, and I found two points of particular interest in it. First, just how weak and incomplete was the Dutch colonization of Indonesia for centuries. Second, just how complicated and rapidly changing was the postwar transition from Japanese rule to independence. Excerpt:
In total no fewer than 120,000 Dutch conscripts would depart between 1946 and 1949, an enormous number that approached the general mobilization before World War II (150,000). Six thousand recruits who were examined and judged ‘fit for the tropics’ refused to embark. Many of these were tracked down and hauled out of beds to the military police. This hunt for deserters went on until 1958! Strict sentences were passed on 2,565 war resisters. Almost three-quarters received custodial sentences of up to two years, the rest remain in jail even longer. Altogether a total of fifteen centuries of prison sentences were pronounced, a remarkably large amount compared to the complete immunity granted to later war criminals. The conclusion was clear: those who refused to kill were locked up, those who murdered without reason went free.
Recommended, there should of course be more such books on Indonesia.
Saturday assorted links
1. 101 things Leila would tell her past self.
2. “The colonel was then carried to the Dotonbori river and tossed into the murky water.”
3. Leadership lessons from Shakespeare’s Henriad.
4. Good thread on the Apple case.
5. Where do the major African economies stand? And fellowship in Tanzania.
In Defense of Plagiarism
Google plagiarism and you will find definitions like “stealing someone else’s ideas” or “literary theft.” Here the emphasis is on the stealing–it’s the original author who is being harmed. I prefer the definition of plagiarism given by Wikipedia, plagiarism is the *fraudulent* use of other people’s words or ideas. Fraudulent emphasizes that it’s the reader who is being cheated, not the original creator. You can use someone else’s words without being fraudulent. We all do this. If you copy a definition or description of a technical procedure from a textbook or manual you are using someone else’s words but it’s not fraudulent because the reader doesn’t assume that you are trying to take credit for the ideas.
In contrast, a student who passes an essay off as their own when it was written by someone else is engaging in a kind of fraud but the “crime” has little to do with harming the original author. A student who uses AI to write an essay is engaging in fraud, for example, but the problem is obviously not theft from OpenAI. Indeed, in another context the same use of AI would not be fraudulent. If I use AI to help write this post, it’s not fraudulent because the primary purpose of this post is not, as it is with a student essay, to warrant the abilities of the author but rather to convey ideas to the reader. How those ideas came to be expressed in words is secondary and sometimes even irrelevant.
Indeed, using some else’s words and ideas is often how the world progresses. Plagiarism is a type of intellectual property law and I have long argued that IP law has grown too strong. Patents, for example, are often too broad and copyright is too long. Similarly, I was very much in support of Ed Sheeran in the ridiculous copyright case that ate of years of his life. Sheeran used ideas that had previously been used by many others but even if he had sampled, sampling is not a terrible crime. If I write, ‘he went on a wild goose chase’ or ‘it’s a brave new world’ need I credit the author? If an economics professor says ‘a price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive’, well a little credit to Cowen and Tabarrok would be nice, but sooner or later might this phrase not enter the vernacular? Crediting authors of unique wordplay should have a time limit, after which such wordplay becomes part of the common pool of expressions available for all. Crediting authors of boilerplate shouldn’t even be required.
The reason plagiarism has come to be defined more by “literary theft” than by the “fraudulent use of other’s people’s ideas and words” is that it’s much easier to prove when someone else’s words have been copied than it is to prove fraudulent use. A computer can scan the text of millions of documents to discover “plagiarism” but the computer has a harder time saying what is fraudulent. I argued earlier, that if I used AI to write this post it wouldn’t be fraudulent. But what if Marginal Revolution won a Pulitzer for twenty years of high quality writing and this post were give as an example? Well, its a judgement call.
In short, the focus of any charge of plagiarism should not be on whether someone else’s words have been used. The use of other’s people’s words is a necessary condition for plagiarism but it’s not sufficient. The focus should be on whether readers have been harmed by a fraudulent use of other people’s ideas and words. Focusing on the latter will dispense with many charges of plagiarism.
How credible is the Milei plan?
Here is a good Substack essay by Nicolas Cachanosky, excerpt:
Inflation expectations depend on what is expected to happen to the budget in the months to come. It is natural, then, to ask whether the observed surpluses are sustainable in the months ahead.
Answering this question requires looking at two things. First, how was the fiscal surplus achieved in January? Second, what is the expected behavior of revenues and expenditures?
The information for the first question is included in the table below, which shows its values in constant terms (February 2024). In real and accumulated terms, fiscal revenues decreased 2.5%, while expenses collapsed by 38%. Where is spending being cut the most? Numbers show that 57% of the adjustment falls on the shoulders of the private sector, while the remaining 43% falls on the government. Contrary to Milei’s repeated statements, most of the austerity is being borne by households and the private sector, whose patience limit is unknown.1 Some of these spending cuts are achieved by postponing transfers and payments to a future month…
Is this sustainable? Can Milei and Caputo continue to put this level of pressure on the already suffering households? There is no data yet for January, but just in December, real salaries in the (registered) private sector fell by -11.5% and 3.7% contraction in the monthly economic activity estimator. A report by IDESA shows that retirement income levels are as low as they were during the 2001 crisis. Worrisome, Empiria Consultores shows that the average salary is now below the poverty rate (figure below). Of course, I’m not saying all of this is Milei’s fault, who received a destroyed economy, but this is the economic and social situation upon which he is adding even more pressure.
Here is Martin Kenenguiser on Milei’s progress. Here is Ciara Nugent in the FT on Milei and state companies. Here is Mary Anastasia O’Grady in the WSJ: “A fiscal balance achieved in January isn’t sustainable, the economy is in recession, and inflation expectations by market participants at over 200% for the year are nothing to brag about. A $9 billion increase in international reserves isn’t a surge in confidence. It’s the result of printing pesos to buy the dollars and then issuing debt at high interest rates to sop up those pesos.” I do not blame Milei, but it is still far from obvious that the current plan is going to work.
Who are currently the most influential thinkers/intellectuals on the Right?
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Here is my corresponding (and much longer and more complicated) post about the Left. Model this difference!
Friday assorted links
1. How to recruit Iraqi weapons scientists.
2. The Zvi with a bunch of things, including commentary on some recent economic models of AI.
3. Dean Ball on how to regulate AI. And Dean’s Substack on related issues.
4. Did Easter Island invent writing independently?
6. “I’m not sure I have a full model of how this works, but the situation where nearly 100% of credentialed experts are Democrats seems to me to have made both parties’ epistemics worse than they were 20 years ago.” — from Matt Yglesias.
R.I.P. The Scottish Enlightenment 1697-2024
The Scottish Enlightenment will die on April 1st 2024, exactly 327 years, eight months and 24 days after the incident that provoked it. For on April 1st the Hate Crime and Public Order Act (Scotland) 2021 comes into force, an Act which will criminalise speech and opinion deemed ‘hateful’ even if spoken in the privacy of your own home.
On January 8th 1697, Thomas Aikenhead, a 20 year-old student, was marched the two miles from the Old Tolbooth Prison on the High Street to a windswept sandy hillock just to the west of the causeway that crossed the marshes between Edinburgh and the port town of Leith, known as Gallow Lee. Surrounded by the pious prayers of the clergymen of the Kirk (the Church of Scotland), Thomas was hanged by the neck until he was dead.
What was Thomas – a murderer? A rapist? Was he one of Edinburgh’s notorious ‘Resurrection Men’? No. Young Thomas’s crime was that in an Edinburgh tavern on Christmas Eve 1696, he had a drink and went on a rant offending the Church and its stranglehold on Scottish culture. He was reported, arrested and tried: “The jury found Aikenhead guilty of cursing and railing against God, denying the incarnation and the Trinity and scoffing at the Scriptures.”
Thomas Aikenhead was the last person to be hanged for Blasphemy in Britain. As such he became a martyr and inspiration. The hanging of a young man for the crime of having a rant in a pub late at night became seen as an act of tyranny and oppression so heinous it was the spark that turned a barren minor nation on the north west fringe of Europe into the blazing furnace of ideas that was the Scottish Enlightenment. Ideas that would change the world forever.
… I am truly appalled that the legacy of Aikenhead and the Scottish Enlightenment…has been trashed by the Scottish Parliament and the Yousaf Government. From April 1st 2024, saying the wrong thing at your own dinner table, let alone in a drunken pub rant like young Thomas did, will once again land you in significant trouble with the law, 327 years, eight months and 24 days after Thomas died.
Mr. Yousaf, his ministers and those who drafted and will enforce this law would do well to remember how history judged those who hanged Thomas Aikenhead on that bleak winter morning on the road to Leith. In doing so they should recall that this gross act of overreach and tyranny was the high tide of the power of the Kirk, power which was swept aside by the forces unleashed when the people said ‘enough’.
An important piece from “C.J. Strachan”. Read and circulate the whole thing.
Indiana’s new intellectual diversity law for universities
Indiana’s Republican governor has just signed new law that introduces “intellectual diversity” as a standard for tenure decisions in state universities. Under the law, campus boards of trustees will determine what intellectual diversity consists of, and lack of such diversity can be grounds for denying tenure. Intellectual diversity also must be considered in the post-tenure review process.
Please note that while I sympathize with many of the complaints I am against this new law, as I explain in my latest Bloomberg column:
Under some scenarios, right-wing and conservative professors could easily end up worse off under this new system. For purposes of argument, let’s assume the worst of a left-leaning academic department, namely that they intentionally prevent conservative professors from getting tenure. Under the new law, there is a chance that a Board of Trustees might grant tenure to a conservative voted down by the department. How would a department of committed lefties address that problem? They’d avoid hiring conservative professors at all, for fear of having their tenure decisions overturned.
Even if you think a Board of Trustees can intervene in tenure decisions in a meaningful and informed manner, they cannot run a job search, which involves going through hundreds or even thousands of applications. The bias merely will be shifted to some other part of the process.
And:
Further issues arise from how the law creates a channel that students and university employees can use to complain about the political orientations of faculty members. The net effect will be to shift power to students, which means easier classes and more grade inflation. Are those trends likely in the longer run to support conservative or classical education values in our universities? As a long-time teacher for almost forty years, I suspect not.
There are further good arguments at the link.
Is an Economic Growth Explosion Imminent?
On the road, I haven’t had a chance to read this paper yet, but I pass it along as a matter of interest:
Theory predicts that global economic growth will stagnate and even come to an end due to slower and eventually negative growth in population. It has been claimed, however, that Artificial Intelligence (AI) may counter this and even cause an economic growth explosion. In this paper, we critically analyse this claim. We clarify how AI affects the ideas production function (IPF) and propose three models relating innovation, AI and population: AI as a research-augmenting technology; AI as researcher scale enhancing technology; and AI as a facilitator of innovation. We show, performing model simulations calibrated on USA data, that AI on its own may not be sufficient to accelerate the growth rate of ideas production indefinitely. Overall, our simulations suggests that an economic growth explosion would only be possible under very specific and perhaps unlikely combinations of parameter values. Hence we conclude that it is not imminent.