Results for “ufo”
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Monday assorted links

1. Speculative speculations on how consciousness emerges.

2. The new, forthcoming Neal Stephenson.

3. What Michael Nielsen suggests I ask him.

4. Cousins are disappearing.  I have (had?) four of them?

5. “People in the meeting later told others in frustration that his winding process and irritability were making it more difficult to reach decisions about the border.”  Brutal throughout.

6. Argentina’s political gender gap is widest among young people.

7. Four different Super Bowl ads incorporated UFO themes.  As I once heard from a member of the U.S. military: “Ten years from now, everyone will believe in either demons or aliens.”

What should UAP disclosure policy be?

That is the subject of my latest Bloomberg column.  Here is the opener:

There is currently legislation before Congress that, if passed, could be one of the most important laws in US history. The Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2023, which calls for transparency in matters related to UFOs, is sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and has considerable bipartisan support, although it may fail due to Republican opposition.

However skeptical you or I might be, there are many allegations from within the federal government that the government is hiding alien crafts and bodies, and that the military is seeking to reverse-engineer alien technologies. There are also more plausible claims that there are flying objects that defy explanation.

And:

…if you think all this talk of aliens is nonsense, isn’t the best response some sunlight to show nothing weird is going on?

That is the strongest argument for the bill: if all the recent UAP chatter reflects neither an alien presence nor threats from hostile foreign powers. In that case, drawing back the curtain would discourage reasonable observers from pursuing the topic further. A modest benefit would result.

What about hostile foreign powers as an explanation for the UAPs?:

In that case, additional transparency could be harmful. The US government conducts a variety of intelligence and military operations, and Congress does not insist that they all be made public. There is no transparency for CIA missions, or for US cyberattacks, or for many other aspects of US foreign policy.

In that scenario the case against the bill is relatively strong.  And what about good ol’ alien beings and spacecraft?

In that case, is the best policy really what transparency advocates call “managed disclosure”? They had envisioned a panel of responsible experts managing the flow of information, bit by bit.

One question is whether such knowledge might be better kept secret, or known only to the small number of elites who manage to put all of the pieces together. Whether a broad social panic would result from revealing an alien presence on earth is hard to say — but it is also hard to see the practical upside. The best argument for disclosure is simply that the public has a right to know, and that such a knowledge of the reality of the humankind’s place in the universe is intrinsically valuable.

A second question concerns the inexorable logic of disclosure. Practically speaking, the US has a long tradition of whistleblowers and truth-tellers. If there is actual hard evidence of alien visitation, it is going to leak out, with or without the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023. Just look at the Edward Snowden case, where an American risked imprisonment and exile to reveal secrets that were far less important than what could be at stake here.

If the current legislation does not pass, or if a much weaker version moves forward, some people may take that as their cue to step forward and spill the beans — with direct proof rather than hearsay.

So in that “most interesting” case a transparency bill may not matter for long.  That means I am not crushed that the disclosure provisions of the bill have been so watered down.  In the case where those provisions really matter, a) it may be better if we don’t know, and b) we will find out sooner or later anyway.  Aliens and UAPs aside, the appropriate degree of transparency is one of the most difficult questions in politics.

Gun Buybacks and the Elasticity of Supply

Can gun buybacks work? Some simple economics suggests, no! The first of our videos on the elasticity of supply, Why Housing is Unaffordable, illustrated inelastic supply. Today’s video on gun buybacks illustrates elastic supply. Our gun buyback video hits the sweet spot for MRU videossolid economics leading to surprising conclusions illustrated in an entertaining and accurate way.

Of course, both of these videos draw upon and pair great with our textbook, Modern Principles of Economics.

My excellent Conversation with John Gray

I had been wanting to do this one for a while, and now it exists.  Here is the audio and transcript, here is the episode summary:

Tyler and John sat down to discuss his latest book, including who he thinks will carry on his work, what young people should learn if liberalism is dead, whether modern physics allows for true atheism, what in Eastern Orthodoxy attracts him, the benefits of pessimism, what philanthropic cause he’d invest a billion dollars in, under what circumstances he’d sacrifice his life, what he makes of UFOs, the current renaissance in film and books, whether Monty Python is still funny, how Herman Melville influenced him, who first spotted his talent, his most unusual work habit, what he’ll do next, and more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: Do you think that being pessimistic gives you pleasure? Or what’s the return in it from a purely pragmatic point of view?

GRAY: You are well prepared for events. You don’t expect —

COWEN: It’s a preemption, right? You become addicted to preempting bad news with pessimism.

GRAY: No, no. When something comes along which contradicts my expectations, I’m pleasantly surprised. I get pleasant surprises. Whereas, if you are an adamant optimist, you must be in torment every time you turn the news on because the same old follies, the same old crimes, the same old atrocities, the same old hatreds just repeat themselves over and over again. I’m not surprised by that at all. That’s like the weather. It’s like living in a science fiction environment in which it rains nearly all of the time, but from time to time it stops and there’s beautiful sunlight.

If you think that basically there is beautiful sunlight all the time, but you’re just living in a small patch of it, most of your life will be spent in frustration. If you think the other way around, as I do, your life will be peppered, speckled with moments in which what you expect doesn’t happen, but something better happens.

COWEN: Why can’t one just build things and be resiliently optimistic in a pragmatic, cautionary sense, and take comfort in the fact that you would rather have the problems of the world today than, say, the problems of the world in the year 1000? It’s not absolute optimism where you attach to the mood qua mood, but you simply want to do things and draw a positive energy from that, and it’s self-reinforcing. Why isn’t that a better view than what you’re calling pessimism?

And:

COWEN: Under what circumstances would you be willing to sacrifice your life? Or for what?

GRAY: Not for humanity, that’s for sure.

Recommended, interesting throughout.  John is one of the smartest and best read thinkers and writers.  He even has an answer ready for why he isn’t short the market.  And don’t forget John’s new book — I read all of them — New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism.

Friday assorted links

1. “His job market paper, “Inflation, Risk Premia, and the Business Cycle”, proposes a novel macro-finance model to rationalize the risk price puzzle — the previously undocumented empirical disconnect between inflation and risk premium shocks.”  J.R. Scott of MIT Sloan.

2. Oregon no longer requires a bar exam to practice law.

3. Ten minute video from hu.ma.ne.  The new AI pin, some call it.  Here is NYT coverage.  And an NYT review.  What do you all think?

4. The economics of visa-free travel to Kenya?

5. A 1599 view on how the moderns were outdoing the ancients.

6. Don’t waste your time reading this stuff.  Because, of all pieces, it comes closest to what I hear from insiders.

Friday assorted links

1. Jon Elster on Marx and Freud.

2. Are right-wing boycotts working?

3. UFO information is not classified in Brazil.

4. Alex Ross on Franz Liszt (New Yorker).

5. New issue of Works in Progress, haven’t read it yet, looks great.

6. Rachel Kleinfeld on political polarization.  One implication is that if you are making the other side feel more threatened, you are part of the problem.

7. “Launched in Fall 2023, Fusion explores pressing issues from a perspective rooted in the tradition of liberty.

Wednesday assorted links

1. “…they estimate that there are about 20 times more free-floating worlds in our Milky Way than stars, with Earth-mass planets 180 times more common than rogue Jupiters.”  (NYT)

2. One attempt to explain U.S. consumer sentiment.

3. Claims by Mari Andrew, about many things.

4. What does the math say about the plausibility of conspiracy theories?

5. “Das Münchner Start-up Marvel Fusion geht in die USA, um dort seine Demonstrationsanlage zu bauen. Der Chef und Gründer des deutschen Hoffnungsträgers beklagt sich im F.A.Z.-Gespräch über das Zaudern der Europäer.

6. Union opposes bringing in Taiwanese workers to U.S. TSMC plant.

Sunday assorted links

1. Questions that are rarely asked: “At the breakfast bar and wondering if having everybody touch the same pair of tongs in the same place is proven to be better than having everybody simply pick up their own piece of bread”

2. The importance of high school guidance counselors.

3. Is fish and chips disappearing?  (As an aside, I don’t find this to be the case.)

4. Jake Seliger tells his story.

5. Mental health problems diminish with income.

6. MIE: “you can now charge your phone with a cassette tape.”

7. Some new UFO bits, not necessarily true, involving Russia.

Thursday assorted links

1. Education vs. cohort control.

2. Economics of generic medicines.

3. Cecilia Rouse is the new president of Brookings.

4. Oregon school performance is cratering.

5. The oldest known customer complaint?

6. How much does IQ explain why liberals are overrepresented in sociology?

7. Not my view, sad! I would opt for Aztec UFOs, with amates.

8. This link includes a Patrick Collison and Lant Pritchett dialogue.

Wednesday assorted links

1. Humans have used enough groundwater to shift the earth’s tilt.

2. Claims about recent problems in northeast (USA) airspace.

3. Hans Niemann lawsuit against Magnus Carlsen dismissed, some parts dismissed “with prejudice.”

4. Ernie 3.5, the new Baidu model.  你好吗!

5. Are there five billion dormant cell phones sitting around?  What should we do with them?

6. Why transformative AI is very hard to achieve.

7. Most people do not do so well on the Ideological Turing Test (one of Bryan Caplan’s greatest contributions).

8. I still don’t believe this version of the UFO story.

Tuesday assorted links

1. Noise pollution and killer whales.

2. “We estimate an MPC [marginal propensity to consume] out of unrealized crypto gains that is more than double the MPC out of unrealized equity gains but smaller than the MPC from exogenous cash flow shocks.

3. Why so little recent progress on improved Covid vaccines? (NYT)

4. How well does he understand decentralized or for that matter centralized systems?: ““I’m a socialist,” Hinton added. “I think that private ownership of the media, and of the ‘means of computation’, is not good.”  Nice!

5. Claims by Marco Rubio.

6. The deputy mayor Midsummer’s Eve culture that is Helsinki.

Thursday assorted links

1. Zurich and Winterthur move to a $26.70 minimum wage (in German).  Is that higher than the average wage in Germany?

2. Much more transmission capacity is needed.

3. China claim of the day: “Wow ByteDance buying $1Bn of NVIDIA AI chips in first half of this year is a lot … that’s 100K chips. ChatGPT was trained on 10K chips”

4. New Behavioral Economics Guide 2023.

5. So, so often people are writing about themselves.

6. Ezra Klein on building and California and the energy transition (NYT).  And Ezra talking to Leslie Kean (NYT, with transcript), she really cannot hold up a plausible defense for her UFO claims.

7. Brazil now systematically runs a trade surplus.

8. Impossibility theorem for open-mindedness.