Monday assorted links
1. “With this shirt you are allowed to get 1 Everyday Value Slam everyday [at Denny’s] for until 12/31/23.” What should such a shirt cost?
3. Those new service sector jobs.
4. Jolly Swagman podcast with Andy Matuschak.
6. Crypto wash trading (lots of it).
That was then, this is now
Barnes & Noble has a plan to open 30 stores in 2023, making the bookseller the leader in what’s being called a big-box revival. This expansion comes after more than a decade of shrinking its numbers in response to competition from Amazon. There are even a couple of the new stores being opened in the Boston area that are, perhaps fittingly, going to be in locations previously occupied by Amazon Books.
Here is the full story.
Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of U.S. Political Divides
We examine the causes and consequences of an important cultural and psychological trait: the extent to which one views the world in zero-sum terms – i.e., that benefits to one person or group tend to come at the cost of others. We implement a survey among approximately 15,000 individuals living in the United States that measures zero-sum thinking, political and policy views, and a rich set of characteristics about their ancestry. We find that a more zero-sum view is strongly correlated with several policy views about the importance of government, the value of redistributive policies, the impact of immigration, and one’s political orientation. We find that zero-sum thinking can be explained by experiences of an individual’s ancestors (parents and grandparents), including the amount of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, the degree of economic hardship they suffered, whether they immigrated to the United States or were exposed to more immigrants, and whether they had experiences with enslavement. These findings underscore the importance of psychological traits, and how they are transmitted inter-generationally, in explaining current political divides in the United States.
That is from a new paper by Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, Sandra Sequeira, and Stefanie Stantcheva. The paper has many interesting particular results, here is one:
Respondents living in Utah exhibit the least zero-sum thinking, on average, and respondents living in Montana, Oklahoma and Mississippi exhibit the most. Importantly, there is no significant geographic clustering and the geographic distribution of zero-sum beliefs is not obviously correlated with that of political leanings.
And this:
If a respondent was born outside the U.S., then they tend to have a less zero-sum view of the world.
African-Americans have more zero-sum thinking than average, and also this:
Zero-sum thinking is also associated with more liberal [TC: the wrong word, right here the misuse is especially glaring!] economic policies and a political alignment with the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party.
Recommended.
Sunday assorted links
Why did China do such a flip-flop on Covid?
After the so-called “Zero Covid” experiment, China now reports that 37 million people are being infected each day. What ever happened to the Golden Mean? Why not move smoothly along a curve? Even after three years’ time, it seems they did little to prep their hospitals. What are some hypotheses for this sudden leap from one corner of the distribution to the other?
1. The Chinese people already were so scared of Covid, the extreme “no big deal” message was needed to bring them around to a sensible middle point. After all, plenty of parts of China still are seeing voluntary social distancing.
2. For Chinese social order, “agreement” is more important than “agreement on what.” And agreement is easiest to reach on extreme, easily stated and explained policies. Zero Covid is one such policy, “let it rip” is another. In the interests of social stability China, having realized its first extreme message was no longer tenable, has decided to move to the other available simple, extreme message. And so they are letting it rip.
3. The Chinese elite ceased to believe in the Zero Covid policy even before the protests spread to such an extreme. But it was not possible to make advance preparations for any alternative policy. Thus when Zero Covid fell away, there was a vacuum of sorts and that meant a very loose policy of “let it rip.”
4. After three years of Zero Covid hardship, the Chinese leadership feels the need to “get the whole thing over with” as quickly as possible.
To which extent might any of these be true? What else?
The best dialogue or podcast I’ve heard this year
Martin Shkreli on how the criminal justice system will treat SBF….interviewer Laura Shin…
Merry Christmas!
From the Thomas Jefferson room at the Library of Congress.
Merry Christmas!
We thank you all for reading!
Saturday assorted links
1. Using ChatGPT to scrape websites. And publicly announced ChatGPT variants and alternatives. And Alpa.
2. The culture that is Finland? Just don’t be proud of it!
3. Claims about Russia (speculative).
4. Under current U.S. patent law, including some 2022 cases, AI cannot count as an “inventor” and receive IP protection.
5. Ali Ahmed Aslam RIP, credited with inventing chicken tikka masala (NYT).
Open Sesame!
The excellent Alec Stapp points us to an absolute classic in the law of unintended consequences:
APNews: A new federal law requiring that sesame be listed as an allergen on food labels is having unintended consequences — increasing the number of products with the ingredient.
Food industry experts said the requirements are so stringent that many manufacturers, especially bakers, find it simpler and less expensive to add sesame to a product — and to label it — than to try to keep it away from other foods or equipment with sesame.
As a result, several companies — including national restaurant chains like Olive Garden, Wendy’s and Chick-fil-A and bread makers that stock grocery shelves and serve schools — are adding sesame to products that didn’t have it before. While the practice is legal, consumers and advocates say it violates the spirit of the law aimed at making foods safer for people with allergies.
Rewatching *A.I* (minor spoilers)
Yes, the 2001 Spielberg movie. Some parts drag, but mostly it has held up very well. I was struck by how Girardian it is. A few points struck me:
1. The robots will be Girardian, whether we like it or not.
2. To the extent we can solve the alignment problem, we do so by torturing the A.I.’s and placing them in situations where they cannot possibly be content.
3. The robots work effectively, but the ChatGPT equivalent in the movie is quite buggy.
4. People are morally superficial, and they love others for what they do for them, not for their own sake. It is the robots who engage with the human beings for sex who learn this truth.
5. The hardest thing to predict is what the A.I.’s will learn from us, and that will make some of them unique and also difficult to manage.
Emergent Ventures, 23rd cohort
Yudhister Kumar, Temecula, CA, high school student, “Changing the world with efficient, solid hydrogen storage, appeals to rationality, and cool physics.”
Anonymous winner, to investigate who is Satoshi. A serious effort.
Mike McCormick, San Francisco and venture capital, to see if the Emergent Ventures model can be scaled.
Michael Florea, from Estonia, currently in Cambridge, Mass., start-up for longevity research.
Heidi Williams and Paul Niehaus, to pursue work in science policy and the economics of science.
Michael Slade, Dublin, to build an app for Marginal Revolution University.
Mike Gioia, Los Angeles, to pursue AI and film.
Oded Oren, Bronx, NYC, former public defender, a new non-profit — Scrutinize — to apply data-driven accountability to our criminal justice system, for instance by identifying overzealous prosecuting attorneys.
Sam Glover, London, 25 year old writer, focusing on social science, Effective Altruism, and forecasting.
Jonathan Schulz, Fairfax, George Mason University, to run RCTs in Benin and research gender inequality and for general career support
Nikolay Sobernius, from Russia currently in Istanbul, general career support, his eventual ambition is to build a new kind of GiveWell about which are the best charities.
Grazie Sophia Christie and Ginevra Lily Davis, Miami, to publish a new magazine The Miami Native, to express the spirit and culture of Miami.
Lydia Nottingham, 18 years old, Oxford University, general career development.
Ukraine tranche:
Mariia Serhiienko, from Cherkasy, Ukraine, currently living in Wroclaw, Poland. Studying Communication Design and working on the art of Ukraine and its relation to contemporary issues.
Alex Mikulenko, currently living and studying in the Netherlands, Leiden University. Theoretical physics, sound/acoustics project, particle physics, neutrinos, general career development.
Mykhailo Marynenko, from Ukraine, “I’m a software engineer with a passion for building modern, collaborative, performant, and scalable web applications and libraries. But also in my spare time I’m a doing live-streaming, security researches, open-source software development, IoT and R&D.”
What is YouChat?
Some discussion here.
Is there an on-line advertising duopoly?
Remember that complaint? Funny how it typically came from people who also hated on-line ads (and thus presumably should have wished them to be more expensive?). Here is the latest (FT):
Meta and Alphabet have lost their dominance over the digital advertising market they have ruled for years, as the duopoly is hit by fast-growing competition from rivals Amazon, TikTok, Microsoft and Apple.
The share of US ad revenues held by Facebook’s parent Meta and Google owner Alphabet is projected to fall by 2.5 percentage points to 48.4 per cent this year, the first time the two groups will not hold a majority share of the market since 2014, according to research group Insider Intelligence.
This will mark the fifth consecutive annual decline for the duopoly, whose share of the market has fallen from a peak of 54.7 per cent in 2017 and is forecast to decline to 43.9 per cent by 2024. Worldwide, Meta and Alphabet’s share declined 1 percentage point to 49.5 per cent this year.
The whole Tim Wu, anti-Facebook crowd has pretty much been wrong about everything from my vantage point…
Friday assorted links
1. Randall Kroszner appointed to the Financial Services Committee of the BOE. And CHIPs program looking to hire.
2. Rare albino baby porcupine rescued in northern B.C.
3. Black neighborhood choice and SES.
4. Assortative mating on blood type? Hard for me to believe, but…
5. Another attempt to understand how LLM work. And will work on LLMs and machine learning now become less open? What is the role of academia in all of this? And how is GPTChat on medical questions?