Our non-eggcellent regulations
Germany, Italy, Poland and Sweden are among the nations the U.S. Department of Agriculture approached to address the shortage brought on by a bird flu outbreak, according to European industry groups.
But supplying Americans with eggs would be complicated for foreign producers — but not because of political tensions over the myriad import tariffs President Donald Trump has imposed or threatened to impose on his nation’s top trading partners.
Even if they were eager to share, European countries don’t have many surplus eggs because of their own avian flu outbreaks and the growing domestic demand ahead of Easter.
One of the biggest obstacles, however, is the approach the United States takes to preventing salmonella contamination. U.S. food safety regulations require fresh eggs to be sanitized and refrigerated before they reach shoppers; in the European Union, safety standards call for Grade A eggs to be sold unwashed and without extended chilling.
Here is the full story, via Rich Dewey. So no, American scientists will not be moving to Europe — their eggs are too dangerous. And yes it is Germany too:
It is common in parts of Europe, for example, for consumers to buy eggs that still have feathers and chicken poop stuck to them.
Here is Patrick Collison, comparing the virtues of America to the virtues of Europe. I do not mind that he left out the chicken poop, for me it is a sign of authenticity. As for eggs, the best ones I ever had were in Chile.
My history with philosophy
At the same time I started reading economics, at age 13, I also was reading philosophy. I lived in Hillsdale, New Jersey, but River Vale had a better public library for those topics, so I would ride my bike there periodically and take out books (I also learned about Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis by bringing home scratched LPs).
Most of all, I was drawn to the Great Books series, most of all the philosophy in there. I figured I should read all of them. So of course I started with the Dialogues of Plato, which occupied my attention for a long time to come. Aristotle was boring to me, though at the time (and still) I felt he was more correct than Plato.
I also, from the beginning, never bought the argument that Socrates was the mouthpiece of Plato. In my early view (and still), Plato was the real genius, and he upgraded the second-rate Socrates to a smarter figure, mostly to make the dialogues better. The dialogic nature of Plato shows is true genius, because any single point of view you might find in there is quite untenable.
My favorite dialogues were the classic ones, such as Crito, Apology, Phaedo, and Symposium. Parmenides was a special obsession, though reader beware. It seemed fundamental and super-important. Timaeus intrigued me, as did Phaedrus, but I found them difficult. I appreciated The Republic only much later, most of all after reading the Allan Bloom introduction to the Chicago edition. My least favorite was Laws.
The other major event was buying a philosophy textbook by John Hospers (yes, if you are wondering that is the same John Hospers who wrote all that gay porn under a pseudonym). I think I bought this one in NYC rather than taking it out of the library. It explained the basic history of “early modern philosophy” running through Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, and that fascinated me. So I decided I should be reading all those people and I did. Berkeley and Hume were the most fun. I already could see, from my concomitant economics reading, that Kant could not think at the margin.
Other early philosophy readings, in high school, were Popper, Nietzsche, and Doseoyevsky, at the time considering Karamazov a kind of philosophy book. Some Sartre, and whatever else I could find in the library. Lots of libertarian philosophy, such as Lysander Spooner’s critique of social contract theories of the state. I also read a number of books on atheism, such as by Antony Flew and George Smith, and a good deal of C.S. Lewis, such as God in the Dock. Arthur Koestler on the ghost in the machine. William James on free will. Various 1960s and 1970s screeds, many of which were on the margins of philosophy. Robert Pirsig bored me, not rigorous enough, etc., but I imbibed many such “works of the time.” They nonetheless helped to define the topic for me, as did my readings in science fiction. If I was reading Popper’s Poverty of Historicism, and Theory and History by Mises, I also was thinking of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy.
For a brief while I considered becoming a philosopher, though I decided that the economist path was better and far more practical, and also more useful to the world.
I kept on reading philosophy through my undergraduate years. The biggest earthquake was reading Quine. All of a sudden I was seeing a very different approach to what social science propositions and economic models were supposed to mean. (I never had been satisfied with Friedman, Samuelson, or the Austrians on ecoomic methodology.) For a long time I thought I would write a 100-page essay “Hayek and Quine,” but I never did. Nonetheless some radical new doors were opened for me, most of all a certain kind of freedom in intellectual interpretation. I also was influenced a good deal by reading Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men/Starmaker novels, feeding into my speculative bent.
I didn’t do much with philosophy classes, though in graduate school at Harvard I sat in on Hilary Putnam’s philosophy of language class (with my friend Kroszner). That was one of the very best classes I ever had, maybe the best. At Harvard I also got to know Nozick a bit, and of course he was extraordinarily impressive. At that time I also studied Goethe and German romanticism closely, and never felt major allergies toward the Continental approaches.
One day at Harvard, in 1984, I walked into Harvard Book Store and saw a copy of Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, which had just come out. I hadn’t known of Parfit before, but immediately decided I had to buy and read the book. I was hooked, and spent years working on those problems, including for part of my dissertation, which was hardly advisable from a job market point of view. Like Quine, that too changed my life and worldview. “Quine and Parfit” would be an interesting essay too.
When I took my first job at UC Irvine, I hung out with some of the philosophers there, including the excellent Alan Nelson and also Gregory Kavka, with whom I co-authored a bit. Greg and I became very good friends, and his early death was a great tragedy. I also enjoyed my periodic chats with David Gordon, a non-academic philosopher who lives in Los Angeles and the best-read philosopher I have met.
In the late 1980s I met Derek Parfit, and ended up becoming Derek’s only co-author, on the social discount rate. The full story there is told in Dave Edmonds’s excellent biography of Parfit, so I won’t repeat it here. These posts are for secrets! I will add that Derek struck me as the most philosophical person I ever have met, the most truly committed to philosophy as a method and a way of life. That to me is still more important than any particular thing he wrote. Your writings and your person are closely related, but they also are two separate things. Not enough philosophers today give sufficient thought to who they are.
After the collaboration with Parfit, he wrote me a letter and basically offered to bring me into his group at Oxford (under what terms was not clear). That felt like a dead end to me, plus a big cut in lifetime income, and so I did not pursue the opportunity.
I ended up with four articles in the philosophical equivalent of the “top five” journals in economics. I also was pleased and honored when Peter Singer invited me to present my paper “Policing Nature” to his philosophy group at Princeton. I think of my books The Age of the Infovore and Stubborn Attachments as more philosophy than anything else, though synthetic of course.
I have continued to read philosophy over the years. Next on my list is the new translation of Maimonides, which on first glance seems like a big improvement. However I read much less philosophy in refereed journals than I used to. Frankly, I think most of it is not very philosophical and also not very interesting. It is not about real problems, but rather tries to carve out a small piece that is both marginally noticeable by an academic referee and also defensible, again to an academic referee. That strikes me as a bad way to do philosophy. It worked pretty well say in the 1960s, but these days those margins are just too small.
Most professional philosphers seem to me more like bureaucrats than philosophers. They simply do not embody philosophic ideals, either in their writings or in their persons. Most of all I am inclined to reread philosophic classics, read something “Continental,” or read philosophic works that to most people would not count as philosophy at all. An excellent tweet on AI can be extraordinarily philosophical in the best sense of the term, and like most of the greatest philosophy from the past it is not restricted by the canons of refereed journals. Maxims have a long and noble history in philosophy.
My notion of who is a philosopher has broadened extensively over the years. I think of Patrick Collison, Camille Paglia, and the best Ross Douthat columns (among many other examples, let’s toss in the best Matt Y. sentences as well, and the best Peter Thiel observations), not to mention some art and architecture and music critics, as some of the best and most important philosophy of our time. The best philosophy of Agnes Callard (NYT) does not look like formal philosophy at all. I know it is hard for many of you to make this mental shift, but revisit how Kierkegaaard and Schopenhauer wrote and you might find it possible. And of course the very greatest philosophers of our time are the people who are building and learning how to use the quality LLMs.
A simple rule of thumb is that if no one is writing you, and telling you that you changed their lives, you probably are not a philosopher. You cannot expect such feedback in mathematical logic, or early in your career, but still it is not a bad place to start for judging this issue.
Looking back, I now see myself as having chosen the path of philosophy more than economics. I view myself as a philosopher who knows a lot of economics and who writes about economics (among other things). I am comfortable with that redefinition of self, and it makes my career and my time allocation easier to understand.
And now to go try that new Maimonides edition…
Mexico fact of the day
Mexico [is]…the current hub of AI server manufacturing. Of the servers imported by the U.S.—including AI and non-AI servers—about 70% come from Mexico, according to a report by Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs.
More of this, please. Here is the full WSJ piece, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The Ross Douthat manifesto?
Not exactly my views, but well worth reading as a whole. Here is one excerpt:
…much of this extinction will seem voluntary. In a normal evolutionary bottleneck, the goal is surviving some immediate physical threat — a plague or famine, an earthquake, flood or meteor strike. The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.
In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity. Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically, without too much conscious deliberation, is what online slang calls NGMI — not going to make it.
Languages will disappear, churches will perish, political ideas will evanesce, art forms will vanish, the capacity to read and write and figure mathematically will wither, and the reproduction of the species will fail — except among people who are deliberate and self-conscious and a little bit fanatical about ensuring that the things they love are carried forward.
And this:
And while this description may sound like pessimism, it’s intended as an exhortation, a call to recognize what’s happening and resist it, to fight for a future where human things and human beings survive and flourish. It’s an appeal for intentionality against drift, for purpose against passivity — and ultimately for life itself against extinction.
Do read the whole thing (NYT).
England and Wales fact of the day
A recent survey, commissioned by the Bible Society and conducted by YouGov, showed 16 per cent of those aged 18 to 24 in England and Wales said they attended church at least monthly, significantly up from 4 per cent in 2018.
Here is more from the FT. Addendum: The above quotation from the FT is slightly misleading. Both numbers are the percentages for those who self-report as Christians.
Saturday assorted links
1. How tariffs affect trade deficits.
2. How many “ghost branches” of humanity are there?
3. There is actual humor in this NYT piece on the pro-natalism movement. “With” or “at,” you can debate, but not all readers will align with the NYT perspective. Bryan has the best line. The correction is funny too. I guess the “ghost branches” of humanity were not pro-natalist enough?
4. Should the moon be a computer?
5. Running 80,000 parallel referendums at all times — is that what they are doing?
6. The Network School Fellowship.
7. “Huge rabbit rescued from kill farm is now therapy bunny, drives mini truck.” (WaPo)
Brian Potter on what he has learned writing Construction Physics
- Individual construction tasks have, on average, not gotten cheaper since at least the 1950s.
- Bricks haven’t gotten cheaper since the mid-19th century, despite massive improvements in brickmaking technology.
- Construction has a reputation for being slow to innovate, but innovations seem to spread in construction at roughly similar rates to other industries, like car manufacturing or agriculture.
- Single family homes use less energy per square foot than multifamily apartments, likely because certain “fixed” energy costs like refrigerators and water heaters are spread across more living space.
- Historically high US homebuilding rates were in large part driven by falling household size. If you control for this factor, the current low rates of US homebuilding looks less dire.
Noting that his numbering scheme has those as 9-13, though it will not let me edit to such. Here is the full link.
Intertemporal substitution (from my email)
From a Czech newspaper:
Recruitment of new recruits in Russia is skyrocketing. With the prospect of a ceasefire, they want to ‘jump on the last train’
The number of Russians who have decided to join the army has multiplied in recent weeks. Regardless of their health, recruitment centres are taking anyone who expresses an interest. And it is growing even as an increasing number of Russian soldiers return from the front line in coffins. This is mainly due to the high rewards, and with the prospect of a ceasefire, the motivation of new recruits is even higher. Many of them hope to collect money and peace of arms will come before they end up on the front line.
Nábor nových rekrutů v Rusku prudce stoupá | iROZHLAS – spolehlivé zprávy
That is all from MR commentator uair01.
Friday assorted links
Music compensation fact of the day
The Kanye West and Jay-Z song “No Church in the Wild,” for instance, sampled a single instrumental line from a failed solo album recorded in the late 1970s by the Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera; the licensing proceeds provided Mr. Manzanera with “the biggest payday he had in the course of his entire career.” Or there is Mr. Hepworth’s revelation that some crazed fan supposedly paid more than $160,000 for a seat at Led Zeppelin’s 2007 reunion.
Here is more from the WSJ review of David Hepworth’s Hope I Get Old Before I Die, reviewed by D.J. Taylor.
Bastiat’s revenge
“S.F. auto glass shops suffering as car break-ins drop”
Here is the San Francisco Chronicle link, via Air Genius Gary Leff.
What I’ve been reading
1. Florian Illies, The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time. An excellent book, usually I am allergic to art history books that attempt to charm, but this one works. Excerpt: “A question posed to the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk: ‘What makes the Monk by the Seashore so unprecedented?’ His answer: “It is the first picture of the dissolution of the subject in the substance.”” I had not known Friedrich also was an expert canary breeder.
2. Elsa Morante, Lies and Sorcery. The kind of long novel that women on average will like much more than men do? If someone said to me they thought it was excellent, I would not feel they had bad taste. For me the narrative strayed too far from anything I cared about, other than fineries about the characters.
3. John Ferling, Shots Heard Round the World: America, Britain, and Europe in the Revolutionary War. A good and well-detailed book for putting the Revolutionary War and its battles into a broader perspective, explicable to both American and British perspectives.
4. Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment. There is plenty one can say about this book and these views, but most of all I am struck how negative “the new Right” is about American institutions. Even at whatever you might think is their most decrepit state (which year is that again?), they are some of the best institutions the world has seen. Call that a low standard if you wish, but it is not an irrelevant standard. Here are some other examples of people becoming far, far too pessimistic about the American status quo ex ante. As personality types, they are simply way too much a bunch of sourpusses. Things just have not been that bad!
5. John Cassidy, Capitalism and its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI. John Cassidy of course is the New Yorker writer on economics. Comprehensive and clearly written, I predict this book will find its audience, and no it does not discuss Nick Land.
*The German Empire, 1871-1918*
By Roger Chickering, this is so far the best book I have read this year, and I knew that within the first fifty pages (or less). It is everything one could want from a book on this very important country and time period. Likely I will report more on it as I read more, for the moment here is one excerpt:
Together, the new smelting techniques had driven the price of crude steel in Europe down nearly 90 percent by the end of the nineteenth century. In Germany, the results of this trend registered in a thirty-fold increase in the annual production of steel between 1879 and 1913. Thanks in great part to the iron fields of Lorraine, German output overtook British annual production in 1893; by 1913, German mills produced more steel than their British, French, and Russian counterparts combined. Much of this steel was poured into the German railways. Rail networks were extended; primarily at the insistence of the army, trunk lines were enlarged to two, in some cases four tracks. Iron rails were replaced with more durable steel. Wheels, axles, couplings, and wagons were modernized into steel, as were bridges. These substitutions not only made railroads faster but also increased their capacity. Meanwhile, palaces of rail travel emerged out of metal and glass as the great train stations of Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, and Germany’s other main cities. Late in the century travel along the steel rails also expanded in the form of tramways onto the streets of the cities themselves.
It is wonderful on the politics of the time as well, for instance tracing out the rise of Bismarck, or how the rivalries between Prussia and Austria shaped so many issues at the time. You can buy the book here.
Thursday assorted links
1. Jerome Powell on stablecoins.
2. Hollis Robbins on o3 and higher education.
3. Google has started hiring for “post-AGI research.” If you want one, here is a straightforward definition of AGI. I believe o3 passes that test, including for the one hour of human labor mark. I hear lots of complaining, but I don’t hear people, even the small-minded men who occupy one tiny corner of this debate, arguing it fails that test. Here is Derya on o3 and immunobiology. Here is Pablo on o3 and the law. Here is the strawberries guy. Also Greg Brockman comments.
4. Biosignatures on a habitable planet? (NYT) And WaPo on the same.
5. Market-based mechanisms for AI agents.
6. Dean Ball, formerly of Mercatus and with excellent taste in music: “I am pleased to announce that as of this week, I have taken on the role of Senior Policy Advisor for AI and Emerging Technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.”
A note on o3 and AGI
Basically it wipes the floor with the humans, pretty much across the board.
Try, following Nabeel, why Bolaño’s prose is so electrifying.
Or my query why early David Burliuk works cost more in the marketplace than do late Burliuk works.
Or how Trump’s trade policy will affect Knoxville, Tennessee. (Or try this link if the first one is not working for you.)
Even human experts have a tough time doing that well on those questions. They don’t, and I have even chatted with the guy at the center of the Burliuk market.
I don’t mind if you don’t want to call it AGI. And no it doesn’t get everything right, and there are some ways to trick it, typically with quite simple (for humans) questions. But let’s not fool ourselves about what is going on here. On a vast array of topics and methods, it wipes the floor with the humans. It is time to just fess up and admit that.