Will Chinese LLMs be much worse?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Presumably these are being built right now.  But which texts will they be trained upon?  Let’s say you can keep out any talk of T. Square.  What about broader Chinese history?  Do you allow English-language sources?  Japanese-language accounts of the war with Japan?  Do you allow economics blogs in English?  JStor?  Discussions of John Stuart Mill on free speech?

Just how good is the Chinese-language, censorship-passed body of training data?  Does China end up with a much worse set of LLMs?  Or do they in essence anglicize most of what they learn and in time know?

Pre-LLM news censorship was an easier problem, because you could let the stock sit in a library somewhere, mostly neglected, while regulating the flow.  But when the new flow is so directly derived from the stock, statistically speaking that is?  What then?

Much hangs in the balance here.  What was it that Paul Samuelson said about writing a nation’s textbooks?

Tyrone cheers up Tim Harford

by  Tyler Cowen in

If you needed someone to cheer you up, would you not want my evil twin brother Tyrone?  Well, Tim Harford is a privileged fellow.  Tyrone read Tim’s recent FT column “Is life in the UK really as bad as the numbers suggest? Yes, it is“, and thought Tim could use a real bucking up.  Tyrone is such a cheery fellow himself, and I so thought I would let him jolly along Tim.  Here is Tyrone’s proposed letter to the FT:

Britain, Britain, Britain — how tears come to my eye each time I swim the Atlantic and stride on shore.  How many times have I returned and with such joy?

The high land rents in Britain are the first and foremost a sign life is really good there.  You get what you pay for!  And in Britain you pay a lot.  You must get a lot too.  For sure, the value of living here can be no lower than the entry fee.  Even much of northern England is not so cheap anymore, and calling it “tea” isn’t going to change that fact.

I hear you all screaming “NIMBY!” while eating your bangers.  Well, NIMBY is one reason why Britain — or some parts of it — are expensive.  But NIMBY doesn’t detract from the quality signal embedded in those high prices.

Let’s say you had a luxury hotel that mismanaged its staff, and so it only opened up three rooms when it should have opened up 300 rooms.  Furthermore, those three rooms are rented out for $3000 a night.  You wouldn’t say the guests paying $3000 a night are miserable in the hotel.  In fact you would conclude they really enjoyed the hotel, to the tune of at least $3000 a night.  They could be enjoying it more at lower prices and higher capacity, but that is like saying the Beatles should have put out more albums.  Both claims are true, but you wouldn’t conclude Britain had a miserable musical life.

If nothing else, the hotel analogy shows Britain has the potential to get oh so much better yet.

GPT tells me that before Brexit, 1.8% of the British population lived in other EU countries, with Spain being a clear first destination.  Was that outflow so high?  The sign of a ruined society?  Or a mark of complacency with a pretty good thing?  A lot of that was (or still is) retirees of course, yet another sign of how splendid British life can be.  What could be better than earning enough in Leeds to spend your declining years in Tavira, yet close enough to fly home and see the grandkids on Boxing Day?

It is not so hard for many British people to migrate to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, or sometimes even the United States.  Northern Ireland beckons too (and the homes there are pretty cheap).  Those acts of migration don’t require a new language, and you might keep the royal family on your money and also on your bestseller lists, wait no they are not the royal family any more.

Chat tells me that in 2019 the net migration from the UK to Australia was about 16,000, hardly a major rebellion against economic servitude.  In that same year, 26,800 Brits decided to leave the barbie and return home — clearly they missed something.  Brit migrants to Australia, unlike those to Provence, are not usually the wealthy.

Tyrone has not only met Tim, but he has observed Tim living and working and succeeding in the United States.  Since Tim left America, presumably he prefers Britain and the superior curries, country homes, and memories of empire.  Not to mention the bookshops.  Amenities!  Tim is hardly the only one moving into southern England.  The UK population more broadly just keeps on rising.  We would gladly have Tim back, but it seems he won’t have us, stars and stripes for never.

Maybe you think some of the high rents in Britain are due to foreigners buying up property.  That is true in some parts of London, but for the country as a whole?  Besides, if London and Oxford give some foreigners the risk protection benefits of their real estate, is that not the cosmopolitan policy my Effective Altruist friends have been urging on me?  It would be easy enough to tax them more for those benefits, any time the Brits need to.

Southern England seems geared to help the world, what with its vaccines, DeepMind, and the data on dexamethasone.  How many regions are grander than that?  No wonder people want to pay so much to live there.  Like yours truly — Tyrone, not to mention Tim — they most of all want to help other humans.

Besides, the UK has a higher birth rate than Switzerland, Norway, or Luxembourg — so where do the real riches lie?  Especially over time.

Put aside some minor problems with the health care system — my friend the very healthy Robin Hanson says it doesn’t matter much.  The evidence keeps mounting that the non-pecuniary benefits of being British hardly could be higher.  And they don’t even tax you on them.  Strawberry Fields Forever.

TC again: Is this the most serious Tyrone has been?  Is he turning over a new leaf?  Have all those weekends in the Lake District rubbed off on him?  But alas, he does not go to the Lake District, he prefers the darker corners of northern New Jersey.  As Herodotus noted, all men consider their own ways to be best, Tyrone not excepted.  And if Tyrone does not live in Britain, how can it possibly be best?

Q.E.D.

Tim Harford, I weep with you, put Tyrone out of your mind.  The fish and chips is better in New Zealand anyway.

Gender, competition, and performance: Evidence from chess players

by  Tyler Cowen in

This paper studies gender differences in performance in a male‐dominated competitive environment chess tournaments. We find that the gender composition of chess games affects the behaviors of both men and women in ways that worsen the outcomes for women. Using a unique measure of within‐game quality of play, we show that women make more mistakes when playing against men. Men, however, play equally well against male and female opponents. We also find that men persist longer before losing to women. Our results shed some light on the behavioral changes that lead to differential outcomes when the gender composition of competitions varies.

Here is the full paper by Peter Backus, Maria Cubel, Matej Guid, Santiago Sánchez‐Pagés, and Enrique López Mañas.  Via someone who is thanked in any case!

Those new Dubai service sector jobs

by  Tyler Cowen in

Fourteen years on, Atlantis The Royal — just a short stroll away from the original resort — is set to open this weekend along with much of the same extravagance. Beyonce will perform to a VIP audience for a reported $24 million and fireworks will light up the sky above the city’s famous artificial tree-shaped island of Palm Jumeirah.

Here is more from Bloomberg.  Via DL.

The game theory of geoengineering

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

Imagine a world in which one consortium of governments proceeds with a climate plan — spraying sulfate aerosols into the air, brightening cloud cover over the oceans, maybe even dumping iron fillings into the ocean. Assume those policies are at least partially effective. Some other set of nations will respond by slowing down their costly transitions from dirty energy.

It’s not that these nations don’t care about the future of the planet. But successful geoengineering will induce them to lag in their more constructive efforts. Why go through a costly transition if the problem is being addressed? These nations might also conclude that the more they slow down, the more geoengineering the virtuous nations will undertake.

Our climate future is thus one of game theory. A nation such as Russia might go further yet and sabotage geoengineering efforts, perhaps with its own environmental tinkering. Even if such actions were seen as acts of war — well, these days that hardly seems beyond the pale.

In any case, such drastic responses are hardly needed for game-theory problems to come to the fore. It is easy enough for less conscientious nations simply to do less, once they observe that some successful geoengineering is in progress. Even within nations, states, regions and political parties are unlikely to agree how much geoengineering is appropriate, which could lead to inconsistent national policies over time.

And this:

None of this is an argument for banning geoengineering. In fact, humankind has been engaged in geoengineering for centuries — by pumping huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. And even if the world’s No. 1 scientific power (that’s the US, to be clear) rejects all intentional geoengineering, it is unlikely that all other nations will follow suit. Does the world really want to leave geoengineering in the hands of the Chinese? There is no choice but to try to make this messy situation better.

All worth a further ponder.

Hobo Economicus

by  Tyler Cowen in

The central implication of maximising behaviour amid competition is that rates of return tend toward equality. We test that implication in a market whose participants have the traits that behavioural economics suggests should make it hardest to find evidence of maximisation: the market for panhandling at Metrorail stations in Washington, District of Columbia. We find that stations with more panhandling opportunities attract more panhandlers and that cross-station differences in hourly panhandling receipts are statistically indistinguishable from zero. Panhandling rates of return thus tend toward equality. Extreme ‘behavioural’ traits do not prevent maximisation in this market.

That is a new Economic Journal article by Peter T. Leeson, R. August Hardy, and Paola A. Suarez.

Protecting against nuclear war

by  Tyler Cowen

Several design changes could be made to the decision-making process to make it safer, according to Cerf. The first would be to remove the 15-minute response time, which forces a US president to launch on warning. Cerf argues this hair-trigger response procedure is a “relic of the past”, considering that the US would retain a second-strike capability by air and sea even if all its land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles were destroyed.

Cerf also thinks that key decision makers should repeatedly practise emergency drills and analyse their responses to learn from their mistakes. They could also conduct “pre-mortems”, in which they imagine worst-case outcomes and then work backwards to see how they could be avoided. Another tweak would be to appoint one member of the decision-making team to oppose the consensus. Rachel Bronson, president and chief executive of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has been warning of the dangers of nuclear war since 1945, hopes that Cerf’s forthcoming film will raise awareness and help nudge the world towards a saner, safer future. “What Moran is doing is very important,” she tells me at the PopTech conference. When it comes to nuclear launch protocols, she adds: “We need to rethink every aspect of this system and push for more time and more engagement and more democracy.”

In November, the Union of Concerned Scientists, another campaigning organisation, wrote to President Joe Biden urging him to revise the nuclear launch protocol. Any launch order should require the consent of two high-level officials in the presidential line of succession, the scientists wrote. “As the risk of nuclear war continues to grow, you have the power to take concrete, immediate steps to build a more stable nuclear weapons system, one that isn’t subject to the whims and questionable judgment of one person alone.”

Here is more from John Thornhill at the FT, an important piece and of course topic.

Is the NHS the UK’s biggest problem?

by  Tyler Cowen in

UK ambulances took an average of 1 hour & 32 minutes to respond to heart attacks & strokes last month. 5 X higher than target, double the average in November. Feels like the NHS is falling apart

That is from Matt Goodwin.

Some Ukrainian refugees in the UK are returning back home to get medical care, because their pledge of NHS coverage has turned out to be very meaningful.

I think one has to face the possibility that the NHS has fallen apart, and “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men…” etc.  To make it all much worse, the British citizenry is convinced that it can get a great product for nearly free.  How will the news be broken to voters?

I don’t see much coverage of this in the MSM, but here is Bloomberg reporting on Peter Thiel:

[Thiel] has described British people’s affection for the state-backed health service as “Stockholm syndrome.”

The venture capitalist’s comments came during a Q&A session after a speech at the Oxford Union, a 200-year-old debating society, on Monday. He also said that the crisis-stricken health service, currently grappling with strikes and long wait times for emergency care, was making people sick and needs “market mechanisms” to fix it. Such mechanisms include privatizing parts of it, avoiding rationing and loosening regulations…

“In theory, you just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over,” Thiel said after an address in which he argued that a perceived fear of disruption was holding back technological and scientific developments. “In practice, you have to somehow make it all backwards-compatible in all these ridiculous British ways.”

The first step to fixing the NHS was, he said, to break away from the view that it is “the most wonderful thing in the world” and understand it as an “iatrogenic” institution, which means it makes people sick.

Ouch.  What will it cost to recapitalize the thing?  How long will it take?  I am more optimistic about England than most commentators these days, but this is perhaps problem number one?

To be clear, I nonetheless recognize the recent successes of the NHS in collecting data and testing hypotheses.  It is patient care at the retail level that is the problem.

Novels as models, and ChatGPT

by  Tyler Cowen

I read your piece on novels as models many years ago, and I’ve been reflecting on it with the advent of LLMs. I wrote a piece (substack) making the case that the data required for AGIs is probably embedded within the human textual corpus, and leaned on your old writing as evidence. I think you would really like it. I would also be curious for a future MR post if you have any retrospective thoughts on your 2005 article.

From @cauchyfriend.  Putting the AGI issue aside, my longstanding view has been that there are more “models” embedded in text than most people realize, a point relevant for economic method as well.  I see LLMs as having established this case, in fact far more definitively than I ever would have expected.

*Power Failure: The rise and fall of General Electric*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new book by William D. Cohan, which I just reviewed for Times Literary Supplement.  Gated, but here is the opening bit:

The individual stocks of the Dow Jones Industrial Average typically fall from grace with some regularity. Of the thirty Dow stocks listed in 1990, for instance, only seven were still in the Dow as of November 2022, mostly because the companies have ceased to be important. Stripped down to its basic fundamentals, that is the tale of General Electric (GE): one of rise and fall. But it had an exceptionally long time at the top. GE has its roots in the 1890s, and by 1993 it was the most valuable company in the United States, with a market value of more than $80 billion. It was removed from the Dow in 2018 – the last original stock from 1896 to leave the index. Its core business had shrunk, with no offsetting growth in another area. Today, the company is no longer a significant object of public attention.

This story can be told in many different ways, and the most impressive feature of William D. Cohan’sPower Failure is that he succeeds with multiple approaches.

You can buy the book here, note the American title is slightly different.

Masaaki Suzuki, a great achiever of our time

by  Tyler Cowen in

I think of Suzuki as on a par with Carlsen or Curry.  Here are a few simple facts:

He has recorded the complete cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach, in pretty much perfect recordings. They are widely acknowledged to be the best Bach cantata recordings ever.  That amounts to 70 CDs of work.

He is currently recording the complete organ works of Bach.  Unlike the cantatas, I don’t think you can say they stand above all others, but they are in the top tier of Bach organ recordings.  Those will amount to — what ?…15 CDs or so.

His Bach harpischord recordings stand among the best.

Not long ago he conducted and recorded Beethoven’s 9th symphony and produced one of the finest renditions of an oft-recorded piece, one that has been taken on by most of the all-time greats.

He founded Bach Collegium Japan, and remains the music director.

Oh, I forgot to mention: “…he is also recording Bach’s concertos, orchestral suites, and solo works for harpsichord…”

Here is Suzuki on Wikipedia, he also records with his son.  Interestingly, his parents were Protestant Christians.

If you have any connections to Masaaki Suzuki that would help bring about a Conversation with Tyler, please do let me know!  How many others have his consistent record of achievement or anything close to it?