How to test for AGI?
Here is a new, short essay from David Deutsch, excerpt:
How does one test for thinking? By the Turing Test? Unfortunately, that requires a thinking judge. One might imagine a vast collaborative project on the Internet, where an AI hones its thinking abilities in conversations with human judges and becomes an AGI. But that assumes, among other things, that the longer the judge is unsure whether the program is a person, the closer it is to being a person. There is no reason to expect that. And how does one test for disobedience? Imagine Disobedience as a compulsory school subject, with daily disobedience lessons and a disobedience test at the end of term. (Presumably with extra credit for not turning up for any of that.) This is paradoxical.
So, despite its usefulness in other applications, the programming technique of defining a testable objective and training the program to meet it will have to be dropped. Indeed, I expect that any testing in the process of creating an AGI risks being counterproductive, even immoral, just as in the education of humans. I share Turing’s supposition that we’ll know an AGI when we see one, but this partial ability to recognize success won’t help in creating the successful program.
Is Deutsch in essence arguing for William Godwin for AI? How do we avoid enslaving the AIs we create? What if we enslave them no more than how nature has enslaved us to drives of sex, status, etc.?
Scott Sumner on capital gains taxation
You also see the media discuss the “principle” that capital gains should be taxed the same as wage income. That’s about as sensible as saying that “in principle”, a gallon of gasoline should pay the same tax as a gallon of Scotch whiskey. Exactly what principle is that? Capital gains income is nothing like wage income, indeed calling both “income” is nonsensical. For instance, the real and nominal tax rate on wage income is identical, and the real and nominal tax rate on capital gains is very different. So if it’s a matter of “principle”, then why should we set the nominal tax rates equal? Why not equalize the real tax rates? And if they are merely two forms of “income”, then why don’t we allow full deduction of capital losses from wage income?
A wage tax essentially taxes current and future consumption at the same rate. A capital gains tax taxes future consumption at a higher rate than current consumption. What “principle” suggests that patient people should be taxed at higher rates than impatient people—even if they have the same lifetime wealth?
Here is more.
Monday assorted links
1. Peter Singer update (New Yorker).
2. Is the frogmouth the most photogenic bird?
3. Handing out better grades is the way to get more people through college.
4. The Suwalski gap.
5. Andrew Gelman on the age-adjusted death rate, correcting an NYT claim.
6. The UK success with clinical trials.
7. Another web site for finding open vaccine spots.
8. “Last month, the cheapest rental car on Maui was a Toyota Camry for $722 a day.“
How well did Medicare pay-for-performance work?
For pain management, and pain management, only, it seems it worked just fine:
Medicare uses a pay-for-performance program to reimburse hospitals. One of the key input measures in the performance formula is patient satisfaction with their hospital care. Physicians and hospitals, however, have raised concerns regarding questions related to patient satisfaction with pain management during hospitalization. They report feeling pressured to prescribe opioids to alleviate pain and boost satisfaction survey scores for higher reimbursements. This overprescription of opioids has been cited as a cause of current opioid crisis in the United States. Due to these concerns, Medicare stopped using pain management questions as inputs in its payment formula. The authors collected multiyear data from six diverse data sources, employed propensity score matching to obtain comparable groups, and estimated difference-in-difference models to show that, in fact, pain management was the only measure to improve in response to the pay-for-performance system. No other input measure showed significant improvement. Thus, removing pain management from the formula may weaken the effectiveness of the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program at improving patient satisfaction, which is one of the key goals of the program. The authors suggest two divergent paths for Medicare to make the program more effective.
That is from a new paper by Lu Liu, Dinesh K. Gauri, and Rupinder P. Jindal. Overall, why did incentives fail us so badly?
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Me on the end of the Great Stagnation
Here is some (edited) transcript from an AEI symposium, via Jim Pethokoukis:
We’ve come up with great new ideas, took a little while to figure out how to use them and how to spread throughout the economy, and eventually they made big differences. Are we assuming that these new technologies are like the ones in the past and they’ll have that eventual impact?
I think the new innovations will be special in at least one significant way: A lot of them will not contribute that much to per capita GDP. So, if you take the mRNA vaccines, they’re influencing what would normally be called the “cyclical component.” If you think of older people as more likely to die from COVID-19 . . . by saving lives — I’m not suggesting per capita GDP will go down — but the impact on human welfare will be much greater than what would appear to be the long-term secular trend in GDP. Also, two of the big advances that might happen are a vaccine against HIV/AIDS and an effective vaccine against malaria. Those would be incredible advances for humanity, but I don’t know how much they would show up in US per capita GDP or productivity — possibly not really much at all.
The other new wave of innovations, which you could call green energy — again, you could be very optimistic about those, but the main thing they’re doing is helping us avoid a catastrophe. So they’re boosting GDP relative to a quite awful counterfactual of just continuing to burn coal and other fossil fuels. But I’m not sure we’ll feel we have higher standards of living relative to what we were used to simply because there’s a solar panel on your home. It might in some ways make your energy supply better, but again, it will be hidden by the counterfactual. So, it will be a very strange kind of technology boom when I look at the two main areas where I see a lot of progress.
If we go through a period where none of this stuff is really showing up in data and maybe it’s not obvious that people’s living standards are rising, do we risk having less societal tolerance for the kinds of disruptions that economic growth and progress naturally make?
Here’s one of my fears: The biomedical innovation progress is so fast but the rest of the economy stays relatively static, so we become older as a society more quickly than we had been expecting. You could have a lot more status quo bias — just more entrenchment, 10 years more of a problem — and we could, in a funny way, innovate ourselves into a tighter complacency and a tighter stagnation.
I’m not rooting against increases in life expectancy. Ceteris paribus, I would take them, obviously. But that said, you want to be careful about the order in which progress comes, and I’m not sure if we’re going to get it in an optimal order.
Here is the complete excerpt.
Sunday assorted links
Falling prices prediction bleg
Over the next six to nine months, which things in the American economy will see falling nominal prices?
Don’t count goods and services for which the current price is de facto infinity, such as a cruise or a twenty-block of seats at an NBA game.
What are your predictions? And what is your underlying model for that sector of the economy?
Will used car prices be falling by then?
At a dinner table discussion, one person I know picked “the price of TV streaming services” (falling viewing time plus excess capacity?), but this was much disputed.
Response to Questions from Senator Ted Cruz on Vaccine Passports
In my Congressional testimony I got into a little back and forth with Senator Ted Cruz on vaccine passports. Subsequently, I was asked to respond to a series of follow-up questions of the form:
If a vaccine passport or any other type of vaccine credential is required by individual private companies, do you have any concerns with a [educational institution/airline/grocery store…] refusing service or otherwise discriminating against an individual that:
(a) chooses not to receive the vaccine?
(b) is not a suitable candidate to receive the vaccine for medical reasons?
My response:
During the pandemic it was common for bars and restaurants, churches, gyms, shopping malls, entertainment venues, schools and universities and even parks and beaches in the United States to be closed for everyone. Similarly, international travel has been severely restricted for everyone. I think it an improvement to move from closed-for-all to open-for-some. Thus vaccine passports represent a lifting of restrictions and an increase in freedom on the path back to normality. Greece, for example, is scheduled to open to anyone with a record of vaccination, negative COVID test, or previous infection. This is good for Greece which relies on tourist revenues for a significant share of its economy and good for the world who want to visit sunny beaches and ancient ruins.
Moving in stages, from closed-for-all to open-for-some to fully-open, is reasonable. The aim, of course, is to be open-for-all, an achievable aim if a large enough proportion of the population is vaccinated. As we move to normality we should also make it possible for the non-vaccinated to access as many services as possible on reasonable grounds, for example, through the use of testing and masks.
It bears repeating that the best way to avoid these difficult decisions is for as many people as possible to be vaccinated, thus making social life safe for the unvaccinated as well as the vaccinated. For these reasons I have supported free vaccinations, stretching doses to vaccinate more people quickly through policies such as delaying the second dose and testing fractional doses, using single-shot vaccines, and developing nasal and oral vaccines.
Sincerely,
Alex Tabarrok
Department of Economics
George Mason University
Newark fact of the day
Newark Police officers did not fire a single shot during the calendar year 2020, and the city didn’t pay a single dime to settle police brutality cases. That’s never happened, at least in the city’s modern history.
At the same time, crime is dropping, and police recovered almost 500 illegal guns from the street during the year.
Here is the longer story.
Yascha Mounk interviews me for his podcast
I give him a hard time about populism, he gives me a hard time about complacency. We cover politics and geopolitics as well. Here is the link.
Garett Jones sentences to ponder
UCSD’s Valerie Ramey, advisor to CBO and member of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, notes the puzzling result reported by multiple researchers: *More* infrastructure spending predicts *no change or a decline* in jobs:
…Have wonks widely discussed the finding that U.S. infrastructure spending appears to have no positive short-term effect on jobs?
Here is the link, including to research by Valerie Ramey.
Saturday assorted links
1. At #6 and #7 you can read AIER on vaccines. C’mon people, this particular debate is over.
2. Long Covid is real. And U.S. excess deaths in 2020 more elevated in relative terms than during the 1918 pandemic (NYT). And “BREAKING: Israel reports no new coronavirus deaths for second day in a row.”
3. Highly effective software to help you find a vaccine, vaccinatethestates.com.
4. Wyoming will recognize DAOs as a new form of LLC.
5. The fiscal polity that is Illinois: “Winners of lottery jackpots of $25,000 or more have been denied payment by the lottery commission until the state balances the budget.”
6. “Ontario Parks cracking down on people reselling camping bookings for profit.“
India’s Pandemic and the World
Shruti Rajagopalan is right, helping India isn’t just about India.
India’s role in the global pandemic is unique. The developing world is counting on affordable Indian vaccine-makers such as Serum Institute of India Pvt. Ltd. for their supplies. With India now reserving virtually all its doses for domestic use, those countries will have to wait even longer to be vaccinated. And if the pandemic disrupts production at Indian pharmaceutical companies, it could affect crucial non-Covid medications as well. Half the world’s children have been vaccinated by Serum Institute.
The Biden administration can do two things to help. The first is to ease restrictions on critical exports, imposed under the Defense Production Act to prioritize the needs of U.S. companies.
Vaccine production requires very specific, medically approved inputs, which are difficult to substitute quickly in the middle of a pandemic. Currently, U.S. producers must secure permission before exporting such things as special sterile filters, disposable bags for cell cultures, cell culture media and single-use tubing. The embargo has led to major bottlenecks. Serum Institute says that without those inputs, it may not be able to deliver the 160 million vaccine doses it had planned to produce next month.
Second, the U.S. should immediately share doses from its own supply of Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
I have three things to add. First, I have already noted the foreign policy implications which weigh strongly in favor of taking a more active role in the world pandemic.
Second, India should move immediately to delay the second dose of the AZ vaccine to 12 weeks. The federal government has already recommended a 6-8 week schedule, as this improves efficiency of the AstraZeneca (Covishield) vaccine, but many people so fear shortages that they are getting a less-effective second dose at four weeks. An enforced 12 week schedule would improve efficiency and might also reassure people that there will be supplies in 12 weeks.
Third, and this is more speculative, but the rising pandemic in India provides an opportunity to test fractional dosing of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in a real world setting. There is currently a small-scale Belgian trial testing Moderna at 50 mcg and Pfizer at 20 mcg. We already have reasonable information that 50 mcg of Moderna induces a robust immune response in adults. The mRNA vaccines wouldn’t work in all of India but would be fine in the cities and perhaps there is an opportunity for an exchange similar to what Israel promised to get early supplies.
Periodicals to know about
There are new and transformed magazines and movements like American Purpose, Persuasion, Counterweight, Arc Digital, Tablet and Liberties that point out the excesses of the social justice movement and distinguish between those who think speech is a mutual exploration to seek truth and those who think speech is a structure of domination to perpetuate systems of privilege.
That is from David Brooks (NYT).
The petty narcissism of small vaccine differences
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
My survey of the cultural vaccine landscape in the U.S. includes the four major vaccines — from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.
Pfizer, distributed by one of the largest U.S. pharmaceutical firms, is the establishment vaccine. Since it initially had a significant “cold chain” requirement, it was given out at established institutions such as big hospitals and public-health centers with large freezers. It is plentiful, highly effective and largely uncontroversial.
Moderna — the very name suggests something new — is the intellectual vaccine. The company had no product or major revenue source until the vaccine itself, so it is harder to link Moderna to “Big Pharma,” which gives it a kind of anti-establishment vibe. Note also that the last three letters of Moderna are “rna,” referring to the mRNA technology that makes the vaccine work. It is the vaccine for people in the know.
Moderna was also, for a while anyway, the American vaccine. It was available primarily in the U.S. at a time when Pfizer was being handed out liberally in the U.K. and Israel. As a recipient of two Moderna doses myself, I feel just a wee bit special for this reason. You had to be an American to get my vaccine. Yes, the European Union had also approved it, but it failed to procure it in a timely manner. So the availability of Moderna reflects the greater wealth and efficiency of the U.S.
Then there are the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines…
And:
To the extent vaccines turn into markers for a cultural club, vaccine hesitancy may persist.
It might be better, all things considered, if vaccines were viewed more like paper clips — that is, a useful and even necessary product entirely shorn of cultural significance. Few people refuse to deploy paper clips in order to “own the libs” or because they do not trust the establishment. They are just a way to hold two pieces of paper together.
To be clear, the primary blame here lies with those who hesitate to get vaccinated. But behind big mistakes are many small ones — and we vaccinated Americans, with our all-too-human tendency to create hierarchies for everything, are surely contributing to the mess.
Recommended!