Results for “YouTube” 1346 found
How is AI education going to work?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is the first part of the argument:
Two kinds of AI-driven education are likely to take off, and they will have very different effects. Both approaches have real promise, but neither will make everyone happy.
The first category will resemble learning platforms such as Khan Academy, Duolingo, GPT-4, and many other services. Over time, these sources will become more multimedia, quicker in response, deeper in their answers, and better at in creating quizzes, exercises and other feedback. For those with a highly individualized learning style — preferring videos to text, say, or wanting lessons slower or faster — the AIs will oblige. The price will be relatively low; Khan Academy currently is free and GPT-4 costs $20 a month, and those markets will become more competitive.
For those who want it, they will be able to access a kind of universal tutor as envisioned by Neal Stephenson in his novel The Diamond Age. But how many people will really want to go this route? My guess is that it will be a clear minority of the population, well below 50%, whether at younger or older age groups…
Chatbots will probably make education more fun, but for most people there is a limit to just how fun instruction can be.
And the second part:
There is, however, another way AI education could go — and it may end up far more widespread, even if it makes some people uneasy. Imagine a chatbot programmed to be your child’s friend. It would be exactly the kind of friend your kid wants, even (you hope) the kind of friend your kid needs. Your child might talk with this chatbot for hours each day.
Over time, these chatbots would indeed teach children valuable things, including about math and science. But it would happen slowly, subtly. When I was in high school, I had two close (human) friends with whom I often talked economics. We learned a lot from each other, but we were friends first and foremost, and the conversations grew out of that. As it turns out, all three of us ended up becoming professional economists.
This could be the path the most popular and effective AI chatbots follow: the “friendship first” model. Under that scenario, an AI chatbot doesn’t have to be more fun than spending time with friends, because it is itself a kind of friend. Through a kind of osmosis, the child could grow interested in some topics raised by the AI chatbot, and the chatbot could feed the child more information and inspiration in those areas. But friendship would still come first.
Worth a ponder.
Tyler Cowen on Undertone podcast
New episode with @tylercowen. We talk about Tyler's implicit theology, literature in translation, Jonathan Swift, Peter Thiel, The Sopranos, NGDP targeting and a whole lot more. Links below — pic.twitter.com/mRQyyAesa4
— dan (@dnschlz) January 15, 2024
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-hx8Z8clI4
- Spotify: spoti.fi/47yJdK9
- Apple: https://apple.co/3S1hxI1
Dan Schulz is a very good interviewer.
Tuesday assorted links
1. My Feb.21 Arsht Center live event with Peter Thiel, “Political Theology,” register here.
2. One account of Russia’s game-theoretic strategy to come (speculative).
3. “Yemen now has more births per year than Russia, far more than Germany or Japan. In a few decades it must end up with a larger population than Russia. The future is Yemeni.” Tweet here.
5. Patrick Luciani reviews GOAT.
7. Short interview with Paul McCartney’s school teacher (1965 video). Of course he sees Paul as a regional thinker.
Saturday assorted links
1. Why do women travel more than men?
2. Gates and Altman play Desert Island Discs (short YouTube).
3. Try not to let moose lick your car (Canada).
4. Luring top scientists out of universities (NYT).
5. AI will underwhelm, and a six-month pause? And it’s time to learn something serious about private equity. Adam is right throughout.
6. “30% or Portuguese people between the ages of 15 and 39 have left the country.”
7. Ho hum. I’ve been watching the other post-briefing interviews as well.
Rashid Khan, RIP
Is Tom Cruise actor GOAT?
Yes says I, and here is Wikipedia for reference. Adam Ozimek (from my email) agrees:
Rewatching Oblivion tonight and it really holds up. Cinematography and CGI that hasn’t aged at all. And Edge of Tomorrow is a sci fi classic for the ages now, made when he was 52.
Those metacritic scores on the recent Mission Impossible films and Top Gun are extraordinary for action blockbusters.
The Scientology stuff is not great for society, but the man tried to and maybe did save movie theaters. And don’t forget this: https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2021/05/11/tom-cruise-stands-his-expletive-laden-m-i-7-rant-over-covid-19/5041447001/
And no he hasn’t done a Rain Man style serious role in a while, but he’s shown plenty of range. Did you know how much of his tropic thunder character was his idea? https://youtu.be/a3fKXBNufy4?si=M4YPtGx8PJTHREB3
GOAT I say
Fair enough. I would start with Risky Business, from 1982, which is genuinely funny and vital and which few other actor GOAT contenders can match. A Few Good Men and Interview the Vampire I also find to his credit, all from the first decade of what is (so far) five (!) decades of being a dominant force in Hollywood. Sadly, Jerry McGuire, like Rain Man, turns me off.
Perhaps Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut are his finest achievements? In any case they show he has a strong presence in art house cinema as well. Minority Report is seminal and Vanilla Sky has a McCartney song in the soundtrack.
Cruise has worked with top directors, including Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Mann and John Woo. He makes creative decisions in his movies as well. Cruise has won plenty of awards, has longevity and variety in his repertoire, and still is important for pulling in the gross. He has done many of his own stunts, even at advanced ages. He also has married three actresses — Mimi Rogers, Nicole Kidman, and Katie Holmes. He has dated Melissa Gilbert, Rebecca De Mornay, Patti Scialfa, and Cher, among others.
One of Cruise’s co-stars, Emily Blunt, described him as “insatiably positive.”
Is he “the last great movie star“? As Hegel once said, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk.
Addendum:
Harrison Ford seems to be the only serious competitor? Cary Grant is a bit too tall, wooden, and British to win, but maybe he comes in third? Jimmy Stewart didn’t have enough dramatic range. Clint Eastwood is amazing, but somehow too much a self-contained bubble? Rock Hudson has degenerated into “Straussian value” in too many of his movies. Who else?
My GOAT podcast with Robert Murphy
He is of the Mises Institute, so plenty of talk about Mises and the Austrians as well.
Bob is very smart and widely read. The other links are here: https://mises.org/library/tyler-cowen-goat-economics, https://soundcloud.com/misesmedia/tyler-cowen-on-the-goat-in-economics
My pick for the best movie of the year, in which I share a bill with Kevin Spacey
Tyler Cowen, economist and author of Marginal Revolutions
May December
I found May December to be the most interesting movie of the year. It examines deep questions about who envies whom, what a meaningful life consists of, what about possession is satisfying, art versus artifice, the nature of celebrity, and how hard it is to live without worrying about what other people think. The stars are Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore, and the director is Todd Haynes. The plotline (these are not spoilers) is that a grown woman had sex with a male seventh-grader, was sent to prison, and later ends up marrying him and having his children. Natalie Portman plays the role of a well-known actress who comes by to learn their story, so that she may better play the woman in a movie. The biggest cinematic influence is perhaps Bergman’s Persona, as we increasingly see different ways in which the two women are parallel or “twinned” in their stories. The movie poster reflects this. The highlight is when Natalie Portman explains to a group of teenagers what it is like to do a sex scene in a movie. In an era where Hollywood is supposed to be stale, this one resets the clock.
From The Spectator, there are many other (lesser) picks as well.
Micah Siegel interviews me about animal welfare and policy
Mark Skousen reviews *GOAT*
An excellent review, here is one excerpt:
Oddly enough he leaves out several economists who many consider possible GOATs: From the British school, David Ricardo (Milton Friedman’s favorite); from the Monetarists, Irving Fisher (whom James Tobin ranked “the greatest economist America has produced”); from the Austrians, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard (which the Mises Institute would consider leaving out unforgiveable); from the Institutionalists, Thorstein Veblen (who Max Lerner called “the most creative American social thought has produced”) and Max Weber (the “one man” that Frank Knight admired); and from the Marxists, Karl Marx (which they would consider his omission a cardinal sin). Cowen tells me he may write a short monograph on Marx (email dated November 22, 2023).
He also excluded the big three of the Marginal Revolution of the 1870s: Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Leon Walras.
Do read the whole thing, and note I may write more on the Marginal Revolution as well, the revolution that is not the blog!
And here is Mark’s daughter, doing a skating back flip on ice.
Why is the quality of recorded classical music so rising? (from my email)
…hypotheses as to why we are blessed with the avalanche of fine new young musicians:
1. (I feel the evidence for this one is conclusive) Technology (e.g. YouTube) allows young musicians anywhere in the world to see what the world standard is. If you see someone performing at skill level X, which years ago you would have dismissed as out of reach, you know you, too, may be able to do it. The bar has been raised. Members of the LA Phil famously declared Boulez’s music “unplayable” a few decades back. Now it is standard repertoire. The global standard is now local, and musicians rise to the challenge.
2. (I feel the evidence for this one is less conclusive, but still strong.) The increasing pervasiveness of pedagogy. Decades ago, one assumed that the best teacher of violin playing (e.g.) was a great violinist. This is like assuming the best coach of running backs is a great running back. Over time, while the “exposure to a great player” tradition is still strong, a parallel tradition of “exposure to a great teacher” has emerged. These teachers understand biomechanics, clarity of terms in instruction, technical developments, etc. See e.g. Paul Rolland (RIP), another one of the Hungarian exiles, whose string teaching method is superb but who personally was not a major performer.
From anonymous, someone in the world of classical music…
Number Go Up
Number Go Up, Zeke Faux’s account of the wildest excesses of the crypto boom (2020-2022), is highly entertaining from page one:
“I am not going to lie,” Sam Bankman-Fried told me.
This was a lie.
Faux describes the scene on a yacht off the Bahamas owned or rented by Brock Pierce, the child actor who starred in the Mighty Ducks and who co-founded Tether, a stablecoin that Faux is on the hunt to uncover its origins and backing:
A crypto venture capital fund manager–wearing a mock souvenir T-shirt from convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private island–joked about a scam that another yacht guest was running. A crypto public relations man offered what he called “Colombian marching powder” to a young woman. A small group of people dancing told me that they were philosophy students who’d come to the Bahamas to intern for FTX’s Bankman-Fried.
On Razzlekhan, the rapper, entrepreneur, and former World Bank economist-intern, who with her husband managed to pull off the largest heist in world history, some US $4.5 billion! (well, technically they stole ~$69 million worth of bitcoin in 2016 but they couldn’t sell it very easily and by the time they were caught in 2022 it was worth $4.5 billion):
As a performer, Razzlekhan was both hypersexual and aggressively unappealing. She alternated jokes about diarrhea and sex with boasts about her edgy business practices. Her signature move, if you can call it that, was to throw up her hand with her fingers split into a “V” stick out her tongue, and say “Razzle Dazzle!” Then she would make a loud phlegmy cough.
Ironically, the US government now holds the recovered coin, making it one of the largest holders of bitcoin in the world.
On the collapse of Three Arrows
Court documents showed that the fund’s holdings included a portfolio of NFTs. Among them were a Bored Ape with a vaguely racist “sushi chef headband” and a pixelated image of a cartoon penis, called a CryptoDickButt, which, incredibly, was worth about $1,000 at the time.
It’s not all fun and games. Faux also travels to the Philippines to witness the bust of Axie Infinity game miners and to Cambodia to investigate what amounts to slave labor camps run by Chinese gangsters.
One doesn’t get a favorable impression of crypto from Number Go Up but in fact one doesn’t learn much about crypto at all. Indeed, Faux’s book isn’t really about crypto it’s about the rise and collapse of a bubble and the consequent madness of crowds. It’s an old and familiar story. Not that different from the tulip mania (see the picture below), the dot-com boom, or the house flippers and mortgage boom of 2006-2008 (see the Big Short for similar stories of excess). The madness of crowds is fascinating, fun, and good for a morality tale but it doesn’t really tell us much about the underling asset. Tulips never amounted to much, the internet did great, house prices are back up. Crypto? Jury is still out. Thus, I was entertained by Number Go Up, but didn’t learn much.
Still, I agree with Faux on this, don’t put your money in Tether.
Wikipedia: Allegory of the Tulip Mania. The goddess of flowers is riding along with three drinking and money weighing men and two women on a car. Weavers from Haarlem have thrown away their equipment and are following the car. The destiny of the car is shown in the background: it will disappear in the sea.
Sunday assorted links
1. Polysee: Irish YouTube videos about YIMBY, aesthetics, and economics.
2. Germany political map of the day.
3. Thwarted Wisconsin DEI markets in everything.
4. The EU AI regulatory statement (on first glance not as bad as many had expected?).
5. The NBA Play-In was in fact a big success. Is the implication that other sports do not experiment enough with producing more fame/suspense at various margins? Basketball games are simply a much better product when the players are trying their best.
6. Your grandfather’s ACLU is back…for one tweet at least.
7. New GiveDirectly results on lump sum transfers, from Kenya.
8. Ideas matter.
9. The Chinese are using water cannons at sea, against the Philippines.
Wednesday assorted links
1. The South Korean woman who adopted her best friend and thus created a family.
2. Who is the literary critic GOAT?
3. Are wealthier people returning to NYC or at least increasing in number?
4. Claims about the declining donor price of Ivy League admission.
5. What predicts risk-taking in research?
6. How many Koreans shoot basketball free throws, and NYT explanation.