Results for “YouTube”
1346 found

Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Rating the Polish cities.

2. New jobs at Open Philanthropy.

3. Paul Krugman on interest rates (NYT).  I am not persuaded, but there is a coherent argument here and this is currently one of the most important questions.

4. New results on surging business formation during the pandemic.

5. Lex Fridman and Mark Zuckerberg avatar chat.

6. Using GPT-4 to predict cardiovascular risk.

7. LLM-generated textbook?

Emergent Ventures winners, 29th cohort

by  Tyler Cowen in

Dan Rivera, South Carolina, FavorPiedmont, addiction recovery and treatment.

Lukas Bogacz, Utrecht/South Africa, to start a company based on fine-tuning LLMs.

Brian Wang, MIT, Panoplia Laboratories, for DNA-based pan-virus vaccine research.

Gabriel Abrams, Washington, D.C., Sidwell (high school), LLMs and economic research.

Chloe Chia, Berkeley, to pursue computational research about human behavior in dense cities.

Jannik Schilling, 18, Hamburg, Bay Area (?), general career development.

David Siegel, to assist in the education of his son Micah Siegel, Bethesda, MD, to produce a YouTube channel about how to help animals.

Shannon Kim, University of Chicago, biology and the origins of life, “Can prebiotic networks and the spread of chiral information explain the origins of biological homochirality?”

Kyrylo Kalashnikov, mini-robotics, University of Toronto, from Ukraine.

Andrew Nijmeh, Toronto, to study the tech of traffic management systems, 15 years old.

Vinaya Sharma, Ontario, “VoltVision.AI is transforming electric grid fault detection and monitoring with autonomous drones, computer vision, and 3D and thermal imaging, helping embark on cheaper, faster and safer transmission line maintenance.” 

Stuart Buck, Houston, Good Science Project, to improve the study of meta science and improve science policy.

Leah Gimbel, Washington, DC, to create a new system to grade principals.

Benjamin Yeoh, London, to organize a London Unconference about home schooling.  Also works as a playwright.

Ukraine cohort:

Eugene Shcherbinin, London/LSE/Odesa, general career support, mathematics and economics.

Anna Orekhova, to aid her new company in science education, Kyiv.

Bohdana Pavlychko, Kyiv, venture capital and talent search, The Second Derivative Fund.

Nadia Parfan, Takflix, Ukrainian movies marketed abroad by streaming, Kyiv

Dmytro Marakhovskiya, co-founder and CEO of Rozmova, a Ukrainian tech platform that connects psychotherapists with clients, to expand into Poland.

And yes there are still other winners to be announced, forthcoming…

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Monkey Cage blog reincarnated as Good Authority.

2. Expert opinion cannot persuade people away from anti-price gouging policies.

3. Sam Enright notes on South India.

4. Erbarme dich.

5. Karnataka fact of the day: “Depression treatment does not significantly increase earnings, consumption, or human capital investment in children.”

6. Might your credit card rewards go away?

7. Eugene Volokh moving to Hoover.

The museum culture that is internet

by  Tyler Cowen in

The Tank Museum in Bovington, England, doesn’t usually rank among the world’s great museums. Located next to a military base in serene countryside, the collection of around 300 armored vehicles attracts only a few hundred thousand visitors a year, mainly families on rained-out beach vacations.

Yet there is one place where it not only ranks among the world’s largest museums, but surpasses them: YouTube.

The Tank Museum’s channel has over 550,000 subscribers — surpassing the Museum of Modern Art (519,000), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (380,000) or the Louvre (106,000).

In April, it announced it was the first museum to get over 100 million views on YouTube, with weekly clips including intensely detailed discussions on tank history, chatty videos of the curators’ favorite war machines and newsier items on how armored vehicles are being used in Ukraine.

Here is more from the New York Times, via Philip Wallach.

Should child influencers have stronger rights to the income they generate?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  You can think of this as a government regulation issue, but alternatively you could frame it as the government enforcing individual property rights that currently are absent.  Here is one excerpt:

More and more children, by which I mean minors below legal working age, are producing content as online influencers. A lot of Instagram or YouTube or TikTok accounts feature such children, and they can be cute, endearing or (depending on your mood) annoying — as well as profitable. By one estimate, the most successful children working in this area — called “kidfluencers” — can generate more than $20 million a year in revenue…

Legally, these children have no claim to the income their sites generate. Thankfully, many parents are loving and generous. But not all. There is no data on how social media earnings are distributed within the family, but the long history of child movie and TV stars indicates that many receive little or nothing.

But change is afoot, and this is mostly a good thing:

Enter the state of Illinois, where a recently passed law gives successful child social media stars a right to some percentage of the earnings they generate, to be held in a trust in their name until they turn 18. Such legislation has precedent. In the early days of Hollywood, California passed the Coogan Law, which gives child actors a right to a certain percentage of earnings, which employers have to place in trust accounts. New York has passed similar legislation.

The social media case is tougher to enforce, because often the parents themselves are the de facto employer and there is no contract specifying terms. And how is the relative contribution of the child to the family income to be assessed? (Time spent onscreen? Cuteness? What if the social media presence leads to a book contract or podcast?) Nonetheless, the law sends a clear signal that the children do have some rights to the generated income, and grown children can sue their parents if the money is not passed along.

Note however that: “It is neither practical nor desirable for the state to insert itself into family decision-making on a regular basis.”  So we should expect only limited gains from such legislation.  Furthermore, unlike with child stars in the movies and on TV, there is no real paper trail of contracts and transactions.  On the upside, those superior property rights for “kidfluencer” income might get some kids to want to work more, rather than less.

Not everyone will like that outcome of course.

I thank Anecdotal, and also A., for pointers on this issue.

Do not underrate the elasticity of supply

by  Tyler Cowen in

When I first read about the discovery of a vast new deposit of lithium in a volcanic crater along the Nevada-Oregon border, I can’t say that I was surprised. Not because I know anything about geology — but because, as an economist, I am a strong believer in the concept of elasticity of supply…

Now about elasticity of supply, in which we economists tend to have more faith than do most people. Time and again over the centuries, economists have observed that resource shortages are often remedied by discovery, innovation and conservation — all induced by market prices. To put it simply: If a resource is scarce, and there is upward pressure on its price, new supplies will usually be found.

Not surprisingly, the Lithium Americas Corporation put in a lot of the work behind the discovery. Searching for new lithium deposits has been on the rise worldwide, as large parts of the world remain understudied and, for the purposes of lithium, undersampled. Just as Adam Smith’s invisible hand metaphor would lead one to expect, that set off many new lithium-hunting investigations.

Sometimes the new supplies will be for lithium substitutes rather than for lithium itself. In the case of batteries, relevant potential substitutes include aqueous magnesium batteries, solid-state batteries, sodium-based batteries, sodium antimony telluride intermetallic anodes, sodium-sulfur batteries, seawater batteries, graphene batteries, and manganese hydrogen batteries. I’m not passing judgment on any of these particular approaches — I am just noting that there are many possible margins for innovation to succeed.

Here is the rest of my Bloomberg column.

Towards a Platform for Dominant Assurance Contracts

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Moyamo at LessWrong is committed to getting dominant assurance contracts, aka refund bonuses up and running.

Imagine a world with no ads or paywalls. A world where open-source software gets the same level of funding as proprietary software. A world where people can freely reuse ideas and music without paying royalties. A world where people get paid for writing book reviews. A world where Game-of-Thrones-quality shows are freely available on YouTube. A world where AI safety research gets the same-level of funding as AI capabilities research. Is this a fantasy world? No, this is the world where people use Dominant Assurance Contracts.

If you think this is a bad idea that no one will support, click on the donation link and make some money. If you think it’s a great idea with lots of potential, click on the donation link and be the one to make this public good a reality. Read the first link to find out more.

My Conversation with Vishy Anand

by  Tyler Cowen in

In Chennai I recorded with chess great Vishy Anand, here is the transcript, audio, and video, note the chess analysis works best on YouTube, for those of you who follow such things (you don’t have to for most of the dialogue).  Here is the episode summary:

Tyler and Vishy sat down in Chennai to discuss his breakthrough 1991 tournament win in Reggio Emilia, his technique for defeating Kasparov in rapid play, how he approached playing the volatile but brilliant Vassily Ivanchuk at his peak, a detailed breakdown of his brilliant 2013 game against Levon Aronian, dealing with distraction during a match, how he got out of a multi-year slump, Monty Python vs. Fawlty Towers, the most underrated Queen song, how far to take chess opening preparation, which style of chess will dominate in the next ten years, how AlphaZero changes what we know about the game, the key to staying a top ten player at age 53, why he thinks he’s a worse loser than Kasparov, qualities he looks for in talented young Indian chess players, picks for the best places to eat in Chennai, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Do you hate losing as much as Kasparov does?

ANAND: To me, it seems he isn’t even close to me, but I admit I can’t see him from the inside, and he probably can’t see me from the inside. When I lose, I can’t imagine anyone in the world who loses as badly as I do inside.

COWEN: You think you’re the worst at losing?

ANAND: At least that I know of. A couple of years ago, whenever people would say, “But how are you such a good loser?” I’d say, “I’m not a good loser. I’m a good actor.” I know how to stay composed in public. I can even pretend for five minutes, but I can only do it for five minutes because I know that once the press conference is over, once I can finish talking to you, I can go back to my room and hit my head against the wall because that’s what I’m longing to do now.

In fact, it’s gotten even worse because as you get on, you think, “I should have known that. I should have known that. I should have known not to do that. What is the point of doing this a thousand times and not learning anything?” You get angry with yourself much more. I hate losing much more, even than before.

COWEN: There’s an interview with Magnus on YouTube, and they ask him to rate your sanity on a scale of 1 to 10 — I don’t know if you’ve seen this — and he gives you a 10. Is he wrong?

ANAND: No, he’s completely right. He’s completely right. Sanity is being able to show the world that you are sane even when you’re insane. Therefore I’m 11.

COWEN: [laughs] Overall, how happy a lot do you think top chess players are? Say, top 20 players?

ANAND: I think they’re very happy.

Most of all, I was struck by how good a psychologist Vishy is.  Highly recommended, and you also can see whether or not I can keep up with Vishy in his chess analysis.  Note I picked a game of his from ten years ago (against Aronian), and didn’t tell him in advance which game it would be.

AI update

by  Tyler Cowen in

We’re in that “a lot of people have stopped caring” phase of the transition, don’t let the status quo and recency biases fool you:

Google’s new flagship AI model, “Gemini,” is set to be a direct competitor to GPT-4 and boasts computing power 5 times that of GPT-4. Trained on Google’s TPUv5 chips, it’s capable of simultaneous operations with a massive 16,384 chips. The dataset used for training this model is around 65 trillion tokens, and it’s multi-modal, accepting text, video, audio, and pictures. Moreover, it can produce both text and images. The training also included content from YouTube and used advanced training techniques similar to “AlphaGo-type” methods. Google plans to release the Gemini model to the public in December 2023.

And that may or may not prove the most important event of that half year…

“What Harvard can learn from Olive Garden?”

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the title of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit from it:

One lesson is that it’s harder to convince poorer individuals to mingle with wealthier individuals in settings where the culture is shaped to align with a higher socioeconomic status. Churches, for instance, are usually free and open to all — but the poor do not seem so keen on attending religious services in wealthier neighborhoods. Maybe that’s because they don’t view the wealthier church as a “better service” (however that might be defined) but rather as an environment where they do not feel entirely comfortable or welcome.

In other words: Wealthier institutions or establishments attract a mixed customer or user base only when they give up cultural control. Taller stained-glass windows and more comfortable pews can do only so much to attract lower-income churchgoers. (An aside: One nice feature of marketing “culture” — for lack of a better word — on the internet is that it can be broadly appealing. Classical music on YouTube, for example, is not only free but also free of snob appeal.)

The business model of America’s nonprofit sector depends on producing status and reputation, both for itself and its affiliates. Many nonprofits work at creating environments of a very particular sort, both to raise money and to boost their influence. To elites, those environments are innocuous, even inspiring. But those same elites are starting to realize that what is inviting to one person is off-putting to another.

Here is a related (and very good) column from Catherine Rampell.