Results for “YouTube” 1353 found
Do not underrate the elasticity of supply
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.
Ho hum model this
The Mexican government releases some of its footage. And more. Here is 4.5 hours, I have not watched it. Here is lots of Twitter commentary. And one snatch of detail on the corpse.
Is this just the Virgen of Guadalupe all over again? But with photos and sensor readings? Por favor, explica’ me a mi!
Towards a Platform for Dominant Assurance Contracts
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
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
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?”
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.
MRU video on opportunity cost
Please note that this video is part of our free Intro to Economics unit plan.
*Landscape with Invisible Hand*
Despite its only middling at best reviews, I found this one of the most original and intriguing movies of the year. The formula “African-American family movie plus Only Fans for space aliens” isn’t exactly exhausted, or for that matter even plausible as the basis for anything. Yet the whole production comes off surprisingly well once you accept the absurdist premise, and it feels freshly cinematic. The movie also has a lot of economics, and self-consciously so, though not exactly in a free market direction. Here is the trailer.
Compensating Kidney Donors
LA Times: Never in the field of public legislation has so much been lost by so many to one law, as Churchill might’ve put it. The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 created the framework for the organ transplant system in the United States, and nearly 40 years later, the law is responsible for millions of needless deaths and trillions of wasted dollars. The Transplant Act requires modification, immediately.
We’ve got skin in this game. We both donated our kidneys to strangers. Ned donated to someone who turned out to be a young mother of two children in 2015, which started a chain that helped an additional two recipients. And Matt donated at Walter Reed in 2021, after which his kidney went to a Seattleite, kicking off a chain that helped seven more recipients, the last of whom was back at Walter Reed.
…The National Organ Transplant Act prohibits compensating kidney donors, which is strange in that in American society, it’s common to pay for plasma, bone marrow, hair, sperm, eggs and even surrogate pregnancies. We already pay to create and sustain life.
…Compensation models have been proposed in the past. A National Institutes of Health study listed some of the possibilities, including direct payment, indirect payment, “in kind” payment (free health insurance, for example) or expanded reimbursements. After much review, we come down strongly in support of indirect payment, specifically, a $100,000 refundable federal tax credit. The tax credit would be uniformly applied over a period of 10 years, in the amount of $10,000 a year for those who qualify and then become donors.
This kind of compensation is certainly not a quick-cash scheme that would incentivize an act of desperation. Nor does it commoditize human body parts. Going forward, kidney donation might become partly opportunistic rather than mostly altruistic, as it is now. But would it be exploitative? Not at all.
Long-time readers will know that I have argued for the greater use of incentives in organ donation both for live donors and cadaveric donors. Pecuniary compensation is one possibility but so are no-give, no-take laws that give those who previously signed their organ donor cards priority should they one day need an organ.
Emergent Ventures winners, 28th cohort
Anup Malani and Michael Sonnenschein, Chicago and Los Angeles respectively, repeat winners, now collaborating on a new project of interest.
Jesse Lee, Calgary, to lower the costs on developing safe and effective sugar substitutes.
Russel Ismael, Montreal, just finished as an undergraduate, to develop a new mucoadhesive to improve drug delivery outcomes.
Calix Huang, USC, 18 years old, general career development, AI and start-ups,
Aiden Bai, NYC, 18, “to work more on Million.js, an open source React alternative,” and general career development. Twitter here.
Shrey Jain, Toronto, AI and cryptography and privacy.
Jonathan Xu, Toronto, currently Singapore, general career support, also with an interest in AI, fMRI, and mind-reading.
Viha Kedia, Dubai/ starting at U. Penn., writing, general career development.
Krishiv Thakuria, entering sophomore in high school, Ontario, Ed tech and general career development.
Alishba Imran, UC Berkeley/Ontario, to study machine learning and robotics and materials, general career development, and for computing time and a home lab.
Jonathan Dockrell, Dublin, to finance a trip to Próspera to meet with prospective venture capitalists for an air rights project.
Nasiyah Isra-Ul, Chesterfield, VA, to write about, promote, and create a documentary about home schooling.
Sarhaan Gulati, Vancouver, to develop drones for Mars.
And the new Ukrainian cohort:
Viktoriia Shcherba, Kyiv, now entering Harris School, University of Chicago, to study economic and political reconstruction.
Dmytro Semykras, Graz, Austria, to develop his career as a pianist. Here is one recent performance.
Please do note there is some “rationing of cohorts,” so some recent winners are not listed but next time will be. And those working on talent issues will (in due time) end up in their own cohort.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Stuart Buck offers a partial history of meta-science.
2. Heidi Williams in WaPo on speeding up science funding.
3. Two economists from Argentina discuss the electoral results (in Spanish).
4. “Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are buying up thousands of the high-performance Nvidia chips crucial for building artificial intelligence software, joining a global AI arms race that is squeezing the supply of Silicon Valley’s hottest commodity.” (FT) China is involved too.
The talks from the Civic Future conference on the Great Stagnation
From my email, from Civic Future:
We held our inaugural annual conference The Great Stagnation Summit 2023 last month at the University of Cambridge. Well, you can now watch and listen to videos of the panel discussions on our YouTube channel. We have also made the discussion transcripts available, which you can read using the links below or on the summit page.
Progress: Have we run out of road? – Tyler Cowen (keynote), David Edgerton, Sam Bowman, Diane Coyle Video / Transcript
Rekindling Britain’s economic flame – Lord Sainsbury, Andy Haldane, Anton Howes, Deirdre McCloskey, Tim Besley Video / Transcript
Progress on trial – Aria Babu, Nicholas Boys Smith, Matt Ridley, Sam Richards, Inaya Folarin Iman Video / Transcript
How to be good stewards of progress – James Phillips, Ben Reinhardt, Stian Westlake, Rachel Wolf, Munira Mirza Video / Transcript
Unlocking the Potential – Matt Clifford, Logan Graham, Saffron Huang, Marc Warner, John Thornhill Video / Transcript
Thursday assorted links
Saturday assorted links
1. Interview with David Garrow. I found this a fascinating piece, one of the best of the year. But it says as much about Garrow as Obama — how you can be that much of a grump? How much “authenticity” do you expect from a president anyway?
2. Does surname diversity imply more innovation?
3. Morris Chang profile (NYT).
4. The distribution of five-star hotels in India.
5. It is great to see Ben Casnocha again, here is his account of when we met in 2006 (“that was then, this is now”).
6. Sílvia Pérez Cruz i Cástor Pérez. And one more.
My views on the UFO hearings
I found them very interesting to watch, and wrote my last Bloomberg column on them. Here is one excerpt:
I do not think that the US government has the remains of alien spacecraft, for example, including some alien bodies, as claimed by retired Air Force Major David Grusch. But the rest of the evidence was presented in a suitably serious and persuasive manner. It is clear, at least to me, that there is no conspiracy, and the US government is itself puzzled by the data about unidentified anomalous phenomena.
As for the more serious claims:
Members of Congress, to the extent they desire, have independent access to military and intelligence sources. They also have political ambitions, if only to be reelected. So the mere fact of their participation in these hearings shows that UFOs/UAPs are now being taken seriously as an issue.
The Pentagon issued a statement claiming it holds no alien bodies, but it did nothing to contradict the statements of [Ryan] Graves (or others with similar claims, outside the hearings). More broadly, there have been no signs of anyone with eyewitness experience asserting that Graves and the other pilots are unreliable.
As is so often the case, the most notable events are those that did not happen. The most serious claims from the hearings survived unscathed: those about inexplicable phenomena and possible national-security threats, not the hypotheses about alien craft or visits.
And to conclude:
I suspect that, from here on out, this topic will become more popular — and somewhat less respectable. A few years ago, UAPs were an issue on which a few people “in the know” could speculate, secure in the knowledge they weren’t going to receive much publicity or pushback. As the chatter increases, the issue will become more prominent, but at the same time a lot of smart observers will dismiss the whole thing because they heard that someone testified before Congress about seeing dead aliens.
I am well aware that many people may conclude that some US officials, or some parts of the US government, have gone absolutely crazy. But even under that dismissive interpretation, it is likely that there will be further surprises.
I thank commenter Naveen for the point about declining respectability. A broader question — which I will continue to ponder — is why it is the United States that held these hearings, rather than other nations (NB: I hope you don’t fall for that Twitter map suggesting that UAP sighting are mainly an Anglo phenomenon).