Results for “YouTube”
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The disinflation as American triumph

That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, score one for the Quantity Theory as well, here is one excerpt:

Enter the notion of “credibility.” A long-standing tradition in macroeconomics, sometimes called rational expectations, suggests that a truly credible central bank can lower inflation rates without a recession. If the central bank announces a lower inflation target, and most people believe the central bank, wages and prices adjust in rough sync with demand. All nominal variables move upward at a slower pace, markets continue to clear, and the economy keeps chugging along. Because individuals in markets believe the disinflation process is for real, they are willing to act in accordance with it in their pricing and wage-demand decisions.

Although rational expectations theory has undergirded several Nobel Prizes (see Robert E. Lucas and Thomas Sargent, for example), most mainstream economists these days do not believe in it as a general approach. The critics might be behavioral economists who scorn the notion that individuals are rational in their market decisions, or they might believe that full credibility is rarely if ever present. After all, do we not live in an age of low trust and mixed quality governance? Over the last year, for instance, I have been party to numerous conversations suggesting the Fed will be afraid to pursue disinflation out of fear of inducing a recession and indirectly electing Donald Trump as president.

And yet it seems the credibility has been there, and so we can give plaudits to various parts of the federal government, including President Biden, for supporting Powell and the Fed. At no point did the president intervene to bash the central bank or send a mixed message, and so the disinflation had implicit stamps of approval from majorities in both parties. It is often the job of Congress to complain, but there were no serious moves made against the independence of the Fed, even if Elizabeth Warren and a few others squawked.

As for the commentariat, a diverse array of economists ranging from the Keynesian Paul Krugman to many conservative economists recognized that rate increases and disinflation were necessary and had to be done with promptness and fortitude. And so credibility reigned.

Granted, the rational expectations view is not always correct — and a recession somewhere down the road isn’t out of the question — but at least in this instance America pulled together and did the job. This sequence of events, which is continuing, should serve as a lesson to those predicting either the decline of America or the creeping polarization and paralysis of our politics. The disinflation can serve as Exhibit A for American optimism and a demonstration that we are still capable of making our own future.

Can the UK and EU pull off the same?

Thursday assorted links

1. A critical history of the AI safety movement.

2. Richard Hanania on class-based affirmative action.

3. James J. Lee comment on the new Greg Clark results.

4. Emily Wilson on different Iliad translations, and her new one (NYT).

5. What happened to the global corporate tax rate deal?

6. People who make money running YouTube channels showing how much they lose by playing slot machines (WSJ).

Sunday assorted links

1. Most of the claims in this Evgeny Morozov NYT Op-Ed are wrong (for a start, he doesn’t realize that current public libraries are largely empty), but it makes the interesting point that AI represents the fulfillment of a neoliberal vision, as on that turf government simply cannot keep up.  Also from NYT here is Rabbi Wolpe, much better and saner than BAP and a lot of the other stuff people are looking to.

2. The weirdest political video I ever have seen? See #7 for background!

3. They are solving for the new no affirmative action equilibrium.

4. Massive phosphate rock deposit discovered in Norway. Julian Simon ascendant.

5. Why Would Anyone Collect 150 John Deere Lawn Tractors? Why not I say!?

6. Folsom Prison Blues (instrumental).

7. Niall Ferguson on the 17th century (Bloomberg). Close to my own views.

Saturday assorted links

1. Janan Ganesh on the Americanisation of Britain (FT).

2. “You Hurt My Feelings” is a good Hansonian movie about how most people are mediocre at their jobs, and how society deals with that fact, and what happens when those protective mechanisms break down.  The starring role of Julia Louis-Dreyfus also makes for good meta-commentary on Seinfeld, a show where the characters speak the brutal, honest truth to each other.

3. Austin Vernon update on geothermal.

4. The world’s largest gas station has 120 pumps.

5. TikTok will enter book publishing? (NYT)

6. The “hotbedding” culture that is Australia? (MIE)

Thursday assorted links

1. Education vs. cohort control.

2. Economics of generic medicines.

3. Cecilia Rouse is the new president of Brookings.

4. Oregon school performance is cratering.

5. The oldest known customer complaint?

6. How much does IQ explain why liberals are overrepresented in sociology?

7. Not my view, sad! I would opt for Aztec UFOs, with amates.

8. This link includes a Patrick Collison and Lant Pritchett dialogue.

Korean markets in everything

One restaurant in Seoul rose to notoriety after “politely declining” people over 49 (on the basis men of that age might harass female staff), while in 2021, a camping ground in Jeju sparked heated debate with a notice saying it did not accept reservations from people aged 40 or above. Citing a desire to keep noise and alcohol use to a minimum, it stated a preference for women in their 20s and 30s.

Other zones are even more niche.

Among those to have caused a stir on social media are a cafe in Seoul that in 2018 declared itself a “no-rapper zone,” a “no-YouTuber zone” and even a “no-professor zone”.

Here is the full story, via Arpit Gupta.

When should you debate in oral public forums?

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

As a general rule, one should not debate publicly with conspiracy theorists. Some conspiracies may be true and should not be dismissed out of hand. But any discussion needs to start by demanding the best available documented evidence, and then subjecting it to rigorous scrutiny. This is very often impossible to do in a public debate, where the unverified anecdote is elevated and methodological issues are obscured or unexamined. Furthermore, it takes more time to rebut a charge than to level it, and in the meantime the rebutter has no choice but to repeat some of the other side’s talking points.

Written exchange, with lags and third-party verification and evaluation, is often best for technical issues.  Don’t let the other side claim the mantle of “those who are willing to debate.”  In fact they are very often not willing to engage in the most appropriate kinds of debate.

In general, I am a big fan of YouTube, including for its educational value.  But — the debate issue aside — it is very often misleading on exactly these same technical issues.  Someone drones on and on with some kind of mesmerizing long story…except a lot of it isn’t true, and there is no real rebuttal.  Print culture is these days extremely underrated.  LLMs are often better yet, you can just ask them for more, or for an alternative point of view.

My Conversation with Noam Chomsky

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Noam Chomsky joins Tyler to discuss why Noam and Wilhelm von Humboldt have similar views on language and liberty, good and bad evolutionary approaches to language, what he thinks Stephen Wolfram gets wrong about LLMs, whether he’s optimistic about the future, what he thinks of Thomas Schelling, the legacy of the 1960s-era left libertarians, the development trajectories of Nicaragua and Cuba, why he still answers every email, what he’s been most wrong about, and more.

I would stress there is no representative sample from this discussion, so any excerpt will not give you a decent sense of the dialogue as a whole.  Read the whole thing, if you dare!  Here is one squib, in fact it is the opener, after which we ranged far and wide:

COWEN: If I think of your thought, and I compare it to the thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt, what’s the common ontological element in both of your thoughts that leads you to more or less agree on both language and liberty?

CHOMSKY: Von Humboldt was, first of all, a great linguist who recognized some fundamental principles of language which were rare at the time and are only beginning to be understood. But in the social and political domain, he was not only the founder of the modern research university, but also one of the founders of classical liberalism.

His fundamental principle — as he said, it’s actually an epigram for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty — is that the fundamental right of every person is to be free from external illegitimate constraints, free to inquire, to create, to pursue their own interests and concerns without arbitrary authority of any sort restricting or limiting them.

COWEN: Now, you’ve argued that Humboldt was a Platonist of some kind, that he viewed learning as some notion of reminiscence. Are you, in the same regard, also a Platonist?

CHOMSKY: Leibniz pointed out that Plato’s theory of reminiscence was basically correct, but it had to be purged of the error of reminiscence — in other words, not an earlier life, but rather something intrinsic to our nature. Leibniz couldn’t have proceeded as we can today, but now we would say something that has evolved and has become intrinsic to our nature. For people like Humboldt, what was crucial to our nature was what is sometimes called the instinct for freedom. Basic, fundamental human property should lie at the basis of our social and economic reasoning.

It’s also the critical property of human language and thought, as was recognized in the early Scientific Revolution — Galileo, Leibniz — a little later, people like Humboldt in the Romantic era. The fundamental property of human language is this unique capacity to create, unboundedly, many new thoughts in our minds, and even to be able to convey to others who have no access to our minds their innermost workings. Galileo himself thought the alphabet was the most spectacular of human inventions because it provided a means to carry out this miracle.

Humboldt’s formulation was that language enables language and thought, which were always pretty much identified. Language enables what he called infinite use of finite means. We have a finite system. We make unbounded use of it. Those conceptions weren’t very well understood until the mid-20th century with the development of the theory of computation by Kurt GödelAlan Turing, and other great mathematicians, 1930s and ’40s. But now the concept of finite means that provide infinite scope is quite well understood. In fact, everyone has it in their laptop by now.

COWEN: Was it the distinction between natural and artificial language that led Rousseau astray on politics?

I will say that I am very glad I undertook this endeavor.

Friday assorted links

1. Davis Kedrosky defends Jared Diamond, a good piece.

2. Is “war-related” a “factor” in financial market returns?

3. Global inequality in well-being has decreased along many dimensions.

4. Overview of the new ARPA-H.

5. “WWSS?”  Or, “What would Singapore say?”  You don’t have to agree, but the question is usually worth asking.  Here is Singapore on LLMs.  And if you don’t already know it — I covered it years ago — here is one of my favorite videos, namely Singapore Complaints Choir.

Emergent Ventures winners, 26th cohort

Winston Iskandar, 16, Manhattan Beach, CA, an app for children’s literacy and general career development. Winston also has had his piano debut at Carnegie Hall.

ComplyAI, Dheekshita Kumar and Neha Gaonkar, Chicago and NYC, to build an AI service to speed the process of permit application at local and state governments.

Avi Schiffman and InternetActivism, “leading the digital front of humanitarianism.”  Avi is a repeat winner.

Jarett Cameron Dewbury, Ontario, and Cambridge MA, General career support, AI and biomedicine, including for the study of environmental enteric dysfunction.  Here is his Twitter.

Ian Cheshire, Wallingford, Pennsylvania, high school sophomore, general career support, tech, start-ups, and also income-sharing agreements.

Beyzamur Arican Dinc, psychology Ph.D student at UCSB, regulation of emotional dyads in relationships and marriages, from Istanbul.

Ariana Pineda, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern. To attend a biology conference in Prospera, Honduras.

Satvik Agnihotri, high school, NYC area, to visit the Bay Area for a summer, study logistics, and general career development.

Michael Loftus, Ann Arbor, for a neuro tech hacker house, connected to Myelin Group.

Keir Bradwell, Cambridge, UK, Political Thought and Intellectual History Masters student, to visit the U.S. to study Mancur Olson and Judith Shklar, and also to visit GMU.

Vaneeza Moosa, Ontario, incoming at University of Calgary, “Developing new therapies for malignant pleural mesothelioma using epigenetic regulators to enhance tumor growth and anti-tumor immunity with radiation therapy.”

Ashley Mehra, Yale Law School, background in classics, general career development and for eventual start-up plans.

An important project not yet ready to be announced, United Kingdom.

Jennifer Tsai, Waterloo, Ontario and Geneva (temporarily), molecular and computational neuroscience, to study in Gregoire Courtine’s lab.

Asher Parker Sartori, Belmont, Massachusetts, working with Nina Khera (previous EV winner), summer meet-up/conference for young bio people in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Nima Pourjafar, 17, starting this fall at Waterloo, Ontario.  For general career development, interested in apps, programming, economics, solutions to social problems.

Karina, 17, sophomore in high school, neuroscience, optics, and light, Bellevue, Washington.

Sana Raisfirooz, Ontario, to study bioelectronics at Berkeley.

James Hill-Khurana (left off an earlier 2022 list by mistake), Waterloo, Ontario, “A new development environment for digital (chip) design, and accompanying machine learning models.”

Ukraine winners

Tetiana Shafran, Kyiv, piano, try this video or here are more.  I was very impressed.

Volodymyr Lapin, London, Ukraine, general career development in venture capital for Ukraine.