Results for “assorted links”

5615 found

1. Museum Selfie-Takers Are Causing Damage by Backing Into Artworks.

2. New Zealand is now falling behind much of Eastern Europe.

3. Dan Schulz reading list.

4. More coverage of Bukele.  Good piece.

5. How religious is Iran these days?

6. Paul Bloom on how to be a good podcast guest.

7. Peter Thiel talk at Harvard.  Best part on Christianity and the Woke starts at about 28:00.

1. YouTube interview with Brad Mehldau.  Very good.

2. How much can embryonic selection boost IQ?

3. Ukraine drone update.  And Master and Margarita movie is a big hit in Russia (NYT).  Do you recall the final scene of the novel?

4. Cowen’s Second Law.  Good thing there is a replication crisis.

5. Groq — blinding speed, I say bullet chess for LLMs!  Here is one possible explanation for the speed.

6. Drone calculates GPS coordinates without a signal?

1. More Joe Henrich on cousin marriage.

2. Dating across languages, using AI (NYT).

3. The Hugo is no longer a legitimate award (NYT).

4. Dan Schulz on how to boot up in classical music (which is one of the world’s greatest gifts to you, and essentially free).

5. “The Horse Association of America was created to fight the rise of the tractor.“

1. Dutch waterworks.

2. Pseudo-currencies in Argentina.

3. Rock’em, sock’em robots.

4. Recommendations for understanding Eastern and Central Europe.

5. Ross D. on Ukraine aid (NYT).

6. BYD will set up an EV factory in northern Mexico.  I am curious to see the policy response to that one.

1. Get feedback on your podcast (not to mention your date!) in real time.

2. “Rare” earths are suddenly not so rare in Wyoming (WSJ).  “Never underestimate the elasticity of supply!”

3. Inside a prison in El Salvador.  And The Telegraph on Bukele.

4. Bad to be bullied.

5. Political donations crowd out charitable donations.

6. Sora and Bishop Berkeley.

7. Marius Schwartz podcast (with transcript) on the Robinson-Patman Act, which sadly is being resurrected by the FTC.

1. Steph Curry full court tunnel shot.

2. Thinking about fire risk (NYT).

3. FTC upset at Coke and Pepsi for offering too-low prices to Walmart.

4. A recent survey on sex differences in intelligence, and here.

5. Markets in everything pay 42k to streak at the Super Bowl.

6. The NYC Print Fair (NYT).

7. Carlson (not Carlsen!) prefers the Russian grocery store.  And he doesn’t like U.S. dollar stores either.

8. Zvi on Gemini.

1. Profile of Samotsvety forecasting team.

2. Cornered markets in everything: “An auction of the tattooed skin of an Austrian performance artist has been cancelled after all 12 pieces were bought by a collector for “a seven-figure sum” ahead of the event.”

3. Some dating bounties are now at 100k (NYT).  “He is polyamorous now, so the bounty will be paid out to the person who introduces him to his long-term primary partner.”

4. Good Henry Farrell post about Hayek and Mill and women and game theory.

5. Ross D.: “Only elites can keep populism alive.” (NYT)

6. “One study by the German Economic Institute (IW) found the army had been underfunded relative to Nato standards by at least €394bn between 1990 and the early 2020s.” (FT)

1. Is a free market revolution coming to Latin America?

2. The future of land grant universities.

3. A new approach to measuring land use regulation.

4. Andy Matuschak on Apple Vision Pro.

5. Should every country build its own LLM?

6. The story of BYD (NYT).

1. Speculative speculations on how consciousness emerges.

2. The new, forthcoming Neal Stephenson.

3. What Michael Nielsen suggests I ask him.

4. Cousins are disappearing.  I have (had?) four of them?

5. “People in the meeting later told others in frustration that his winding process and irritability were making it more difficult to reach decisions about the border.”  Brutal throughout.

6. Argentina’s political gender gap is widest among young people.

7. Four different Super Bowl ads incorporated UFO themes.  As I once heard from a member of the U.S. military: “Ten years from now, everyone will believe in either demons or aliens.”

1. Lookism in sentencing decisions.

2. An autonomous vehicle was set on fire by a crowd in San Francisco.  In some alternate universe, a small drone would emerge from the burning vehicle and strike them all down.

3. Have you noticed that Michelle Obama was, less than 24 hours ago, up to #3 in the betting markets for likelihood of being the next U.S. President?  She was at about 7%.  Now it is Gavin Newsom who is #3 at about ten percent.  At the same time, the NYT Editorial page, other MSM sources, and Hillary Clinton all seem to be turning on Biden, on the issue of age of course.  I would not place too much emphasis on that seven percent number, or that ten percent number, as I suspect there is private information at work here — either private information that Biden is toast, or private information that he isn’t toast.  The problem is I don’t know which.  Still, this is a live issue.

It is also a good test of public intellectuals.  Obviously, the issue is not just about Biden’s current competency (which I cannot judge — articulateness is overrated!), but also a) how the public perceives him, b) how his staff and other countries perceive him, and c) how matters will be four to five years from now, when he is still President, if he is still President.  (Start by reading Shakespeare on political leadership.)  If you’re defending Biden, for reasons related to your expected value calculations, I hope at least you are being honest with yourself about your Straussianism here.  But please do add to your calculations the notion that the American public is pretty fed up with this kind of response from our mainstream political institutions.

One possible lesson here is that our political establishment really cannot coordinate on making needed changes.  The other possible lesson is that they can.  I am prepared for Bayesian updates, as my status quo assessments by necessity will be disturbed.

4. Susie Essman is a comic genius (NYT).

5. A three-minute clip on how various top chess players walk into a tournament entrance.  Can you guess who shows up last?

1. Liverpool man who inherited £100,000 lets 12 strangers give the money away.

2. Jonathan Eaton, RIP.  And more on his work in trade economics.

3. ACX grants from Astral Codex.  And new African School of Economics coming in Zanzibar.

4. The Monk and the Gun is a fun Bhutanese movie about the foundations of democracy (and markets).

5. Using AI to campaign and deliver your victory speech, while in jail.

6. Another 2014 post on Putin: “Putin is signaling to the Russian economy that it needs to get used to some fairly serious conditions of siege, and food is of course the most important of all commodities. Why initiate such a move now if you are expecting decades of peace and harmony?”

7. John Bruton, RIP (NYT, he negotiated peace with Northern Ireland and also set the corporate income tax rate low in Ireland and designed the referendum that overturned the country’s ban on divorce).

8. Ad for temporary co-host for Planet Money on NPR.

1. NBA In-Season Tournament renamed ‘NBA Cup’ with Emirates as a sponsor.

2. “We instruct GPT to make risk, time, social, and food decisions and measure how rational these decisions are. We show that GPT’s decisions are mostly rational and even score higher than human decisions.”  Link here.

3. My old post on Putin as a reader of history.  And my 2014 post on modeling Putin.

4. You can’t understand contemporary culture without pondering the notion of mental illness (I’m on Larry David’s side here).

5. California’s attempt to strangle AI.

6. “After adjusting for publication selection bias, the median probability of the presence of an effect decreased from 99.9% to 29.7% in economics.” Link here.

7. Liberalismo a la madrileña, a new book.

8. “Anchovy sex is a force of nature.”  And is there an “orgasm gap” (with humans)?  And which groups does it favor?

9. Seiji Ozawa, RIP (NYT).

1. “Conservatives share a terrible epistemological ecosystem, where false claims go viral much more often.”

2. How to model the Putin interview.

3. What really happened with the Hugo Awards?

4. In this one study, wage subsidies have a pass-through rate of about 28%.

5. When it comes to Ontario, the world is waking up.

6. Bard is now Gemini.  And a quick overview here.  And here is Zvi on Gemini.  And Ethan Mollick.

1. “That work suggested it was not how many times a word was repeated that predicted whether Roy’s son learned it early, but whether it was uttered in an unusual spot in the house, a surprising time or in a distinctive linguistic context.”  Link here.

2. Neruda update (New Yorker).  The poor Tamil maid.

3. Positive rather than adverse selection into life insurance.

4. Deutsche Bahn is still using Windows 3.11 (auf deutsch).

5. The Norwegian Century is indeed upon us (in Norwegian).

6. Matt Yglesias “Tourism is good, actually” ($$).

7. Krugman, Wells, and the economics of Taylor Swift.

1. “…we demonstrate that when an organism needs to adapt to a multitude of environmental variables, division of labor emerges as the only viable evolutionary strategy.”

2. How is AI helping ornithology?

3. Vesuvius Challenge Prize awarded, we can read the first scroll.  And a background Bloomberg piece.

4. Seafood as a resilient food solution after a nuclear war.

5. Nabeel Qureshi on whether there is a Moore’s Law for intelligence: “The shocking implication of what we have seen in this piece so far is that there may be no great, transformative breakthroughs needed to get to the critical inflection point. We already have the ingredients. As Ilya Sutskever likes to say, “the machine just wants to learn” – data, compute, and the right algorithms result in intelligence of a particular kind, and more of those inputs results in more intelligence as an output!”

6. What is Jordan Peterson doing in his new shows?

7. Enceladus questions.