Results for “from the comments” 1938 found
Claims about Iran (from the comments)
Sure on non-profit university board motives (from the comments)
The problem for the board of Harvard is going to be the problem for most any elite institution – it is the sort of position that is used as a prize for status hierarchies among the folks who already have everything.
This means that concerns for the board are overwhelmingly going to personal brand management. And the constituency that matters will not be the public, Harvard grads, or even in the Harvard professorate. It will be the folks who might be able to snub millionaires and disinvite them from the finer things in life.
And once you get into such situations, be they left wing or right wing, you have a very hard time avoiding signaling spirals. After all, there are plenty of folks who want the social cachet of these positions and an effective cudgel to get it will always be to signify greater loyalty to “the cause” than the current incumbents. Which means that the board will be good at playing status games and terrified of enforcing standards in a way that might make them look bad.
The key reason behind a huge amount of elite failure, be it in the Catholic Church, Harvard, the ACLU, or the Republican Party is that the normal feedbacks cease mattering as much as the feedbacks from other folks at the top. And that very rarely reflects mundane practical concerns, let alone popular norms.
Here is the link, though not on the whole worth threading through.
From the comments, what will happen in New Zealand edition?
Libertarian reform isn’t at the top of the headlines in New Zealand, but there are a few things you might expect in that direction:
– Reforming pharmaceutical approvals so products with approval in two other trusted peer countries get automatic approval in NZ. Relevant because of the relatively slow approval time for Covid-19 vaccine in NZ over the pandemic.
– modest cuts in the public service
– adjusting income tax brackets for the last 2 years of inflation (unlike the US, these are not customarily adjusted each year)
– Liberalization of urban development in city fringe areas
– Re-introduction of “partnership schools”, akin to charter schools in the USIt should be re-iterated that the libertarian coalition partner, Act, are very much a junior coalition partner, and it’s unclear how much leverage they have. Dust should settle over the next 2-8 weeks. The National Party will likely nix any Act policy which they worry could risk support of more centrist voters.
That is from Ben Smith. For the interested, here is some New Zealand election coverage.
From the comments, on the new Meta smart glasses
There is clearly a lot of negative emotional reactivity regarding these glasses going on here, but it’s worth thinking about the implications, both positive and negative.
1. They clearly can be built with current technology. Therefore, assuming they are useful, they will be built.
2. It clearly looks like they provide a much superior hands-free experience for smart phone operation. I see both benefits and issues that could go along with this, but need to note that anything that keeps drivers from fumbling with their phones has potential positive safety implications.
3. They are a potential boon to people with disabilities. The glasses can provide a unified experience that can enable anyone who has difficulty manipulating a computer mouse, phone or other handheld device to get information quickly and efficiently.
4. The same applies to people who are in the early stages of dementia. Given an accompanying personal database of photos of friends and loved ones, the visual prompts from the glasses can help a person with failing memory and mental faculties.
5. The glasses would be similarly useful to people in professions that require them to interact with very large numbers of other people, such as clergymen, managers, politicians and even retail store workers. The ability to rapidly call up names and information about someone that you’ve met only once four years ago is not necessarily a bad thing.
6. I think it inevitable that law enforcement agencies are going to be potentially huge customers of this. For example, given current security trends, I think that the TSA will be buying a boatload of these.
7. The same obviously applies to the military.
It’s going to be interesting.
That is from Phil C.
From the comments, on OWS and PEPFAR
There is somewhat of an intellectual void in Republican leadership over the past 20 years. Occasionally that void creates space for a uniquely good idea that doesn’t align too well with ideology. When the Democrats are in charge, there are plenty of mainstream Democratic ideas to fill up the agenda, so nothing too unusual happens.
The low ideological alignment also explains why these ideas are underrated later, because they have no deep well of partisans to promote their successes.
That is from Kevin.
From the comments, space daddy edition
Benny Lava
2. Personal quibble but I hate the direct links to twitter because I can’t read the comments since I don’t have an account. Wish there was a better system to post threads from twitter.
By far the easiest way to handle this is to get an account with twitter.
Anonymous
If you want to use their service, you should probably get an account. They’re free.
Benny Lava
That is precisely the problem. I don’t want to use their service.
Anonymous
You seem to want to use their service. You want the information contained there, as per your 13:33:30 post.
Reason
He’s big sads that space daddy took away his Lefty playground.
Here is the link to the debate.
On white flight (from the comments)
Are whites fleeing from Asian-heavy California public schools? One recent paper suggested maybe so, but abc raises some doubts:
I don’t want to dismiss the paper out of hand, as I have seen time and again the challenges communities face both in and outside of the school setting in accommodating demographic change.
However, I don’t think the headline result in this paper is particularly credible. First, there isn’t a well-articulated research question to guide the choice of regression. Second, the authors implicitly rely on the “an instrument is always better” fallacy rather than explaining why their instrument yields more reliable estimates than naive OLS for the (unstated) question of interest. Taken together, the paper is undergrad-thesis level material elevated only by a click bait topic and result. If we want to make bold claims about White animosity towards Asians (a claim that also constructive of such animosity and counter-animosity from Asians towards Whites) we should demand substantive evidence. This paper does not present such evidence.
Some key takeaways:
(1) The authors note that a mechanical housing market replacement would suggest a one-for-one effect, but say that their -1.47 effect is above that threshold. However, if we check the confidence interval using a conservative 1.96 critical value and the estimated standard error of the coefficient estimate, we have -1.47 + 1.96*0.268 = -0.96 so that we are not statistically significantly different from -1 by this measure.
(2) The naive OLS estimate in high-SES regions is -0.6, well below the fixed enrollment effect of -1. The authors speculate that OLS may be biased downward because the error term include unmeasured district quality changes that draw in both Asians and Whites. (Note such a correlation only operates if enrollment is not capped, so inconsistent with that model.) The authors don’t document any of these omitted variable issues, however, and just assert that their instrument will be better.
(3) Authors do not substantively engage issues with their IV. First, the IV doesn’t account for changes in composition of immigrants over time (increasing wealth and education of Asian arrivals relative to earlier waves) nor does it account for movement of second-generation Asian families. If there is no omitted variable bias but the instrumented entry is lower than the actual entry, then mechanically the coefficient will have to be higher to offset this effect and restore least-squares minimization.
(4) The instrumented Asian inflows coefficient could pick up effects from Asian-agglomeration effects. A one unit increase in Asian enrollment from pure fixed-pattern immigration flows made lead to shifts of previously settled Asians or shift the direction of subsequent immigration. For example, a settled Korean in Riverside who sees large increases in Korean population in Orange County may see OC as being more attractive than before and move into the area. This induced shift may be only partially captured by the first-stage prediction, leaving the 2nd stage coefficient of interest to increase in magnitude.
(5) Various sensitivities lead to surprising results. First, the instrument behaves poorly in some subsamples, e.g. the bottom-half of the SES scale. Why should we believe an instrument in one data subset when it plainly fails in the complement? Second, the instrument is insignificant in the Bottom Tercile of the above-median SES group (appendix table 2). Third, the IV estimate is only -0.841 in the top tercile of the above-median SES group, again below the key -1 threshold if enrollment caps are binding. Taken together, are we to think that we can identify white flight using this instrument only for the 66.6th to 83.3th percentile bucket?
(6) There’s just a big background trend issue that one has to worry about here. The theory of white flight begs the question of “flight to where?” However if we just look at Appendix Figure 2 during this time period there is a big drop in total White enrollment (and a small decline in Black enrollment) while Asian and Hispanic enrollment see big increases. To what extent are we just finding that aging out of whites in high-SES regions is being replaced disproportionately by Asians?
(7) A couple other wrinkles: how are mixed-race students handled? how would demographic shifts in total enrollment by district affect the 1-to-1 threshold? If child population is shrinking over time (e.g. because families are leaving CA, children per family is declining) then normal churn would predict more than 1-to-1 replacement of new-cohort race versus previous-cohort race.
So perhaps the right answer is “no”?
Does Germany need more polarization? (from the comments)
My perception is that in Germany most major political decisions are not on the ballot: migration, nuclear energy, international, alliances, emission reduction policies to name but a few examples. Whereas people in the Americas worry about polarization, I would argue that Germany’s problem is the opposite. Compared to the historical average German politics is too tame and not polarized enough. Polarized debates were much more endemic when the country debated the Nato Doppelbeschluss, the Kohl era (re-unification) or the Adenauer era (West alliance, later the failed project of a European army). The counterfactual in many of these cases would have been different had the other party been in power. The same is not true for the Merkel era. The word ‘Alternative’ derives from her suggesting that her Euro-crisis management was without alternative. If I may offer one conjecture as to why this is happening, I would argue that the degree of elite convergence is greater than in the Americas. The opinion spectrum covered by public intellectuals is just so much smaller. And with trade unions and the church in decline so is the opinion spectrum covered by the country’s leading non-governmental institutions. (The treatment of that party’s very different initial leadership in the mid 2010’s illustrates this point.) So, in short, my (and many people’s) argument is that as in the Hotelling model ideological conformity of the elites has created the space for a non-ideologically aligned entrant. Naturally, this entrant is more extreme than a more conservative version of the Christian Democrats (and I tend to think that this is so because Christianity forbids you to go down certain tempting, yet inhumane rabbit holes but that is for another day) and of lesser quality because given the current intellectual climate the new party has trouble recruiting elites. Needless to say, you should not vote for this party. But I understand why it exists.
That is from “C.”
From the Comments
The context is that human challenge trials were “ethically fraught” but, Sure writes:
…I think we had more than a few instances in history where restricting movement, shuttering houses of worship, and stratifying the economy into favored and disfavored sectors was considered ethically fraught.
I mean we know that limiting visitation to old folks shortens their lives. We know that child abuse becomes harder to find the fewer the number of folks who lay eyes on them each day. We know that initimate partner violence increases when the housing market gets frozen. And we know that suicides crest when businesses go under.
Yet no such epistemic humility and wariness followed with public health recommendations to be tried on a scale reserved hitherto for literal wars and genocides. And we blindly went ahead full speed.
Or consider even the better defined but wildly more mundane issue: proof of vaccination. For decades health ethicists told us that merely revealing a patient’s name, let alone which medications they have taken, was an unconscionable ethical violation. One which we instituted balkanized medical systems to manage and where the cost has been literal lives lost as we have had untold numbers of patients fall through the cracks thanks to duplicate profiles, failure of providers to communicate, and of course scads and scads of useful data locked away from effective statistical analysis that could spot patterns of medical error.
Yet when the powers that be decided that we needed vaccine passports so we could enjoy dining again? Well, every waiter in the country becomes a safe repository of PHI.
No formal study. No deliberations. Precious little if any publications.
And even then, it went only for what was the most expedient option for the enlightened. No ability to get an antibody titer card for medical equivalence. No ability to substitute PCR results with a physician evaluation of recent disease recovery.
Professional medical ethics are bogus. There is no consistency and the entire profession serves to pander to the prejudices of the educated.
From the comments, on AI safety
This is from Richard Ngo, who works on the governance team at OpenAI:
A few points:
1. I agree that the alignment community has generally been remiss in not trying hard enough to clarify the arguments in more formal papers.
2. The only peer-reviewed paper making the case for AI risk that I know of is: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aaai.12064. Though note that my paper (the second you linked) is currently under review at a top ML conference.
3. I don’t think that a formal model would shed much light here. My goal in writing my paper was to establish misaligned power-seeking AGI as a credible scientific hypothesis; I think that most who think it’s credible would then agree that investigating it further should be a key priority, whether or not their credences are more like 10% or more like 90%.
From this batch of comments. Here is Richard on Twitter.
On a land tax, from the comments
A land tax in its purest form will never survive contact with political reality. To implement it you have to tell people that own their own homes that they are in fact renting them from the government, and at rates which depend on how much other people covet their land. This may be economically incorrect but it is how opposition will play out.
Furthermore, determining land values as distinct from property values in highly built-up areas with strong planning constraints (e.g. the UK) is an exercise in guesswork. You cannot realistically disentangle the value of the land from the actual and likely permissions on that land. The valuation process will be intensely political, prone to corruption, and any modelling easily manipulated by how exemplars are chosen. In the UK at least it would be a bloodbath.
That is from Sonofid. And from dan1111:
So much hand wringing over NYC and San Francisco, and treating this as the standard “urban” case.
Meanwhile, 90% of US cities feature depressed urban cores with very cheap, under-used land. Maybe figuring out how to make more US cities desirable is the low hanging fruit? And there is plenty of comparative study that can be done, since some cities have been better at rebounding than others.
On censorship of LLM models, from the comments
IMO, censorship is a harder task than you think.
It’s quite hard to restrict the output of general purpose, generative, black box algorithms. With a search engine, the full output is known (the set of all pages that have been crawled), so it’s fairly easy to be confident that you have fully censored a topic.
LLMs have an effectively unbounded output space. They can produce output that is surprising even to their creators.
Censoring via limiting the training data is hard because algorithms could synthesize an “offensive” output by combining multiple outputs that are ok on their own.
Adding an extra filter layer to censor is hard as well Look at all the trouble chatGPT has had with this. Users have repeatedly found ways around the dumb limitations on certain topics.
Also, China censors in an agile fashion. A topic that was fine yesterday will suddenly disappear if there was a controversy about it. That’s going to be hard to achieve given the nature of these algorithms.
That is from dan1111. To the extent that is true, the West is sitting on a huge propaganda and communications victory over China. This is not being discussed enough.
On publication bias in economics, from the comments
I’m not surprised by this finding.
Economics has a much higher bar for identification and often relies on observational data, so there are always going to be many possible problems with an empirical exercise that could be used as justification to turn down a paper. In this environment it becomes extremely important to have stars in your regression table to avoid one of these justifications being seized on as the damning explanation for why your test is no good.
Procedurally, what economists like to see is a paper that tests the predictions of a well-specified theory and comes back with statistically significant results in every single case plus a smattering of increasingly arbitrary robustness tests that can be found in the appendix. In many cases the theory itself is one that appeals conceptually to one or more of the referees (i.e. is consistent with their prior work) which further makes a null finding hard to sell.
That is from Infovores.
From the comments, on CDC reform
These are the word of commentator Sure:
The reasons you cannot change the CDC have little to do with remote work the major issues are:
1. The people who staff the place could either make a lot more money doing something else or they believe they could. This means that they selected into working here and did so precisely because they like some combination of the present culture and the mission as presently understood. Asking them to change is going to be treated as something tantamount to taking a major pay cut at best.
2. It is overrun with academics. The director of NIOSH has 5 advanced degrees. And something like half the upper leadership has at least two runs through the academic gauntlet (granted the MPH is vastly easier than the MD or PhD) and pretty much all of them have reasonable output of academic papers. Many look at the CDC as complementary to an academic career and even the lifers have CVs at least compatible with going academic. This means a lot of the work product and setup is geared more toward publication, conference presentation, and deliberative work rather than rapid response.
3. The place has gone monocultural. Talking about the Obama era largely means talking about the old dinosaurs who retired out as the times changed. Since 2015, their political donations have been 99.94% to Democrats. This means that they get bogged down in the latest vanguard concerns of the Democratic base and that they are increasingly ignorant about and isolated from the bulk of the populace. Things that make some sense in dense urban corridors where few people get dirty at work make little sense in sparsely populated areas with significant morbidity burdens from work.
4. The hiring is completely incestuous. A huge number of low-level folks have parents who worked there or at related institutions (e.g. NIH) and even larger proportions involve folks who share educational pedigrees (universities, med schools, advisers). And even if a president wants to change this, there are civil service protections, congressional limitations (being a specifically delegated remit of authority), and of course that would require either Democrats to eat a lot of flak from their base among the educated or the Republicans signing up for a mass whipping for being “anti-science” and attribution of any cataclysm to this sort of personnel purge regardless of the real merits.
5. The activists are running rampant. Culturally competent pandemic management, as taught by the CDC, suggests that in a pandemic public health officials should not criticize cultural or ethnic leaders unnecessarily. They also suggest that you cannot shame or browbeat people into compliance with public health efforts, and that attempts to do so often backfire by having identity groups (religious, ethnic, national, etc.) respond to your nociceptive stimuli by rejecting previously accepted public health interventions. The worst messaging coming out of the CDC, particularly anonymously, violates all the guidelines I have seen the CDC issue when working overseas with MSF.
6. Doing your job well is boring. Most of the time you should be just making certain that resources (e.g. antibiotic stockpiles) are in place and that the same things that worked last time are ready to be implemented again (e.g. surge vaccination). And your ability to innovate and come up with something useful is pretty unlikely as there have been 50,000 people before you who give it their best stab. This leads to people “innovating” for the sake of “innovating”. This leads to people amplifying secondary concerns like “representation”, “equity”, “sustainability”, or the like. And a couple iterations of promoting the “innovators” over the maintainers will rapidly lead to atrophy of core capabilities. Zika or H1N1 represent less than 2% of the total work burden of the CDC, most of being agile is about maintaining capabilities when they are never used. And that is boring and at least currently not great for career advancement.
Remote work, in my best guess, would likely be a boon for the long-term flexibility of the CDC. Getting folks out of Atlanta and DC, having more capability for folks to work from the breadth of the country, and potentially even letting late career clinical folks have more access to the institution without having to disrupt their lives with a cross-country move are all to the good.
But until a bunch of people get fired, the CDC is unlikely to effectively change. On my more pessimistic days, I figure the real solution would involve burning the place to the ground.
Here is the original post.
On the five-year breakeven rate (from the comments)
The market for TIPS isn’t deep enough for the market-implied breakeven rates to be a reliable signal. Making a sizable bet on future inflation rates requires leverage, and there aren’t exchange-traded TIPS futures to provide that leverage. Hedge funds that want to make this trade will instead enter an inflation swap contract with a bank. That activity only ends up being reflected in market-implied breakevens to the extent that the bank hedges by buying or selling TIPS in the swap market. This is atypical – the bank would hedge much if its exposure by entering offsetting swap contracts with other counterparties.
A real measurement of market expectations for inflation would need to include those swap transactions. The TIPS spot market is a biased and somewhat price-insensitive corner of the market, driven by buyers like target date funds that have a mandate to have an X% allocation to TIPS.
That is from an Alex in the comments.
I don’t myself have a good sense of those issues, but I thought this gjk comment was interesting enough to pass along.