tylercowen

Remarkable that mortgage rates have increased from 2.7% in January 2021 to 7.4% today and yet median house prices are up 33% in that time.
via @Redfin

Some personal fantasy-novelist news:
x.com/WordOnFire/sta…

"Ikiru" (1952) is a kind of movie that once seen, it is impossible to forget. It is the sort of movie that has the potential to change someone's life or at the very least their worldview. Akira Kurosawa has directed better movies, but this is probably his most important and unique work. It is a kind of movie most directors would be afraid to touch, especially those concerned more about the commercial side of the industry. It is, in my view, the best performance in Takashi Shimura's long career.

I recently told @scottlincicome that industrial policy should be implemented by industrial policy critics. Those who are most obsessed with the problems and weaknesses are best suited to the challenge. So this is my attempt to do that in some sense.

Suecia tiene más premios Nobel de literatura que toda Latinoamérica y la verdad no creo que Suecia tenga una literatura más relevante que la de Argentina, que no tiene ni un Nobel de literatura.

I think one of the hard things AI is going to do is force a lot of people to look at why human beings do things. Hard because ultimately we do most of what we do, including many beautiful things, as some form of status seeking.

good summary by @daveweigel

Good day to be a Free Presser

thefp.com/subscribe

Reading about the Socialist Calculation Debate. Doesn't seem that different from the early debates about AI itself.

Yes.

🇦🇱 Albania’s capital, Tirana, has released an AI avatar of Mayor Erion Veliaj to address citizens from now on.

The real Veliaj is currently in prison.

Funny story, maybe. I've been writing a history of the North American West from the beginning to the near future. (Coming next yr!) I began in 2020. Since I define the West as "the area between the Mississippi and the Pacific," I came up with what I thought was a great title...

Thrilled to announce my new book, The Madrid Model, published by @CatoInstitute with a foreword by @tylercowen

Madrid shows what freedom can deliver: 144 tax cuts & 500+ deregulation measures brought more prosperity and strong job creation. 🚀📈

OUT NOW

cato.org/books/madrid-m…

I've got a piece up at @thedispatch about the similarities between today’s AI safety community and past millenarian movements & why the Catholic Church recognises the pattern when it sees it.
thedispatch.com/article/cathol…

The elites of Victorian Britain got up late, drank ceaselessly, worked short hours, partied through the night, and knew nothing about science, technology or engineering. And yet, by their own lights, they were hugely effective.

worksinprogress.co/issue/the-seve…

The Victorians are often held up as a model against the supposedly soft, feckless, humanities-educated elites of today. But I argue that the genius of their system may have been its drastic weighting towards soft skills, team-building and intra-elite networking:

- A Victorian’s gentleman’s office hours typically began about 11am and finished about 5pm, including a multi-course lunch with wine.

- Upper-class Victorians drank ceaselessly. Conduct guides recommended four or five glasses of wine at dinner *for married women*. Port was often served in pints.

- Party culture was intense and nocturnal. Balls started at about 10pm, peaked after 1am, and continued till dawn. During the social season, bankers, judges and politicians might go to several balls per week.

- Elite Victorians learnt almost no STEM at school or university. At least half of class time was given over to ancient languages, often as much as 80 percent. One leading educationalist remarked that it was not worth teaching science to gentlemen because it does not involve ‘continued reasoning’.

- Sports and character formation were valued far above transmitting facts. A top headmaster described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’.

This cannot have made elite Victorians more productive individually, but maybe the dense social and emotional network it created helped them to work as a sort of extended team.

Perhaps we should think again about what makes groups of people effective.

Effective Altruism is and will be more influential than you think marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…

Tyler Cowen showing up to defend EA here gives me mild nightmares because I remember him calling the top in 2022: x.com/MargRev/status…

But his bottom line that EA is “directionally correct, even if you should not follow its recommendations all the way” seems directionally correct to me, and in line with what I was getting at last week about EA’s pragmatism: x.com/albrgr/status/…

He says more attention to AI safety would be good, and gives EA some credit there. I’d add that EAs were saying this years before most others, which is a pretty good example of Tyler’s closing line that “interesting and valuable ideas” can spring from weird places. (And I say this as someone who was pretty skeptical on the AI safety work for a long time.)

And I agree that EAs can be offputtingly arrogant. That’s one reason I’m really glad we practice “worldview diversification” at CG (coefficientgiving.org/research/world…) - though I still wish we had a more robust intellectual grounding for it and a better/more principled way to translate it into ultimate allocations.

I’m also sympathetic to Tyler’s view that some EAs “perceive a high risk of doom without sufficient evidence,” though I also think that the best available estimates from people who are trying as hard as possible to be neutral (e.g., x.com/Research_FRI/s…) suggest plenty of reason for concern. I think a lot of the problem here is just the fundamental difficulty of our epistemic position here, as I think @Research_FRI and @michael_nielsen have done a good job pointing out. With concrete harms like the Hugging Face attack starting to show up in practice, I do sometimes feel like Tyler is unfairly shifting the epistemic goalposts (though not particularly in this case).

And as a small correction - CG doesn't have a “$40 billion fund,” or really an endowment of its own at all. I think that number might have come from a back-of-the-envelope guess I gave here (semafor.com/article/09/03/…), building on @nanransohoff’s estimate of what all AI-linked donors might eventually give each year.

Anyway, I agree w/ the upshot that more EA at the margin would be a good thing!

It is insane how much AI has sped up massive data projects I had.

Right now: 160 years of notarial deeds (which I thought would take me two to six months initially); 120 years of newspapers entries (I had been gradually accumulating this since 2016 which is why I often post images of newspapers from Quebec); 60 years of shipping entries into port with ship details (same as the newspapers which provided the shipping intelligence).

All three projects ended up being completed much faster. Look, if you are serious about querying the past, AI is the tool for that brave future! Our ability to understand where we come from is now unrivalled and some small amounts of creativity may end up generating insane amounts of additional knowledge.

This is the best time to do economic history.

Every angle is better than than the last 🤯

Literally intelligence explosion: "OpenAI has told people it plans to dump hundreds of results to unsolved problems on GitHub on Tuesday"

We are witnessing history unfold.