BRIEFLY NOTED: 2023-07-01 Sa
Coming homework apocalypse; southeast Asia; Albert & Carroll on quantum, Boltzmann, & þe fine-tuning; & Alloway & Joe Weisenthal, Heath, Koop, and Sharma on inflation, large-scale human cooperative...
…organization, optimal investment leverage, & Pakistan under the harrow…
MUST-READ: What to Do wiþ Homework?
My problem has always been that I am too lazy to do all the homework: I start out thinking “of course, I know how to do this already”; I then shift to “I could figure this out but don’t have time to waste on it right now”; and so I end up with “I am lost”. The problem is that the task needs to engage me at the right level—interesting enough that I want to do that particular task, yet straightforward enough not to trigger the “just tell me the answer” response. And as our collective ability to grade homework collapses, more and more people are going to wind up in my pickle. Teachers need to figure out ways around, and through:
Ethan Mollick: The Homework Apocalypse: ‘Fall is going to be very different this year. Educators need to be ready…. Cheating with AI is a part of the Homework Apocalypse, but only one part…. Think of how the calculator completely changed what was valuable to teach, and the nature of math teaching overall—huge modifications that were mostly for the good. But… schools [had] time… as they were slowly adopted over a decade…. Now, what happened to math is going to happen to nearly every subject… as soon as school is back in session…. Essays… instructors are going to need to decide how to adjust their expectation… to preserve the value of essay assignments…to embrace a new technology that helps students write better…. Reading assignments…. Ask the students to engage with the AI, checking the AI answers for errors and expanding on good or bad points the AI makes. Using AI as a reading partner and tutor has a lot of potential, but requires experimentation…. Problem sets are… under threat…. There is light at the end of the AI tunnel for educators, but it will require experiments and adjustment. In the meantime, we need to be realistic about how many things are about to change…
ONE VIDEO: David Albert & Sean Carroll: Quantum Theory, Boltzmann Brains, & þe Fine-Tuned Universe:
Thinking about Boltzmann Brains tends to make me unhappy. It leads me to find it frighteningly plausible that crawling chaos is reality beyond our current field of vision, and is coming for us at lightspeed:
ONE IMAGE: Southeast Asia:
Very Briefly Noted:
Cory Doctorow: There Is Always An Alternative: ‘Margaret Thatcher’s dictum, “There is no alternative”…. This is inevitabilism, the belief that nothing can change…. At its best, science fiction demands that we look beyond what a gadget does and interrogate who it does it for and who it does it to…
Jonathan Bernstein: Republicans Help Biden by Taking Credit for His Policy Wins: ‘GOP senators trumpeting to constituents the spoils of the infrastructure plan they opposed only helps the White House…
Jo Walton (2010): The Suck Fairy: ‘you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf…. The advantage of this is exactly the same as the advantage of thinking of one’s once-beloved ex as having been eaten by a zombie, who is now shambling around using the name and body of the former person. It lets one keep one’s original love clear of the later betrayals…
Kevin McDermott: St. Louis Is the Struggling Downtown You Haven’t Heard of—and Right-Wing Policies Are Making Things Worse: ‘St. Louis’s significantly more dire problems don’t neatly fit that conservative-media narrative…. A blue island in a red state… at the mercy of conservative state governments. The consequences of this dysfunction can be far-reaching…
Henry Farrell: Shoggoths amongst us: ‘What Lovecraft's monsters _actually_ tell us about Large Language Models…
"James Bessen (2015): Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth…
Duncan Black: Compassionate Conservatvism: ‘Often I think about how Paul Ryan said he cared deeply about helping poor people, and centrist dipshits spent years pretending to believe him (or actually? who knows)…. Except for the occasional… "my wife got breast cancer, that seems bad, let's fund breast cancer research more," where something personally affecting a Republican makes them briefly see the light one very narrow issue, Republicans are not interested…
Dan Davies: eisenhower as cybernetician: ‘the great complex…. I’ve been reading Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address (the “military-industrial complex” speech)…. Really interesting ideas in there, of the sort that people have fairly systematically ignored because they’re difficult…
Duncan Black: Heat Dome: ‘I used to have a too optimistic view of climate change. The main reason was I figure it would be fairly gradual. Not costless, but gradual enough to not be catastrophic (in a broad sense, not that I thought it would avoid all catastrophes). I was wrong in several ways, but one was not appreciating just how closely very inhabited areas already flirt with being too hot for humans…
Vladimir Lenin (1918): ‘To: G. F. FYODOROV: It is obvious that a whiteguard insurrection is being prepared in Nizhni…. Organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like. Not a minute of delay…
¶s:
My view is that, since our current inflation is not an expectational phenomenon, it will ebb away as supply chains reknit, and as the excess sectoral demand for commodities and labor produced by the reopening shock die away—unless we get another bad supply shock, either from the Ukraine war, or from something else very unpleasant happening in the world. Thus it seems to me we should act as though the inflation problem is behind us, but stand ready to change our mind if we learn otherwise:
Tracy Alloway & Joe Weisenthal: It Was a Week for Feeling Good About the US Economy: ‘Inflation is bad, and it’s better to have real growth. But at the end of the day, the crucial thing for financial stability—and not having a cascade of bankruptcies and defaults—is that companies and banks have the nominal dollars on hand to pay their debts, pay the rent and their employees. All told, we can probably tell some story about how because of structural reasons and policy choices, the recent rate hikes were just not as powerful as expected—thanks in part to the firehose of cash that continues to pour into the economy from the federal government. The question, then, is what does that mean for inflation and will the Fed still need to generate a recession to get as back to target?…
Market economies, scientific research communities, bureaucracies, ideology propaganda networks, rituals to create assibayah—all these are attempt to scale human cooperation to the magnitude that we, in our world of 8 billion, need it to be. It is striking that nothing useful to our urgent questions of institution design has ever come out of the socialist tradition:
Joseph Heath: On the Scalability of Cooperative Structures: Remarks on G. A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism: ‘Every system of cooperation is sustained by a particular “institutional toolkit”—devices used to promote cooperative behaviour…. A particular toolkit is scalable to the extent that it can incorporate an increase in the number of individuals participating, while maintaining roughly constant levels of cooperative behavior…. Our evolved psychology provides us with a set of pro-social psychological dispositions that can be used rather effortlessly to establish small-scale systems of cooperation, but that the fundamental architecture of these systems is such that they lack scalability…. Thus it is only when cooperation is reorganized, and placed on a different footing, that it can be further expanded…. In complex societies we should regard major elements of social structure as essentially a set of kluges, designed to overcome the limitations of our natural sociability…
A very smart observation here by Philip. But, as I say, there is no reason to believe that the forces Peters points to have in fact had enough time to work in a stable environment to drive the world to the conclusions he wants to reach. And, somewhat paradoxically, his argument that leverage efficiency requires that optimal leverage be one or less smells like an argument that depends on ergodicity:
Philip Koop: ‘One more thing. [Ole] Peters' critics often screw up by affirming the consequent. Peters is not saying that there is no such thing as utility or risk aversion; he is saying that in cases where one is running a self-financing portfolio with reinvestment, it is not *necessary* to evoke risk aversion to explain why investors prefer higher time average returns… The effects of getting the optimal leverage ratio wrong are asymmetric with respect to risk. If you overestimate L, you decrease returns and *increase* risk. If you underestimate L, you decrease returns but *decrease* risk; a too-low leverage ratio has a higher risk-adjusted return than a too-high leverage ratio…. Thinking in ergodic terms is perfectly consistent with accounting for risk-aversion. BTW, I personally think Peters' earlier (2009) paper, Optimal leverage from Non-Ergodicity, gives a more thorough account of optimal leverage than the Peters & Adamou paper…
Pakistan is, along with Nigeria, Iran, and Egypt, one of the countries where the most good could be done for humanity by getting its governance better. Yet its attempts at reform have been massively less successful than those of its subcontinental partners India and Bangladesh. And do note that Pakistan has $40 billion dollars of flood damage from last year alone, and is in the global-warming bullseye:
Mihir Sharma: Pakistan Needs to Break Its Bailout Addiction: ‘The country should take a cue from rival India and use its crisis as an opportunity to address the economy’s fundamental flaws…. Unless access is restored to a $6.7 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund before it expires on June 30, the country’s deeply stressed economy will go into freefall. Pakistan’s chronic shortage of foreign exchange is now, in the absence of IMF funding, reaching emergency levels. The central bank’s reserves would cover only about a month of imports. Pakistan’s great rival India, when faced with a similar crisis more than 30 years ago, pushed through sweeping reforms that devalued the rupee, reduced the size of the public sector, and raised government revenue. It’s time for Pakistan to do the same…
Contra the quote of Joseph Heath, 'The Dawn of Everything' shows that for much of human history, huge portions of continents managed well without market economics.
McDermott is a member of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial board and part of the power structure of St. Louis that centers around the Post-Dispatch. Even in the P-D's final days of terminal decline it still wields power far beyond its current economic or journalistic resources, and it has been fighting hard against any progressive leadership in St. Louis trying to solve problems since most of those solutions come with he cost of the old white guys who run the city and county losing a sliver of their power and wealth. It is deeply rich for McDermott to take to the pages of the New York Times to criticize living conditions in the city when he has had a large part in making those conditions what they are.