BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-12-24 Sa

Things Þt Went Whizzing by...

MUST-READ: I Am Lucky in My Commenters:

I think this very much hits the sweet spot:

alfgifu: Comment on: Perhaps Stochastic Parrots Are Somewhat Intentional?: ‘Every sentence I have so far heard, read, spoken or written about ChatGPT makes more sense to me when I substitute "the collective hive mind of the internet circa 2021, filtered for presentability”. ChatGPT is a very effective tool for summoning the general consensus of its source material and rearranging it…. It's a fun way to filter information and the collective insight of whatever subsections of humanity online fed into the training data is, when shaped by whatever set of design choices have gone into its training, probably as good as or better than most of us at generating various kinds of text if you care more about form and general vibeness than actual accuracy. And it often is right, because it benefits from an amped-up wisdom of crowds effect…. I remain unconvinced that this is 'autocomplete for everything', or even for many things, but if I ever want a randomised list of things the early 2021 internet really liked I'll know where to turn…

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ONE VIDEO: Alan Blinder & Jim Leaviss:

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ONE IMAGE: Deepest Winter:

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Very Briefly Noted:

• Stephen Roach: A China Optimist’s Lament: ‘Xi Jinping’s increased emphasis on security, power, and control comes at the worst possible time… I confess I did not think that China would fall into so deep a Maoist-Leninist middle-income trap so quickly…

• John Burn-Murdoch: Britain’s winter of discontent is the inevitable result of austerity: ‘A decade of Tory spending cuts left the country vulnerable to the external shocks of the past two years… The Conservatives are, as John Stuart Mill said, the stupid party. But I am surprised at how much damage they have been able to do…

• Paul Krugman: ‘I'm not going to try picking over the entrails of the latest inflation report. Just noting the role reversal. A year ago inflation optimists kept trying to explain away the bad news… Remember that nothing the Fed has done since March has yet had a chance to affect demand, production, and employment; and nothing the Fed has done since September of 2021 has yet had a chance to affect reported inflation numbers…

• Janos Kornai (1979): Resource-Constrained versus Demand-Constrained Systems… Perhaps the second most brilliant “comparative systems” economics article…

• Bryan Mena (April 20, 2022): U.S. Economy Grows Moderately Amid High Inflation, Ukraine Invasion: ‘Higher costs and difficulty hiring remain a challenge for business, latest Fed Beige Book report on economic conditions says… News from the day the bond market was most pessimistic about the long-term inflation outlook…

• Nick Timiraos (April 20, 2022): Fed’s Powell Seals Expectations of Half-Point Rate Rise in May: ‘Federal Reserve officials have broadly signaled a desire to raise interest rates to levels that don’t provide stimulus… News from the day the bond market was most pessimistic about the long-term inflation outlook…

• EricTopol: A new variant alert: ‘There’s a swarm of new subvariants. One of these is XBB, which is a recombinant (fusion) of 2 different BA.2 variants, BJ.1 (BA.2.10.1.1) and BA.2.75 (BA.2.75.3.1.1.1)… And this variant is how deadly, exactly?…

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Noah Smith: Why the U.S. middle class is feeling squeezed” ‘My response to people like Jacob Shell isn’t just “See? A ton of people still have 3 bedrooms and 2 cars and a college education!”.... When health care and child care and college cost an arm and a leg, when middle income people have to choose between cheap decaying Rust Belt cities and unaffordable superstar metros, when people get fewer vacation days per year, when lots of middle class people don’t get started in their careers til their 30s, when the 1% have pulled away, and when the smoothly rising trends of past decades have trailed off into stagnation, there are plenty of damn good reasons for the American middle class to feel squeezed in the early 2020s. The next question, of course, is what we do about all this. “How to restore the American middle class” will be the subject of a series of posts, I think. But the important take-away here is that yes, there is something that needs to be restored...

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John Gruber: Quora Is Beta Testing an AI Chatbot: ‘Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo: “Today we are starting a beta test for a new product called Poe. Short for 'Platform for Open Exploration', it lets people ask questions, get instant answers, and have back-and-forth dialogue with AI. Poe will initially be available on iOS, and it will be invite only until we work out scalability, get feedback from beta testers, and address any other issues that come up. After we get through this phase, we will open up to everyone and add support for all platforms.” Way of the future...

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Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson: Best of Further Reading 2022: ‘There was just one, standout article for me this year: [Adam Fisher’s] paean to Sam Bankman-Fried, penned by a “private historian” who channelled F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway to bring us not just a profile of the founder of FTX and his “small team dedicated to fixing the world”… but, perhaps unwittingly, the year’s most revealing insight into the VC industry. Sequoia Capital not only invested $214mn with “SBF” after its partners were awed by his ability to pitch cryptobabble while playing League of Legends, but published the portrayal of him as a latter day John Pierpont Morgan on its own website. Archived for posterity after Bankman-Fried’s fall gave Sequoia second thoughts and a gigantic writedown, the profile may yet spawn a new genre of financial fan fiction. Which founder would not now want such a portrait from the Hans Holbein of Silicon Valley? And which journalist would not like to get paid by the word for so, so many words? “Love is the currency,” the ode to SBF tells us. But I suspect that Sequoia shelled out something more concrete than love — or crypto…

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Paul Campos: Study finds Holocaust-related deaths much higher in Nazi-controlled countries: ‘That is a terribly tasteless headline, and LGM apologizes to everyone in the world for it, but look at this long hand-wringing piece from the Atlantic [by Yasmin Tayag].... Hundreds of thousands of Republicans have died from COVID who would be alive today if not for the Republican party’s COVID policies.... There’s scientific value in trying to pin down the precise answer to the question of the exact dimensions of the Republican party’s mass murder of its own constituents, but that what has in fact since happened was what was going to happen was as predictable at the time as water flowing downhill.... Leave aside the classic both-siding, where the Biden’s administration less than perfect COVID policy is compared to a national anti-vaccination campaign led by mass murderer Ron DeSantis et. al. for the sake of “balance.” The really infuriating part is blaming this carnage on partisan politics. Hundreds of thousands of easily preventable COVID deaths in the USA over the last two years were caused and continue to be caused by THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. Not by “partisan politics,” which have existed for the nation’s entire history, unlike one of the nation’s two major parties being opposed to vaccination, which is something that just happened for the first time two years ago...