BRIEFLY NOTED: FOR 2023-04-24 Mo
The transistor as seen from 1953; the shifting South Asian monsoon; Noah Smith against NIMBYism; Dan Davies, Ethan Mollick, Daniel Bessner, & Stuart Buck...
ONE VIDEO: The Transistor (1953):
ONE IMAGE: Shifting Monsoon:
MUST-READ: Against NIMBYism:
I admire and envy Noah Smith for his patience at over and over again, willing to talk calmly and respectively to the NIMBYists:
Noah Smith: “Luxury” construction causes high rents like umbrellas cause rain: ‘The NIMBY mindset persists in the face of evidence…. Imagine that you ran around waving your arms and saying “Stop! Stop! Umbrellas make rain worse!!” People would think you were a silly person, and rightly so…. It is theoretically possible for new market-rate housing to cause gentrification in the small area surrounding them… “induced demand”, and it’s a favorite theory of the academics who decry market-rate housing. But… even if market-rate housing draws rich people to a particular neighborhood, it must be drawing them away from some other neighborhood…. Rich people who flock to a trendy new neighborhood must be coming from another part of Austin…. Even if new housing did increase rents in one place, it would be reducing them in a different place. If you think about housing policy from the city-wide level instead of just from the vantage point of a single neighborhood — as you definitely should, if you’re a policymaker or a planner — then “induced demand” isn’t scary, because it’s really just relocated demand…
Very Briefly Noted:
Claudia Sahm: This Recovery Is Worth Fighting for: ‘Turn off the TV, put down the newspaper, and stop doomscrolling. During the past three years, we've made progress on some of our most intractable economic problems. Protect it and push forward….
Danny Quah: Shifting the Great Powers: ‘Soft power… a leading mode of thinking on world order…. Its emphasis on trust, attractiveness, and legitimacy shifts the centre of gravity of decision-making… towards those who experience [power’s] consequences, the demand side…
Matt Yglesias: ‘This is a misunderstanding of the issue—the reason the Dahl estate wants to retroactively edit the books is precisely because they are afraid people will opt for the “just don’t buy the book” solution. They’re in the business of selling books, not of defending intellectual principles or aesthetic integrity…
Stephen Bush: ‘One sad but funny subplot [of Twitter] today are the “LeBron thinks he’s better than me!?” tweets. I mean, unless, Mr WarioNFT69, you are really Michael Jordan: he is! I would also add: it is of a piece with a wider mistaken libertarian worldview to see “verification” as something that is worth more to the individual than the community. You know you’re the real Hugo Rifkind: it’s me who gains something from that being verified…
Josh Chafetz: ‘Exactly. Musk and his ilk fundamentally misunderstood what the blue check was. It was about verifying identity; it wasn't some sort of Important Person Recognition Award: Geoffrey Skelley: ‘There’s no incentive to pay for verification. The logic is underpants gnomes-level stuff: 1. Take away checkmark that verified identity and make someone pay for same thing that doesn’t really verify identity. 2. ?????. 3. Profit…
Dan Shipper: A Few Things I Believe About AI: ‘This problem, which I’m calling knowledge orchestration, is the biggest unsolved problem for builders in AI outside of progress on foundational models. It touches how you store, index, and retrieve the knowledge you need to perform useful large language model tasks. There are many people trying to improve this at different layers of the stack…
Substack Writers: Product news for writers: Paid subscriber-only replies: ‘We’re experimenting with a tool that allows writers to limit replies to only their paid subscribers. Some writers with paid subscriptions will see this option starting today, and it will roll out for everyone in the coming days. Our hope is this new tool will help you encourage good-faith discussions on Notes, while also offering new value to your paying subscribers…
Meg Conley: ‘Listen, I was feeling every minute of 38 today (+ some minutes more) then this guy came along on Substack and was basically like, "you young lady with your stance against slurs and your use of pronouns...you young miss who is young + stupid + just so young! You are young! And a woman! And young!”And Idk. I'll take it. 🙏…
Meg Conley: ‘And money to be lost by being associated with that outrage-clickbait-attention machine. Today brought the 10th email asking if they can pay me outside of Substack because of the Substack moderation philosophy. This sender just read @Hamish McKenzie Note from today and that was that.
I think they thought he was being thoughtful and sincere. They just think he’s wrong. And people - or at least my readers - are done compromising their values in service of social media…
David Roberts & Sabeel Rahman: The wonky but incredibly important changes Biden just made to regulatory policy: ‘A few weeks ago, OIRA answered Biden's call by issuing updated versions of two crucial documents: circular A4 and circular A94. The former contains guidance for agencies on how OIRA will evaluate regulations; the latter contains guidance for how it will evaluate public investments…
¶s:
Dan Davies: The Lawson Doctrine: ‘Where did it all go wrong? Lots of places, of course, in different ways and at different times. But the British economy, in the period from about 1986 to 1992 is on my mind…. The “Lawson Doctrine”… that current account deficits… are only a problem if they are accompanied by public sector budget deficits. If they aren’t, then they must have arisen as a result of private sector firms’ and households’ investment and spending decisions, and consequently they are likely to be, to use the phrase of the time “benign and self-correcting”…. If the market worked, the Lawson Doctrine would have worked. The point of the Hayekian economy as information processor is that whenever a private sector transaction happens, information is transmitted through the supply and demand mechanism, and then incorporated into the price mechanism…. The Lawson Doctrine failed because the globalised trade and capital markets of the 1980s were not able to transmit enough information at a fast enough rate. Using the word in its strictest sense – the one which your internet service provider uses in its advertisements – it didn’t have enough bandwidth…
Ethan Mollick: Democratizing the Future of Education: ‘Take, for example, this simple instruction as a starting point: “You generate clear, accurate examples for students of concepts. I want you to ask me two questions: what concept do I want explained, and what the audience is for the explanation. Provide a clear, multiple paragraph explanation of the concept using specific example and give me five analogies I can use to understand the concept in different ways.” Paste it into Bing creative mode…. Bing AI will execute the instructions…. When you answer, it will do a web search…. The AI will then provide you with the explanation you needed. Since there is some randomness in the system, it will provide slightly different answers each time, so you can always try again if you don’t like the results. Or, even better, ask the AI to change something: “can you swap out the third example for another” or “can you make the explanations simpler”…. But we can go further than even these good explanations. How about adding some low-stakes testing: You are a quiz creator of highly diagnostic quizzes. You will make good low-stakes tests and diagnostics. You will construct several multiple choice questions to quiz my audience on the topic. The questions should be highly relevant and go beyond just facts. Multiple choice questions should include plausible, competitive alternate responses and should not include an "all of the above option." At the end of the quiz, you will provide an answer key and explain the right answer. Now we get a quiz that we can use…
Daniel Bessner: The Liberal Discontents of Francis Fukuyama: ‘Fukuyama the analyst stands in tension with Fukuyama the liberal booster. The former appreciates that life under liberalism is often grim, defined by anomie, precarity, and despair; the latter can’t believe that, and so he doesn’t. Though Fukuyama can’t ignore liberalism’s numerous problems, he also can’t bring himself to imagine that there might be an alternative. To him, accepting the inevitability of liberalism is identical with mature thinking…. Autocratic governments, he notes, make bad decisions—they invade Ukraine or enact a zero-Covid policy—and most people don’t want to live under them. It’s not a surprise that there are far more migrants to Europe or the United States than to Russia or China. “No authoritarian government,” Fukuyama correctly affirms, “presents a society that is, in the long term, more attractive than liberal democracy.” History remains at its end. It’s difficult to say that Fukuyama is wrong. Liberalism faces no serious challengers to its domination, either from the left or from the right. But this leads us to a question. Why haven’t liberalism’s failures engendered a more robust ideological backlash? Even clearly anti-liberal rivals to the United States, such as China and Russia, don’t proffer alternative, universally applicable ideological systems…. We now know, contra Fukuyama, that liberalism is incapable of making capitalism’s wonders work for most of humanity. But this failure might provide us with an opportunity, at least at some point in the future. When capitalism’s contradictions prove to be too great, it’s possible liberalism’s hegemony will collapse, and we will be able to conceive of ideas presently unthinkable. And with new ideas, history might restart again…
Stuart Buck: How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?: ‘Some research projects feel like they are squarely in one bucket or the other, but it’s not always that clear. Applied research is meant to be research with immediate applications in mind. But, of course, applied research could stumble upon something that leads to a fundamental insight. Basic research is meant to be curiosity-driven research without immediate applications in mind. But, of course, it could quickly lead to a killer application. In the universe of possible courses of research, there exist many questions that, in the end, will satisfy the spirit of both applied and basic research. The natural follow-up question is: is finding this subset of golden problems really feasible? One’s knee-jerk reaction might be that it is not replicable in any kind of systematic way; it is a matter of unreliable personal taste. The history tells a different story. The mid-20th century’s great American R&D labs show us that selecting profitable courses of research that satisfy the spirit of basic research has been done at a high level within large research organizations over the course of several decades. In this piece, I dive into exactly how Bell Labs ensured that their researchers were working on the right problems. This piece will be the first in a series examining what modern applied research orgs can learn from the great dragons of industrial R&D — places like Bell Labs, GE Research Laboratory, and DuPont’s research department….
I can see why the Stuart Buck piece interested you. Industrial research labs are a part of your recipe for modern economic growth. One of the unintended consequences off breaking up the Bell system in the Eighties was kneecapping Bell Labs. It is an interesting question whether Nokia, Samsung, and TSMC would be as pivotal in telecoms today, if Bell Labs had somehow been preserved as the national treasure it was.
The business at substack about writers being able to limit postings to paid subscribers only has existed since I set up That's Another Fine Mess three years ago. It's how I keep the bullshitters at bay. So this "new" announcement is BS. I'll bet you a year's free subscription to TAFM (which doesn't participate in Notes, since if I wanted to fuck around in Twitter I'd go there, not here) that Substack has done this because Notes has already "gone south" like Twitdom. And their "offer" to let writers "invest" in Substack (at the high price point now, rather than the price the other insiders got) is also bullshit.
Do not trust these Silly Con Valley otherwise-unemployables, whether they are fucking up FleeceBlock, or Twitter or Substack or You Name It, further than you can see any of the little con artists with your eyes closed.