BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-05-01 Mo
Musk's twitter, shooting itself in the foot, over and over again, forever; is human weak sociabiility "genetic" in any relevant sense?; Drezner on U.S.-China, Mollick on prompting ChatBots, Yglesia...
ONE IMAGE: Twitter Decides Not to Display to Readwise.io:
Chopping off your audience just because you can is a very strange thing for a company that has only one advantage: the legacy reach of its social network:
MUST-READ: Human Diffuse Sociability:
I am sorry: I do not believe that this is in any way “evolutionary” except to the degree that human cultural plasticity is “evolutionarily”. For one thing, in all of the environments of evolutionary adaptation, people on their own meeting strangers would have been relatively rare occurrences. For another thing, a Campbell is not comfortable among a group of strange MacDonalds, or even meeting a strange MacDonald one-on-one:
Mark Moffett: I found the 8th wonder of the world in a coffee shop: ‘How humans came to feel comfortable among strangers, like those in a café, is an under-explored mystery. Unlike other species, humans possess a unique ability to feel comfortable around strangers. This trait likely emerged early in human evolution, allowing the formation of anonymous societies based on markers of identity, such as language or clothing. These anonymous societies eventually gave rise to modern civilizations, where diverse populations can coexist and interact peacefully despite superficial differences. I rank the humble coffee shop as the eighth wonder of the world…
Very Briefly Noted:
Jason Karsh: ‘Just to be clear about where we are right now. Gorsuch should resign. Thomas should absolutely resign. Holy fuck should Roberts resign. The background check on Kavanaugh was BS and we still don’t know who paid off his debts. And Barrett was brute-forced onto the court…
Mattathias Schwartz: Jane Roberts, who is married to Chief Justice John Roberts, made $10.3 million in commissions from elite law firms, whistleblower documents show…
George Takei: ‘Gov. Abbott found it politically expedient to label the murdered victims in Texas as “illegal aliens.” He was not only despicable, he was wrong…
John Mullin: The Fed, the Stock Market, and the “Greenspan Put”: ‘Does the Fed ease monetary policy after large stock market declines? Should it?…
Tanta (2007): Reelin' In the Suckers: ‘In case you missed it in the comments, there were many discussions of this (excellent) Bloomberg piece yesterday, “Banks Sell ‘Toxic Waste’ CDOs to Calpers, Texas Teachers Fund.” Please read the whole thing if you have not done so already…
Frances Coppola: First Republic Bank goes to meet its maker: ‘The troubled bank has been closed down by the California regulator and its assets and deposits transferred to JP Morgan Chase…. Does this resolution mark the end of the US’s banking crisis? Frankly I doubt it. The Fed is not done with interest rate rises yet, and there are other banks out there that have foolishly over-egged uninsured deposits and failed to manage interest rate risk. There will be more casualties to come….
Allison Parshall: The Computer Scientist Peering Inside AI’s Black Boxes: ‘Cynthia Rudin wants machine learning models… to show their work…. These are high-complexity…e neural networks. But as long as they’re reasoning about a current case in terms of its relationship to past cases, that… forces the model to be interpretable. And we haven’t lost any accuracy…
Henry Farrell: “Red Team Blues” and the As-You-Know-Bob problem: ‘Science fiction can be understood… as… narrative strategies to avoid, sublimate or escape the As-You-Know-Bob Problem… [that] can be extremely useful outside science fiction…. See how Cory provides just enough technical detail… how he unobtrusively uses the narrative both to convey the information and persuade you that it is important. Then try to steal his best tricks…
Sebastian Park & Uri Bram: The Best Books on Making Good Decisions: ‘Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman & Olivier Sibony. But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman. The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova. Money Games: The Inside Story of How American Dealmakers Saved Korea's Most Iconic Bank by Weijian Shan. Exhalation by Ted Chiang…
Packy McCormick: Evolving Minds: ‘The phonetic alphabet… enabled the composability of ideas…. The printing press… enabled the composability of science…. The off chance that we’re in the beginning of a third intellectual revolution, one that enables the composability of knowledge and complex problem-solving. Large Language Models (LLMs) shrink the gap between thought and execution...
¶s:
Alexandra Scaggs: Anatomy of a bank panic: ‘First Republic Bank’s shares have been triggering circuit breakers after a headline said it is “most likely” headed for failure, not a rescue. That could very well be true. But this is a good opportunity to engage in some light media criticism. Like . . . what exactly is being reported here? This headline says that more than one person told CNBC that they think First Republic gets taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. instead of being rescued…. It isn’t immediately clear whether these sources are government officials, regulators, First Republic executives, or a couple of hedge funders betting on a few million dollars’ worth of FRC shares…. This could have been the result of chasing a Reuters story…. Reuters reported early Friday that government officials have gotten involved in the First Republic situation. That shouldn’t be a surprise either, to be clear. Still, the initial report led the stock to rise more than 6 per cent, because markets are hyper-reactive in times of uncertainty. And after digging into the details, CNBC’s reporting doesn’t really contradict the facts of Reuters’ story. It had taken an additional 50-ish per cent out of the bank’s equity capitalisation by noon, though…
Matthew Yglesias: More courage, less fear: ‘Don't fight "cancel culture" by exaggerating its power…. Sarah Owermohle’s April 12 article in Stat News…. The point of this kind of article is to send a message that this kind of conclusion is not welcome, that if researchers know what’s good for them, they’ll desk drawer that kind of empirical result and focus their energies on other areas. This tactic can be very effective. I know plenty of people who are ensconced in the progressive universe and who have doubts about some aspect of the progressive consensus that they don’t want to voice publicly because they think it will end badly for them. I don’t think those fears are entirely unwarranted…. [But while] epistemic institutions can’t function if everyone is compelled to toe the party line, they also can’t function if people are prohibited from issuing sharp critiques of those who dissent. The question is whether those sharp critiques create a spirit of dialogue or a climate of fear. The answer hinges in part on how the people involved respond, but also on what lessons actors in wider society draw from these episodes. I found the mentality behind the Stat piece disturbing, but at the end of the day, [Jennifer] Doleac is going to be running a criminal justice program for a major philanthropy…
Ethan Mollick: A guide to prompting AI (for what it is worth): ‘A little bit of magic. Okay, I lied slightly about the “there-are-no-magic-words” thing. There are some phrases that seem to work universally across LLMs to provide better or different results, again, by changing the context of the answer. Some possible things to experiment with: Be creative/make any assumptions you need. This will tend to remove some of the constraints of practicality around AI answers, and can be useful if you are trying to generate something novel. Show your work/provide sources/go step-by-step. The AI will make up information that it does not have access to. There is some evidence that asking it to show its work, or its sources, reduces that risk somewhat. Even if it doesn’t, it can make checking work easier. Write me code and tell me how to use it. If you can’t code, you might be able to now. AI can do some amazing things with Python programs, and tell you exactly how to run it. I don’t know coding, but I have written a dozen Python programs in the last month. If there are errors in the code, and there likely will be, just give them to the AI to correct. Write a draft/provide an example. If the AI refuses to do something (“you should be creative and write your own novel, I can’t help”, sometimes asking it to provide something like a draft can get it to produce results…
Daniel W. Drezner: The Risks of De-Risking: ‘A few thoughts on the latest buzzword to describe Sino-Western relations…. Look, this is not all on the Biden administration. China has behaved poorly across a wide variety of policy arenas. Both Yellen and Sullivan are correct to point out that it takes two sides to repair a relationship. I am just saying that if the Biden administration really wants to install a floor on the relationship, it needs to think harder about the wordsmithing. The transatlantic policymakers might like the term de-risking. They should realize that dog won’t hunt…
15 years ago at the start of the Great Recession there were perhaps a dozen banks in my town. With 15 years of monetary easing there may be now 2 dozen banks (and branches). I would suppose tightening will reduce the numbers back to the old days.
Mullin: Of course, the setting of monetary policy instruments ought to respond to things like stock market crashes. That's what it means to have a policy of targeting economic outcomes. Its loose talk to refer to changes in instrument settings as "policy" changes. Central banks are not supposed to have "stances," either. Ther are no stances in tennis while the ball is in play.