BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-06-08 Th
Matuschak on Apple Vision Pro; þe political gender gap among þe young; Marques Brownlee on Apple Vision Pro; Yglesias on the true meaning of "content of þeir character", Lynley on Apple's long-run...
…ML plans, Campos on Pence, DuBois on R.E. Lee, & Leyden’s extreme techno-optimism…
MUST-READ: Andy Matuschak on Apple Vision Pro:
Smart. Remember: the iPhone was launched as a “wide-screen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communicator”—yet phone calls are 1/100, music-plus-podcasts 1/10, and messages-email-&-web-browsing 1/3 of what I use my phone for currently. It’s the other use cases that Steve Jobs and company had not really thought of that have become really key:
Andy Matuschak: Vision Pro: ‘The hardware seems faintly unbelievable… as powerful as… mid-tier laptops (M2), plus a dizzying sensor/camera array with dedicated co-processor, plus displays with 23M 6µm pixels… and associated optics, all in roughly a mobile phone envelope…. What does Apple imagine we’ll be doing with these devices, and how will we do it?… This isn’t a virtual reality device, or an augmented reality device, or a mixed reality device. It’s a “spatial computing” device…. On its surface, the iPhone didn’t have totally new killer apps when it launched… mail client, a music player, a web browser, YouTube, etc. The multitouch paradigm… made those apps possible on the tiny display… allowed those familiar tools to be used anywhere…. Relatively quickly, the iPhone did acquire many functions which were “native” to that paradigm. A canonical example is the 2008 GPS-powered map…. If I find the Vision Pro’s launch software suite conceptually conservative, what might I like to see?… Huge, persistent infospaces…. Ubiquitous computing, spatial computational objects…. Shared spatial computing….
ONE IMAGE: Þe Political Gender Gap Among þe Young:
ONE VIDEO: Marques Brownlee on Apple Vision Pro:
The Reality Distortion Field is now the entire product:
Very Briefly Noted:
I am still on Teams Soft-Landing and The-Fed-Has-Got-This here: Chris Anstey: Team Recession’s Setback: ‘This year, another team is coming under pressure: those who have been warning of a US, or even global, recession starting in the foreseeable future. The American economy in particular has withstood multiple blows without any sign of an imminent collapse in growth…
Republicans R oxymorons: Jeremy Bauer-Wolf: South Dakota governor demands conservative makeover for public higher education: ‘Kristi Noem… wants the public colleges, which collectively enroll more than 33,600 students, to enact rules fortifying free speech while also banning drag performances on their campuses and references to preferred pronouns.….
Very true and very nicely put: Brian Klaas: Billionaires and the Evolution of Overconfidence: ‘To understand billionaires, you need to understand horizontal inequality, illusory control, self-selection bias, quantified self-worth, and the evolution of overconfidence…
I find it truly remarkable that CoinBase’s is “a real argument”, with actual legislators claiming to believe it: Matt Levine: When Is a Token Not a Security?: ‘[If] CoinBase is right… crypto has essentially discovered a way to sell unregulated stock… include most of the economic features of stock in a crypto token… sell it to venture capitalists… wait a year then you never have to worry about securities regulation. But this is a real argument!…
I wish I got to teach this course: Alex Imas: Behavioral Economics…
People can gain great wisdom with age and experience. GW did: Mary V. Thompson: “The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret”: ‘George Washington… was born into a society in which slavery was a simple fact of life…. Unlike most of his contemporaries, however, Washington's views on the subject of slavery did a complete turnabout over the course of his life… in the space of a very short 67 years…
How is it that ever-running constant-bullshit machines can be successful? When they take huge numbers of swings at bat, and are graded entirely by their hits: Noah Smith: David Sacks and Balaji raise a false alarm about the jobs numbers: ‘The government numbers are not fake. They're just noisy…
Important. But this paper is much thinner than I wish. And it should not be “explain”, but, rather,” might explain”: Tian Chen Zeng & al. (2018): Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck…
Rather, foe people who have not figured out how big and strange the world is, being anti-witnessed is an enormous status insult: Jonah Goldberg: Class Dismissed: ‘How material abundance erodes class but intensifies social status…. In the increasingly immaterial world of the attention economy, being witnessed is the new source of status…
Maybe. I have to think about this a lot more: Ethan Mollick: AI and Books: ‘After these experiments, I have come to believe how we relate to books is likely to change as a result of AI…
¶s:
A very nice framing indeed of “content of their character” as “we here in America reject statistical discrimination as a thing it is valid to do”: Matthew Yglesias: The message conservatives don't want to hear about anti-Black racism: ‘[Tim] Scott, an individual human being who has not done anything wrong… [is] treated as presumptively criminal based on a statistical inference. Conservatives often paint certain styles of contemporary diversity programming as objectionable forms of collective guilt on the part of white Americans. But they do very little to extend empathy to people caught up in negative stereotyping and racial profiling, practices that can be very hurtful whether or not they are malicious…. Even leaving [Martin Luther] King[ Jr.]’s socialism aside, the call to build a society in which people are “judged based on the content of their character” rather than on hazy statistical inferences about their ethnicity is a call that has real content—content that I think many conservatives disagree with. They think it’s correct and appropriate to use stereotypes as decision-making heuristics and that efforts to socially stigmatize such behavior or make it illegal lead to dysfunction and social collapse.…
Is there enough computational power on our local machines to properly tune transformer models for each of our individual use cases? The argument “if not, Moore’s Law will soon make it so” does not, I think, hold here: Matthew Lynley: Reading the tea leaves for Apple's AI plans: ‘Apple's AI announcements summed up to two throwaway lines involving Transformers-based approaches. Let's over-speculate on what that means!… Apple is going after fine-tuning and quantization of machine learning models rather than outright foundation model development. And that’s not surprising given that there’s a small set of companies that can afford the tens of thousands of H100 chips required to train a massive foundation model. There are some companies working reducing the cost of that training, but it’s still pretty restricted to Nvidia hardware…. Apple is going for a future where model development is dominated by fine-tuning and quantizing larger open source models on local hardware… leaving foundation model development to the larger players… and focusing on the long tail…
The thing is that Mike Pence probably believes what he says, at some level: Paul Campos: The counterintuitive nature of statistical reasoning: ‘It’s time to remind the LGM audience that Mike Pence is still a thing that exists, and that announced this morning that it’s running for president. Of the United States, not of a consortium of Indiana tire dealerships…. Back in 2000, when he was running for Congress…. “Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill. In fact, 2 out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer…” Think about the mentality that could write something like that, and consider it to be a compelling argument…
Techno-optimism of the will!: Peter Leyden: The Great Progression Begins: ‘AI helps launch a new event series, a new Substack series & a new era of progress…. What an incredible opportunity to be living when humans cross a threshold into a new age of technological sophistication and societal complexity… part of the first cohort that must now figure out how to live and work with the most powerful technology yet developed—intelligent machines…
I think DuBois made too many concessions to the Lee-ites here. Lee acted as if I was very unhappy about those clauses of his father-in-law's will fit manumitted the slaves owned by the estate. You do not do that unless you are substantially pro-slavery as an institution: W.E.B. DuBois (1928): Robert E. Lee: ‘People do not go to war for abstract theories of government. They fight for property and privilege…. That was what Virginia fought for…. Lee followed Virginia… because he did not have the moral courage to stand against his family and his clan… Either he knew what slavery meant… or he did not. If he did not he was a fool. If he did, Robert Lee was a traitor…
That Brian Klass thing is really good.
Speaking of thick causality, what are the short- and long-term implications of the ideological gender gap among young people? (I don't have data but I suspect it's global, for some meanings of "conservatism"; after all, a male-dominated gender hierarchy is an intrinsic part of pretty much all variations I'm aware of regardless of the other hierarchies at play).
Long-term it looks like a good thing, but in the short term I wonder if we're not going to see disenfranchisement attempts aimed explicitly (or by correlation) at young women as the cohort becomes more important as a voting pool.