BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-06-10 Sa
Mollick on chatting wiþ books rather þan reading them, to which I say it works well only for a particular kind of book; machine-tool exporters; Wolf on þe crisis of democratic capitalism...
…& Krugman on the success of Biden industrial industrial policy, Smith on one year before the mast of the good ship neoliberalism, Blight on Frederick Douglass’s reading of the Constitution against itself, & Devereaux on the information-theoretic nullity that is Graeber and Wengrow,..
MUST-READ: Our Future Relationship to Books?:
I have come to the conclusion that this is a very dangerous road to go down, for most books and most kinds of books, at least.
To the extent that a book is a catechism of questions-and-answers, yes, you can ask an LLM questions and get back the right answers. To the extent that a book is structured to contain its own chapter and overall summaries, yes, you can ask an LLM to summarize and get back the right answers. But anything else is a crapshoot. And perhaps the most dangerous thing is that, because LLMs are tuned to be persuasive, we are bad judges of how much of a crapshoot it is. The metaphor that I have settled on is that you are talking to a ninth grader with a very good memory who has read, but not understood the book—a stochastic parrot, one might say:
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…. AIs… at least have the appearance of having, an understanding of the context and meaning of a piece of text. This radically changes how we approach books…. We can ask the AI to extract meaning for us…. These changes are exciting in some cases… threatening in others…. With more accurate, detailed access to human knowledge provided by these larger context windows, AIs will begin to change how we understand and relate to our own written heritage in massive ways. We can get access to the collective library of humanity in a way that makes the information stored there more useful and applicable, but also elevates a non-human presence as the mediator between us and our knowledge. It is a trade-off we will need to manage carefully…
Of course, this may change. The owl was once the baker’s daughter, after all…
ONE IMAGE: Distributors of Embodied Technological Knowledge:
ONE VIDEO: The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism:
Very Briefly Noted:
BDM: The romance of the grift: ‘Elizabeth Holmes… just told a lot of obvious lies—not just about Theranos, but about trivial things, like her dog…. The way to find out if she was lying was not to ask her if she was lying, or ponder the unknowable depths of lying, if you’re being played, whatever. It was an empirical question with an empirical answer…
Matthew C. Klein: "Greedflation" and the Profits Equation: ‘The assumption behind the "greedflation" thesis is that companies are choosing to squeeze volumes because they care more about unit margins than total profits. There are other possibilities…
Branko Milanovic: America’s Adam Smith: ‘A review of Glory M. Liu’s “Adam Smith’s America”…. An excellent book…. Free trade vs. protectionism… sympathy vs. self-interest… the price system (free market) and government…. The broadness of Smith’s oeuvre allowed a sensible discussion of all the themes, and made each of the six positions defensible…
Brian Albrecht: Why You Should Read More Thomas Sowell: ‘Especially Basic Economics and Knowledge and Decisions…. I’m not suggesting you read the bad stuff. As with anyone, read Sowell’s best stuff! For me, that’s Basic Economics, for an intro to economic reasoning and policy book, and Knowledge and Decisions, for a deeper dive…
Charlie Stross: Shrinking the World: ‘In 1810, a stagecoach or mail coach ticket from London to Edinburgh would cost roughly a month's wages for a servant, and the journey would take 48 hours…. England in 1816 was about the size of the globe in 2016…
John Gruber: First Impressions of Vision Pro and Vision OS: ‘It doesn’t look at all like looking at screens inside a headset. It looks like reality, albeit through something like a pair of safety glasses...
Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Ilona Sologoub: The Ukraine-Russia Culture War…
Jamelle Bouie: The Four Freedoms, According to Republicans: ‘Freedom to control… freedom to exploit… freedom to censor… freedom to menace…
Reddit: Textual history of repentant Sauron?…
Dan Drezner: Why I’m Not Worried About the GOP’s Crowded 2024 Field: ‘Sure, Trump could win, but everyone seems to have 2020 amnesia…. [Sanders] was poised to take a commanding lead…. Then… Jim Clyburn endorsed Biden, who then won a plurality of the South Carolina primary. After that, the Democratic Party establishment went and decided…. There is still oodles of time for the GOP to coalesce around an alternative…
¶s:
The contrast between the manufacturing and machines-installed-and-rebar-in-the-ground boom from Biden’s policies and the total nothingburger rffects of the Trump-McConnell-Ryan tax cut of last decade is quite striking, and is a lesson that people should greatly take to heart: Paul Krugman: ‘I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there's pushback against the observation of a Biden manufacturing boom. So first of all, no, it isn't just inflation. Deflate by whatever you like, and it's still parabolic. Second, when people say "of course it's happening, it's being subsidized"—well, yes, but the size of the boom has surprised everyone, including industrial policy proponents. So there's real news here. Third, when people say that growth of a sector isn't necessarily good… here's a public purpose behind Biden industrial policy, so big is probably good…. The usual suspects claimed that a green energy transition would require huge economic sacrifice. Seeing this much investment in response to subsidies that are still only a fraction of 1% of GDP suggests otherwise…
It was not so much the text of the articles of the Constitution, but rather the existence of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution’s Preamble that created a dynamic to push the Constitution in the direction of becoming a Constitution of Liberty: David Blight: The Two Constitutions: ‘I have come to see [Frederick Douglass] as a deeply committed political thinker who argued his way, through what he called “careful study,” using legal and moral logic, to a vision of an antislavery Constitution. Guided by the natural rights tradition, Douglass found the core meaning of the American crisis. “Liberty and Slavery—opposite as Heaven and Hell,” he wrote in 1850, “are both in the Constitution.” What divided the nation was a Constitution “at war with itself”…
As I periodically say, the big problem with Graeber’s work is that truth and falsehood are always mixed together, and you cannot tell which is which unless you already know more about the subject he is writing about than Graeber already does. Hence, in a Shannon information sense, Graeber’s works are completely uninformative: Bret Devereaux: ‘Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, is having a rough time at this AIA panel; consensus may be that the book is 'important' and 'timely' but not... right... in pretty crucial ways dealing w/ hierarchy in early societies…. Scheidel's review of DoE, ("Resetting History's Dial") is very much not a positive one. Academic book reviews are often couched in neutral language which can make it hard for readers to pick up on the tone. But "their resultant inability to account for broad trajectories of human development" and "their idealist purism traps Graeber and Wengrow in a cage of their own making" and his catalog of problems with particular evidence all amount to a deeply skeptical review. His 'brightside' quote, ('this book could be good for non-specialists because it can tell them things Graeber and Wengrow claim are new but are actually old hat') is actually a pretty savage backhanded complement to put in an academic review…
The right-neoliberal position is a theological one: “The market giveth, the market taketh away—blessed be the name of the market” is true, right, just, and holy. The centrist-neoliberal position is that political sclerosis and rent -eeking have poisoned the ability of the government to improve on market outcomes, and so we have to pretend “The market giveth…” etc. The left-neoliberal position is that often market institutions are much better means for attaining social-democratic ends than command or bureaucracy because they are powerful mechanisms for crowdsourcing solutions to problems of production—as long as market prices are tuned to social values. Left neoliberalism is this a social-democratic wolf in sheep's clothing: Noah Smith: ‘Neoliberalism: a thread…. The year I spent being called… a "neoliberal" taught me a lot…. The people who now call themselves "neoliberals" are the heirs… [of] the liberals of the 1990s who responded to the failure of communism and the excesses of libertarianism by creating a new, center-left technocratic policy program…. The best neoliberal manifesto I know of is this essay from 1999 by DeLong. It sees free trade and globalization, along with strong welfare states in rich countries, as the best way to make the world more prosperous and more equal at the same time. If you want a more recent, longer-form neoliberal manifesto, the best one I know is the book "Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital", by Kim Clausing…. markets as the fundamental generators of prosperity, and government as the way to distribute that prosperity more equitably…. [But] I believe that government needs to do more than just redistribute…. Government can't shoulder the entire burden of equalizing…. We need additional, quasi-independent institutions, like unions…. Land reform that goes way beyond what most neoliberals would endorse…. Industrial policy is underrated, both at the national and the local level. Neoliberalism under-emphasizes science policy, for example. I want a Big Push for science-driven growth…. Can the government "pick winners"? Yes. The government *must* pick winners. Green energy and other zero-carbon technologies being chief among the things we must pick…
LLM and AI: I remember way back when calculators first came out and teachers had a fit particularly when it came to math homework. Eventually they adjusted and had to accept the use of calculators. Teachers adopted by making the questions harder, work to arrive at the answer had to be shown, and answers were no longer round numbers, had to be expressed in fractions, etc. I suspect with AI now doing summary work, future education focus will revolve around working knowledge of the details or using overarching themes across different disciplines. Essentially the work gets harder and the expectations, higher.
I don't think Mollick reads books the way the rest of us do. Most of us want the narrative with the author controlling what is presented to us and when. No one picks up a mystery or thriller and reads just to answer questions like "What was the vital clue?" or "How do they stop the mad bomber?" That defeats the whole purpose of reading the book. You don't go to the theater and watch a production of Henry V, Part 2 to find out the year Henry IV died.
Mollick doesn't want to read books. He wants to search books and find very particular things, for example, in what year Henry IV died. His examples are all about search, search for linguistic tics, search for metaphors, search for major points and supporting arguments. That's all very well and good if you work in certain fields and do a lot of searching, but it isn't reading save in a very limited sense. I've been rather unimpressed with LLMs so far, but I'm willing to believe that they could work reasonably well as search engines. People are used to sorting out the wheat from the tares in search engine results, so even an imperfect search would be useful.
As for understanding, I'm with the mathematicians who say that when an android proves a theorem, nothing happens. The development of artificial intelligence is historically entwined with our modern understanding of what it means to prove a theorem. Mathematicians have been addressing these issues for nearly a century now, and, perhaps strangely, they've placed human understanding at the center of all things. You can only learn so much by searching a proof. To understand it, you have to follow the author's narrative. (For a good essay on this, check out Harris' "DO ANDROIDS PROVE THEOREMS IN THEIR SLEEP?")