BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-09-07 Th
Cognitive self-defense in the digital-attention society; learn R!; America's current droughts; very briefly noted; Ezra Klein, Horace Dediu, Stefania D’Amico & Thomas King, & Ben Levinstein on...
Cognitive self-defense in the digital-attention society; learn R!; America's current droughts; very briefly noted; Ezra Klein, Horace Dediu, Stefania D’Amico & Thomas King, & Ben Levinstein on attention conservation, customer value & þe Apple Vision Pro, wheþer þe Fed has already raised interest rates enough, & what GPT-LLMs are good for; & are stochastic parrots hexapods?, Franklin Ford’s “Robe & Sword”, racism as anti-utilitarianism at Chicago, & briefly noted for 2023-09-04 Mo…
MUST-READ: Cognitive Self Defense in the Digital-Attention Society:
The economy we are moving into is not really an information economy. It is much more an attention economy. Maybe we should call it a digital-attention economy.
First of all, it is not information in any Shannon sense of reducing our uncertainty about the state of the world that we are buying, or consuming. We can process the feeds that we pay for and that others pay to inundate us in order to gain Shannon-sense information, but that is not really the major part of what is going on. The major part of it is others seeking to command our attention and our attempts to wrestle our attention back into a pattern that is good for us—whether for entertainment, love, friendship, or information.
And it contains many bad actors who are trying to hack our brains for our detriment and for their profit and power. The only good strategy is to just say no:
Ezra Klein: ‘There’s all the obvious reasons news orgs and journalists should quit Twitter but the other reason is that you just don’t want the dumb-but-compelling chaos of that site capturing your attention so often. You don’t want Elon Musk, or the people he favors in his algorithmic hunger games, living rent-free in your mind. That real estate is valuable! (One of the worst parts of Threads is so many people here are still so obsessed with what happens there that there’s constant spillover!)…
Moskov: ‘How did you write that parenthetical a mere 7 minutes after this post?: Ezra Klein: “If I wanted more advertisers to use my platform I would stop, personally, doing things that would make advertisers stop using my platform.What I would not do - and just spitballing here - is draw attention to the flood of neo-Nazi content my decisions helped unleash on that platform.And what I would definitely not do - and again, just talking in absurd hypotheticals that would never happen - is draw attention to that content by blaming the anti-defamation league for my collapsing revenues…
Ezra Klein: ‘Because I was thinking about that post and how it was kind of a waste of time to have thought about that at all…
Ezra Klein: ‘(And that first post was a response to twitter spillover to threads)…
ONE VIDEO: Learn R in 39 Minutes:
ONE IMAGE: America’s Current Drought Right Now:
Very Briefly Noted:
Rutger Bregman: ‘This is simply an extraordinary study. Researchers gave $7,500 (CAD) to homeless people in Vancouver. The result? The program *saved* money. It helped many of them to move into housing faster, which saved the shelter system $8,277 per person. 🧵👇…
Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Measuring the Natural Rate of Interest…
Viola Zhou & Nanchanok Wongsamuth: How BYD snatched Tesla’s crown: ‘BYD dominates the Chinese EV market. Now it’s coming for the world…. Battery technology… allows it to compete on both price and performance… is tied directly to the company’s founder, Wang Chuanfu…
Public Sphere: Alexander Kustov: What facts can change minds on immigration?: ‘In our new preprint with Michel Landgrave, we show that most Americans don't know much about the legal immigration process. Informing voters about the difficulties involved makes them more pro-immigration <https://osf.io/mu4j5/>…
Free Trade: Robert Shapiro: Trade Agreements Have Created U.S. Jobs And Raised U.S. Incomes…
China: Dave Lee: Who’s Winning the US-China Chip War? Ask These Experts: ‘Huawei’s new Mate 60 Pro… TechInsights… [founds] contained a 7 nanometer Kirin 9000s processor—the first 7nm chip fabricated by China’s own… SMIC…
Journamalism: Clay Shirky: ‘Isaacson having written Jobs’s biography can’t be overstated as a rationale for Musk hiring him…. I don't imagine Isaacson was busily hiding esoteric takedowns in bootlicking prose…. The tension between Musk's behavior vs. having been contracted to write a hagiography led [to] some of the sotto voce signaling to the reader…
Neofascism: John Gruber: Should Apple Cease Advertising On Twitter?: ‘It’s hard to imagine any other ad venue… where Apple would run ads that run alongside ads like this one. No need for a statement. Just cease running ads on Twitter/X…
Nick Cohen: Brexit: Why can’t we break the conspiracy of silence?: ‘Brexit has crashed and burned—taking the country with it. But no one in English politics wants to talk about it…
Jonathan M. Katz: ‘So funny how many of those are running around: Scott Burton: “neither left nor right but a secret, third thing that also hates trans and wokeness and defends white nationalists under the guise of freedom of speech” we got another original thinker here…
NOTES, & on SubStack:
The $3500 cost of next year's Apple Vision Pro headset looks to be a very modest markup over the fully amortized cost of a very sophisticated piece of frontier technology—and far below what the marginal demand price will be for the only 300,000 such headsets Apple is likely to be able to ship in 2024.
The AppleVision likely to appear in 2026 is likely to cost less than half, and so not be the equivalent of a $100 a mont but rather of a $40 a month commitment to Spatial Computing. Thus I am an Apple Vision long-run bull these days:
Ah. But how does it "incorporate economic expectations" and "allow for forward guidance"? The strengths of these factors are not parameters that can be identified statistically or derived theoretically. I I am still looking for someone to tell me why a list of past inflation, episodes, and a couple of paragraphs about how each one of them came to an end is not a better guide than a study like this, ingenious and competent as it is:
“Throwing more layers and parameters and training and compute at it will make it get better” very much begs the question: “Better” at what, exactly? Ask a modern LLM to do anything more complex than regurgitate a passage from a FAQ list or a catechism, and hallucinations are rampant—even when it is, supposedly, grounded in reality via web searches.
Now do not get me wrong: I think these GPT models will be very useful, because a huge proportion of what we write is, in fact, semi-ritualistic stochastic parrotage. In writing first drafts of that, and in reading such writing in order to extract the Shannon-information gist, I am expecting to use GPT's a lot over the next decade to make my life easier. But that is all that it is:
The economy we are moving into is not really an information economy. It is much more an attention economy. Maybe we should call it a digital-attention economy.
First of all, it is not information in any Shannon sense of reducing our uncertainty about the state of the world that we are buying, or consuming. We can process the feeds that we pay for and that others pay to inundate us in order to gain Shannon-sense information, but that is not really the major part of what is going on. The major part of it is others seeking to command our attention and our attempts to wrestle our attention back into a pattern that is good for us—whether for entertainment, love, friendship, or information.
And it contains many bad actors who are trying to hack our brains for our detriment and for their profit and power. The only good strategy is to just say no:
Brexit:
One reason for not talking about it was mentioned in the podcast - none of the parties want to upset the Brexit voters so that they can try to get their vote.
Let us not forget the Lib-Dems ran on a platform of retuning to the EU and got crushed - with their leader losing her seat.
Let us also not forget that Labour under Corbin's leadership was pro-Brexit. The Labour party voted in Parliament to ratify the referendum quickly and then played silly games that just resulted in a relatively hard Brexit. Starmer may want to renew relations with the EU, but he will have to do that piecemeal while not frightening the Brexit (anti-immigrant) believers in the once "red wall" counties.
Lastly, Britain remains delusional about its global status. They claimed that the EU would offer Britain a Canada++ deal. They did not. Pols claimed post-Brexit trade deals would be the easiest to enact. They have been meager. Britain is not a colossus bestriding the globe any more, and it is quite clear that this was not going to happen again. Britain's role as a permanent member of the UN Security Council is only due to the possession of nuclear weapons. Its actual military capabilities are rather weak.
The relatively isolated Britain, largely cut off from a far larger EU, is now bringing home the stupidity of the Brexit decision, once that could have been averted if a non-binding referendum had been discarded if cooler heads had been able to persuade their colleagues this was an undesirable decision. But the idealogues in the parties just went along with the popular (just) decision and the rest is history.
Cognitive self-defense...: "(One of the worst parts of Threads is so many people here are still so obsessed with what happens there that there’s constant spillover!)…"
Ezra is being too mild (as he would be). It is more like a million screams, passing through an amplifier larger than any that the Bose could ever imagine.