BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-11-11 Sa
Sub-Turing BradBot's presentation-of-self; John Gruber on spatial video in the Apple VisionPro; very briefly noted; Jan Hatzius's economic outlook, Sub-Turing BradBot I 1.0, & Chat-GPT has no...
Sub-Turing BradBot's presentation-of-self; John Gruber on spatial video in the Apple VisionPro; very briefly noted; Jan Hatzius's economic outlook, Sub-Turing BradBot I 1.0, & Chat-GPT has no theory of mind; & the hinge of human history is 1870, Sub-Turing BradBot I, & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-11-09 Th…
ONE IMAGE: The Tentative Winner for Sub-Turing BradBot’s Presentation-of-Self:
ONE AUDIO: Dithering: Spatial Video in the VisionPro:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Olivier Blanchard: If markets are right about long real rates, public debt ratios will increase for some time. We must make sure that they do not explode: ‘Stabilizing the debt ratio implies reducing primary deficits to zero. For both economic and political reasons, there is no way governments can do this quickly…. The strong turn to fiscal austerity, which took place from 2010 to 2014 in Europe and is widely seen today as having been too quick, impeding the European recovery, should serve as a cautionary tale. Add to this the additional spending needed to reinforce defense and increase public green spending. It is clear that the adjustment must be steady but equally clear that it has to be slow…
Human Capital: Sanjoy Mahajan: Street-Fighting Mathematics: ‘Guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation…. Extreme-cases reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization, generalization, and pictorial analysis… mental calculation, solid geometry, musical intervals, logarithms, integration, infinite series, solitaire, and differential equations. (No epsilons or deltas are harmed by taking this course)…
Left-Wing Dystopias: Noah Smith: ‘Degrowth, ethnic cleansing of races deemed to be "colonizers", the hollowing out of math education, and NIMBY pastoralism are all deeply dystopian visions. They are not ahead of their time, or unrealizable utopias. They're just bad!…
Diversity: Economist: Young children may benefit from having more male teachers: ‘[Pro-male] gender quotas in Finnish primary schools seemed to benefit boys and girls alike…. The [test-focused “meritocratic”] selection criteria for teachers may have elevated candidates who were less suitable—exactly the outcome critics of quotas fear…
Central Country: Matthew C. Klein: The Threat from China's Capital Flight: ‘Perhaps as much as $500 billion a year is likely leaving the country in ways that are not showing up in the official financial accounts. That is putting downward pressure on the currency...
Plague: Matthew Yglesias: What happened with Covid NPIs?: ‘Learning the right lessons from 2020…. The early wave that hit Greater New York was a scary exemplar of how bad things might have gotten…. If you take the Great Flu model seriously, essentially every state did adopt meaningful NPIs. And if you judge their success by the curve-flattening criterion, it worked. So it’s arguably less that NPIs failed everywhere than that NPIs actually worked everywhere… relative to reasonable expectations…
CryptoGrifts: Katie Roiphe: Why Are We So Obsessed With Sam Bankman-Fried’s Parents?: ‘Bankman and Fried’s friends and colleagues are often quoted calling them “ethically fastidious” or “deeply ethical,” but these ethics seemed to fall away in the face of their son’s improbable success. The couple had not become partners in big law firms; they had chosen a less lucrative, more intellectually stimulating, principled path. And yet, the proximity to enormous, dizzying sums of money seemed to stir their imaginations…. the father began working for his son’s companies. Bankman liked to say that he was “the adult in the room,” but he was also the lawyer in the room. Former employees were quoted by Bloomberg saying that SBF “consulted his dad constantly,” and he was on several group chats charting the demise of FTX. There was talk in the trial about how the company didn’t have a “risk-management team,” but aren’t your parents supposed to be your risk-management team?…
GPT-LLM-ML: Om Malik: ChatGPT & Friends: The Cool Kids boosting my productivity: ‘For me, a new generation of “intelligent” tools is replacing the older ones…. First, it was Otter, and then Grammarly. Now, OpenAI has stepped in, effectively replacing both… MidJourney…. OpenAI, the Descript App, MidJourney, and Poe… an entirely revamped workflow that elevates my productivity…. specific prompts to guide my searches. Most of my writing is done on Lex. Page, while Sudowrite remains my preferred platform for creative ideation…. For summarizing PDF files, I turn to Claude (from Anthropic)…. I also process podcast audio with MacWhisper and then use Claude for summarization. This approach saves me from listening to prolonged discussions. There are just too many podcasts out there, and ironically, my own approach to podcasts is what’s preventing me from producing more of them…
Journamalism: Doktor Zoom: Are You Okay New York Times? Do You Need a Policeman or a Brain Doctor?: ‘President Joe Biden traveled to an Amtrak maintenance warehouse in Bear, Delaware, Monday to talk up the jobs and economic growth…. [Lisa Friedman and Mark Walker] New York Times… this weird lede…. “President Biden, perhaps Amtrak’s most famous advocate, announced $16.4 billion in funding for rail projects on Monday, exhibiting a business-as-usual approach as polls show him trailing former President Donald J. Trump one year before Election Day. Speaking at a maintenance warehouse where Amtrak trains are serviced in Bear, Del., Mr. Biden made no mention of the polling from The New York Times and Siena College polls…” Dang, Joe, where are your priorities? Why won’t you dance for the New York Times? The story went on like that, alternating between brief mentions of the infrastructure event and extended grumping about Biden’s failure to acknowledge that this one poll says he’s doomed, doomed, portraying the Amtrak event as so much train-whistling past the graveyard…
Kevin Kruse: ‘Trump is promising to imprison his opponents, to establish concentration camps for illegals migrants, and to turn the executive branch into a dictatorship but don’t worry, the New York Times sent a fashion reporter to one of the courts where he’s on trial…
SubStack NOTES:
Economics: This looks probably right to me. There is likely to be a continued trend of disinflation in the upcoming year. Sectors that previously experienced significant price increases are likely to soften. The labor market is likely to normalize. The likelihood of a U.S. recession is very limited, given continued strong growth in real household income, reduced impact from monetary and fiscal tightening, and a rebound in manufacturing activity. Most major central banks are probably finished with rate hikes and more inclined to implement “insurance” rate cuts should growth decelerate. Thus we have a cautiously optimistic view of the global economic landscape for 2024, and a rather optimistic view of the U.S. economic landscape:
GPT-LLM-ML: This is now good enough to be deployable as a first-line virtual office-hours ChatBot to answer fairly straightforward and basic book questions. It still has no theory of mind—little sense of which labels to attach to the multiple perspectives I present in the book, and very little sense of “bottom lines”. But does it really need them?:
GPT-LLM-ML: Chat-GPT has no theory of mind. It cannot even imagine distinguishing between what I think were the causes of World War I and what Lenin’s successors in the Kremlin thought were the causes of WWI. This is a big problem since I want to use it as a front-end search engine to a big book that tries to fairly present many different points of view before summing issues up with what my point of view is:
Noah Smith: Left Wing Dystopias.
Noah suffers from "number blindness", possibly as a result of short-term thinking. Of course we need growth in our current economic system - but it is NOT SUSTAINABLE.!
Simple math.
1% economic growth over the next century to 2123 implies a 2.7x increase in production. This may require similarly large increases in energy use, resource extraction, and even population size unless we can reduce population size but maintain growth with productivity gains. A planet with 2.7x the the current requirements to sustain economic growth?
But wait, that is merely a century hence. Surely we want civiolization to last longer than that? What abount the same growth for teh next millennium to 3023?
Well that results in an economy nearly 21,000x larger. Obviously the Earth cannot support this. Neither can any of the rocky planets, so it would mean that in a millennium, almost all of the human population would be living in space, perhaps filling teh solar system with habotats in a Dyson swarm.
And then what?
A millennium only looks back as far as the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066. Not exactly a long time historically, yet we would have effectively put our human future in a dead end. maybe all that production can be maintained by robots in the solar system, but to what end?
If we want to maintain a liveable Earth, with a population that lives well but doesn't destroy our biosphere, we simply have to consider nogrowth and degrowth strategies at least as far as consumption is involved. Earth would be far better off with a much smaller poplulation, all living comfortable lives at a high standard of living, with the most destructive of resource extraction and manufacturing tightly controlled and possibly even off-planet.
Current growth is just not sustainable over the long term. It is the same issue as decarbomnizing our energy production. There are always excuses to maintain "business as usual" rather than really aggressively working towards that goal.
I believe the chatbot avatar needs to be holding a mug of coffee.