Travel times in 1914; Biden’s industrial policy; very briefly noted; Arpit Gupta on the natural rate of inflation; Claudine Gay plagiarism complaint; Baratunde Thurston on how there is always...
As with others of my age, and UK education, essay writing with [fountain pen] ink on paper was part of the English curriculum and exams were all essay style, no multiple choice. To ensure essays in exams were full of likely scoreable points as possible, I would use 5 minutes of my time for each 1/2 hour essay drawing a "mind map" of all the key points I could think of, and then proceed to use that as the outline for the exam essay. As the mind map was part of the exam output, any failure to complete the points in the tests would at least be shown to the reviewer that I did know what should have been included. Until the mid-1980s, work that needed to be typed was handed to staff to type for payment - very much like office secretarial pools in firms.
But like Fallows, I was taken immediately with the word processor. It eliminated the problem of mistyping on a basic electric typewriter, but even better, it allowed frequent rewrites and copying and pasting paragraphs to different orders to ensure the logic of my thoughts progressed as smoothly as possible. Not for me the effortless single draft of natural writers of fiction!
I do still print out my drafts and hand edit changes that will be electronically made, but unlike historic letters and texts with crossing-outs and word insertions, word-processed texts are as clean and error-free as personal inspection and spell and grammar checkers can make them.
One negative of some of these automated tools like "Autocorrect" is that work "correction" seems to be made almost invisibly, overriding the correct, but unknown word, with the wrong nearest word in its dictionary. If there is one thing I would like in an LLM system would be to just go back to highlighting words it thinks are incorrect, rather than silently autocorrecting them. [I don't disable autocorrect as my typing on a phone is appallingly bad, and autocorrect is still more useful than not. Interestingly, using speech-to-text translation has improved my output on the phone and I may even buy such a system for my main computer.]
The ability to edit quickly is also a huge advantage in coding where syntax and logic are critical in writing correct programs. But as with essay writing, it discourages thought in favor of just writing code snippets that can be tested and then ordered and reordered to remove bugs. Having been put off computing in the early 1970s by the bugs generated from even the simplest code submitted on paper to be turned into punch cards which then resulted in pages of fanfold showing the failure in the stacktrace, I found joy in the immediate feedback of personal programmable calculators and then computers. I have never looked back since. But the bad habits of minimal thought, have suffused my coding and my texts, ever since.
However, I did note when teaching, that students brought up with education that tested for knowledge with multiple answer tests had extraordinary difficulties writing lab reports in a coherent style. Word processing software that is effectively free did not improve the writing of current students over that of hand-written reports of an earlier generation.
‘"What caused the civil war?", "Does burning fossil fuel warm the planet?", "Do guns kill people?", "Should women have equal rights?" and any number of other really simple questions are "gotchas" in a GOP primary. That makes me sad…
Casten is "sad"? WTF. That Republican politicians feel that facts are an anathema to their voters should be an affront to any person with functioning gray cells. If a 1/3 of the population actually agrees with the underlying idea that these are unfair gotchas (as well as 2/5ths of the population agreeing the 2020 election result was illegitimate) we have a major reality problem in what is the current economic and military hegemon.
A rather rose-tinted view of California's energy and tech sector regulation. While we do have excellent climate that facilitates solar energy, both centralized and distributed, the utility companies, especially PGE that dominates N. California, has resisted regulations, put shareholders before customers, and left the customer with some of the highest electric energy rates in the country. "You want solar?" Then you must pay extra for using our powerlines because otherwise we lose revenue and profits. The Public Untilities Commission seems forever complying with what the industry wants.
Tech sector regulation? Don't make me laugh. Sacramento maybe well-meaning, but it is clueless. Look at the misguided attempt to force age-verification for use of websites - "protect the children".
And while I applaud California trying to reduce GHG emissions, and it is doing a decent job at that, it doesn't seem to be having much impact on the rest of the world just looking at global emissions. Even COP28 was a pathetic example of the world not agreeing to do anything substantial. Maybe California and like-minded states with large GHG emissions can get an agreement to genuinely phase out fossil fuels with regulations, incentives, and Pigou taxes. This is an existential issue that needs something more akin to war-footing seriousness, not bromides that appease the vested interests and their paid-for apologists.
The good old days, when Britain was the center of the empire and ruled much of the world. My English education in the 1960s had more than a smattering of that in our pre-O'Level geograpghy lessons. ;-)
When teaching, outright copy and paste was common amongst students, although software seems to have reduced that problem especially when students are reminded that pagiarism of even minor extent is considered "academic dishonesty". Nevertheless, small edits of text are sufficient to beat basic plagiarism. In defense of writers, sometimes it is hard to beat the elegance of prose written by a good writer. Poor writers also cover their poor knowledge with ambiguous, or hard to interpret, sentences. Sometimes one has no recourse but to lift that sentence and make small edits so that it does not need to be placed in quotes and sourced, yet still retain its [ambiguous] meaning.
Perhaps LLMs will dumb down the writing [like business writing], but at the risk of plagiarizing text in blocks from phrases, to sentences, to paragraphs. Can this be trained out of them?
As for the resignation of Claudine Gay over plagiarism, idk how serious it was. We know that politicians have often plagiarized others, whether in speeches or in academic work to bolster their credentials. I would hope someone is going over every single thing Stefanik has written and said and looked for evidence of plagiarism, and if found, hound her with the same gotchas she used on the "antisemitism" BS she bullied the 3 chancellors with.
DeLong on Gupta: I agree. What are the microeconomic determinants of this “natural rate of inflation.” a rate that I take should be the Fed’s target. Descriptively, this depends on
a) size and frequency of the sector/product specific shocks that push relative prices (“real micro prices across sectors”) away from their real income maximizing pattern (“what a flexprice market economy wants them to be.”)
and
b) the resistance to change of the relative prices, “stickiness.”
This focus is nearly orthogonal to “expectations” which, in my understanding, are mainly of interest in a one-good/one labor input market. Perhaps “expectations” are part of the explanation for stickiness of relative prices.
Perhaps the value of economic history is in helping to identify when shocks are heterogeneously sectoral and when they are uniform enough to allow the economy to be modeled as a one good/one labor input system.
Tyson and Mendonca: California has certainly been a laboratory, but not all the experiments have proven successful in identifying policies to encourage employment of lesst-cost technologies to reduce net CO2 emissions.
Coyle: Maybe, but personally I am more impressed by the policy distortions that DISCOURAGE urban density: land use and building codes, lack of congestion and road use taxation.
LLMs, plagiarism, and wordprocessors.
As with others of my age, and UK education, essay writing with [fountain pen] ink on paper was part of the English curriculum and exams were all essay style, no multiple choice. To ensure essays in exams were full of likely scoreable points as possible, I would use 5 minutes of my time for each 1/2 hour essay drawing a "mind map" of all the key points I could think of, and then proceed to use that as the outline for the exam essay. As the mind map was part of the exam output, any failure to complete the points in the tests would at least be shown to the reviewer that I did know what should have been included. Until the mid-1980s, work that needed to be typed was handed to staff to type for payment - very much like office secretarial pools in firms.
But like Fallows, I was taken immediately with the word processor. It eliminated the problem of mistyping on a basic electric typewriter, but even better, it allowed frequent rewrites and copying and pasting paragraphs to different orders to ensure the logic of my thoughts progressed as smoothly as possible. Not for me the effortless single draft of natural writers of fiction!
I do still print out my drafts and hand edit changes that will be electronically made, but unlike historic letters and texts with crossing-outs and word insertions, word-processed texts are as clean and error-free as personal inspection and spell and grammar checkers can make them.
One negative of some of these automated tools like "Autocorrect" is that work "correction" seems to be made almost invisibly, overriding the correct, but unknown word, with the wrong nearest word in its dictionary. If there is one thing I would like in an LLM system would be to just go back to highlighting words it thinks are incorrect, rather than silently autocorrecting them. [I don't disable autocorrect as my typing on a phone is appallingly bad, and autocorrect is still more useful than not. Interestingly, using speech-to-text translation has improved my output on the phone and I may even buy such a system for my main computer.]
The ability to edit quickly is also a huge advantage in coding where syntax and logic are critical in writing correct programs. But as with essay writing, it discourages thought in favor of just writing code snippets that can be tested and then ordered and reordered to remove bugs. Having been put off computing in the early 1970s by the bugs generated from even the simplest code submitted on paper to be turned into punch cards which then resulted in pages of fanfold showing the failure in the stacktrace, I found joy in the immediate feedback of personal programmable calculators and then computers. I have never looked back since. But the bad habits of minimal thought, have suffused my coding and my texts, ever since.
However, I did note when teaching, that students brought up with education that tested for knowledge with multiple answer tests had extraordinary difficulties writing lab reports in a coherent style. Word processing software that is effectively free did not improve the writing of current students over that of hand-written reports of an earlier generation.
‘"What caused the civil war?", "Does burning fossil fuel warm the planet?", "Do guns kill people?", "Should women have equal rights?" and any number of other really simple questions are "gotchas" in a GOP primary. That makes me sad…
Casten is "sad"? WTF. That Republican politicians feel that facts are an anathema to their voters should be an affront to any person with functioning gray cells. If a 1/3 of the population actually agrees with the underlying idea that these are unfair gotchas (as well as 2/5ths of the population agreeing the 2020 election result was illegitimate) we have a major reality problem in what is the current economic and military hegemon.
Late post for a thread on crypto and grifting. Well it seems that the grifting is now out in the open:
Chief executive of collapsed crypto fund Hyperverse does not appear to exist
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/04/chief-executive-of-collapsed-crypto-fund-hyperverse-does-not-appear-to-exist
Re: California Leads the Way on Climate
A rather rose-tinted view of California's energy and tech sector regulation. While we do have excellent climate that facilitates solar energy, both centralized and distributed, the utility companies, especially PGE that dominates N. California, has resisted regulations, put shareholders before customers, and left the customer with some of the highest electric energy rates in the country. "You want solar?" Then you must pay extra for using our powerlines because otherwise we lose revenue and profits. The Public Untilities Commission seems forever complying with what the industry wants.
Tech sector regulation? Don't make me laugh. Sacramento maybe well-meaning, but it is clueless. Look at the misguided attempt to force age-verification for use of websites - "protect the children".
And while I applaud California trying to reduce GHG emissions, and it is doing a decent job at that, it doesn't seem to be having much impact on the rest of the world just looking at global emissions. Even COP28 was a pathetic example of the world not agreeing to do anything substantial. Maybe California and like-minded states with large GHG emissions can get an agreement to genuinely phase out fossil fuels with regulations, incentives, and Pigou taxes. This is an existential issue that needs something more akin to war-footing seriousness, not bromides that appease the vested interests and their paid-for apologists.
Travel Times 1914
The good old days, when Britain was the center of the empire and ruled much of the world. My English education in the 1960s had more than a smattering of that in our pre-O'Level geograpghy lessons. ;-)
Plagiarism
When teaching, outright copy and paste was common amongst students, although software seems to have reduced that problem especially when students are reminded that pagiarism of even minor extent is considered "academic dishonesty". Nevertheless, small edits of text are sufficient to beat basic plagiarism. In defense of writers, sometimes it is hard to beat the elegance of prose written by a good writer. Poor writers also cover their poor knowledge with ambiguous, or hard to interpret, sentences. Sometimes one has no recourse but to lift that sentence and make small edits so that it does not need to be placed in quotes and sourced, yet still retain its [ambiguous] meaning.
Perhaps LLMs will dumb down the writing [like business writing], but at the risk of plagiarizing text in blocks from phrases, to sentences, to paragraphs. Can this be trained out of them?
As for the resignation of Claudine Gay over plagiarism, idk how serious it was. We know that politicians have often plagiarized others, whether in speeches or in academic work to bolster their credentials. I would hope someone is going over every single thing Stefanik has written and said and looked for evidence of plagiarism, and if found, hound her with the same gotchas she used on the "antisemitism" BS she bullied the 3 chancellors with.
DeLong on Gupta: I agree. What are the microeconomic determinants of this “natural rate of inflation.” a rate that I take should be the Fed’s target. Descriptively, this depends on
a) size and frequency of the sector/product specific shocks that push relative prices (“real micro prices across sectors”) away from their real income maximizing pattern (“what a flexprice market economy wants them to be.”)
and
b) the resistance to change of the relative prices, “stickiness.”
This focus is nearly orthogonal to “expectations” which, in my understanding, are mainly of interest in a one-good/one labor input market. Perhaps “expectations” are part of the explanation for stickiness of relative prices.
Perhaps the value of economic history is in helping to identify when shocks are heterogeneously sectoral and when they are uniform enough to allow the economy to be modeled as a one good/one labor input system.
Tyson and Mendonca: California has certainly been a laboratory, but not all the experiments have proven successful in identifying policies to encourage employment of lesst-cost technologies to reduce net CO2 emissions.
Coyle: Maybe, but personally I am more impressed by the policy distortions that DISCOURAGE urban density: land use and building codes, lack of congestion and road use taxation.