BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-04-27 Sa
“Homeostasis” according to Stafford Beer; Serlet on why MAMLMs work; very briefly noted; resentment of the poor by the rich; expanding the Supreme Court as job #1; & Essential & Key Readings for...
“Homeostasis” according to Stafford Beer; Serlet on why MAMLMs work; very briefly noted; resentment of the poor by the rich; expanding the Supreme Court as job #1; & Essential & Key Readings for Econ 115: The World Economy in the 20th Century; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2024-04-22 Mo…
ONE IMAGE: What “Homeostasis” Is According to Stafford Beer:
ONE VIDEO: Bertrand Serlet: Thoughts on Why AI Works:
Very Briefly Noted:
Economics: Michael Rushton: Keynes’s Grandchildren: ‘Producing enough goods and services to satisfy all of our ordinary needs is a goal achieved…. Two things prevented us from reaching Keynesian utopia. Zachary Carter…. “Keynes distinguished between human needs essential to survival and semi-needs whose ‘satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows… [that] may indeed be insatiable.’”… A public school-teacher taking a waitressing job over the summer months to make ends meet is not in the grip of a “disgusting morbidity”, but is at the mercy of an economic system whose priorities are all off kilter. But it is also true that the upper strata… are chasing accumulation of wealth, conspicuous consumption, and preservation of the family position in that quartile, that does represent something deeply amiss… <https://michaelrushton.substack.com/p/keyness-grandchildren>
Jamelle Bouie: The Small-Business Tyrant Has a Favorite Political Party: ‘The small-business tyrant… is the business owner whose livelihood rests on a steady supply of low-wage labor… and who views those workers as little more than extensions of himself, to use as he sees fit. The small-business tyrant is, to borrow an argument from the writer and podcaster Patrick Wyman, an especially reactionary member of America’s landowning gentry: local economic elites whose wealth comes primarily from their ownership of physical assets…. To look at Republican politics at the state level is to see an economic agenda dominated by the worst of this particular class… <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/opinion/the-small-business-tyrant-has-a-favorite-political-party.html>
Economist: Don’t be gloomy about Tesla and its EV rivals: ‘The industry has had a terrible few months. But demand is likely to pick up…. Today you can buy a Ford f-150… for less than $40,000… $4,000 more than the petrol version… that you earn back in a single year by not having to fill it up with petrol (which, in contrast to lithium, is not getting cheaper)…. Roughly 200,000 charging ports across America, twice the number available in 2020…. Western makers should fixate less on high-end models and stop neglecting the middle-of-the-road. Until they do, high prices will keep demand subdued and economies of scale elusive. Ford expects its pickup-obsessed electric division to lose at least $5bn this year… <https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/04/24/dont-be-gloomy-about-tesla-and-its-ev-rivals>
Subrat Patnaik & Carmen Reinicke: Nvidia Shares Go on a $290 Billion Tear as Clients Splurge on AI: ‘Stock rallies 15% this week, reversing last week’s selloff. Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft pledge to spend more on AI…. First-quarter reports “from… Google, Microsoft and Meta… upside to CY24 capex, mostly driven by buildout of AI infrastructure”…. Meta shares were hammered on Thursday, tumbling 11%, after the Facebook-parent… revealed that it will spend billions of dollars more than expected on AI this year. But Microsoft and Google-parent Alphabet were able to convince investors that spending on AI was already paying off…. “I hate to say things are a no-brainer,” Marino said. “But if you take a look at all the budget lines and all the capex spending, where is that going? It’s got to go to Nvidia, they have the best chips”… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-26/nvidia-shares-go-on-a-260-billion-tear-as-clients-splurge-on-ai?sref=fSOf3OlP>
Chris Miller: The Chips Act has been surprisingly successful so far: ‘More than halfway through its incentives spending, the US will have far greater scope to manage shocks…. Rhe US government has now spent over half its $39bn… [and] driven an… investment boom. Chip companies and supply chain partners have announced investments totalling $327bn over the next 10 years…. US statistics show a stunning 15-fold increase in construction of manufacturing facilities for computing and electronics devices. Debate about the Chips Act has focused on delays and manufacturing difficulties, but the vast volume of investment tells a different story… <https://www.ft.com/content/26756186-99e5-448f-a451-f5e307b13723>
Economic History: Kari Leigh Merritt: The Southern Gap: ‘As… Gavin Wright… pointed out, the NHC’s central claim… that slavery was essential for American economic growth… ignored decades of… work on capitalism and slavery… [and] contradicted nearly everything economists have argued regarding slavery’s impact on the South’s (under)development…. Elite capture of the state is bad for democracy and worse for development…. Today, more than a lifetime after Roosevelt’s declaration of the South as the ‘the nation’s No 1 economic problem’... The South remains poor, underdeveloped, and lags behind the rest of the country by every measurable standard… <https://aeon.co/essays/capitalism-and-underdevelopment-in-the-american-south>
Ens***ification: Ed Zitron: The Man Who Killed Google Search: ‘While I’m guessing, the timing of the March 2019 core update, along with the traffic increases to previously-suppressed sites, heavily suggests that Google’s response to the Code Yellow was to roll back changes that were made to maintain the quality of search results…. After nearly 20 years of building Google Search, [Ben] Gomes would be relegated to SVP of Education at Google. Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world’s largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume. A quick note: I used “management consultant” there as a pejorative… <https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/>
Human Capital: Noah Smith: Universities and the reallocation problem: ‘Because universities are so crucial to America’s economic machine, we support them with any number of government policies…. So if universities’ economic productivity is suffering from structural problems, it’s a big deal. And I think that one problem we tend to overlook is that universities have difficulty reallocating resources. For example, the University of California San Diego just announced new limits on how many people can major in computer science…. A bit crazy, no? In recent years, a lot more students want to go to college to learn computer science…. Universities should respond to the increasing demand for CS majors by hiring more CS profs and lecturers, and decreasing the number of teachers in the subjects that students no longer want to study…. If universities can’t meet that demand because of their legacy commitments to economically less important sectors, that’s not just a problem for college kids—it’s a problem for the United States as a whole… <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-things-9c6>
Nationalism: Cosma Shalizi (1998): “Nations & Nationalism” by Ernst Gellner: ‘Industrial economies… [by] technical and organizational innovations… continually change how they employ… human resources…. No one can expect to follow in the family profession…. In an industrial, changing society… training must be… couched in a far more universal idiom, and emphasize understanding and manipulating nearly context-free symbols… in short take on the characteristics formerly associated with the literate High Cultures of Agraria…. States become the protectors of… [such] "idioms"…. To be without such an idiom is to be cut off from all prospects of a decent life…. Thus the passion behind nationalism derives… from the hope of a tolerable life, or the fear of an intolerable one. Faced with an difference between one's own idiom and that needed for success, people either acquire the latter, or see that their children do (assimilation); force their own idiom into prominence (successful nationalism); or fester. Thus industrialism begets nationalism, and nationalism begets nations…. Nations are constructed, in a highly arbitrary way, out of… raw material, often with… false consciousness (e.g., thinking one is reviving peasant culture and folk traditions, while actually creating a formalized, school-dependent High Culture) and outright fabrication... <http://bactra.org/reviews/nations-and-nationalism/>
Cognition: Addison del Mastro: Storage Is Retrieval: ‘A little piece of work and life wisdom…. Putting something away is no good unless you can get it back without a whole lot of concealed work waiting for you… <https://thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/storage-is-retrieval>
SubStack NOTES:
Economics: Barry Ritholtz looks through the lagged housing components of inflation and concludes that we are at the Fed’s inflation target right now:
Barry Ritholtz: March 2024 State Coincident Indexes Ease: ‘Q1 2024 [seasonally-adjusted Real] Gross Domestic Product expanded at a disappointing 1.6%… lagg[ing] economists’ consensus of 2.4%…. As Bill McBride pointed out in yesterday’s At the Money, lease renewals for rental apartments or homes… were signed either 1 or 2 years ago; Monetary policy doesn’t impact that that all. Swap out OER for the more timely Zillow Rent Index / Apartment List Index, you get a CPI with a 2 handle. Or, just back out lease renewals, and you get the same results. The economy remains robust, inflation is more of a housing issue with some services concerns thrown in. I believe if we had better and more timely CPI/PCE models, the Fed would already be cutting… <https://ritholtz.com/2024/04/march-2024-state-coincident-indexes-ease/>
Neofascism: Fred Clark hits one out of the park:
Fred Clark: Rural White MAGAs & What ‘Woke C.S. Lewis’ Got Wrong: ‘Most resentment doesn’t punch up. Most resentment punches down. The rich resent the poor. The hegemonic majority resents the disenfranchised minority. The enslaved resents the enslaved. The abuser resents the abused. The usurer resents the debtor. The powerful resent the powerless…. The “logical” form of resentment also exists…. But he poor fellow being choked and burdened… isn’t “utterly corrupted” by the “besetting sin” of resentment…. Mainly, overwhelmingly, his concern is simply getting this guy off his back. Tolstoy’s first-person oppressor here, however, is utterly corrupted and wholly consumed by his resentment of the very man he is, present-tense, exploiting and choking…. That perpetual need to keep saying that, to himself and to others, to have to repeatedly assert “I’m not a bad guy, really I’m not!” is, for this man, “some sort of negative experience.” And thus it seems, to him, that resentment is, as Jacobs says, “rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience.”… We resent those we have wronged. We resent those we have harmed. We resent those we are harming. If it weren’t for them, after all, we wouldn’t have to spend so much time and energy reassuring ourselves and others that we’re still good people. If it weren’t for our annoying, bothersome victims, we’d be so much happier…. And so we ask for mirth from those we torment, demanding that they “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”… <https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2024/04/18/rural-white-magas-and-what-woke-c-s-lewis-got-wrong/>
Neofascism: In the good state of the world come next January, the first item of business must be expanding the Supreme Court to fifteen justices. The second must be creating a Deputy Chief Justice who would be mandated by legislation to preside over meetings when the Supreme Court meets to discuss cases, and to assign the writers of majority opinions:
Josh Marshall: Peering into the Corrupt Court’s Pretensions and Corruption: ‘The display we saw yesterday was a vivid illustration of how the Court has gone thoroughly rogue, cutting itself off from even the appearances of the processes that give it legitimacy…. If… there might be some limited ways that official acts can’t be… crimes… trying to overthrow the government can’t be one of those official acts…. You say that there may be some cases where a very narrow kind of immunity applies. But what we have before us now certainly isn’t one of those cases. End of story. But that’s not what we got…. Perhaps this was all just the equivalent of the preposterous hypotheticals…. But let us be real. We know who these people are. They’re telling us. It’s a rogue court, a thoroughly corrupt one, one that is so far gone in its corruption that it feels free even from the practical obligation to clothe its corruption for the sake of appearances.… <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/peering-into-the-corrupt-courts-pretensions-and-corruption/sharetoken/mODEiFEfA3a3>
Bertrand Serlet: Thoughts on Why AI Works
Nicely done video. However, right at the end I think he jumps to a conclusion about "reasoning". There is precious little to show that LLMs reason. They can memorize. They can interpolate concepts. My experience is that they can form a few analogies. But reasoning - i.e. logically connect a chain of concepts, I don't yet see evidence for. Maybe that is as simple as further scaling, or maybe it needs additional models. Simple reasoning, such as achieved by young children seems within its grasp, although without good experiments to ensure it is not parrotting from its data I would hesitate to say YES/NO.
Fred Clark tends to get it right. I first read him when he was debating the Christian principles involved in taking a job with a microcredit charity that charged interest. His article on Missouri denialists - those who do not believe that Missouri actually exists - was perfect. Most of the resentment in the world is people resenting people less well off. It's the old "being poor can't be that bad if you still have a cell phone" or "those 1930s breadlines weren't that bad; all those guys had hats". It explains all those small business tyrants upset that their workers get food stamps, housing vouchers and possibly even medical care. This resentment is something that has always been out in the open, but most observers ignore it the way a Missouri denialist has to avoid counting the 50 stars on the US flag. Clark nails it nicely and puts it, as he often does, in a good Christian framework. If there were more Christians like him, Brand Christian wouldn't be as deprecated today.