Bookmarks (559)

It is called Alternative Approaches to Monetary Policy, it is on-line and free.  I have not read it yet, but here is part of the preface: From feedback received on The Money Illusion, I see a need to take a deeper look at the fundamentals of monetary policy. What is monetary policy? Why do economists […] The post The new Scott Sumner book appeared...

1. Matt Teichman podcasts with Gaurav Venkataraman.  Starts with a discussion of memory and biology. 2. Quiz: how much of a rationalist are you? 3. A large language model for finance.  And further commentary from Bloomberg, it being their model.  And the paper, is this the largest domain-specific training set? 4. ChatGPT banned in Italy […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

You cannot trust the banning entity with the powers you are about to give it: The RESTRICT Act, a proposed piece of legislation which provides one way the government might ban TikTok, contains “insanely broad” language and could lead to other apps or communications services with connections to foreign countries being banned in the U.S., […] The post Again, don’t ban TikTok appeared first...

Sketchplanations writes up my theory of unintended consequences: People are complicated. Life is complicated. Ecosystems are complicated. Alex Tabarrok writes, “The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system.” This so often happens in any kind of government program, regulation, law or attempt to control something within […] The post The Law of Unintended Consequences appeared...

Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, due out in November, now available for pre-order, via Andrew Farrant.  I haven’t read this book, but I do know Jennifer a small amount and am optimistic. David Edmonds, Parfit: A Philosopher and his Mission to Save Morality.  I’ve already told you I love this book, due out […] The post Two forthcoming biographies appeared first on...

One of the best essays of this year, though I think the author considerably underrates how much heterogeneity we are building on the internet, globally, and also through GPT models.  Nonetheless an excellent read with some hard-hitting points and good photos to illustrate.  Here is one excerpt: This article argues that from film to fashion […] The post Alex Murrell, The Age of Average...

1. More Leopold on alignment.  Leopold continues to be good on this topic. 2. I think gated, but here is Scott Alexander on my AI argument.  I am a big fan of Scott’s, but this is a gross misrepresentation of what I wrote.  Scott ignores my critical point that this is all happening anyway (he […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

Not debates about AI, no the other ones.  For one thing, more ideas and more intelligence will mean more projects.  That raises the value of permitting reform, and raises the value of YIMBY.  But perhaps the most surprising conclusion comes on the immigration issue, with apologies to Garett Jones: Which policy issue might decrease in […] The post How will AI change *other* policy...

A sharply worded whitepaper from law firm Cooper and Kirk accuses regulators at the FDIC and the FED of an illegal and unconstitutional attack on crypto done without cover of law or Congressional approval. Cooper and Kirk are one of the most powerful and influential law firms in Washington. The firm’s attorneys have frequently appeared before […] The post The Government Conspiracy Against Crypto appeared...

Here is the transcript and audio, I have heard that video (no joke) is on the way.  Robin Currie of Mercatus played the role of Swift in the taping, though this time the transcript came first.  Here is part of the summary: GPT Swift discusses his support for the Church of Ireland, his shift from […] The post My Conversation with Jonathan GPT Swift...

With the current surplus of generation in the country’s energy system, Ukraine is ready to resume exporting electricity to the EU, Ukrainian Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko said after he met with EU Commissioner for Energy Kadri Simson in Brussels. Here is the full story.  Ahem! The post Ukraine fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsChina is after that big, deep lake Buklail,...

1. On existential risk and AI, Zvi responds at length.  And a response from Richard Ngo at Open AI (at least he knows what mood affiliation is).  And Joseph Walker on existential risk. 2. First mRNA vaccine against bacteria? 3. Index of cultural differences, across many countries. 4. How much would you have to pay […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

GPT4 passed the medical licensure exam but the critics want to know how does it perform in the real world? Zak Kohane, pediatric endocrinologist, data scientist, and chair of the Harvard Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School has apparently been working with GPT4 for about 6 months. He has a […] The post GPT-4 Does the Medical Rounds appeared...

The surprise, and the irony, is that the more good players there are, the more important the great ones have become. The proliferation of offensive threats has meant that defenses can’t train their attention all on one person; that means that there are better shots for the best players to take, and the best players […] The post Modeling the current NBA appeared first...

Cheap, tailored expertise Many of the poor have little access to experts, on topics ranging from physical and mental health, agriculture, and entrepreneurship. Hiring experts can be transformative: Bloom et al (2013) found that management consultants substantially improved production at textile factories in India. Many envisioned that the internet would level access to expertise, allowing entrepreneurs in […] The post How might AI impact developing economies?...

Here is an Elon Musk-signed petition, with many other luminaries, calling for a pause in “Giant” AI experiments.  Here is one excerpt: In parallel, AI developers must work with policymakers to dramatically accelerate development of robust AI governance systems. These should at a minimum include: new and capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI; oversight and […] The post The permanent pause? appeared first on...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one piece of it: For another, an effort to make banks safer can effectively push risk into other sectors of finance. It can move into money market funds, commercial credit lenders, fintech, insurance companies, trade credit, and elsewhere. These institutions are generally less regulated […] The post Regulation Can’t Prevent the Next Financial...

1. Some concrete thoughts on AI regulation (am not convinced, but goes way beyond most discussions). 2. One good prompt for GPT.  And Richard Ngo AI predictions. 3. A Toby Ord calculation on the odds of being electorally decisive. 4. The economics of pay transparency. 5. More on the import of LLaMA, and will Siri […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

Adam Posen has an excellent piece in Foreign Policy: Beginning with the Trump administration, and accelerating under the Biden administration, U.S. trade and industrial policy has prioritized relocating manufacturing production back to the United States. For all their differences, both administrations disregarded other countries in this pursuit. Both also attacked international trade and investment as […] The post America’s Zero-Sum Economics Doesn’t Add Up...

Stunting growth now in the development of artificial intelligence just makes the probability of a bad future outcome more likely, as the people who are prosocial and thoughtful are more likely to be discouraged from the field if we attach a stigma to it. My view is that most people are good and care about […] The post A brief observation on AGI risk...

1. Judith A. Green, The Normans: Power, Conquest & Culture in 11th-Century Europe.  A very clear and to the point book on a complex topic.  This is a good one to read with GPT-4 accompaniment for your queries.  In Sicily, near Palermo, the Normans produced one of my favorite sites in all of Europe. 2. […] The post What I’ve been reading appeared first...

1. Conservatives often win their battles. 2. Some Afro-Surinamese music. 3. Vyacheslav Dvornikov interviews me (in Russian).  And a related piece (in English) on Russia moving toward dependence on China. 4. “A simple heuristic of only judging the level of detail in the message consistently allowed people to discriminate lies from truths.” 5. Small teams […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

It starts in less than two weeks, in Astana.  But unlike those Karpov-Korchnoi matches in the 1970s, the soon to be former world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen, is still very much on the scene and still is widely regarded as the #1 player, as his various ratings confirm. How will that change the incentives of […] The post Nepo vs. Ding appeared first on...

The Public Choice Outreach Conference is June 9-11 in Arlington, VA near Washington, DC. Please apply (it’s free) and please encourage your students to apply. More details in the flyer (pdf). The post The Public Choice Outreach Conference! appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Honestly?. Google paid $99 an hour on the ... by SGfrmthe33In reply to Free as in well...

The post (Younger) Spinoza appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to derek. Google paid $99 an hour on the internet. ... by SGfrmthe33In reply to Kent Guida. And you need to read Leo Strauss to ... by AnthonyBI asked GPT-4 for 10 Straussian readings of Tyler naming his ... by RebeccaIs Tyler his god? by TomWinTejasLooks like an anchor from traveling the...

Côte d’Ivoire citizens pay the highest income taxes in the world according to this year’s survey findings by World Population Review. While both its sales and corporate tax regimes may be considerably lower than those of other countries globally, at 60%, Côte d’Ivoire’s income tax rates are markedly higher compared to developed countries. Only Finland (56.95%), Japan (55.97%), Denmark […] The post Côte d’Ivoire claim of the day...

1. “I asked GPT4 to perform a risk assessment on Silicon Valley Bank...” 2. New four-part documentary on chess, I have not seen it but it does appear serious. 3. An economic argument against non-compete clauses, one step deeper than the usual. 4. Japan could do much more with geothermal power (NYT). 5. Charisma as […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

I analyze the adult age at death of 115,650 European nobles from 800 to 1800. Longevity began increasing long before 1800 and the Industrial Revolution, with marked increases around 1400 and again around 1650. Declines in violent deaths from battle contributed to some of this increase, but the majority must reflect other changes in individual […] The post Lifespans of the European Elite, 800-1800...

Duncan McClements, 17, incoming at King’s College Cambridge, economics, general career and research support. Jasmine Wang and team (Jasmine is a repeat winner), Trellis, AI and the book. Sophia Brown, Berlin/Brooklyn, to study the State Department,and general career development. Robert Tolan, western Ireland, farmer and math Olympiad winner, YIMBY by street for Ireland. Conor Durkin, […] The post New Emergent Ventures winners, 25th cohort...

Stuart Richie rebuts some of the recent studies: And here’s the thing: when the authors of the “Facebook arrival” study raised their standards in this way, running a correction for multiple comparisons, all the results they found for well-being were no longer statistically significant. That is, a somewhat more conservative way of looking at the […] The post Are social media making us miserable?...

1. Note to self: do not play Bongcloud against Vladimir Kramnik. 2. You shall know a word by the company it keeps. 3. Pithy one-liners that will be popular with neoliberals? 4. “A funny state of affairs that isn’t getting enough attention is that the US government is suing Facebook for allegedly monopolizing social media, […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

From Wikipedia: Kevin Kelly (born 1952) is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and a former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture… Among Kelly’s personal involvements is a campaign to make a full inventory of all living species on earth, an effort also known as the Linnaean enterprise. […] The post What should I ask Kevin Kelly?...

How should you choose your next trip?  I can see a few general philosophies on the table: 1. Prioritize those countries and regions you haven’t visited yet.  For me that might mean Montenegro, Lithuania, Bangladesh, and Saudi Arabia.  But the downside is waking up one morning and saying “Hey, what the hell am I doing […] The post Travel philosophies for the well-traveled appeared...

Somehow missed this the first time I looked, but GPT-4 got *significantly worse* at microeconomics after it was trained to tell you what you want to hear. pic.twitter.com/8tDtTwf1II — Ben Levinstein (@ben_levinstein) March 22, 2023 Microeconomics has gone up in my eyes… The post How to make GPT worse at microeconomics appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Skeptical American. Per Merriam-Webster:...

Fifty years ago today, on March 23, 1973, Alexander P. Butterfield, the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, issued a rule that remains one of the most destructive acts of industrial vandalism in history. “No person may operate a civil aircraft at a true flight mach number greater than 1 except in compliance with conditions and limitations […] The post End Speed Limits on Aircraft appeared...

The central claim of our work is that GPT-4 attains a form of general intelligence, indeed showing sparks of artificial general intelligence. This is demonstrated by its core mental capabilities (such as reasoning, creativity, and deduction), its range of topics on which it has gained expertise (such as literature, medicine, and coding), and the variety […] The post Baby AGI is Here appeared first...

1. “ChatGPT for me.” 2. Early GPT-4 paper from Microsoft. 3. The new art of moviemaking (ho hum!). 4. “A scrip for my five-year-old to talk to GPT.” 5. “Interestingly, 9.4 percent of humans were more creative than the most creative GAI, GPT-4.” 6. Plug-ins are here.  Every day, people!!!  Here is the initial list. […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

A Washington Post poll finds that 41 percent of Americans support a federal ban of the popular short-video app, while 25 percent say they oppose it. And 71 percent are concerned that TikTok’s parent company is based in China, including 36 percent who say they are “very concerned.” Here is the WaPo article.  A single poll on this issue […] The post Do Americans want to ban TikTok?...

The SEC allowed Coinbase to go public in 2021, he [Brian Armstrong] wrote, including after reviewing its disclosures that “clearly explained our asset listing process and included 57 references to staking.” Here is the full WSJ article.  Rule of law people, or “rule of men” (and women)?  Which is it? Here is the full Brian […] The post Regulatory sentences to ponder appeared first...

1. Some roots of the Swedish music miracle. 2. “Fast ihr ganzes Leben hat eine 104 Jahre alte Britin im selben Haus verbracht – nun soll dieses neue Bewohner bekommen.” 3. Man Bun Magnus plays a very nice game. 4. Pending major changes in UK clinical trials system and regulation.  Could prove significant. 5. Is Freud […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

In The New Madness of Crowds I argued that SVB failed because “Greater transparency and lower transaction costs have intensified the madness of the masses and expanded their reach.” A piece by Miao, Zuckerman and Eisen in the WSJ now adds to to the other side of the problem. Depositors were working on twitter time, […] The post The Great Digital Divide: Panic at...

Upon arrival, Spinoza’s morning routine had been: 1. Ask to go outside to pee. 2. Come back in and eat his kibble. 3. Possible option of belly scratching. In that order. His current routine, upon my waking, is: 1. Demand to have belly scratched. 2. Pretend to go outside, but return immediately for his kibble. […] The post The evolution of my canine custodianship...

Here is the transcript, audio, and video.  Here is part of the summary: Historian Tom Holland joined Tyler to discuss in what ways his Christianity is influenced by Lord Byron, how the Book of Revelation precipitated a revolutionary tradition, which book of the Bible is most foundational for Western liberalism, the political differences between Paul […] The post My excellent Conversation with Tom Holland...

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation across various domains, including medicine. We present a comprehensive evaluation of GPT-4, a state-of-the-art LLM, on medical competency examinations and benchmark datasets. GPT-4 is a general-purpose model that is not specialized for medical problems through training or engineered to solve clinical […] The post Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge...

Many people are upset at my rather anodyne remarks from earlier in the week.  Thus I have a simple question: what are the best cost-benefit studies of urban investments in bicycle lanes and other bicycle-friendly policies?  They have to take into account the opportunity cost of the land for bike lanes, the cost of cycling […] The post What is the best cost-benefit analysis...

1. “We propose the nose as central to faces and their perception.” 2. Musa al-Gharbi on why conservatives are happier. 3. Some observations on Chinese management. 4. Bryan Caplan revalued GPT.  And EleutherAI open source stuff.  And Prismer open source stuff (“every day, people!”).  And Adobe’s Firefly AI now in beta.  And @getlindy.  And “Little […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

When interest rates go up, the price of bonds goes down. As Tyler and I discuss in Modern Principles, the inverse relationship between interest rates and prices holds for any asset that pays out over time. In particular, as Patrick McKenzie points out, when interest rates go up, the value of a loan goes down. […] The post In Praise of the Danish Mortgage...

Good Morning from Germany, where China is losing importance as export destination. In Feb, exports to China slumped by 12.4%, while exports to US rose 19%. This means that US is by far the most important export market, France is also establishing itself as #2, far ahead of China. pic.twitter.com/S2pSqeRTO9 — Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) March […] The post Germany fact of the day appeared...

Here is my latest Bloomberg column, penned on Sunday, these days the VIXes are back down to normal ranges.  Here is one excerpt: One reason for (relative) optimism is simply that the world, and policymakers, have been preparing for this scenario for some time. Not only do memories of 2008-2009 remain fresh, but we are […] The post “This banking crisis won’t wreck the...

Titled “Bank runs, crypto scams, and world-transforming AI,” plus a round of overrated vs. underrated, among other topics, including inflation. Lots of fun, I feel Bari and I always have very good energy together… The post My podcast with Bari Weiss, she interviews me appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to PHinton. I agree that “billionaires don't pay ... by IshIn reply...