Category: History
My Conversation with the excellent Michael Nielsen
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Michael Nielsen is scientist who helped pioneer quantum computing and the modern open science movement. He’s worked at Y Combinator, co-authored on scientific progress with Patrick Collison, and is a prolific writer, reader, commentator, and mentor.
He joined Tyler to discuss why the universe is so beautiful to human eyes (but not ears), how to find good collaborators, the influence of Simone Weil, where Olaf Stapledon’s understand of the social word went wrong, potential applications of quantum computing, the (rising) status of linear algebra, what makes for physicists who age well, finding young mentors, why some scientific fields have pre-print platforms and others don’t, how so many crummy journals survive, the threat of cheap nukes, the many unknowns of Mars colonization, techniques for paying closer attention, what you learn when visiting the USS Midway, why he changed his mind about Emergent Ventures, why he didn’t join OpenAI in 2015, what he’ll learn next, and more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Now, you’ve written that in the first half of your life, you typically were the youngest person in your circle and that in the second half of your life, which is probably now, you’re typically the eldest person in your circle. How would you model that as a claim about you?
NIELSEN: I hope I’m in the first 5 percent of my life, but it’s sadly unlikely.
COWEN: Let’s say you’re 50 now, and you live to 100, which is plausible —
NIELSEN: Which is plausible.
COWEN: — and you would now be in the second half of your life.
NIELSEN: Yes. I can give shallow reasons. I can’t give good reasons. The good reason in the first half was, so much of the work I was doing was kind of new fields of science, and those tend to be dominated essentially, for almost sunk-cost reasons — people who don’t have any sunk costs tend to be younger. They go into these fields. These early days of quantum computing, early days of open science — they were dominated by people in their 20s. Then they’d go off and become faculty members. They’d be the youngest person on the faculty.
Now, maybe it’s just because I found San Francisco, and it’s such an interesting cultural institution or achievement of civilization. We’ve got this amplifier for 25-year-olds that lets them make dreams in the world. That’s, for me, anyway, for a person with my personality, very attractive for many of the same reasons.
COWEN: Let’s say you had a theory of your collaborators, and other than, yes, they’re smart; they work hard; but trying to pin down in as few dimensions as possible, who’s likely to become a collaborator of yours after taking into account the obvious? What’s your theory of your own collaborators?
NIELSEN: They’re all extremely open to experience. They’re all extremely curious. They’re all extremely parasocial. They’re all extremely ambitious. They’re all extremely imaginative.
Self-recommending throughout.
The decline in Native American wealth
I had not realized how negative were the effects of the 1887 Dawes Act, which broke up many Native American reservations. Before 1912:
There was a nontrivial number of relatively wealthy superintendencies, which runs counter to the common perception of uniform poverty during this period. In 1912, the wealthiest superintendency had total per capital wealth levels above $600,000 in 2019 real terms, while total per capital wealth was just $90 in the least wealthy superintendency…
Our results suggest that, on average, Indigenous Peoples in the early twentieth century had substantial levels of wealth per capita, although there was wide diversity in wealth levels. Between 1912 and 1927, wealth per capita declined by nearly 50 percent.
Per capita indigenous wealth had been above white wealth at the beginning of the period.
Here is the AER version of the piece, by Donn. L. Feir, Maggie E.C. Jones, and Angela Redish, ungated here.
How important is “the scientific method”?
From a recently published paper by Alexander Krauss:
Using data on all major discoveries across science including all Nobel Prize and major non-Nobel Prize discoveries, we can address the question of the extent to which “the scientific method” is actually applied in making science’s groundbreaking research and whether we need to expand this central concept of science. This study reveals that 25% of all discoveries since 1900 did not apply the common scientific method (all three features)—with 6% of discoveries using no observation, 23% using no experimentation, and 17% not testing a hypothesis. Empirical evidence thus challenges the common view of the scientific method.
File under “In favor of methodological pluralism.” Via Zhengdong Wang.
My excellent Conversation with Benjamin Moser
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Benjamin Moser is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer celebrated for his in-depth studies of literary and cultural figures such as Susan Sontag and Clarice Lispector. His latest book, which details a twenty-year love affair with the Dutch masters, is one of Tyler’s favorite books on art criticism ever.
Benjamin joined Tyler to discuss why Vermeer was almost forgotten, how Rembrandt was so productive, what auctions of the old masters reveals about current approaches to painting, why Dutch art hangs best in houses, what makes the Kunstmuseum in the Hague so special, why Dutch students won’t read older books, Benjamin’s favorite Dutch movie, the tensions within Dutch social tolerance, the joys of living in Utrecht, why Latin Americans make for harder interview subjects, whether Brasilia works as a city, why modernism persisted in Brazil, how to appreciate Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag’s (waning) influence, V.S. Naipaul’s mentorship, Houston’s intellectual culture, what he’s learning next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: You once wrote about Susan Sontag, and I quote, “So much of Sontag’s best work concerns the ways we try, and fail, to see.” Please explain.
MOSER: This is what On Photography is about. This is what Against Interpretation is about in Sontag’s work. Of course, in my new book, The Upside-Down World, I talk about how I’m not really great at seeing, particularly. I’m not that visual. I’m a reader. I’m a bookworm. Often, when I’ve looked at paintings, I’ve realized how little I actually see. Sometimes I do feel embarrassed by it. You’ll read the label and it’ll be three sentences, and it’ll say like, A Man with a Dog. You’re like, “Oh, I didn’t even see the dog.” You know what I mean?
On these very basic levels, I just think, “Oh, if someone doesn’t point it out to me, I really don’t see.” I think that that was one of the fascinating things about Sontag, that she was not really able to see. She was actually quite terrible at seeing, and this was especially true in her relationships. She was very bad at seeing what other people were thinking and feeling.
I think because she was aware of that, she tried very hard to remedy it, but it’s just not something you can force. You can’t force yourself to like certain music or to like certain tastes that you might not actually like.
COWEN: What was Sontag most right about or most insightful about?
MOSER: I think this question of images — what images do — and photography and how representations, metaphors can pervert things. She had a very deep repulsion to photography. She really hated photography, and this is why a lot of photographers hated her because they felt this, even though she didn’t really say it. She really didn’t trust it. She really thought it was wicked. At the same time, for somebody who had a deficit, I guess you could say, in seeing, she really relied on it to understand the world.
I think that tension is very instructive for us, because now, she already says 50 years ago, “There are all these images. We don’t know what to do with them. We don’t know how to process them.” Forget AI, forget Russian trolls on Twitter. She uses this word I really like, hygiene, a lot. She talks about mental hygiene and how you can clean the rusty pipes in your brain. That’s why I think reading her helped me at least to understand a lot of what I’m seeing in the world.
COWEN: Do you think she will simply end up forgotten?
Again, I am happy to recommend Benjamin’s latest book The Upside-Down World: Meetings with Dutch Masters.
The Screwworm
The Atlantic: Screwworms once killed millions of dollars’ worth of cattle a year in the southern U.S. Their range extended from Florida to California, and they infected any living, warm-blooded animal: not only cattle but deer, squirrels, pets, and even the occasional human. In fact, the screwworm’s scientific name is C. hominivorax or “man eater”—so named after a horrific outbreak among prisoners on Devil’s Island, an infamous 19th-century French penal colony in South America.
For untold millennia, screwworms were a grisly fact of life in the Americas. In the 1950s, however, U.S. ranchers began to envision a new status quo. They dared to dream of an entire country free of screwworms. At their urging, the United States Department of Agriculture undertook what would ultimately become an immense, multidecade effort to wipe out the screwworms, first in the U.S. and then in Mexico and Central America—all the way down to the narrow strip of land that is the Isthmus of Panama. The eradication was a resounding success. But the story does not end there. Containing a disease is one thing. Keeping it contained is another thing entirely, as the coronavirus pandemic is now so dramatically demonstrating.
To get the screwworms out, the USDA to this day maintains an international screwworm barrier along the Panama-Colombia border. The barrier is an invisible one, and it is kept in place by constant human effort. Every week, planes drop 14.7 million sterilized screwworms over the rainforest that divides the two countries. A screwworm-rearing plant operates 24/7 in Panama. Inspectors cover thousands of square miles by motorcycle, boat, and horseback, searching for stray screwworm infections north of the border. The slightest oversight could undo all the work that came before.
A reminder that civilization takes work. Excellent piece by Sarah Zhang. Read the whole thing.
Hat tip: Stone Age Herbalist.
Isaac Asimov predictions from 1981
1985 — World oil production will fall below world needs
1990 — North America will no longer be a reliable source for food export
1995 — The nations of the world will meet (unwillingly) in a Global Congress to tackle seriously the problems of population, food, and energy.
2000 — Under global sponsorship, the construction of solar power stations in orbit about the earth will have begun.
2005 — A mining station will be in operation on the moon.
2010 — World population will have peaked at something like 7 billion.
2015 — The dismantling of the military machines of the world will have made international war impractical.
2020– The flow of energy from solar-power space stations will have begun. Nuclear fusion stations will be under construction.
2025 — The Global Congress will be recognized as a permanent institution. The improvement in communications will have developed a world “lingua franca,” which will be taught in schools.
2030 — The use of microcomputers and electronic computers will have revolutionized education, produced a global village, and prepared humanity for the thorough exploration of the solar system and the plans for eventual moves toward the stars.
Two of those are really good! They are from The Book of Predictions, by David Wallechinsky, Amy Wallace, and Irving Wallace.
Did World War II pull America out of the Great Depression?
Maybe by less than people had thought, here is a new ReStat paper by Gillian Brunet:
I use newly-digitized contract data on U.S. war production spending over 1940-1945 to analyze the macroeconomic effects of U.S. military spending in World War II. I find personal income multipliers of 0.34 over two years and 0.49 over three years. Personal income multipliers may substantially understate GDP multipliers, perhaps by as much as 50%. Employment estimates imply costs per job-year over the same time horizons of $405,013 and $232,268 in 2015 dollars, suggesting job creation was limited. I also find evidence of negative scale effects: larger positive spending shocks are associated with systematically smaller multiplier estimates.
Via Alexander Berger. The author’s title is “Stimulus on the Home Front: The State-Level Effects of WWII Spending.”
*Scarce and Valuable Economic Tracts*
Three big volumes, about 1800 pp., these books reprint the true classics behind the origins of economic thought. These are the best works of economics published before Adam Smith, and essentially they founded economic science. The originals were edited by the classical economist John Ramsay McCulloch, but they now have been reprinted by Classical Liberal Press. I don’t know of any comparably easy way to read these works, or anything close.
Here is one volume, here is another, here is a third. Each is priced below $20, definitely recommended.
What should I ask Velina Tchakarova?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. She runs a geopolitics firm, hails from Bulgaria, is in my view broadly classical liberal, focuses on conflict in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, and is very active on Twitter.
Here is Velina on LinkedIn. She does not seem crazy.
So what should I ask her?
*Shock Value: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy*
That is the new and very useful book by Carola Binder, mostly a very good economic history. Here is one excerpt:
The [Nixon price controls] were seen as necessary to support the third component of the Economic Stabilization Program, an expansionary fiscal package that included tax reductions to promote business recovery. The Council of Economic Advisers wrote in its annual report that “action to make fiscal policy more expansive had been limited by the need to avoid intensifying any inflationary expectations and stepping-up the inflation. The establishment of the direct wage-price controls created room for some more expansive measures, because it provided a certain degree of protection against both the fact and the expectation of inflation.”
The ties of the dollar to gold had been cut recently as well, as Bretton Woods turned into floating exchange rates. 1970s macro was a strange thing!
The book is recommended, you can pre-order here, most of American monetary history is covered.
Thwarted markets in everything, antiquities remain underpriced
An auction house has withdrawn 18 ancient Egyptian human skulls from sale after an MP said selling them would perpetuate the atrocities of colonialism.
Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afrikan reparations, believes the sale of human remains for any purposes should be outlawed, adding that the trade was “a gross violation of human dignity”.
The skulls of 10 men, five women, and three people of uncertain sex, were listed by Semley Auctioneers in Dorset, with a guide price of £200-300 for each lot.
They were originally collected by the Victorian British soldier and archaeologist Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, who founded the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum in 1884.
Here is the full Guardian story, indirectly via Samir Varma.
Who was the wealthiest man in the world in the 1830s?
Wu Bingjian, better known in the west as ‘Houqua’, or sometimes ‘Howqua’, was the most successful Chinese merchant of his day. As leader of the Cohong (gonghang), the guild of Chinese traders that had been authorized in the late 18th century by the Qing court to oversee trade with Western merchants at Canton (Guangzhou), he was at once the richest man in the world. In 1834, Wu’s personal wealth was estimated at 26 million Mexican silver dollars (£6.24 million then, around (£680 million today). To put this wealth in perspective, the contemporary European financier Nathan Rotschild held capital equivalent to US $5.3 million (around £1.06 million) in 1828. Wu’s extraordinary ability to maintain a complex balance between his business interests, the Qing court and his Western partners, made him the most importnat player in Western countries’ trade with China for over half a century.
That is from the new and quite interesting Creators of Modern China: 100 Lives from Empire to Republic 1796-1912, edited by Jessican Harrison-Hall and Julia Lovell.
Economists’ predictions from 1980
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the intro:
Out of curiosity, I recently cracked open The American Economy in Transition, published in 1980, edited by Martin Feldstein and including contributions from… Nobel-winning economists [Samuelson, Friedman, Kuznets], successful business leaders and notable public servants. Though most of the essays get it wrong, I found the book oddly reassuring
The problems the book describes truly are of a different era. On one hand, I was comforted to learn that many of these fears turned out to be unfounded. On the other, I am concerned that many current economists are not worried about the correct things.
How did they do in their analyses?:
For instance, many authors in the book are focused on capital outflow as a potential problem for the US economy. Today, of course, the more common concern is a possible excess inflow of foreign capital, combined with a trade deficit in goods and services. Another concern cited in the book is European economies catching up to the US. Again, that did not happen: The US has opened up its economic lead. Energy is also a major concern in the book, not surprisingly, given the price shocks of the 1970s. No one anticipates that the US would end up the major energy exporter that it is today.
Then there is the rise of China as a major economic rival, which is not foreseen — in fact, China is not even in the book’s index. Nether climate change nor global warming are mentioned. Financial crises are also given short shrift, as the US had not had a major one since the Great Depression. In 1980 the US financial sector simply was not that large, and the general consensus was that income inequality was holding constant. Nor do the economics of pandemics receive any attention.
So you may see why the book stoked my fears that today’s economists and analysts do not have a good handle on America’s imminent problems.
As for opportunities, as opposed to risks: The book contains no speculation about the pending collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor are the internet, crypto or artificial intelligence topics of discussion.
The column is interesting throughout. Milton Friedman for instance thought that the Fed would not find it politically profitable to fight inflation until inflation reached 25 percent. The best essay in the book was by Samuelson, who noted that such predictions usually misfire.
My Conversation with the excellent Coleman Hughes
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Coleman and Tyler explore the implications of colorblindness, including whether jazz would’ve been created in a color-blind society, how easy it is to disentangle race and culture, whether we should also try to be ‘autism-blind’, and Coleman’s personal experience with lookism and ageism. They also discuss what Coleman’s learned from J.J. Johnson, the hardest thing about performing the trombone, playing sets in the Charles Mingus Big Band as a teenager, whether Billy Joel is any good, what reservations he has about his conservative fans, why the Beastie Boys are overrated, what he’s learned from Noam Dworman, why Interstellar is Chris Nolan’s masterpiece, the Coleman Hughes production function, why political debate is so toxic, what he’ll do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: How was it you ended up playing trombone in Charles Mingus Big Band?
HUGHES: I participated in the Charles Mingus high school jazz festival, which they still do every year. It was new at the time. They invite bands from all around to audition, and they identify a handful of good soloists and let them sit in for one night with the band. I sat in with the band, and the band leader knew that I lived close by in New Jersey, and so essentially invited me to start playing with the band on Monday nights.
I was probably 16 or 17 at this point, so I would take the NJ Transit into New York City on a Monday night, play two sets with the Mingus Band sitting next to people that had been my idols and were now my mentors — people like Ku-umba Frank Lacy, who is a fantastic trombone player; played with Art Blakey and D’Angelo and so forth. Then I would go home at midnight and go to school on Tuesday morning.
COWEN: Why is the music of Charles Mingus special in jazz? Because it is to me, but how would you articulate what it is for you?
Here is another:
COWEN: If I understand you correctly, you’re also suggesting in our private lives we should be color-blind.
HUGHES: Yes. Broadly, yes. Or we should try to be.
COWEN: We should try to be. This is where I might not agree with you. So I find if I look at media, I look at social media, I see a dispute — I think 100 percent of the time I agree with Coleman, pretty much, on these race-related matters. In private lives, I’m less sure.
Let me ask you a question.
HUGHES: Sure.
COWEN: Could jazz music have been created in a color-blind America?
HUGHES: Could it have been created in a color-blind America — in what sense do you mean that question?
COWEN: It seems there’s a lot of cultural creativity. One issue is it may have required some hardship, but that’s not my point. It requires some sense of a cultural identity to motivate it — that the people making it want to express something about their lives, their history, their communities. And to them it’s not color-blind.
HUGHES: Interesting. My counterargument to that would be, insofar as I understand the early history of jazz, it was heavily more racially integrated than American society was at that time. In the sense that the culture of jazz music as it existed in, say, New Orleans and New York City was many, many decades ahead of the curve in terms of its attitudes towards how people should live racially: interracial friendship, interracial relationship, etc. Yes, I’d argue the ethos of jazz was more color-blind, in my sense, than the American average at the time.
COWEN: But maybe there’s some portfolio effect here. So yes, Benny Goodman hires Teddy Wilson to play for him. Teddy Wilson was black, as I’m sure you know. And that works marvelously well. It’s just good for the world that Benny Goodman does this.
Can it still not be the case that Teddy Wilson is pulling from something deep in his being, in his soul — about his racial experience, his upbringing, the people he’s known — and that that’s where a lot of the expression in the music comes from? That is most decidedly not color-blind, even though we would all endorse the fact that Benny Goodman was willing to hire Teddy Wilson.
HUGHES: Yes. Maybe — I’d argue it may not be culture-blind, though it probably is color-blind, in the sense that black Americans don’t just represent a race. That’s what a black American would have in common — that’s what I would have in common with someone from Ethiopia, is that we’re broadly of the same “race.” We are not at all of the same culture.
To the extent that there is something called “African American culture,” which I believe that there is, which has had many wonderful products, including jazz and hip-hop — yes, then I’m perfectly willing to concede that that’s a cultural product in the same way that, say, country music is like a product of broadly Southern culture.
COWEN: But then here’s my worry a bit. You’re going to have people privately putting out cultural visions in the public sphere through music, television, novels — a thousand ways — and those will inevitably be somewhat political once they’re cultural visions. So these other visions will be out there, and a lot of them you’re going to disagree with. It might be fine to say, “It would be better if we were all much more color-blind.” But given these other non-color-blind visions are out there, do you not have to, in some sense, counter them by not being so color-blind yourself and say, “Well, here’s a better way to think about the black or African American or Ethiopian or whatever identity”?
Interesting throughout.
*Native Nations*
The author is Kathleen Duval, and the subtitle is A Millennium in North America. This is an excellent book. Here is one excerpt, strung together by me from three separate pages:
By 1400, the cities of Cahokia, Moundville, and the Huhugam were abandoned. People continued to live nearby and, in many cases, continued to use the ruins as part of their ceremonies, but they no longer lived in the cities. Trade, religion, and politics became democratized, more the domain of the people. North America changed dramatically between 1200 and 1400, and the causes had nothing to do with Europeans.
Climate change, and The Little Ice Age, are the most likely culprits here:
The Little Ice Age was particularly hard on large, centralized agriculture-based cities around the world, including those of Cahokia, Moundville, and the Huhugam. In times of hardship and famine, leaders struggled to maintain their positinos, especiallly if they had claimed special powers over natural forces that were out of their control: rain, rivers, and tempereature. The urbanized settlments of North America were unable to deliver the healthand prosperity that people had enjoyed for generations. Now people saw conditions getting worse in their lifetimes: less food, more poverty, a declining future for their children…
Gradually, across Native North America, people developed a deep distrust of centralization, hierarchy, and inequality. The former residents of North America’s great cities reversed course, turning away from urbanization and political economic centralization to build new ways of living…
The first European explorers who crossed North America got a glimpse of this changing world.
I am excited to read the entire book.