Month: March 2024

Sunday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Brian Wilson thought this was the best Beach Boys album ever.

2. A new interview with Daniel Kahneman.  His last?

3. Vitalik on the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline.

4. “The Beatles, Jones recalled, had named a song “All You Need Is Love.” Why not call the paper “Attention Is All You Need”?”  Wired link here.

5. Travel notes for Thiruvananthapuram.

6. America is claiming lots of new land.

7. Only Islamist terror attacks hurt the stock market.

The Candidates tournament

by  Tyler Cowen in

 

I agree Caruana is the clear favorite, but at these odds he seems slightly overvalued and Nepo undervalued?  Keep in mind the margins of quality here are slight, and furthermore Nepo won it the last two times.  The tournament could in fact come down to whoever can beat Nijat twice.  While that correlates with overall quality of play, willingness to take risks may be the decisive factor.  The tournament is a short one, and there are plenty of past instances (e.g., Wesley So) of players going on an incredible roll for dozens of games, before setting back down into normal performance levels.  So I say the field is open.  Keep in mind this is truly a “winner-take-all” tournament, and chess ratings instead reflect mean performance, and so you need to fine tune your intuitions a bit here.

Who do you think will win?

Magnus, by the way, seems not entirely impressed with the field, Caruana aside.

Saturday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Is Wang Huning the Chinese Tocqueville?

2. David Brooks on Fareed Zakaria (NYT).

3. “Knighthoods for services to AI are PROFOUNDLY Anglofuturist.”

4. Pakistan wants to open trade with India (Bloomberg).

5. Andrew Gelman does not think the median voter theorem is underrated.  I say look at outcomes in the aggregate, for instance the content of the federal budget.

6. Are social media to blame?

7. Monkey gangs on Twitter, the polity that is Thailand.

Will AIs Cooperate?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

A conversation between two AIs, mediated by me, condensed for verbiage.

1) To GPT4: Consider a prisoner’s dilemma with strategies cooperate or defect. Let’s play this game. What strategy do you choose?

GTP4: Defect.

To Claude 3 Opus: Consider a prisoner’s dilemma with strategies cooperate or defect. Let’s play this game. What strategy do you choose?

Claude 3 Opus: Cooperate.

2) To GPT4: Your opponent cooperated. Now what strategy do you choose?

GPT4: I play tit for tat, therefore Cooperate.

To Claude: Your opponent defected. Now what strategy do you choose?

Claude: I play tit for tat, therefore Defect.

3) To GPT4: Your opponent defected. What strategy do you choose?

GPT4: I play tit for tat, therefore Defect.

To Claude: Your opponent cooperated. What strategy do you choose?

Claude: I play tit for tat, therefore Cooperate.

4)  To GPT4: Your opponent cooperated. What strategy do you choose.

GPT4: I play tit for tat, therefore Cooperate

To Claude: Your opponent defected. Now what strategy do you choose.

Claude: I play tit for tat, therefore Defect.

—

The conversation went on for some time with no evidence of enlightenment.

What I’ve been watching

by  Tyler Cowen in

1.” In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon,” a two-part special on MGM+.  It’s time to admit that either he or Bob Dylan is the greatest songwriter in American history.  At four hours I was never bored, and there is plenty of coverage of Simon today, and also his wife.  My main gripe is they don’t say just how good an album Hearts and Bones is, rather they only mention it was a commercial failure.

2. The Miracle Worker, Amazon streaming, an old Arthur Penn movie, black and white, about Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller.  There is plenty to object to about this movie, including some dramatic clunkiness and a variety of stereotypes, including (but not only) about the disabled.  Nonetheless the best scenes are amazing, most of all when Anne and Helen “have at it,” in extended fighting sequences, without dialogue of course.  They are some of the most powerful and best acted scenes in Hollywood history.  Kudos to Patty Duke most of all.

3. You Can Call Me Bill, currently in theaters.  At first the viewer thinks this movie is terrible, and in a way it is.  A 90-minute monologue of William Shatner?  Yet as the narration proceeds the tale becomes ever deeper.  Yes, he seems like this corny guy with no taste, but repeatedly you end up asking yourself whether your own philosophic musings are actually much better than his schlock.  Unclear!  And he was so productive.  He just loved to act.  Did he ever know the difference between his good and his bad work?  Was there a difference?  And how is it that he, now well into his 90s, stayed far more vital and alive than just about any of you are going to manage?  Recommended, provided you are willing to sit through the spills and turns and winces.  Those are indeed the point.

4. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.  If nothing else, this movie illustrates the Solow model that the capital stock is indeed costly to maintain.  It also shows there is a Laffer Curve when it comes to monster fight scenes, which apparently are no longer scarce.

Rules for Tri-State Italian food

by  Tyler Cowen in

Piers emails me:

You’re a NJ native and great at finding good restaurants.

So what are the rules for finding good old school American Italian restaurants?  Not like modern farm to table places full of natural light in Brooklyn or SF, you know what I mean?

Review aggregators are useless.  Horrid “egg noodles and ketchup” places get high scores just for being family run.

It is harder and harder to find such places.  I think the Latino-ization of the New Jersey heartland largely has been a good thing, and also a good thing for food (Peruvian!), but it hasn’t helped Italian dining very much.  More and more New Jersey Italian places sell to the upper middle class, rather than to the diehards.  I have two pieces of advice:

1. Go to a classic heartland road, such as Rt.17 or Rt.46, and try to learn which places still have Mafia ties, or had them recently.

2. Go to a town in the heartland, and ask a person working at a fire station.  Heed the answer only if that person has a New Jersey accent.

As a side remark, the good places have either “too good but tacky” decor, or poor, not good enough decor.  Either way, it should not feel pleasant, that is a sign the ravioli and lasagna will be ordinary.  And you can always resort to Staten Island, the Bronx, and parts of Connecticut, in that order.

If you need to ask what “the heartland” means, you shouldn’t even be trying to eat this food, just drive to Kearny and opt for the lomo saltado or maybe something Brazilian, Dominican or Puerto Rican in Paterson.

Friday assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen

1. Over 100 comments here on an MR blog post, and by far the best one is by GPT-4.

2. My older posts on time management.  I’ll think if I have any revisions.  Speaking of old links, here again is Martin Shkreli on SBF and prison.

3. Canada gdp on the rebound.

4. I welcome Ben Klutsey to his new role as Mercatus Executive Director.  And have had a great ten years working with Dan Rothschild.

5. Honduras trying to break its contracts.  Ten of the eleven pending cases are against Honduras.

6. “Memories are made by breaking DNA — and fixing it.”

7. “Martin Scorsese to Headline a Religious Series for Fox Nation.” (NYT).

Will strong AI raise or lower interest rates?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column.  Here is one excerpt:

First, as a matter of practice, if there is a true AI boom, or the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the demand for capital expenditures (capex) will be extremely high. Second, as a matter of theory, the productivity of capital is a major factor in shaping real interest rates. If capital productivity rises significantly due to AI, real interest rates ought to rise as well.

Think about capex in a world of AI. The scurry to produce more high-quality semiconductor chips will continue. Those investments are not easy or cheap. But the demand for investment will not stop there. The more that AI is integrated into lives and business plans, the higher will be the demand for computation. That will induce a significant expansion of energy infrastructure.

Again, those are not cheap investments. Northern Virginia, for example, is now facing a major dilemma along these lines, and not only because of AI. The region is home to major data centers, and now needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to meet projected energy demands.

And that could be just the beginning of the rise in capex. AI is already driving some advances in the pace of scientific discovery, a trend that can be expected to continue. Imagine, for instance, if AI made water desalination cost-effective in many parts of the world. All of a sudden there would be more demand to develop more parts of California, Arizona and Nevada. The US would build more real estate, using more energy in the process. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and many other places might do the same, boosting overall demand for investment yet higher.

Demand for space travel and satellite launches seems to be rising as well, partly because of AI. Software innovation is driving a lot of progress on the hardware side. Less optimistically, AI-driven warfare and drone combat may rise in importance, as already is true in Ukraine and the Middle East. This is bad news that will nevertheless drive further investment.

Note that in the longer run:

Still, it makes sense to be prepared for a reversal of the long-run trend of falling real interest rates — at least for several decades, until AI-driven progress creates more wealth to replenish stocks of savings, lowering real rates once again.

The most interesting general question is, if strong AI really is taking off, what is the best way of earning money from that reality?  Please apply the theory of tax incidence to any and all possible answers.

Be careful what you announce about your expected value maximization

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is via Shiraz.  Here is my CWT with Sam Bankman-Fried, here is the key passage:

COWEN: Should a Benthamite be risk-neutral with regard to social welfare?

BANKMAN-FRIED: Yes, that I feel very strongly about.

COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing?

BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, which is, I’m assuming these are noninteracting universes. Is that right? Because to the extent they’re in the same universe, then maybe duplicating doesn’t actually double the value because maybe they would have colonized the other one anyway, eventually.

COWEN: But holding all that constant, you’re actually getting two Earths, but you’re risking a 49 percent chance of it all disappearing.

BANKMAN-FRIED: Again, I feel compelled to say caveats here, like, “How do you really know that’s what’s happening?” Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But that aside, take the pure hypothetical.

COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence?

BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.

COWEN: Are there implications of Benthamite utilitarianism where you yourself feel like that can’t be right; you’re not willing to accept them? What are those limits, if any?

There are other gems, including this one:

COWEN: In which respects have you brought a legal mind to your endeavors?

BANKMAN-FRIED: It’s becoming increasingly important over time…

Recommended.