Sam works on innovation coverage at Progress Eire, an impartial coverage suppose tank in Dublin, and runs a publication referred to as The Fitzwilliam. Most related to us, on his private weblog, he writes a well-liked hyperlink roundup; what follows is an abridged model of his Hyperlinks for November.
Blogs and brief hyperlinks
1. Is Google search getting worse? The standard of proof round this is remarkably poor.
2. On the sport concept of $1 margarita evening. As this put up describes, it will be nice to have a standing social event each week on the identical time and place that might function my buddy group’s “workplace hours”. The changeability of plans makes me really feel that increasingly more of my time is being spent on social coordination.
3. Relaxation in peace to Peter Temin. I loved his paper reviewing the financial system of the early Roman Empire. In some unspecified time in the future, we needs to be overlaying the economies of pre-industrial Europe in my studying group.
4. For Progress Eire, I lately wrote about why extra teachers don’t begin corporations. I additionally gave an replace on our efforts to help Olympiad-level arithmetic in Eire, and turned on paid subscriptions for my weblog.
5. Local weather predictions have been comparatively correct.
6. Is AI going to supercharge NIMBYism? The preliminary hope with efforts like Tract was the other, and I’ve no prediction on how this stuff will shake out.
7. VAT cuts to create extra readers. Do I scent an arbitrage alternative within the paper market?1
8. The standard knowledge in city economics is that minimal house requirements for ground house and different issues of private choice are a horrible concept. The Irish authorities’s said discount in minimal house requirements is now being delayed, or probably cancelled solely, due to a problem within the Excessive Court docket. The court docket in query is intimating that the European Union could must get entangled. Even when you suppose that modestly lowering minimal house requirements is a foul concept, I’m baffled by the worldview by which democratically elected officers had the authority to introduce these rules within the first place, however to not modestly scale back them. Is that this anarchism with respect to the issue of political authority, however solely when modifications are within the route of much less regulation, slightly than extra? Is there even a worldview right here, or simply bitterness and cynicism?
9. One other thought: Have I been bizarre flag cones this whole time?
10. Stephen Webb on why Britain has too many lifeguards. I’m reminded of the Mitchell and Webb sketch about how a lot of an outrage it’s when a yr goes by and nil folks drown in Britain:
I’m attempting to attract consideration to the large waste of public cash that’s led to a scenario in the place completely no one in a complete yr drowns accidentally. What that should imply when it comes to fencing, warning indicators, swimming classes, folks coming into faculty to inform youngsters to watch out, life belts and the upkeep of waterside paths is simply staggering. There has clearly been an enormous overspend, as a result of in any conurbation of as much as half 1,000,000 folks equivalent to Westchester that’s run with the correct priorities, not less than two or three folks ought to drown yearly.
I’m conversant in the totally different methodologies for methods to calculate the worth of a statistical life, however can anybody clarify to me (a) why totally different international locations, even at related ranges of improvement, selected totally different strategies, and (b) whether or not the big divergence in these numbers has any sensible significance? (After you’re executed with that, I’ve the identical confusion in regards to the totally different methodologies for calculating social low cost charges.)
[E]very authorities has a price for a human life which determines the suitable stage of funding in, say, street security measures. The UK is often on the decrease finish right here—at round £2.5m (say $3m) in comparison with over $12m within the US and about $4.5m within the EU.
Lastly, from my e-mail inbox, I’ve been knowledgeable of the thriller of the Scottish lifeguards:
Certainly one of my minor obsessions is that plainly ‘lifeguard’ is a particularly widespread teenage summer season job in Scotland however not wherever else within the UK. I do not know why.
Each time I communicate to a Scottish particular person now I’ve to cease myself from asking “did you’re employed as a lifeguard as an adolescent?”. However each time teenage jobs come up in dialog, >>65% of Scottish folks I’ve met say they had been lifeguards, in comparison with <<5% of English or Welsh or (Northern) Irish folks. I’m not randomly sampling, clearly, however that’s loopy.
The BBC even had a lesbian romance drama set in Helensburgh the place the entire premise is that ‘lifeguard’ is the default job you’re taking while you’re simply on the lookout for one thing to generate income whereas dwelling along with your mother and father.
I don’t get it.
11. The New Yorker has come out in opposition to non-commutative algebraic buildings.
Music and podcasts
1. Stevie Marvel, Innervisions. I had forgotten how very good this album is. My favorite tracks are Don’t You Fear ‘Bout a Factor and Too Excessive. Aside from some backup vocals and minor synthesiser, Stevie Marvel performs each instrument on this album—completely insane. Right here is the related You’ll Hear It episode.
2. Podcast of the month: Dean Ball on how he wrote the AI Motion Plan. Is “How do you insert sane and clever technocrats to be largely left alone in administrations run by lunatics?” going to be the defining political query of the late 2020s?
3. Lauryn Hill, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Realising I ought to weblog extra about genres apart from jazz and classical. I used to be prompted to re-listen to this after Apple Music declared it the best album of all time. Maybe my second favorite rapper after André 3000, though it has been some time since I’ve considered such issues. My favorite monitor is To Zion, though you need to definitely be listening to the entire album so as.
4. Hugh Mellor on Ramsey on fact. I by no means did get round to studying Reality and Likelihood, however that is of curiosity for 2 causes. First, I’ve heard philosophers declare that the Cheryl Misak biography fully shoehorns Ramsey into the pragmatist custom, however I’ve not waded into this debate. Second is that, due to the breadth and depth of his thought, operating the teeny tiny convention on Frank Ramsey can be a dream.
5. The Marginal Revolutionaries on the Baumol impact. Right here is the authentic e-book the place Baumol proposed the thought with William Bowen.
6. Ahmad Jamal Trio, The Awakening. Take note of how the vitality is totally different on Dolphin Dance in comparison with the Herbie Hancock authentic (I’ve additionally been re-listening to that album, one in every of my favourites). You most likely recognise the lick round 0:40 from usually being sampled in hip hop.
7. Dan Wang and Stephen Kotkin discuss how historians work. This one works higher as a video podcast. You’ll be able to hear extra about Kotkin’s time dwelling in Magnitogorsk on the Conversations with Tyler podcast, one in every of my favorite podcast episodes of all time.
Papers
1. Matt Clancy, Easy methods to Speed up Technological Progress. One of many many (many!) issues I recognize about Matt is that he permits his webpages to be downloaded as nicely-formatted PDFs. That is an outline of among the supplies on New Issues Below the Solar; probably the most attention-grabbing new ones I came upon about are opinions on how lengthy it takes to go from science to know-how (reply: about 20 years), and how widespread impartial discovery is. I assigned this paper as one of many core readings for an economics class I educate on on the College of Edinburgh (lengthy story, I’ll put up about it quickly).
2. Numerous, The Influence of Superior AI Techniques on Democracy. I’ve now joined not one however two studying teams by which I’m the one one who is just not knowledgeable political scientist. From the lengthy creator listing, I solely recognise Bruce Schneier and fellow Work together-er Saffron Huang.
Web page two opinions among the literature on political biases in AI: they are saying LLMs are biased towards “progressive/libertarian” views (aren’t these usually opposites? What does this imply?) when introduced with a number of alternative questions, however are politically impartial when they’re able to reply freely. My sense is that it’s been tough to measure political bias beneath precise life like utilization circumstances.
I typically got here away with a reasonably low opinion of Nature Views, or editorials related to Nature generally. One facet of ‘pretend rigour’ this paper excels in is that these 10 pages of comparatively imprecise and milquetoast opinions cite a whopping 141 sources (and I don’t get the impression the authors have really learn all of them). Can we truthfully say this was a larger contribution to human information than a considerate Substack put up by one in every of them would have been?
Diving into these sources so that you don’t need to, footnote 9 is a pleasant reminder that I ought to weblog sooner or later about James Fishkin’s deliberate polling methodology within the context of whether or not we are able to ever get Northern Irish folks to agree on something. Nan Ransohoff lately had the misfortune of listening to me discuss this literature in additional element than she might have probably needed to clarify why my reply to her query of “What can different international locations be taught from what Eire has executed nicely in coverage?” was not “residents’ assemblies”.
In footnote 60, Hugo Mercier’s heterodox “argumentative concept of purpose” is cited as “proof” of the next declare:
Does the declare that individuals generally need to win arguments, slightly than come to a mutually agreeable end result, really want a quotation? Even when one way or the other the reply is sure, why would that quotation be one extraordinarily particular and extremely disputed speculation in cognitive science, that’s largely irrelevant to the declare as said in the primary textual content? (Sorry for being imply.)
This additionally jogged my memory that I’ve a ten,000-word absurdly bloated draft of a weblog responding to Mercier and Sperber’s argumentative concept of purpose, which I by no means completed on time to undergo the Astral Codex Ten e-book evaluate contest. It might or could not ever see the sunshine of day; if you wish to learn a duplicate and let me know whether or not it’s salvageable, you are able to do so right here.
This was the second time within the political science group that I used to be instinctively sympathetic with the thought of a paper, however annoyed with the sloppiness of the execution. One suspects that if I preserve coming throughout as so pedantic, they’re going to kick me out.
Movies and video
1. Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing. It is a documentary in regards to the genocide of alleged communist sympathisers and ethnic Chinese language following the 1965 coup by which Suharto got here to energy in Indonesia. Provided that the governments for the reason that transition to democracy have nonetheless been sympathetic to Suharto, very minimal archives have been launched, and it’s unknown what number of had been killed, even to the closest million. To make this movie, Joshua Oppenheimer spent a number of years dwelling in Indonesia and studying to talk fluent Indonesian, for the needs of filming and partially befriending the perpetrators, who fortunately volunteered to reenact the executions.
I feel The Act of Killing is a superb achievement, and deserves its repute as probably the best documentary of all time. As somebody who has watched a good quantity of Ken Burns, that is in a totally totally different league.
2. Lastly, from YouTube, now we have Bob James and Tame Impala on NPR Tiny Desk. I’ve additionally been watching footage from the Chinese language Cultural Revolution. Lastly, a speculative discuss: cosmological pure choice as conceptual infrastructure for AI alignment. That’s from the ODYSSEY convention, the second within the ILIAD sequence of alignment occasions. Confusingly, the all-caps titles don’t appear to point an acronym, though some backronyms have been recommended (“Worldwide League of Clever Agent Deconfusion”). I’ll purchase dinner for the primary one who can give you a great AI security backronym for EPIC OF GILGAMESH.
You’ll be able to learn the total model of Sam’s November hyperlinks right here.
[1] Additionally a great time to be reminded that value-added tax creates much less pointless ache than gross sales tax.
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