~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (568)

1. Andrej Karpathy on Llama 3. 2. The PEN awards are on the brink of collapse. 3. These were my fiscal, political and other predictions from 2010. 4. AI is being integrated into social media — now.  Social media will change. 5. New Yorker Music critic Alex Ross cites Fischer Black on noise. 6. How […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

When I post about the skyrocketing price of housing and the need to build, commentators (include some of the most astute commentators on MR), will sometimes object by pointing to the increasing and historically high number of houses per capita. They question how this aligns with rising prices and wave vaguely towards factors like monopoly […] The post Why a Housing Shortage Exists Despite...

With a group of friends I was having a chat about the merits of the current vs. past America.  Battle of the Ancients and Moderns!  I generally favor current times, but not unconditionally.  So I promised them a list of what I missed from the past.  To be clear, these are personal judgments, not claims […] The post What I am nostalgic about appeared...

All of this is from Devin Pope, in response to Lyman Stone (and myself).  Here was my original post on the paper, concerning the degree of religious attendance.  I won’t double indent, but here is Devin and Devin alone: “I’m super grateful for Lyman’s willingness to engage with my recent research on measuring religious worship […] The post Response from Devin Pope, on religious...

Latin American immigrants are starting businesses at more than twice the rate of the U.S. population as a whole. The jump in Latino entrepreneurship has driven up the overall share of new businesses owned by immigrants, who accounted for 36% of launches last year compared with 25% in 2019, according to a new analysis of […] The post U.S.A. fact of the day appeared...

The craziest LLaMA 3 reveal: The 400B+ version of the model is **on par with Claude 3 Opus**, and it's still training. Soon, we'll have a better-than-Opus, fully open-source model. The implications are huge. pic.twitter.com/chaDp7jaCa — Matt Shumer (@mattshumer_) April 18, 2024 Here is from Meta. The post Claims about claims (it’s happening) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Brendan Long....

1. Interview with Ulrike Malmendier, a regional thinker in the best sense of the term. 2. “Paying Off People’s Medical Debt Has Little Impact on Their Lives, Study Finds.” (NYT)  Model that. 3. Another look at suicide rates. 4. Should you have privacy rights to your brainwaves? (NYT)  And should you have the right to […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

Only rarely: Recent social movements stand out by their spontaneous nature and lack of stable leadership, raising doubts on their ability to generate political change. This article provides systematic evidence on the effects of protests on public opinion and political attitudes. Drawing on a database covering the quasi-universe of protests held in the United States, […] The post Do protests matter? appeared first on...

Here is the audio, video, and transcript, along with almost thirty minutes of audience questions, filmed in Miami.  Here is the episode summary: Tyler and Peter Thiel dive deep into the complexities of political theology, including why it’s a concept we still need today, why Peter’s against Calvinism (and rationalism), whether the Old Testament should […] The post My excellent Conversation with Peter Thiel...

Sometimes I feel like focusing on policies that only affect growth rates by a few tenths of a percentage point feels small. But then I remind myself that the difference between the United States and Argentina over the last 120 years was 0.5 percentage point. pic.twitter.com/Pd6SIg1FwS — Jason Furman (@jasonfurman) April 17, 2024 The post Economic growth sentences to ponder, Argentina fact of the...

1. Lyman Stone criticizes the Pope paper on church attendance.  Good criticisms, see also the points by Sure and others in the comment section.  This paper doesn’t seem to hold up?  I’ll gladly publish a response by the author, otherwise a withdrawal might be in order? 2. Good critique of the AGI concept.  And AI […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

President Biden has made a big deal of simplifying fees: The FTC is proposing a rule that…would ban businesses from charging hidden and misleading fees and require them to show the full price up front. The rule would also require companies disclose up front whether fees are refundable. This would mean no more surprise resort fees […] The post Why is the Biden Administration Against...

…residents of La Salut neighbourhood in Barcelona are celebrating a move to wipe themselves off the map. For years, residents had complained that they could not get home because the number 116 bus was always crammed with tourists visiting Antoni Gaudí’s Park Güell. The park is the city’s second most popular attraction after the Sagrada Familia basilica. […] The post Barcelona escalates its role in the...

That is the subject of my latest Bloomberg column.  Here is one excerpt: The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises is having a moment, especially in Latin America. Argentine President Javier Milei admires Mises, and he has adopted some Misesian ideas, such as the notion that “the middle of the road leads to socialism.” Milei used to be an academic […] The post The Ludwig von Mises comeback appeared...

Sociology and Classical Liberalism in Dialogue: Freedom is Something We Do Together https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666961331/Sociology-and-Classical-Liberalism-in-Dialogue-Freedom-is-Something-We-Do-Together  Direct link to pdf: https://rowman.com/WebDocs/SociologyLiberalism.pdf The post Charlotta Stern and Fabio Rojas appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to dearieme. “Looking after neighbours” seems ... by MIn reply to Anti-Gnostic. To take it a short, happy step ... by Anti-GnosticIn reply to Evolutionist. “Reminiscent of a certain British ......

“I have one partner now with three kids. He is transmasc, and he’s radical about the way he raises them. They’re radically home-schooled. They’re 17 and nonbinary, 6 and 5. They know everything in age-appropriate ways. They’ve seen their mommy undergo the transmasc experience, seen their mom become who they really are.” 5 and 6!  […] The post Does the NYT not recognize child...

From a recent paper: We bring novel data to bear on these questions, presenting the largest empirical study of private security to date. We introduce an administrative dataset covering nearly 300,000 licensed private security officers in the State of Florida. By linking this dataset to similarly comprehensive information about public law enforcement, we have, for […] The post Data on private security forces appeared...

1. Paul Christiano appointed to USG Head of AI Safety. 2. Further worries about the anti-cavity thing.  I don’t pretend to know the answers here, but this has not been thought through well enough.  And SSC update. 3. Fritz Peterson, RIP, MIE.  Very 1970s. 4. The economic research policymakers actually need. 5. Doris Day: A […] The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on...

Thus, approximately 1 out of 7 people who I classify as a Latter-day Saint attends [religious service] weekly. And: However, only 5% of Americans attend services “weekly”, far fewer than the ~22% who report to do so in surveys. Oh, and this: The religions with the longest average visit duration are Orthodox Christians (116 minutes), […] The post LDS and indeed USA fact of...

Here is a very good article by Ronald Bailey of Reason magazine.  Excerpt: The contours of the new progress movement stretch from the Human Progress project at the libertarian Cato Institute to the “eco-modernist” initiatives at the Breakthrough Institute and the Pritzker Innovation Fund. Four relatively new groups at the forefront of the pro-progress forces […] The post The progress in Progress Studies appeared...

…at least half of a population of ten million depend on the state in some way—35% are retirees, 10% government workers, and another 5% receive either unemployment benefits or integration benefits. They would see a country with less youth than they once saw; they would see what is in fact, after Italy, the second-oldest country in […] The post A portrait of Portugal appeared first...

1. Should we change species to save them? (NYT) 2. Mechanical watch. 3. Why is it called Martingale? And “With French under fire, Mali uses AI to bring local language to students.” 4. McDonald’s new marketing: Billboards that smell like its French fries. 5. Erwin Dekker on the history of economic thought. 6. Strawberries and the […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

A record number of drugs are in shortage across the United States. In any particular case, it’s difficult to trace out the exact causes of the shortage but health care is the US’s most highly regulated, socialist industry and shortages are endemic under socialism so the pattern fits. The shortage of Adderall and other ADHD […] The post The Adderall Shortage: DEA versus FDA...

Our primary concern in this chapter will be Iran, though toward the end we will shift the focus to Central Asia.  We can best begin with a first-order approximation of the pattern of Iranian history across the whole period.  It has four major features.  The first is the survival of something called Iran, as both […] The post Michael Cook on Iran appeared first...