~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (547)

1. The French had concluded it was impossible to break the Enigma machine. 2. The emerging era of AI diplomacy. 3. What LLMs recommend for Europe.  Twitter summary here. 4. A short history of the origins of civilization. 5. “Deep Fusion Films has announced the commission of a new 8-part podcast series Virtually Parkinson hosted […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

Good! The post Apologies, the great Frank Fukayama still lives! appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Hazel Meade. How’s that working out for you? by The Scary Black HundrederIn reply to Anon. Nietzschean then! by ThorIn reply to Anon. Yes, well, that's why they hated Fukuyama ... by Hazel MeadeNope. https://x.com/FukuyamaFrancis/status/1850923410710495435 by SeanIn reply to Anon. I laughed more than I...

Rey Hernández-Julián and Frank Limehouse writing in the Journal of Economics Teaching write that very few principles of economics textbooks deal with modern information and digital tech industries: The main takeaways of our review are highlighted by two stand-alone textboxes found in Mankiw’s (2023) textbook. This textbook has been regarded as one of the most […] The post Principles of Economics Textbooks and the...

One of the most admirable and impressive things about the EA movement is how many people in it will avidly learn about other areas.  Whether it be animal welfare, mosquite bed nets, asteroid risk, or the properties of various AI programs, you can find numerous EAs who really have gone out of their way to […] The post Effective Altruists and finance theory appeared...

I would say this was a good not great movie, but I pass along word because it is rare to have a movie so exclusively devoted to both public choice and social choice theory, and realistically so.  (Thomas Reese said in an interview that the details on the conclave were pretty realistic too; if you […] The post *Conclave* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION....

1. An eighth grade test from 1912. 2. “Create an AI agent with a crypto wallet (and optional X account) in less than 3 minutes” 3. Robot chips away at one pillar of the cost disease. 4. Was the Trans-Siberian railroad the greatest mega-project of all time? 5. About twenty percent of U.S: jobs heavy […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

From Wikipedia: Paula Jayne Byrne, Lady Bate…is a British biographer, novelist, and literary critic. Byrne has a PhD in English literature from the University of Liverpool, where she also studied for her MA, having completed a BA in English and Theology at West Sussex Institute of Higher Education (now Chichester University). Byrne is the founder and chief […] The post What should I ask Paula Byrne?...

Let’s say you have a production process, and the AIs involved operate at IQ = 160, and the humans operate at IQ = 120.  The O-Ring model, as you may know, predicts you end up with a productivity akin to IQ = 120.  The model, in short, says a production process is no better than […] The post Does the O-Ring model hold for...

It’s well past the August holiday peak, but anger against over-tourism in Spain is spilling into the off-season, as holiday-makers continue to seek winter sun. On Sunday locals in the Basque city of San Sebastian plan to take to the streets under the banner: “We are in danger; degrow tourism!” And in November anti-tourism protesters […] The post The anti-tourism movement continues into winter...

1. Samuel Siskind, Awake, he is a 17-year-old composer.  And Les Aunties, female vocalists from Chad. 2. Forthcoming Nvidia book. 3. Emory University invests in Bitcoin. 4. We can terraform the American West.  By Casey Handmer, I am a big fan of this approach and think it is far more promising than Mars exploration. 5. […] The post Saturday assorted links appeared first on...

More than 6.1 million malaria cases, and 1,038 deaths, have been recorded in the country this year through the end of September, compared with 4.5 million cases, and 469 deaths, for all of 2023. Worse, cases are likely to soar far higher in the next couple of months because peak malaria season, driven by seasonal […] The post Ethiopia fact of the day appeared...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: To see how this is likely to play out, start with a distinction between sectors in which it is relatively easy to go out of business, and sectors in which it is not. Most firms selling computer programming services, for example, do […] The post The uneven effects of AI on...

Here is a very good New York piece by Reeves Wiedeman, here is the excerpt from yours truly: When I reached out to Tyler Cowen, he said that his prognostication of football’s death had been off in part because he misread people’s concern for their health and the health of others. “COVID changed my mind […] The post What happened to football’s concussion crisis?...

1. Goldfish crackers are changing, but only for a limited period of time. 2. The rise and decline of the secretary. 3. Not every economist would agree.  Even fewer would frame it as such, even if they had some sympathies in that direction. 4. Canadian backlash on immigration. 5. Perplexity on the move. 6. The […] The post Friday assorted links appeared first on...

From the Institute for Progress, here is the link, the participants were Caleb Watney, Dylan Matthews, Alexander Berger, and myself.  Excerpt: Tyler Cowen: I would stress just how decentralized science funding is in the United States. The public universities are run at the state level. We have tax incentives for donations where you have to give […] The post Science and politics podcast appeared first...

Here is one excerpt: Over-regulation was the enemy at many presentations, but this wasn’t a libertarian conference. Everyone agreed that safety, quality, the environment, etc, were important and should be regulated for. They just thought existing regulations were colossally stupid, so much so that they made everything worse including safety, the environment, etc. With enough political will, […] The post Scott Alexander on the Progress Studies...

Here is a fun post by Arnold Kling on which thinkers have kept name recognition and also influence.  Excerpt: Sociology (Erving Goffman, Talcott Parsons, Robert Nisbet, Charles Murray, Matt Granovetter, Robert Trivers, E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould) Is there not a good case to be made that we are living in Erving Goffman’s world? […] The post Risers and Fallers, mostly Fallers appeared...

1. First robot painting to auction at Sotheby’s. 2. A Large Language Model for Interpreting Longitudinal Medical Records.  Twitter summary here. 3. Practical suggestions for federal action on housing affordability. 4. Pseudoerasmus. 5. Are drivers an especially right-wing group of people? 6. Might Argentina have to default? (FT) 7. Origins of truth terminal and what it […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

There is a new paper on this topic: We investigate the effects of substantial Medicare price reductions in the medicaldevice industry, which amounted to a 61% decrease over 10 years for certain devicetypes. Analyzing over 20 years of administrative and proprietary data, we find theseprice cuts led to a 25% decline in new product introductions […] The post Quantifying the Super-Villains appeared first on...

From the Institute for Progress.  There are four of us, namely  Dylan Matthews, Matt Clancy, and Jacob Trefethen as well.  There is a transcript, and here is one very brief excerpt: Tyler Cowen: I see the longer run risks of economic growth as primarily centered around warfare. There is lots of literature on the Industrial Revolution. People […] The post Metascience podcast on science and safety...

Although many women report being victimized by gossip, fewer report spreading negative gossip. Female gossipers might be unaware they are gossiping if they disclose such statements out of concern for targets. Four studies (N = 1709) investigated whether women believe their gossip is motivated by concern and whether expressing concern for targets insulates female gossipers against social […] The post Gossip phrased with concern provides advantages...

1. The latest @pmarca gambit.  Crypto + AI.  And a Brian Armstrong offer, take it! 2. Where did all that Millennial wealth come from so suddenly? 3. Anthropic’s new computer use capabilities.  And further observations on that. 4. The perverse consequences of tuition-free medical school (Atlantic). 5. New James Boyle book on AI and the […] The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on...

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: It also matters if Satoshi was a single person or a small team. If a single person, that might mean future innovations are more likely than generally thought: If Satoshi is a lone individual, then maybe there there are more unknown geniuses […] The post Does it matter who Satoshi was?...

We argue that deep learning provides a promising avenue for taming the curse of dimensionality in quantitative economics. We begin by exploring the unique challenges posed by solving dynamic equilibrium models, especially the feedback loop between individual agents’ decisions and the aggregate consistency conditions required by equilibrium. Following this, we introduce deep neural networks and […] The post Quantitative Economics with Deep Learning appeared...