tylercowen

Interesting fact: avg debt at graduation is higher in Denmark, Norway, UK, Finland, Australia, Netherlands than the US, almost identical in Canada. Some differences in income based repayment but...US university debt is dominated by "low value Masters" + dropouts. 1/2

@AK_Bhavya @tylercowen Tyrone thinks political polarization has gone down

This was written by @tylercowen in 2013. Average Is Over is a very underrated book for what high quality provable prediction looks like….

We're trialling a new kind of forecasting tournament. The challenge: submit forecasting questions that trigger divergent predictions from the top AI forecasting systems. There's a $25k prize pool for the question writers, allocated by how much disagreement you can elicit. Motivation: - AI forecasters are becoming competitive with human pros. - Many questions are "solved", e.g. if I ask "Will a nuclear bomb go off in Europe this month?" all the models know it's <1%. - Still, other questions are intractable, because of aleatoric uncertainty. "What will be NVIDIA stock price in 1 year?" Again, the models will agree (this time by being very uncertain), and there's not much to learn. - If you can make the AIs disagree, you've found something interesting: a place where the AIs have divergent models of how the world works or differences in what information sources they're relying on. - Identifying these wedge questions will help the field develop AI forecasters that can tackle genuinely challenging problems. This is exactly what we'll need them for, as we navigate the uncertain world ahead. Please apply! Link in reply.

From a 17-year-old spearheading an AI company’s technical report to high school internships mentored by CEOs, China’s tech giants are increasingly trying to spot and cultivate talented teenagers. In the most recent publicized example, on March 16, Chen Guangyu, a 17-year-old high school student, co-authored a technical report on large language models for Beijing-based Moonshot AI. The report, published on web-based software collaboration platform GitHub, was later praised by Tesla CEO Elon Musk as “impressive work” on X, sparking heated discussion on Chinese social media. sixthtone.com/news/1018378

A single employee with no venture backing just built a $1.8B business using AI tools and $20K. That's ~4% of OpenAI and Anthropic's combined revenue. One person. If one person can do that, how much total revenue is being built on top of them?🧵(1/5)

I am hiring a full-time Head of Media ASAP to work with me and the Cluny Institute team to completely change the landscape of media for serious things, such as engagement with religion and spiritual themes from film to books to a new publication launching this summer. Must have a healthy revulsion to all of the superficial “vibe shift” content, must be in DC, and must like to have fun while building real things that reach the soul. Generous salary and benefits. Iykyk.

Ditto.

Talk about a narrative violation — real electricity prices have fallen since 2010

US prime-age employment rate is close to an all-time high. This is simply not consistent with large-scale AI disruption to the labour market

Was looking for buildings inspired by Escher and came across this Chongqing bookstore.

New pod coming youtu.be/BUVjaodXRc8?si…

It now takes longer to read a paper than write a paper. Solve for equilibrium.

I love America

Lynne Kiesling of @knowledgeprob nails it. @tylercowen thinks marginalist logic is fading into an AI background. But her marginalist argument suggests just the opposite. 🔥🔥🔥

Please prepare yourself for months of shameless self-promotion, mute me on socials, feel free to avoid me in public etc, because my next book — A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World — is now officially available for pre-orders.

@josh_wayne1984 If you do, the AI will start reprogramming your DNA.

@tylercowen I want to click on that but I am to scared.

And how resilient are you? #230548828-4153906252" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mercatus.org/resilient-soci…

this is a beautiful shot of the launch.

If you're under 53 years old, you have never once been alive while a human was farther than 250 miles from Earth. Tonight, four astronauts are heading 252,000 miles out. That's a thousand times farther than any person has gone in your lifetime. The 250-mile ceiling is where the International Space Station floats. Every astronaut since December 1972 has been stuck in that zone. Spacewalks, science experiments, cool photos from orbit, sure. But nobody left the neighborhood. The last crew to go farther was Apollo 17. December 1972. Nixon was president. The internet didn't exist. Cell phones were 11 years away. The youngest member of that crew is now 90 years old. The farthest any human has ever been from Earth is 248,655 miles. The Apollo 13 crew set that number in 1970, and they didn't mean to. Their oxygen tank blew up, and the emergency route home took them farther out than anyone before or since. Tonight's crew will break that record on purpose. And the crew itself. Victor Glover becomes the first Black astronaut to leave Earth's neighborhood. Christina Koch becomes the first woman. Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian fighter pilot, becomes the first non-American to do so. When they come home, they'll slam into the atmosphere at 25,000 mph, faster than any human has ever traveled. The Moon's south pole has ice. Water ice, sitting in craters so deep that sunlight hasn't hit them in billions of years. A 2024 NASA study found way more of it than anyone expected. You can split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which gives you rocket fuel, breathable air, and drinking water, all made on the Moon instead of hauled up from Earth. George Sowers at Colorado School of Mines calculated that Moon-made fuel could shave $12 billion off a single trip to Mars. The Moon is a gas station on the road to Mars. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced last week a $20 billion plan to build a permanent base at the South Pole over the next seven years, with landings every six months. China is developing its own lunar lander and spacesuit, aiming for a crewed landing by 2030. The Artemis program has burned through $93 billion so far, and the first actual surface landing is penciled in for 2028. There's a real question of who gets there first this time around. Harrison Schmitt walked on the Moon in December 1972 as part of Apollo 17. He's 90. Asked about it this week, he sounded pretty relaxed. "Mars is attainable," he said. "We're humans. That's what we've always done."