Simon D. Halliday

The reason AI still can't write well is that it writes what IT wants to say, not what YOU want to say. Writing is thinking. I expect this to be fixable, but not via typical "scale to AGI" approaches.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra: "If you take a statin for 5 years after a heart attack... in that 5 year period, how much would you think or hope it would add to your life expectancy?" Joe Rogan: "25%? 30%?" Malhotra: "Just over 4 days."

PhD students interested in the history of thought: you must apply to Duke's HOPE summer program. I went twice as a grad student! You can't be a scholar without knowing the history and historiography of your field, and this is the best place to get the basics.

It is embarrassing that a U Chicago Professor interviewee would imply that economics, prior to his trenchant insight, has ignored that marginal utility is concave, with no pushback save for a tweet after it was noted. It is embarrassing that a U Chicago Professor interviewee would make asinine cheap Mamdani propaganda comments about “caviar” with no pushback. Say “yachts” next time fool. It’s embarrassing that U Chicago has such a “center.” They couldn’t handle a real Milton Friedman center — pathetically caving to, uh, their English department. They destroyed the Stigler Center making it mostly into something he would’ve hated. But a center dedicated to redistribution, yep, that’s totally cool. I love Chicago, but today I’m embarrassed for it.

This is a blatant straw-man mischaracterization of Economics. From Nobelist Mirrlees (1971) who derived an optimal top marginal tax rate of zero to Saez (2002) who suggests much higher rates, public finance economists use Social Welfare Functions (SWFs): a formalization that goes back to Bergson in the 1930s but that has deep roots in Bentham’s 19th century utilitarian political economy. My personal view is that social welfare functions combined with diminishing marginal utility of consumption practically bake in tons of optimal redistribution without considering distortions. We can debate that. But please: the idea that public finance doesn’t handle the possibility that caviar for the rich might have less social benefit than bread for the poor is just arguing with a cartoon version of economics.

Trump administration saying, literally, that they put zero value on human life. If your kid breathes in air pollution from a power plant or industrial source, EPA is saying that they care only insofar as cleaning up that pollution would cost the emitter something; they explicitly do not care about your kid.