Vankous

@JeremiahDJohns @MariGO2thepolls MIT OpenCourseWare /j

@MariGO2thepolls it's a real problem that like 95% of political youtube is utter trash (and 99% of what passes for econ youtube, if there's a single good and popular econ channel on that site please let me know)

I hate philosophy tube so much

@tenobrus why is the comparative advantage argument wrong?

i don't begrudge sam for saying this, having people come after u and ur family in ur home is more than enough justification. but i think he's lying, and i think it's quite bad that instead of engaging and grappling with these policy issues openai is choosing to ignore and mislead. we as a country need to be figuring out how the fuck to handle this, what society should or could look like, and burying our heads in the sand is not going to help. it makes it much harder to coordinate political will when one of the AI leaders makes placating statements like this, "everything will shake out fine, weird transition but things will be alright". the only way humans have long-term meaningful contributions to the economy is if we hit hard walls on the generality or cost of artificial intelligence. you do not get humans directing agents towards goals if the models are better than the humans at very human shaped tasks like "managing others to achieve a goal" and "determining which goals to pursue". sure, if we have aligned models perhaps those goals are implicitly or explicitly determined by human desires, but that doesn't mean we have any real day to day or week to week or month to month input on how to get there. "comparative advantage" cmon man. think about it. that only actually makes sense in a world we're hard limited on compute. a country's population grows very slowly, it has meaningful opportunity cost on the labor it does. if it turns out we can really only support five Mythos 9 instances running globally then sure, maybe they'll spend their time directing humans. but realistically why would you pay a human for a task rather than just another model instance, maybe weaker maybe not? why would you be interested in outputs that come 100x slower, that require massively more double checking and verification, that can't be coordinated with and steered except over incredibly bandwidth inefficient channels? nah just spawn another instance!! and if the reason we're doing this is truly that every GPU is maxxed out running full tilt... then the *work* humans are going to be doing isn't then can't "directing agent swarms", it can't be "creative and high value intellectual labor utilizing the full value of AI". the models have the advantage there, so we're spending our time as exogenous bio-compute, mechanical turks for the machines, shifting around uninterpretable bits succession style. hardly a vision of the future we want. maybe the answer is physical or relational. we can do things in the real world that machines can't, we have meaning to other humans that they don't. granting that for a moment, ignoring the looming shadow of increasingly functional humanoid robotics and superstimulus companions, what does that economy actually *look like*? humans as factory workers and nurses who are always looking down at their phone or listening in their earpiece for the next instruction from chatgpt 9.4-mini? artists?? a whole economy of artists?? humans don't seem to value art enough *now* for many to be able to make a living off it. it's very tough for me to see *who is paying* here! we relegate humans to exclusively low paid and low impact jobs, for which their value is exclusively to each other. meanwhile the models have discovered a cure for cancer. how exactly do the artists scrape enough together from their circular human-value economy to afford the cancer cure? if the machines are just *giving* us the cancer cure, then we're *not* buying it, and clearly our jobs and economic intuitions are in fact irrelevant! we're working under a totally different system. and we have yet to figure out what that system *is* or how to get there.

@DoctorVive Is there like a specific paper of his that's an example for the 3C optimal result and ignores some major climate risks?

@vankous Who, Nordhaus? Lots of places. I discuss them all in Chapter 2 of this:

William Nordhaus, a Nobel winner who teaches at Yale, doesn’t count most climate risks so he can say 3C of global heating is economically optimal. Everyone knows that he uses this funny accounting—and mostly they shrug. The authority of economists is a planetary catastrophe.

@s8mb @DavidCleminson6 Source: CSA Centre share.google/YQda61ogceqRur… Nursery age children seem less likely to be victims of sexual abuse so I don't think the vulnerability/ease of predation argument is correct. The gender diff seems correct and large though.

@DavidCleminson6 Men are much more likely to sexually abuse children than women, and children in nurseries are most vulnerable and easy to predate on.

I've said before that I don't think men should work in nurseries, and nurseries should have the right to not employ them. In fact, not only is it illegal for nurseries to not hire men, the government is running a PR campaign to encourage them to apply! gov.uk/government/new…

@paulnovosad @JesusFerna7026 @BasilHalperin @ben_golub Related REPEC paper ranking ideas.repec.org/top/top.item.r… (recursive citation count should catch whether the influence lasted at all even indirectly)

@JesusFerna7026 @BasilHalperin @ben_golub If a topical paper influences how people think about a transitory but important thing, who cares how it ages in terms of cites?

There should be a retrospective reputational penalty imposed on referees who vote no on a paper because the paper is too simple technically -- if that paper ends up being important. It's an almost definitional indicator of bad judgment. (Not tweeting about my own experiences!)

@andrewgwils Related ideas.repec.org/top/top.person…

We can create weighted google scholar profiles. Like weighted CGPA. Who wants to join me in this startup? Seed round at minimum 1B.

@captgouda24 I wish there was a way to identify this. Maybe data on residence of dual nationality individuals or couples?

However! That does not actually identify which is a better place to live, on average, only the marginal returns for movers. Roy model and self-selection type deal

@NewLeftEViews @Jackbmeyer I thought the steelman of that point was that there's not enough independent variation along different types/attributes of institutions to disentangle their individual effects on the outcome

@Jackbmeyer What irked me was not just the conflation of "talking about institutions" with A&R but the notion that "any story that distinguishes between types of institutions is unsupported by the data – because the data simply doesn’t separate types of institutions." Where to begin?

Good response by Jack: just because something presents an empirical puzzle and ineradicable endogeneity doesn’t mean you can dismiss it as ‘tautological’. It’s a failure to understand merit of the political economy approach (and frankly a failure to understand the concept of tautology).

@mean_field_zane And Nietzsche wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer

You see, it’s over. I have used this incentive-compatible contract to get you to reveal yourself as the low type, whilst signalling with my offer that I am the high type.

@rohitshinde121 @captgouda24 @EigenGender It takes me more than 2 weeks to properly read a nonfiction book. Similarly it's already hard to learn via structured material like textbooks, taking all of one person's writing/related writing and converting it into flashcards and learnable material is even harder

@captgouda24 @EigenGender Why do you think it is hard? Apart from the obvious thing of knowing about a topic in that much detail. I think there are great returns to the Dwarkesh style if you apply it to literally anything else. Dwarkesh can't really cover much on his own. He himself is a bottleneck.

it’s kinda wild that after 3 years literally no one else has attempted to duplicate this

@phenoatypical Reminded of this science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… Though their desirability measure is just Pagerank lol

here is a dating/sex post!!! I think some men are running Ponzi schemes on the sexual marketplace open.substack.com/pub/phenoatypi…

@worst_account @VVBellerose If wage theft ensures people who'd otherwise be unemployed are employed, at the cost of lower wages for the employed isn't that in most cases beneficial to the least powerful overall? The unemployed are worse off than low income employees

@VVBellerose And the tweet following that one is to say that Hodgskin is right that the utilitarian-positivist version of liberalism trends towards power apologia. x.com/i/status/20474…

The theft effects are pretty clear

@EigenGender @captgouda24 there are obvious exceptions to this. Why do you think this isn't another exception? (I think what you mean is breaking unilaterally breaking laws that reasonable people agree are good is bad even if they produce negative welfare)

@captgouda24 breaking the law is bad even if those laws provide negative welfare

I will defend wage theft. It is the evasion of government regulations. On the margin, it prevents disemployment due to minimum wage laws. At the very least, its welfare effect is unclear.

@davidshor @laderafrutal @anmhouston Reminded of #NarSenBurConSceAboRea" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">plato.stanford.edu/entries/conser…

@laderafrutal @anmhouston I feel like it's hard because obviously 99% of people can't reason through these things. But I feel like there's a whole community of earnest nerds on the left who argue about STAR vs RCV vs PR or who have opinions on median-mean and basically zero Republicans?

Why are educated Republicans so much dumber/less informed on gerrymandering? Probably tens of thousands of Dems can reason correctly on questions like "Do majority-minority seats make it easier or harder for Dems to take the House?" On the GOP side, maybe a couple hundred?

@trophyjoey @hecubian_devil @Aurora48618 Huh, I find this kinda odd. Also bi, and I feel like men and women are hot in similar ways. Or at least can be hot in a common way

@hecubian_devil @Aurora48618 I’m bi and not into trans people. For me personally, when I’m interested in women, it’s for their feminine features, for the lack of a better term and for men, it’s for their masculine features. Im a Hillary/biden/kamala voter so im not trying to come at this with any disrespect.

I have no problem with lesbians who aren’t into trans women. People have preferences; it’s fine, not necessarily indicative of a political stance that’s anti-trans in any way. Live and let live. But bisexuals who don’t like trans people…something’s going on there

@DavidAstinWalsh reminded of this passage from the Birth of Biopolitics 1000littlehammers.wordpress.com/wp-content/upl…

Honestly the next direction that the Cedric Robinson/racial capitalism discourse needs to go is about how academic Marxists, in particular, treat the "classics" as essentially sacred texts that require a biblical level of exegesis...

@JohnRuf6 @jack_whitcomb_ @mean_field_zane relevant data from the UK ifs.org.uk/sites/default/…

@jack_whitcomb_ @mean_field_zane For the median econ PhD student (not top 10!) the private sector upsides make a standard professional salary. You can just take a standard professional salary for 6 years instead of taking 6 years of poor salary and get a professional salary instead.

as like a guy who comes home and like tinkers around with data stuff as a hobby like there's something to be said for a PhD in economics as "you get to do your hobby full-time for 6 years at atrocious pay and then get a pretty standard wage afterwards" very very appealing.

@arpitrage @JohnRuf6 otoh, is how fast you finish university really the bottleneck? eg if you shifted to this system wouldn't expect it to balance out from more congestion for entry level jobs? (ie is the fact that these people are doing a degree the bottleneck to starting life ?)

@arpitrage @JohnRuf6 The UK already has 3 year degrees with summer holidays, just w/ specialisation to 3-4 subjects for last 2 years of school. And a year of school can in principle be shaved off in addition to that, but that's indexing on developing country private school edu

I mean 3 years is clearly feasible even at current standards. Just take a full battery of classes each summer. The problem is that using summer for internships is a good idea at that stage in your life.