SantiG

“There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Also one of the least politically diverse departments and at the bottom of hours spent studying of any major. So many of the problems in K-PhD originate in Ed schools including some of the worst speech policing policies. I believe Ed schools need to be completely rethought

The minimum wage literature has completely changed in the 2020s. Almost all evidence point to the econ 101 model being correct.

Claude knows! —> The Lump of Labor Fallacy and Why AGI Unemployment Panic Is Economically Illiterate Let me lay this out with full rigor, because this argument deserves to be prosecuted completely rather than waved away with a sound bite. I. What the Lump of Labor Fallacy Actually Is The lump of labor fallacy is the assumption that there exists a fixed, finite quantity of work in an economy — a lump — such that if a machine (or an immigrant, or a woman entering the workforce) does some of it, there is necessarily less left for human workers to do. It treats employment as a zero-sum pie. The fallacy was named and formalized in the early 20th century but the error it describes is far older. It animated the Luddite riots of 1811–1816, where English textile workers destroyed power looms convinced that the machines would steal their jobs permanently. It drove opposition to the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, the mechanical reaper, the steam engine, the telegraph, the railroad, the automobile assembly line, the personal computer, and every other major labor-displacing technology in the history of industrial civilization. Every single time, the catastrophists were wrong. Not partially wrong. Structurally, fundamentally, categorically wrong — because they misunderstood the nature of economic production itself. The reason the fixed-pie assumption fails is this: demand is not fixed. Work generates income. Income generates demand for goods and services. Demand for goods and services generates new categories of work. This is an engine, not a reservoir. When you drain some of the reservoir with a machine, the engine speeds up and refills it — and often refills it past its previous level. II. The Classical Economic Mechanism That Destroys the Fallacy To understand why the lump-of-labor assumption is wrong about AGI, you need to understand the precise mechanism by which technological unemployment resolves itself. There are four distinct channels, all operating simultaneously: Channel 1: The Productivity-Demand Feedback Loop (Say’s Law, Modified) When a technology increases the productivity of labor or replaces labor entirely in a given task, it lowers the cost of producing whatever that task was part of. Lower production costs mean either: ∙Lower prices for consumers (real purchasing power rises), or ∙Higher profits for producers (which get reinvested, distributed as dividends, or spent as wages for other workers), or ∙Both. Either way, aggregate real income in the economy rises. That additional real income does not evaporate. It gets spent on something — including goods and services that didn’t previously exist or were previously too expensive to consume at scale. That spending creates demand. That demand creates jobs. This is not a theoretical conjecture. The average American in 1900 spent roughly 43% of their income on food. Today it’s around 10%. Agricultural mechanization didn’t produce a nation of starving unemployed farm laborers — it freed up 33% of household income to be spent on automobiles, television sets, air conditioning, healthcare, education, travel, smartphones, and streaming services, most of which didn’t exist as industries in 1900. The workers who left farms went to factories, then to offices, then to service industries, then to information industries. The economy didn’t run out of work. It metamorphosed.

Researchers put together an incredible workplace wellness program that provided thousands of workers with paid time off to receive biometric health screening, health risk assessments, smoking cessation help, stress management, exercise, etc. What did this do for their health?🧵

The paper I’ve been most obsessed with lately is finally out: nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news…! Check out this beautiful plot: it shows how much LLMs distort human writing when making edits, compared to how humans would revise the same content. We take a dataset of human-written essays from 2021, before the release of ChatGPT. We compare how people revise draft v1 -> v2 given expert feedback, with how an LLM revises the same v1 given the same feedback. This enables a counterfactual comparison: how much does the LLM alter the essay compared to what the human was originally intending to write? We find LLMs consistently induce massive distortions, even changing the actual meaning and conclusions argued for.

Many conservatives are remembering how Paul Ehrlich was wrong about all his enviro-pessimism and supposed constraints on growth, but all those views are the same concerns that fuel the anti-immigrant movement. Zero sum. Fixed pie. Misanthropy. People as "takers," not makers.

Important article just out using LLM’s to analyze the political valence of social science abstracts over 60+ years. Some key results: - Social science does, indeed, exhibit leftward slant. - This slant has increased substantially over the past several decades. - It is strongest in less policy-adjacent fields and with respect to cultural rather than economic subject matter. Work like this is vital for conceptualizing how ideological skew in academia manifests and why it matters. It’s about the actual content of scholarship, not just the politics of professors when off the clock. Many and rapid citations are in order. link.springer.com/article/10.100…

I'm not sure that's entirely controversial ... but I'd also like to point out that this authority does not follow 1-to-1 with positions of granted power. You may have a manager "over" you on the org chart who has learned less authority from co-workers/etc ... but they still have technical "power" over you. I'd also say that's one of the current big flaws in organizational structures ... they are not built around those who naturally gather authority, but around processes that sometimes completely ignore such things and appoint positions of power based on other criteria.

@Kpaxs most companies don't have a leadership problem, they have a permission problem. everyone's waiting for someone to say it's okay to fix the obvious.

@ryan_landay @Kpaxs That person responsible in the story either doesnt care or has the wrong incentive structure such he is worse of fixing, and thus doesnt do it.

@Kpaxs That’s not the root reason why the organizational dysfunction exists in this example. Logically someone at the company is paying to rent the office and that person is either responsible for the fridge or knows who is. So why can’t anyone in this story find that person?

Here a controversial take: most of the authority that exists in any organization was never formally granted to anyone. It was assumed, exercised, and then retroactively legitimized by the fact that it worked.

Los pedagogos son básicamente gente que no sabe de tu materia, pero que cree que sabe cómo debes enseñarla, y te lo explica en unas clases aburridísimas que demuestran que en realidad son ellos quienes no saben enseñar. Ansío el día en que la pedagogía se considere seudociencia.

“This is very urgent business ladies and gentlemen, I beseech you. Resist it while you still can, and before the right to complain is taken away from you, which will be the next thing.” Many know this famous Christopher Hitchens clip but few know the full argument he is making. I will break it down here. 🧵

La #dolarización no lo resuelve todo, nunca se la vendió así. Esta semana cumplió 26 años dolarizado #Ecuador y pocos saben que el 7 de enero se publicó en los principales diarios este manifiesto firmado por reconocidos economistas que la promovían. Ellos señalaron precisamente eso, que no era una panacea, y recomendaban otras reformas estructurales que todavía están pendientes 26 años después.

this is a catastrophe. StackOverflow provided data to LLMs, LLMs replaced StackOverflow, and now no new Q&A hub exists to provide fresh data. it’s a self-undermining causal loop, like mold growing on food, consuming it, and dying once the food is gone.

One day we will expose the corruption of the New York Times with the Venezuelan Narco-Socialist regime and I am sure it will be Walter Duranty and the USSR-level.

This is why despite the Venezuela thing being obviously illegal, I don't mind it.

it’s so upsetting to see the New York Times lie and say Venezuela has not been under tyranny for over 2 decades… Im 31 and my entire childhood was filled with my family and our friends being persecuted/ jailed/ exiled. We had to get bodyguards because regime groups kept calling my house saying they were gonna kill my mom’s daughter if she didn’t stop reporting on Chavez’ establishing of a dictatorship by handing the country to Cuba. My mom then had to go into hiding for a month after they accused her of KILLING THE ATTORNEY GENERAL with not a drop of evidence . That was after she was put through a MILITARY TRIAL. She had to flee on a boat IN 2005. then they also accused my grandpa, a newspaper owner, of terrorism and he was arrested BY INTERPOL. A few years before that they had TORTURED AND KILLED OUR BODYGUARD GERMAN. you CANNOT arrive at Venezuela’s story on January 3, 2026. Of course, the article’s author Francisco Rodriguez was enjoying chavismo as a major ally and advisor in congress when my family and I were living the horror described. He was already defending chavismo when we were burying German. But the New York Times doesn’t say that.

Francisco Rodríguez and the @nytimes say we venezuelans are lying when we say Venezuela has been under authoritarianism for 25 years … well, 20 years ago I had to escape cause Chavez accused my mom of terrorism for doing journalism. By that time he had already put her through a MILITARY TRIAL. By that point he had already killed dissidents and had political prisoners. Many of us know Chavez early tyranny. What the New York Times doesn’t tell you is the author worked with Chavez. We don’t forget.

Central bank independence is not a panacea. The ECB is actually a great example of how a nominally independent central bank with a narrow mandate can easily be pushed into helping out the governments that are in dire fiscal straits and that need help funding their debt. If you want to protect your local central banker from government interference, get your government to run surpluses.