“We must avoid the schoolteacher attitude to politics and business, marking the work of politicians and businessmen as if it were a test of intellectual ability and singling out the best and worst students. Instead, we must consider institutions. Do we have those institutions which help filter out incompetence and bias, or which are resilient to error? The answer, for now, is: no.” #ChrisDillow https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2023/04/when-clever-people-do-stupid-things.html #ViaRSS
Lots of useful economic history in this @theprospect piece by #MegJacobs https://prospect.org/economy/2023-04-13-forgotten-left-economics-tradition/ ht @chrishenjum #mastecon
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @SteveRoth @blair_fix the claim isn’t that economists are stupid. it’s that the forms of (necessary) simplification dominant in economics are shaped by the discipline’s incentives, in order to become the politically dominant, highest prestige form of “social science” discourse, it was incentivized to choose simplifications that flatter the wealthy and powerful. i think that claim accurate, although now (finally) there is some meaningful backlash in the discipline. 1/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @SteveRoth @blair_fix an analogy to climate science would be the deniers who claim global warming research is motivated by the grants you can get for climate alarm. but that’s a much less persuasive story. given that actual incumbent capital is much more likely to be harmed rather than helped by climate interventions, what would motivate plutocratic purchase of climate alarmism, rather than denialism? 2/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @SteveRoth @blair_fix we know of lots of incumbent interests that do work to purchase denialist research, and “green” do-gooders are economically tiny by comparison. You have to head towards Davos-Great-Reset conspiracizing to make this kind of claim work for climate. For economics, it’s very straightforward. 3/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @SteveRoth @blair_fix The discipline bought its way to the top of the prestige and policy-discourse hierarchy by offering an intellectual framework that prestige-setters were willing to endorse, because it legitimates the hierarchy whose apex they occupy. /fin
@SteveRoth this analysis by @blair_fix is compelling in conventional terms, but a bit more complicated if holding gains are computed as income, per your work, given the effect of interest rates on term asset prices.
was ZIRP a gift to capital (bc asset price appreciation) or a win for workers (bc factor income shares)? https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/04/16/how-interest-rates-redistribute-income/
playing with generative models feels like psychoanalysis: free associate to *this*, let’s see where you go!
but it’s hard to know if you are “psychoanalyzing” society, the training set, or idiosyncrasies in the way the model interprets the training set. ymmv!
What would it look like to separate payments and deposits from the risk lending side of banking?
@SteveRoth thinks it through. https://open.substack.com/pub/wealtheconomics/p/perfectly-safe-deposits-and-robust
today in government in the sunshine… https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/os-ne-education-public-records-cost-20230413-6e45hkjnvnfkto2nioj3wgemyi-story.html
“Decades of assuming that govt actors don’t know enough to intervene in the marketplace have created a self-fulfilling prophecy in which govt actors actually don’t know, because they have never done industrial policy, have never been taught to do industrial policy, and lack the appropriate institutions and information to do it well, even if they abstractly knew how. Parts of the govt that used to be directly engaged with economic planning have withered away” @henryfarrell https://crookedtimber.org/2023/04/13/industrial-policy-and-the-new-knowledge-problem/
ron desantis just made himself unelectable in any national race. probably even in florida next time around.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @markhughes really? the reveal isn’t that we spy on allies. it’s the specifics. it won’t help Sisi’s counterintelligence, or put US sympathetic persons at risk, to know exactly what has been eavesdropped? it won’t harm our intelligence broadly if pessimistic assessments of a battlefield situation have to be treated as public, so become as impossible to make in private as they are in public (reasonably, since public pronouncements can self-fulfill).
I seek to follow high ethical standards, so there is no reason that any law should apply to me. https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/3948631-the-supreme-court-has-no-code-of-conduct-its-starting-to-show/
@failedLyndonLaRouchite @markhughes i think it very much the case that information is way overclassified for bullshit CYA and office politics reasons. it’s also the case that some information are correctly classified. this leaker who was trying to impress his gamer friends waa not leaking inter-office embarrassments. he was leaking revealing details about surveillance of very “hot” ongoing crises that quite properly were classified.
think of the possibilities for honeytraps made from kindness rather than lust or avarice.
place a politically inconvenient person in a situation where a cooperating undocumented migrant needs help. have the migrant in some offhand way reveal their status. if the kindness does not immediately desist, you’ve made yourself a felon.
for a political coalition built around unkindness as retribution for perceived grievance, this kind of trap may be usefully selective.
how on earth would a 21 year old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard have access to all this shit? isn’t access to classified information compartamentalized, even among people with security clearances that would permit them, if they had a good reason, to see it? you’d think the US security state would have learned a little from Manning and Snowden? maybe they need to learn from firms like Apple about how to restrict information flows by default?
You’ve got to love the implications for liberty of a decision that says any doctors that might be called to treat a person who takes a risk that doesn’t work out are “harmed” and have standing to sue to prevent the risk-taking.
Doctors Against Skiing could put an end to the lax permitting process that allows such a dangerous sport to exist.
Shouldn’t ER doctors have standing then to sue gun manufacturers?
an end of history is like a permanently high plateau.
really at the heart of civil society in the modern South is the service organization Enbies of the Confederacy.
The amazing @jeffspross is here!
"Conservatives like to troll liberals by asking 'What is a woman?' In the next few election cycles, they’re going to find out."
It is astonishing to me that the writer of this piece is #RichardHanania. https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-women-rebel-against-pro-life
it’s clearly very expensive to train gpt-4-ish models. but how expensive is it to run them? if openai permitted, what kind of hardware would you need to run a local gpt-4?