Month: March 2019

First links post in a while because I have some housekeeping. After trying to have comments just on reddit, I’ve realized it makes way more sense to just have comments right below the articles again. I really don’t like the WordPress default comment system so I’ve opted instead for Disqus. These have been implemented for a while, but I wanted to bring your attention to them.

I’ve also finally updated the site to default to https. Kind of an embarrassment for a site promoting encryption to not have https defaulted, but this blog is a volunteer project done for personal interest (and personal expense!).

I’ve removed Greg Mankiw’s blog from the sidebar because I realized I wasn’t reading it much anymore and it doesn’t talk about too much interesting econ stuff very often. I also removed Jeffrey Tucker’s blog beautiful anarchy, because I don’t think he posts there anymore now that he’s running aier.org.

I’ve added gwern.net because this past year I’ve realized how much more I’ve been going to his site even though I’ve known about it for a long time. Gwern is a rationalist independent researcher. He doesn’t really write blogs so much as essays on a topic. I recommend his site wholeheartedly. Seriously, his site is the first link on this post for a reason. If you are overwhelmed by the amount of content, see if anything in his “Most Popular” or “Notable” categories jump out at you and start there. I personally found “Embryo Selection For Intelligence” to be quite engrossing.

Slate Star Codex has had some good posts about the importance of OpenAI’s GPT-2. First some background on GPT-2. Next, GPT-2 seems to have learned things haphazardly, in almost a human-like way, to attain its goals of creating good responses to prompts. It connects things in a stream of consciousness reminiscent of a child’s thoughts. As Scott says, simply pattern matching at a high level is literally what humans do.

Also on AI, I found an amazing 2018 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison by LessWrong user Larks. It’s a very impressive in depth look at groups concerned about the AI alignment problem.

From Vox: “The case that AI threatens humanity, explained in 500 words”.

Noah Smith writes A Proposal for an Alternative Green New Deal. It makes vastly more sense than the vague, progressive wishlist discussed by current Democratic members of Congress. However, even Smith’s suggestions seem pretty poorly thought out to me; he endorses massive subsidies to green technology, on the order of $30 billion a year, without addressing how the state will know where to invest the money. As I recall, the government isn’t a great central planner. He also just kind of tosses in there universal health insurance, apparently paid for by the government, which sounds like Medicare for all. That seems to both massively politically complicate anything actually trying to fix climate change, and also destroy the entire federal budget, which I think is a national security problem.

Related, on a more nuanced note, John Cochrane discusses a letter signed by many economists endorsing a carbon tax, which seems much more precise and useful to people concerned about climate change. To make it politically palatable, they suggest making a carbon dividend paid to all taxpayers out of this tax. Noah Smith also endorsed this approach as just one piece of his Green New Deal. On brand, The Economist endorses carbon taxes as well.

Bitcoin Hivemind developer Paul Sztorc writes about Bitcoin’s future security budget. It’s a really good technical discussion of how Bitcoin can be funded in the future, and why we need sidechains to help pay for the cost of keeping Bitcoin secure.

Bruce Schneier writes about the need for Public Interest Cybersecurity, envisioning it as a parallel to public interest legal work. It’s an interesting take, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, he’s right that lawmakers know little about the technologies they are supposed to regulated, but that’s also true of literally every industry. Sure it would be great if we had more things like the EFF, but I’m have to ask 80,000 Hours if they thought people going into charity work should work for the EFF or AI Alignment research or other existential risk. I’m also not sure I agree that there aren’t enough incentives to invent new security protocols. Google is taking security very seriously on their own, but so are tons of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency developers who are constantly seeking ways to make their projects more secure and do more creative things with crypto.

The U.S. trade deficit hit a 10 year high. Here is the actual Bloomberg article. This is silly political bickering, so I won’t spend much time on it, but it reflects just how the president fails to grasp very simple economics. The trade deficit doesn’t mean anything by itself, it’s just a measure of the goods traded, and it’s not even very good at that (goods designed here but manufactured in another country see their whole value “subtracted” in the trade deficit despite American labor inputs). The drivers of the trade deficit are things like relative values of currencies and national savings rates, not the levels of tariffs. Meanwhile, Trump’s tax cuts have spurred U.S. growth while the rest of the world has been sluggish, leading to higher trade deficits because Americans are relatively more wealthy. This flurry of economic activity prompted the Fed to raise rates to stave off inflation, which also drives up the trade deficit, and so Trump has taken the horrible tact of trying to publicly attack the Fed to lower rates, which is terrible for any sort of responsible Fed policy. The whole thing is a ridiculous mess which could have been avoided if Trump had any semblance of economic knowledge.

The Fifth Column podcast is a highly entertaining libertarian politics podcast. Episode 132 is a little different as Michael Moynihan takes the opportunity to interview Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-wing think tank, on the Maduro government in Venezuela. I have a lot of thoughts on this interview, but my foremost is whether Weisbrot counts as an actual representative voice of the Left. I think one of the worst things social media does is to hold up the most controversial person on one side because they generate the most clicks and buzz and force both sides to jump in and flame each other. In an hour long interview, Weisbrot takes, as far as I can tell, no opportunity to criticize the Maduro regime, nor offers any way in which they could have improved their policies. He accepts and touts statistics that support his view, and dismisses, minimizes, or ignores stats that counter him–even if they are all from the same source! Even though he’s a big deal at a left-wing think tank, I have to point out that most left-leaning academics don’t need to be in think tanks because most university politics skew left. This might explain how someone with this level of willful ignoranceg could hold such a key position. I think the interview is worth listening to if you would like to see the extent of what humans can do to put up mental barriers to seeing their own logical inconsistencies and motivated reasoning. Nonetheless, I feel bad about linking to this interview as I think it unfairly represents actual socialists who would like to nationalize all industries and seize the means of production.