Here are some scattered comments about the 2024 elections.
I was glad to have Manifold Markets and Election Betting Odds to watch the results. I want numbers, not encumbered by the storytellers and emotions of the news media. I also watched the odds that Nate Silver tried to update, but that was a total flop.
I see many weak hints that the polarization of the US has subsided compared to 2020.
Continue ReadingI’ve seen plenty of people recently ranting about how presidential candidate X is obviously terrible because of their position on Y. It’s often the case that if I were voting solely on Y, I’d agree that candidate X is terrible.
I see patterns suggesting that those people tend to choose X first, and then choose one or more Y’s that fit an opponent of X.
I want to push back on these patterns, and explain why I expect to be confused as to how scared I should be by the upcoming election results, by focusing on issues based on how important I’d think they were if I didn’t know who would be running.
The most important issues are at least an order of magnitude more important than typical issues, so I ought to base my vote on the most important issues if at all possible.
Continue ReadingNearly a book review: Situational Awareness, by Leopold Aschenbrenner.
“Situational Awareness” offers an insightful analysis of our proximity to a critical threshold in AI capabilities. His background in machine learning and economics lends credibility to his predictions.
The paper left me with a rather different set of confusions than I started with.
His extrapolation of recent trends culminates in the onset of an intelligence explosion:
Book review: Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, by Paul Scharre.
Four Battlegrounds is often a thoughtful, competently written book on an important topic. It is likely the least pleasant, and most frustrating, book fitting that description that I have ever read.
The title’s battlegrounds refer to data, compute, talent, and institutions. Those seem like important resources that will influence military outcomes. But it seems odd to label them as battlegrounds. Wouldn’t resources be a better description?
Scharre knows enough about the US military that I didn’t detect flaws in his expertise there. He has learned enough about AI to avoid embarrassing mistakes. I.e. he managed to avoid claims that have been falsified by an AI during the time it took to publish the book.
Scharre has clear political biases. E.g.:
Conservative politicians have claimed for years – without evidence – that US tech firms have an anti-conservative bias.
(Reminder: The Phrase “No Evidence” Is A Red Flag For Bad Science Communication.) But he keeps those biases separate enough from his military analysis that I don’t find those biases to be a reason for not reading the book.
Continue ReadingThis week we saw two interesting bank collapses: Silvergate Capital Corporation, and SVB Financial Group.
This is a reminder that diversification is important.
The most basic problem in both cases is that they got money from a rather undiverse set of depositors, who experienced unusually large fluctuations in their deposits and withdrawals. They also made overly large bets on the safety of government bonds.
Continue ReadingIn 1986, Drexler predicted (in Engines of Creation) that we’d have molecular assemblers in 30 years. They would roughly act as fast, atomically precise 3-d printers. That was the standard meaning of nanotech for the next decade, until more mainstream authorities co-opted the term.
What went wrong with that forecast?
In my review of Where Is My Flying Car? I wrote:
Josh describes the mainstream reaction to nanotech fairly well, but that’s not the whole story. Why didn’t the military fund nanotech? Nanotech would likely exist today if we had credible fears of Al Qaeda researching it in 2001.
I recently changed my mind about that last sentence, partly because of what I recently read about the Manhattan Project, and partly due to the world’s response to COVID.
Continue ReadingThe ESG investing movement (environmental, social, and corporate governance) is becoming potentially important, potentially good, and potentially corrupt.
I’ll walk through some of the sources of influence on it.
Continue ReadingBook review: The Resilient Society, by Markus Brunnermeier.
This is a collection of loosely related chapters on current political topics such as pandemic response and macroeconomics. I haven’t read the whole book. But since each chapter is designed to stand alone, I feel comfortable reviewing a subset of the book.
They’re more readable than the comparable Wikipedia pages, but less rigorous.
Continue ReadingBook review: Shut Out: How a Housing Shortage Caused the Great Recession and Crippled Our Economy, by Kevin Erdmann.
Why did the US have an unusually bad recession in 2008, followed by years of disappointing growth?
Many influential people attribute it to the 2004-2006 housing bubble, and the ensuing subprime mortgage crisis, with an implication that people bought too many houses. Erdmann says: no, the main problems were due to obstacles which prevented the building and buying of houses.
He mainly argues against two competing narratives that are popular among economists:
Book review: The Cult of Smart, by Fredrik deBoer.
The Cult of Smart is a sporadically thoughtful book about education politics, sometimes rising above tribal politics, and sometimes repeating tired old tribal rants.
Continue Reading