J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 223

Information technology does not fit into a market economy...

Information technology does not fit into a market economy very well. Organizations that focus on profit to the exclusion of all other goals have had a hard time staying dominant in technology industries. Perhaps Google has decided that it is time to focus on profit rather than on leading humanity into the information age: Graydon Saunders: I'm Going to Miss Google: "I mean, it'll be awhile, but they've gone and decided to die.... Rumour���highly plausible rumour���has it that the business decision to kill the Inbox app, rather than the Gmail app, comes down to 'Inbox makes it too easy to dodge promo emails'. Google's original business model was 'let's get more people using the Internet'.�� That worked, in large part because there was a vast amount of unrealized utility available.�� Now, though, it's turning into ';et's glue eyeballs to ads'.��Which, well. You can have success, or you can have control.��Both is not an option. This is Google deciding that it MUST have control. That'll kill ya...

#noted

Comment of the Day: It's "piss in your ear", Ronald: Rona...

Comment of the Day: It's "piss in your ear", Ronald: Ronald Brakels:On Newcomb's Problem, Self-Locating Belief, and the Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine: "I would one-box simply to avoid having having the Jack of Spades squirt cider in my ear...

#noted

Matt Bruenig: What Do Modern Monetary Theorists Think Abo...

Matt Bruenig: What Do Modern Monetary Theorists Think About Inflation?: "Advocates of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) say that we should understand all government spending as being funded by seignorage.... This then allows them to say things like 'taxes don���t fund spending' and other bumper-sticker type slogans that mostly just confuse people.... This seems like a tedious rhetorical exercise.... Whether taxes are needed to 'fund spending' or 'offset the inflation caused by seignorage' is in the eye of the beholder, but either way of saying it still concedes that taxes are necessary...

#noted

Scott Aaronson: Quantum Computing, Capabilities and Limit...

Scott Aaronson: Quantum Computing, Capabilities and Limits: An Interview with Scott Aaronson: "1,000 qubits... an amplitude... [for] every possible setting of all 1,000 bits.... Quantum mechanics has been telling us since the 1920s... to keep track of the state... nature is somehow keeping track of this list of 2 to the 1000 power complex numbers, which is more numbers than can be written in the entire observable universe. But... when you make a measurement you don���t actually see these numbers, you just see a single probabilistic outcome... a random answer. If you just wanted a random answer, well you could have picked one yourself with a lot less trouble? So the entire hope for getting a speed advantage from a quantum computer is to exploit the way that these amplitudes work differently than probabilities. The main thing that amplitudes can do, that probabilities don���t do is that they can interfere with each other...

#noted

Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person

Weekend Reading*: Scott Alexander: Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person: "'Universal love', said the cactus person. 'Transcendent joy', said the big green bat. 'Right', I said. 'I���m absolutely in favor of both those things. But before we go any further, could you tell me the two prime factors of 1,522,605,027,922,533,360,535,618,378,132,637,429,718,068,114,961,380,688,657,908,494,580,122,96, 258,952,897,654,000,350,692,006,139?' 'Universal love', said the cactus person. 'Transcendent joy', said the big green bat. The sea was made of strontium; the beach was made of rye. Above my head, a watery sun shone in an oily sky. A thousand stars of sertraline whirled round quetiapine moons, and the sand sizzled sharp like cooking oil that hissed and sang and threatened to boil the octahedral dunes...

...���Okay,��� I said. ���Fine. Let me tell you where I���m coming from. I was reading Scott McGreal���s blog, which has some good articles about so-called DMT entities, and mentions how they seem so real that users of the drug insist they���ve made contact with actual superhuman beings and not just psychedelic hallucinations. You know, the usual Terence McKenna stuff. But in one of them he mentions a paper by Marko Rodriguez called "A Methodology For Studying Various Interpretations" of the N,N-dimethyltryptamine-Induced Alternate Reality, which suggested among other things that you could prove DMT entities were real by taking the drug and then asking the entities you meet to factor large numbers which you were sure you couldn���t factor yourself. So to that end, could you do me a big favor and tell me the factors of 1,522,605,027,922,533,360,535,618,378,132,637,429,718,068,114,961,380,688,657,908,494,580,122,963,258,952,897,654,000,350,692,006,139?

���Universal love,��� said the cactus person. ���Transcendent joy,��� said the big green bat. The sea turned hot and geysers shot up from the floor below. First one of wine, then one of brine, then one more yet of turpentine, and we three stared at the show. ���I was afraid you might say that. Is there anyone more, uh, verbal here whom I could talk to?���

���Universal love,��� said the cactus person. At the sound of that, the big green bat started rotating in place. On its other side was a bigger greener bat, with an ancient, wrinkled face. ���Not splitting numbers / but joining Mind,��� it said. "Not facts or factors or factories / but contact with the abstract attractor that brings you back to me / Not to seek / but to find���. ���I don���t follow,��� I said. ���Not to follow / but to jump forth into the deep / Not to grind or to bind or to seek only to find / but to accept / Not to be kept / but to wake from sleep���.

The bat continued to rotate, until the first side I had seen swung back into view.

���Okay,��� I said. ���I���m going to hazard a guess as to what you���re talking about, and you tell me if I���m right. You���re saying that, like, all my Western logocentric stuff about factoring numbers in order to find out the objective truth about this realm is missing the point, and I should be trying to do some kind of spiritual thing involving radical acceptance and enlightenment and such. Is that kind of on the mark?��� ���Universal love,��� said the cactus person. ���Transcendent joy,��� said the big green bat....

I vomited, hard, all over my bed. It happens every time I take DMT, sooner or later; I���ve got a weak stomach and I���m not sure the stuff I get is totally pure. I crawled just far enough out of bed to flip a light switch on, then collapsed back onto the soiled covers. The clock on the wall read 11:55, meaning I���d been out about an hour and a half. I briefly considered taking some more ayahuasca and heading right back there, but the chances of getting anything more out of the big green bat, let alone the cactus person, seemed small enough to fit in a thimble. I drifted off into a fitful sleep.

Behind the veil, across the infinite abyss, beyond the ice, beyond death, the dew rose from the soaked ground and coalesced into a great drop, which floated up into an oily sky and became a watery sun. The cactus person was counting on his spines.

���Hey,��� the cactus person finally said, ���just out of curiosity, was the answer 37,975,227,936,943,673,922,808,872,755,445,627,854,565,536,638,199 times 40,094,690,950,920,881,030, 683,735,292,761,468,389,214,899,724,061?���

���Yeah,��� said the big green bat. ���That���s what I got too.���

#weekendreading

Scott Alexander: Meaningful : "'I���m not claiming humans...

Scott Alexander: Meaningful : "'I���m not claiming humans really know what anything means', said the first angel. 'Just that it���s impressive you can get that far by manipulating a purely symbolic mental language made of sense-data-derived thought-forms with no connection to real at all'. 'I guess that is kind of impressive', said the second angel. 'For humans'...

#noted

Eric Loomis: Bush: "Let���s not forget that Bush Sr was p...

Eric Loomis: Bush: "Let���s not forget that Bush Sr was part and parcel of the move of the Republican Party to the right. His actions were not as extreme as that of his son or Trump, but they helped pave the way for what is today an undemocratic party flirting with fascism. I don���t find Bush a despicable or contemptuous figure, but there���s a lot unsavory aspects to the man and his policies that need to be remembered as so many liberals long for the Republican Party where Lee Atwater could racebait Bush into the White House...

#shouldread

Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (March 1, 2019)

Yes, the Fed's Target Is Now too High. Why Do You Ask? : The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's forecast that the first-quarter growth rate will be only 0.9% is now a semi-solid thing: you cannot take it to the bank, but you can borrow on it...

Note to Self: Neoliberal: The 2019 Neoliberal Shill Bracket: "The round of 64 polls will be published tomorrow and will remain up for 48 hours. Each round will have its own thread with all the polls in it. There will be a 24 hour cool off period between rounds for tasteful smack talk...

Jeanne Reames: Hephaistion Philalexandros: in Praise of That Guy behind the Throne

Wikipedia: Folie �� Deux

David Bandurski:

Federal Reserve Bank of New York: Nowcasting Report

Matt O'Brien: The Important Way the 2008 Crisis Was Worse than the Great Depression

Jacob Levy: The Defense of Liberty Can���t Do Without Identity Politics | Democracy for Republicans | Two Hundred Years of the Liberty of the Moderns | Why I Am Not a Moderate

Spencer Strub

Dylan Riley

Anne Case: Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Science: This 'what if we took this equation seriously?' factor... is... the spookiest thing.... Take the h in Max Planck's equation seriously, and you have the quantum principle���something that was not in Planck's brain when he wrote the equation down. Take seriously the symmetry in Maxwell's equations between the force generated when you move a magnet near a wire and the force and the force generated when you move a wire near a magnet, and you have Special Relativity���something that was not in Maxwell's brain when he wrote down the equation.Take Newton's gravitational force law's equivalence between inertial and gravitational mass seriously and you have General Relativity���something never in Newton's mind.
And take the mathematical pathology at r = 2M in the Schwarzchild metric for the space-timemetric around a point mass seriously, and you have event horizons���and black holes...

Sean Carroll (2009): Boltzmann's Universe: "I wanted to emphasize something Dennis says quite explicitly, but (from experience) I know that people tend to jump right past in their enthusiasm: 'Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however.' The point about Boltzmann���s Brains is not that they are a fascinating prediction of an exciting new picture of the multiverse. On the contrary, the point is that they constitute a reductio ad absurdum that is meant to show the silliness of a certain kind of cosmology...

Charlie Stross (2008): : The Fermi Paradox Revisited; Random Despatches from the Front Line

Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer (): _[Dialectic of Enlightenment
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1...

Dylan Riley: The Third Reich as Rogue Regime Adam Tooze���s "Wages of Destruction"

Olivier Blanchard: Public Debt: Fiscal and Welfare Costs in a Time of Low Interest Rates

Mark Koyama: A Nationalism Untethered to History: "The novelty of The Virtue of Nationalism is twofold. First, Hazony���s positive vision of a national state is based on the biblical account for the early Israelite kingdom.... Second... the nationalism Hazony defends is essentially an ethnic nationalism.... In the current political environment, these views should not be ignored.... A frank conversation about national loyalty, and especially the history of the nation state and its role in the advances of the modern world, are needed now more than ever. Unfortunately, The Virtue of Nationalism has very little to offer to such a conversation...

Equitable Growth's Heather Boushey schools our friend, smart young whippersnapper Noah Smith formerly of Stoneybrook and now of Bloomberg: "There is a lot of evidence from political scientists as to how loudly money talks in political democracies, and it is very well laid out in Elisabeth Jacobs's contribution to our After Piketty": Elisabeth Jacobs (1017): Everywhere and Nowhere: Politics in _Capital��in the Twenty-First Century...

On this question, these days I tend to go the full MMT: the bond market will tell us when it is time to worry about the deficit and the debt, and that time is not now: Jason Furman and Larry Summers: Why Washington Should Worry Less About the Deficit: "As policymakers set budgets in the coming years, a lot will depend on what interest rates do. Financial markets do not expect the increases in interest rates that budget forecasters have priced in. If the markets prove right, that will strengthen the case against deficit reduction. If, on the other hand, interest rates start to rise well above what even the budget forecasters expect, then, as in the early 1990s, more active efforts to cut the deficit could make sense...

Yet more evidence that inflation builds very slowly. There appears to be no such thing as a red line that prudent economies dare not cross: Sylvain Leduc, Chitra Marti, and Daniel J. Wilson: Does Ultra-Low Unemployment Spur Rapid Wage Growth?: "The unemployment rate ended 2018 at just under 4%, substantially lower than most estimates of the natural rate. Could such an ostensibly tight labor market lead to a sharp pickup in wage growth from its recent moderate pace, such that the relationship between wage growth and unemployment is not always linear? Investigations using state-level data show no economically significant nonlinearity between wage growth and unemployment that would predict an abrupt jump in wage growth...

There do not appear to be many examples of governments that both increase inequality and raise the standard of living of the bottom 10%. Instead, it appears to be one or the other: Dan Davies (2015): Up and Down, Left and Right: "Inequality in the UK against the income of the poorest 10%, as a time series.... It hits you right between the eyes. It���s all up-and-down or left-and-right. The sort of thing that generates the difficult cases for liberal political philosophy���increases in inequality which nevertheless benefited the worst-off, which would have showed up as a southwest-to-northeast upward slope���never happened...

Big oligopolistic companies conduct research and development to produce technologies that benefit them���which typically means technologies In which capital substitutes for labor and allows them to shed jobs from their value chain. Enhancing societal well-being, however, requires the development of technologies that do not substitute for but that complement human capabilities. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that the private sector cannot get this balance right: Tim O'Reilly: Gradually, Then Suddenly: "Neural interfaces: One of my biggest 'Wow!' moments of 2018 took place in the offices of��neural interface company CTRL-labs.��The company's demo involves someone playing the old��Asteroids��computer game without touching a keyboard, using machine learning to interpret the nerve signals.... But that���s just the first stage. Essentially, users of this technology 'grow' another virtual hand, which they can move independently of their physical hands.... Humanity is already going cyborg.... Don���t fall into the trap of thinking that AI will replace humans when it can be used even more powerfully to augment them...

Dylan Riley (2003): Privilege and Property: The Political Foundations of Failed Class Formation in Eighteenth-Century Austrian Lombardy: "Political society is reducible neither to interests in civil society, nor to the state.... The structure of political society matters for group formation.... A political society, in which actors make claims on the state in terms of privileges attached to residence, rather than property ownership, inhibits class formation even when other factors, such as the relations of production, state pressure, and culture, promote it. Where such a political organization is not broken, class formation will not occur even in the presence of strong economic, state-centered, and cultural pressures...

It is far from clear to me that the risk of a U.S. recession this year is low. The risk that a recession will be called is low. The risk that a recession will start is 30%:Gavyn Davies: Alarm Bells Ring for the��Goldilocks World Economy: "Markets seem willing to overlook the continuing slowdown in the advanced economies, which has taken the latest growth rate to only 0.8 per cent.... This is perversely seen as good news because it will reduce the likelihood of further interest rate increases.... The dovish turn in US monetary policy has been confirmed by an unusual��volte-face in policy guidance by the Fed leadership in the space of a few weeks.... This phase of the cycle is often described as the��Goldilocks zone, in which growth ��� like the heroine���s porridge in��The��Story of the Three Bears���is neither too hot nor too cold.... Meanwhile, growth is still high enough to indicate that the risk of outright recession in the next 12 months remains close to zero.... While the US is still clinging to the middle of the��Goldilocks zone, the eurozone is flirting with the bottom boundary of its zone. Any further decline in the nowcast would see a large increase in the probability of a European recession this year. With the Japanese nowcast already in negative territory and Asian trade flows headed sharply downwards, the markets may not be able to ignore much further weakness in the world economy...

Todd N. Tucker: @toddntucker: "Trump's desperation to get a deal after the collapse of North Korea talks is probably going to mean the US will not get anything meaningful on Chinese economic reforms: Jenny Leonard: @jendeben: "NEW: U.S. officials are rushing to finalize Trump's China deal even as hawks in his administration want to push Beijing for more concessions. Trump wants a signing summit ASAP. His team has been on the phone with Chinese officials to iron out details: Jenny Leonard, Andrew Mayeda, and Saleha Mohsin: U.S. Said to Ready Final China Trade Deal as Hawks Urge Caution: "The preparations for a Trump-Xi summit come amid conflicting signals from the Trump administration.... Mnuchin... Kudlow said the countries are on the verge of an 'historic' pact.... Lighthizer told lawmakers that more work needs to be done and said the administration won���t accept a deal that doesn���t include significant 'structural' changes to China���s state-driven economy. He also stressed the need for a enforcement mechanism, allowing the U.S. to take unilateral action if China breaks the rules...

Sean Carroll (2009): Remembering the Past is Like Imagining the Future: "The way that the human brain goes about the task of 'remembering the past' is actually very similar to how it goes about 'imagining the future'.... That���s what Daniel Schacter at Harvard and his friends have discovered, by doing functional MRI studies of brains subjected to different kinds of cues.... Pieces of data relevant to any particular memory���times, images, sounds���are stored piecemeal in different parts of the brain. When we want to 'remember' something, another part of the brain assembles these pieces into a (hopefully) coherent picture. It���s like running a new simulation every time you need a memory, and it���s the same thing we do when we try to imagine some event in the future.... Memories can be unreliable... many of us don���t appreciate the extent to which that is true.... False memories���conjured from any number of sources, from gradual embellishment to direct suggestion by others���seem precisely as vivid and real to us as accurate memories do. For a good reason: the brain uses the same tools to construct the memory from the available raw materials. A novel and a history book look the same on the printed page...

I have to think about this: Yes, distributions have lower tails. but it still seems to me that the absence of clearly visible life out there is powerful evidence that there is a "Great Filter": that one of the parameters (or more than one of the parameters) in the Drake Equation is near zero. Sandberg et al. seem to me to be arguing not so much that the absence of visible life out there is likely even if none of the parameters are near zero, but that our uncertainty is so great that it is not surprising that the universe we live in has one or more parameters near zero even though the average value of each parameter across all universes we might live in is larger: Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord (): Dissolving the Fermi Paradox: "The Fermi question is not a paradox, it just looks like one if one is overconfident in how well we know the Drake equation parameters. Doing a distribution model shows that even existing literature allows for a substantial probability of very little life, and a more cautious prior gives a significant probability for rare life. The Fermi observation makes the most uncertain priors move strongly, reinforcing the 'rare life' guess and an early 'Great Filter'...

#noted #weblogs

I have to think about this: Yes, distributions have lower...

I have to think about this: Yes, distributions have lower tails. but it still seems to me that the absence of clearly visible life out there is powerful evidence that there is a "Great Filter": that one of the parameters (or more than one of the parameters) in the Drake Equation is near zero. Sandberg et al. seem to me to be arguing not so much that the absence of visible life out there is likely even if none of the parameters are near zero, but that our uncertainty is so great that it is not surprising that the universe we live in has one or more parameters near zero even though the average value of each parameter across all universes we might live in is larger: Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord (): Dissolving the Fermi Paradox: "The Fermi question is not a paradox, it just looks like one if one is overconfident in how well we know the Drake equation parameters. Doing a distribution model shows that even existing literature allows for a substantial probability of very little life, and a more cautious prior gives a significant probability for rare life. The Fermi observation makes the most uncertain priors move strongly, reinforcing the 'rare life' guess and an early 'Great Filter'...

#noted

Sean Carroll (2009): Remembering the Past is Like Imagini...

Sean Carroll (2009): Remembering the Past is Like Imagining the Future: "The way that the human brain goes about the task of 'remembering the past' is actually very similar to how it goes about 'imagining the future'.... That���s what Daniel Schacter at Harvard and his friends have discovered, by doing functional MRI studies of brains subjected to different kinds of cues.... Pieces of data relevant to any particular memory���times, images, sounds���are stored piecemeal in different parts of the brain. When we want to 'remember' something, another part of the brain assembles these pieces into a (hopefully) coherent picture. It���s like running a new simulation every time you need a memory, and it���s the same thing we do when we try to imagine some event in the future.... Memories can be unreliable... many of us don���t appreciate the extent to which that is true.... False memories���conjured from any number of sources, from gradual embellishment to direct suggestion by others���seem precisely as vivid and real to us as accurate memories do. For a good reason: the brain uses the same tools to construct the memory from the available raw materials. A novel and a history book look the same on the printed page...

#noted