J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 365
May 15, 2018
Another piece worrying that human beings are simply unequ...
Another piece worrying that human beings are simply unequipped to deal with an advertising supported internet, in which money flows to those who hack your brain to glue your eyeballs to the screen: Ben Popken: As algorithms take over, YouTube's recommendations highlight a human problem: "A supercomputer playing chess against your mind to get you to keep watching...
...After YouTube built the system that recommends videos to its users, former employees like Guillaume Chaslot, a software engineer in artificial intelligence who worked on the site's recommendation engine in 2010-2011, said he watched as it started pushing users toward conspiracy videos. Chaslot said the platform���s complex ���machine learning��� system, which uses trial and error combined with statistical analysis to figure out how to get people to watch more videos, figured out that the best way to get people to spend more time on YouTube was to show them videos light on facts but rife with wild speculation.... This isn���t just a YouTube problem. Chaslot���s research on YouTube, which he released earlier this year, added to growing concerns about the pervasiveness of similar algorithms throughout modern society....
This reporter was helping his son research outer space for his school project. When he searched for "Saturn," the first results were mostly documentaries. One of the recommended videos was "10 facts you didn't know about space." That video led to additional recommendations such as "can you believe it" videos, a synthesized voice reading Nostradamus predictions and a clip "they don't want you to see" of pro-Putin propaganda. What had started out as a simple search for fun science facts for kindergartners had quickly led to a vast conspiracy ecosystem.... Chaslot, a software engineer in artificial intelligence, worked on a project to introduce diversity to YouTube���s video recommendations starting in 2010. It didn���t do as well for watch time, he said, so it was shut down and not used. "This is dangerous because this is an algorithm that's gaslighting people to make them believe that everybody lies to them just for the sake of watch time," he said....
The conspiracy videos are perfectly positioned to push our buttons and draw us in to consume more of them���signs that YouTube���s algorithm prioritizes, wrote Robert J. Blaskiewicz Jr., a columnist for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.... "Conspiracy stories hit our emotional fight or flight triggers,��� Blaskiewicz wrote. ���And the stories rest on the unstated premise that knowledge of the conspiracy will protect you from being manipulated. This in itself compels people to watch and absorb as much as they can and to revisit videos."... YouTube has said it's simply reflecting what users want to see, and videos are chosen based on their individual profile and viewing history....
YouTube has to balance protecting its profits with the trust of its users. Fail to walk the line and it can begin to undermine user value, said Kara Swisher, Recode executive editor and MSNBC contributor. "I think it's a problem not just throughout Youtube, but Google, Facebook, all these companies is that they prioritize growth over anything else. They may not be meaning to do it, but if growth is the goal, then user experience is not the goal,��� said Swisher. ���Real users, the ones you���re trying to attract, go away. And so it's in all their interests from a business point of view to clean this place up and to have more control over it and there's a moral responsibility to create a platform that isn't being abused by anybody. ���Good advertisers don't wanna be next to these kind of videos either,��� she added...
#shouldread
#riseoftherobots
#publicsphere
The Rise of the Robots: Recent Must- and Should-Reads as of May 15, 2018
Another piece worrying that human beings are simply unequipped to deal with an advertising supported internet, in which money flows to those who hack your brain to glue your eyeballs to the screen: Ben Popken: As algorithms take over, YouTube's recommendations highlight a human problem: "A supercomputer playing chess against your mind to get you to keep watching...
OK, Ben: how do we write regulations that constrain aggregators that want to hack our brain and attention and empower platforms that enable us to accomplish what we prudently judge our purposes to be when we are in our best selves? How was it that printing managed to, eventually, generate a less-unhealthy public sphere? Young Habermas, where are you now that we need you?: Ben Thompson: Tech���s Two Philosophies: "Apple and Microsoft, the two 'bicycle of the mind��� companies'... had broadly similar business models... platforms.
Jason Rhode: What tech calls ���AI��� isn���t really AI: "We're in the dark ages of neuroscience and neuroanatomy, to say nothing of the philosophical riddles...
We call them "AI", but that confuses and distracts us: Michael Jordan: Artificial Intelligence���The Revolution Hasn���t Happened Yet: "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the mantra... intoned by technologists, academicians, journalists and venture capitalists alike...
Isn't AdBlock a bigger piece of the answer?: Zeynep Tufekci: We Already Know How to Protect Ourselves From Facebook: "Personalized data collection would be allowed only through opt-in mechanisms that were clear, concise and transparent...
Zeynep Tufekci: Why Mark Zuckerberg���s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn���t Fixed Facebook: "By now, it ought to be plain... that Facebook���s 2 billion-plus users are surveilled and profiled, that their attention is then sold to... practically anyone... who will pay... including unsavory dictators like the Philippines��� Rodrigo Duterte...
Josh Marshall: Is Facebook In More Trouble Than People Think?: "People aren���t fully internalizing that the current crisis poses a potentially dire threat to Facebook���s... core advertising business.
Kevin Drum: In Defense of Smartphones: "Sherry Turkle is an MIT professor who thinks social media is decimating face-to-face contact...
A. Michael Froomkin, Ian R. Kerr, Joelle Pineau: When AIs Outperform Doctors: The Dangers of a Tort-Induced Over-Reliance on Machine Learning and What (Not) to Do About it: "Someday, perhaps soon, diagnostics generated by machine learning (ML) will have demonstrably better success rates than those generated by human doctors...
David Autor and Anna Salomons: Is Automation Labor-Displacing? Productivity Growth, Employment, and the Labor Share: "Is automation a labor-displacing force?...
Sean Gallagher: Facebook scraped call, text message data for years from Android phones: "A New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site...
Hannah Kuchler: The anti-social network: Facebook bids to rebuild trust after toughest week: "Mark Zuckerberg began 2018 vowing to 'fix Facebook'.... That job is more urgent than ever...
Kevin Drum: Uber Really Shouldn���t Be In the Driverless Car Business: "The fact that it���s an Uber car doesn���t surprise me. They���re exactly the kind of company that would cut corners..
A Question About the Future of Work...: I have no sense of what kinds of things the masses of displaced workers will do in the future at the level of "microprocessor", "robot", "accounting software 'bot"...
Charlie Stross: Test Case: "There are ramifications...
Gillian Tett(January 2017): Donald Trump���s campaign shifted odds by making big data personal: "CA has built a franchise by promoting a proprietary technique known as ���psychographs���...
Barry Ritholtz: Inflation: Price Changes 1997 to 2017: "It is notable that the two big outliers to the upside are health care (hospital, medical care, prescription drugs) and college (tuition, textbooks, etc.)...
Matt Townsend et al.: America���s ���Retail Apocalypse��� Is Really Just Beginning: "The reason isn���t as simple as Amazon.com Inc. taking market share...
Iason Gabriel: The case for fairer algorithms: "Software used to make decisions and allocate opportunities has often tended to mirror the biases of its creators, extending discrimination into new domains...
Paul Krugman: "This might be a good time to talk about the arithmetic of trade and manufacturing... why even a full-on trade war can't restore the manufacturing-centered economy Trump wants back...
Cory Doctorow: Let���s Get Better at Demanding Better from Tech: "In 2018, companies from John Deere to GM to Johnson & Johnson use digital locks and abusive license agreements to force you to submit to surveillance and control how you use their products...
Janelle Shane: Do neural nets dream of electric sheep?: "Neural network[s]... used for everything from language translation to finance modeling. One of their specialties is image recognition...
Kenneth Rogoff: Economists vs. Scientists on Long-Term Growth: "Most economic forecasters have largely shrugged off recent advances in artificial intelligence...
Katharine G. Abraham and Melissa S. Kearney: Explaining the Decline in the U.S. Employment-to-Population Ratio: A Review of the Evidence: "Within-age-group declines in employment among young and prime age adults have been at least as important...
Anna Stansbury and Lawrence Summers: On the link between US pay and productivity: "More rapid technological progress should cause faster productivity growth...
Kenneth Rogoff: When Will Tech Disrupt Higher Education?: "Universities and colleges are pivotal to the future of our societies...
Susan Houseman: Understanding the [Post-2000] Decline in Manufacturing Employment: "How did so many people erroneously point to automation as the culprit? It was, Houseman said...
Andrew Wachtel: Universities in the Age of AI: "Over the next 50 years or so, as AI and machine learning become more powerful, human labor will be cannibalized by technologies that outperform people in nearly every job function..
Dan Davies and Others: Chris Hanretty: LRT: study in most recent APSR suggests getting people to take perspective of marginalised group...
Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox: "The Fermi question is not a paradox...F
Charlie Stross: Dude, you broke the future!: "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. And if it looks like a religion it's probably a religion...
riseoftherobots
publicsphere
May 14, 2018
Could the Swedish Academy Please Stop Giving Nobel Prizes to Economists���Like Eugene Fama���Who Lack Basic Historical Literacy?
Someone who wishes me ill reminds me of this from six years ago.
Could the Swedish academy please stop giving nobel prizes to economists���like Eugene Fama���who lack basic historical literacy? This isn't rocket science, after all. I really do not think that this is very much to ask: Paul Krugman (2011): Boom For Whom: "While I���m talking about inequality and the crisis, I realized recently that there���s another channel not usually talked about, via the misperception of success...
...Let me start with a puzzle: why did faith in the wonders of financial deregulation persist so long?... Deregulation began producing disasters from early on... the Latin American debt crisis of the early 1980s; Garn-St. Germain produced the savings and loan debacle; freed-up capital flows produced the Asian crisis and LTCM; and now we have the great bust. So why were The Very Serious People so convinced that it was a good thing?... The answer from the usual suspects has always been that the era of deregulation was also an era of unprecedented economic growth... Peter Wallison... Eugene Fama....
Beginning in the early 1980s, the developed world and some big players in the developing world experienced a period of extraordinary growth. It���s reasonable to argue that in facilitating the flow of world savings to productive uses around the world, financial markets and financial institutions played a big role in this growth....
These are pure fantasies.... Why?... The answer, once you think about it, is obvious: growth for whom? There���s only one way in which the post-deregulation boom was exceptional, and that���s in terms of the growth in incomes at the top of the scale.... If you���re looking at the average, the last generation is a poor shadow of the postwar boom. But if you���re talking about the 1 percent, wonderful things have happened. No wonder then, that The Very Serious People... have retained faith in deregulation despite repeated disasters.
#mondaysmackdown
#hoisted
#shouldread
Ann Marie Marciarille: Minutes Matter, Don't Wait!: "Or s...
Ann Marie Marciarille: Minutes Matter, Don't Wait!: "Or so my local 'Emergency Room of Brookside' bleats from its website�� but, even more oddly, from the pop up advertising that is dogging my web browsing these days...
...Yes, many are haunted by targeted impulse buy purchase opportunity pop ups during their web browsing.�� It is called behavioral targeting. I get it. And, I am looking at lots of hospital service sites and articles as part of research on a manuscript.�� But, generalizing from that, is there really behavioral targeting for using ER services? And what an ER add it is, telling me the current waiting time at this local ER in minutes.... When you click through they offer a list of all the conditions that may be ER-worthy, stressing the danger of ambiguous symptoms. To be fair, they also post an equally ambiguous list of what may not be ER worthy but only Urgent Care worthy. Overall, I do think the pitch is that what you don't know may kill you and better be safe than sorry when parsing urgent from emergent.
The curious thing about this is how at odds it is with current health insurance plan design that is trying to�� move the "prudent layperson" standard on current covered ER services more than a bit by structuring plans or Medicaid coverage to include��financial disincentives for ER use that is not, retrospectively, deemed to be life threatening.... Anthem is making a name for itself as it rolls out these "non-emergency clauses" on a state by state basis. Missouri is among those states... surprisingly little push back���except by hospitals and Senator McCaskill���over the re-making of the standard.... In coaching its plan enrollees on how to self-screen for appropriateness of ER use, Anthem sends them to a web page not unlike the Emergency Room of Brookside page... minus the fear-inducing warnings that life-threatening conditions may masquerade as merely urgent conditions. So, there it is, two sets of troubling symptoms and the layperson responsible for sorting through them and deciding whether a fear-inducing or fear-rationalizing reading is appropriate.
Of course, I 'm still trying to figure out how the auto accident victim who was transported�� by ambulance on back board and later released with a diagnosis of not ER covered bruises and scrapes was supposed to have stopped all the clocks to complete their self-diagnosis while in the ambulance.��
I can't help but think that this is really another battle in the epic war between hospitals and insurers over who will determine cost and control.... Anthem contemplates that hospitals will screen more stringently for ER care in light of the distinct possibility that they may be treating an individual who is going to be uninsured.... ERs are riding into battle under the banner of consumer protection and EMTALA enforcement...
#shouldread
"Greeks to Their Romans"-The Twentieth Century Superpower Succession: Delong Morning Coffee Podcast
20th century British Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan is most known not for anything he did but for a witty letter that he wrote to Dick Cressman, Director of Psychological Warfare at Allied Forces Headquarters in the Mediterranean���
"Greeks to Their Romans"-The Twentieth Century Superpower Succession
Thx to Wavelength and the very interesting micro.blog http://delong.micro.blog/2018/04/21/greeks-to-their.html
May 13, 2018
Notes on a Framework for Understanding Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History
Three approaches to history:
As an image of what we should become���The study of history as a way of motivating us to recover what has been lost and return to a golden age
As a linear story of human progress, leading up to us, who are either perfect as we are or are going to continue to progress into the future because the arrow of time is also the arrow of history and the arrow of progress
Benjamin���s: we are the hunchback dwarf concealed out of sight inside the Mechanical Turk: we seek messianic redemption and we pull the strings of science and historical knowledge to strive for utopia. History provides us with flashes of illumination insight as we seek to carry out our messianic task.
It is easiest to understand Benjamin���s perspective if you remember when and where he wrote: in Europe in the 1930s, everything was going to hell in a handbasket. ���Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will��� was the watchword. It compelled some sort of theological faith that out of one's defeated efforts some sort of eucatastrophe would emerge.
Tht was the only standpoint that would allow Benjamin to get up in the morning to work and struggle, rather than simply killing himself, as he ultimately did.
IMHO at least, start here���with when and where Benjamin lived, with what were the two conceptions of history and progress he rejected, and with what his own fundamental standpoint was��� and much that was very murky becomes clear...
Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm
Andrew Robinson: Walter Benjamin: Messianism and Revolution���Theses on History https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/walter-benjamin-messianism-revolution-theses-history/
Stanford Encyclopedia: Walter Benjamin https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/
Robert Alter: On Walter Benjamin https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/on-walter-benjamin/
Karl Marx: Theses on Feuerbach https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm
This File: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/05/notes-on-a-framework-for-understanding-walter-benjamin-theses-on-the-philosophy-of-history.html
key: https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0Z6yaQAvDB69HBBmdMvD1g2pQ
Adam Smith (George Goodman) (1972): Supermoney: "Anyway, ...
Adam Smith (George Goodman) (1972): Supermoney: "Anyway, we sat at the great man���s knee, and then we went out to apply the theory...
...We would wait tensely while the mentor graded our papers. I bring this up because I remember bringing in a stock that provides the perfect example of what an individual can do by himself. The mentor had bid us study Gillette. The mentor held up a pack of Blue Blades, very dramatic. ���This will double, and if you know a double, you can do better than that.��� People used up the Blue Blades, threw them away, and bought more. Gillette dominated its market with an army of salesmen. Its displays were on every drugstore counter, and it was going into other grooming items.
What else was like Gillette? We were to go out scouting. I took a careful walk around a drugstore, and then I went to the manuals, and then I brought my stock to the mentor and waited for my very good grade.
I had a stock called Tampax. It had no debt, no preferred, and plenty of cash. Its product was a leading product. It was like Gillette in that you used it, threw it away, and bought more. It had flexibility in the pricing. Its profits grew every year. I wanted an A for my idea.
I got a B, and I protested. ���It���s a very good little company,��� said the mentor. ���I
suppose Kimberly-Clark or Scott could compete with it. But what is so unique?���
���What is unique is that when people go to the drugstore, they don���t know the name of any other product,��� I said. ���Like Kleenex. Tell me the name of what else competes with Kleenex. A generic name is better than patents.���
The mentor wouldn���t change my B to an A. ���It���s a solid B,��� he said. But the earnings grew perhaps 15 percent a year; we were looking at technological companies whose earnings grew 50 percent a year, making oscilloscopes and particle accelerators and other patented, super-sophisticated stuff, protected by patents and by technical staffs with hundreds of Ph.D.���s in physics.
���Yours is a population-growth stock,��� said the mentor. ���I don���t see why it���s ever going to grow considerably faster, although that fifteen percent could compound. Texas Utilities and Coca-Cola increase their earnings every year too, and those stocks are already on the approved lists of all the banks.���
So I didn���t buy Tampax at 5, adjusted for splits.
The mentor was right for that time: the technology stocks moved much faster. A couple of years later the pace accelerated, so that their patents were no protection, and then there was price-cutting in some of the products. Some of those technological companies are far bigger today, and some are treated as cyclical companies. But Tampax is around 120. I feel dumb every time I think about it...
#shouldread
The New York Times tried to suck up to the eminent and in...
The New York Times tried to suck up to the eminent and intelligent Alice Dreger the wrong way. Boy! Is she pissed! And she only gets pissed when getting pissed helps fix a significant problem: that the New York Times today is a central part of a "postapocalyptic, postmodern media landscape where thoughtfulness and nonpartisan inquiry go to die": Alice Dreger: Why I Escaped the ���Intellectual Dark Web���: "I asked what this group supposedly had in common...
...the answer..."they���ve climbed the ladder of fame by pissing people off, saying stuff you���re not supposed to say." They regularly made progressives angry with "politically incorrect" statements about gender, race, genetics, and so on. This troubled me... that one might think of pissing people off as an inherent good, a worthy end.... Pissing people off is something to be done accidentally, as a side effect, while you���re trying to fix a significant problem. Yet the operating assumption... seems to be that angering progressives represents a mark of honor in itself.... The Times article confirmed my initial fears���and made me glad that I asked to be left out (which I was). The article begins by breathlessly reporting that the IDW is rife with "beauty" and "danger."... Meh.... If these people are having conversations that are so rare "in the culture," how is it that they have millions of followers.... The whole thing���especially the excitement over these people having found a "profitable market"���made me identify anew with that person standing in the ESPN-televised crowd at some SEC football game holding the sign that said, "You people are blocking the library." I don���t see it as a sign of intellectual progress when a bunch of smart people find a way to make money off of niche political audiences by spewing opinions without doing much new research.... Twenty years since my first scholarship-based op-ed ran in The New York Times, here���s what I see: a postapocalyptic, postmodern media landscape where thoughtfulness and nonpartisan inquiry go to die...
#shouldread
Maybe I have become unhinged and have lost my mind, but w...
Maybe I have become unhinged and have lost my mind, but when I read this by Barry "whistling past the graveyard" comes to mind. Democracies vote incumbents out of office when things go wrong not when incumbents mismanage. A system that could produce a more informed effective electorate than the uniformed democratic electorate would seem likely to have an edge. The counter has always been that a restricted franchise may produce more competence, but it definitely produces plutocracy. These days, however, democracies seem increasingly to be likely to produce plutocracy without the competence. And the recent rise of transnational neo-fascism makes things even worse: politicians reconcile a broad democratic electorate with their desires to pursue plutocracy via performative cruelty against those they label as "others".
From China's perspective, what "democracy" generates is the same amount of plutocracy, much less competence, and mob rule in the sense that giddy minds will be dizzied by demagogues with foreign (and domestic) quarrels.
Yes, China does face the five-good-emperors-in-a-row-is-the-limit problem. But modern democracies face problems too.
I have less confidence in "built-in course-correction" than Barry does.
Time to go read The Federalist Papers, written when it was not a slam-dunk belief anywhere that a republic could be sustained, again: Barry Eichengreen: China and the Future of Democracy: "Growing geostrategic influence, rising soft power, and, above all, continued economic success suggest that other countries will see China as a model to emulate...
...They will be attracted to its political model, which eschews the chaos of Western democracy in favor of centralized administrative control. The attractions are even more alluring against the backdrop of the Trump administration���s incoherent approach to governing, the British Tories��� shambolic efforts to manage Brexit, and Italy���s inability to form a government.... Decisions are costly to reach and difficult to sustain in democratic systems.... China���s approach, which has delivered the goods for two generations now, has more going for it, especially from the perspective of poor countries where sustained growth is the priority....
But this confident forecast misses a key point. Democracy may be messy, but it contains a built-in course-correction mechanism. When policy goes awry, the incumbents responsible for the mistake can be, and often are, voted out of office, to be replaced, in principle at least, by more competent rivals. An authoritarian regime has no such automatic adjustment mechanism.... The idea that China���s leaders will continue to avoid serious policy errors indefinitely, and that their capacity as crisis managers will never be tested is, quite simply, fanciful....
China, clearly, is emerging as a world power, even more quickly than it otherwise would, to the extent that the US is coming to be seen as an unreliable partner concerned only with advancing its own interests���at the expense, if necessary, of other countries. But the belief that China will continue growing at mid-single-digit rates for an extended period violates the first rule of forecasting: don���t extrapolate...
#shouldread
I can't help it. Every time I see a 60 plus male from t...
I can't help it. Every time I see a 60 plus male from the South or the Midwest, I cannot help but think: "There goes an easily grifted moron!" The strong that has to be rolled uphill to keep Trumpland from falling further behind the rest of the country is very large and heavy: Paul Krugman: What���s the Matter With Trumpland?: "Regional convergence in per-capita incomes has stopped dead. And the relative economic decline of lagging regions has been accompanied by growing social problems...
...a rising share of prime-aged men not working, rising mortality, high levels of opioid consumption. An aside: One implication of these developments is that William Julius Wilson was right. Wilson famously argued that the social ills of the nonwhite inner-city poor had their origin not in some mysterious flaws of African-American culture but in economic factors���specifically, the disappearance of good blue-collar jobs. Sure enough, when rural whites faced a similar loss of economic opportunity, they experienced a similar social unraveling.
So what is the matter with Trumpland? For the most part I���m in agreement with Berkeley���s Enrico Moretti, whose 2012 book, ���The New Geography of Jobs,��� is must reading for anyone trying to understand the state of America. Moretti argues that structural changes in the economy have favored industries that employ highly educated workers���and that these industries do best in locations where there are already a lot of these workers. As a result, these regions are experiencing a virtuous circle of growth: Their knowledge-intensive industries prosper, drawing in even more educated workers, which reinforces their advantage. And at the same time, regions that started with a poorly educated work force are in a downward spiral, both because they���re stuck with the wrong industries and because they���re experiencing what amounts to a brain drain.
While these structural factors are surely the main story, however, I think we have to acknowledge the role of self-destructive politics. That new Austin et al. paper makes the case for a national policy of aiding lagging regions. But we already have programs that would aid these regions���but which they won���t accept.... Kansas and Oklahoma... relatively affluent in the 1970s... have now fallen far behind���have gone in for radical tax cuts, and ended up savaging their education systems.... And when it comes to national politics, let���s face it: Trumpland is in effect voting for its own impoverishment. New Deal programs and public investment played a significant role in the great postwar convergence; conservative efforts to downsize government will hurt people all across America, but it will disproportionately hurt the very regions that put the G.O.P. in power...
#shouldread
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