~marginalrevolution | Bookmarks (560)

This year is likely to be remembered for the Covid-19 pandemic and for a significant presidential election, but there is a new contender for the most spectacularly newsworthy happening of 2020: the unveiling of GPT-3. As a very rough description, think of GPT-3 as giving computers a facility with words that they have had with numbers […] The post That was then, this is now...

1. The people who still use typewriters. 2. “Vaccine skeptic hired to head federal study of immunizations and autism.” 3. David Perell on AI and writing. 4. Paralysed man stands again after receiving ‘reprogrammed’ stem cells. 5. Modeling how the military and the media interact.  An underdiscussed topic. 6. How baseball analytics are keeping pitchers from […] The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on...

In Collaborating with AI Agents: Field Experiments on Teamwork, Productivity, and Performance Harang Ju and Sinan Aral (both at MIT) paired humans and AIs in a set of marketing tasks to generate some 11,138 ads for a large think tank. The basic story is that working with the AIs increased productivity substantially. Important, but not […] The post The Madmen and the AIs appeared...

Here is the link, via Alex T. The post Men watch women’s sports more than women do appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsTo me, the illogical thing is that men like to watch men's ... by FloccinaWomen have to do more of the housework, so that leaves less ... by KalebergIn reply to Sashoir. A friend of mine preferred women's ... by KalebergIn...

A few thoughts on the new ChatGPT image release. (1) This changes filters. Instagram filters required custom code; now all you need are a few keywords like “Studio Ghibli” or Dr. Seuss or South Park. (2) This changes online ads. Much of the workflow of ad unit generation can now be automated, as per QT […] The post Balaji on the new image release...

I can think of a few reasons: At least for the time being, even very good LLMs cannot be counted on for originality.  And at least for the time being, good economic reasoning does not require originality, quite the contrary. Good chains of reasoning in economics are not too long and complicated.  If they run […] The post Why LLMs are so good at...

1. Inaccurate beliefs about skill decay.  George Loewenstein papers have been quite good historically… 2. New Dwarkesh book with Stripe Press, an oral history of AI. 3. New Alice Evans paper on the global Islamic revival. 4. Waymo is coming to WDC. 5. 2025 color stats. 6. Bhattacharya now confirmed at NIH. The post Wednesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn...

On November 4, 1979, a mob of radical university students and supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini, surged over the wall and occupied the US Embassy in Tehran. Fifty two Americans were taken hostage but six evaded capture. Hiding out for days, the escapees managed to contact Canadian diplomat John Sheardown and Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor and […] The post Canada and America in Better Times...

Regulatory fragmentation occurs when multiple federal agencies oversee a single issue. Using the full text of the Federal Register, the government’s official daily publication, we provide the first systematic evidence on the extent and costs of regulatory fragmentation. Fragmentation increases the firm’s costs while lowering its productivity, profitability, and growth. Moreover, it deters entry into […] The post Rethinking regulatory fragmentation appeared first on...

1. 23 Australians sent to the hospital by red ant stings. 2. Maurice Obstfeld on the trade deficit. 3. William Vollmann update, good piece. 4. The State Capacity crisis, and a popular version here. 5. On the underground economy. 6. Iguanas rafted from North America to Fiji. The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         Comments#2 can’t be any more clear...

You recently mentioned the Alpha School and their claims about AI tutoring. I share the skepticism expressed in your comments section regarding selection bias and the lack of validated academic benchmarks. I wanted to highlight a more rigorously evaluated project called Tutor CoPilot, conducted jointly by Stanford’s NSSA and the online tutoring firm FEVTutor (sadly […] The post Jonathan Bechtel on AI tutoring (from...

Cato has a good summary of Deregulation in Argentina: The end of Argentina’s extensive rent controls has resulted in a tripling of the supply of rental apartments in Buenos Aires and a 30 percent drop in price. The new open-skies policy and the permission for small airplane owners to provide transportation services within Argentina has […] The post Argentina’s DOGE appeared first on Marginal...

This Valentine’s Day was a memorable one as MRU finally hit its nationwide goal of having MRU products adopted by 25% of U.S. high schools by the year 2025. (See our final MRU Adoption & Market Share map for 2-14-25.) Great work, bravo! The post Congratulations to the Marginal Revolution University team! appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         CommentsIn reply to Dean. “Context, please. What does...

Buried in China’s latest government budget were some numbers that add up to an alarming trend. Tax revenue is dropping. The decline means that China’s national government has less money to address the country’s serious economic challenges, including a housing market crash and the near bankruptcy of hundreds of local governments… Tax revenue fell further […] The post China fact of the day appeared...

1. Is YouTube why Herbie Hancock has not made an album in so long? 2. Often you need only one person with the AI.  And the demand for translators is falling. 3. Willingness to be paid. 4. Speculative claims about AI tutoring. 5. The peso in Argentina is now quite overvalued, and this is a […] The post Monday assorted links appeared first on...

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  He has a new book coming out, namely Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead. Ken is tenured at Harvard, here is his Wikipedia page, here is Ken on scholar.google.com, here is o1 pro on Rogoff, […] The post What should I ask Ken Rogoff?...

Does it matter whether SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab in Wuhan or had natural zoonotic origins? I think on the margin it does matter. First, and most importantly, the higher the probability that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab the higher the probability we should expect another pandemic.* Research at Wuhan was not especially unusual or […] The post What Follows from Lab Leak? appeared...

If you peer into the souls of the major LLMs, they are (broadly) positive, friendly, universalistic, and cosmopolitan.  They are more objective than media as a source of information.  They are too politically correct, but nastiness would be much worse.  They are open, and you can be inquisitive with them.  They are (again broadly) socially […] The post We are lucky good LLMs were...

While the psychological dispositions that underlie conspiracy thinking are well researched, there has been remarkably little research on the political preferences of conspiracy believers that go beyond self-reported ideology or single political issue dimensions. Using data from the European Voter Election Study (EVES), the relationship between conspiracy thinking and attitudes on three deeper-lying and salient […] The post Who believes in conspiracy theories? appeared...

Carney said removing barriers to the free movement of workers, goods and services across the country would increase the size of Canada’s economy by $250 billion… Carney said his government would table legislation by July 1 to allow goods to travel across the country barrier-free. He said his government would also remove labour mobility restrictions […] The post Carney seeks internal free trade for...

1. O’Shaughnessy Ventures launches Infinite Books, Jimmy Soni in charge. 2. Matt Kahn on natural disaster economics. 3. Namibia will soon be the richest country in Africa. 4. Bhutan holds lots of Bitcoin. 5. “How I read poems, with aphantasia.” 6. Welcome to the world’s biggest rodeo. 7. US border officials have caught more people […] The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on...

City Journal: A year and a half since fires devastated the historic town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, Hawaii, only six houses have been rebuilt—six out of more than 2,000. Why is the recovery effort taking so long? Initially, the biggest hurdles were the pace of debris removal and damage litigation. Both were […] The post Maui is Not Abundant appeared first...

The Federal Communications Commission is prepared to block mergers and acquisitions involving companies that continue promoting diversity, equity and inclusion policies, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said Friday. President Donald Trump has ordered federal agencies such as the Justice Department to draw up lists of companies, nonprofits and other organizations to target over “illegal DEI efforts,” which the […] The post Not the precedent I have been...

It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six. And then the doors shut. By 2021, there […] The post The vanishing male writer appeared first...