Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  Here is Wikipedia: Paul Bloom…is a Canadian American psychologist. He is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, and art. Here is Paul’s own home page.  Here are Paul’s books on Amazon.  Here is Paul on Twitter.  Here is Paul’s new Subs ..read more

1. Works in Progress will be running an “Invisible College” in Cambridge, UK. 2. How much was Britain already industrializing in the 17th century? 3. Something, something, blah blah blah, but probably interesting? Research article is here. 4. “We find that once the sales of foreign exporters are taken into account, U.S. market concentration in manufacturing was stable between 1992 and 2012.” 5. Is the newly rediscovered Klimt portrait (NYT) a picture of Helene Lieser, a female Austrian economist who studied with Mises? 6. Shruti and Rasheed Griffith podcast on the Caribbean. The post Thursday ..read more

I agree with Tyler, that the FTC ban on non-competes is overly broad and not tailored to fields where the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. Additionally, the FTC’s authority to enact this rule, rather than Congress, is questionable. Nevertheless, I don’t think banning non-competes is without merit. The reason is not the standard Twitter-econ view that non-competes are bad for workers. Indeed, some non-competes, so-called “gardening leave”, pay the worker during the non-compete period. Sounds pretty good! More generally, non-competes are just one item in the wage bargain like hours, health and p ..read more

Here is a new paper by Sara Abrahamsson.  Perhaps there is Norwegian exceptionalism at work, but the results reflect my expectations reasonably closely.  The basic setting is that smart phones were banned in middle school, but at varying (and exogenous) rates around the country.  Here are some of the core findings, noting that reading the paper gives some different impressions from some of the Twitter summaries: 1. Grades improve, for instance for the girls it goes up by 0.08 standard deviations.  Worth doing, but hardly saving a generation.  For girls, the biggest imp ..read more

Michael Stack writes me: “Hi Tyler – you wrote about preferring current airport procedures to pre-9/11 procedures. Do you plan to elaborate on this? I have a hard time understanding why you’d feel that way. Here is the list I produced – these are guesses as to why you might feel the way you do: Because friends/family can’t meet you at the gate, it reduces crowding in some of the stores, restaurants, and waiting areas. Security imposes a higher cost on travelers which reduces crowding – what are the pricing effects? Is this a transfer from airlines? From travelers? You’re very worried about an ..read more

Why did I deepfake myself? To see if conversing with an AI-generated version of myself can lead to self-reflection, new insights into my thought patterns, and deep truths. pic.twitter.com/DWODoZ9lXL — Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) April 24, 2024 The post It’s happening, Reid Hoffman AI twin edition, wwrgs? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.       Related Stories Imagine recording and storing everything you read What can LLMs never do? “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI”   ..read more

1. U.S. vs. Taiwanese work culture. 2. Albert Wensemius and the rise of Singapore. 3. Unusual questions answered by Megan McArdle. 4. Why Panama dollarized. 5. New open access book on prices and games by Michael Richter and Ariel Rubinstein. 6. Canada now limiting immigration. 7. “In the fiscal year 2023, more than half of the irregular arrivals at the US’s southern border were from countries outside Mexico and northern Central America for the first time…”  FT here, source here. 7. Helen Vendler, RIP. 8. A possible plateau in opioid and drug overdose deaths? (limited data, but possibly tr ..read more

Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses just got a massive Multimodal upgrade – Meta AI with Vision It doesn't just take speech input, it can now answer questions about what you are seeing. Here are 8 features that is now possible 1. Ask about what you are seeing pic.twitter.com/IJQ3WuZMAJ — Min Choi (@minchoi) April 24, 2024 The post Imagine recording and storing everything you read appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.       Related Stories What can LLMs never do? Deregulate our universities “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI”   ..read more

By Rohit Krishnan, he and I are both interested in the question of what LLMs cannot do, and why.  Here is one excerpt: It might be best to say that LLMs demonstrate incredible intuition but limited intelligence. It can answer almost any question that can be answered in one intuitive pass. And given sufficient training data and enough iterations, it can work up to a facsimile of reasoned intelligence. The fact that adding an RNN type linkage seems to make a little difference though by no means enough to overcome the problem, at least in the toy models, is an indication in this direct ..read more

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, basically you should charge them fees rather than discourage them through other means>  Here is one excerpt: By this reasoning, the Japanese decision to raise bullet train prices for tourists is exactly the right approach. In the meantime, the Japanese government, which faces high pension costs, has more money at its disposal. There is no need to resent or otherwise restrict the tourists at all, and indeed I have found the Japanese people to be extremely gracious and helpful to foreigners. Higher prices for tourist train tickets will ma ..read more