Links to Consider, 10/29

Tyler Cowen reinvents the book, using AI;A Conspiracy to convict Derek Chauvin?; John Cochrane on industrial policy; the Zvi on SBF

Tyler Cowen writes,

I believe this is the first major work published in GPT-4, Claude 2, and some other services to come.  I call it a generative book. 

I think it is a fantastically exciting idea, but Tyler’s post uses too much AI jargon. I found Ben Yeoh's description more illuminating.

The substance of the book is Tyler’s asking and answering the question of who is the greatest economist of all time. Of course, that requires him to place economists in their historical context and explain the significance of their ideas.

If you “read the book in ai,” that means you use a chatbot to ask questions related to the book’s contents. The chatbot answers your questions. You absorb the book by interrogating it, as opposed to reading it in the conventional way.

From now on, every book should be like this.

For one thing, it puts the consumer into active mode. You are going to remember much more if you are asking questions and getting answers than if you are merely reading.

For another thing, you are not restricted to taking one path through the book. You can “choose your own adventure,” as it were.

Roger Kimball writes,

You won’t read about it in The New York Times or The Washington Post. Neither CNN nor MSNBC will devote airtime to the story. But other, less establishment  outlets have it. Here, for example, is Alpha News, with the eyebrow-raising headline “Court docs reveal ‘extreme’ public pressure on prosecutors in George Floyd case.”

“New court documents,” the story begins, “expose the ‘extreme pressure’ prosecutors faced in Hennepin County to charge Derek Chauvin and three other former Minneapolis police officers in the death of George Floyd. Several attorneys opposed charging the ‘other three’ officers and withdrew from the case due to ‘professional and ethical rules.’”

The most devastating allegation is that the man who conducted the autopsy did not believe that Floyd died of strangulation but felt pressured to say otherwise in court.

According to the blogger New Neo, that is actually old news.

I give the conspiracy theory a 2 percent probability of being true, but no more than that, because

• we do not know how much organizational soap opera is going on involving the former prosecutor who is making these allegations

• if true, the story means that several people in the prosecutor’s office believed that Chauvin was innocent, but none of them have come forward since.

• I would have expected Chauvin’s lawyers to have noticed the strange behavior in the prosecutor’s office and flushed out the story

• an outlet pushing the conspiracy theory has almost nothing to lose if it turns out to be false. They can just move on the the next conspiracy theory. Will they lose any of their audience? Probably not.

John Cochrane writes,

The problem with US public investment is not just lack of money. It is that the money we do spend goes down ratholes, so not spending is wise. Public teacher unions that deliver generations of children, mostly already disadvantaged, who cannot read or count. $4 billion dollar per mile subways. Leonhardt mentions other countries' success with high speed trains, without mentioning the poster child for all that is wrong with US public investment: the California railroad. 15 years and counting, $100+ billion dollars, not a mile of track laid yet. SNCF, the French state railroad company smelled so much rot it wouldn't touch the project.  

He points out that bringing semiconductor manufacturing home does not increase our supply of chips. It just makes them more expensive.

I am just as grumpy about industrial policy. I understand why it appeals to politicians. But if Hamas supporters should be exiled to Iran, then economists who support industrial policy should be exiled to North Korea.

Zvi Mowshowitz reviews the Michael Lewis book on SBF. I personally don’t think I could get through the book. Even Zvi’s review was too long for me. A couple of excerpts.

This is a very raw-G ‘smart’ person, who manufactured an entirely artificial superficial charm, has grandiose self-worth, pathologically lies, is endlessly manipulative, lacks remorse or guilt, has extreme emotional shallowness, fails to accept responsibility for anything ever, needs stimulation constantly to the point of constantly fidgeting, never sleeping and playing video games during television appearances, is constantly impulsive and irritable and irresponsible, has goals like going infinite and mostly does things without any plan or vision at all, did all the crimes and the first opportunity he got had his bail revoked

To me that screams Dark Triad, but I cannot tell whether Zvi sees it that way.

Was Sam born a criminal? Of all Sam’s characterizes in the list I open with, one of the few that is conspicuously missing involves doing juvenile crimes.

Why would he? There was no point. Crime looked boring. Until it didn’t.

Having spent his entire childhood bored out of his mind…

OK, so as a youth he didn’t do things that a stereotypical Dark Triad guy does. In elementary school he didn’t beat up other kids and steal their lunch money. As a teenager he didn’t rob a liquor store. In his early twenties, he didn’t pick up women in bars, take them home, and assault them. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t born bad. It doesn’t mean that he turned to crime out of boredom. It means he needed to find a criminal activity that fit with his skill set. That’s my two cents.

substacks referenced above:

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Who's the G.O.A.T. Economist? Tyler Cowen's AI generative book.

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Book Review: Going Infinite