Links to Consider, 6/30

Alice Evans on discrimination against women; Lynne Kiesling on Economic Calculation; Noah Smith on electrification; Lorenzo Warby on Marxian science

Alice Evans writes,

In male-majority US undergraduate classes, men speak for longer, interrupt frequently and are much more assertive. Another US study finds that male-majority undergraduate teams accord grant men more influence and are more likely to choose men as external representatives. Even when women achieve top grades in physical sciences, the male majority rarely rate them as equally knowledgeable or want to study together.

These appear to be genuine examples of social behavior that disfavors women. I can almost hear Bryan Caplan asking, “What about social behavior that disfavors men?” Rather than stand on whataboutism, I would say that pointing out social behavior that disfavors one sex is helpful, because we should try to change our behavior.

Lynne Kiesling writes,

Knowledge is not data, and data are only an incomplete surrogate for knowledge. Knowledge is perception, interpretation, and judgement; the distillation of those elements into action in an economic system with prices (and profit and loss) creates data. Economic calculation has an irreducible cognitive dimension because it is grounded in subjective personal judgements about opportunity costs.

Clarifying these differences between knowledge and data suggests that the complex economy is in fact not computable, at least not in any meaningful sense that reflects underlying human values and can adapt to unknown and changing conditions in dynamic systems. AI can generate, process, and analyze data, but AI cannot react to data and take actions without contextual knowledge grounded in human cognition. AI cannot perform economic calculation without human input.

Instead of me, Reason Magazine should have asked Kiesling to write on this topic.

Noah Smith writes,

Often, electricity and combustion accomplish two different purposes. Combustion, which releases energy very quickly and relies on very dense energy storage mediums (e.g. gasoline), has long provided the “oomph” to make vehicles go. But electricity, with its capacity for fine control, is what we use to power our computers, radios, and other electronic instruments. And because pushing electrons in a nice orderly line is more efficient than releasing energy as heat, electricity is better for some applications like lighting our houses. So for a century and a half, combustion and electricity have largely existed side by side. One offered power and portability; the other, precision.

…two new technological revolutions shored up electricity’s fundamental weaknesses — low power and low energy density — while expanding on its fundamental strengths of precision, efficiency, and storability.

…As a result, we’re starting to see electricity become competitive in many of the applications where combustion easily won out in past decades. Solar power is taking over from fossil fuel combustion at an accelerating rate. Batteries are replacing internal combustion engines in cars, also at an accelerating rate. Battery-powered drones are quickly becoming much more important in warfare. Heat pumps are improving to the point where they’re able to challenge combustion-based heating. Battery-powered stoves, ovens, dryers, and other appliances will be both more powerful and cheaper than their gas-burning equivalents.

I hope Noah’s vision for the future is right. You can read contrary takes from Bjorn Lomborg (WSJ) or Mark P. Mills.

Lorenzo Warby writes,

Marx’s economistic systematising created a pretence of being social scientist—to himself and even more to Engels—that many people have maintained ever since. Hence a pre-Darwinian metaphysician is even now regularly treated as if he was a social scientist. This despite being wrong about more or less everything—class, commerce, surplus, immiseration, the state, patterns of history, commodification, division of labour, foraging societies …

Treating Marx as what he is not—a social scientist—is a falsity that is having increasingly grim consequences. This original sin against taking evidentiary standards and humilities of scholarship seriously has polluted and corroded the Social Sciences and Humanities, is moving onto to Science and Medicine and out into institutions.

I think that Marx’s popularity owes a lot to what Tyler Cowen calls mood affiliation. If you are in the mood to resent everything WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), then Marx will come across as having deep insights.

substacks referenced above:

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The original intellectual sin of modern academe

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The triumph of electromagnetism over thermodynamics

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Are Men More Influential?

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AI and Economic Calculation