ChatGPT has kickstarted a bunch of discussion of how AI/ML will change the world. No argument there. But reading some of it, I’m reminded of something that has bugged me in some of the discussions of AI “safety”. Take this bit, from Sam Hammond, via Marginal Revolution: ordinary people will have more capabilities than a …
Author Archives: Walter
Editing as humility
A colleague of mine once called editing “a helping profession.” It’s a nice idea that speaks to how different the craft of editing actually is from how people imagine it. There’s a stereotype of the dictatorial editor, assigning stories they want, rejecting others, and creating a whole publication in their image. Maybe somewhere that exists …
Moneyball
Derek Thompson has a great Atlantic piece about how the Moneyball-ization of everything has changed culture and sports. The thesis is that analytics push homogenization. I write about data stuff so I should have something thoughtful to say about that but instead I want to veer outside my normal lane and register a basketball take: …
Scientific understanding
A perspectives piece in Nature on AI and science provides a nice description of scientific “understanding” that I want to share here:
What causes recessions?
A few different resources explaining the various causes of recessions… In 2019 I wrote a feature about firms and recessions, and I summed up the causes of recession this way: Recessions… can be caused by economic shocks (such as a spike in oil prices), financial panics (like the one that preceded the Great Recession), rapid …
The Fed can’t do it all
In this post, I want to clip together a few different threads about central banks and inflation–and specifically the idea of how you might fight inflation beyond interest rates. In my new project, Nonrival (a full post about that later but sign up!), I covered the Bank of England this week. I wrote: Central banks, …
Randomization is good
Researchers used LinkedIn to study the economic power of “weak ties.” It’s a fascinating topic and you can read about the study here. The New York Times reported on the study with the headline “LinkedIn Ran Social Experiments on 20 Million Users Over Five Years.” To put it charitably, that’s a very weird reaction. Stepping …
Side doors
“Well shit, we just need to blog more.” The Verge has been redesigned. That’s from the editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, who goes on to say: When you embark on a project to totally reboot a giant site that makes a bunch of money, you inevitably get asked questions about conversion metrics and KPIs and other extremely …
Some intellectual influences
I’ve been thinking about the perspectives and schools of thought that I came to in my formative years that, for better or worse, have shaped how I think about a wide range of things. I thought it’d be useful to sketch those out, if only for myself. They’re quite different from each other — some …
Behavioral economics in one chart
It’s sometimes claimed, not entirely unreasonably, that the research on cognitive biases amounts to an unwieldy laundry list. Just look at how long the list of cognitive biases is on Wikipedia. This frustration is usually paired with some other criticism of the field: that results don’t replicate, or that there’s no underlying theory, or that …
beyond the times 