Last year I had the opportunity to be a “Pro” forecaster on INFER, the crowd forecasting tournament run by Cultivate Labs and the University of Maryland (formerly Foretell of Georgetown’s CSET). Basically you get a small stipend to participate each month. It was fun and I recommend it! Ultimately, I decided not to keep going …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Code is not law
I’m fond of Lessig’s saying that “code is law” and I often mention it on the blog. But there’s a deeply distorted version of this idea cropping up in crypto lately and it’s worth distinguishing it from the original meme. Lessig’s idea was that human behavior was affected by four types of “governance” including markets, …
On falsification
From Richard McElreath’s textbook Statistical Rethinking, via Data Elixir: …The above is a kind of folk Popperism, an informal philosophy of science common among scientists but not among philosophers of science. Science is not describe by the falsification standard, and Popper recognized that. In fact, deductive falsification is impossible in nearly every scientific context. In …
Notes on trade and globalization
I’ve been trying to revisit the arguments and evidence for global trade and trade liberalization recently. I want to post a few links so I don’t lose track of them. Overall, I came away suspecting that the pro-trade side, which I’ve been sympathetic toward, is a bit overconfident relative to the evidence. But also that …
Technology adoption
Derek Thompson has a piece at The Atlantic on why America “doesn’t build what it invents.” It covers a lot of good ground. Here I just want to link to a few other things that I think speak to one piece of this topic. Paul Romer testified in 2020 that the US was first a …
AI governance is governance
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 …
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 …
beyond the times 