waning gibbous sampler

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

wouldn't your classifier be trained to predict phrase instead of topic? so to the extent to which there's a type of document which is related to topic, but does not contain phrase, you're going to miss is. TBH, why not just explain this all to an LLM and let it rip (via API)?

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I mean this is the pretty straightforward implication of the leaked emails + that whole cohort's obsession with Leo Strauss right?

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

tbh pasting things into ChatGPT paragraph-by-paragraph (vs scripting using an API) belies a level of technical ignorance that makes me doubt the execution quality of the entire enterprise

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

The Taming Of Chance? An Engine Not A Camera is very specific to the applications of probability in finance, but very highly recommended.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

"there are six types of Abundance, and one of them is fascism," Hogwarts-ass ideology

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

it's so telling that even the supposed quantitative whizzes seem totally unfamiliar with, like, bandit problems.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

yeah this is why I think the Biden admin's attempts to lower the temperature were exactly wrong and he should've been trying to fan the J6 and antivaxx flames into random disorganized violence as much as possible

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I think valuations for the hyperscalers have all gone nuts in recent years, driven by expectations for massive GenAI spend. Also, are OpenAI and Anthropic really at the same revenue run rate? I would've guessed OAI is much bigger, but maybe the token use of Claude Code equalizes it?

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

Let's say we "solve" ML, in the sense that we can easily get the best possible black box solution to a well-posed optimization problem... that doesn't get around having to figure out what optimization problem should you should pose to achieve a set of fuzzy human objectives.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

if bezos had stayed Woke I honestly think he would've had a pretty good shot

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

purchasers could also just pay measurement talent what it's worth, but for cultural reasons basically refuse to do that

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

It's an unfortunate example of his particular talent for combining profit and psychosis---Grok is probably the clear favorite to lock down the extremely lucrative area of ai waifus, no?

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I think "learn how to get computers to do things systematically" should also obviously continue to be on the list, even as the specific form that knowledge takes continues to evolve

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

it should be patently obvious to anyone who has ever met a dog that problem-solving intelligence, memory, emotions, and sentience are all fundamentally distinct from auto regressive language modeling.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I mean, insofar as "hot people" has historically included "young actors and musicians," it's a group that has tended to lean more progressive than conservative.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

Cahokia Jazz is sort of in the same vein, and very fun

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I think you could have had fun as a world weary economist at Amazon trying to explain causal inference to llms

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

the level of technical sophistication is also shockingly low compared to tech / finance. Like, I do quantitative evaluation of social data for a living at a company that is actually trying to make money, and all of the "analysis" I've seen would get pretty harshly shot down on my team.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I'm biased but kind of genuinely don't understand why? Is it literally just the conservative guide?

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

getting into the fulfillment game is incredibly capital intensive and operationally hard. Shopify tried and got sent packing. Amazon is trying other way around---Multi-Channel Fulfillment and Buy With Prime---let's see if it goes anywhere.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

from the vantage point of tech, I'm also continuously shocked by the lack of any culture of purposeful experimentation for exploring the action space. A party that funds thousands of candidates a year does not have to settle for crappy observational regressions!

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

we need to get a lot less dogmatic about what "ought" to work, messaging-wise, and treat the whole thing more atheoretically. Quantitative strategy should be "who knows why, but this kid in NYC is racking up views, give him more money," not "a regression will tell us where to turn the Racism Dial"

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

idk what "doxxing" even means in this context---the vast majority of Americans expect their employer / job to be public knowledge as a matter of course.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

what's the metric by which Biden was more interesting than Trump but Trump was more interesting than Kamala?

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I love the Nuri spiced sardines you can get on Amazon as a step up from grocery-store stuff without being as insanely pretentious / expensive as a lot of the new-wave tins.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

maybe I'm cynical, but I'd put the breaking point at 2000: the Jan 6th that actually worked.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

the thing is a tax cliff at $1M is aesthetically displeasing to a certain type of wonk, but I highly highly doubt that it would actually change any allocative decisions! Like, the number of people making between $0.90 and $1.20 is measure zero! for many of them making 2 commas has independent value!

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I have a strong suspicion that he's hiding his power level on a variety of "HBD" and intrinsic-sex-differences topics---mainly coming out of his pretty consistent friendship / engagement / respect for neoreactionary thinkers who are less circumspect on those issues than he is.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

you cannot destroy the master's house with the master's tools (statistical analysis of textual data)

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

yeah I think I'm in the camp of a slower drawn-out malaise based on the data we're seeing now. The big question IMO is whether / when the shoe drops on speculative assets.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

Is there actually any reason to expect negative Q2 GDP? Last quarter GDPNow was blinking red for a long time, whereas this quarter it's been quite positive.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

the other, unfortunate, outcome would be that the strategy worked, a generation got hooked, and people will grumble but suck it up and pay. The other angle is the natural countercyclicality of gig economy employment...

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

but DoorDash is literally profitable, isn't it?

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

if Lula won, so can we

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

If Zohran were eligible he'd almost certainly be in the mix, right?

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I don't think the numbers are large enough to be material but it is... interesting... that the NYT Co has a big property tax exemption from the city that would be expiring in the middle of a new mayor's second term: academysecurities.com/wp-content/u...

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I think it's also remarkable just how few immigrants / children of immigrants work in prestige media relative to basically every other industry in nyc

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

there's also just not nearly enough data to support a definitive "no." What have staffing / morale levels looked like since the inauguration? Did DOGE truly leave the NWS untouched? If not, *how do you know* there was no impact??

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

yeah, but so has google, and they release most of their bleeding edge stuff on their own api first.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

IMO it's dumb / irrational that Amazon hasn't made a play here: they're woefully behind on proprietary models and would be the clear winners from a more commoditized open source ecosystem

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

the other way of putting it is that basically every subsegment of that graph would get you immediately stopped out in a professional trading seat. Your balance is supposed to go up and to the right!

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I kind of just do not believe the smoothing here... a raw dot plot, faceted / colored by group would present the data imo

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

as is Mamdani, to be clear!

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

lol in fairness I know exactly who you're talking about bc he's pretty sui generis

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

as someone who actually wants him to succeed, a bit of a performative schism with the real dead-enders before he actually starts staffing up would be ideal tbh

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

fwiw the early returns are really good (he seems likely to win the first rank vote), and betting markets have snapped to 99% chance he wins

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I wonder if something like the residual of the regression of SPX on BTC would measure something like actual expected cashflows, ex risk premia / speculative frenzy

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

the LLM is also actively "trying" to trick you into accepting its errors in a way the grad student isn't

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

by the same token, if he loses by a hair the blame will go entirely to the NYT

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

"the governor has the legal power to remove the NYC mayor" feels like a real Chekov's gun here.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

the three body problem series is a great example of exactly this dynamic (and imo didn't get nearly enough shit for it)

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I think we do need to change the valence towards people in the media from "wow you work for the NYT that's so cool 🤩" to "you are a collaborator with the enemy, hope they're at least paying you well"

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

indirect inference as bloodsport? bactra.org/notebooks/in...

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

tbh the most obvious path is just a city bailout of FreshDirect which is (a) universally loved and (b) on the path to financial ruin: nypost.com/2025/01/19/b...

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

Zohran's response to the NYT endorsement should just be to point out that it's not a surprise, since both AG and Andrew have spent their whole lives coasting off their last names... but as we learned last Saturday, in NYC we don't have kings.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

there's a too-cute-by-half argument that many of the worst social externalities of heroin are downstream of addicts doing whatever they can to afford heroin. So, conditional on a certain # of addicts, you probably want it to be cheap? The problem ofc is the extensive-margin demand response...

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

the thing is, white college-educated males went for Trump! so even going off of pure statistics you'd probably expect most newsroom leadership to lean T

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

ugh as a NYer it genuinely pains me to hear that---bring her to the UWS some time!

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

ah, yeah, looks like you might be right. But it doesn't sound like the Canadian teams are putting out particularly high-quality stuff either.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

they're Canadian!

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

In fairness, there is credible reporting that the survey may be noisier than usual, right? Which I agree is very far from evidence of outright interference, but is probably the first step in that direction given what we've seen of the DOGE playbook. www.wsj.com/economy/cpi-...

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

a core tenet of LessWrong rationalism is that intelligence points are real and with enough of them you can unlock "infinite persuasion". It's genuinely unclear to me why anyone without that community's particular combo of video game poisoning and insane discursive norms takes it seriously

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

it's especially funny bc so much of the time the real value add of the PhD is the tacit social knowledge---which preprints are likely to be actually worth reading, which papers published in good journals are actually universally acknowledged as bullshit.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

anyone who has interacted with an animal knows that general intelligence is not rooted in language, so in order to believe in LLM AGI you have to believe that language somehow spans all the relevant nonlinguistic cognitive processes---and none of the boosters ever explain why they think this!

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

the best stylized fact for this is that Manhattan is now the least Republican borough

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

TBH I think it's our role as economists to point out that interactions with LLM-based systems are actively adversarial: you're interacting with an agent that has been trained to maximize the appearance of reasoning / understanding, while minimizing the costs of computation. We have theories of this!

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

it's particularly insane that these are basically exactly the same people who were lining up to support the Tik Tok ban, which was the most toxic thing the Democratic Party has recently supported.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

The WelcomeFest types fall into exactly the same trap as activists on the other side: thinking that Posting success with a college-educated audience qualifies you to persuade marginal voters. The answer has to be "throw a bunch of money at Tik Tok zoomers we've never heard of and treat it like RL"

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

yeah, in my experience, most confounders worth caring about can be visually isolated with a bit of creativity

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I think a reasonable heuristic is that if you cannot design a scatterplot that clearly shows your effect it is too small / subtle to ever practically matter

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I mean I think much of the pushback comes from minority groups who, by any objective standard, deserve at least as much discursive care, and currently don't receive it.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I am surprised that there's no opportunity for Dems with specialized skills to volunteer. I have a PhD and work in tech; I'm not going to give up my cushy job to go work for a PAC. But I would happily volunteer to participate in methodology seminars, review code, mentor junior scientists, etc.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I think the problem is expecting that a bunch of donor advisors can figure this out from first principles with a spreadsheet, vs. just trying a bunch of options and ruthlessly doubling down on whatever works.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

It's fascinating to me because insofar as this guy has an area of expertise it's supposed to be Econ Wonkery, but there are obvious principal-agent and market-for-lemons problems that are obviously kind of fatal here.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

now McCain, on the other hand, absolutely should not have been allowed to run for president: repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcont...

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I think a reasonable heuristic is that all of these statistics are sales hype until Apple and Netflix (the only two majors who aren't trying to sell LLMs) start talking about needing materially less headcount.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

fwiw, I interpret "genius" here to mean something like "so preternaturally talented that, at 19, you can be among the best in the world, and straightforwardly outperform peers with a couple of decades on you." IMO the experience curve is just too different for that to work in management.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I unfortunately gotta say that this one is a win for the incredibly painful and drawn-out peer review process in Econ (and should hopefully be a blow to the working-paper-journalism-industrial-complex)

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

He has no incentive to confirm if asked, but he also has no incentive to take the initiative and aggressively lie about something that happened if there actually are sources who can catch him in it.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

the corollary is that if most people like feeling like their job matters, we should expect jobs that are important, but feel subjectively meaningless, to command a compensating wage differential! of course Graeber is too invested in being too cool for Econ to ever even consider this angle.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

literally his entire thesis is built on the fallacious assumption that "does your job feel subjectively useful" is an unbiased estimator of objective social utility.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I mean, conditional on there being a large retail demand for gold bars, "customers drive them home themselves from a place that's basically a warehouse" is probably the most efficient allocation model? and you can kind of back-solve margins from there.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

Arguably there should probably be further bifurcation between models tuned for chat-style conversation and models expected to adhere strictly to a target output schema.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

on the one hand, unbundling the "home essentials" part of the trip from the fun picking-out-toys part seems like it could be an opportunity for AMZN... on the other, unclear that it would be particularly profitable without picking up the higher-margin toys purchases as well.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I do not! That makes sense though --- wonder if it's an opportunity for an experiment.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

yeah, I meant more what's stopping you from fulfilling the same needs by placing an order a day or two before? (or is it literally that you need all this stuff just in time)

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

genuine question, what're the main factors that prevent Amazon from entering the ring? just timing?

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

meh, "a new technology has made a proxy metric less useful" is not really deadweight loss IMO, given that there are pretty undisputed benefits elsewhere in the economy

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I will also throw in a glowing endorsement of the Musée des Arts et Métiers if not already on your list

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

Aux Bons Crus!!! the steak poivre changed my life. More basic, but I also love Breizh Cafe.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

it feels like we're on track for *decades* of "actually it's classist to expect people to be literate" Discourse and I'm absolutely dreading it

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

tfw ur in the master race

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

this of course culminates in a healing global unification under reverend mother aoc

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I'm honestly somewhat surprised that neither Elon nor Trump has announced that they'll invent the lightsaber

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

It's funny because I was always like "generational hatred is so stupid, and generations are fake anyway, I'm gonna be cool and hip to the ways of the youth forever," but when my time comes it turns out I despise those pimply broccoli haired fascists with the vitriol of a boomer

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

maybe the clearest counter example is that Warsh could simply announce that as Fed chair he would support SPY price floor targeting. The rest of the economy would break even more rapidly! But equity markets might be fine.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

but weird shit can happen! Eg, if the market suddenly expects hyperinflation, you'd prob see nominal prices *spike*, even as real profits collapse. Similarly eliminating the cap gains tax, paid for by tariffs, would prob increase equity returns while tanking the real economy.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

I agree with the general sentiment probabilistically, but confident assertions about what "will" happen to the market are just sephiroth-posting imo.

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

the anti-affirmative action part of the Harvard case was total bullshit, but the data are extremely clear that there has been systematic discrimination against both East Asian and Indian applicants in college admissions (vis a vis white applicants) for decades

waning gibbous sampler (@waningibbous.bsky.social) reply parent

if Schumer had any imagination he'd be signaling hard that as majority leader he'd support a "clean" extension of TCJA to extend the current policy baseline (lol)