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Javier E

Climate change just became solvable because of math - 0 views

the.ink/...case-for-climate-unilateralism

climate change economic cost research

shared by Javier E on 04 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • For years, economists’ best estimates of the cost of climate inaction were giant but not quite big enough to stimulate immediate and adequate action. The cost of inaction was, in a sense, high enough to be terrifying but too low to be galvanizing
  • now a groundbreaking new study has raised the estimated cost of inaction by so much that it makes acting seem like a bargain, and even makes it makes sense for wealthy countries to act alone, regardless of what their peers are doing. It’s a rare academic paper that could change everything.
  • Until the new paper, the most commonly used economic models were predicting climate impacts on the world economy on the order of about $200 in losses per ton of carbon emitted, or around 2 percent of world GDP (the monetary value of everything people produce) per degree of warming
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • But while those are huge numbers by any measure (world GDP is around $100 trillion), they aren’t big enough to motivate most leaders to justify mitigation, which will also cost a whole lot of money.
  • To put it in terms the authors use, the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act will cost Americans roughly $80 per ton of carbon emissions avoided, and while each ton not pumped into the atmosphere would save the world $200 as a whole, it would only save Americans about $40 of that $200, making it feel to some altruistic but not self-evident in purely economic terms.
  • In their new paper, economists Adrien Bilal of Harvard and Diego Känzig of Northwestern take a fresh look at the data
  • They show that the social cost of carbon is likely far bigger — six times bigger — than previously estimated: losses of more than $1,000 per ton, or around 12 percent of world GDP per degree of warming.
  • — roughly equivalent to the economic drag on big economies if they were permanently at war.
  • Suddenly, that $80 Americans are spending on reducing one ton of carbon emissions is netting them $200 or so in U.S. economic activity.
  • Bilal and Känzig argue that it’s very much worth it for countries of means to spend the money now to avoid much greater costs down the line
  • the potential losses are so vast it makes sense for these countries to go ahead and act on their own to avoid climate change losses, even if other nations do nothing.
  • What’s different about your methodology and how did it lead you to the numbers you've come up with?
  • Adrien Bilal: So virtually all of the previous work that's been done on the subject has relied on comparisons of different countries that heat up or cool down at different points in time. The U.K. gets a little hotter in one year, and then Germany stays cool. And then you look at how GDP in the U.K. evolves following that change in temperature.
  • that generally gives you numbers in the vicinity of $150 per ton of carbon emitted and a 2 percent decline in GDP per degree Celsius in warming
  • we think that is quite different from what climate change is actually doing to the world. It's not only that the U.K. is going to heat up a little more than Germany, but the whole world is heating up because of climate change. And, in particular, oceans are also heating up. And when the whole planet warms, that has potentially really different implications for the climate system, increased frequency of extreme weather events that then have big local impacts. 
  • that's actually what geoscientists have been telling us for a long time, but it simply hadn't percolated into economics. And so we took that perspective very seriously and thought, "Well, what happens when we basically compare years where the world is very hot to years where the world is cooler?" And that gives you a much larger effect of climate change on the economy.
Javier E

The AI Revolution Is Already Losing Steam - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-already-losing-steam-a93478b1

ai revolution analysis evaluation 2024 economics

shared by Javier E on 04 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • Most of the measurable and qualitative improvements in today’s large language model AIs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—including their talents for writing and analysis—come down to shoving ever more data into them. 
  • AI could become a commodity
  • To train next generation AIs, engineers are turning to “synthetic data,” which is data generated by other AIs. That approach didn’t work to create better self-driving technology for vehicles, and there is plenty of evidence it will be no better for large language models,
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  • AIs like ChatGPT rapidly got better in their early days, but what we’ve seen in the past 14-and-a-half months are only incremental gains, says Marcus. “The truth is, the core capabilities of these systems have either reached a plateau, or at least have slowed down in their improvement,” he adds.
  • the gaps between the performance of various AI models are closing. All of the best proprietary AI models are converging on about the same scores on tests of their abilities, and even free, open-source models, like those from Meta and Mistral, are catching up.
  • models work by digesting huge volumes of text, and it’s undeniable that up to now, simply adding more has led to better capabilities. But a major barrier to continuing down this path is that companies have already trained their AIs on more or less the entire internet, and are running out of additional data to hoover up. There aren’t 10 more internets’ worth of human-generated content for today’s AIs to inhale.
  • A mature technology is one where everyone knows how to build it. Absent profound breakthroughs—which become exceedingly rare—no one has an edge in performance
  • companies look for efficiencies, and whoever is winning shifts from who is in the lead to who can cut costs to the bone. The last major technology this happened with was electric vehicles, and now it appears to be happening to AI.
  • the future for AI startups—like OpenAI and Anthropic—could be dim.
  • Microsoft and Google will be able to entice enough users to make their AI investments worthwhile, doing so will require spending vast amounts of money over a long period of time, leaving even the best-funded AI startups—with their comparatively paltry warchests—unable to compete.
  • Many other AI startups, even well-funded ones, are apparently in talks to sell themselves.
  • the bottom line is that for a popular service that relies on generative AI, the costs of running it far exceed the already eye-watering cost of training it.
  • That difference is alarming, but what really matters to the long-term health of the industry is how much it costs to run AIs. 
  • Changing people’s mindsets and habits will be among the biggest barriers to swift adoption of AI. That is a remarkably consistent pattern across the rollout of all new technologies.
  • the industry spent $50 billion on chips from Nvidia to train AI in 2023, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue.
  • For an almost entirely ad-supported company like Google, which is now offering AI-generated summaries across billions of search results, analysts believe delivering AI answers on those searches will eat into the company’s margins
  • Google, Microsoft and others said their revenue from cloud services went up, which they attributed in part to those services powering other company’s AIs. But sustaining that revenue depends on other companies and startups getting enough value out of AI to justify continuing to fork over billions of dollars to train and run those systems
  • three in four white-collar workers now use AI at work. Another survey, from corporate expense-management and tracking company Ramp, shows about a third of companies pay for at least one AI tool, up from 21% a year ago.
  • OpenAI doesn’t disclose its annual revenue, but the Financial Times reported in December that it was at least $2 billion, and that the company thought it could double that amount by 2025. 
  • That is still a far cry from the revenue needed to justify OpenAI’s now nearly $90 billion valuation
  • the company excels at generating interest and attention, but it’s unclear how many of those users will stick around. 
  • AI isn’t nearly the productivity booster it has been touted as
  • While these systems can help some people do their jobs, they can’t actually replace them. This means they are unlikely to help companies save on payroll. He compares it to the way that self-driving trucks have been slow to arrive, in part because it turns out that driving a truck is just one part of a truck driver’s job.
  • Add in the myriad challenges of using AI at work. For example, AIs still make up fake information,
  • getting the most out of open-ended chatbots isn’t intuitive, and workers will need significant training and time to adjust.
  • That’s because AI has to think anew every single time something is asked of it, and the resources that AI uses when it generates an answer are far larger than what it takes to, say, return a conventional search result
  • None of this is to say that today’s AI won’t, in the long run, transform all sorts of jobs and industries. The problem is that the current level of investment—in startups and by big companies—seems to be predicated on the idea that AI is going to get so much better, so fast, and be adopted so quickly that its impact on our lives and the economy is hard to comprehend. 
  • Mounting evidence suggests that won’t be the case.
Javier E

The YouTuber with the power to influence the Indian election - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...-the-indian-election-886jnlmlq

election influence power india impartiality objectivity crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 04 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • “When Hitler was in power, would it have made sense to say ‘he’s bad on this front but on the other hand, he’s built good roads and the trains run on time, so let’s be balanced’? In a normal situation, I would be more neutral, but this is not the time for neutrality. This election is a fight for Indian democracy. If we lose, there won’t be any chance in future to be neutral.”
Javier E

Opinion | The Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab. These 5 Key Points Explain Why. - The... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-lab-leak.html

pandemic origin covid china lab history investigation

shared by Javier E on 04 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.
  • If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.
  • The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.
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  • Dr. Shi’s group was fascinated by how coronaviruses jump from species to species. To find viruses, they took samples from bats and other animals, as well as from sick people living near animals carrying these viruses or associated with the wildlife trade. Much of this work was conducted in partnership with the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based scientific organization that, since 2002, has been awarded over $80 million in federal funding to research the risks of emerging infectious diseases.
  • Their research showed that the viruses most similar to SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus that caused the pandemic, circulate in bats that live roughly 1,000 miles away from Wuhan. Scientists from Dr. Shi’s team traveled repeatedly to Yunnan province to collect these viruses and had expanded their search to Southeast Asia. Bats in other parts of China have not been found to carry viruses that are as closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
  • When the Covid-19 outbreak was detected, Dr. Shi initially wondered if the novel coronavirus had come from her laboratory, saying she had never expected such an outbreak to occur in Wuhan.
  • The SARS‑CoV‑2 virus is exceptionally contagious and can jump from species to species like wildfire. Yet it left no known trace of infection at its source or anywhere along what would have been a thousand-mile journey before emerging in Wuhan.
  • The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature
  • The laboratory pursued risky research that resulted in viruses becoming more infectious: Coronaviruses were grown from samples from infected animals and genetically reconstructed and recombined to create new viruses unknown in nature. These new viruses were passed through cells from bats, pigs, primates and humans and were used to infect civets and humanized mice (mice modified with human genes). In essence, this process forced these viruses to adapt to new host species, and the viruses with mutations that allowed them to thrive emerged as victors.
  • Worse still, as the pandemic raged, their American collaborators failed to publicly reveal the existence of the Defuse proposal. The president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, recently admitted to Congress that he doesn’t know about virus samples collected by the Wuhan institute after 2015 and never asked the lab’s scientists if they had started the work described in Defuse.
  • By 2019, Dr. Shi’s group had published a database describing more than 22,000 collected wildlife samples. But external access was shut off in the fall of 2019, and the database was not shared with American collaborators even after the pandemic started, when such a rich virus collection would have been most useful in tracking the origin of SARS‑CoV‑2. It remains unclear whether the Wuhan institute possessed a precursor of the pandemic virus.
  • In 2021, The Intercept published a leaked 2018 grant proposal for a research project named Defuse, which had been written as a collaboration between EcoHealth, the Wuhan institute and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who had been on the cutting edge of coronavirus research for years. The proposal described plans to create viruses strikingly similar to SARS‑CoV‑2.
  • Coronaviruses bear their name because their surface is studded with protein spikes, like a spiky crown, which they use to enter animal cells. The Defuse project proposed to search for and create SARS-like viruses carrying spikes with a unique feature: a furin cleavage site — the same feature that enhances SARS‑CoV‑2’s infectiousness in humans, making it capable of causing a pandemic. Defuse was never funded by the United States.
  • owever, in his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci explained that the Wuhan institute would not need to rely on U.S. funding to pursue research independently.
  • While it’s possible that the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally (as seen in some distantly related coronaviruses), out of the hundreds of SARS-like viruses cataloged by scientists, SARS‑CoV‑2 is the only one known to possess a furin cleavage site in its spike. And the genetic data suggest that the virus had only recently gained the furin cleavage site before it started the pandemic.
  • Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted.
  • When the Wuhan scientists published their seminal paper about Covid-19 as the pandemic roared to life in 2020, they did not mention the virus’s furin cleavage site — a feature they should have been on the lookout for, according to their own grant proposal, and a feature quickly recognized by other scientists.
  • At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a team of scientists had been hunting for SARS-like viruses for over a decade, led by Shi Zhengl
  • In May, citing failures in EcoHealth’s monitoring of risky experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab, the Biden administration suspended all federal funding for the organization and Dr. Daszak, and initiated proceedings to bar them from receiving future grants. In his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci said that he supported the decision to suspend and bar EcoHealth.
  • Separately, Dr. Baric described the competitive dynamic between his research group and the institute when he told Congress that the Wuhan scientists would probably not have shared their most interesting newly discovered viruses with him. Documents and email correspondence between the institute and Dr. Baric are still being withheld from the public while their release is fiercely contested in litigation.
  • In the end, American partners very likely knew of only a fraction of the research done in Wuhan. According to U.S. intelligence sources, some of the institute’s virus research was classified or conducted with or on behalf of the Chinese military.
  • In the congressional hearing on Monday, Dr. Fauci repeatedly acknowledged the lack of visibility into experiments conducted at the Wuhan institute, saying, “None of us can know everything that’s going on in China, or in Wuhan, or what have you. And that’s the reason why — I say today, and I’ve said at the T.I.,” referring to his transcribed interview with the subcommittee, “I keep an open mind as to what the origin is.”
  • The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.
  • Labs working with live viruses generally operate at one of four biosafety levels (known in ascending order of stringency as BSL-1, 2, 3 and 4) that describe the work practices that are considered sufficiently safe depending on the characteristics of each pathogen. The Wuhan institute’s scientists worked with SARS-like viruses under inappropriately low biosafety conditions.
  • ​​Biosafety levels are not internationally standardized, and some countries use more permissive protocols than others.
  • In one experiment, Dr. Shi’s group genetically engineered an unexpectedly deadly SARS-like virus (not closely related to SARS‑CoV‑2) that exhibited a 10,000-fold increase in the quantity of virus in the lungs and brains of humanized mice. Wuhan institute scientists handled these live viruses at low biosafety levels, including BSL-2.
  • Even the much more stringent containment at BSL-3 cannot fully prevent SARS‑CoV‑2 from escaping. Two years into the pandemic, the virus infected a scientist in a BSL-3 laboratory in Taiwan, which was, at the time, a zero-Covid country. The scientist had been vaccinated and was tested only after losing the sense of smell. By then, more than 100 close contacts had been exposed. Human error is a source of exposure even at the highest biosafety levels, and the risks are much greater for scientists working with infectious pathogens at low biosafety.
  • An early draft of the Defuse proposal stated that the Wuhan lab would do their virus work at BSL-2 to make it “highly cost-effective.” Dr. Baric added a note to the draft highlighting the importance of using BSL-3 to contain SARS-like viruses that could infect human cells, writing that “U.S. researchers will likely freak out.”
  • Years later, after SARS‑CoV‑2 had killed millions, Dr. Baric wrote to Dr. Daszak: “I have no doubt that they followed state determined rules and did the work under BSL-2. Yes China has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.”
  • SARS‑CoV‑2 is a stealthy virus that transmits effectively through the air, causes a range of symptoms similar to those of other common respiratory diseases and can be spread by infected people before symptoms even appear. If the virus had escaped from a BSL-2 laboratory in 2019, the leak most likely would have gone undetected until too late.
  • One alarming detail — leaked to The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by current and former U.S. government officials — is that scientists on Dr. Shi’s team fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019. One of the scientists had been named in the Defuse proposal as the person in charge of virus discovery work. The scientists denied having been sick.
  • The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.
  • In December 2019, Chinese investigators assumed the outbreak had started at a centrally located market frequented by thousands of visitors daily. This bias in their search for early cases meant that cases unlinked to or located far away from the market would very likely have been missed
  • To make things worse, the Chinese authorities blocked the reporting of early cases not linked to the market and, claiming biosafety precautions, ordered the destruction of patient samples on January 3, 2020, making it nearly impossible to see the complete picture of the earliest Covid-19 cases. Information about dozens of early cases from November and December 2019 remains inaccessible.
  • A pair of papers published in Science in 2022 made the best case for SARS‑CoV‑2 having emerged naturally from human-animal contact at the Wuhan market by focusing on a map of the early cases and asserting that the virus had jumped from animals into humans twice at the market in 2019
  • More recently, the two papers have been countered by other virologists and scientists who convincingly demonstrate that the available market evidence does not distinguish between a human superspreader event and a natural spillover at the market.
  • Furthermore, the existing genetic and early case data show that all known Covid-19 cases probably stem from a single introduction of SARS‑CoV‑2 into people, and the outbreak at the Wuhan market probably happened after the virus had already been circulating in humans.
  • Not a single infected animal has ever been confirmed at the market or in its supply chain. Without good evidence that the pandemic started at the Huanan Seafood Market, the fact that the virus emerged in Wuhan points squarely at its unique SARS-like virus laboratory.
  • With today’s technology, scientists can detect how respiratory viruses — including SARS, MERS and the flu — circulate in animals while making repeated attempts to jump across species. Thankfully, these variants usually fail to transmit well after crossing over to a new species and tend to die off after a small number of infections
  • investigators have not reported finding any animals infected with SARS‑CoV‑2 that had not been infected by humans. Yet, infected animal sources and other connective pieces of evidence were found for the earlier SARS and MERS outbreaks as quickly as within a few days, despite the less advanced viral forensic technologies of two decades ago.
  • Even though Wuhan is the home base of virus hunters with world-leading expertise in tracking novel SARS-like viruses, investigators have either failed to collect or report key evidence that would be expected if Covid-19 emerged from the wildlife trade. For example, investigators have not determined that the earliest known cases had exposure to intermediate host animals before falling ill.
  • No antibody evidence shows that animal traders in Wuhan are regularly exposed to SARS-like viruses, as would be expected in such situations.
  • In previous outbreaks of coronaviruses, scientists were able to demonstrate natural origin by collecting multiple pieces of evidence linking infected humans to infected animals
  • In contrast, virologists and other scientists agree that SARS‑CoV‑2 required little to no adaptation to spread rapidly in humans and other animals. The virus appears to have succeeded in causing a pandemic upon its only detected jump into humans.
  • it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.
  • a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.
  • Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.
  • it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them.
  • Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics.
  • A successful investigation of the pandemic’s root cause would have the power to break a decades-long scientific impasse on pathogen research safety, determining how governments will spend billions of dollars to prevent future pandemics. A credible investigation would also deter future acts of negligence and deceit by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to be held accountable for causing a viral pandemic
  • Last but not least, people of all nations need to see their leaders — and especially, their scientists — heading the charge to find out what caused this world-shaking event. Restoring public trust in science and government leadership requires it.
Javier E

It feels like the social order is crumbling in Germany | The Spectator - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...-order-is-crumbling-in-germany

germany social order history crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 04 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • . The concept of irrational German angst has become a bit of a cliche over the years, but this time the threats to social cohesion feel very real
  • a wave of aggression against politicians and activists. Last year alone there were 3,691 offences against officials and party representatives, 80 of which were violent
  • This series of assaults on politicians and activists fuel wider fears around the state of Germany’s post-war order
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  • The rise in political violence combined with a rapidly shifting party landscape in which a right-wing force is emerging as a major player reminds many Germans of the 1920s and 30s
  • Despite proportional representation, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats shared over 70 per cent of the vote from 1953 to 2005. Now polls suggest they are now heading for a record low of 46 per cent, and the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is the second most popular party in many surveys.
  • the country had a reputation for being one of the most stable democracies in the world. West Germany bounced back from Nazism with low crime rates, an ‘economic miracle’ starting in the 1950s and two major parties seemingly able to cover most voters’ needs
  • a new spate of scandals has sparked fears that far-right sentiments may be more embedded than political polling suggests. 
  • blatant disregard for the country’s post-war taboos by members of the wealthy elite cast unsettling doubts over the idea that this only about the great unwashed.
  • The feverish moral panic has triggered a range of knee-jerk reactions
  • Gigi D’Agostino’s song will be banned from the Oktoberfest as well as a number of similar events around the country. Prominent politicians are pushing for a ban of the entire AfD. The political violence is to be combatted with harsher punishments specifically for attacks on politicians. 
  • This verboten culture is unlikely to do anything but provoke a backlash
  • Instead of attempting to ban the symptoms of this shattering of certainties, politicians should be thinking about their causes. What Germany needs right now isn’t moral outrage but level-headed pragmatism. 
Javier E

Elon Musk's Latest Dust-Up: What Does 'Science' Even Mean? - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...artup-meta-yann-lecun-a35e48f2

science progress scientific method musk

shared by Javier E on 03 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • Elon Musk is racing to a sci-fi future while the AI chief at Meta Platforms is arguing for one rooted in the traditional scientific approach.
  • Meta’s top AI scientist, Yann LeCun, criticized the rival company and Musk himself. 
  • Musk turned to a favorite rebuttal—a veiled suggestion that the executive, who is also a high-profile professor, wasn’t accomplishing much: “What ‘science’ have you done in the past 5 years?”
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  • “Over 80 technical papers published since January 2022,” LeCun responded. “What about you?”
  • To which Musk posted: “That’s nothing, you’re going soft. Try harder!
  • At stake are the hearts and minds of AI experts—academic and otherwise—needed to usher in the technology
  • “Join xAI,” LeCun wrote, “if you can stand a boss who:– claims that what you are working on will be solved next year (no pressure).– claims that what you are working on will kill everyone and must be stopped or paused (yay, vacation for 6 months!).– claims to want a ‘maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth’ but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform.”
  • Some read Musk’s “science” dig as dismissing the role research has played for a generation of AI experts. For years, the Metas and Googles of the world have hired the top minds in AI from universities, indulging their desires to keep a foot in both worlds by allowing them to release their research publicly, while also trying to deploy products. 
  • For an academic such as LeCun, published research, whether peer-reviewed or not, allowed ideas to flourish and reputations to be built, which in turn helped build stars in the system.
  • LeCun has been at Meta since 2013 while serving as an NYU professor since 2003. His tweets suggest he subscribes to the philosophy that one’s work needs to be published—put through the rigors of being shown to be correct and reproducible—to really be considered science. 
  • “If you do research and don’t publish, it’s not Science,” he posted in a lengthy tweet Tuesday rebutting Musk. “If you never published your research but somehow developed it into a product, you might die rich,” he concluded. “But you’ll still be a bit bitter and largely forgotten.” 
  • After pushback, he later clarified in another post: “What I *AM* saying is that science progresses through the collision of ideas, verification, analysis, reproduction, and improvements. If you don’t publish your research *in some way* your research will likely have no impact.”
  • The spat inspired debate throughout the scientific community. “What is science?” Nature, a scientific journal, asked in a headline about the dust-up.
  • Others, such as Palmer Luckey, a former Facebook executive and founder of Anduril Industries, a defense startup, took issue with LeCun’s definition of science. “The extreme arrogance and elitism is what people have a problem with,” he tweeted.
  • For Musk, who prides himself on his physics-based viewpoint and likes to tout how he once aspired to work at a particle accelerator in pursuit of the universe’s big questions, LeCun’s definition of science might sound too ivory-tower. 
  • Musk has blamed universities for helping promote what he sees as overly liberal thinking and other symptoms of what he calls the Woke Mind Virus. 
  • Over the years, an appeal of working for Musk has been the impression that his companies move quickly, filled with engineers attracted to tackling hard problems and seeing their ideas put into practice.
  • “I’ve teamed up with Elon to see if we can actually apply these new technologies to really make a dent in our understanding of the universe,” Igor Babuschkin, an AI expert who worked at OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, said last year as part of announcing xAI’s mission. 
  • The creation of xAI quickly sent ripples through the AI labor market, with one rival complaining it was hard to compete for potential candidates attracted to Musk and his reputation for creating value
  • that was before xAI’s latest round raised billions of dollars, putting its valuation at $24 billion, kicking off a new recruiting drive. 
  • It was already a seller’s market for AI talent, with estimates that there might be only a couple hundred people out there qualified to deal with certain pressing challenges in the industry and that top candidates can easily earn compensation packages worth $1 million or more
  • Since the launch, Musk has been quick to criticize competitors for what he perceived as liberal biases in rival AI chatbots. His pitch of xAI being the anti-woke bastion seems to have worked to attract some like-minded engineers.
  • As for Musk’s final response to LeCun’s defense of research, he posted a meme featuring Pepé Le Pew that read: “my honest reaction.”
Javier E

Opinion | Belgium Shows What Europe Has Become - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...belgium-election-europe.html

belgium EU crisis right-wing

shared by Javier E on 03 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • In Brussels, the seat of the European Union, rising crime, pollution and decaying infrastructure symbolize a continent in decline. With unusual clarity, Belgium shows what Europe has become in the 21st century: a continent subject to history rather than driving it.
  • For a long time, Belgian politicians and citizens hoped that European integration would release them from their own tribal squabbles. Who needed intricate federal coalitions if the behemoth in Brussels would soon take over? Except for the army and the national museums, all other levers of policy could comfortably be transferred,
  • The upward absorption has not come to pass. The European Union remains a halfway house between national government and continental superstate. There is no E.U. army or capacious fiscal apparatus. Consequently, Belgium has been put in an awkward position. Unable to collapse itself into Europe, it is stuck with a ramshackle federal state
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  • As the ideological glue that allows Belgians to cohabit has come unstuck, the traditional parties of government have found it difficult to retain public backing. Amid a wider fracturing of the vote, Flemish and Walloon voters are now lured by adventurers on right and left
  • Belgium serves as a stern reminder that there are few bulwarks against the trends that ail European nations. The country is no Italy or Netherlands, where the far right is already in government, and party democracy and its postwar prosperity survive only as faint memories.
  • Yet even with Belgium’s lower inequality rates, higher union membership and comparatively stronger party infrastructure, the march of the far right has also proved eerily unstoppable.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Can't College Grads Find Jobs? Here Are Some Theories - and Fixes. - The ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...aduates-jobs-unemployment.html

inflation thinking assumptions fallacy history economics culture politics US policy

shared by Javier E on 01 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • simply tossing your résumé and cover letter into a company’s job portal has a low probability of success, especially now. It’s so easy to submit applications that companies are being bombarded with thousands of them. Human beings can’t possibly review all of them, so they’re reviewed by computers, which simply search for keywords. They don’t understand in any deep way either the applicant’s qualities or the employer’s needs.
  • “The better writer you are, the greater your chance of getting rejected, because you won’t use keywords” the way the evaluation algorithm wants,
  • Personal contact is crucial, he said. Rather than spraying applications far and wide, he recommends focusing on a handful of companies, researching them in depth and contacting a wide range of people connected with them, even their suppliers and customers.
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  • Du Bois’s quote, “Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States,” serves as a poignant reminder of the importance of education, understanding and open discourse in addressing societal challenges.
Javier E

The Jury, Not the Prosecutor, Decides Who's Guilty - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678564

trump trial political prosecution rule of law got

shared by Javier E on 31 May 24 - No Cached
  • Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is an elected prosecutor who ran as a Democrat in a heavily Democratic city. Trump also received more scrutiny from prosecutors after he became a political figure than he’d ever experienced before. But none of this has any bearing on whether Trump actually committed the crimes with which he was charged.
  • The bar for convicting any defendant in the American justice system is extremely high: It requires a unanimous decision by 12 citizens who deem a crime to have occurred beyond a reasonable doubt
  • The more important question is not what motivated the charges, but whether they were justified and proved to a jury’s satisfaction.
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  • A prosecutor may well have political motivation, but his motivation isn’t what determines a verdict; he must prove his charges in court, through an adversarial process. Despite the yelps that Trump was tried in a kangaroo court, his lawyers had every opportunity to challenge jurors, introduce evidence, question prosecution witnesses, and call their own.
  • Trump is also right to note that his business practices and records didn’t attract anywhere near as much attention before he was a politician. Trump was famous before he was president, but becoming the most famous person on Earth is something else entirely. With the perks of fame comes more scrutiny. (Just ask Hunter Biden.)
  • Supporters of the Trump prosecution should be honest about the possibility of political motive underlying the case. The danger of political bias is an inherent flaw in the system of elected district attorneys that most jurisdictions around the U.S. use.
  • Capone was a notorious gangster, involved in murder, bootlegging, and racketeering, so it seems ludicrous that he was nailed on something as procedural and dry and quotidian as evading taxes.
  • the Capone case. The mobster committed many crimes, but he did them in a way that made them hard to prosecute. Like many organized-crime bosses, he made sure to speak about things elliptically and keep his fingerprints (literal and metaphorical) off things. (Does this sound familiar?) But Capone couldn’t hide financial crimes as effectively. Prosecutors went after him for tax evasion because that’s what they could prove. It is not selective prosecution to go charge someone for a crime for which you have evidence, even if you don’t charge them for the other, more difficult-to-prove crimes. It is realism. It’s also justified and just.
  • Republican cries of political prosecution can also be understood in another, better way. Because Trump’s defenders are unwilling to argue that he didn’t falsify the records or that it shouldn’t be a crime, they’re actually arguing that he should get a pass on crimes they view as minor because he’s a political figure
  • “If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” Trump said at a press conference this morning. Indeed, that’s the point of equal justice under the law.
Javier E

Wrong Case, Right Verdict - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...678551

rule of law history US trump

shared by Javier E on 31 May 24 - No Cached
  • If Trump does somehow return to the presidency, his highest priority will be smashing up the American legal system to punish it for holding him to some kind of account—and to prevent it from holding him to higher account for the yet-more-terrible charges pending before state and federal courts. The United States can have a second Trump presidency, or it can retain the rule of law, but not both.
Javier E

The Bottomless College Parent Trap - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...trap-higher-education-ce6d7b86

college sports culture

shared by Javier E on 30 May 24 - No Cached
  • Payments to thousands of former and current athletes will approach $2.8 billion, minus the trial lawyers’ cut of the class-action suits. This follows the NCAA’s decision to let college athletes benefit financially from their names, images and likenesses
  • Most legal analysis of the settlement concludes that the days of the “amateur” college athlete are over. In the future, the men and women on Division I teams and others likely will be regarded as professionals who will be paid to play by universities through revenue-sharing agreements up to $20 million a year per school.
Javier E

Opinion | How We've Lost Our Moorings as a Society - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-civility-society.html

guardrails society evolution context culture crisis trump politics

shared by Javier E on 30 May 24 - No Cached
  • To my mind, one of the saddest things that has happened to America in my lifetime is how much we’ve lost so many of our mangroves. They are endangered everywhere today — but not just in nature.
  • Our society itself has lost so many of its social, normative and political mangroves as well — all those things that used to filter toxic behaviors, buffer political extremism and nurture healthy communities and trusted institutions for young people to grow up in and which hold our society together.
  • You see, shame used to be a mangrove
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  • That shame mangrove has been completely uprooted by Trump.
  • The reason people felt ashamed is that they felt fidelity to certain norms — so their cheeks would turn red when they knew they had fallen short
  • He keeps pushing our system to its breaking point, flooding the zone with lies so that the people trust only him and the truth is only what he says it is. In nature, as in society, when you lose your mangroves, you get flooding with lots of mud.
  • People in high places doing shameful things is hardly new in American politics and business. What is new, Seidman argued, “is so many people doing it so conspicuously and with such impunity: ‘My words were perfect,’ ‘I’d do it again.’ That is what erodes norms — that and making everyone else feel like suckers for following them.”
  • Nothing is more corrosive to a vibrant democracy and healthy communities, added Seidman, than “when leaders with formal authority behave without moral authority.
  • Without leaders who, through their example and decisions, safeguard our norms and celebrate them and affirm them and reinforce them, the words on paper — the Bill of Rights, the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence — will never unite us.”
  • . Trump wants to destroy our social and legal mangroves and leave us in a broken ethical ecosystem, because he and people like him best thrive in a broken system.
  • in the kind of normless world we have entered where societal, institutional and leadership norms are being eroded,” Seidman said to me, “no one has to feel shame anymore because no norm has been violated.”
  • Responsibility, especially among those who have taken oaths of office — another vital mangrove — has also experienced serious destruction.
  • It’s not that the people in these communities have changed. It’s that if that’s what you are being fed, day in and day out, then you’re going to come to every conversation with a certain set of predispositions that are really hard to break through.”
  • Your sense of responsibility to appear above partisan politics to uphold the integrity of the court’s rulings would not allow it.
  • Civil discourse and engaging with those with whom you disagree — instead of immediately calling for them to be fired — also used to be a mangrove.
  • when moral arousal manifests as moral outrage — and immediate demands for firings — “it can result in a vicious cycle of moral outrage being met with equal outrage, as opposed to a virtuous cycle of dialogue and the hard work of forging real understanding.”
  • In November 2022, the Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit advocacy group, surveyed 1,564 full-time college students ages 18 to 24. The group found that nearly three in five students (59 percent) hesitate to speak about controversial topics like religion, politics, race, sexual orientation and gender for fear of negative backlashes by classmates.
  • Locally owned small-town newspapers used to be a mangrove buffering the worst of our national politics. A healthy local newspaper is less likely to go too far to one extreme or another, because its owners and editors live in the community and they know that for their local ecosystem to thrive, they need to preserve and nurture healthy interdependencies
  • in 2023, the loss of local newspapers accelerated to an average of 2.5 per week, “leaving more than 200 counties as ‘news deserts’ and meaning that more than half of all U.S. counties now have limited access to reliable local news and information.”
  • As in nature, it leaves the local ecosystem with fewer healthy interdependencies, making it more vulnerable to invasive species and disease — or, in society, diseased ideas.
  • It used to be that if you had the incredible privilege of serving as U.S. Supreme Court justice, in your wildest dreams you would never have an American flag hanging upside down
  • we have gone from you’re not supposed to say “hell” on the radio to a nation that is now being permanently exposed to for-profit systems of political and psychological manipulation (and throw in Russia and China stoking the fires today as well), so people are not just divided, but being divided. Yes, keeping Americans morally outraged is big business at home now and war by other means by our geopolitical rivals.
  • More than ever, we are living in the “never-ending storm” that Seidman described to me back in 2016, in which moral distinctions, context and perspective — all the things that enable people and politicians to make good judgments — get blown away.
  • Blown away — that is exactly what happens to the plants, animals and people in an ecosystem that loses its mangroves.
Javier E

Opinion | How to Force Justices Alito and Thomas to Recuse Themselves in the Jan. 6 Cas... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...thomas-recuse-trump-jan-6.html

Scotus impartiality constitution

shared by Javier E on 29 May 24 - No Cached
  • The U.S. Department of Justice — including the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, an appointed U.S. special counsel and the solicitor general, all of whom were involved in different ways in the criminal prosecutions underlying these cases and are opposing Mr. Trump’s constitutional and statutory claims — can petition the other seven justices to require Justices Alito and Thomas to recuse themselves not as a matter of grace but as a matter of law.
  • The Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland can invoke two powerful textual authorities for this motion: the Constitution of the United States, specifically the due process clause, and the federal statute mandating judicial disqualification for questionable impartiality, 28 U.S.C. Section 455.
Javier E

Revealed: Israeli spy chief 'threatened' ICC prosecutor over war crimes inquiry | Israe... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-prosecutor-war-crimes-inquiry

spy chief icc prosecutor war crimes inquiry israel mossad trump history politics UN

shared by Javier E on 28 May 24 - No Cached
  • The diplomatic efforts were part of a coordinated effort by the governments of Netanyahu and Donald Trump in the US to place public and private pressure on the prosecutor and her staff.Between 2019 and 2020, in an unprecedented decision, the Trump administration imposed visa restrictions and sanctions on the chief prosecutor. The move was in retaliation to Bensouda’s pursuit of a separate investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, allegedly committed by the Taliban and both Afghan and US military personnel.However, Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, linked the sanctions package to the Palestine case. “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” he said.
Javier E

The Authoritarian Grip on Working-Class Men - 0 views

jamestraub.substack.com/...-authoritarian-grip-on-working

masculinity toxic history culture crisis

shared by Javier E on 27 May 24 - No Cached
  • as Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment  points out, working-class American men “are much more likely to be politically apathetic” than they are to be active authoritarians. “They look for belonging, purpose, and advice, and find a mix of grifters, political hacks and violent extremists who lead them down an ugly road.” That’s the manhood problem.
  • Donald Trump has a special genius for intuiting the dark, unspoken things that people want and need
  • He understands that the era when American men looked to Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart–men who protected, sacrificed, stood tall in the saddle–is over
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  • ask, as both Kleinfeld and Reeves do, how we can reduce the demand for illiberalism and violence by helping working-class men find a place in an increasingly feminized society.
  • We often wonder whether the cause of our illiberal tilt is economic or cultural--a loss of financial security and hope for the future, or a wrenching change in identity, demography and values. The problem of manhood lies at the intersection of these two domains, for working-class men have lost both economic standing and social status.
  • Identity is not simply a dependent variable of economic standing. Men went to matter–as men. If that need is not satisfied by work, it has to be satisfied elsewhere. There must be alternatives to the manosphere. 
  • Everyone, of course, needs virtuous purpose in order to lead a full life, but American working-class men have lost so many traditional sources of selfless action that they have become especially vulnerable to the call of the selfish jerk. Where, then, do you find virtuous purpose? In volunteer work, for example, or in programs of national service. Organizations like Big Brothers can do every bit as much for the big brother as for the little one. 
  • Volunteerism no doubt sounds like a naive prescription in a world hellbent on self-aggrandizement. But the idea of “service,” and its emotional satisfaction, pervaded American life so long as the mainline Protestant churches flourished, which is to say until a generation or two ago.
  • People need to feel needed; and helping those who need you is a source of great joy. Is it really impossible to restore the idea that a man is not only a strong, stoical creature who can throw a football through a tire but one who seeks opportunities to serve others?
Javier E

(3) Chartbook 285: Cal-Tex - How Bidenomics is shaping America's multi-speed energy tra... - 0 views

adamtooze.substack.com/...ook-285-cal-tex-how-bidenomics

transition power generation politics policy

shared by Javier E on 27 May 24 - No Cached
  • If the Texas solar boom, the biggest in the USA, has little to do with Bidenomics, are we exaggerating the impact of Bidenomics? Rather than the shiny new tax incentives is it more general factors such as the plunging cost of PVs driving the renewable surge in the USA. Or, if policy is indeed the key, are state-level measures in Texas making the difference? Or, is this unfair to the IRA? Are its main effects still to come? Will it pile-on a boom that is already underway?
  • What did I learn?
  • First, when we compare the US renewable energy trajectory with the global picture, there is little reason to believe that Bidenomics has, so far, produced an exceptional US trajectory.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Everywhere, new investment in green energy generation is being propelled by general concern for the climate, shifting corporate and household demand, the plunging prices for solar and batteries triggered by Chinese policy, and a combination of national and regional interventions
  • How different would we expect this data to look without the IRA?
  • The most useful overview of these modeling efforts that I have been able to find is by Bistline et al “Power sector impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” in Environmental Research Letters November 2023. If anyone has a better source, please let me know.
  • The top panel shows the historical trajectory of US generating capacity from 1980 to 2021. The second half of the graphic shows how 11 different models predict that the US electricity system might be expected to develop up to 2035, with and without IRA.
  • all the models expect the trends of the 2010s to continue through to the 2030s which means that solar, wind and battery storage dominate America’s energy future. Even without the IRA, the low carbon share of electricity generation will likely rise to 50-55% by 2035. Bidenomics bumps that to 70-80 percent.
  • The question is: “How does the renewable surge of 2022-2024, compare to the model-based expectations, with and without the IRA?”
  • The answer is either, “so so”, or, more charitably, it is “too early to tell”. In broad terms the current rate of expansion is slightly above the rate the models predict without the provision of additional Bidenomics incentives. But what is also clear is that the current rate of expansion, is far short of the long-run pace that should be expected from the IRA
  • At this point, defenders of the IRA interject that the IRA has only just come into effect. Cash from the IRA is only beginning to flow. And in an environment of higher costs for renewable energy equipment and higher interest rates, cash matters.
  • As Yakov Feygin put it: “Maybe the pithiest way to put it is that there are pre-IRA trends and outside IRA trends, but IRA has served to rapidly compress the timeframes for installation in a lot of technologies. So five years has turned into two, for example.”
  • So, to judge the impact of the IRA to date, the real question is not what has been built in 2022 and 2023, but what is in the pipeline.
  • Advised by JP Morgan, sophisticated global players like Ørsted are optimizing their use of both the production and investment tax credits offered by the IRA to launch large new renewable schemes. Of course, correlation is not the same as causation
  • Where the IRA is perhaps doing its most important work may be in incentivizing the middle bracket of projects where green momentum is less certain.
  • According to Utility Drive: “The 10 largest U.S. developers plan to build 110,364 MW of new wind and solar projects over the next five years, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, but the majority of these projects remain in early stages of development. Just 15% of planned wind and solar projects are under construction, and 13% are considered to be in advanced stages of development, … ”
  • The states that I have highlighted in red stand out either for their unusually low existing level of renewable power capacity or their lack of current momentum.
  • Along with Texas, the pipelines for the PJM, MISO and Southeast regions (which includes Florida) look particularly healthy.
  • The relatively modest California numbers should not be a surprise. As Yakov Feygin and others pointed out, what is needed in California is not more raw generating capacity, but more battery storage. And that is what we are seeing in the data.
  • The numbers would be even larger if it were not for the truly surreal logjam in California’s system for authorizing interconnections. According to Hamilton/Brookings data the volume of hybrid solar and batter capacity in the queue for approval is 6.5 times the capacity currently operating in the state. In other words there is an entire energy transition waiting to happen when the overloaded managerial processes of the system catch up
  • Texas’s less bureaucratic system seems to be one of its key advantages in the extremely rapid roll-out of solar.
  • though it may be true that globally speaking the United States as a whole is a laggard in renewable energy development,
  • If California (with an economy roughly comparable to that of Germany at current exchange rates) and Texas (with an economy roughly the size of Italy’s) were countries, they would be #3 and #5 in the world in solar capacity per capita.
  • the obvious question is, which are the laggards in the US energy system.
  • So there is a lot to get excited about, at, what we are learning to call, the “meso”-level of the economy (more on this in a future post).
  • What the state-level data reveal is that there are a significant number of large states in the USA where solar and wind energy have barely made any impact. Pennsylvania, for instance
  • The relative levels of sunshine between US states is irrelevant. As the global solar atlas shows, the entire United States has far better solar potential than North West Europe. If you can grow corn and tobbaco, you can do utility-scale solar. The fact that Arizona is not a solar giant is mind boggling.
  • Texas is both big and truly remarkable. California already is a world leader in renewable energy. Meanwhile, the majority of the US electricity system presents a very different picture. There is a huge distance to be traveled and the pace of solar build-out is unremarkable.
  • This is where national level incentives like the IRA must prove themselves
  • And these local battles in America matter. Given the extremely high per capita energy consumption in the USA, greening state-level energy systems is significant at the global level. It does not compare to the super-sized levels of emissions in China, but it matters.
  • Indonesia’s total installed electricity generating capacity is rated at 81 GW. As far as immediate impact on the global carbon balance is concerned, cleaning up the power systems of Pennsylvania and Illinois would make an even bigger impact.
  • A key test of Biden-era climate and industrial policy will be whether it can untie the local political economy of fossil fuels, which, across many regions of the United States still stands in the way of a green energy transition that now has all the force of economics and technological advantage on its side.
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