Did you know that some of my links, I get from other link roundups? I don’t always give credit to aggregators, since it’s not like they wrote the original article. But in case you like more links, the ones I follow are Critical Distance (games criticism), Perfect Number (ace ex-evangelical blogger), and Ozy (rationalist blogger). I also run a separate link roundup for The Asexual Agenda.
Oh, and in case anyone is interested, I wrote a couple queer fiction book reviews this month: Aces Wild, and The Bell in the Fog. On to the links:
Can You Trust An AI Press Release? | Asterisk Magazine – When I wrote about LLM error rates, I pointed out even when AI companies boast of their models’ performance, the error rates are there in plain sight. But I also said you shouldn’t actually trust those numbers. This article goes into more depth, explaining how AI companies can select information that shows their products in the best light, while understating the performance of rivals.
The Games Behind Your Government’s Next War | People Make Games (video, 1:12 hours) – A look at the world of wargaming, i.e. games made for the serious purpose of helping decision-makers prepare for war and other crises. The video forthrightly confronts the ethical question: is this killing people?
I think my stance is fairly favorable to wargaming. Assuming that wargaming is effective (although this is legitimately in question), I would really rather that decision-makers are good at strategy, rather than bad at it. I wouldn’t celebrate an incompetent soldier for saving the lives of rival soldiers. I think it’s a mistake to blame only the military for bad wars, when a lot of the blame belongs to the cultural and political systems that decide to make war in the first place. The part I blame on the military is when they produce propaganda that tilts cultural sentiment to their own benefit.
“Bullshit Jobs” is a Terrible, Curiosity Killing Concept | The Diff – Like many people I had absorbed the idea of “bullshit jobs” through cultural osmosis. But then I actually read the essay by David Graeber, and I was completely anti-convinced. He’s combining two distinct problems: a) Many people are unsatisfied with their jobs (which does not mean they are useless), and b) Many people have jobs that Graeber thinks are useless (but which workers themselves may or may not be satisfied with). When Graeber touched upon jobs that I have tangential expertise in, it was clear that he lacked the knowledge and imagination to understand their value, so what does that say about the other jobs I don’t know about?
Graeber hypothesizes that about half of jobs are bullshit–a level of conspiracy that requires much greater justification than “I can’t think of what makes these jobs valuable”. If bullshit jobs really were so ubiquitous, that argues in favor of aggressive layoffs, and it’s not like employers haven’t tried that! David Graeber inadvertently aligning with Elon Musk is something we really don’t need in the world.
Graeber extended the essay into a book, which is what this article criticizes. Apparently, Graeber corrected himself on the value of actuaries (whom he disparaged in his original essay) but fails to hold to account any of the epistemological methods that led him to the error in the first place. There are surely some examples of wasted labor in our economy, and the article discusses potential cases–but Graeber’s methods to identify examples is fundamentally flawed.
A surprisingly introspective video from a former Anti-SJW Youtuber | Reddit – It’s commentary on a video by Armoured Skeptic, expressing regret for his involvement in anti-SJW YouTube. I’m linking secondary commentary because I’m not willing to watch the source video, although you can watch it if you like (and let me know your thoughts!). One commenter described Armoured Skeptic as part of the beginning of the alt-right pipeline, and it’s interesting to glimpse what became of these folks once they saw where the pipeline led.
The Air We Breathe | Unlearning Economics (video, 1:17 hours) – Air pollution is the canonical example of a negative externality, so why haven’t we figured out how to deal with it?
The video incidentally discusses the story about health organizations initially insisting that COVID wasn’t airborne, because of a bogus five-micron threshold that was a misinterpretation of research on a different question. I read about that back when the story broke, and it still makes me so mad. That’s scientific malpractice.
Grocery Store Greedflation – Is Price Gouging Behind Higher Food Prices? | The Plain Bagel (video, 16 min) – I’ve seen a lot of people express support for the theory of “greedflation”. My understanding is that this is a legitimate economic theory, but it’s just one of many, and I don’t understand how people can be so confident about it, while being otherwise so skeptical of economics. I think having “greed” in the name is just really good marketing, because it’s basically rage bait. Yes, corporations are greedy, but they weren’t not greedy before, so what exactly do you think “greedflation” means? Is greedflation even about greed at all? In this video Richard discusses grocery store profit margins, and why the evidence for greedflation is mixed at best.
… the canonical example of a negative externality, so why haven’t we figured out how to deal with it?
Can you name a subject in economics with more institutional disincentive to consideration than negative externalities?
… grocery store profit margins…
Most of the reported greedflation I’ve read about happens at the wholesale processing/distribution level.
Ah I like the “greedflation” video- I am also skeptical about how everyone is saying that recent inflation is caused by companies just increasing prices for no reason other than they just want to. Isn’t the market supposed to correct for that? There must be a reason that the market is slow to correct for it in this case, probably something related to the pandemic. The way people talk about this on social media though, it’s like one day the bosses at big grocery chains just decided to raise prices because they’re greedy- as if this is just some new idea that they’ve never had before, and there’s nothing stopping them from making as much money as they want by making prices as high as they want, except that they shouldn’t do that because it’s not nice.
I should acknowledge that I don’t have an adequate response to the proposition that greedflation occurs further up the supply chain. I just don’t know much about it.
Honestly, I’m not so much interested in the merit of greedflation as an economic theory, as I am interested in the phenomenon of popular interest in the theory. What do people think the theory means, and does that align with what it actually means?
Richard only really considered the question of whether grocery stores were exercising greedflation, but it was informative to see how one might investigate the question. Profit margins: yes that makes sense. But there are several distinct kinds of profit margins, and some measures might naturally go up with inflation.