Tag Archives: Ericrweinstein

Me vs. the DISC

Posted on by

1. One of Eric Weinstein’s catch-phrases is the DISC, which I think stands for the Distributed Information Suppression Complex.

2. Recently, I was asked if I want to contribute some sections to a guide for college students of first-year economics. In looking at the guide, I was reminded of my frustrations with mainstream economics. The GDP factory. The failure to appreciate intangible factors. The failure to incorporate the business problems posed by the Internet into mainstream courses. My seemingly hopeless moonshot to overthrow neoclassical economics. My attempt with Specialization and Trade that fell with a thud. etc.

3. One idea that I extracted from Jeffrey Friedman’s turgid prose is that the economics profession probably selects for those who believe in and desire technocratic power. That seems to me what drives the DISC in economics. It leads to things like Raj Chetty’s project.

A central part of Opportunity Insights’ mission is to train the next generation of researchers and policy leaders on methods to study and improve economic opportunity and related social problems. This page provides lecture materials and videos for a course entitled “Using Big Data Solve Economic and Social Problems,” taught by Raj Chetty and Greg Bruich at Harvard University.

Gosh, if you were to just link data from tax returns, credit bureaus, and Google searches, imagine how well “seeing like a state” could work. Ugh.

4. Unfortunately, I am Bill. Let me tell you the story of Bill. In 1990, I was promoted to a low-level management position in charge of five people inside Financial Research at Freddie Mac. One of the staff I inherited was Bill. Bill was a very bright guy, the sort who is called a “computer genius” by people who are intimidated by computers, and even by some who are not intimidated. He was older, in his fifties, with the title of “economist” but doing the work of a glorified research assistant. Bill had bounced around different departments at Freddie Mac, as one supervisor would unload him for his performance issues and another would pick him up for his potential and background.

Bill was very popular with the other staff. When they had a gnarly problem in SAS or with installing new software on a PC (this was a challenge in those days), he would help. Unfortunately, he found these problems so interesting that he would gladly drop whatever assignment you gave him in order to work on the tech issues. So if he was supposed to run a report that I needed for a meeting with top management the next day, I could not count on him to do it. He was very distractable.

One day, he distractedly wandered through the tape library for Freddie Mac’s mainframe computers. I have no idea why. He pulled down a tape and, lo and behold, he found data that had been missing for years. It was data from loans that were originated in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The data was no longer needed for processing the loans, but it was priceless for research purposes. We could now correlate default rates to data from loan applications, such as the original loan-to-value ratio.

I soon hired another research assistant, Sudha. She was far from brilliant, and her computer skills were weak, but she was meticulous and organized. The other staff, who loved Bill, resented Sudha, especially because Bill always ended up doing the work for Sudha’s memos. But when I left my position, my replacement soon said to me, “Now I understand what you were doing. You needed Sudha in order to get Bill’s projects done.”

So I am Bill. I am distractable. That is who I am. That is where I live. Being distractable perhaps enables me to discover insights. But it also is a weakness. If I were like Bryan Caplan, I would spend several years delving deeply into a topic and come out with a compelling book. Maybe somebody needs to find a Sudha to pair with me.

Speculative thoughts on evolution

Posted on by

In a podcast, Eric Weinstein and Tom Bilyeu discuss a number of things, including evolution. I want to focus on that topic, which comes up sporadically, especially at minutes 11-15, 1:19, 1:24-1:31. A related issue is learning disability, which comes at minute 25, minute 57, minute 1:03, minute 1:17, and elsewhere.

My understanding of genetics and natural selection differs from Eric’s. Keep in mind that I never took a biology course, and most of any scientific discussion of alleles and so on goes right past me. So you should trust him more than you trust me.

I want to claim that evolution is like a statistician with insufficient data to determine whether a particular gene should be passed along or not. My slogan might be “Evolution selects for traits, and genes only code for proteins*” *or do other biochemical stuff.

Think of evolution as statistician. Call this EAS. EAS does not necessarily know which traits to keep. Take left-handedness, for example. Do we need to tell a just-so story in which left-handedness has survival value at a population level? Or can the genes for left-handedness have survived because they don’t have much impact on survival either way? Or is left-handedness an emergent property of gestation, not determined entirely by genetics? Maybe left-handedness is just a random variant that does not affect survival at either an individual or a group level.

EAS can figure out when single-gene mutations that are bad, and it can work on selecting those out. But a lot of traits are not single-gene based, and traits themselves are multidimensional. Suppose that we think in terms of an input-output matrix or a production function in which genes are inputs and traits are outputs. My sense is that the relationship between the inputs and the outputs is so complex that not only can we not figure out that relationship, but evolution cannot figure it out, either. So maybe there are some “bad” genetic combinations that get selected out, but there are plenty of genetic combinations that are far from optimal that do not get selected out.

Suppose that I have a combination of genes that is far from ideal for survival. But a lot of those genes overlap with genes that are ideal for survival, so evolution cannot be sure what to keep and what to discard. Furthermore, even though my combination of genes is “bad,” it is not so bad that I am unable to survive and reproduce. So “bad” combinations of genes can persist, and you cannot say that merely because a gene has persisted it must have some survival value. Same with traits.

So I am arguing against Eric’s inclination to see everyone as having good traits, and the rest of us should work to see the gifts that others have. I think instead that some people who just seem stupid or lazy are in fact stupid or lazy, due to a combination of the genes they inherited and the random adverse events that occurred during gestation. (One of my main takeaways from Kevin Mitchell’s Innate is that lots of bad things can happen during gestation.) EAS is not going to get rid of their traits or their genes. They are entitled to human dignity, but we should not set them up for failure by claiming that they really can perform great feats with the right encouragement.

Culture also affects selection. The person you want to mate with in an agricultural society may differ from the person you wanted to mate with in a hunter-gatherer tribe, so one can imagine culture changing the gene pool over time. In the last 20 minutes or so of the podcast, Eric argues that developments such as birth control and economic forces have affected sexual preferences. If so, then obviously this is a rapid cultural change, not a biological evolutionary one.

As an aside, I think that Eric and I share the trait of being disagreeable, and that it happened to work for us. He felt a strong need to prove himself to the educators who doubted him, and that was a powerful motivator for him. Similarly, when I was forty, I was tired of people saying that I was a visionary who could not implement anything, and that motivated me when I started my business. I decided that in order to succeed I needed to network, and I did more of that than I have ever done before or since. That helped make me lucky.

But being disagreeable and wanting to prove yourself to people who doubt you is hardly a guarantee of success. If it were, then the struggling students that Eric wants to champion might do better if their teachers are doubtful rather than supportive.

Eric’s view reminds me of that of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Law of Compensation.

Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else

I do not think that the genetic/gestation lottery is as fair as that. Some defects are just defects. And some excesses are just advantages.

Eric Weinstein and Tyler Cowen, partially annotated

Posted on by

The podcast is here.

For the first hour, it reminds me of conversations I occasionally had at home as a teenager, in which I would climb onto an intellectual ledge and my father would try to gently talk me down. Here, Tyler plays the role of my father.

At one hour and six minutes, Tyler himself climbs onto a ledge. In talking about the stagnation that began in 1973, he speaks of the “feminization” of our society.

One possibility is that he was thinking, “Our society reduced its rate of risk-taking and novelty-seeking. Women tend to like risk-taking and novelty-seeking less than men. Therefore, it is fair to speak of feminization.”

The first two statements are controversial, but suppose that they are true. The conclusion still does not follow. We need some link that connects the premises to the conclusion at the level of society. Did women, starting around 1973, acquire significant power to direct corporate investment and/or the regulatory apparatus? Or did men in these positions lose their, er, manhood around this time? I don’t think that’s a ledge you want to stand on.

Another interpretation of “feminization” works much better but is somewhat less interesting. That is, we can say that because of the decline of manufacturing and the rise of the New Commanding Heights industries of education and health care, employment opportunities for women improved while those for men worsened. At the same time, widening the door for women to enroll in universities was like opening up professional sports to African-Americans in that the formerly-excluded were able to compete effectively and some of the formerly-protected were left worse off.

This latter interpretation allows “feminization” to explain why earnings of the median working-age male have shown at best disappointing growth over the past 35 years. But it does not work as a broad sociological explanation for other phenomena, such as a slowdown in scientific discovery or an apparent decline in the productivity of civil engineering.

About 15 minutes later in the podcast, Eric tries to interest Tyler in a comparison of mainstream and heterodox thinkers. Tyler will have none of it. He says that we are the last generation that will understand the distinction. His view appears to be that institutional brand names, such as “New York Times” or “Harvard Economics Department” will not impress the Internet generation.

So where does that lead? What becomes of what Eric would call society’s “sense-making apparatus”? One scary scenario is that it doesn’t get any better than it is today, so that the loss of the information Leviathans with which we grew up will lead to a sort of Hobbesian “war of all against all.” A more optimistic scenario would be a “cream rises” outcome in which to attain broad credibility you have to rise to a very high level of intellectual rigor. Think of Scott Alexander as an example.

Podcast on Preference Falsification

Posted on by

Eric Weinstein and Timur Kuran. It’s almost three hours, and I listened to the whole thing. I might listen to parts of it again, because there are lots of little pieces that were interesting.

One interesting piece was Kuran’s recollection of Donald Trump belittling John McCain by saying that being captured did not make McCain a war hero. Kuran’s point was that Trump was violating political norms and his willingness to do so increased his support. As I recall, Kuran used the metaphor of “guardrails” and said that Trump was willing to ignore them.

In the three-axes model, conservatives are very attached to guardrails. Human beings are dangerous drivers on the road of life, and guardrails like religion and traditional values are what keep us from smashing into telephone poles. But in Kuran’s analysis, Trump’s supporters were so fed up with having to pretend to go along with elites that they were happy to see someone who clearly did not care what the conservative establishment thought about him.

I am not happy with the term “preference falsification.” In standard economics, preferences refer to consumer choices, and we say that “choices reveal preferences.” But not many examples that the speakers give to illustrate preference falsification involve consumption. Instead, some of the examples in the podcast refer to signals. So in Turkey when secularism was in power, people signaled that they were secular even if they were religious. Now they have to do the opposite. Also, many examples refer to political beliefs or voting behavior.

I am afraid that if you are not more careful in defining preference falsification, you end up using it as an all-purpose boo-word. The podcast includes some discussion of the suppression of ideas in academia. I’m totally on board that idea suppression is an issue. I am less convinced that applying the term “preference falsification” provides additional insight.

Persuasion vs. Demonization

Posted on by

My latest essay begins,

I will describe two modes of political discourse, which I call persuasion mode and demonization mode. In persuasion mode, we treat people on the other side with respect, we listen to their logical and factual presentations, and we respond with logical and factual presentations of our own. In demonization mode, we tell anyone who will listen that people on the other side are awful human beings.

Although I don’t cite Eric Weinstein’s podcast with Timur Kuran, I think that listening to that podcast influenced what I wrote. I have some comments about that podcast scheduled to go up on this blog next week.

Eric Weinstein on the IDW

Posted on by

He speaks and futzes with a coffee mug in a twenty-minute video, in which he explains the origins of the intellectual dark web. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

My thoughts.

1. Weinstein speaks of “we” as if the label IDW was concocted by a a conspiracy of folks sitting in a room kicking around ideas for names. I doubt that it happened that way.

2. I think that my post following the Bari Weiss article mostly got the IDW’s philosophy correct. I wrote,

Really, the principles of good intellectual debate are not that obscure. Just make arguments as if you were trying to change the mind of a reasonable person on the other side. I believe that the reason that we don’t observe much of this is that most people are trying to raise their status within their own tribe rather than engage in reasoned discourse. It’s sad that reasoned discourse does not raise one’s status as much as put-downs and expressions of outrage.

Although he uses different terminology, Weinstein seems to suggest that institutions of the mainstream media–he names CNN, NPR, the NYT, and “magazines like The Atlantic“–have degenerated into put-downs and expressions of outrage at the expense of reporting the news. Stories that would reflect badly on the ability or moral conduct of oppressed groups, or that would reflect favorably on the moral conduct of privileged groups, cannot be processed by these institutions that hitherto were fairly reliable curators of news. The IDW is a reaction against, or an alternative to, the dereliction of duty on the part of the mainstream outlets. Not an alternative news source, but an alternative source of discussion and analysis.

3. Weinstein thinks that the mainstream media will not appreciate a rival. But it is worse than that. The oppressor-oppressed narrative is a main binding tribal force for progressives. I would say the main binding force. I doubt that these folks can tolerate someone who claims to be on the left but challenges that narrative. The Jonathan Haidts and Eric Weinsteins of the world are going to be chased out of their village with spears and rocks.

4. After watching the video, I would say that the IDW is making a wager. The bet is this: we know that we will be branded as racists or troglodytes by the mainstream media. Our wager is that the public will see us as the decent human beings we are, and the attacks will rebound to discredit the mainstream media rather than discredit those who identify with the IDW.

I know from watching other videos that Weinstein is far from confident that he can win such a wager. But the attempt is to his credit.

Eric Weinstein on economics

Posted on by

I found my way to what he wrote a couple years ago.

So long as public goods make up a minority of a market economy, taxes on non-public goods can be used to pay for the exception where price and value gap. But in the modern era, things made of atoms (e.g. vinyl albums) are being replaced by things made of bits (e.g. MP3 files). While 3D printing is still immature, it vividly showcases how the plans for an object will allow us to disintermediate its manufacturer. Hence, the previous edge case of market failure should be expected to claim an increasingly dominant share of the pie.

This reminds me of my 2002 essay, asymptotically free goods.

An asymptotically free good is a good where almost of all of the cost involved consists of research and development. It differs from a natural monopoly in two ways.

1. In contrast with an amusement park or a utility, the cost of maintaining the capital for an asymptotically free good is relatively low. Once the research is complete and the idea is proven, the costs are trivial. In the absence of patent protection, there is nothing to stop a competititor from taking the idea and driving the price close to zero.

For example, once you have undertaken the research to produce a new miracle drug, the marginal and average costs of producing it are low. To take another example, once devices have been designed and protocols established for a high-speed wireless network, the cost of providing and maintaining the equipment for a network may be low relative to the number of users.

2. Asymptotically free goods are like public goods in that it is costly to exclude someone from enjoying the benefit of an asymptotically free good.

–It is costly to hook someone up to the electric grid. It is costly to keep someone off a wireless network.

–The cost of setting up and maintaining a gate at an amusement park is relatively low. The cost of policing the Internet to stop music swapping is enormous.

Later, Weinstein says,

Advertising and privacy transfer (rather than user fees) have become the business model of last resort for the Internet corporate giants.

We are not in a neoclassical world. In my essay, I conclude

Problems are being solved not by throwing capital and labor at them, but by undertaking research and development which, when completed, leads to solutions that cost relatively little in terms of traditional factors of production. . .

For those who tend to view government as an instrument of the public good whenever the free-market outcome may be flawed, asymptotically free goods provide an excuse for more government intervention. For those who tend to see government as providing an instrument by which status quo interests can impede change, asymptotically free goods are a reason for keeping government hands off.

For his part, Weinstein concludes

Capitalism and Communism which briefly resembled victor and vanquished, increasingly look more like Thelma and Louise; a tragic couple sent over the edge by forces beyond their control. What comes next is anyone’s guess and the world hangs in the balance.