>Single women’s marriage/cohabitation rates rise by 29 percentage points and employment among baseline nonemployed women rises 27 percentage points after six or more quarters.
These effect sizes are huge. That and the drama of the findings provokes general skepticism. So I welcome some experienced folks picking this apart.
essentially negativity progresses since:
>it is easier to differentiate oneself through negative comments than through positive comments
I find this interesting in two respects:
1) I agree with the finding about social media
2) In my experience this effect is broadly true beyond the internet and before it:
Journalism skews negative because it is easier to capture your attention with the bad vs. the good (in part due to human loss aversion).
This is my experience in the domain of art as well. Most high-status books and stories deal with negative themes and deeply flawed characters. There is a basic assumption that somehow the negative has more artistic value than the positive, and perhaps the positive is necessarily bland and uniform.
e.g. "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
In my experience this is wrong. It is however true that its easier to come up with specific negative art.
Positive states have lower entropy: there are fewer of them. There are many more ways to fail. Thus it's easier to come up with novel negative things vs. positive.
I think therefore the negative slant to our art represents a culture of laziness in our institutions. Part of this is the result of selection: unhappy artists succeed more easily, rise to levels of authority, and assume that anyone who does not share their negative view and aesthetics are bland.
It's sad though. I think they believe all happy families are alike because they have never truly understood even one happy person.
The implications are big: a society led by such sad people becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
OK, these effect sizes are huge. That and the drama of the findings provokes general skepticism. So I welcome some experienced folks picking this apart.
>Single women’s marriage/cohabitation rates rise by 29 percentage points and employment among baseline nonemployed women rises 27 percentage points after six or more quarters.
OK, it's temping for me to make this comment about Vinod and perceptions of his past actions. But he's not important in the larger picture, and this issue definitely is.
Overall, we absolutely need to devote a lot of energy and discussion to this question now, since there are a lot of options, and building consensus and implementing anything smoothly will be slow. If we wait too long, we tempt disaster due to factors like unrest or missing the window of control. For example, the world is getting populist leaders now because we failed to address the inequality of growth in the last 30 years. So the more intelligent, powerful people raise this issue now, the better.
I'm not sure about each of these options yet. Definitely the change to capital gains makes sense (cough, OK I must gesture here at the carried interest rule for a moment...).
Sovereign wealth funds scare me. A fundamental approach where the government owns and directs capital sets up the wrong incentives. Over time, it risks privileging the elite, or at best the leviathan, over the median individual.
Rather, my gut is to pursue a broader distribution of wealth & power, e.g. by:
1) reducing the barriers to capital value, e.g. through promoting open source software, and eroding software IP
2) creating a systemic forcing function reducing inequality. The ideal one would be progressive wealth tax. Of course this is incredibly difficult in practice.
3) creating friction agains large corporations. this would need to be a totally new approach to antitrust. beyond eroding IP, I'm not sure of the best way to do this generally, even in ideal terms (perhaps progressive taxes on capital value appreciation?)
Taking action to even the distribution of wealth & power anywhere in the world is a good idea. this has always been true. The Machine Learning Revolution is just making it more urgently true.
That said it's a bad idea to have the state:
- pick the winners (who will just end up being the ones who lobby the most)
- pick the industry (what even counts as "AI"? machine learning is applicable to to every domain)
Having done my share of pipetting back in the day, I have no problem letting my ML overlords take that part of the job.
for good or ill, overall biology is so complex and hard to experiment with, ML progress will be bottlenecked by other factors at a level of productivity much lower relative to information technology. But it's still be a huge deal.
Every system has its tradeoffs. But I am sold on the idea that our current one is a major contributor to the degradation of our institutions. The options here would likely be better.
Sure it's hard to make any changes to our entrenched system. But at least these changes are non-partisan. Of course since it hurts the current system both parties will cooperate to defeat change.
Your phone can use tiny skin-color changes to measure your heart rate, measuring your face when you unlock it. good to within 5 beats per minute. it also estimates its confidence of each measurement, and throws them away when too low. impressive, and a bit scary what you can measure with neural nets.
also:
>the material record offers indirect evidence for distributed authority. Indus seals, small stone stamps that likely facilitated exchange and credit, were found primarily in private residences at Mohenjo-daro rather than in temples or central administrative buildings.
Speculative, of course. But cool data & approach. And it doesn't have to prove anything, except that it's plausible there are other ways to structure societies, that can have different results.
Impressed by the progress. Also interesting how much stronger depression is as a risk factor, vs. all others.