Saturday, May 9, 2015

Highly Linkable

We begin with some short videos:


The NFL Draft was last week. Brian Burke re-examined Massey and Thaler's landmark paper "The Loser's Curse: Decision-Making & Market Efficiency in the NFL Draft" applying the new CBA. The findings are interesting in that there continues to be little to no surplus value at the top draft picks with a lot to be had in the second and third rounds. This is not what the typical football fan (or GM) wants to think. Just to illustrate, look at what the Buffalo Bills did.

The supply of land (like all resources) is not fixed in the long run (and the long run does not mean a long time from now)--so explains Don Boudreaux.

Warren Zola asks, "What IS the NCAA's mission?"

Arnold Kling has a new meme: Teaching Emergent Economics. Don't miss the first one on trade as a technology.

Sumner argues that investing is not like guessing the winner of a beauty pageant as suggested famously by Keynes.

I love this technique, The Mellow Heuristic, Bryan Caplan argues using for adjudicating intellectual disputes when directly relevant information is scarce. I discovered it for myself and have used it since late childhood. 

Never shy of asking the tough questions, Robin Hanson asks us to rank the sacred.

Would you/should you/could you pay for a dinner reservation--so asks Tim-I-am Harford.

Finally, some counter-conventional wisdom (AKA, stuff people are getting wrong):

  • Alex Tabarrok exposes what business journalists and some economists don't understand about efficiency wages--their idea that paying workers more works magic.
  • Terry Burnham empirically challenges the idea born of Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and echoed by Gladwell's David and Goliath that simply making problems harder to read improves test taker results.
  • Ken Popehat White breaks down what an emblematic McClatchy column on free speech gets wrong.
  • Alex Tabarrok appears again to show how Jon Stewart is wrong on many levels about education in Baltimore.
  • Scott Sumner says basically NOBODY understands the concept of "currency manipulation".

Why Are We Afraid Of Getting Smarter?

What I would watch for over the next 15 years are developments that enable humans to evolve more rapidly, in order to compete with machines.
That is from Arnold Kling discussing Vinod Khosla's essay about the next technology revolution.

Thinking about the singularity and perhaps it is a bad analogy, but will our future robot overlords be of the demeanor of teenagers or middle-aged adults ... or grandparents, and will they be male or female? Will they be an it or a they (a collective like the Borg or individuals)? Will they be Mr. Spock or Navin Johnson? In other words, how human will they be and how much will that hold them back?

Despite all the worry about the singularity, I come down firmly on the side that advances in AI, et al. will be used to radically improve humans. I foresee improvements by orders of magnitude to cognitive abilities in addition to health, strength, and other physical attributes as we advance scientifically and economically. Basically we are some future cyborgs' impoverished ancestors. And of course realize that from nature's point of view up to now we have been the super AI.

Also, to counter the doom and gloom regarding the loss of jobs taken by robots, I offer (in addition to this evidence): Some people predicted the device that is the modern smart phone, but who predicted the massive size of the app universe that serves it? Some predicted how computers would bring productivity enhancements and job replacement/elimination in modern business, but who predicted the magnitude or breadth of information technology jobs?

It is much easier to imagine the elimination of work through improvements. It is much harder to imagine what it takes to get there and what else is created along the way. It is simple to master a pencil and imagine how useful it is immediately upon first encounter. It is virtually impossible to fully comprehend what it takes to create a pencil or to conceive of the smallest sample of that which it can be used to design.

There is always more out there.