Sam Enright is engaged in innovation policy at Progress Ireland, an independent think tank based in Dublin. He also runs a publication called The Fitzwilliam. Most pertinently, on his personal blog, he features a well-received link roundup; the following is a summarized version of his Links for May.
Blogs and Short Links
1. Yudhister Kumar discusses the rationale behind Occam’s razor. While I grasped only about 10% of his insights, this article aligns with our ongoing discourse regarding the philosophical implications of Solomonoff induction.
2. You could win $50,000 by submitting an essay for the Berggruen Prize on whether we are entering a new Axial Age.
3. Lauren Gilbert’s links point to a new paper by Nick Bloom and colleagues, which estimates that government statistics yield a 25:1 return on investment.
This leads nicely into a feature on Hiya Jain’s article about P.C. Mahalanobis and the development of statistics in India. Hiya and I share similar thoughts; this essay complements my earlier discussion of the Second Five-Year Plan in my Milton Friedman essay.
4. In an exciting recent update from the field of Islamic theology, a fatwa has been issued against AIs that themselves issue fatwas.
5. Ava Huang examines photos of Marilyn Monroe.
6. Check out the latest update from the Institute for Progress.
7. Niko McCarty is developing an interactive book on biology.
8. I expressed a desire on my ideas page for an app that requires users to write a sentence about their intentions before changing tasks, speculating about its potential impact on technological psychology. A reader informed me about similar software called one sec.
9. What Rebecca Lowe has been reading. I’m curious if the reason large language models seem relatively immune to engagement farming and other negative social media incentives is that while talking with AI is genuinely enjoyable, reading other people’s interactions with AI can feel tedious.
10. Daily links, featuring Sam Enright. Last month’s links also made it to Marginal Revolution.
11. Introducing The Anthropic Institute, directed by Jack Clark.
12. Through an understood biological mechanism, dogs can sometimes detect cancer by smelling a patient’s breath. My friend Akash Kulgod started a company named Dognosis, aiming to train AI models to identify cancer more effectively using this phenomenon. He has recently published promising results in the Journal of Clinical Oncology about dog-based diagnostics. Kudos to everyone involved.
Music and Podcasts
1. Explore what Claude Mythos means for national security .
2. It’s difficult for many to comprehend the catastrophic collapse of the Irish economy during the Global Financial Crisis. While I’m not sure if definitive literature on this exists, I found value in this three-part series about Brian Cowen’s government from 2008 to 2011. However, it’s unfortunate that heavy drinking may have impaired some judgement during that period.
3. An underrated podcast worth exploring is I Was There Too, in which actors share experiences about minor roles in iconic films. Here’s an episode about being an extra in There Will Be Blood.
4. The Rest is History delves into the UK in the 1970s with episodes one, two, three, and four. From this series, I learned that Thatcher oversaw the closure of more grammar schools than any prior Education Secretary, and she appeared to support Ted Heath’s government’s system of price controls. Interestingly, non-Brits may not realize how much the party now associated with Euroscepticism has transformed: Labour’s 1983 election platform promised to withdraw from the European Union without a referendum.
Here are some new albums I discovered or listened to in depth this month:
5. Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 2. I’ve recently enjoyed listening to all Mahler’s symphonies in a listening salon, and this remains my favorite.
6. Maurice Ravel, Violin Sonata No. 2. I recently attended an incredible live performance by Hilary Hahn. The concert was the best I’ve attended this year, and the jazz and blues influences in the second movement are particularly fascinating for a composition from 1927.
7. Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure. Previously unfamiliar with pianist Andrew Hill, I found this album an essential gap in my jazz knowledge. Featuring stellar musicians like Eric Dolphy, Joe Henderson, and Tony Williams, it’s recorded by the famous Rudy van Gelder. Highly recommended for those seeking an accessible introduction to avant-garde music.
8. Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food. I’m particularly fond of the lyrics on these albums, especially the track The Good Thing, and the innovative cover of Take Me to the River. This marks the start of their collaboration with Brian Eno.
Books and Papers
1. Jonathan Uesato et al., Solving Math Word Problems with Process-based and Outcome-based Feedback. I read this during the ‘reasoning’ month in the Fitzwilliam AI Circle. When working to enhance a language model’s performance, a dilemma arises concerning the evaluation of its results based either on its final answers or the reasoning process behind them. This 2022 paper provides crucial insights into that dilemma. The authors found that while outcome supervision suffices for accuracy, it yields different reasoning quality compared to process supervision, and outcome-supervised reward models indirectly enhance reasoning quality. They also contend that process-based feedback has distinct interpretative and alignment advantages.
2. Jason Wei et al., Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models. It’s not immediately apparent that guiding a language model with a step-by-step thought process would enhance its reasoning abilities. Yet, this study confirms that it does. Interestingly, it was also unexpected that reasoning would translate so well into natural language without veering into ‘mentalese’ thought processes.
Annotating numerous thought chains for improvement is a costly endeavor. This paper demonstrates that a reward model can be trained to recognize effective reasoning.
Presented at NeurIPS 2022, it feels distant now, though I recall Steven Pinker’s outcry regarding the change in the conference’s name from “NIPS” to something less controversial.
3. Ryan Hill, Carolyn Stein, Race to the Bottom: Competition and Quality in Science. I engaged with this for the Institute for Progress’ course on innovation economics for PhD students.
The core argument posits that scientists, to a considerable extent, are driven by the desire to be first in their discoveries. This creates a counterproductive incentive, where the quality of research tends to decline in the most promising areas, as scientists rush to publish first. If only a standardized assessment for scientific promise existed, we could empirically test this hypothesis.
4. Jean Acheson et al., The Elasticity of Taxable Income. This is perhaps the most enjoyable government report I’ve read. You can find my detailed response in my Progress Ireland essay.
5. Emmanuel Saez et al., The Elasticity of Taxable Income with Respect to Marginal Tax Rates: A Critical Review. This serves as the main survey in the literature regarding taxable income elasticity. There are few clean natural experiments available in economics, and with limited major tax reforms, the empirical tax literature tends to focus on events such as the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the Reagan tax cuts, the Kennedy tax cuts, and (as discussed in this paper) the Clinton tax increases.
Emmanuel Saez often collaborates with Thomas Piketty, and alongside Gabriel Zucman, they form a trio of French economists who have faced intense scrutiny for their modeling techniques. My conversations with tax economists indicate that Piketty and his colleagues tend to make assumptions that paint a bleaker picture of inequality in the U.S.
Returning to this paper, I chuckled at the footnote on page 17, which highlights a public choice theory argument advocating for a narrow tax base. According to Brennan and Buchanan in The Power to Tax, the state tends to maximize revenue beyond socially optimal levels. This suggests that tax systems should be designed to complicate additional revenue generation, ideally leading to a more distortionary and limited tax base. Conventional optimal tax theory, like the Mirrlees review, seeks to optimize social well-being while raising necessary funds. If the efficacy of various tax types in generating revenue differs and the government tends to collect excessive revenue, we may need to invert these optimal tax principles.
In pursuit of my most unconventional perspectives, I’ve considered how Ireland’s heavy reliance on distortionary corporate taxes may actually be advantageous, as it hinders the state from generating excessive revenue.
6. Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training (3rd edition). While discussing music is akin to dancing about architecture, the challenge of expressing the value of a weightlifting book is more complex. Nevertheless, I found it enlightening and entertaining. I have been practicing the outlined program for about six months and have made consistent progress, despite some travel disruptions. In line with my tendency for public self-improvement, I am currently drafting an essay about weightlifting.
7. Jay Cummings, Real Analysis: A Long-Form Mathematics Textbook (2nd edition). Engaging in math problems after a weightlifting session might seem unconventional, but this was an excellent book, far more engaging than Rosenlicht’s Introduction to Analysis. The book’s homepage is worth checking out.
For anyone seriously considering graduate studies in economics, I recommend this book. Comfort with real analysis is essential for understanding theoretical economic research, as concepts like compactness—while seemingly niche—are actually vital and beautifully applicable.
Films and Videos
1. Rohit Shetty’s Chennai Express. This marked my inaugural experience with Bollywood, being my third Indian film overall after S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR and the remarkable Pather Panchali. Although this film is often described as “timepass,” an endearing term in Indian English, it has gained immense popularity, with one of its songs garnering nearly 300 million views on YouTube, equivalent to the total subscribers of the T-Series channel.
A significant portion of Chennai Express satirizes cultural disparities between North and South India, though it leans heavily on Northern humor directed at dosai, idli, and head-bobbing, lacking a reciprocal commentary. This might be a missed chance to critique the excessive involvement of former movie stars in Tamil Nadu politics, but perhaps I am overanalyzing it.
The plot relies heavily on the protagonist being unable to speak Tamil, which complicates the narrative for those who can’t distinguish Indian languages. My friend Claude Opus 4.7 provides an interesting take on differentiating languages for English speakers.
The main character is portrayed by Shah Rukh Khan, also known as “King Khan.” My first awareness of him came through his guest appearance on David Letterman. His staggering level of fame is genuinely remarkable.
2. Greg Kohs’ AlphaGo documents the historic Go match between DeepMind and Lee Sedol in 2016. This documentary is available for free on YouTube. This was my third viewing, and I teared up again, especially enjoying the charming character of the European Go champion Fan Hui.
Endnotes:
[1]This may technically only be a blog post, but it originates from the official website of the Jordanian government’s department for issuing fatwas.
[2] This is, to my knowledge, unrelated to Tyler Cowen.
[3]Referendums, as we understand, are considered un-British. Searching for this was my first introduction to Grokipedia. I can’t ascertain whether Michael Foot is sufficiently ‘woke’ to elicit Elon Musk’s ire.
[4]Compared to figures like Ornette Coleman, Hill embraces a more accessible aspect of hard bop, making it arguably the last subgenre that could have been danced to.
[5]This likely pertains to mathematics or similar fields where outcomes can be verified. The study utilized the GSM8K dataset, focusing on straightforward math word problems.
[6]This is the same context Martin Feldstein discussed in his 1995 paper.
[7]Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have pointed out that French economists often approach views influenced more by their nationality than professional criteria.
[8]The evidence suggesting a connection between fiscal centralization and a minimal state is significantly mixed, ultimately refuting an appealing theory.
[9]Cummings describes this as the “greatest definition in mathematics.”
[10]RRR is a Telugu film, often referred to as ‘Tollywood’, a term shared with the Bengali film sector, derived from Kolkata’s Tollygunge district. In contrast, Pather Panchali is a Bengali production; I was introduced to Ray through an essay by Amartya Sen.
