Here is a new paper by Sara Abrahamsson.  Perhaps there is Norwegian exceptionalism at work, but the results reflect my expectations reasonably closely.  The basic setting is that smart phones were banned in middle school, but at varying (and exogenous) rates around the country.  Here are some of the core findings, noting that reading the paper gives some different impressions from some of the Twitter summaries: 1. Grades improve, for instance for the girls it goes up by 0.08 standard deviations.  Worth doing, but hardly saving a generation.  For girls, the biggest imp ..read more

Michael Stack writes me: “Hi Tyler – you wrote about preferring current airport procedures to pre-9/11 procedures. Do you plan to elaborate on this? I have a hard time understanding why you’d feel that way. Here is the list I produced – these are guesses as to why you might feel the way you do: Because friends/family can’t meet you at the gate, it reduces crowding in some of the stores, restaurants, and waiting areas. Security imposes a higher cost on travelers which reduces crowding – what are the pricing effects? Is this a transfer from airlines? From travelers? You’re very worried about an ..read more

Why did I deepfake myself? To see if conversing with an AI-generated version of myself can lead to self-reflection, new insights into my thought patterns, and deep truths. pic.twitter.com/DWODoZ9lXL — Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) April 24, 2024 The post It’s happening, Reid Hoffman AI twin edition, wwrgs? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.       Related Stories Imagine recording and storing everything you read What can LLMs never do? “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI”   ..read more

1. U.S. vs. Taiwanese work culture. 2. Albert Wensemius and the rise of Singapore. 3. Unusual questions answered by Megan McArdle. 4. Why Panama dollarized. 5. New open access book on prices and games by Michael Richter and Ariel Rubinstein. 6. Canada now limiting immigration. 7. “In the fiscal year 2023, more than half of the irregular arrivals at the US’s southern border were from countries outside Mexico and northern Central America for the first time…”  FT here, source here. 7. Helen Vendler, RIP. 8. A possible plateau in opioid and drug overdose deaths? (limited data, but possibly tr ..read more

Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses just got a massive Multimodal upgrade – Meta AI with Vision It doesn't just take speech input, it can now answer questions about what you are seeing. Here are 8 features that is now possible 1. Ask about what you are seeing pic.twitter.com/IJQ3WuZMAJ — Min Choi (@minchoi) April 24, 2024 The post Imagine recording and storing everything you read appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.       Related Stories What can LLMs never do? Deregulate our universities “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI”   ..read more

By Rohit Krishnan, he and I are both interested in the question of what LLMs cannot do, and why.  Here is one excerpt: It might be best to say that LLMs demonstrate incredible intuition but limited intelligence. It can answer almost any question that can be answered in one intuitive pass. And given sufficient training data and enough iterations, it can work up to a facsimile of reasoned intelligence. The fact that adding an RNN type linkage seems to make a little difference though by no means enough to overcome the problem, at least in the toy models, is an indication in this direct ..read more

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, basically you should charge them fees rather than discourage them through other means>  Here is one excerpt: By this reasoning, the Japanese decision to raise bullet train prices for tourists is exactly the right approach. In the meantime, the Japanese government, which faces high pension costs, has more money at its disposal. There is no need to resent or otherwise restrict the tourists at all, and indeed I have found the Japanese people to be extremely gracious and helpful to foreigners. Higher prices for tourist train tickets will ma ..read more

1. AI Camera turns your images into poetry. 2. Highly capable model locally on your phone. 3. Clara Piano reviews GOAT.  “Perhaps, in his emphasis on the importance of ideas, Cowen reveals that he is ultimately a Simonian. After all, the human mind is the ultimate resource.” 4. Market liberalism, Chinese style. 5. Red flags for improper judicial conduct. 6. Data on the economics of bookselling, designed to dissuade would-be authors. The post More Tuesday links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.         Comments #1. AI Camera turns your images i ..read more

In an excellent, deep-dive Alice Evans looks at patriarchy in Egypt using pictures drawn from four thousand years of history. Here are three examples. A wealthy woman, shown at right circa 116 CE. Unveiled, immodest, looking out at the world. A person to be reckoned with. After the Arab conquests, pictures of people in general disappear, and there are no books written by women. With the dawn of photography in the 19th century we see (at left) what was probably typical, veiled women, and very few women on the street. In the  1950s and 1970s we see a remarkable revitalization and liberaliz ..read more

Several common measures — like employing a chief diversity officer, offering diversity training or having a diverse board — were not correlated with decreased discrimination in entry-level hiring, the researchers found. But one thing strongly predicted less discrimination: a centralized H.R. operation. The researchers recorded the voice mail messages that the fake applicants received. When a company’s calls came from fewer individual phone numbers, suggesting that they were originating from a central office, there tended to be less bias. When they came from individual hiring ma ..read more