Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• How do we move the needle on progress?

  We are looking for economically significant sectors with lagging productivity and a plausible path to improved productivity in the future. So what meets these three criteria? I think a careful look at the economic landscape reveals four areas from which we could derive massive increases in human welfare: health, housing, energy, and transportation/logistics. If we want progress, we need a relentless push for innovation and dynamism in these sectors.
  ...
  First, health, housing, energy, and transportation are all highly regulated sectors of the economy. It is simply impossible to take significant steps toward progress without addressing regulatory obstacles. We are not going to get progress by tweaking the tax code or by business as usual. In some cases, regulators will need to allow more safety risks to be taken.

• A generation of economists helped get us into this mess. A new generation can get us out.

  The good news is that there's a new economics that's increasingly ascendant, one that rejects the market-centric framework and its conservative policy tools on behalf of Appelbaum's simple but profound conclusion: "Communities can decide what they want from markets."
  ...
  A higher tax rate, minimum wage, or regulation might or might not ding growth - there's evidence on both sides. But we as a community or a society might decide that because we want workers to earn living wages, the wealthy to pay a fairer share, and businesses not to degrade the environment and regularly blow up financial markets, the benefits of these policies outweigh their costs.

• Only the Fed Can Save Us

  Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve must stand up to Trump. If they don't, the American economy is heading for disaster.

  A decade of historically low interest rates has begun to warp our economy. As we learned to our collective horror during the 2008 financial crisis, a period of sustained low interest rates forces investors on a desperate search for higher yields, inflating asset prices and the risks of owning loans and debt of all kinds.

• A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked

  For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake.

  As a philosophical question, whether humans have control over their own actions had been fought over for centuries before Libet walked into a lab. But Libet introduced a genuine neurological argument against free will. His finding set off a new surge of debate in science and philosophy circles. And over time, the implications have been spun into cultural lore.
  ...
  To decide when to tap their fingers, the participants simply acted whenever the moment struck them. Those spontaneous moments, Schurger reasoned, must have coincided with the haphazard ebb and flow of the participants' brain activity. They would have been more likely to tap their fingers when their motor system happened to be closer to a threshold for movement initiation.

  This would not imply, as Libet had thought, that people's brains "decide" to move their fingers before they know it. Hardly. Rather, it would mean that the noisy activity in people's brains sometimes happens to tip the scale if there's nothing else to base a choice on, saving us from endless indecision when faced with an arbitrary task. The Bereitschaftspotential would be the rising part of the brain fluctuations that tend to coincide with the decisions. This is a highly specific situation, not a general case for all, or even many, choices.

• The Intellectual We Deserve

  Nathan J. Robinson long diatribe on Jordan Peterson in Current Affairs.

  But, having examined Peterson's work closely, I think the "misinterpretation" of Peterson is only partially a result of leftists reading him through an ideological prism. A more important reason why Peterson is "misinterpreted" is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it's impossible to tell what he is "actually saying." People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected.

• Revealed: How a secret Dutch mole aided the U.S.-Israeli Stuxnet cyberattack on Iran

  Finally some news on how this was carried out.

  An Iranian engineer recruited by the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD provided critical data that helped the U.S. developers target their code to the systems at Natanz, according to four intelligence sources. That mole then provided much-needed inside access when it came time to slip Stuxnet onto those systems using a USB flash drive.

  Makes Russian interference in our elections and China stealing our intellectual property seem rather mild in comparison.

• America, the Gerontocracy

  Our leaders, our electorate and our hallowed system of government itself are aging. And it shows.

  The U.S. doesn't have a Politburo, but if you calculate the median age of the president, the speaker of the House, the majority leader of the Senate, and the three Democrats leading in the presidential polls for 2020, the median age is - uh - 77.
  ...
  The final leg of America's gerontocratic triad is its system of government. That, too, is old and a bit creaky. No nation in the world has a written Constitution older than ours. And it shows.

• Quantifying My Cognitive Decline

  I can relate to memory problems as I age.

  We're used to seeing our bodies getting old because of all the visible physical changes. We're not used to mental changes because they are less observable to ourselves and the people around us. Unless we talk or act differently, other people don't see the changes. And we don't feel the changes unless we try to do something and fail.

• Of Brains & Minds: An Exchange Patricia Churchland, reply by Colin McGinn

  A bit old but I just discovered this lively exchange between two philosophers.

  "Nevertheless, there are nostalgic philosophers who whinge on about saving the purity of the discipline from philosophers like me and Chris Eliasmith and Owen Flanagan and Dan Dennett. What do the purists, like McGinn, object to? It is that their lovely a priori discipline, where they just talk to each other and maybe cobble together a thought experiment or two, is being sullied by data. Their sterile construal of philosophy is not one that would be recognized by the great philosophers in the tradition, such as Aristotle or Hume or Kant."

• The Monty Hall problem

  If you solve this problem, you have solved the original.

      There are three boxers. Two of the boxers are evenly matched
      (i.e. 50-50, no draws!); the other boxer will beat either them, always.
      You blindly guess that Boxer A is the best and let the other two fight.
      Boxer B beats Boxer C.
      Do you want to stick with Boxer A in a match-up with Boxer B,
      or do you want to switch?
  

• Number Theorist Fears All Published Math Is Wrong

  "I think there is a non-zero chance that some of our great castles are built on sand," he said, arguing that we must begin to rely on AI to verify proofs.

  Buzzard's point is that modern mathematics has become overdependent on the word of the elders because results have become so complex. A new proof might cite 20 other papers, and just one of those 20 might involve 1,000 pages of dense reasoning. If a respected senior mathematician cites the 1,000 page paper, or otherwise builds off it, then many other mathematicians might just assume that the 1,000-page paper (and the new proof) is true and won't go through the trouble of checking it. But mathematics is supposed to be universally provable, not contingent on a handful of experts.

• How to lose weight with intermittent fasting: Alternate day fasting benefits

  This type of intermittent fasting may be as beneficial as daily calorie restriction, but easier to stick with, researchers found.

  Besides shedding weight and fat, the people who fasted had beneficial cardiovascular changes and showed reduced levels of an age-associated inflammatory marker, the study found.
  At the same time, alternate day fasting didn't cause a decline in bone mineral density or white blood cell count the way continuous calorie restriction has been shown to do in previous studies.
  

• A reflection on the departure of RMS

  It's not so much about Richard Stallman's comments related to Marvin Minsky but a problem of questionable behavior over many years.

• Google: Elevating original reporting in Search

  Recently, we've made ranking updates and published changes to our search rater guidelines to help us better recognize original reporting, surface it more prominently in Search and ensure it stays there longer. This means readers interested in the latest news can find the story that started it all, and publishers can benefit from having their original reporting more widely seen.

Some suggestions for Democrats on how to frame political issues when running for office.

• Crony capitalism

  • The way socialism is misunderstood in this country gives it a bad name. So instead the campaign issue should be to eliminate crony capitalism with reference to quotes from Adam Smith himself, for example:

    "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices".

    "It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary".

    "Most government is by the rich for the rich. Government comprises a large part of the organized injustice in any society, ancient or modern.Civil government, insofar as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, and for the defence of those who have property against those who have none."

  • Emphasize how regulatory capture undermines democracy and propose restrictions on government officials becoming lobbyists and vice versa.

• Income Inequality
  • Avoid talking about taxing the rich and instead change tax policies that benefit them in the first place. For example before 1982 corporate stock buybacks were considered a form of stock market manipulation and illegal. Now they just make the rich even richer. If corporations have excess cash they can give the money to employees instead.
  • Return to Ronald Reagan tax rates. "Make America Fair Again".

• Those who benefit from a policy have to reimburse those who are hurt from it.
  • For example immigration helps the meat packing industry and farms requiring labor to pick crops. But this costs cities and states in terms of providing things like health care and education. Tax those who benefit financially to pay for the increased costs imposed on others.
  • Liberalizing international trade benefits many by reducing prices but hurts workers in sectors facing import competition resulting in job losses and lower wages. Make those who benefit from international trade pay to train those for new better paying jobs. Instead of keeping coal mining jobs in depressed areas, give money to create new, better ones (solar, etc?).
• Health Care Reform
  Instead of medicare for all (which is too easy to criticize) suggest ways to fix our broken health care system.
  
  • Set our Drug prices to be the same as in other countries.
  • Let Medicare negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies.
  • Reveal how much money lobbyists give elected members of congress.
  • Allow individuals to import drugs into the United States for personal use.
  • Crack down on patent evergreening whereby slight modifications of old drugs are used to extend their patent life without any significant therapeutic advantage.
  • Do not let the drug companies write our health care laws.
• Law and order.
  • Don't let corporations get off with just paying a fine and not admitting guilt. Indict the corporate executives in charge and put them on trial.
  • Admit Obama was wrong to bail out the mortgage companies and not help the citizen mortgage buyers who were take advantage of.
  • As much as it is tempting to do so, forget about convicting Trump of anything. Those who will vote for him know he is a dishonest and a crook and they don't care.

• Fix our dysfunctional political system. This may be difficult since both Democrats and Republicans in office benefit from the current system.

  • Openly support Represent Us to "End corruption. Defend the Republic".

    We bring together conservatives, progressives, and everyone in between to pass powerful anti-corruption laws that stop political bribery, end secret money, and fix our broken elections.

  • Openly support Lawrence Lessig as in,
    How Money Corrupts Congress and a Plan to Stop It
    

    This new type of corruption is more subtle, indirect and harder to outlaw. Corporations legally donate money to the election campaigns of legislators, who in turn tend to vote in favor of the interests of those corporations.

  • Support term limits for members of Congress and all judges.