Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Here's why Chuck Schumer will never close the carried-interest loophole

  The managers get to keep (carry) a portion (an interest) in the funds they manage. In reality, the investors are paying the managers for their labor of managing, which is income. The carried interest doesn't represent capital the managers put at risk. It represents compensation. It should be taxed as income, but it gets taxed as capital gains, thus at a lower rate.
  ...
  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was never going to close the carried-interest loophole. Schumer lives off of that loophole. He is married to the hedge-fund and private-equity industries in a very dysfunctional marriage. Schumer extracts wealth from the industries while constantly, for two decades, threatening to take away their loophole, but always saving them in the end.

• Can the Visa-Mastercard duopoly be broken?

  America is home to the heftiest interchange fees of any major economy - costs are an order of magnitude greater than in Europe and China. That largely benefits two firms: Visa and Mastercard, which facilitate more than three-quarters of the country's credit-card transactions. Doing so has made them two of the most profitable companies in the world, with net margins last year of 51% and 46% respectively.
  ...
  These fees are set by Mastercard and Visa, but collected by banks, which take a slice and use them to fund perks, such as insurance and air miles, to entice customers. For the right to use the card networks' transaction-processing services, banks hand over enormous fees. The result is that consumers pay through the nose for their perks while remaining largely oblivious. According to a paper published last year by Joanna Stavins of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and colleagues, retailers raise prices at the tills by 1.4%, passing interchange costs on to households.

• A Critique of Utilitarianism

  Russ Roberts: part I of a 4-part series on utilitarianism

  ... I critique what I call narrow utilitarianism -- the day-to-day calculus of pleasure and pain -- as a basis for making big life decisions. In the process of writing the book, I realized that utilitarianism is embedded in various ways in how economists think about decision-making at both the societal and individual level. I also realized that the utilitarian approach tends to encourage economists to focus on the measurable at the expense of what is not measurable and that this can lead us badly astray, a theme that is at the heart of my book. So this essay is in some sense the intellectual backstory of the issues that I write about in WILD PROBLEMS as well as expanding the ideas in the book beyond the focus on individual decision-making and looking at the implications for public policy.

• We don't have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model

  Behavioral economics has identified dozens of cognitive biases that stop us from acting 'rationally'. But instead of building up a messier and messier picture of human behavior, we need a new model.   By Jason Collins

  Outside of applied work, the lack of a theoretical framework hampers progress of behavioral economics as a science. Primarily, it means you don't understand what it is that you are observing. Further, many disciplines have suffered from what is now called the replication crisis, for which psychology is the poster child. If your body of knowledge is a list of unconnected phenomena rather than a theoretical framework, you lose the ability to filter experimental results by whether they are surprising and represent a departure from theory. The rational-actor model might have once provided that foundation, but the departures have become so plentiful that there is no longer any discipline to their accumulation. Rather than experiments that allow us to distinguish between competing theories, we have experiments searching for effects.
  ...
  However, modifications to the rational-actor model will emerge from the fact that its current conception typically involves poorly specified or incorrectly assumed objectives, a conception of rationality focused on bias rather than error, and an inadequate consideration of the constrained computational resources that we have at hand. The rational-actor model is not bad, but, like those astronomers grappling with epicycles on epicycles, we can and should try to do better.

• The AI startup erasing call center worker accents: is it fighting bias - or perpetuating it?

  Hi, good morning. I'm calling in from Bangalore, India." I'm talking on speakerphone to a man with an obvious Indian accent. He pauses. "Now I have enabled the accent translation," he says. It's the same person, but he sounds completely different: loud and slightly nasal, impossible to distinguish from the accents of my friends in Brooklyn.

• What is NSDR technique and what are its benefits

  NSDR or Non-Sleep Deep Rest refers to techniques which not only help induce calm and relaxation but also help improve learning and memory or in other words neuroplasticity.

  NSDR is simply a term coined by neuroscientist and Stanford professor Andrew Huberman to refer to relaxation techniques like Yoga Nidra or self-hypnosis. He didn't invent these practices; he simply created the term NSDR to makes these concepts more acceptable within the scientific community. Because moment you say yoga people in the west start thinking weird postures and once you say hypnosis, the general impression is losing control of your body to someone else.

• Reflections on "American Rehab"

  Center for Investigative Reporting's Reveal team podcast series about Synanon.

  In 1965, renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow credited the Game with helping Synanon achieve the status of "eupsychia," or a perfectly psychologically healthy society, that should serve as a model for American society. Whereas his academic training taught him to "treat [people] as if they were like brittle china that would break easily," Synanon's "'no-crap therapy'" suggested that human beings needed to "clean out the defenses, the rationalizations, the veils, the evasions and politenesses of the world." Maslow (and many others) studied Synanon as an exercise in building "a little Utopia, a place out of the world where you can get real straightforwardness, real honesty and the respect that is implied by honesty." Throughout the 1960s, Synanon Game Clubs proliferated across the United States, with tens of thousands of members participating, including college students, CEOs, Black Panthers, and Oakland police officers.

  I still miss the New York City Game Club hosted by Irwin Rothleder until March 30, 1992.

• ACM TechBrief Warns of Promise and Peril of "Sleeper": Quantum Simulation Technology

  "Quantum Computing and Simulation" underscores how quantum simulation, an offshoot of quantum computing that has received relatively little attention, poses profound societal and individual risks as well as benefits with serious public policy implications. These include that intense media and policymaker focus on the theorized encryption-cracking power of future quantum computers has obscured the imminent viability, and actual likely consequences, of quantum simulation technology today.

• OldWeb Today

  Browse emulated browsers connected to old web sites in your browser!

• 'Taylor Swift Songbook' Class Now Being Offered at the University of Texas

  The star's work will be taught alongside that of famous poets such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wyatt, Coleridge, Keats, Dickinson and Plath.

  "This course uses the songwriting of pop music icon Taylor Swift to introduce literary critical reading and research methods - basic skills for work in English literature and other humanities disciplines," the description reads. "Focusing on Swift's music and the cultural contexts in which it and her career are situated, we'll consider frameworks for understanding her work, such as poetic form, style, and history among various matters and theoretical issues important to contextualization as we practice close and in-depth reading, evaluating secondary sources, and building strong arguments."

• Fifty years ago, I started playing this little-known sport with a funny name. Now, it's all the rage.

  Bill Gates on pickleball.

• New studies bolster theory coronavirus emerged from the wild

  Two new studies provide more evidence that the coronavirus pandemic originated in a Wuhan, China market where live animals were sold - further bolstering the theory that the virus emerged in the wild rather than escaping from a Chinese lab.