Peter Diamandis sounds like one.
these homegrown Chinese tech giants are driving China’s AI revolution at an unprecedented pace, building out everything from autonomous vehicles and smart cities to facial recognition capabilities and AI-driven healthcare platforms.
He is referring to Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. The quote is from his “blog,” Abundance Insider, which currently is available by email subscription (free) but not on the web.
Frances Woolley surveys a lot of the literature on “outcomes-oriented” education.
In sum, learning outcomes are a relatively new approach to motivating good teaching. Yet, to the extent that they will succeed, it will be in old-fashioned ways: by persuading faculty members to sit down and have conversations about curriculum, teaching, and student assessment, by giving instructors feedback on their teaching performance and methods, and by mandating the teaching of core skills. Yet, in my experience, even achieving these minimal goals for a learning assessment process will not be easy, because of the structural rigidities within the university system.
Jerry Muller would have something to say about the outcomes approach.
The quote:
fiat currencies have underlying value because men with guns say they do.
Don’t peek at the answer, which is below the fold.
Hint 1: You may have read the essay by following a link from Marginal Revolution (but I came across the essay earlier from a different link).
Hint 2: I find much to agree with in the essay.
If you’re 10–20: These are prime years!
. . .Above all else, don’t make the mistake of judging your success based on your current peer group. By all means make friends but being weird as a teenager is generally good.
There is much more at the link. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I read this as saying, “Go against your programming as a teenager.” I figure that teenagers are programmed to care above all about their status within their peer group. You become defined by your friends.
When I graduated high school, a remarkably wise classmate wrote in my yearbook a message saying gently that she preferred it when I stepped out of the role that I had defined for myself (or fallen into) within my group of friends. This inspired me to re-define myself when I went away to college.
So my advice is to look for opportunities to redefine yourself. When I went to graduate school, I took up folk dancing as a hobby, even though I had been afraid to dance before. When I worked at the Fed and at Freddie Mac, I made a lot of lateral moves in order to fend off boredom. But I think I stayed in both places too long. I take the view that working in a large organization is like attending school. You get through the curriculum in a few years, and then it’s time to graduate. To put this another way, each organization has its own culture. Once you have experienced that culture for a few years, the best way to learn and grow is to experience a different organizational culture.
Working at Freddie Mac (back in the late 1980s and early 1990s), I was defined by others as someone who could come up with a vision but could not execute. Starting my own business was a chance to redefine myself. I recommend starting a business, because it is an educational experience, even if it doesn’t work out.
Yes, businesspeople are flawed human beings. But they are the least-flawed major segment of society. If any such segment deserves our admiration, gratitude, and sympathy, it is businesspeople.
Our education system is filled with teachers who seek to elevate the status of non-profits and government. They seek to lower the status of for-profit business. My guess is that this would change if we had a voucher system. If educators worked in a profit-seeking mode, then they would not be going all-out to denigrate profit-seeking.
Contrary to what we are educated to believe, there is nothing inherently noble about working for non-profits or for government. Businesses are forced to make the interests of customers a priority. That is not true for non-profits or for government. The non-profit just has to satisfy its donors. Some government officials have to worry about satisfying enough people to stay in power, and the connection between how well they serve people in general and their electoral prospects is pretty loose. But most government workers do not even face the threat of being thrown out of office. Maybe they have a boss who cares about how well they serve people, and maybe the boss is willing and able to fire them if they fail.
I am not saying that individuals who work for non-profits or for government are uncaring or lazy. I am saying that they work in an environment in which being uncaring or lazy is not punished as reliably as it is in business.
I think that it ought to be more socially desirable to work in business than to work in the non-profit sector or in government. It’s too bad that it seems to be the other way around.
A kind review from Tristan Flock.
In The Three Languages of Politics, Kling argues that to understand our political opponents, we need to update the way we frame disagreements. Liberals, conservatives, and libertarians each have their own tribal language, which often baffles and infuriates outsiders. Until we grasp the nuances and assumptions of each language, mutual understanding is impossible. Fortunately, Kling provides a simple framework for making sense of these semantic differences.
age-adjusted cancer incidence rates and death rates have been going down since 1990, primarily due to better social policies like discouraging smoking. Five-year-survival rates have been gradually improving since at least 1970, on average by maybe about 10% though this depends on severity. Although some of this is confounded by improved screening, this is unlikely to explain more than about 20-50% of the effect. The remainder is probably a real improvement in treatment. Whether or not this level of gradual improvement is enough to represent “winning” the War on Cancer, it at least demonstrates a non-zero amount of progress.
Robin Hanson pointed out years ago that various data sources suggested little difference in mortality between populations with extensive medical treatment and populations with less medical treatment. He hypothesized that the cases where medical treatment prolongs lives are offset by cases where treatment hastens death.
How to reconcile Hanson with Alexander? Some possibilities:
1. Perhaps Alexander’s data are more recent and reflect recent progress.
2. Perhaps the difference in cancer survival rate is too small to be significant in overall mortality statistics. You are affecting a small portion of the population, and you are increasing lifespans of the affected individuals by less than 10 years each (they tend to be elderly and prone to dying of other things.)
3. The gains in successful cancer treatment tend to be offset increases in deaths caused by medical interventions that worsen outcomes.
The book is Uncivil Agreement. I conclude,
Consider the persuasive case she builds that citizens’ political behavior is driven primarily by group emotions and tribal loyalty. This would seem to me to support a libertarian view that a better society is one in which most decisions are kept out of the realm of politics altogether. Making good choices is hard enough even for the most rational of centralized decision-makers. If the underlying political behavior is not even rational to begin with, then the prospects for beneficial government intervention must be even more remote.
I thought that the political psychology in her book was very consistent with what I wrote in TLP.
Here is an interview of Mason by Ezra Klein, which struck me as very worth a listen. Neither of them seems to have found that the research moves them in a libertarian direction.
So far, the book still ranks at the top of my list of non-fiction books of the year.
Over a period of less than five years, China will retake Taiwan and also bring much of East and Southeast Asia into a much tighter sphere of influence. Turkey and Saudi Arabia will build nuclear weapons and become dominant players in their regions. Russia will continue to nibble at the borders of neighboring states, including Latvia and Estonia, and NATO will lose its credibility, except for a few bilateral relationships, such as with the U.K. Parts of Eastern Europe will return to fascism. NAFTA will exist on paper, but it will be under perpetual renegotiation and hemispheric relations will fray.
This is not his forecast of the most likely future, but he tees it up as a pessimistic scenario.
I think that forecasting the emergence of other powers is easy if you think only in terms of the problems that the U.S. faces. But you get a different point of view if you think about other countries’ problems and ask, “Whose problems would you prefer?”
China is aging rapidly. It faces the problem known as premature de-industrialization, meaning that there is not enough demand for manufactured goods to provide a broad base of middle-class jobs for low-skilled workers. If giant cities connected by high-speed rail are the most efficient configuration, then fine. But what if that turns out to be a bad bet?
I do not agree that Turkey has a chance to be a dominant player in its region. Nobody in the region likes the Turks. The Turks don’t even like each other very much. There are major divides between urban and rural, between religious and secular. If they come to dominate, it will only be in a tallest-pygmy sort of way.
Saudi Arabia, like Turkey, has yet to show that its entire society is on board with modernization. If only a thin sliver of elite is ready to join the modern world, then it will have plenty of internal conflicts to worry about. It won’t be a dominant player.
According to David Halberstam, in the early 1960s at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet leader Khrushchev told Americans that Laos would fall “like a rotten apple” into Communist hands. Today, if we look around for rotten apples, meaning regimes that are failing to deliver for their people, we can find them in Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and Iran. If those apples were to fall, particularly the latter two, that would make up for foreign policy problems that might emerge elsewhere.
Again, Tyler is not arguing that the pessimistic scenario is the most likely one. But I think he gives it a notably higher p than I would.
Sarah Krouse in the WSJ writes about underfunded pensions at state and local governments.
When the math no longer works the result is Central Falls, R.I., a city of 19,359. Today, retired police and firefighters are wrestling with the consequences of agreeing to cut their monthly pension checks by as much as 55% when the town was working to escape insolvency. The fiscal situation of the city, which filed for bankruptcy in 2011, has improved, but the retirees aren’t getting their full pensions back.
She points out that the total unfunded liability of these pensions is $5 trillion.
The trouble with deficit spending, as I have pointed out, is that it sets the stage for political conflict. Retirees expect their benefits. Bond-holders expect to get paid back. Taxpayers expect current services. Some groups are going to be disappointed.