Andy Mukherjee: “In the longer term, India is seeking to buttress its investment appeal by emerging as an alternative to China. With President Xi Jinping’s policies aggravating a rift with the West, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pitching his country as a destination for multinationals to reduce their overexposure to Chinese supply chains. There’s no guarantee that the gamble, backed by $24 billion in subsidies for manufacturers, will work. As Arvind Subramanian, an economic adviser to the Modi administration until 2018, and Josh Felman, a former International Monetary Fund official in New Delhi, noted in a recent Foreign Affairs article: “India faces three major obstacles in its quest to become ‘the next China;’ investment risks are too big, policy inwardness is too strong, and macroeconomic imbalances are too large.”…As long as India Inc. delivers reasonable earnings growth, foreigners won’t be able to ignore a country where an increasingly muscular domestic investment class has come to worship profit.” More: “Poised to overtake China as the world’s most populous country next year, India is in the midst of a building boom. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is seeking to modernize roads, rail networks and ports in attempt to vie with China as a manufacturing hub. That’s set to translate into a 6.7% jump in steel demand to around 120 million tons in 2023, according to the World Steel Association, the highest growth among major economies. India, which also saw a similar expansion this year, overtook the US to become the world’s No. 2 steel consumer after China a couple of years ago.”
Yejin Choi: ” I’m a big fan of GPT-3, but at the same time I feel that some people make it bigger than it is. Some people say that maybe the has already been passed. I disagree because, yeah, maybe it looks as though it may have been passed based on one best performance of GPT-3. But if you look at the average performance, it’s so far from robust human intelligence. We should look at the average case. Because when you pick one best performance, that’s actually human intelligence doing the hard work of selection. The other thing is, although the advancements are exciting in many ways, there are so many things it cannot do well. But people do make that hasty generalization: Because it can do something sometimes really well, then maybe is around the corner. There’s no reason to believe so.”
FT: “If you want a nuanced worldview, reach for that novel…A novelist is like a magician: although they are writing fiction, they have a certain authenticity about them, because we understand we are reading something that’s not real. And as Aristotle suggests, it is this that allows the characters in a novel to somehow feel more real to us than historical figures; each represents a kind of embodiment of the human condition that we can relate to. Many studies have found that reading works of “literary fiction” — as opposed to non-fiction or pop fiction — increases empathy and emotional intelligence. This is because the reader is exposed to a much broader range of experiences and cultures than they would come across in real life, which helps them understand that other people have beliefs, desires and perspectives that differ, sometimes greatly, from their own.”
The Week lists the 10 biggest scientific breakthroughs of 2022: nuclear fusion, James Webb Telescope, transplant promise, a universal flu vaccine, changing an asteroid’s trajectory, AI for artists, new vaccines to fight malaria, cancer treatments advance, injecting human cells into rats’ brains to study psychiatric disorders, creating life without sperm or eggs.
Hayek: “[T]he competitive price system makes possible the utilization of an amount of concrete knowledge which could never be achieved or approached without it. It is true, of course, that the director of any centrally planned system is likely to know more [about the economy at large] than any single entrepreneur under competition. But the former could not possibly use in his single plan all the combined knowledge of all the individual entrepreneurs that is used under competition. The knowledge which is significant here is not so much knowledge of general laws, but knowledge of particular facts and the ever-changing circumstances of the moment – a knowledge which only the man on the spot can possess. The problem of the maximum utilization of knowledge can therefore be solved only by some system which decentralizes the decisions.” [via CafeHayek]
