Arnold Kling: “Democracy does not mean will of the people. At best, it provides for peaceful transfer of power.” He adds: “Perhaps the idea that democratic governments are accountable to the people is a Noble Lie. If people did not believe it, they would be inclined to be rebellious and disobedient, and this could get out of hand, meaning anarchy and violence. On the other hand, the Noble Lie seems to have gotten out of hand, in that government seems to me to be too powerful. For me, the virtue of democracy is that it allows for peaceful transfers of power. In an ideal country, the stakes in elections would be low, because of constitutional limits on government. Elites would be able to negotiate and settle differences, unperturbed by engaged, polarized masses who use primaries to punish compromisers. The public will have modest demands and expectations for government, but they will vote out of power a party that governs poorly. Their voting will be fluid, based on satisfaction or dissatisfaction with those in power; not fixed, based on strong party allegiance.”
Juergen Schmidhuber: “Perhaps you know that all the recent famous AI applications such as ChatGPT and similar models are largely based on principles of artificial neural networks invented in the previous millennium. The main reason why they works so well now is the incredible acceleration of compute per dollar. ChatGPT is driven by a neural network called “Transformer” described in 2017 by Google. I am happy about that because a quarter century earlier in 1991 I had a particular Transformer variant which is now called the “Transformer with linearized self-attention”. Back then, not much could be done with it, because the compute cost was a million times higher than today. But today, one can train such models on half the internet and achieve much more interesting results…There’s no reason to believe that in the next 30 years, we won’t have another factor of 1 million and that’s going to be really significant. In the near future, for the first time we will have many not-so expensive devices that can compute as much as a human brain. The physical limits of computation, however, are much further out so even if the trend of a factor of 100 every decade continues, the physical limits (of 1051 elementary instructions per second and kilogram of matter) won’t be hit until, say, the mid-next century. Even in our current century, however, we’ll probably have many machines that compute more than all 10 billion human brains collectively and you can imagine, everything will change then!”
FT: ““Now, people generally look at diaries and the first thing they do is look for a 15-minute gap, and it just gets taken,” one consultant tells me. “My biggest challenge is finding time to eat lunch.” I’ve come to think of this as the “suitcase principle” of white-collar work: just as you always fill your up suitcase whether you’re going away for a weekend or a week, white-collar work always seems to expand to fill the time available. What happened after the invention of spreadsheets is an instructive example of how time-saving technology can create more work. The days when accountants could sit back and relax didn’t last long. By the time Levy was writing, the new technology was already reshaping demand. People began to expect work to be done quicker because they knew it could be done quicker. More importantly, spreadsheets vastly expanded what kind of analysis was possible.”
Adam Grant: “We often think about relationships on a spectrum from positive to negative. We gravitate toward loving family members, caring classmates and supportive mentors. We do our best to avoid the cruel uncle, the playground bully and the jerk boss.But the most toxic relationships aren’t the purely negative ones. They’re the ones that are a mix of positive and negative. We often call them frenemies, supposed friends who sometimes help you and sometimes hurt you. But it’s not just friends. It’s the in-laws who volunteer to watch your kids but belittle your parenting. The roommate who gets you through a breakup and then starts dating your ex. The manager who praises your work but denies you a promotion.Everyone knows how relationships like that can tie your stomach into a knot.”
