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Open Thread April 8, 2023, Angry Bear, angrybearblog.com Tags: open thread

Destroy ‘creative ambiguity’ in order to change the world Stavros Mavroudeas Professor of Political Economy Panteion University In a recent (much publicized by systemic circles) article, G. Varoufakis, referring to the current international banking turmoil, uttered the supposedly radical slogan ‘let the banks burn’. Of course, G. Varoufakis is not famous for the coherence of his economic analyses. As he has described himself, he is a fairy tale creator impersonating an...

from Dean Baker There has been a lot of concern in recent days about the impact of AI on people’s intellectual property. The latest AI programs screen millions of documents, songs, pictures, and videos posted to the web and freely grab any portion that seems to fit the commands given the program. As it stands, the creators of the material are not compensated, even if a large portion of their work appears in the AI product. This raises serious questions about how AI will affect the future...

Positive revisions make for a good March industrial production report  – by New Deal democrat If retail sales for March were bad, industrial production (blue in the graph below) was at very least mixed to the upside. Total production increased +0.4%, and on top of that February was revised higher by +0.2%, and January was revised higher by +0.5%. The not so good news is that while manufacturing (red) was also revised higher by +0.5% for...

It seems pretty clear that I’ve underestimated both the Albanese governments chances for a second term and the prospects for getting the Voice referendum passed. So, I’m considering where I got things wrong. First, I underestimated how bad the LNP Opposition would be. In part that’s because I assumed it would be led by Frydenberg. I’m not a fan, but he would have been much more effective than Dutton. Relatedly, I’ve been surprised by the unwillingness of the LNP to give an inch...

from Lars Syll There’s nothing magical about Bayes’ theorem. It boils down to the truism that your belief is only as valid as its evidence. If you have good evidence, Bayes’ theorem can yield good results. If your evidence is flimsy, Bayes’ theorem won’t be of much use. Garbage in, garbage out. The potential for Bayes abuse begins with your initial estimate of the probability of your belief, often called the “prior” … In many cases, estimating the prior is just guesswork, allowing...

from Blair Fix and RWER current issue From the moment the first veins of coal were opened (thousands of years ago), one thing has been certain: the fossil-fuel business would eventually die. But what’s always been uncertain is the when and the how. That’s because there is no law of nature that tells us how much of a non-renewable resource humans will exploit. One possibility is that we will harvest fossil fuels to the point of utter exhaustion. Of course, there will always be some scraps...

There’s been yet another big leak of US secret intelligence. As usual, the main result was embarrassment for the US state, from the (re)confirmation that it routinely spies on its allies, and from the publication of some unflattering comments on those allies. The substantive content was uninteresting, revealing no greater insight (and sometimes) than that available to careful observers with no access to secret information (Daniel Drezner has more on this). There don’t seem to be any...

from Spencer Graves and RWER current issue To the extent that copyrights and paywalls on academic journals are obstacles to “the progress of science and the useful arts”, there are things that individual researchers, academic administrators, and the public can do to help overcome these obstacles: Researchers can submit their work only to open-access journals and refuse to submit their work to journals that will put their work behind a paywall. (No one who wants to be cited wants their...

from Asad Zaman Cold: we let our emotions influence our behavior. Callous: concern for others causes us to share our good fortune with others, instead of keeping everything for ourselves. Cruel: We feel pain for the suffering of others, and sorrow for the extinction of species, or destruction of their habitat, instead of joy at the resulting profits. Calculating: We are not concerned with maximizing our monetary gains, down to the last penny. The paper “The Empirical Evidence Against...