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Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#121

Post by tomhoward »

randomb_1979 wrote: post #41

[flagged]

I've never been an avid follower of Cowan's, but have heard him from time-to-time on various podcasts and read some of is writings, and in my assessment, his standout quality is that he's just very mild-mannered and doesn't get enraged or dogmatic about anything, and demonstrates himself as being very well researched and considered in his positions.

For this reason he's able to engage in productive discussions with people across the ideological spectrum; his podcast appearance with Ezra Klein [1] was particularly gratifying in this regard.

We wouldn't want every commentator to be like this, and his manner doesn't mean we have to embrace everything he says, but there's an important role for someone like Cowan, who will allow their interviewee to express their position when most others just want to pile on and scapegoat.

[1] https://player.fm/series/the-ezra-klein-show-2468767/tyler-c...

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#122

Post by ChrisLomont »

n4r9 wrote: post #55
ChrisLomont wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For example GDP growth doesn't magically fix rising homelessness Nothing magically fixes homelessness, but GDP correlates well with a host of public benefits, including "poverty reduction and per capita income growth performances are correlated" [1]. All these correlations can be more accurately detailed by searching google scholar. In the US, it seems homelessness has decreased greatly since it was first investigat…

Isn't this a prime example of correlation, not causation?

Given that GDP/capita is not only correlated but causually related to many wellness factors in society, it much more likely not simply a correlation. These connections are well studied - check through google scholar is you really want to dig into it.

More GDP/capita means more resources to fight things like homelessness.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#124

Post by ChrisLomont »

cf wrote: post #82
ChrisLomont wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For example GDP growth doesn't magically fix rising homelessness Nothing magically fixes homelessness, but GDP correlates well with a host of public benefits, including "poverty reduction and per capita income growth performances are correlated" [1]. All these correlations can be more accurately detailed by searching google scholar. In the US, it seems homelessness has decreased greatly since it was first investigat…

Homelessness has been increasing rapidly in recent years across North America even while GDP growth has been adequate. You actually need to devote resources to fight homelessness.

>Homelessness has been increasing rapidly in recent years across North America even while GDP growth has been adequate

I don't think that's true. For example, in the US, dept of urban housing has this [1], which shows total number of homeless decreasing despite total underlying population increasing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#125

Post by hos234 »

the_watcher wrote: post #25
hos234 wrote: post #13

Mark Zuckerberg is too full of himself. Not only does he have a track record of not having an imagination, he seems to have got it into his head, that if he reads two books on Economics and Sociology over the summer he needs to be at the policy making table. WTF seriously? I have no idea why he is being entertained. Hand the cash over to experts and fuck off.

> Not only does he have a track record of not having an imagination, he seems to have got it into his head, that if he reads two books on Economics and Sociology over the summer he needs to be at the policy making table. The latter is at least arguably true if one assumes that's all the thought he's put into things, but the former statement is just wildly false

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. He is not qualified to be in the room. The problem when people like him with a big chequebook show up, is the majority of "experts" will just pander to get the cheque which has many unintended consequences. Fact of life.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#126

Post by danans »

eloff wrote: post #71
eloff wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the compound interest problem. If you keep compounding growth, like growing GDP at 1-2% a year, within some few thousand years you've grown bigger than all the resources within a sphere the same number of light years in radius. So clearly, growth is not sustainable and must eventually slow down until it approaches zero. To be clear, we're far away from that today. But the parent is mathematically correct, the be…

A lot of people nitpicking at the argument here, about resource substitutions, efficiency improvements, etc. So let's simplify this argument a little. It's not possible to have infinite growth in a finite universe. By definition infinity > not infinity for arbitrarily large values of not infinity. Therefore the limit of growth as time approaches infinity is 0. At some point you reach the physical limit of the system…

> At some point you reach the physical limit of the system and exponential growth ends. This is true even for digital systems if the digital good involves some physical resource like energy, storage space, bandwidth, etc.

At some point well before that, the sun will go red giant and swallow earth, so that's sort of beside the point. In the meantime, if we continue to fuel GDP growth via inefficient use of non-renewable natural resources, we'll have big problems far sooner than any astrophysical limit sets in.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#128

Post by asdfadsfgfdda »

eigenvalue wrote: post #97
sova wrote: post #5

It seems that naturally with technological progress and population increase, we are doomed to always zero out our gains in the minute with losses in the aggregate. How is it that science and technology move forward but crop yields remain constant? Cowen mentions that it seems to be a "last mile problem" for delivering scientific research benefits to all. Collison has a cool list of "Fast" completed projects on his si…

It could be that the low hanging fruit in crop yields has already been reached. That is, the part addressable through better fertilizer, crop rotation, trait selection via breeding, etc., and to get a large leap from here requires something much more drastic (e.g., wholesale gene editing via CRISPR or the like) which may not be practicable given social pressures. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that the low-s…

The energy content of corn is about ~100 kWh per bushel. If you can magically convert all of the sun's solar radiation into corn with perfect efficiency (~2,500 kWh/m2 per year), you get 100,000 bushels of corn per acre. Compared to the actual efficiency of 176 bushels per acre, there's a lot of room for improvement. It might not be possible with anything similar to modern agriculture, but it's fun to think about.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#129

Post by adenverd »

uoaei wrote: post #107
dluan wrote: post #104

> Collison: But even if technology solved that, I guess my worry would be that the socio-institutional dynamics that have ruined cities or made them less effective or whatever, probably also generalized and applied to other domains. Reminder that Stripe as a company put out a position opposing Prop C. The hypocrisy, I guess. Someone needs to update pg's 'founders should live in the future' to specifically include FAG…

>Fully Automated Gay Space Luxury Communism For those having trouble parsing that acronym.

I'm afraid to ask, but, in what community is this phrase spoken frequently enough to warrant an acronym?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#130

Post by chillacy »

> U.S. life expectancy is basically going up in linear fashion. But if you look at expenditures, we used to spend a few percentage points of GDP on healthcare, and now it’s about 18%. So we’ve gone up to 18%, and we’re not even boosting the rate. I’m not saying it’s the fault of any one group of people, but something has gone wrong.

(US life expectancy actually declined for a 3rd straight year due to "deaths of despair" like drug overdoses and suicides)

But as for the 18% of GDP on healthcare, medicine is an inelastic good that has severe supply side restrictions (AMA + legislation) and no price transparency. Companies are profiting greatly, it's great for GDP and terrible for people.

Similar for the other "cost disease" areas mentioned: education and housing (though for different reasons).

Slatestarcodex has a good overview on cost disease too: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

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