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FOCUS: I Am on Tracy Alloway & Joe Weisenthala€™s Great Odd Lots Podcast This AM!:

And I think it went very well indeed:

Tracy Alloway & Joe Weisenthal & Brad DeLong: : Odd Lots: Brad DeLong on the F TX Collapse & the 
South Sea Bubble: a€~We're in the aftermath of an extraordinary bubble in cryptocurrencies and the 
collapse of FTX is a defining chapter of the industry's turmoil. But what does history tells us 
about the cycle of bubbles and busts? Which past manias are the most similar to

what we've just seen? In this episode, we speak with Brad DeLong, an economic historian at the 
University of California at Berkeley, who is also the author of the new book, Slouching Towards 
Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. He explains how the FTX saga shares shocking 
similarities with the story of the South Sea Company, a British endeavor that was at the
center of a massive mania of speculation in the early 1700sa€l

MUST-READ: GPT-Chat:

Ben Thompson: AI Homework: a€Tt happened to be Wednesday night when my daughter, in the midst of 
preparing for a€oeThe Trial of Napoleona€D for her European history class, asked for help in her 
role as Thomas Hobbes, witness for the defense. I put the question to ChatGPT, which had just been 
announced by OpenAI a few hours earlier:

Did Thomas Hobbes believe in separation of powers

Yes, Thomas Hobbes believed in the concept of separation of powers. In his book
"Leviathan," Hobbes argued that a strong, centralized government is necessary to
maintain                                                    order and prevent conflict in society. 
However, he also believed that a single ruler
or group should not have complete control over all aspects of government. Instead, he
advocated for the separation of powers into different branches, with each branch having
specific responsibilities and powers.

Hobbes believed that the legislative branch of government should be responsible for
making laws, the executive branch should be responsible for enforcing laws, and the
judicial branch should be responsible for interpreting laws. This separation of powers
would prevent any one branch from becoming too powerful and would help to ensure that
the government acts in the best interests of the people.

Overall, Hobbes' views on separation of powers were influential in the development of
modern systems of government. Many political philosophers and statesmen, including
John Locke and the authors of the United States Constitution, were influenced by his
ideas.

This is a confident answer, complete with supporting evidence and a citation to Hobbes work, and it 
is completely wronga€!. It was dumb luck that my first ChatGPT query ended up being something the 
service got wrong, but you can see how it might have happened: Hobbes and Locke are almost always 
mentioned togethera€!.

It is an open question as to what jobs will be the first to be disrupted by AI; what became obvious 
to a bunch of folks this weekend, though, is that there is one universal activity that is under 
serious threat: homeworka€!. Who hasna€™ t had to write an essay about a political philosophy, or a 
book report, or any number of topics that are, for the student assigned to write said paper
theoretically new, but in terms of the world generally simply a regurgitation of what has been 
written a million times before. Now, though, you can write something a€ceoriginala€D from the 
regurgitation, and, for at least the next few months, you can do it for free. The obvious analogy 
to what ChatGPT means for homework is the calculator: instead of doing tedious math calculations
students could simply punch in the relevant numbers and get the right answer, every time; teachers 
adjusted by making students show their work. That there, though, also shows why Ai-generated text 
is something completely different; calculators are deterministica€l. AI output, on the other hand, 
is probabilistic: ChatGPT doesna€™ t have any internal record of right and wrong, but
rather  a statistical model about what bits of language go together under different contextsa€!

On the other hand:

Use of ChatGPT generated text for posts on Stack Overflow is temporarily banneda€l. Because the 
average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by 
ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site and to users who are asking or looking for correct 
answers. The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces
have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers 
are very easy to produce. There are also many people trying out ChatGPT to create answers, without 
the expertise or willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to postinga€!

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality


O A^er Things Azt Went Whizzing bya€:

Very Briefly Noted:

•  Oren Etzioni: a€~AI refers both to the fundamental scientific quest to build human intelligence 
into computers and to the work of modeling massive amounts of data. These two endeavors are very 
different, both in their ambitions and in the amount of progress they have madea€! Yes. Exactly. 
But AI is also two more things: conversational computers that do not s-ck, and pumping money out of
the pockets of naA~ve VCs.

•  Rana Faroohar: a€~Wage inflation? What wage inflation?a€™ ask workers: a€~While inflation in 
areas such as food and fuel hits the poor in every country hardest, the comparative decline in real 
versus nominal wages has actually been sharpest in the rich worlda€!. It is a bitter irony thata€! 
central bankers must now quash inflation, [but] they have no tools to fix whata€™ s truly broken in
labour marketsa€! This is why I worry about those who are so confident that whacking the labor 
market will diminish inflation efficiently. It seems to me that, since real wages are falling, 
inflation is coming from supply-chain bottlenecks and such. And whacking construction and 
tradeables with higher interest rates seems to me likely to be very inefficient at relieving 
supply-chain
bottlenecks.

•  Claudia Sahm: Burden of proof is on the inflation hawks now: a€~Reality shows a "soft landing" 
in 2023 in the United States taking shape. We avoid a recession, we keep the job-full recovery, and 
inflation moves back down. Hawks, it's time to join us in realitya€! My reading is that the FOMC 
agrees with this: that the pause is likely to start in January.

•  Daniel Drezner: Emmanuel Macron is Kinda Sorta Right about Russia: a€~Much as the hard-working 
staff here at Dreznera€™ s World wants to mock Macron some more, however, there is the inconvenient 
fact that he might have a point. As noted in this space two months ago, NATO needs to communicate 
that it does not pose an existential threat to Russia even as the war grinds ona€! But
NATO is an existential threat to Putina€™s rAOgime, in the long run at least. And this is a 
problem, especially as Putin continues to misbehave and hence raise NATOa€™s consciousness with 
respect how better the world would be if he were simply gone.

• Max Read: Halogencore: a€~Halogencore movies are stories of corporate intrigue and malfeasance, 
told from the point of view ofa€! low-level apparatchiks, functionaries, subordinates, and middle 
managersa€!. They are stories of beaten-down people acquiescing to or negotiating compromise with 
power. The "victory" of a happy ending in a halogencore movie is not that power has been
toppled but that our compromised hero has manage to survivea€! A whole genre that I had not known 
existed!

•  Ian Millhiser: A Trump judge seized control of ICE, and the Supreme Court will decide whether to 
stop him: a€~Judge Drew Tiptona€™ s order in United States v. Texas is completely lawless. Thus 
far, the Supreme Court has given him a passa€! I confess I had not expected Republican judges too 
think that it was their job to let lawless court orders stand for a while just to gum up the
workings of the Democratic-led executive.

• Michael Slaby: Our Private Public Sphere: a€~What the Twitter upheaval might teach us about 
private public goodsa€!. One of the great erosions of public intuitions by neoliberal technocrats 
preaching market-based venture-philanthropy doublespeak over the last decade has been the quiet 
background disinvestment in the actual public systems and public infrastructures capable of 
providing
public goodsa€! A very smart point.

Leave a comment

AJs:

I confess that this has always been my reaction to the FaceBook. I used to think it was just 
because I had been too lazy to invest the time to train the FaceBook to offer me the feed that I 
would want to see. But Ted makes a very good case that the FaceBook's entire strategy has been to 
degrade its feed as much as possible in the interests of profit, while still maintaining its 
audience. It worked for a while
because too many people had no place else on the internet they could go to. But now, I hope, the 
tipping point has been passed:

Ted Gioia: How Web Platforms Collapse: The Facebook Case Study: a€~But long before these fiascos, 
Facebook decided to take control of what I get to see from my family, friends, and other accounts I 
follow. In the early days of Facebook, I would simply scroll through my friendsa€™ posts in reverse 
chronological ordera€! intuitive and easy to manage, but Facebook

announced one day that it would improve the ordera€!. (They recently allowed for a chronological 
option, but it took yearsa€”and a growing sense of desperation at the corporate HQa€”for them to 
loosen up their restrictions.) The company claimed they would give me the most interesting stuff 
firsta€”but the real story here was that priority on a feed can be monetized. Thata€™ s the
same reason why Google fills up page one of the search results with so much crapa€!. This obsession 
with monetizing usersa€™ access to information has hurt Facebook much more than they realize.a€! 
Mr. Z. wants to get paid before anything goes viral, and thata€™ s the exact opposite of 
Substacka€™ s successful formulaa€!. The speed of the collapse, however, was surprising.
Facebook announced the launch of Bulletin on June 29,2021. Facebook announced the termination of 
Bulletin on October 4,2022. Even King Henry VIIIa€™ s wives lasted longer than that. Of course, 
Facebook has to let some things bypass the algorithm. They cana€™ t build the whole experience on 
promoted posts. So they decided that top priority should go to key life events^.\

Ellie Carina continues absolutely killing it with her "what if Galadriel and Sauron did fall in 
love?a€D Rings of Power FanFic epic:



Cf., also:

Ellie Carina: The Trials of Mairon: Chapter 24: The Hundred Year Peacea€\

Kage Baker: The House of the Stag: a€~a€ceNowa€! if you die tomorrow, you will still have seen the 
fairest sight of your livesa€!. Free their eyes!a€Da€! She looked on them in horror and looked 
white ragea€!. a€oeWhat have you done?a€D a€oeBrought you workmen, as I promised,a€D he said in 
that same theatrical tone, meeting her eyes without flinching. She saw amusement
there, and a covert purpose. a€oeWhy, madam, are you displeased? Shall I have them hanged?a€D 
a€ceNo!a€D she cried. a€oeYou will have them released at once!a€Da€! a€oeThen I will spare your 
livesa€!. But you will slave for me nonetheless, to make fair the rooms in which my lady lives ,a€D 
a€oeThey will not slave!a€! If they choose to work, you will pay them in gold, and
then youa€™ 11 let them go!a€Da€l a€oeWife, I will defer to your wishesa€!. For I am your slave in 
all things. Should one of them displease you, however, his head shall look down sadly from a 
pike.a€D a€oeMay I speak with you alone a moment?a€Da€!

Andor is not a Star Wars story. Andor is a WWII or a post-war Eastern Europe storya€”and it is a 
great one:

Popula: What made 'Andor' so good?: a€~What made Andor so great and so relentlessa€! the question 
of what it would actually be like to live under, or within, a Galactic Empire, day after day: the 
material and moral experienced’’the bureaucracy and logisticsa€! [of] an interplanetary system of 
dominationa€!. The character I found most memorable: Syril Karn, Cassian Andor's
shadow double. If Cassian's peril and suffering are there to show us how death-defying rebels are 
made, Syril devoutly hopes to answer the counter-question of where all those translucent-skinned, 
tight-wound Imperial officers come froma€!. It's good to remember that, in the 1977 Star Wars, what 
Luke was originally whining to Uncle Owen abouta€”his single, motivating dreama€”
was his desire to get off Tatooine and go to the Academy. The Imperial Academy, that is. With a 
more permissive uncle, or at least one who needed less help on the moisture farm, Luke Sky walker 
could have been wearing a black helmet and flight suit, the most gifted killer in a TIE fighter 
swarma€!

In what sense is this the same playbook as Andrew Jackson or Louis Bonaparte?:

Claire Berlinski: New Caesars, Hungary Edition: a€~Thirteen ways to destroy a liberal democracya€!. 
Rule number one: Rewrite history, deliberately fostering nostalgia for an authoritarian pasta€!. 
Heighten ethnic, racial, religious, and class divisionsa€!. Magnify fear of foreigners and 
outsidersa€!. Enter Caesara€!. Conflate entertainment and politicsa€!. Create chaosa€!. Destroy
confidence in the idea of objective trutha€!. Humiliate or destroy people who are better fit to be 
leadersa€!. Gain control over the mediaa€!. Reward loyalistsa€! Punish the unsubmissive. Use 
punitive taxes and spurious lawsuitsa€!. Stack the courtsa€!. Rejigger the constitutional

Clearly, it is time to move. Eric Tarloffa€™ s new novel up to the very top of the pile:

James Fallows: More on the book list: Tarloff and Kaplan: a€~Erik Tarloffa€™ s latest novel, Tell 
Me The Truth About Lovett is very gooda€!. Erika€™ s books combine hold-your-attention plotting, 
with elegant and droll dialogue and description, with insider awareness of their respective 
settingsa€!. This onea€l set in the arts world of San Franciscoa€! is a comedy-of-manners
about the world of philanthropy, and the endless dance between the people who must ask for money 
and those who decide whether to give. From Evelyn Waugh onward, the Brits have been world champions 
in mercilessly hilarious depictions of this sort of relations-among-unequals. Erik has a 
Brit-worthy touch. The book is also about gender politics of all sorts, about parents and
children, about love and loss. Ita€™ s quite risquA©. I enjoyed ita€!

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Read Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality in the Substack app
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Read Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality in the Substack app
Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Leave a comment
Subscribe now