Links for August

Metascience, Milton Friedman, the Irish Enlightenment

Here are the most interesting things I read, watched, and listened to in August. But first, some announcements:

1: I have an ongoing side project to save the Irish Mathematics Olympiad. If you’re feeling generous, you can donate here, or if you think you can help in some other way, email sam [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com. Thank you to everyone who has donated and otherwise helped, and you should be hearing some exciting news on this front soon.

2: Our regular Dublin reading group goes from strength to strength. In August, we read The Autobiography of Morris Chang with Karina Bao; in September, we will discuss the political legacy of Charles de Gaulle; and in October, we will read and watch a production of Macbeth with Henry Oliver. Email sam [at] thefitzwilliam [dot] com if you’d like to join with a brief bio.

3: I recently crossed the threshold of having over 3,000 open tabs. Even with a tab manager, this has adversely affected my computer’s performance. It may be time to declare tab bankruptcy.

4: I will be in America for most of October, first for the Interact retreat and then for the Progress Conference. If anyone is in the Bay Area October 6–22, and/or Chicago October 23–26, and would like to meet up, please email or DM me. I could be convinced to go to LA, Boston, or New York for a few days for the right opportunity.

5: This is your periodic reminder to use my invite code to join Lynkmi. Thanks to Oisín’s generosity, I have ℵ₀ invites remaining. If that joke makes sense to you, you are likely to enjoy the website.

6: I apologise that the post is late: I spent my allocated blogging time last month in a manor house in rural Somerset, in which the WiFi was spotty at the best of times. On the plus side, large chunks of this post were written in a hall built in the 14th century. Also: I’ve been busy – see point #1!

Blogs and short links

Patrick Collison on the Irish Enlightenment. The enduring interest of Irish thinkers in payments infrastructure strikes again.

For Progress Ireland, I wrote about whether governments should fund science more and how to incentivise more replication studies.

Related: Matt Clancy on the culture of publish-or-perish and the rate of return for government-funded R&D.¹ Literature reviews like these inspire in me a sense of awe that reality really does have a surprising amount of detail. You start by asking a straightforward and important question: Are European governments currently underinvesting in basic science? You look for papers about this with decent theory and plausible causal inference, and then, with growing horror, you realise that those papers don’t exist. Many such cases.

Works in Progress is now available in print. Julian Gough said it best:

If you would prefer the world to go forwards, rather than backwards; if you think things can get better, rather than worse; if you want us to bring the best of the past with us, into that wonderful future; then maybe subscribe to the print version of Works in Progress magazine.

José Luis Rícon on the limits of metascience and rounding up links.

Gavin Leech on the credulity of Robert Sapolsky. And here is more. Alas, Sapolsky’s human behavioural biology lecture series is indeed excellent.

The latest entry in the genre of “urban planning is an intellectually bankrupt discipline”.

The poorer the country, the less redistributive the tax system.

The latest edition of “Old man Sam Enright shakes fist at sky”.

How judicial review killed the Stonehenge tunnel.

Another entry I stumbled across to add to the list of things unexpectedly named after people: the supply store chain Smart & Final is named after its founders, J.S. Smart and H.D. Final.

I am long Sweden (and short The Guardian).

“Claude, please explain this meme to me.”²

The low density of Bromley is holding London back:

Bromley is the least dense London borough because it is over 50% greenbelt, with only 13% as many residents per km² as Tower Hamlets. The borough’s golf courses alone could hold more than 10k new homes. For every 10k in new homes, London could generate £2bn in value that goes towards funding the extension.”

Question: Has national happiness been increasing? Answer: Yes, but you don’t notice it in survey data, because people’s sense of how good an ideal life is progressively improves, such that a 1-to-10 happiness scale needs to be constantly recalibrated.³ Can someone please apply this methodology to China? One of the most disturbing facts which I’ve been unable to reconcile with the rest of my worldview is that average happiness does not seem to have gone up during any of China’s economic growth, reform and opening-up period.

The philistine supremacy: The Arlington Central Library contains no Herman Melville. I admit that I’ve never read Moby Dick, although I did enjoy reading this 30,000-word article about the economics of whaling, which I gather contains some similarities.

Conor McGregor supports vetocracy:

My first action as President will be to establish a mechanism that allows the Irish people to veto government decisions that have a negative impact on their lives. This will apply in key areas such as immigration, the establishment of IPAS centres, healthcare, education, and housing.

My advice: Instead of reading the news, read Wikipedia. Here is an overview of the science policy of the second Trump Administration.

Ireland’s Minister for Research on how to respond to Trump’s science cuts (gated).⁴ I was unaware that the Irish government has made an application to dectuple (?!) the official size of the country:

I can only imagine the future impact of Prof Brian Jacob’s paper which provided unequivocal proof that our continental shelf was larger than once believed. This research is the basis of our submission to expand our economiec zone of interest at sea by a factor of ten to the European Commission.

Ben Bernanke’s dinner speech at Milton Friedman’s 90th birthday party:

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna [Schwartz]: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.

Redux: Tyler Cowen on the glories of Irish economics.

From Brian Potter: Where’s my robotic bricklayer? If anybody is interested in a pilgrimage to Surrey to visit the first wall ever built by an automatic bricklaying device, email me.

I also read Brian on how the US scaled up aeroplane production so quickly during World War II. You should also pre-order his new book The Origins of Efficiency.

Overlay aerial photography of your city with Soviet spy plane images.

The total fertility rate in Heilongjiang, Manchuria, has reached 0.52.

Best of Wikipedia: Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather was one of the founders of the movement to unify all of North America into a single country called the “Technate”.

Is the replication crisis more problematic in some fields than others because their “foundational” results have few downstream consequences?

Dario Amodei inside John Collison’s pub. I agree with Kevin Kwok: I will not start watching this series until John actually downs a pint. I know that atavism is in him.

Automating scientific discovery with Leap. As yet, I know Jamie Rumbelow a great deal better than his wife, and it appears they are living up to the evergreen wisdom of my mate Kyle:

I think our generation has defined the ‘layabout boyfriend, girlboss girlfriend’.

Introducing the Medical Evidence Project. Here is background context on how we ought to fund scientific error detection. Congratulations to James Heathers for getting this off the ground.

Related: Andrew Gelman on the Institute for Replication.

Did we ever get to the bottom of why, as late as the 1960s, there were parts of Spain where 15% of the population lived in caves?

Shani Zhang on whether AI (among other things) is turning her into a house cat.

You can now buy the FABRIC book. You may or may not wish to take a glimpse inside ratcamp. At the aforementioned West Country manor house, three people asked me to explain Löb’s theorem to them – a new record! – because I (falsely) come across as the type of person who might know that.⁵

Congratulations to the new cohorts of Emergent Ventures winners. I believe we now have more winners from Patch than all of continental Europe…

We have people everywhere: The “Godfather of Kenyan running” is from Mallow, County Cork.

Barring an early death, by 2029, the queen of Malaysia will be Irish. See footnote for more details than you could possibly want to know about Malaysian regal succession rules.⁶

Update from the Centre for British Progress.

What Rob Long read in July.

Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu’s vision for metascience. Of this essay’s far too many footnotes, footnote 45 sent me down a rabbit hole about how John Ioannidis’s famous paper Why Most Published Research Findings are False is itself mostly false. Isn’t that beautiful, in its own way?

A niche recommendation, even by my standards: a helpful index of the Irish Planning and Environmental Law newsletter.

I’m currently trying and failing to reach my XP goals on the ‘advanced’ track of MathAcademy. But I did read this reflective write-up from Jonathan Whitmore, who describes it as a game-changer for motivated individuals self-studying mathematics.

The history of origins of life research, the first part of a new series.

Progress, or How Big Things Get Done, Kevin Bryan’s new class about “Econ history + theory + history of tech/thought + philosophy on why rare orgs at rare times in rare places accomplish new things.” This looks excellent.

Amanda Askell shares mundane life wisdom. If Anthropic ever wants to host a research salon in Dublin and wants a moderator, you know where to find me… also: can insect bites really be cured this easily? (Despite having been to India and Ghana, I’ve never been bitten by a mosquito in my life.)

Britain’s Alan Turing Institute has failed. Why? See also the response to the comments, and ATI’s delusional response.

Literature is calling you to put down your phone. Related to previous discussion about whether your phone is making you dumb.

Claims about Belizean jungles. I only know exactly one person from Belize, but his dad’s back garden is a yet-unexcavated Mayan burial ground (really!).

Jacob Trefethen’s thoughts about how to reform the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

There are, I assume, many problems with the National Institute of Health. But the specific claim that it funds a large number of small, crappy trials is unfair.⁷

More reading group inspiration: journal club on how poverty fell.

Ben Kuhn on impact, agency, and taste. And how Ben managed major projects, and sees staring into the abyss as a core life skill.

“Vegetative electron microscopy”. IYKYK.

Podcasts

I finally got around to listening to the Acquired podcast with Morris Chang. It was cool to hear Karina getting recognition at 2:21. :D What a legend:

Ben Gilbert: One question . . . I wanted to ask you is TSMC is essentially the only trillion-dollar company in the world not on the West Coast of the United States. It is this incredibly important thing in the world. It’s this unlikely success of grand scale.

Morris: Unlikely, in your opinion!

Seamus Murphy on photographing Afghanistan. I agree with Tyler Cowen, by the way, that the North is the more interesting of the two Irelands to visit…

I am very pleased to have finally found a jazz podcast I like, namely You’ll Hear It. It is quite extraordinary how different the original version of Rhapsody in Blue, with George Gershwin himself conducting, sounds. The clarinet glissando is a later addition!

Zvi Mowshowitz surveys the state of AI. Unfortunately, the audio quality here is poor. I didn’t realise that GPT-5’s performance is in line with the trends! Listen also for crucial context on the claim that “AI won a gold medal at the IMO this year”.

How Hitler almost starved Britain.

The Partially Examined Life on Burkean conservatism. They do not come away impressed with Reflections on the Revolution in France (and neither did I). We also have Bourke on Burke.

The Very Bad Wizards on one of my favourites, In Bruges.

From the Peking Hotel: The Rise and Fall of Falun Gong. I am ashamed to admit that many of the things I believed about Falun Gong were essentially CCP propaganda!

Ed Nelson on the legacy of Milton Friedman. Many times I have almost ordered Ed’s two-volume history of Friedman’s role in American economic policy debates, but it’s too expensive for me…

Julian Gough on the universe as a developmental process. I once heard Julian described as “right up on the crank/genius threshold, but on the correct side”.

Casey Handmer on building energy capacity and solar power. Related: Luke Farritor update. I’m sad to announce that my boy crush on Casey has come to an end.

Lewis Bollard on why factory farming isn’t going away.

Tyler Cowen’s Year of Bach. Self-recommending!

Ben Yeoh asks Michael Nielsen about metascience.

An overview of the work of George Berkeley. I’ve been wondering recently whether I am the only person on earth who has never read any of Berkeley’s philosophy, but has read his pamphlet on Irish monetary policy. Is this like enjoying Thomas Hobbes, but only for his work on optics?

Melvyn Bragg and guests on Edmund Burke. Unfortunately, none of my letters to Parisian gentlemen have blossomed into masterpieces of political philosophy.⁸

Papers

Peter Singer, Moral Experts. An argument, which I’m sympathetic to, that moral philosophers know something useful that the rest of us don’t. Is it still possible to get a three-page paper published in a top philosophy journal? I read this for my political theory reading group, so I suppose I’ll have more to say after that discussion. My favourite Singer from the horse’s mouth remains his Practical Ethics textbook.

Benjamin Jones, Lawrence Summers, A Calculation of the Social Returns to Innovation. One of the main sources for my piece about whether we are currently underspending on basic research. I think an important stylised fact worth committing to memory is that the research-intensiveness of the American economy has been relatively constant since WW2, but the government has been playing less of a role in that. Footnote 9 is helpful:

The National Science Foundation reports (NSF 2019) that 62.5% of recent U.S. R&D spending represents product development (i.e., R&D targeted toward the development or improvement of specific products or processes), 20% of spending represents applied research (i.e., research that has a specific practical aim or objective), and the remaining 17% of spending represents basic research (i.e., without any particular application in view). Taking a mainstream estimate of a 3-year delay for product development R&D, a 6-year delay for applied R&D, and 20-year delay for basic R&D, the average delay (weighted across expenditure on each category) would be 6.5 years. Taking a conservative estimate of a 5-year delay for development R&D, a 10-year delay for applied R&D, and a 30-year delay for basic R&D, the average delay would be 10 years.

For me, this paper is an update that research that takes a very long time to come to fruition is a vanishingly small proportion of the total. I was also interested by footnote 6:

U.S. R&D expenditure is based on numerous surveys of the National Science Foundation, and include R&D performed and funded by private businesses with at least five employees, federal and state governments, universities, and non-profit organizations.

I didn’t realise that a four-person startup by definition doesn’t contribute to research statistics.

In this paper Larry Summers is also on his old beat about how the consumer price index overstates the extent of inflation (p.21), because new and higher-quality goods are constantly being introduced to the available basket:

Since at least the Stigler commission (Stigler et al. 1961), the economics consensus has been that inflation in consumer and producer prices is overstated, and hence real GDP growth is understated. The Boskin Commission found that the consumer price index overstated inflation rates by 1.10% per year, with a “plausible range” of 0.80% to 1.60% per year (Boskin et al. 1996). The most substantial source of bias (0.60%) found was due to the introduction of new goods and quality changes in existing goods – i.e., outcomes of innovation itself, so that the benefits of innovation are understated in concrete ways. The Boskin Commission’s findings and recommendations led to changes in price measurement approaches, and net of these changes the inflation bias was subsequently estimated to be an approximate 0.65% overstatement per year (Gordon 2000), although quality advances and new goods problems remain particularly challenging. The ongoing advance of computing, the Internet, and associated digital services has now led many economists to believe that inflation bias may be much worse again today (Goolsbee and Klenow 2018, Brynjolfsson et al. 2019).

You can read more here about why Larry Summers thinks that the purported phenomenon of “wage stagnation” is caused by measurement error.

Various, Impact 2030: Ireland’s Research and Innovation Strategy. See here for some of my criticisms of the approach taken here.

Various, Talent Nation. The latest attempt to get the Irish government to take seriously the fact that our startup sector is relatively weak, and that we paper over all of its problems by having more money than God from corporation tax on American companies. I wish these folks the best, and have signed their petition. Still, I got a good chuckle from their pyramid, which looks like something from r/ChartCrimes:

Joan Didion, In Bed. The first Didion that I’ve read, in the form of a short essay about what it’s like to experience a migraine. I’m not sure if this was intentional, but I found it evocative that ‘migraine’ was used here as a bare singular noun, i.e. it doesn’t appear with an article: “I spent yesterday in bed with a headache not merely because of my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers and wrong-think, but because both my grandmothers had migraine, my father has migraine and my mother has migraine.” Her speaking of ‘migraine’ instead of ‘a migraine’ somehow makes it seem like more of a permanent fixture or ‘friend’. Recommended especially to people who don’t experience migraines but have partners or close friends who do.

Books

Morris Chang, The Autobiography of Morris Chang: Volume II; 1964–2018. This book is divided very strangely: volume 1 is 200 pages, and ends when Morris Chang is a manager considering early retirement and still over a decade away from founding TSMC. Volume 2 is ~650 pages, and everything to do with achieving global dominance in the semiconductor industry is packed into the last 100. This book only came out in traditional Chinese last year, when Morris was aged 93. Among the many revelations of volume two are that Jensen Huang was offered the position of CEO of TSMC, and turned it down almost immediately. I am also glad Morris and Jensen are proponents of large age-gap friendships.

Alex Ross, Listen to This. An anthology of music criticism columns for The New Yorker, from the author of The Rest is Noise, which I’m told is one of the greatest books about music of all time. My favourite chapter was the one about classical music in China. There is also a deflationary piece about how many of the most widely reported stories about Bob Dylan – including the idea that there was widespread outrage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 – are at best exaggerated. Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall was also written and first performed before the Cuban Missile Crisis. This worked well as an audiobook, which included (sadly too short) excerpts of the music in question.

Parth Shah, Friedman on India. A collection of two important documents written by Milton Friedman: his essay on Indian economic planning, and a memorandum he drafted for the government of India in 1955 as part of a technical assistance programme under the Eisenhower Administration. Both, I would say, have aged fairly well.

Music

Some new albums I discovered, or listened to properly for the first time, last month:

George Russell, The Jazz Workshop. I have listened to little Russell. Ezz-Thetic is the most popular and accessible track here. Personally, I feel that Ye Hypocrite, Ye Beelzebub will repay repeat listenings the most.

Jaco Pastorius, Jaco Pastorius. Come On, Come Over was straight to the regular rotation. I’d previously only heard Pastorius through his collaborations, like with Weather Report. He’s also on Joni Mitchell’s Mingus album.

Antonín Dvořák, Symphony No. 1 (Royal Scottish National Orchestra recording). The “Bells of Zlonice” symphony. Unfortunately, there is no Sticky Notes episode about this symphony yet, so I don’t know what to think. ;) A friend told me last year that not liking Dvořák was the classical music equivalent of not liking the taste of chicken, and I’m inclined to agree.

Keith Jarrett, Shostakovich 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87. These are prelude-fugue pairs which cycle through all 24 keys. I did not even know that Keith Jarrett had released classical recordings, but these are superb, and were my go-to piano recordings last month.

Films

Satyajit Ray, Pather Panchali. I found out about this doyen of Bengali cinema from the chapter about him in Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian. This is Ray’s first film, from 1955, and the first in the Apu Trilogy. I don’t know how else to describe it than that this film feels very License Raj; the listed producer in the credits is “The Government of West Bengal”! There is one iconic abuse scene over halfway through, which is breathtaking and worth watching the whole film for. The Ravi Shankar soundtrack will also appeal to anyone with an interest in Indian classical music.

Eva Libertad, Deaf (Sorda). The only time I have seen Spanish sign language. I thought this was excellent, especially the scenes of the couple fighting. Simple, low-budget, and yet I haven’t seen a film released in America this good in years.

Wong Kar-wai, Chungking Express. Still one of my favourite films. It was interesting to rewatch this with a friend who was trying her best to hide the fact that she hated it. I had forgotten quite how plotless it is. Chungking Express and several pieces of fiction I read in late summer 2023 form for me what I think Claire Wang means by the term ‘foundational texts’. Here’s a nice video essay about how it managed to be so low-budget.

From YouTube, I am apparently now in the brainrot business. And, unfortunately, business is booming. I also watched Gavin Leech explain what’s going on in AI, and Milton Friedman’s masterful performance on the Phil Donahue Show. Finally, Kim Yo Jong is getting more extreme.

1. By ‘related’, I mean that I just steal all of his ideas.

2. Sonnet’s response: “This meme plays on the contrast between the Universal Approximation Theorem (a legitimate mathematical concept) and the confused, skeptical expression on this dog's face.

The Universal Approximation Theorem states that neural networks with sufficient width can approximate any continuous function to arbitrary accuracy. However, the theorem has an important limitation: it only guarantees approximation capability, not that the network will actually learn efficiently or generalize well in practice.

The joke is that someone (presumably a person, though the meme format suggests it's the dog) mistakenly thinks this theorem implies that neural networks can perform "parsimonious OOD (Out-of-Distribution) reasoning in the limit." This is actually a significant misunderstanding because:

1. The theorem says nothing about out-of-distribution generalization

2. "Parsimonious" (simple/efficient) reasoning isn't guaranteed - the approximating network might be incredibly complex

3. The "in the limit" part suggests needing infinite width or training time, which isn't practical

The dog's bewildered, side-eye expression perfectly captures the reaction someone knowledgeable about machine learning theory would have to this confused interpretation. It's the canine equivalent of “that's... not how any of this works.”

The humor comes from using a cute, confused dog to represent the feeling of encountering someone who's confidently wrong about a technical concept.”

3. If you are suspicious of the practice of having people rate their happiness on a cardinal scale, or whether these figures can really be compared, you may want to read this report by the Happier Lives Institute defending it as the least bad option.

4. Technically, the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, but who can remember these titles with all the departmental reshuffles?

5. Bizarrely, this is not the first time this topic has come up on my blog; in April we talked about Boolos and Jeffrey’s chapter on provability logic.

6. Hat-tip to Sam Mendehlson in my email inbox:

“I just got back from Malaysia, which I knew very little about before going. I learned a bit about their monarchy which I thought you’d be interested in for specific reasons we’ll get to in a few paragraphs . . . Malaysia is split between two land masses (plus some small islands): the peninsula (where it borders Thailand to the north and has Singapore below its southern tip) and the large island Borneo (which is mostly made up of Indonesia and also has the small kingdom of Brunei). They have different histories and most of the population is on the peninsula.

The peninsula has 11 states and 2 federal territories. The federal territories are basically the capital region. Two of the states, Penang and Malacca, are former Straits Settlements, once directly ruled by the British (and before them, the East India Company, at one point answering to the bosses in Calcutta). Singapore was also one of the Straits Settlements.

The remaining 9 states are the territories of former sultanates and were ruled indirectly, with a British Resident installed in each. This seems more or less like the formula in India with the three presidencies (Bombay, Madras, Calcutta) with direct rule and then the countless Princely States with indirect rule.

Though Malaysia is democratic, each of those states still has its sultan. I haven’t read much yet about what they actually do, but to quote wikipedia: “The monarchies of Malaysia exist in each of the nine Malay states under the constitutional monarchy system as practised in Malaysia. The political system of Malaysia is based on the Westminster parliamentary system in combination with features of a federation.” Every five years the sultans get together and decide who should be the King of Malaysia, or rather the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, for the next five years (or until they die or step down). Though they do “vote” on the next king, it follows a particular order so that it cycles through each state in the same succession pattern.

(Fun fact: Malaysia’s first prime minister was Tunku Abdul Rahman. Malaysia’s first king was Tuanku Abdul Rahman.)

Malaysia is around 23% Chinese and for whatever reason most of my trip was in cities with large Chinese majorities, where even the small Indian minorities seemed more prevalent than the Malays (ethnic Malays are distinct from the broader multi-ethnic Malaysian umbrella). I felt like I was missing out on the Malay culture so when I was staying in the old Chinese tin mining town of Ipoh (once the world’s largest supplier of tin!) I made an effort to visit Kuala Kangsar, which is the royal capital of the state and was a 40 minute train ride away. It’s a quiet, pretty, green village with a wild 1917 Indo-saracenic mosque and a cool 1933 Islamo-deco (my term) palace, and the only slightly older Malay-fusion style old palace. There’s also the Malay College, known as the “Eton of the East,” set up in 1905 as the first fully residential school in British Malaya and is where Malay elites could send their kids. Anthony Burgess taught there in the 50s.

The current Sultan of Perak seems fairly liberal among the sultans, and his wikipedia says he is an advocate for “Islamic moderation.” In contrast, other states have Sharia law. His wife, the Raja Permaisuri (Queen consort), does not wear a headscarf, which is significant as I’m not sure I saw a single Malay woman without a headscarf anywhere I went.

Ah, his wife. That was the point of all of this. She’s half Malay, half Irish. Their 17 year old son Raja Azlan Muzzaffar Shah is the heir to the throne. The Sultan of Perak is next in line to be the king, but that will be the current Sultan, not the son. However, there is a clear pathway for an Irish King of Malaysia in around 50 years! Mark your calendar!

Or… not quite. Most of the sultanates have hereditary succession, but in the Perak Sultanate “the throne rotates among three branches of the royal family loosely based on agnatic seniority” and the quarter-Irish Raja Kecil Besar (Grand Minor Prince) is only third in line for the throne of Perak.

And that’s where I gave up trying to figure it out. But anyway, I thought you’d want to know!”

Of course, this all assumes that Irishness is a dominant gene, as people often do.

7. Relative to other funding bodies of scientific trials, that is.

8. They have been at best minor works.