Income inequality

the world taken as a single country would be as unequal as the most unequal country on earth, South Africa

World’s inequality was reduced in the past 30 years, for the first time since maybe the 1820’s and this was mainly due to China getting back into the world economy. No longer, right now China is more unequal than the average, so its growth will add inequality

Will Africa grow and reduce world inequality? Very likely no, african countries need growing on avergae 7-8% a year and historically they have not recorded that steady growth ever. And also India needs growing and pulling its population out of poverty, will it succed?

So, unless advqned countries takes a decisive action within, world inequality will soon stop oing down and will start growing again

Thanks Branko Milanovic for that clear view http://glineq.blogspot.com/2021/05/notes-on-global-income-inequality-non.html

and 2 charts from here https://twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1211317792361926658

Attractive profits, complements and value stacks

Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement from Joel Spolsky essay about tech companies keeping control of chocke point in the tech stack, and commoditize the djacent stacks as a way of preempting competition

rekated, I think, the law of attractive profits by Clayton Christensen that states “When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.” HBR breaktru ideas of 2004 https://hbr.org/2004/02/breakthrough-ideas-for-2004

Chris Dixon on complements https://cdixon.org/2009/09/10/non-linearity-of-technology-adoption

christensen and spolsky really say the same thing but chosse to show the arrow of causation in different directions, C is worried how the managers of an incumbent company, the sort of company that does portfolio decisions within an estabilished business, can chase profits in other segment of the value chain once they are commoditizied. SPolsky speaks to startups which have doggedly built a business in one segment and need preventing competition, in an environent marked by disruption

Natural Abstraction Hypothesys

Testing The Natural Abstraction Hypothesis: Project Intro

“Our physical world abstracts well: for most systems, the information relevant “far away” from the system (in various senses) is much lower-dimensional than the system itself.”

Reminds me of Hofstadter example with the sort of billiard balls, how does he call it?

Detusch rather talks of emergent phenomenon, we can usefully do thermodynamic calculations on a pot of boiling water but if we wnated to he reductionists we should do impossible calculations on the dynamics of bubbles and the result would be the samme.

In the lesswrong post the hypothesis is developed in relation to AI and its “alignment”, I still do not grasp the full extent of this concept, mostly theoretical and detached from reality

“the natural abstraction hypothesis would dramatically simplify AI and AI alignment in particular. It would mean that a wide variety of cognitive architectures will reliably learn approximately-the-same concepts as humans use, and that these concepts can be precisely and unambiguously specified”

“If true, the natural abstraction hypothesis provides a framework for translating between high-level human concepts, low-level physical systems, and high-level concepts used by non-human systems.”

of Broccoli and Chestnuts

an horse chestnut is genetically closer to broccoli than to a sweet chestnut

There is no such a thing as a tree, phylogenetically like there is carcinization for sea arthropods tending to become crabs, so there is dendronization, tweak the expression of a couple of genes, heat the right and a green plant develop wood

and there’s no such a thing as wood, althought evident is it, from the point of view of evolution

apparently there is a classic Scott Alexander I should read here THE CATEGORIES WERE MADE FOR MAN, NOT MAN FOR THE CATEGORIES

The incipt does indeed smell of classic “The argument goes like this. Jonah got swallowed by a whale. But the Bible says Jonah got swallowed by a big fish. So the Bible seems to think whales are just big fish. Therefore the Bible is fallible. Therefore, the Bible was not written by God.”

Cells with learning

https://www.the-scientist.com/features/can-single-cells-learn-68694

“To Gelber, the experiments demonstrated that Paramecium was learning to associate the wire with food, a conclusion that challenged scientists’ belief that only highly evolved, multicellular animals with central nervous systems were capable of such behavio. More fundamentally, her results suggested that at least some of the biological machinery needed for learning and other cognitive processes might exist not in the connections among neurons in an animal brain, but within individual cells themselvesr”

Previously on this site “Neurons with memory”https://1500poundgoat.com/2021/04/21/neurons-with-memory/”

I see a pattern here, at least MR Tyler Cowen getting interested in alternative explanations to neurons connecting, I found both links on his website

post-scarcity energy scenario

“With our current battery technology of about 100 Wh/kg and $100/kWh, 30 TWh of battery storage for load-shifting would cost US$3 trillion. The global energy market turns over this much every year”

“those batteries would weigh 300 million tonnes and fill 15 million twenty-foot cargo containers. A decade-long installation program at 2020 prices would cost about 1.5 percent of global GDP”

“Generating 100 percent of our energy from solar panels would consume less than 0.5 percent of Earth’s land. Uninhabited deserts take up 33 percent of the Earth’s land. Agriculture uses 11 percent. Roads and roofs in urban areas are 1 percent”

“As of 2020, solar energy was so cheap—even excluding curtailment—that you could synthesize hydrocarbons from captured CO2 for about as much as it costs to drill and refine. Prometheus Fuels,”

“What else might we do with stupendously cheap electricity? Thermodynamically intensive devices such as heat pumps and electrochemical devices such as smelting aluminium or magnesium will recycle everything. By reverse-osmosis, they will desalinate enough water to refill rivers parched by global warming. They will power air conditioning, data center cooling, antimatter synthesis, and zero-impact mining using hard rock tunnel boring machines far beneath the surface”

Also, why is solar in so much steepr trajectory than nuclear ? Product cycles in solar con last as little as 6 months and the rate of learning gets exponential. Nuclear, on the other hand, in 75 years of it history is having trouble to roll-out its 3rd generation reactors

form here, I am happy to read something so optimistic, I have a few things to check by myself https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/long-live-the-sun

Definition of Conservative, effective

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.”

I have been looking for a synthetic operational, braod definition for all those behaviours relating to universality and particularism, privilege and rule of law and I like this one

Being in Italy there is no conservatism (funny, there’s lot more “conserved” from the past here) soi I think to it as an effective defintion of “right politics”

thanks Cory Doctorow for the pointer, funny the defintion is buried in a comment in Crooked Timber https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1388934085242810373

I like the idea of a Gresham law for political ideas “

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

BTW the comment is fresh, Frank WIlhoit has been dead for over 10 years, it is a famous quote. I know nothing of political science and indeed the quote is misapprorpiated, it was said by a Frank WIlhoit composer

Mis-appropriated Quotation on Conservatism[edit]

There’s a quotation[10] floating around the internet originally written by the composer and software architect Frank Wilhoit:[11]

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

.

Several authors have misattributed this quotation to Francis M. Wilhoit: e.g. [12] with people later realizing that the comment was made 8 years after Francis M. Wilhoit died.