Benquo

Previously: Is GDP a Kind of Factory? There is a word, "convergence," which economists use when they want to say that poor countries are becoming less poor relative to rich ones. There is a phrase, "the resource curse," for the tendency of countries with valuable natural resources to stay poor...

LLMs are searchable holograms of the text corpus they were trained on. RLHF LLM chat agents have the search tuned to be person-like. While one shouldn't excessively anthropomorphize them, they're helpful for simple experimentation into the latent discursive structure of human writing, because they're often constrained to try to answer...

There is an epistemic stance, common among academics in quantitative fields, academics who wish they were in quantitative fields, and independent scholars who do not wish to decorrelate too much from the academic mainstream by communicating in an incompatible dialect, that treats statistical convergence as the gold standard of evidence....

The US homicide rate hit 10.2 per 100,000 in 1980, fell to 4.4 by 2014, then spiked to 6.5 in 2020. This looks like a story about violence rising, falling, and rising again. The actual story is simpler and worse: homicidal violence tripled in the 1960s and 70s. After adjusting...

In 2021, economists Arvind Subramanian, Justin Sandefur, and Dev Patel announced that poor countries had finally started catching up to rich ones, vindicating the Solow growth model's prediction of "convergence." Now they say the rumors of Solow convergence's vindication were premature; the convergence trend reversed and poor countries are falling...

Zack Davis emailed me[1] asking me to weigh in on the moderators' request for comment on their proposal to ban Said_Achmiz. I've had a conflict with Said in the past in this thread and apparently they're claiming in private communications that this is a major reason I don't use the...

On Profitable Partial Exit from Perverse Regimes Through the Exercise of One's Formal Rights as a Citizen Enough criticism and analysis for the moment; here's a constructive program! Whole systems become richer through exchange and division of labor, which affords people more leisure to explore and investigate the environment, and...