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[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
It will probably discredit me in the minds of some, but I have to admit that I read Russell Kirk’s (1953) The Conservative Mind with a great deal of guilty pleasure, and admiration. Some time I would like to return to his defense of the liberal arts in the service of the cultivation of a natural aristocracy. But today I explore what I earlier (recall) described as a his “call for a reformed more prudent imperialism.”
At first sign, Kirk’s work belongs to the tradition of American isolationism. It’s quite critical of imperialism, and one can quote many passages like the following (from the discussion of Irving Babbit in chapter XII): “Imperialism is one aspect of man's ancient expansive conceit, which the Greeks knew would bring hubris, and then blindness, and finally nemesis.” For Kirk (and Babbitt) it clearly means the divine punishment of hubris. Nemesis plays an important role in this chapter (and Kirk’s general argument).
First, the existence of nemesis is part of the argument against the false realism, and false empiricism, of Machiavellianism (I quote Kirk who partially quotes Babbit):
Yet Machiavelli and his followers are not true realists: "The Nemesis, or divine judgment, or whatever one may term it, that sooner or later overtakes those who transgress the moral law, is not something that one has to take on authority, either Greek or Hebraic; it is a matter of keen observation." With Hobbes, this negation of morality enters English political thought, and we continue to suffer from its poison.
Nemesis, thus, follows eventually and necessarily from an enduring transgression of moral boundaries. (I leave it to fans of Star Trek to draw the obvious connections.) Kirk’s claim is, part and parcel of, and supported by, the providentialism articulated throughout The Conservative Mind. But having said that, Kirk’s “whatever one may term it” betrays a hint of the need for new myths for a materialist (a point he ascribes to Santayana).
As an aside, while the main official target of this argument will be ‘liberal humanitarianism,’ the quoted passage is clearly a swipe against Burnham, whose The Machiavellians, defenders of freedom had sought to offer anti-liberals a positive program. But Burnham’s new (managerial) elite is, in fact, dangerous because, like the modern Nietzcheans whose poetry it constantly emulates, it fails to recognize natural limits and so is itself an engine of destruction.
Second, in his own age Nemesis is exemplified and illustrated by Hiroshima and Nagasaki--a point reiterated several times throughout the book. Here it also sets up the argument against ‘Liberal humanitarianism’ which “in the United States found itself embarrassed, to put the matter mildly, when the Second World War was won-won at the expense of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all they meant to the American conscience, won at the expense of consuming centralization at home, the maintenance of permanent armies abroad.”
No less eloquent than the Marxist critic or the Schmittian, Kirk evokes Liberal humanitarianism (with its self-confident standardization and consumerism) as the false imperialism throughout his argument. In fact, it is the task of the twentieth century conservative to tame this “corroding imperialism more ominous even than those the Romans failed to resist after they had crushed Macedonia.” It is precisely “in victory” that conservatism is required “to redeem her from ungoverned will and appetite” that is the product of two centuries of (Hamiltonian) expansionism. Kirk forcefully rejects the idea that American “institutions” can be imposed “upon cultures which have as good a claim to respect.”
In fact, Kirk’s providentialism is informed by the near miraculous revival of conservative forces during the mid-twentieth century against the grain of progressivism. This revival he understands as a moral awakening due not just to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also to the horrors of the Gulag and many smaller examples of the excesses of planning.
I don’t think Kirk advocates retreat from empire altogether. Rather, he councils national humility in preserving it, against what he calls “the tremendous imperialistic instinct of modern democracy.” Goes on to claim that it is an empirical “error (as Mirabeau said) to suppose that democracy and imperialism are inimical; they will hunt together in our time, as they did in Periclean Athens and Revolutionary France.”
Those of us long accustomed to an imperial presidency with its tendency toward plebiscitary democracy, the permanent multitude of US American bases around the world, and a number of disastrous foreign interventions in the name of humanity will have to judge Kirk’s exhortation – despite its truth – a failure. But no liberal can rejoice in this failure—rather it should be the foundation of more sober reflection on reform of our crass political culture, our weakening institutions, and empire.
When, in 2001, George W. Bush looked Vladimir Putin in the eye, he found him “very straightforward and trustworthy.” Nearly two decades later, the former president amended his account, saying that Russian oil riches had “changed” Putin. Another possibility does not seem to have occurred to Bush. Perhaps, in 2001, he looked into the eyes of someone consummately well-trained at dissimulation.
One might make a strong case that deep insight into Putin’s character requires profound knowledge of the social system from which he emerged, that is, the totalitarian police-state that was the USSR. In Gaila Ackerman and Stéphane Courtois’s 2022 Le Livre noir de Vladimir Poutine (which translated is “The Black Book of Vladimir Putin”), we find a considerable quantity of such insight.
This book, a collection of essays from scholarly experts on Russia and the former Soviet Union, comes at an especially important moment, as many on the religious right have become enamored of Putin’s supposedly Christian leadership of Russia. The Black Book of Vladimir Putin hews close to the facts and shows that any pretense to reality cannot deny that Putin’s regime is brutal, deceitful, corrupt, and unworthy of even mild admiration.
This book comes at an especially important moment, as many on the religious right have become enamored with Putin’s supposedly Christian leadership of Russia.
Putin: Homo Sovieticus
One of the two co-editors, Stéphane Courtois, is perhaps the world’s foremost historian of the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet communism. He is the main editor of the international bestseller, the title of which is played on in this current book, The Black Book of Communism. He is also the author of perhaps the finest biography of Lenin produced to date.
One of the central contributions Courtois has made to our understanding of Soviet society is the breathtaking scale of its moral corruption and the human costs that were a consequence of that condition. The Black Book details the gruesome quantitative data representing athe tens of millions of innocent human beings the Soviet machine-plowed into the ground.
This scholarly expertise makes Courtois an extraordinary analyst of Putin. The several chapters in this book that he authors or co-authors with co-editor Galia Ackerman are full of brilliant insights into the complicated business of understanding Putin, based on studying the forces that produced him. In Courtois’s view, the Russian strongman must be understood as an example of “Homo sovieticus,” a political personality irrevocably formed by his decade-and-a-half career, begun as a young man, in the stupendously brutal and amoral bureaucracy of the KGB.
The Soviet regime is formally gone, but the legacy of its formidable security apparatus lives on. There was never a “decommunization” process in the wake of the USSR’s collapse. The vast majority of those who had participated in its structures and atrocities escaped punishment, and many of them created political careers in the post-communist era. One sees this with clarity in people like Putin who were deeply marked by their socialization within that apparatus. One of the Ackerman/Courtois chapters is aptly titled “The KGB returns to power,” and another “Vladimir Putin’s headlong rush to the past.”
In Courtois’s view, the Russian strongman must be understood as an example of “Homo sovieticus,” a political personality irrevocably formed by his decade-and-a-half career, begun as a young man, in the stupendously brutal and amoral bureaucracy of the KGB.
Putin’s post-Soviet political career accelerated markedly in the wake of his response, during his first stint as prime minister, to the bombings of several Russian apartment buildings in September 1999. The bombings were attributed by the Russian regime to the same Chechen Islamist forces that had invaded Dagestan in August, but the latter never claimed responsibility. An independent investigatory commission was created, but the Russian regime refused to cooperate with it. Several of its members were subsequently assassinated. Alexander Litvinenko, an agent with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the post-Soviet incarnation of the KGB (which was suspected by some critics of the government’s statement on the bombings as the real agents behind them), defected to the UK and wrote a book detailing the FSB’s responsibility. He was subsequently fatally poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 administered in a cup of tea. British intelligence sources determined that Putin’s fingerprints were almost certainly all over Litvinenko’s assassination.
Months after the bombings and a subsequent land invasion of Chechen territory, Putin rode the wave of horror and nationalist emotion to the Russian presidency for the first time. This was the series of events that provided the crucial backdrop for Putin’s rise to political power.
Putin’s Neo-Imperialism
The Black Book of Vladimir Putin works through much of the history of Putin’s aggression toward former Soviet republics. Putin has worked assiduously and ruthlessly to bring them into subordinate relations with Russia. Such efforts have included the overt subversion of political process in those countries, the crushing of political movements inside them hostile to his administration, and outright war, occupation, and annexation. Ukraine is merely the latest example of the neo-imperialism of the Putin regime, which is closely modeled on the expansionism of the Stalin years. Putin’s use of a friendly dictatorial regime in Belarus to arrange the delivery of tactical nuclear weapons to a country with an almost 700-mile border with Ukraine is but the latest example of Putin’s merciless and militaristic politics with respect to his neighbors.
In addition to Courtois’s formidable contributions, the volume offers many useful chapters on Putin’s imperialist ambition. Two chapters by Andrei Kozovoi, a historian of Russia at the University of Lille, expand on his insights into the secret police history and mentality of Putin. Mairbek Vatchagaev, a Chechen historian who was a member of the Chechen republic that fell during the Second Chechen War, provides an insider’s account of Putin’s successful effort to install Ramzan Khadyrov, a hardline despot sympathetic to the Russian regime, as political chief in Chechnya. The entire history of Putin’s action in the region is reasonably understood as an effort to reassemble the political monolith that was the former Soviet Union, the fracturing of which Putin described as “a major humanitarian tragedy” and the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century.
The Orthodox Church: Putin’s Ally
Antoine Arjakovsky, a French-born historian of Crimean ancestry, contributes a revealing chapter on the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in providing crucial cultural support to the Putin regime. Patriarch Kirill gets much attention here. Many know of the scandal of the disappearing $30,000 watch on Kirill’s wrist, but Arjakovsky gives many more troubling examples of the moral compromise of a church hierarchy that has been solidly propagandizing for the Putin regime for years now. Kirill’s aggressive support of the war in Ukraine, and his framing of it in “metaphysical” terms, is deeply morally troubling. This is especially so given a leader in Moscow who flippantly speaks of nuclear exchange with the West, in an apocalyptic language of religious martyrdom that previously was heard only from Islamist suicide bombers. Kirill’s aggressive mobilization of the “Moscow as Third Rome” ideology provides more ground for the church’s warm relationship with the Putin regime.
Arjakovsky also discusses the Mitrokhine archive, which consists of notes compiled by Vassily Mitrokhine, a former KGB archivist who defected to the United Kingdom. These documents provide information on the re-creation of the Moscow Patriarchate under Stalin in 1943 and on the dictator’s efforts to exert control over the church. It was the NKVD, and later the KGB, that controlled the nominations to leadership positions in the church hierarchy and formulated plans to use the church’s relations with international religious and peace organizations for Soviet espionage.
This book offers a healthy corrective for the portion of the American right that’s become frustrated with liberalism and has turned to Putin’s Russia as a viable alternative—many of whom believe truly amazing things about Putin and the society over which he rules. The idea that Russia is a profoundly authentic Christian state is roundly debunked by straightforward social facts. What kind of Christian social utopia has the massive violent crime, murder, suicide, alcoholism, abortion, and divorce rates of Russia? None of this is consistent with a society in which Orthodox Christian culture and belief are deeply entrenched and practiced. On the contrary, it is all quite consistent with the low levels of real practical religiosity in Russia reported in reliable survey data. Research on how Russians behave in religious terms shows that they are in fact not entirely unlike Americans. That is, survey responses show high levels of religious belief, and much lower numbers of church attendance at services. Indeed, Americans have significantly higher levels of regular church attendance. This is evidence that those eager to emulate Russia are hard pressed to explain, when they can even be bothered to acknowledge its existence.
Limits of Liberal Critiques of Putin
Many, though not all, of the contributors to the book are evidently liberal democrats in their politics, and this has significant consequences on a few topics. Complicated aspects of the cultural and political debates between liberals, national conservatives, and religious traditionalists simply disappear under this lens. The fierce cultural struggle over, for example, the sexual political revolution of modernity is often caricatured in these pages as the illegitimate reactionary effort to destroy the pure and wholly positive sexual freedom of the ever-expanding LGBTQI+ community. Co-editor Ackerman, for example, in the chapter “A pseudo-conservative society that walks backwards,” presents as obvious atrocities the Putin regime’s support for the biological family, natalist policies, the reestablishment of sex-segregated primary and secondary education, and the reintroduction of school uniforms. She also cheers the efforts of George Soros’s Open Society to move the Russian cultural thermometer closer to the temperature of the Western democracies. But one scarcely needs to be pro-Putin to find that some of the things his regime advocates are not wholly inconsistent with reasonable cultural conservatism, as articulated by many sources outside Putin’s Russia.
One scarcely needs to be pro-Putin to find that some of the things his regime advocates are not wholly inconsistent with reasonable cultural conservatism, as articulated by many sources outside Putin’s Russia.
Another example that shows up in several of the chapters is the facile way in which Russian nationalist and conservative philosophers with large and complicated bodies of writing behind them, such as Alexander Dugin and Ivan Ilyin, are flatly characterized as “fascists” and “Nazis” without any systematic effort to show how the entire body of their work would justify such a classification. Dugin’s idiotic online pronouncements on the Ukrainian War (“The Ukrainians should be killed, killed, killed. No more discussions.”) are mobilized by several different chapter authors as a definitive reason to dismiss everything he has ever thought or written. But both Dugin and Ilyin have produced some work nuanced enough to require a more intellectually serious critique than this crude effort to demonize. So while the book’s collection of data offers a strong repudiation of Putin’s regime, its dismissals of Russia’s social conservatism on liberal grounds are less persuasive.
Dealing with Putin
Even with its shortcomings, how can Courtois’s and Ackerman’s volume guide America’s response to the most pressing matter regarding Russia today, the war in Ukraine? As modern wars often are, the Russia–Ukraine affair is complicated, especially in its international implications. There is evidence of strong bipartisan American disapproval of Russia in the wake of the Ukrainian invasion. However, distinctions along partisan lines emerge over the practical question of what the United States should do. On the American right, this dispute is particularly rancorous. In the most recent Claremont Review of Books, Mark Helprin and Michael Anton argue the positions from the right on, respectively, the necessity to vigorously defend Ukraine and the wisdom of American refusal to get strongly entangled in the conflict.
It goes without saying that crucial to any responsible position in this debate is understanding the character of Vladimir Putin and the nature of his regime. The Ackerman–Courtois volume will not definitively put an end to these debates, but it does dispel any illusions that Putin’s leadership is anything more morally sophisticated than an effort to resurrect the spirit of Soviet Russia.
And perhaps it did not start in the United States? Here is more from David Rozado, including a full research paper:
Great Awokening is a global phenomenon. No evidence it started in US media. Analysis of 98 million news articles across 36 countries quantifies. Exception: state-controlled media from China/Russia/Iran using wokeness terminology to criticize/mock the Westhttps://t.co/yHwPMSR4D0 pic.twitter.com/RF30c2UmWQ
— David Rozado (@DavidRozado) April 6, 2023
The post Is the Great Awokening a global phenomenon? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
One model of a future course is a super-textbook: lectures, exercises, quizzes, and grading all available on a tablet with artificial intelligence routines guiding students to lectures and
exercises designed to address that student’s deficits and with human intelligence—tutors—on call on an as-needed basis, possibly for extra marginal fees.
That was Tyler and I in our 2014 paper. Here’s the Washington Post on the Khan Academy and OpenAI colloboration.
…last week, the private Khan Lab School campuses in Palo Alto and Mountain View welcomed a special version of the [GPT] technology into its classrooms.
Rather than solve a math problem for a student, as ChatGPT might do if asked, Khanmigo is programmed to act like “a thoughtful tutor that’s actually going to move you forward in your work,” says Salman Khan, the technologist-turned-educator who founded Khan Academy and Khan Lab School.
Khanmigo was developed in concert with OpenAI, the nonprofit tech start-up that created GPT-4, the underlying technology for the latest version of ChatGPT. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment on the partnership.
The post Khan Academy Joins with OpenAI appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
As I wrote in a recent article published in the Wall Street Journal, there is no rule of law under authoritarian rule. No matter if we are talking about emperors of old or the party-state systems of the past century (otherwise known as communist authoritarianism), the enduring characteristics are the same: a tiny minority or even one individual holds the highest levels of power, monopolizing the authority and resources of the nation. Any laws created in such systems are merely tools to protect these monopolies for the benefit of the rulers, at the expense of the ruled.
Talking about the rule of law in a place like China (more specifically, CCP-occupied China) is thus as absurd as talking about traffic regulations in the wilderness. The so-called law is the law of kings, wielded at whim. Unlike in democratic systems where the law stands above all people and ensures social justice and independence of government branches, under authoritarianism, those with power are the law.
As I did in the Wall Street Journal article, I would like to draw on the case of human rights attorney Gao Zhisheng to illustrate how the regime uses its legal system to destroy its opponents. But Public Discourse’s longer format allows me in this essay to more fully explain the manner in which the CCP manipulates the legal system, and to demonstrate why simply having laws on paper is not enough to protect individual rights.
Talking about the rule of law in a place like China (more specifically, CCP-occupied China) is thus as absurd as talking about traffic regulations in the wilderness.
Gao Zhisheng and the CCP
Born in 1964, Gao Zhisheng became part of an upswelling of interest in the law in the early 2000s. This group comprised activists and attorneys who saw the law as a mechanism to reform government corruption and potentially bring political change. This became known as the Rights Defense Movement. For a time, determined and high-minded individuals like Gao operated somewhat freely and won some low-profile social justice cases in court. But this period was temporary and ended with the internet age, which enabled unprecedented CCP surveillance. When Gao began taking on cases involving the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners—a hot-button issue for the CCP—the regime clamped down.
By 2005, not long after he received his public laurels, Gao’s law office was shuttered, and his legal license later revoked. In 2006 he was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison plus five years with no political rights, but was let out on parole after a few months. If his parole was meant as a lure to instill silence, Gao refused the bait and continued to speak out about human rights issues. Displeased with his refusal to toe the line, the Party struck back. In 2007, he was abducted and held in the basement of a military facility where he was tortured for over fifty days within an inch of his life. The horrific suffering he experienced defies the imagination.
For a decade, Gao was caught in this hellish cycle of incarceration, torture, house arrest, and disappearance. Then, on August 13, 2017, after a memoir he’d written in secret under house arrest was published abroad, he was taken from his home with no warning or legal basis. His family notified the police of a disappeared person and demanded that they conduct a search. But despite multiple pleas for action, and multiple demands for a response from public security, the family was pushed aside or ignored. No explanation was offered, and no action was taken.
No Accountability
It has now been five and a half years since Gao’s disappearance, five and a half years for his family to suffer without news, without word of his health, well-being, or whereabouts. With the police and public security unresponsive, what avenues are available to Gao’s family in the law?
Many of the People’s Republic of China’s legal codes are fairly clear and straightforward, and in many cases bear a resemblance to Western laws. The legal procedures for a missing person case are similar: the case is filed, and injured parties can bring lawsuits and appeal. But could Gao’s family bring a lawsuit against public security for negligence, and demand that the court force the public security to give an explanation? If they disagreed with the ruling given, could they proceed with an appeal, as described under the law as codified in the constitution? Could Gao Zhisheng himself, if at home, file his own case in court and defend himself, as is expressed in the law?
Unfortunately for Gao and countless others, the fact that these steps are available per the text of the PRC’s legal code means nothing in practice under CCP-controlled China. First, and foremost, government bodies in China are not independent, and must act according to the Party’s bidding. The CCP acts as a shadow government, pulling the strings while the government—made up of unelected officials and their hires—does the bidding of the Party.
Hence, public security, a government branch with police functions, must administer the CCP’s orders. In Gao’s case, it seems that public security was ordered to abduct him. This means that calling the police and demanding an answer from public security is equivalent to calling the fox to send back the hens. The CCP, by its own law, cannot be sued. Furthermore, the possibility of suing a government agency or official is almost nil since the Party controls the judiciary and the courts. Even if a case were to make it into the court system, the CCP would probably order the court to extend the case under piles of procedural steps so that, years later, the verdict would essentially be: “the public security searched but didn’t find anything, and therefore can’t be found guilty of inaction.”
The CCP acts as a shadow government, pulling the strings while the government—made up of unelected officials and their hires—does the bidding of the Party.
Even if the family were able to appeal such a ruling, the precedents for the CCP fabricating evidence on a grand and blatant scale practically guarantee that the family’s case has no chance for victory in court.
Should Gao Zhisheng ever write up a case file himself, what would be a likely outcome? If he were at home, he would be surrounded by thugs preventing him from leaving and submitting his file at court. Well, what if his family were able to somehow get past the thugs and deliver his documents on his behalf? As the lead plaintiff in his own case, if he were blocked from leaving home, the “legal” outcome from the court would probably be that, due to lack of appearance at court, “the plaintiff has forfeited his case.”
Dead End Law
Though I raise Gao’s case in the hypothetical, the precedents are very real. When I was in prison, my wife Weijing was under house arrest at our home in Shandong when I was awarded a prize from the Megsaysay Foundation. She made it to Beijing, planning to take a plane to accept the award on my behalf. But she was illegally stopped inside the airport, and her passport destroyed, following which she was forcefully taken back to our home in Shandong. So she hired a lawyer to sue the Border Protection. The court took the case files and even sent Weijing a date for her case to be heard in court. But when she tried to leave our home in Shandong to attend the trial, the thugs surrounding our home wouldn’t let her leave.
This is another example of the CCP’s infuriating system of bureaucratic paradoxes designed to at once give the semblance of lawfulness while making a lawful outcome entirely impossible. For regular people, the law is simply a dead end—words on paper whose only purpose is to provide a front, a façade, a detour leading away from the truth.
What other options do people in China have for bringing complaints or seeking redress for injustices? The petition system, in which citizens seek to place complaints directly in the hands of officials, has been shown for decades to be nothing more than a scam, another way for citizens to waste their time and precious hope—not to mention funds for travel to the capital—on empty dreams. In Western nations, the media are often a tool to exposure corruption, push for justice, and address grievance. But in CCP-occupied territory, the media are the mouthpiece of the party. There is no news, only propaganda. Cases such as Gao’s would not be broadcast on the CCP’s platforms. If information about Gao or other activists is leaked online, it will be quickly deleted and filtered out. This is, for most activists, another dead end.
Any action, any citizen, any institution or idea that the CCP deems contrary or in opposition to its leadership will be crushed.
But for those who refuse to relent, and refuse to give in to the Party’s obscene power, there are ways of getting information about the CCP’s crimes out of CCP-occupied territories, and there are ways of contacting foreign media. But invariably the CCP will send public security to your door along with the accusation of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” They slap a so-called “pocket crime” on your chest, which means they accuse you of something completely random as though they just picked it from their pocket. Then they drag you away. And there’s always the favorite accusations of “collaborating with a foreign enemy power,” “disclosing national secrets,” or “inciting subversion of state power.” In any case, the CCP will use the same means it has used against Gao Zhisheng to subdue anyone who refuses to be enslaved by it.
Again, there is no rule of law under authoritarianism. Even though on paper there are good laws, they are almost always overruled by the CCP’s “evil” laws and regulations. The good laws are completely out of reach for regular people seeking justice and positive outcomes. Article 35 of the constitution states: “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China have freedoms of speech, press, assembly, association, and protest.” Article 37 states: “Any citizen, without the sign-off from the people’s procuratorate, or the ruling of the court, and under the administration of the public security, cannot be arrested, cannot be illegally detained, or under other circumstances have their freedom of movement taken and their persons illegally searched.”
These articles are well written. But does the CCP actually abide by a single word of it? Can regular people actually use any part of it? The CCP nullifies these provisions with this single statement: “It is necessary to maintain the leadership of the CCP.” In other words, any action, any citizen, any institution or idea that the CCP deems contrary or in opposition to its leadership will be crushed.
Does what I have described make you want to completely change the system?
As long as there is authoritarianism in China, there will not be democratic constitutionalism and the rule of law. Without the guarantees in democratic constitutionalism, the rule of law, and limits to power, freedom for Chinese citizens will be but a pipe dream. Hence, only ending authoritarianism, establishing the balance of power, and respecting the rule of law will stop the government from being a tool of the CCP’s desires and evil aims. Only in this way can we end cases like Gao Zhisheng’s and guarantee social justice, equality, and human rights for all in China.
The central claim of our work is that GPT-4 attains a form of general intelligence, indeed showing sparks of artificial general intelligence. This is demonstrated by its core mental capabilities (such as reasoning, creativity, and deduction), its range of topics on which it has gained expertise (such as literature, medicine, and coding), and the variety of tasks it is able to perform (e.g., playing games, using tools, explaining itself…). A lot remains to be done to create a system that could qualify as a complete AGI.
From a group of Microsoft researchers. They are correct.
The post Baby AGI is Here appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Scott McLemee reviews David Hellerstein’s The Couch, the Clinic, and the Scanner: Stories From Three Revolutionary Eras of the Mind.
In The New Madness of Crowds I argued that SVB failed because “Greater transparency and lower transaction costs have intensified the madness of the masses and expanded their reach.” A piece by Miao, Zuckerman and Eisen in the WSJ now adds to to the other side of the problem. Depositors were working on twitter time, the regulatory apparatus was not.
Depositors were draining their accounts via smartphone apps and telling their startup networks to do the same. But inside Silicon Valley Bank, executives were trying to navigate the U.S. banking system’s creaky apparatus for emergency lending and to persuade its custodian bank to stay open late to handle a multibillion-dollar transfer.
As Matt Levine summarizes:
Instead of hearing a rumor at the coffee shop and running down to the bank branch to wait on line to withdraw your money, now you can hear a rumor on Twitter or the group chat and use an app to withdraw money instantly. A tech-friendly bank with a highly digitally connected set of depositors can lose 25% of its deposits in hours, which did not seem conceivable in previous eras of bank runs.
But the other part of the problem is that, while depositors can panic faster and banks can give them their money faster, the lender-of-last-resort system on which all of this relies is still stuck in a slower, more leisurely era. “When the user interface improves faster than the core system, it means customers can act faster than the bank can react,” wrote Byrne Hobart. You can panic in an instant and withdraw your money with an app, but the bank can’t get more money without a series of phone calls and test trades that can only happen during regular business hours.
It’s not obvious whether the right thing to do is slow down depositors, at least in some circumstances, or speed up regulators but the two systems can’t work well at different speeds.
The post The Great Digital Divide: Panic at Twitter Speed, Respond at AOL Speed appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
This morning we are learning the details of the U.S. government’s decision to bail out depositors at Silicon Valley Bank, a failed bank that specialized in dealing with tech startups and venture capital. SVB got into trouble by going long on treasuries in a low interest rate environment. We are no longer in a low interest rate environment.
Federal deposit insurance is, in my view, one of the true miracles of modern American capitalism. It is a remarkable tool for ensuring financial stability and it is one of the fundamental prerequisites for making fractional reserve banking possible. It protects small investors and savers at minimal cost to the American taxpayer.
The bailout that was announced is much more than deposit insurance. The details aren’t yet fully known but if the headlines are accurate, all depositors will be made whole, regardless of whether their deposits exceeded the $250,000 FDIC limit. As it turns out, the vast majority of SVB deposits were far in excess of that. Much of that was in medium-sized business accounts used for rent, payrolls, and so forth.
We can quibble about whether or not it is a good idea to bail out those institutions; I am skeptical that it is a good idea to do that as a blanket policy, especially given that many of those institutions have revenue streams that far exceed their cash on hand. But regardless of those cases, regulators should draw a line at bailing out one of SVB’s biggest individual depositors: the stablecoin known as USDC.
USDC is run by Circle Internet Financial Ltd. As a stablecoin, it promises to maintain a 1:1 exchange rate with the US dollar. It has delivered on that promise during a period of economic growth, but it was forced to drop that peg when SVB collapsed.
Why is that? Because Circle had $3.3 billion in reserves at SVB. That’s right: their holdings were 13,000 times the maximum amount ensured by the FDIC. Bailing out Circle, and with it USDC, requires serious money.
What is the problem with bailing out this depositor? Why does it require special scrutiny? The answer is because the depositors who run stablecoins use their deposits differently than any other depositors do.
Stablecoins are cryptocurrency. They promise to deliver all of the benefits of fiat currency without government interference or regulation. The idea is that the computer can use blockchain technology and algorithmic trading strategies to produce an alternative to the dollar without relying on the mechanism of a central bank. Stablecoins are interesting because they promise, in the best case scenario, to reproduce something that I can use already: a US dollar, which is firmly and irrevocably pegged to its own value already.* The benefit of a stablecoin like USDC over the US dollar is that it enables transactions beyond the reach of the normal payments system, which can be used for activities like buying illegal things, pretending that you’re beyond the reach of the U.S. government, and speculating about our techno-future.
As it turns out, stablecoins are only stable if people believe that they are stable.** And people will only believe that they are stable if they are backed by something—that is, collateralized. That is what Circle’s SVB deposits were: a large pot of money that comprised some of its collateral to defend USDC’s value. When that money became uncertain, USDC had to drop its peg. It was no longer a stablecoin because its collateral was in question.
The problem become clear when we put all of the pieces together: SVB was acting as a central bank for USDC. Ensuring Circle’s deposits means that the US government is now the central bank for USDC.
Now, the politics that will follow from this promise to be very interesting. Crypto defenders will not want to notice that crypto got a government bailout to ensure its value. Crypto opponents might not want to acknowledge that crypto just got a big signal that it is too big to fail.
The US government bails out financial institutions from time to time. And the Fed is our central bank, after all. But it does so in exchange for the ability to regulate those financial institutions, and to take ownership over their assets when their activities threaten systemic financial stability. That is what the US government should do now in response to USDC. Otherwise, the US government should allow USDC to try to use its algorithms to save itself, which is the whole point of stablecoins in the first place.
Either the US government is the central bank that guarantees the value of USDC, or it is not. There is no third option.
* This is a tautology, but it is on purpose.
** In the words of an old friend, decentralized algorithmic stablecoins are impossible. See more here. And here.
tompepinsky
I am seeing estimates that over 97% of the funds are not FDIC insured, and many of those accounts are held by start-ups. An outright failure would be calamitous for the Silicon Valley start-up ecosystem. Likely the best outcome is if a major bank steps up and buys the thing, rendering depositors whole. Without such a buyout, regulators are in an awkward position. Leaving depositors hanging might generate additional bank runs or financial market runs. Making depositors whole, however, sets a crazy precedent (“in fact, we’re raising the guarantee to $10 million!).
So what exactly does the FDIC/Fed/Treasury have to do to get a deal consummated ASAP? What kind of behind the scenes horsetrading will be involved?
Here is NYT coverage of the basic facts. Note that every now and then the U.S. banking system is semi-insolvent, but matters work out because “on paper” losses do not have to be either realized or reported as such. Remember the 1980s? One danger is that if other banks start selling their bonds at a loss, the problems in the system will become increasingly transparent and compound themselves. That is not the most likely scenario, but it is something to watch out for. And here is the black humorous but not true take…
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Scott McLemee rounds up upcoming university press titles focused on science, medicine and the natural world.
Here is the audio, video, and transcript, Yasheng is a China scholar and a professor at MIT. Here is part of the episode summary:
Yasheng joined Tyler to discuss China’s lackluster technological innovation, why declining foreign investment is more of a concern than a declining population, why Chinese literacy stagnated in the 19th century, how he believes the imperial exam system deprived China of a thriving civil society, why Chinese succession has been so stable, why the Six Dynasties is his favorite period in Chinese history, why there were so few female emperors, why Chinese and Chinese Americans have less well becoming top CEOs of American companies than Indians and Indian Americans, where he’d send someone on a two week trip to China, what he learned from János Kornai, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Now, in your book, you write of what you call Tullock’s curse— Gordon Tullock having been my former colleague — namely, embedded succession conflict in an autocracy. Why has Chinese succession been so stable up to now? And will we see Tullock’s curse whenever Xi steps down, passes on, whatever happens there?
HUANG: I do want to modify the word that you use, stable. There are two ways to use that term. One is to describe the succession process itself. If that’s the situation we’re trying to describe, it is not stable at all. If you look at the entire history of the PRC, there have been so many succession plans that failed, and at a catastrophic level. One potential successor was persecuted to death. Another fled and died in a plane crash. Others were unceremoniously dismissed, and one was put under house arrest for almost 15 years, and he died —
COWEN: But no civil war, right?
HUANG: Yes, that’s right.
COWEN: No civil war.
HUANG: That’s right. There’s another way to talk about stability, which is stability at the system level, and that, you are absolutely right. Despite all these problems with these successions, the system as a whole has remained stable. The CCP is in power. There’s no coup, and there were not even demonstrations on the street associated with the succession failures. So, we do need to distinguish between these two kinds of stability. By one criterion, it was not stable. By the other criterion, it is quite stable.
The reason for that is, I think — although it’s a little bit difficult to generalize because we don’t really have many data points — one reason is the charisma power of individual leaders, Mao and Xiaoping. These were founding fathers of the PRC, of the CCP, and they had the prestige and — using Max Weber’s term — charisma, that they could do whatever they wanted while being able to contain the spillover effects of their mistakes. The big uncertain issue now is whether Xi Jinping has that kind of charisma to contain future spillover effects of succession failure.
This is a remarkable statistic: Since 1976, there have been six leaders of the CCP. Of these six leaders, five of them were managed either by Mao or by Deng Xiaoping. Essentially, the vast majority of the successions were handled by these two giants who had oversized charisma, oversized prestige, and unshakeable political capital.
Now we have one leader who doesn’t really have that. He relies mostly on formal power, and that’s why he has accumulated so many titles, whereas he’s making similar succession errors as the previous two leaders.
Obviously, we don’t know — because he hasn’t chosen a successor — we don’t really know what will happen if he chooses a successor. But my bet is that the ability to contain the spillover effect is going to be less, rather than more, down the road, because Xi Jinping does not match, even in a remote sense, the charisma and the prestige of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. There’s no match there.
Recommended. And I am happy to recommend Yasheng Huang’s forthcoming book The Rise and Fall of the East.
Pre-order here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300266367?ref_=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_dp_CXCHDSQB8JBKEXM4J5BE
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Amazon is pulling back from its second headquarters expansion in Crystal City (yes I still call it that), and this will herald a new age of lesser competition for businesses and their main offices:
…the growing difficulty of courting corporations. If Amazon stiffs Northern Virginia, future politicians elsewhere may be less eager to promise tax breaks and infrastructure investments, not to mention spend their reputational capital. Politically speaking, it will be harder for urban and suburban leaders to rise to the top by attracting a new major corporate tenants. “Pro-business” local governments may be less common in the years to come.
Another relevant trend is the work-from-home and hybrid models. Why should a major corporation invest in more office space if a lot of that space will be used only part of the time?
It is worth thinking through how remote and hybrid work will affect regional evolution. There have already been “booms” in some relatively small resort areas, such as parts of Maine, Long Island and West Virginia. But there will be a more general impact as well. To the extent corporations give up on clustering their talent in big office buildings, people will spread out where they live. Not everyone will set down stake in the Hamptons or along the Irish coast. Plenty of people will want to live near family or where they were born, or perhaps a few hours away from the main office as part of a hybrid arrangement.
In this new world, it will be much harder for a well-governed region to rise to the top. Even if its leaders succeed in convincing a company to relocate, for instance, there may be fewer workers who do so. Or perhaps there will be the same number of workers but they will come into the office less frequently and live scattered in many directions, sometimes in other states or metropolitan areas.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with this outcome. But the potential parvenu region just won’t feel that exciting, and the level of activity won’t feed upon itself in terms of attracting more retail and cultural amenities.
And:
Overall, there may be less competition to attract corporations. At the same time, political competition for residents may become more intense, because more people will be able to choose where to live regardless of where they work. This competition could lead to improvements in schools and parks.
Here is the rest of my Bloomberg column.
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A new paper puts forth a fascinating theory: Maybe remote work is making it easier for couples to become parents—and for parents to have more children.
The economist Adam Ozimek and the demographer Lyman Stone looked at survey data of 3,000 American women from the Demographic Intelligence Family Survey. They concluded that female remote workers were more likely to intend to have a baby than all-office workers, especially if they were richer, older, and more educated. What’s more, remote workers in the survey were more likely to marry in the next year than their nonremote counterparts.
Remote work might promote family formation in a few ways. Remote workers can move more easily, because they don’t have to live within commuting distance of their job. This flexibility might result in more marriages by ending the “two-body problem,” where romantic partners find employment in different cities and must choose between their career and their relationship. What’s more, remote work reduces commutes, and those weekly hours can be shifted to family time, making it easier to start or grow a family.
Fertility is an awkward topic for journalists, because starting a family is such a complicated and intimate decision. But fertility rates aren’t declining simply because more people are choosing not to have children—American women report having fewer kids than they want, as Stone has documented in previous research. If remote work is subtly restructuring the contours of life to enable more women to have the families they want, that’s great news.
That is all from Derek Thompson at The Atlantic.
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Academic freedom and intellectual merit are under attack in the United States, from both the left and the right. The norms of the university and intellectual life are fragile and need protecting because such norms are always in tension with political and economic power.
The undersigned members of the GMU Department of Economics express their commitment to academic freedom and to intellectual merit.
Addressed to the George Mason University (GMU) community and the public at large
~~~
American universities have professed allegiance to two ideals. First, the ideal of academic freedom – the right of students and faculty to express any idea in speech or writing, without fear of university punishment, and secure in the knowledge that the university will protect dissenters from threats and violence on campus.
Second, the ideal of intellectual merit – the right and duty of academic departments to hire and promote the most brilliant, creative, and productive faculty in their fields, and admit the most intellectually promising students, without pressures from the administration.
These ideals are the cornerstones of liberal education. They protect faculty and students who hold views unpopular on university campuses. Academic freedom protects existing students and faculty who dissent from current dominant academic opinion and ideology. No matter how unpopular their views, they know the university will protect them. As stated in the University of Chicago Statement on freedom of expression and as quoted in GMU’s “Free Speech at Mason” Statement:
[We must hold a fundamental commitment to] the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.
Intellectual merit protects prospective students and faculty who speak and write against current dominant viewpoints. No matter how unpopular their views, they know that university administration will not obstruct or prejudice their admission, hiring, or promotion.
Recently, both of these ideals have come under attack. Pressure for conformity has intensified and universities have increasingly interfered with departments’ personnel decisions. For example, at some universities, one of the more egregious new practices is the requiring of written “diversity” statements by prospective students, staff, or faculty, then used to discriminate among candidates, often by quarters of the university with interests other than those of the department or unit. Such methods recall arrogations of the past, such as The Levering Act of 1950, used against radicals.
We strongly believe the attacks on academic freedom and intellectual merit are deeply mistaken. The classic rationales in favor of these ideals are sound. To protect them, viewpoint diversity must be celebrated and academic departments must maintain their ability to select, hire, and promote students and personnel based on intellectual merit. We insist that the degree of institutional autonomy that the GMU Department of Economics has traditionally enjoyed is vital to the health of viewpoint diversity not only within the university but within the academy writ large.
It is vital that every department in a university enjoys independence, so it can dare to be different and keep viewpoint diversity alive. George Mason University has excelled in supporting viewpoint diversity with a variety of diverse departments, centers and organizations. Viewpoint diversity at George Mason has benefited the university, the United States, and the wider intellectual world.
Indeed, some of the Department’s chief contributions have taught that all forms of authority can exert power to excess, and that guarding against such excess calls for the very ideals affirmed here, respect for dissent and intellectual merit.
We, the undersigned members of the GMU Department of Economics, look forward to continuing our independence to do good economics according to our judgment, guided by the ideals of academic freedom and intellectual merit.
Signed by the following GMU Department of Economics faculty (full-time & emeritus):
1. Jonathan P. Beauchamp
2. James T. Bennett
3. Donald J. Boudreaux
4. Bryan D. Caplan
5. Vincent J. Geloso
6. Timothy Groseclose
7. Robin D. Hanson
8. Garett Jones
9. Daniel B. Klein
10. Mark Koyama
11. David M. Levy
12. Cesar A. Martinelli
13. John V.C. Nye
14. Thomas C. Rustici
15. Vernon L. Smith
16. Alex Tabarrok
17. Karen I. Vaughn
18. Richard E. Wagner
19. Lawrence H. White
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One of the highlights of any year, here is the letter, part about Yunnan, part about Chinese locksdowns, but this time only a smidgen about music, and much more. Here is an excerpt:
The situation worsened if one tested positive. A trip to a centralized quarantine facility (often a bed in a convention center) would await. That was sometimes the least concern. The city’s policy was to separate children from their parents if either tested positive; fear of separation drove parents mad with worry, until an outcry prompted the city to drop the policy. Dog-owners who couldn’t find another household willing to host their pet had to decide whether to leave it alone at home for the duration of their illness; or let it loose outside and hope for the best. (A viral video of a health worker beating a corgi to death with a shovel did not help to make the decision easier.) A positive test would summon cleaning staff into one’s home, who could soak everything—clothes, books, furniture—in disinfectant…
Psychologically, the most difficult thing was that no one knew how long the lockdown would last: a few days or a few weeks more. Every so often a video would circulate that purported to show someone who jumped from a balcony. Friends spoke about three types of shock. First, the raw novelty of extended physical confinement. Second, the wonder of feeling food insecure in this age and in this city. Third, a disenchantment with government pronouncements. Many people kicked themselves for trusting officials who said that Shanghai would impose no lockdown. They saw how positive cases in their own neighborhoods would be absent from the city’s data releases. And they shared a recording of a health official who said that these controls were unscientific.
And:
But life in Yunnan was much better than being in the big cities last year. “Far from being seen as a regrettable backsliding and privation,” Scott writes: “becoming a barbarian may have produced a marked improvement in safety, nutrition, and social order.”
I advocate for departing from the court center too. So it’s time to say: it’s a barbarian’s life for me.
Dan Wang — very highly rated but still underrated!
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FreshRSS 