Andrei Zisu

To put it bluntly, Europe has saddled itself with an intellectually vacuous decision that will hobble its agricultural output for decades.

This is amazing

“Teenagers want an outlet to express their opinions with the same kind of conviction that they generally might not be able to express at home or other parts of their life,” said Hal, a 17-year-old admin on

Implicații posibile pentru România

This hidden reserve of workers is bigger than economists thought, Mr. Talavera said. But in Europe it appears to have finally been exhausted. “That is one of the reasons you haven’t seen wage growth picking up substantially,” he said.

If he’s right, that should mean that wages will continue to rise.

The fact that low wage growth has afflicted virtually every wealthy country, though, suggests that there are deeper forces at work that are not yet fully understood.

Kissinger on AI

Third, that AI may reach intended goals, but be unable to explain the rationale for its conclusions. In certain fields—pattern recognition, big-data analysis, gaming—AI’s capacities already may exceed those of humans. If its computational power continues to compound rapidly, AI may soon be able to optimize situations in ways that are at least marginally different, and probably significantly different, from how humans would optimize them. But at that point, will AI be able to explain, in a way that humans can understand, why its actions are optimal? Or will AI’s decision making surpass the explanatory powers of human language and reason? Through all human history, civilizations have created ways to explain the world around them—in the Middle Ages, religion; in the Enlightenment, reason; in the 19th century, history; in the 20th century, ideology. The most difficult yet important question about the world into which we are headed is this: What will become of human consciousness if its own explanatory power is surpassed by AI, and societies are no longer able to interpret the world they inhabit in terms that are meaningful to them?

Interesting argument although not sure I fully agree

Starea educației în 2018. Mulțumim guvernanților din ultimii 29 ani.

Sure. This is a counterargument to the open publication process, but not one that can't be easily overcome. I think the current subscription model leads to a perversion of science publishing...

"The major challenge consuming me is that the wheels are coming off the Enlightenment right now, on our watch, and it’s our own damn fault.

The GRIN technologies – the genetics, robotics, information and nano revolutions – are advancing on a curve. Meanwhile, we humans are trying to process this exponential change with our good old v. 1.0 brains. With precious little help at all from those creating this upheaval.

Folk are not stupid. They can clearly detect the ground moving beneath their feet, and that of their children and jobs and futures. When the ground moves beneath her feet, any sane primate looks for something apparently solid to hold onto. Anybody with apparently simple stories about what’s going on, forcefully told, *will* get attention.

You’ve doubtless seen the data about how the most common job in the vast majority of states is truck driver. So what are we doing? We’re obsoleting these jobs as fast as we can, with a hand wave about how, “Oh, they’ll find better jobs.” While, meanwhile, the rate of suicide and drug addiction and protest voting among the solid middle-aged former middle-class soars. These guys are not stupid. They know they’ve been had. And we’re going to pay for it. And don’t tell me the solution is to have the robots just give them a guaranteed income. Humans require meaning as surely as food.

The days when scientists could not [care] about the impact of their work on cultural, values and society are over. If they ever existed, which they didn’t, but that’s water over the dam.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to guys working on, oh, something like massively increasing the number and power of mitochondria in human cells. And I’m like, you know that if you massively increase the amount of energy creation in cells, you’re talking about changing what it means to be human, right? Are you intentionally trying to create supermen? And the answer every time is “Wow, what a fascinating question, I never thought of that.”

It’s not that these scientists are stupid, obviously. It’s that they’re tunnel-vision. They don’t wake up thinking about how they can change the human race. They wake up thinking about how they’re going to wire the goddamn monkey. That’s just the way these guys are.

Fix it. Get out of your silo. If you can’t figure out the societal and cultural implications of what you’re doing, start seeking out people who might, and start systematically having lunch with them. And then invite the most interesting ones into your lab with the goal of them becoming partners.

One example of this was the scientist who was spending her life finding the biomarkers for a disease for which there was no cure. Mercifully, her lab was among the first to start systematically bringing in partners from entirely outside. One of them asked, “What’s the point of creating despair? Might it be possible for you to find it interesting to search for a biomarker for a disease to which there is a cure?” To which she replied, of course, “Wow, what a fascinating question, I never thought of that.” But once it was pointed out to her, she happily did find another interesting biomarker problem that was culturally useful.

Culture moves slower than does innovation. That’s just what humans are like. Deal with it, or watch the collapse of the Enlightenment as they ever increasingly come at you with torches and pitchforks – and correctly so. Mary Shelley knew her humans.

My wife and I used to raise border collies. Border collies make terrible pets. You can not give an intelligent species nothing to do. If you don’t give them sheep, or something comparably interesting, they will come up with something to occupy their great minds. And you may not like it."

This central ambiguity matters a lot. Prices can in fact be shoved around by powerful forces: big business, strong unions, and ubiquitous monopolies, or at least oligopolies with market power. In financial markets, prices can be manipulated by collusion or secret trading or access to inside information. In labor markets, wages can be affected by the ability of businesses to fire workers without cause or by stern government policies that restrain growth and keep unemployment high.

Belief in the Invisible Hand allows economists to minimize these concerns. The battle against unions, for example, is driven by a claim that the Invisible Hand guides business and labor to set fair wages. Union organizers believe that they are not set fairly and that workers need collective bargaining to level the playing field. Alan Greenspan, as Federal Reserve chairman, believed that bargaining power mattered. High unemployment, he realized, could keep workers insecure and therefore less willing to bargain hard for their jobs, giving business more power over wages than the Invisible Hand would dictate. One measure of insecurity is the rate at which workers are willing to quit their jobs. If the quit rate is high, workers are secure and might ask for higher wages, putting pressure on business to raise prices and stimulating inflation; if the  quit rate is low, workers don’t have the security to bargain hard. (Of course, unions sometimes have too much power, too, driving wages too high.) Greenspan kept a close eye on this and seemed to encourage worker insecurity.

Faith in the Invisible Hand led to the once-general belief that a higher minimum wage results in lost jobs. It presumes that the wage paid reflects the worth of the workers and that any wage increase resulting from a minimum wage law represents an overpayment to workers, reduces profits, and also reduces the hiring of new workers. But in fact often the wage can be too low because of a business’s power or generally restrictive government policies that keep unemployment high. In that case, a hike in the minimum wage would be healthy economically, restoring demand for goods and services, and would not cause jobs to be lost. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the American economist John Bates Clark made one of the first claims that, economy-wide, wages reflect the worth of labor. As we shall see, there is little serious empirical work to justify this conclusion, and recent studies—what I call dirty economics—have shown that increases in the minimum wage result in very few lost jobs, if any. Empirical analysis is at last changing economists’ minds.

Put crudely, newish democracies are typically dismantled in four stages. First comes a genuine popular grievance with the status quo and, often, with the liberal elites who are in charge. Hungarians were buffeted by the financial crisis and then terrified by hordes of Syrian refugees passing through en route to Germany. Turkey’s pious Muslim majority felt sidelined by secular elites. Second, would-be strongmen identify enemies for angry voters to blame. Mr Putin talks of a Western conspiracy to humiliate Russia. President Nicolás Maduro blames America for Venezuela’s troubles; Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, blames George Soros for his country’s. Third, having won power by exploiting fear or discontent, strongmen chisel away at a free press, an impartial justice system and other institutions that form the “liberal” part of liberal democracy—all in the name of thwarting the enemies of the people. They accuse honest judges of malfeasance and replace them with stooges, or unleash tax inspectors on independent television stations and force their owners to sell.

All currencies have an ISO 4217 3-letter code. (The Transnistrian ruble has none, for example)

The "Mental" and the "Physical"

A pope’s real power lies in his mandate to appoint the cardinals who will vote in his successor, and there too Francis has been making strides. In June, he will hand out 14 new red hats, including three to key collaborators. At that point he will have selected 47 percent of the 125 voter-cardinals eligible to choose his successor, just shy of a majority.