Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Live from the Data Science Noösphere: Five this fall that look to me worth going to:

About a month and a half ago I decided that there was really no place in any of my classes for my "what you really ought to know about doing economics" lecture http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/07/how-to-think-like-an-economist-if-that-is-you-wish-to.html: it would be either incomprehensible (because students would not understand it) or unnecessary (because students would already know it).

Live from Berkeley: Making Textbooks & Course Readers Affordable: Berkeley on the Leading Edge: "Friday, October 27, 2017 :: 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. :: Environmental Design Library Atrium http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/libraries/environmental-design-library: Can students afford to take your class?...

Live from the EJMR Supporter Cesspool: And, yes, we are looking at you George Borjas. You could be saying: "Hey! Guys at EJMW! A lot of you are real dicks! Don't be!"

Instead, you say something very different.

Cosma Shalizi reminds me of the internet "data scientists are (good and empirically oriented) statisticians" discussion of 2011-12.

Let me say three things:

1. You should never use Excel to handle your data.

2. I don't know whether it is depressing or exhilarating to recognize that, for me as for Cosma, how often my reaction these days is: "I already wrote something incisive and very much worth reading about that—now to find it in my weblog archives..."

3. Increasingly, data management, analysis, and presentation are things that many more people need for their jobs than statistics departments can reasonably expect to funnel through their major programs. It's like in the middle ages: the number of people who needed to have a good, clear, legible-penmanship chancery hand vastly exceeded the number of professional calligraphers and illustrators. Data management, analysis, and presentation skills are, increasingly, the legible-penmanship chancery hand of the twenty-first century.

Should-Read: Drew Conway: The Data Science Venn Diagram http://www.dataists.com/2010/09/the-data-science-venn-diagram/: "The primary colors of data: hacking skills, math and stats knowledge, and substantive expertise...

Note to Self: "Data Science" as an Ephemeral Term:There was a time—perhaps a century, maybe a bit more, certainly not much less—ago, when the high-tech bleeding edge electricity sector was an important but discrete part of the "economy".

Note to Self: I am told that what we are doing here is something called "data science"...

Note to Self: Data Science Reading List:

• John Tukey: The Future of Data Analysis: "Large parts of data analysis are inferential... but only parts.... Large parts... are incisive.... Some parts... are allocative... dude its in the distribution of effort..." http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=euclid.aoms/1177704711

Note to Self: View jupyter notebook from dropbox (or other) links:

• Dropbox: change: "https://www.dropbox.com/" to: "http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/urls/dl.dropbox.com/"; then load the url...
• Else: change: "https://" to "http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/"; then load the url...

Hoisted from 2001: Information Technology and the Future of Society (My Bekeley CITRIS Kickoff Talk) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/citris_kickoff.html: For perhaps 9000 years after the beginnings of agriculture the overwhelming proportion of human work lives were spent making things: growing crops, shearing sheep, spinning yarn, weaving cloth, throwing pots, cutting down trees, copying books, and so on, and so forth.

Live from Cyberspace: The elective affinity between fantasy and computer programming:

Paul Dourish: The Original Hacker's Dictionary: "WIZARD n. 1. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works... http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html

This is the state of my website when that happened:

Brad De Long's Website https://web.archive.org/web/19961218222950/http://econ161.berkeley.edu:80/ http://delong.typepad.com/1996-12-18-brad-de-longs-website.pdf

Pages up as of that crawling included:

Note: I will collect stuff relevant to this assignment desk here: http://www.bradford-delong.com/stream-the-road-to-xanaduthe-invisible-college.html

Assignment Desk: http://www.bradford-delong.com/assignment-desk.html

+ + + +

I am looking for somebody to write something to tell me what I should think—these days about website (re)design, and the assorted and related topics that I think of as "The Road to Xanadu" and "The Invisible College".

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any organization with a website that has not been redesigned in two years will find itself thinking about starting yet another website redesign process. Hence my throat clearing for http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/07/what-you-need-to-read-today-reading-reihan-salams-why-i-signed-up-for-obamacare-hoisted-from-my-archives.html yesterday and my hoisting of http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/07/should-read-well-its-been-two-more-years-ezra-klein-2015-i-have-sat-down-a-couple-of-times-to-write-up-what.html today...

Should-Read: Well? It's been two more years!

Ezra Klein (2015): "I have sat down a couple of times to write up what's worked and what's failed at Vox... http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/08/a-very-brief-sokratic-dialogue-on-website-redesign.html

Glenn Fleishman: Glenn Fleishman Likes His iPhone http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/07/glenn-fleishman.html: "My Real iPhone Review: I haven't had time to write up all my impressions of my first day with an iPhone...

...but I am perfectly happy to admit that it exceeded my expectations, partly because I was prepared to be slightly let down by some of the bigger promises.... What's still valid about my hesitation in recommending the first-generation iPhone is that AT&T's EDGE network truly is too slow for anything but simpler text-heavy Web sites and for email, and that viewing Web pages and other text that's designed for wide-column layout is hard to read on screen. The former problem will be solved with an updated piece of hardware that uses the third-generation (3G) cell network. The latter problem could be solved in software, by offering an option to rewrap text streams into narrower columns for better legibility.

The first thing you need to know is that ZeroHedge http://zerohedge.com is a grift: the idea is to tell gullible people that the elites are hiding the truth from them and that only ZeroHedge dares tell the TRUTH!!—the first words I see on ZeroHedge right now are "Worst Crash In Our Lifetime Coming This Year Or Next". And if you scare your gullible readers enough, you can keep their eyeballs glued to the screen and sell them to advertisers—many of whom will be selling their own grifts to an audience already selected for being easy to grift: Gold. Physical gold. Kept in Singapore. For a small fee, of course. Also ammunition.

Hoisted from June 4, 2007: Neil Henry vs. Jay Rosen Future-of-Journalism Smackdown! http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/06/neil_henry_vs_j_1.html: "Excuse me, I need to worship my idol a bit more... There... That's better...

Thank you very much.

Let me follow the example of our Lord and Master Alpha-Go as it takes the high ground first.

Let me, therefore, take the hyper-Olympian and very long run historical point of view.

The human brain is a massively parallel supercomputer that fits inside half a shoebox.

Comment of the Day: Tracy Lightcap: A Note on Coursera CEO Rick Levin's Clark Kerr Lecture...: "I think Thoma's course is indicative of the kinds of courses that succeed on-line... http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/05/highlighted-rick-levin-kerr-lecture.html?cid=6a00e551f08003883401b7c8fbb17e970b#comment-6a00e551f08003883401b7c8fbb17e970b

Eric Miller: The Unnamed Behemoth: Review of "Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena" http://amzn.to/2pSZyVd: "Deep learning eloquently brought to bear on the contemporary moment has, quite evidently, not been enough to shore up the aging foundations of our republic... https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/unnamed-behemoth

...And a live-from-the-West-Wing Twitter feed is not likely to advance our fortunes, either.... Is the liberal democratic tradition up to the challenge—the challenge of disciplining an economic order that exists not to prosper democracy but itself? On such crucial questions this volume sounds an uncertain note—and a rather quiet uncertain note at that.... No thoroughgoing leftists (seemingly) number among the contributors—none, that is, disposed to warn of enlarging catastrophic conflict between democracy and capital...

(1) But I thought I had done so! Was I too elliptical?

Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Page In which I am pwned, decisively, on twitter:

Brad DeLong  @delong: Replying to @Crutnacker @Tengrain: My advice: let Trump live rent-free in your head from 8:00 to 8:15 PM. That's enough. At other hours, evict him...

Jesus HidalgoCristos  @JesusHCristos: Replying to @delong @Tengrain @Crutnacker: I've tried. But he continues screaming and banging on pans, & even after he's evicted, the stench of feces he's smeared on the walls lingers.

https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%40delong&src=typd

Cory Doctorow: Walkaway http://amzn.to/2qZkY3Z

Inclusive AI: Technology and Policy for a Diverse Urban Future https://www.eventbrite.com/e/inclusive-ai-technology-and-policy-for-a-diverse-urban-future-tickets-31896895473: Wed, May 10, 2017 10:30 AM - 5:30 PM

Panel 3: The Future of Work: Automation and Labor

• Ken Goldberg
• Brad DeLong,
• James Manyika
• Costas Spanos
• Laura Tyson
• John Zysman

Live from the Internet from 2015: Ben Thompson (May 22, 2015): Medium the Network: "The most pertinent analysis is from The Facebook Reckoning. Specifically:

Must-Read: Jeremy Cliffe: On Twitter: Today's FAZ Report on May's Disastrous Dinner with Juncker https://twitter.com/JeremyCliffe/status/858810953353367552: "Today's FAZ report on May's disastrous dinner with Juncker...

Should-Read: Sean Blanda: Medium, and The Reason You Can’t Stand the News Anymore: "We get sliced and sliced into smaller and smaller groups, each with its own group of pundits, publications, and Facebook memes...

There are times in the past when I wished that I had this image at my fingertips...

We Are Live and Ready to Go with Reddit AMA: http://reddit.com/r/IAMA

IAMA economist Brad DeLong, an economist to be found at http://bradford-delong.com and @delong, a Berkeley professor and a former Clinton administration official. I am here to talk about why Trump's trade policies are highly likely to be disastrous failures—the normal result of a moron singularity.

But ask me anything.

A lot of intellectual energy in the early 2000s was a reaction to the installation by a five-to-four vote of a manifestly unqualified president--and the huge wave of justificatory bullshit that the Noise Machine generated around that in the form of clouds of misinformation to hide reality. People with platforms began calling it out, hoping to find other people to talk to to check whether they were being gaslighted or not.

The finest example of this I have ever seen was Belle Waring's Best Weblog Post EVAR from 2004. It's a thing to remember. If aspect of the Reagan presidency were real tragedy, and the entire Bush 43 presidency was tragic farce, what is this about to be?

Belle Waring (2004): If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride--A Pony!: "I think Matthew Yglesias' response to Josh Chafetz' exercise in wishful thinking was about right...

...even if Brad DeLong's is more nuanced.

I'd like to note, though, that Chafetz is selling himself short. You see, wishes are totally free. It's like when you can't decide whether to daydream about being a famous Hollywood star or having amazing magical powers. Why not--be a famous Hollywood star with amazing magical powers! Along these lines, John has developed an infallible way to improve any public policy wishes. You just wish for the thing, plus, wish that everyone would have their own pony!

Live from Cyberspace: A Proposed Twitter-Interaction Strategy: Draining Your Part of Its Cesspoo:

I have swung around to a view of Twitter (and Facebook, but I haven't gotten around to managing Facebook).

Live from Cyberspace: Noah Smith: On Twitter: "The history of Twitter in three tweets..."

What should I be doing that I am not doing?

• Notebook: The Public Sphere
• Discussions...
• Notebook: Discussion of: The Economist as...?: The Public Square and Economists
  • The Economist as...?: The Public Square and Economists
    • The Economist as...? (pdf)
• The Invisible College:
• What Is the Excellence of an Economist?

Most-Recent Must-Reads:

• Tony Judt (1994): The New Old Nationalism: "Québecois today have few of the grievances expressed thirty years ago, when the region was economically depressed and its language and culture in decline... (M)
• Pseudoerasmus and Friends: The Cultural Turn Among "Historians of Capitalism" Considered Harmful (M)
• Martin Wolf: Too Big, Too Leninist: A China Crisis Is a Matter of Time: As Minxin Pei notes in a brilliant book, China’s Crony Capitalism... (Tu)
• Matt Bruenig (2012): The Never-Ending Libertarian Quest to Appear Clever: "I have been following an amusing back-and-forth between Bryan Caplan (I, II, III) and Matt Yglesias... (W)
• Paul Krugman: Notes on the Macroeconomic Situation: "So the Fed has raised rates... a mistake, although not as severe... as it would have been a year ago... (Th)
• Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: We Should Have Taken Trump Literally as Well as Seriously: "The national press’s Trump coverage did to an extent err by not taking him seriously enough... (Th)

Most-Recent Should-Reads:

• Robbie Whelan and Esther Fung: China’s Factories Count on Robots as Workforce Shrinks: "Suzhou Victory Precision Manufacture Co.’s chairman, Yugen Gao, said the days when the company drew its strength from China’s cheap and hardworking employees are gone... (Tu)
• David Drake: What Distant Deeps: "Empires have generally used proxies to fight wars on their borders... (Tu)
• Douglas O. Staiger, James H. Stock, and Mark W. Watson (1997): How Precise Are Estimates of the Natural Rate of Unemployment?: "Uncertainty arising from not knowing the parameters of the model at hand... (W)

Most-Recent Links:

• The Niskanen Center is doing great work: Jacob Levy: The Multiculturalism of Fear | The Defense of Liberty Can’t Do Without Identity Politics | Authoritarianism and Post-Truth Politics
• Kevin Drum: Now Even Conservatives Are Calling Them "Tax Cuts For the Rich": "National Review editor Rich Lowry.... When was the last time you heard a conservative, let alone the editor of NR, refer to tax reform as a 'traditional Republican' 'tax cut for the rich'? That's the way liberals jeer at supply-side voodoo.... But now they are. What does this mean?"
• Katie Martin and Leo Lewis: Japanese banks warn of leaving London without Brexit clarity: Financial groups suggest relocating functions within 6 months to mainland Europe
• Matthew Klein: Who wins and loses from America’s transfer union?
• Simon Wren-Lewis: How the media misled us over Brexit and Donald Trump: Partisan newspapers and TV channels let "politicised truths" pass unchallenged...
• Simon Wren-Lewis: What Brexit and austerity tell us about economics, policy and the media
• Chye-Ching Huang and Paul N. van de Water: Millionaires the Big Winners From Repealing the Affordable Care Act
• Amanda Bayer and Cecilia Elena Rouse: Diversity in the Economics Profession: A New Attack on an Old Problem
• The History of Economics Society

I must say I would greatly appreciate one...

Tedra Osell, Scott Eric Kaufman, Brad DeLong, Ari Kelman, and Eric Rauchway: Historical Scholarship and the New Media: May 23, 2007 U.C. Davis History Department Lunch Colloquium: Courtesy of U.C. David Department of History http://history.ucdavis.edu/:

Scott McLemee: Obituary of Scott Eric Kaufman: "Scott Eric Kaufman--an American critic and journalist who developed a readership while blogging as a graduate student in English--died in Houston on Monday following multiple organ failure and acute complications... about a month short of his 40th birthday...

Weekend Reading: The problem with this from the extremely smart and thoughtful Izabella Kaminska's argument here is that people pay for the New York Times--and they got Judy Miller, Whitewater!, and Emails!. People pay for the Washinton Post, and get Fred Hiatt--plus get told that Stanley Kaplan University is wonderful, and that Clarice Starling and Eliot Ness established the high reputation of the FBI. In pay-for journalism you may be the customer rather than the product, but that does not get you far enough:

Izabella Kaminska: Facebook and the manufacture of consent: "As to... what’s really wrong with the media, the simple adage that you get what you pay for and that if it’s free you are the product is... insightful...

...If you pay peanuts, you will get poorly balanced, poorly verified, poorly sourced and poorly scrutinised news. And if you condone the mass distribution of free news and normalise it by calling it a “business model” or an “eco-system” you will fan the propaganda war rather than abate it. Don’t make Facebook and Google filter fake news. If you value truly balanced and verified news; if you value comment which scrutinises vested interests, business models or government policy; or if you value being confronted by views which are different from your own but still well argued, pay for the news, don’t just get it from Facebook....

Must-Read: The problem is not so much that trolls are crippling Twitter--that is true--but that Twitter turns people who could be normal into trolls:

Noah Smith: Trolls Are Crippling Twitter: "he biggest problem is inherent to the technology itself...

This is the kind of story that I remember Nate Silver and his http://fivethirtyeight.com doing right over and over again in 2012 and 2008. Take the model--a very useful poll-aggregating model, even with what I regard as its unhelpful Bayesian frame--and use it as a springboard for a really smart, really high quality moderately-deep dive into some aspect of the situation that can be illuminated by the data.

William H. Janeway and Raj Kushwaha: Enterprise Software: Death and Transfiguration: "Once upon a time — and it was a time that lasted some thirty years...

Note to Self: The iron law of websites:

All websites, sooner or later, no matter how good intentioned the authors or how much advance planning of information architecture was conducted, evolve to mimic the bureaucratic structure of the organization that maintains it. This makes them much less uselful for everybody else...

Must-Read: Mark Pesce: Zombie Moore's Law: Hardware Eats Software:

Intel announce some next-generation CPUs that aren’t very much faster... delays... some of its 10nm process CPUs; and Apple’s new A10 chip, powering iPhone 7, is as one of the fastest CPUs ever...

Live from the Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy that Is Twitter: Storify: On the Suspension of Glenn Reynolds from Twitter:

Live from the Internet: I need--very badly--a better aggregation-on-the-fly tool than Storify. Fold might be a possibility (in spite of its quirks) if only its "remix cards" feature would become a reality. But at the moment it just takes too long to put something together in it vis-a-vis Storify's compose pane-search pane interface. And simply dumping links with text in a weblog compose window produces a much more compact presentation than does Storify...

Are there any other better tools than those two for vacuuming up things on the internet quickly that I have missed?

Must-Read: Ben Thompson: Beyond the iPhone:

At first glance, as Manjoo noted, the iPhone 7... is mostly the same as the two-year-old iPhone 6....

• 2006-09-13: Un-Atlantic Economic History: It is a fair criticism that we Berkeley Economics people think Economic History is Atlantic Economic History, and overwhelmingly North Atlantic Economic History. Well, now I have a new course's worth of readings to compile--and I know I will have read only an appallingly small portion of it: "Un-Atlantic Economic History: The Economies Bordering the Indian Ocean and the China Seas, 1000-1950" Where to start?.... Fernand Braudel, The Structure of Everyday Life.... Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350.... K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750.... Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India 1857-1947... <--Alas! I never finished putting the course together, and still have never taught it...

Must-Read: Charlie Warzel: "A Honeypot For Assholes": Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment:

For nearly its entire existence, Twitter has not just tolerated abuse and hate speech, it’s virtually been optimized to accommodate it...

Noah Smith periodically asks me why I feel that I do not have time to read David Andolfatto--why what he writes goes never to the top but always to somewhere lower, in the middle of the too-read pile...

Here is one sufficient reason:

David Andolfatto, February 2009:

Here we go again.... Many governments appear to be taking seriously the notion that a massive government 'electric shock therapy' is needed…. Is there any merit in the view that a massive government fiscal action can rescue the day? Apparently, there must be. Why would all these learned people be advocating a policy prescription that is not solidly backed by economic theory and the historical evidence?… I am especially eager to learn how this evidence might be construed as supporting the notion that fiscal policy 'works'…

• 2006-08-30: Hoisted from Comments: Understanding Danny Okrent: I Don't Think We Can Blame Donald Luskin for This: Jim Dandy writes, apropos of Danny Okrent's belief that Paul Krugman sought to deceive his readers by mixing-and-matching numbers from the household and the establishment survey.... 'We certainly know who "they" were [Donald Luskin], but that flying attack monkey shall remain unnamed, having already been confined to "stupidest man" territory.' My guess is that that is probably not the case. We know that Okrent thinks Luskin is creepy. If A thinks B is a creep, A would have to be really stupid, a COMPLETE idiot, totally unfit for paid employment, to take B's word for technical details without verifying them. So I think the balance of the probabilities is that Okrent's source for this was not Luskin.