CategoryEconomics
How Data Can Appear in Science Papers — Out of Thin Air!
At Retraction Watch, Gary Smith explains how one author team apparently copy pasted missing data about green innovation in various countriesRecently, Retraction Watch, a site that helps keeps science honest, noted some statistical peculiarities about a paper last September in the Journal of Clean Energy, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries.” The site was tipped off by a PhD student in economics that “For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent.” But that wasn’t the big surprise. The big surprise was when the student wrote to one of the authors: In email correspondence seen by Retraction Watch and a follow-up Zoom call, [Almas] Heshmati told the student he had used Excel’s autofill function to mend the data. He had marked anywhere from two to four observations before or after the missing values Read More ›
Full-Time: Why We Need More Creative Productivity, Not Less
A new book shows how we lost the meaning of work and the ways we can get back on track.If Information Is Wealth, Are Deepfakes a Form of Counterfeiting?
The current tech media overdose on panic over deepfakes. They could be drowning out practical ways of fighting backArtists Strike Back!: New Tool “Poisons” Images Pirated by AI
Nightshade, developed by University of Chicago computer science prof Ben Zhao, makes the AI generator keep giving you a cat when you ask for a dogIndustry Pro: No, AI Is NOT Driving the Mass Big Tech Layoffs!
“It may explain the loss of some content generation and customer support positions — but doesn’t explain the layoffs of software developers.”Is New AI Driving the Mass Big Tech layoffs?
The jury’s out on whether that’s really what’s happening and, if so, whether it will improve profitabilityWhat Will the New Media Landscape Look Like?
Billionaires have been “scooping up” publishers in recent years but that has not stopped the bleed of red inkIn 2020, at Idea Grove, a PR and marketing firm’s blog, Jarrett Rush asked a title question, “What will the media landscape look like in five years?” Four of those five years are up so we can fairly assess two of the predictions: First, Twitter is going to continue to explode as a hub for media ‘pre-reporting.’ Many reporters vet SMEs and story ideas through Twitter already, but as traditional forms of media continue to die out, we will only continue to see growth in nontraditional platforms like Twitter. – Mary Brynn Milburn Well, something like that did happen, sort of. Elon Musk bought Twitter, changed its name to X, revealed all the government-directed censorship that previous management co-operated with, Read More ›
Business Media Report That 2023 Was a Bad Year for Tech Startups
We are told that 2023 was an extinction level event for tech startups. In the United States, roughly 3200 private venture-backed companies went out of business last year, in a huge “cash bonfire.” We have likely never heard of most of them because their stories are more conventional than, say, the saga of crypto bad boy Sam Bankman-Fried. As Tech Crunch puts it, The story of most startup failures is far less exciting. The timing isn’t right, funding dries up, runways run out. Of late, a lot of macroeconomic factors have come into play, as well. These past few years have been especially brutal for startup land… Combined, those companies raised north of $27 billion. Even more starkly, it’s a Read More ›
What AI Will Probably Really Do to White Collar Businesses
The tech media are full of scare stories but we can look at what happened when advanced technology hit blue collar industries as a guideIf you read the tech media, you may sometimes find yourself wondering if you (or they?) Are living in a sci-fi movie? Consider these news tidbits: “even in situations designed to prevent it from happening, chatbots invent information at least 3 percent of the time — and as high as 27 percent.” (New York Times) “Eighty-nine percent of machine learning (ML) engineers who work with generative AI say their models show signs of hallucination, according to survey results published Wednesday from ML observability platform Aporia.” (Fortune) Elsewhere, we are told, some AI could act as sleeper agents: “A sleeper agent is an AI that acts innocuous until it gets some trigger, then goes rogue.” At TechCrunch, we learn “Anthropic researchers Read More ›
AI Will Disrupt Everything — But Forget the Robot Apocalypse!
It will be a slow, steady, measured disruption, like the one the printing press createdAs Gary Smith noted the other day, many people, spurred on by the ravings of AI prophets, attribute human qualities to machines and thus easily imagine a tech apocalypse in which chatbots — that cannot, by nature, think — are supposedly running the world. Let’s look at why that is not really going to happen. First, a bucket of ice water from cold, hard reality Chatbots depend on grabbing, repurposing, and disgorging large amounts of copy which, from the creators’ perspective, is copyright violation. Writers, artists, and content managers take copyright violation seriously; creation is their living. So yes they are suing bigtime. Jonathan Bartlett‘s well-advised caution that many different people’s content is used, blended, in these AI products isn’t Read More ›
How Bottom Up Media Now Threaten the Traditional Top Tier
New media resources like subscription-based Substack are rapidly becoming the venue of choice for whistleblowers with stories to breakEarlier this week I noted the way bottom up media are slowly replacing top down media. A story breaking just then provides, in its way, a perfect vignette. Former Timesman James Bennet has written a memoir in The Economist of the revealing incident in which he was forced to resign in 2020. He concludes that the New York Times has “lost its way.” The uproar centered on his allowing Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton to pen an op-ed which urged that troops be called in to deal with the massive George Floyd riots. As Bennet points out, Cotton’s perspective was widely shared among Americans; thus it merited discussion on principle. But his preference for open discussion resulted in a newsroom Read More ›
How Bottom Up Media Are Slowly Replacing Top Down Media
The decline and death of legacy media organizations is speeding up and the media replacing them are much smaller, more numerous and more independentThe recent news that Popular Science has shut down — after 151 years — highlights the increasingly rapid decline of traditional, top-down media. Matthew Yglesias summarizes: The media industry saw several waves of high-profile layoffs in 2023. We had layoffs in January, Gawker shut down in February, Buzzfeed cut 15 percent of its staff in April, Condé Nast laid off staff (including at the New Yorker), NPR cut ten percent of its workforce, and Vox Media laid off four percent of its staff on November 30, after a prior round of layoffs. Last year also closed with a bunch of media layoffs, which came on the heels of pandemic layoffs, so it’s been a brutal few years. Matthew Yglesias, “Another Read More ›
Can Money Be Pure Information? Merely a Trusted Idea?
A group of pragmatic Pacific Islanders put that concept to the test centuries agoThe villagers of the island of Yap developed a unique currency system that has worked for centuries that provides insight into the way in which money is, first and foremost, a collective idea, not a thing. Yap is one of the Yap Islands, part of the Federated States of Micronesia. For many centuries, Yapese had been in the habit of traveling to another island, Palau, some hundreds of miles distant, where they milled huge limestone chunks into discs with a hole in the centre. Originally, the stones (rai) may have been ceremonial objects or ornaments of value. But at some point, a decision was made to use them as a form of currency. The currency, isolated from others, operates in Read More ›
Pooley on Superabundance and the Time Price Revolution
We live with more and work less than ever beforeMartin Luther King Jr. on the Failures of Communism
The great advocate for justice saw, as George Gilder does, why materialism fails usMore Gale Pooley and More Population Growth
We're living in a time-price revolutionCountering the prevailing narrative of doom, economist Dr. Gale Pooley shows how the incredible power of learning curves has instead brought about an era of unprecedented abundance. Based on his research into time prices (the money price divided by one’s hourly income), Pooley demonstrates that virtually every commodity is substantially cheaper today than it was decades or centuries ago. We are truly in a time-price revolution. We’ve been sharing a number of lectures from past COSM conferences. This video is just one of many you can find at the Bradley Center’s YouTube page. There you’ll find several lectures, interviews, and panels dealing with issues that range from economics, Big Tech, and artificial intelligence. Notable speakers include 2022 Kyoto Prize winner Read More ›
Why So Blue? Look at the Progress We’ve Made
Even though there are reasons to celebrate, the mainstream narrative hides themWe’ve cited the groundbreaking book Superabundance several times here at Mind Matters, mainly in connection to its co-author, Gale Pooley, a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty, and a speaker at the 2021 COSM conference, the yearly technology summit that has attracted speakers like Carver Mead, Peter Thiel, and others. Pooley’s co-author, Marian Tupy, who lectured at COSM 2022 on the book, does work on human progress at the Cato Institute, and published a post showing the many ways humanity has benefitted over the last century. He stands opposed to the mainstream approximations of doom that declare our world’s swift-approaching expiration date, writing, The chance of a person dying in a natural catastrophe — earthquake, Read More ›
New Review of “Life After Capitalism” Amplifies Book’s Core Themes
Returning to the "mind-centered economy" where knowledge is wealthA new review of George Gilder’s latest book Life After Capitalism from Samuel Gregg highlights the need for the return of the “mind-centered economy,” in which governmental bureaucracies no longer hamper human creativity and imagination. When capitalistic, democratic societies fall for materialistic presuppositions of the world, they end up resembling socialist contexts in which the state is everything and individual men and women are squelched. Gregg writes at the Acton power blog, [Gilder]takes this notion of the free human mind as the decisive factor in driving economic growth and applies it across the board to economic theory, technology, and our understanding of money. Looking at the question of incentives, for example, Gilder points out that they would yield nothing in Read More ›
George Gilder on the Eric Metaxas Show: Wealth is Knowledge
Gilder proclaims loud and clear that human knowledge and innovation are the keys to economic growthGeorge Gilder, economist, venture capitalist, and author of the new book Life After Capitalism, appeared on the Eric Metaxas Show to discuss his new title and the overarching story of his life. Gilder co-founded Discovery Institute, the parent organization of Mind Matters and the Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence, and his 1980 book Wealth & Poverty strongly influenced the economic policy decisions of President Ronald Reagan. In this interview, Gilder speaks with Metaxas about his upbringing, his ascendancy into the public policy sphere, and the philosophy that underpins his life work. Gilder proclaims loud and clear that human knowledge and innovation are the keys to economic growth, and that this points to the fact that the activity of Read More ›