Brain Drain Ain’t So Bad

Posted on by David Wright

Here’s a survey paper:

This paper reviews four decades of economics research on the brain drain, with a focus on recent contributions and on development issues. We first assess the magnitude, intensity and determinants of the brain drain, showing that brain drain (or high-skill) migration is becoming the dominant pattern of international migration and a major aspect of globalization. We then use a stylized growth model to analyze the various channels through which a brain drain affects the sending countries and review the evidence on these channels. The recent empirical literature shows that high-skill emigration need not deplete a country’s human capital stock and can generate positive network externalities. Three case studies are also considered: the African medical brain drain, the recent exodus of European scientists to the United States, and the role of the Indian diaspora in the development of India’s IT sector. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the analysis for education, immigration, and international taxation policies in a global context.

I’m a brain drainer myself, moving to the US from Canada for a high-skilled job. I did it because I felt that the opportunities for professional growth were better here and I haven’t been disappointed.

On the other hand, I totally understand why people return to their homelands (bringing those skills back), someday I probably will, too. The abstract of the paper doesn’t mention this factor but I’m sure it plays a big role.

The Yudkowsky Ambition Scale

Posted on by David Wright

1) We’re going to build the next Facebook!

2) We’re going to found the next Apple!

3) Our product will create sweeping political change! This will produce a major economic revolution in at least one country! (Seasteading would be change on this level if it worked; creating a new country successfully is around the same level of change as this.)

4) Our product is the next nuclear weapon. You wouldn’t want that in the wrong hands, would you?

5) This is going to be the equivalent of the invention of electricity if it works out.

6) We’re going to make an IQ-enhancing drug and produce basic change in the human condition.

7) We’re going to build serious Drexler-class molecular nanotechnology.

8) We’re going to upload a human brain into a computer.

9) We’re going to build a recursively self-improving Artificial Intelligence.

10) We think we’ve figured out how to hack into the computer our universe is running on.

Source here. Here is more on Eliezer Yudkowsky. Here is wikipedia on Eliezer. He used to blog with Robin Hason, a powerful signal of quality.

THUMP [PG’s head into the sand]

Posted on by David Wright

There’s this old joke that I really like:

One night a police officer sees an economist looking around a park bench near a light.
“What happened?” asks the police officer.
“I lost my keys but I’m having a really hard time finding them” replies the economist.
“Here, let me help” and they look for the keys awhile.
After not getting anywhere, the police officer asks, “where did you drop them?”
“Oh, replies the economist, way over there” and he gestures vaguely towards a nearby park, drenched in darkness.
“Well, then why on earth are we looking here?” asks the police officer.
“Because this is where the light is”

A powerful lesson. Sometimes we are so desperate for an answer we look for it in a very unlikely place and try to extrapolate back to the thing we want. Sometimes this works, but it can be devilishly hard. And it can also be stupidly useless.

Meanwhile, the one thing you can measure is dangerously misleading. The one thing we can track precisely is how well the startups in each batch do at fundraising after Demo Day. But we know that’s the wrong metric. There’s no correlation between the percentage of startups that raise money and the metric that does matter financially, whether that batch of startups contains a big winner or not.

…I don’t know what fraction of them currently raise more after Demo Day. I deliberately avoid calculating that number, because if you start measuring something you start optimizing it, and I know it’s the wrong thing to optimize.

That’s the inestimable Paul Graham. Perhaps economists should spend more time thinking about what they should and should not be measuring.

In a related discussion he says this:

The counter-intuitive nature of startup investing is a big part of what makes it so interesting to me. In most aspects of life, we are trained to avoid risk and only pursue “good ideas” (e.g. try to be a lawyer, not a rock star). With startups, I get to focus on things that are probably bad ideas, but possibly great ideas. It’s not for everyone, but for those of us who love chasing dreams, it can be a great adventure.

And we also get this interesting tidbit:

thaumaturgy: Off-topic, but something I’ve been chewing on lately: what’s it like to have your every written (or spoken!) word analyzed by a bunch of people? Esp. people that you end up having some form of contact with. It seems like it would be difficult to just have a public conversation about a topic. Do you think about that much when you write?

PG: It’s pretty grim. I think that’s one of the reasons I write fewer essays now. After I wrote this one, I had to go back and armor it by pre-empting anything I could imagine anyone willfully misunderstanding to use as a weapon in comment threads. The whole of footnote 1 is such armor for example. I essentially anticipated all the “No, what I said was” type comments I’d have had to make on HN and just included them in the essay. It’s a uniquely bad combination to both write essays and run a forum. It’s like having comments enabled on your blog whether you want them or not.

Math Problem Few Know Exists Solved. Nobody Understands Solution (yet?)

Posted on by David Wright

Nature has the scoop:

The usually quiet world of mathematics is abuzz with a claim that one of the most important problems in number theory has been solved.

Mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University in Japan has released a 500-page proof of the abc conjecture, which proposes a relationship between whole numbers — a ‘Diophantine’ problem.

And this:

Conrad says that the work “uses a huge number of insights that are going to take a long time to be digested by the community”. The proof is spread across four long papers1–4, each of which rests on earlier long papers. “It can require a huge investment of time to understand a long and sophisticated proof, so the willingness by others to do this rests not only on the importance of the announcement but also on the track record of the authors,” Conrad explains.

Mochizuki’s track record certainly makes the effort worthwhile. “He has proved extremely deep theorems in the past, and is very thorough in his writing, so that provides a lot of confidence,” says Conrad. And he adds that the pay-off would be more than a matter of simply verifying the claim. “The exciting aspect is not just that the conjecture may have now been solved, but that the techniques and insights he must have had to introduce should be very powerful tools for solving future problems in number theory.”

Here are some other fun tidbits. About the mathematician quoted in the article:

I personally know Brian Conrad (quoted in article). He has an encyclopedic knowledge of algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry, I would say that he’s in the top ten people worldwide who could reasonably assess whether Mochizuki’s proof is correct. And he has a great nose for bullshit, and little patience for it.
He is taking this claim seriously. He doesn’t necessarily believe it’s correct (presumably he’s a bit careful in what he says to the press), but he seems to think it has a shot, and is worth paying attention to.

Here’s the author’s wikipedia page (the days of prodigies sweeping the profession are clearly over).

And here is the abstract for the first of the papers (I hope my TeX rendering works with all this bizarro notation):

Abstract. The present paper is the first in a series of four papers, the goal of which is to establish an arithmetic version of Teichm¨uller theory for number fields equipped with an elliptic curve — which we refer to as “inter-universal Teichm¨uller theory” — by applying the theory of semi-graphs of anabelioids,
Frobenioids, the ´etale theta function, and log-shells developed in earlier papers by the author. We begin by fixing what we call “initial Θ-data”, which consists of an elliptic curve EF over a number field F, and a prime number l ≥ 5, as well as some other technical data satisfying certain technical properties. This data determines various hyperbolic orbicurves that are related via finite ´etale coverings to the once-punctured elliptic curve XF determined by EF . These finite ´etale coverings admit various symmetry properties arising from the additive and multiplicative structures on the ring Fl = Z/lZ acting on the l-torsion points of the elliptic curve.

We then construct “Θ±ell NF-Hodge theaters” associated to the given Θ-data. These Θ±ell NF-Hodge theaters may be thought of as miniature models of conventional scheme theory in which the two underlying combinatorial dimensions of a number field — which may be thought of as corresponding to the additive and multiplicative structures of a ring or, alternatively, to the group of units and value group of a local field associated to the number field — are, in some sense, “dismantled” or “disentangled” from one another. All Θ±ell NF-Hodge theaters are isomorphic to one another, but may also be related to one another by means of a “Θ-link”, which relates certain Frobenioid-theoretic portions of one Θ±ell NF-Hodge theater to another is a fashion that is not compatible with the respective conventional ring/scheme theory structures. In particular, it is a highly nontrivial problem to relate the ring structures on either side of the Θ-link to one another. This will be achieved, up to certain “relatively mild indeterminacies”, in future papers in the series by applying the absolute anabelian geometry developed in earlier papers by the author. The resulting description of an “alien ring structure” [associated, say, to the domain of the Θ-link] in terms of a given ring structure [associated, say, to the codomain of the Θ-link] will be applied in the final paper of the series to obtain results in diophantine geometry. Finally, we discuss certain technical results concerning profinite conjugates of decomposition and inertia groups in the tempered fundamental group of a p-adic hyperbolic curve that will be of use in the development of the theory of the present series of papers, but are also of independent interest.

Well, about time!

Dragon Moms Weep With Envy

Posted on by David Wright

A self-motivating child? Jackpot.

According to his mother, he says, he “didn’t have any interest in it at all” in the piano aged five and only resumed playing a year later after he discovered that his friends were taking lessons.

“I had no great desire to practice, but then some friends at school started playing and I was spurred on to work by the thought of them catching me up. It was a competition,” he remembers.

Grosvenor likes to relay memories of his formative years in competitive terms: He admits that he didn’t care much for the music as a child, but rather saw playing the piano as a “challenge” that needed “overcoming.”

It’s the wish of every achieving parent to have a kid that is desperate to be awesome. Doesn’t always work out.

I’m starting to believe that competitive pride is the most valuable resource in the universe. How much progress would we have if we didn’t care about besting our neighbors?

The Keys To Being Awesome

Posted on by David Wright

Step 2, which everyone goes on and on about (particularly when talking about Steve Jobs) is to never settle for anything less than awesome. If it isn’t great, personally insult the person that suggested it and send it back.

Step 1, though, is that you need to KNOW WHAT AWESOME IS:

Please, please, please spend time hanging out in the latest and greatest apps, regardless of their personal relevance or interest to you. If you do, your expectations of a “good experience” will be raised. Archaic team communication tools are often a good indication of what the decision makers believe qualifies as “good.” (Hint: it’s often a very low bar relative to what’s possible!)

Desire and drive are certainly precursors to success. But there’s a reason why awesome farms pop up only rarely. Awesomeness isn’t easy and unfortunately few people are exposed to greatness in a manner than teaches them to be great.

To the extent possible, expose yourself to awesome stuff. Otherwise, how do you know what awesome is?

Word of the Day: Awesome Farm

Posted on by David Wright

Awesome Farm (n): a company or organization or place where excellence is practiced and taught. The best way of identifying these places is years and years after the fact when you notice that the people who were there are currently all being awesome. This is a favorite topic of mine:

My favorite test for whether a company is excellent company or not is whether the people who were a part of it go on to do extraordinary things. Think of the Paypal mafia.  It’s not clear to me that GO passes this test.

In the (re)insurance business, there are two Paypal mafias that come to mind: AIG’s actuarial department in the 80s and F&G Re. The top ranks of my business have over the last 20 years been massively over-represented by people with one of these two lines on their resume.

It’s possible to be awesome without being an awesome farm, of course. There’s something else in the water at these places, though. Maybe everyone else is just lucky.

Robin Hanson’s Survey

Posted on by David Wright

Here is a simple one question survey that I’d like to get a hundred or so folks to answer. It is a surprisingly interesting question, and I have a bet with Bryan Caplan on it, but I won’t say more now, so as not to bias your answer.

This is his post. It sure is surprisingly interesting. I found the phrasing of the question really boggled my mind. *Should* suggests there is one answer, yet we can choose many. *Should* for some reason also pushes my mind to think of what people will adopt instead of what I’d like them to adopt. I really don’t think there’s any concrete reason for picking one over another.

Will we be comfortable reclassifying people?

Perhaps this is Hanson’s bet with Caplan. New category vs old category. If that’s the case, I’d bet people will be less scared of classifying robots as something human than classifying humans into some novel superset.

We will want to think there’s nothing different about ourselves because we won’t feel any different.

Pattern Search

Posted on by David Wright

What a cool idea.

Video gamers can supposedly differentiate between tones more similar to one another than non-gamers. Perhaps, if you made a theme of very similar colors, you could achieve the same benefit from programming. Although I suspect it might not work because the difference in the colors has to have significance for your brain to really start paying attention to it. So you could have a color-sensitive language. Or maybe color could be the only significant thing, then you could just bind each character to a color in your text editor and use a normal language.

While walking in the wood today and looking at the detail on the ground and searching for ripe fruit in the trees I was thinking about how our brains are really good at picking out specific visual things from noise and how more complex visual things are sometimes easier to recognize than simpler things. Also its possible to get really good at picking out subtle clues from very complex input: think about a native American Indian’s ability to track moving animals over long distances.

So I think what would be really cool is to have a way of representing each function of a program as a visual form, ideally a 3-dimensional one. You could then look at these form and over time you would start to be able to see certain things about the function just by looking at the forms. I wonder if that might be a much faster way of searching for specific things within a large body of code such as you might do in a security audit than actually reading through all the code because it taps into the innate concurrency of the right-hemisphere.

There would be some difficulty would be in generating appropriate visual forms. The form has to be meaningful. The ideal would be if it were meaningful to the point where somebody well used to them could write the code a form represented just by looking at the form or, at least, infer the gist of it. Of course you don’t have to limit yourself to one form per function, you could have 10 different forms per function, each representing different properties, or forms generated from by dividing the code in lots of different ways (not just functions). Or maybe you could simplify everything I’m saying here and just have a lot more statistical static analysis of code then displayed with charts and infographics.

First Song Deaf Man Hears: Mozart’s Lacrimosa

Posted on by David Wright

Here’s the intro and the reddit post:

Austin Chapman was born profoundly deaf. Hearing aids helped some, but music — its full range of pitches and tones — remained indecipherable. As Chapman explains, “I’ve never understood it. My whole life I’ve seen hearing people make a fool of themselves singing their favorite song or gyrating on the dance floor. I’ve also seen hearing people moved to tears by a single song. That was the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around.”

But earlier this month, that changed when Chapman got new hearing aids (Phonak’s Naída S Premium). Suddenly:

The first thing I heard was my shoe scraping across the carpet; it startled me. I have never heard that before and out of ignorance, I assumed it was too quiet for anyone to hear.

I sat in the doctor’s office frozen as a cacophony of sounds attacked me. The whir of the computer, the hum of the AC, the clacking of the keyboard, and when my best friend walked in I couldn’t believe that he had a slight rasp to his voice. He joked that it was time to cut back on the cigarettes.

That night, a group of close friends jump-started my musical education by playing Mozart, Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Sigur Ros, Radiohead, Elvis, and several other popular legends of music.

Being able to hear the music for the first time ever was unreal.

When Mozart’s Lacrimosa came on, I was blown away by the beauty of it. At one point of the song, it sounded like angels singing and I suddenly realized that this was the first time I was able to appreciate music. Tears rolled down my face and I tried to hide it. But when I looked over I saw that there wasn’t a dry eye in the car.

After reading this article, I listened to Lacrimosa, not really recognizing the name.

Oh, THAT song?! Holy cow, what a choice. No kidding it brought tears to his eyes. It brought tears to MY eyes listening to it after just reading about the guy’s story.