2025-06-25 14:12:26
Ted Gioia argues that cultural products are getting longer:
Some video creators have already figured this out. That’s why the number of videos longer than 20 minutes uploaded on YouTube grew from 1.3 million to 8.5 million in just two years…
Songs are also getting longer. The top ten hits on Billboard actually increased twenty seconds in duration last year. Five top ten hits ran for more than five minutes…
I’ve charted the duration of [Taylor] Swift’s studio albums over the last two decades, and it tells the same story. She has gradually learned that her audience prefers longer musical experiences…
I calculated the average length of the current fiction bestsellers, and they are longer than in any of the previous measurement periods.
Movies are getting longer too. Of course this is the exact opposite of what the “smart phones are ruining our brains” theorists have been telling us. I think I would sooner say that the variance of our attention spans is going up? In any case, here is part of Ted’s theory:
An important piece and useful corrective.
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2025-06-25 13:04:48
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, responding to a recent study out of MIT. Here is one excerpt:
To see how lopsided their approach is, consider a simple parable. It took me a lot of “cognitive load”—a key measure used in their paper—to memorize all those state capitals in grade school, but I am not convinced it made me smarter or even significantly better informed. I would rather have spent the time reading an intelligent book or solving a math puzzle. Yet those memorizations, according to the standards of this new MIT paper, would qualify as an effective form of cognitive engagement. After all, they probably would have set those electroencephalograms (EEGs)—a test that measures electrical activity in the brain, and a major standard for effective cognition used in the paper—a-buzzin’.
The important concept here is one of comparative advantage, namely, doing what one does best or enjoys the most. Most forms of information technology, including LLMs, allow us to reallocate our mental energies as we prefer. If you use an LLM to diagnose the health of your dog (as my wife and I have done), that frees up time to ponder work and other family matters more productively. It saved us a trip to the vet. Similarly, I look forward to an LLM that does my taxes for me, as it would allow me to do more podcasting.
If you look only at the mental energy saved through LLM use, in the context of an artificially generated and controlled experiment, it will seem we are thinking less and becoming mentally lazy. And that is what the MIT experiment did, because if you are getting some things done more easily your cognitive load is likely to go down.
But you also have to consider, in a real-world context, what we do with all that liberated time and mental energy. This experiment did not even try to measure the mental energy the subjects could redeploy elsewhere; for instance, the time savings they would reap in real-life situations by using LLMs. No wonder they ended up looking like such slackers.
Here is the original study. Here is another good critique of the study.
The post Does AI make us stupider? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2025-06-25 02:42:44
Ranked choice voting (RCV) is an increasingly popular electoral institution that has been posited by reformers and media outlets to produce transformative effects on electoral outcomes and representation. However, there is little social scientific evidence available that evaluates these claims. I test the effects of RCV on municipal fiscal outcomes and the ideological composition of city councils. I also estimate RCV’s effects on these outcomes relative to public opinion — in other words, whether RCV narrows the gap between outcomes and mass policy preferences. This article finds no empirical support for the proposition that RCV changed fiscal outcomes or the ideological composition of city councils — both on absolute terms and relative to mass opinion. Furthermore, the roll-call based ideal points of legislators serving before and after RCV did not change, and the relationship between city district opinion and city legislator ideology is unchanged post-adoption. Taken as a whole, this article does not find evidence that RCV has produced the types of transformative political effects that reformers have postulated.
Here is the full paper by Arjun Vishwanath. Source.
The post The Effects of Ranked Choice Voting on Substantive Representation appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2025-06-24 23:57:57
1. Arc Institute releases the first draft of a virtual cell model.
2. The continuing resurgence of Fischer Black in current macro.
3. Robert Nelsen on why the diabetes breakthrough is important.
4. Law Review Puts Out Full Issue Of Articles Written With AI.
5. ChatGPT got this guy out of the woods.
6. The most successful undergraduate theses, a partial list.
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2025-06-24 14:24:45
There are lots of assumptions behind these results, but still it is good to see someone working through some scenarios:
A smaller human population would emit less carbon, other things equal, but how large is the effect? Here we test the widely-shared view that an important benefit of the ongoing, global decline in fertility will be reductions in long-run temperatures. We contrast a baseline of global depopulation (the most likely future) with a counterfactual in which the world population continues to grow for two more centuries. Although the two population paths differ by billions of people in 2200, we find that the implied temperatures would differ by less than one tenth of a degree C—far too small to impact climate goals. Timing drives the result. Depopulation is coming within the 21st century, but not for decades. Fertility shifts take generations to meaningfully change population size, by which time per capita emissions are projected to have significantly declined, even under pessimistic policy assumptions. Meanwhile, a smaller population slows the non-rival innovation that powers improvements in long-run productivity and living standards, an effect we estimate to be quantitatively important. Once the possibility of large-scale net-negative emissions is accounted for, even the sign of the population-temperature link becomes ambiguous. Humans cause greenhouse gas emissions, but human depopulation, starting in a few decades, will not meet today’s climate challenges.
That is from a new NBER working paper by
The post How do declining fertility and climate change interact? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2025-06-24 12:48:01
I have not been here since 2019, so here are the trends I am noticing:
1. Vastly more shops are open on Sundays than before.
2. Central Paris continues to evolve into a nearly bilingual city. It is not quite Amsterdam or Stockholm, but getting there. And the Parisians do not seem to mind speaking English.
3. There are more and more non-European restaurants of many kinds. From a walking-by perusal of menus and clienteles, they seem quite good and serious on the whole.
4. It is increasingly difficult to find a gas station in the city (before returning a rental car).
5. An amazingly high percentage of young women have publicly visible tattoos. I do not understand the logic here. I do (partially) understand tattoos as an act of rebellion, differentiation, or counter-signaling. I do not understand tattoos as an act of conformity.
6. Smoking has almost disappeared here. I saw plenty of young people vaping in Reims, but not the same in Paris.
7. Paris now has Rainier cherries in June, a sign of encroaching civiliation.
8. High-quality bookshops, with beautifully displayed titles and covers, still can be found frequently.
9. I had never seen the area near the Bibliotheque National before, it is excellent. I saw this Indian guy in concert there, after o3 recommended that I go.
10. Paris is doing just fine.
The post My Paris delta appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.