Ben WaberWe had some crazy weather in Boston today (ominous pic of the crows is from last week), but at least I had some talks for my #AcademicPlaylist to keep me company while helping my neighbor clear a downed tree from their driveway! (1/9)
First was an excellent talk by Suze Berkhout and Ada Jaarsma on the nocebo effect and harmful feedback loops in society at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J37f0Coi9o8 (2/9) #philosophy #psychology #bioethics
Suze Berkhout and Ada Jaarsma - Nocebos Talk Back
Next was an interesting talk by Giacomo De Giorgi on the relationship between farming, non-farming enterprises, migration, and rainfall in incomplete markets at the #CEPR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXJlgsgsxo0 (3/9) #economics #migration #agriculture
VDEV 48 - 5 December 2023: Giacomo De Giorgi (University of Geneva, BREAD and CEPR)
Next was a fantastic conversation with Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba on reimagining India's economic future at the Indian School of Business. While this hits some of the points in Rajan's previous discussion at the Stigler Center, there's more emphasis on the tradeoff between manufacturing subsidies and education investment (and there are more jokes)! Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7RVUNdHkHg (4/9) #economics #India
LIVE| Raghuram Rajan in conversation with Prof Bhagwan Chowdhry at ISB
Next was an incredible talk by William Merrill on the limitations of transformer models at the SAIL workshop. Using complexity theory Merrill proves that transformers are fundamentally incapable of a number of critical reasoning tasks, such as inherently sequential reasoning, and workarounds impair scalability. This talk should be required listening for folks using/developing these models. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLHuwjeSf1Y (5/9) #AI #transformers
William Merrill - The Parallelism Tradeoff: Limitations of Log-Precision Transformers
Next was a great conversation with Henrik Bresman about X-Teams on the INSEAD podcast. I first heard about this approach from co-author Deborah Ancona, and for the unfamiliar it's an essential way to think about building and leading teams https://knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-organisations/x-teams-three-principles-guide-todays-leaders (6/9) #management #teams #work
Next was an important talk by Reshmaan Hussam on the benefits of gainful employment beyond income at Harvard's Center for International Development. Through a study at Rohingya refugee camps, Hussam demonstrates that gender-based programs might be counterproductive in some circumstances like this one, but work generated more prosocial value than cash or volunteer work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpNc6sNLdFk (7/9) #economics #work #gender #Rohingya
The Household at Work: Evidence from a Refugee Camp
Next was a fascinating talk by Simon Lobach on the aluminum industry in Amazonia at the UCLA Latin American Institute. Lobach presents an in-depth view of the messy relationship between mining firms and local populations, and argues that given their track record it's probably better to work with mining companies based in developed countries to improve their practices further since when the pull out of a region less scrupulous actors take their place https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O59qHvuE1OE (8/9) #sustainability
UCLA Center for Brazilian Studies - Aluminum in Amazonia: Unmodern Encounters
Last was an engaging panel on last mile challenges for retail, service delivery, and employee transit at CMU with Karina Ricks, Karen Lightman, and Sarah Fox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_essDmQFVu0 (9/9) #transportation #UrbanPlanning
ENAiBLE Panel: The Last Mile — Challenges for retail and service delivery and employee transit
Ulrike Hahn@bwaber this sounds interesting!
@UlrikeHahn It's a beautiful approach
@bwaber I’m 9 minutes in, it’s just outlining how and why transformers don’t fit into the Chomsky hierarchy..currently in track to be one of the most interesting things I’ve seen all year
@bwaber by far the most interesting/informative thing I saw with respect to #LLMs all year is this talk by William Merrill which came from Ben Waber’s great regular digest of online talks - watch this, follow Ben…(money back guarantee)
(passing familiarity with the Chomsky hierarchy and complexity theory will help, but you only need to understand what kind of thing they are for the talk to be interesting)