What am I up to now?
November, 2024
Contents
Updates
This was the first month of the third year of my PhD. It’s a polarizing year – half of the economists I know say it was the best year of their PhD; the other half say it was the worst. At the beginning of the year, a student is expected to be broadly exploring many projects; by the end of the year, the student should have a Research Agenda and a self-definition and a table of contents for their dissertation and — well, it’s a busy year.
I spent October in Oxford only, exploring. Here’s a non-comprehensive list of what I’ve been working on:
Public finance and the local social contract in Gambia — we’re going to baseline next month for an RCT that will span 2025. This is my first big project from start-to-finish; there are parts I love, parts I abhor, and parts which confuse me. But I’ve learned a lot very fast.
The political economy of policy advice — what do current models of expert policy advice leave out, especially in poor countries? Most of this advice is not coming from academics, even if it’s based on our work.
Using LLMs to extract estimates from papers to make meta-analyses easier. Or at least easier for the research assistants who have had to do this manually for ages. I’ve had mild success so far, but everything still requires manual review. Maybe a 60% time-savings (which is great!).
Forecasting accuracy over different timeframes — you might have heard me ask, rather more pretentiously, “What is the shape of the forecasting error curve?” I’ve been dancing around this question since 2021; Eva Vivalt and Duncan Webb are digging back in.
A couple of AI research topics in poor countries, which I’m hesitant to talk about publicly (because nothing has been thought through yet).
Why are temporary energy solutions becoming permanent across Africa? I’ve talked many peoples’ ears off about Karpowership, a Turkish company which operates 50+MW diesel power plants on container ships. There’s been on anchored off Accra for a most of a decade, and another dozen spread around the continent. This is weird.
The political economy of malaria eradication. An emerging dynamic: many poor countries National Malaria Eradication agencies, and also have national vaccine programs. The distribution of malaria vaccines in several Central African countries have been delayed by political infighting over who gets the funding, responsibility, and credit.
Other than work, October remains an S-tier month. Oxford looks fabulous in fog and orange hues. My wonderful girlfriend visited for my birthday; I am deeply grateful for United’s Dulles-to-Heathrow flight. We’ve made three pumpkin pies in the last four days.
Other highlights include: a demo of the Apple Vision Pro in London, Nabokov’s Pnin, thrifting with LH, and a very affectionate kelpie moving in down the street.
Reading
Thesis
Nabokov’s Pnin is a top book of my year. Wittier than Amis, more evocative than Hardy, and sharper than Salinger.
Pnin is everything Lolita is not. Professor Pnin is everything Humbert is not. He is loving and clever and pathetic; he enjoys hosting dinner parties and will happily buy a football and a too-facile book for his ex-wife’s son, and be so charming about them both that the son sees him as a father. It’s a story of the Russian emigres — they are hounded, impoverished, disdained, and forgotten, but they don’t mind deeply. They persevere. Critics make a big deal out of a one-page digression on Pnin’s first love, Mira Belochkin, who died at Buchenwald. Nabokov’s wife being Jewish as well, people read more into this than they must.
Matt Levine got here first:
COWEN: What makes Nabokov’s Pnin an interesting novel?
LEVINE: [laughs] You’ve been reading my secret Tumblr.IF ANYONE HAS A LINK TO MATT LEVINE’S SECRET TUMBLR, I WILL PAY YOU $100. Which I’m not going to link up to. It’s just very Nabokovian. He’s just this great esthete of almost pointless pleasure in writing.
There’s this scene that I love where Pnin, the absentminded professor character, is heartbroken after a run-in with his ex-wife. He’s dejectedly walking through the park on the way home, and he’s pondering the meaning of life.
Nabokov says something like he’s almost come upon a solution to one of the great mysteries of life. Then he’s interrupted by a squirrel who runs up on a water fountain and demands that he help the squirrel drink from the water fountain. So he helps the squirrel, and then he moves on.
It’s just this random interlude of gorgeous writing and bizarre scenery and just random pileup of weird delightfulness with no point that I find very appealing. [laughs]
Squirrels show up repeatedly in the book, and the critics make a lot of this too. The squirrel motif is, I think, just because Nabokov liked squirrels.
Antithesis
Han Kang won the Nobel Prize for literature this month, and she may be the first winner I read before their win.Bob Dylan doesn’t count. I read The Vegetarian a few years ago, and again after her win. Han does a really good job of writing meat disgustingly (and there’s a lot of food in this book, maybe too much for a Yom Kippur read). But it’s not about meat.
I’m still peeved about the reviews on Goodreads. Check out the first review right now:
This is deeply personal to my own beliefs. I’m a vegan.
I don’t want to take that away from them, and nothing personal. But, just like the Nabokov critics saying the squirrel is a reincarnation of whomever, you’re wrong. I’m going to tell you what the book is about, and the critics are right. The Vegetarian is a book about gender relations in South Korea. That’s it. If it has a commentary about animal welfare, that commentary is, “isn’t it horrible that women are treated like meat?”
Synthesis
I was reminded of both the above listening to Ta-nehisi Coates on the Ezra Klein show, a really excellent podcast episode. Coates’ new book discusses the conflict in Palestine. The two of them were very close on experiences and facts — both having visited the West Bank recently — but far apart on narrative. Coates said that he strongly believed in the interpretation of the reader, that the book is out in the world now and he no longer has the right or the ability to dictate how it is received — even though he was evidently quite peeved by Ezra’s reading of it. Specifically, Klein wanted to push Coates towards a more holistic view of the conflict, but Coates stood by his analysis of the underdog.
Authors do put their books into the readers’ hands. Readers are sometimes wrong. These two things are irreconcilable, especially because I am never wrong, it is only the readers obsessed with Pninian squirrels and vegan Koreans who are wrong. It is an act of trust and resignation to put complicated ideas in writing into the world.
Links
``An esoteric branch of math called fraction theory may hold the answers to science’s deepest mysteries”
George Orwell on the cost of books. Of course, this was a poor country at a poor time.
It is difficult to establish any relationship between the price of books and the value one gets out of them. “Books” includes novels, poetry, text books, works of reference, sociological treatises and much else, and length and price do not correspond to one another, especially if one habitually buys books second-hand. You may spend ten shillings on a poem of 500 lines, and you may spend sixpence on a dictionary which you consult at odd moments over a period of twenty years. There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later: and the cost, in terms of money, may be the same in each case.
Gwern on what makes Matt Levine great; self-recommending. It’s a question I’ve asked before. Gwern’s answer is elegant and fine: Levine covers a complicated subject with “news” every day which is actually news — there’s a new angle or something to each story. His counterexample (barfights and court reporting) is unfair.
The plaque on the Eastern Scheldt Barrier defending Netherlands from the North sea reads: “Here the tide is ruled by the moon, the wind, and us.”
The US Marine Corps’ Small Unit Leader’s Guide to Mountain Warfare Operations. Full of interesting tidbits, useful for the most intense camping trip of all time. Ctrl-F for “swearing”.
Are the British a joke of a nuclear power? (I love you guys, I promise.) Literally, yes — have you heard about Blue Peacock and the chicken-powered nuclear bomb? Of course, they couldn’t be normal about it:
This proposal was sufficiently outlandish that it was taken as an April Fool’s Day joke when the Blue Peacock file was declassified on 1 April 2004. Tom O’Leary, head of education and interpretation at the National Archives, replied to the media that, “It does seem like an April Fool but it most certainly is not. The Civil Service does not do jokes.”
We can’t take the UK seriously, not because they once thought about building a chicken bomb, but because they didn’t build a chicken powered bomb!Arf arf! It’s debatable whether we should be reverent towards the atom bomb, whether we should reify and fear and treat it as sacred — but we should not mock it.
Previously
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