Osias Jota

We all know that robots are making it impossible for people without a college degree to get jobs. That's a basic fact about the economy known to all right-thinking people. And, just like most of the other "facts" about the economy known by right-thinking people, it happens not to be true.

The figure below shows the change in the employment to population ratio (EPOP) for people over 25 from before the recession to the present. (It compares the average for the last four months with the year-round average for 2006.)

                            Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics and author's calculations.

As can be seen the drop in the EPOP for college grads, at 4.0 percentage points, is somewhat smaller than the 6.1 percentage point drop for those with some college and the 5.9 percentage point drop for those with just a high school degree. But before anyone jumps on this as evidence of the education bias in today's economy, note that the EPOP for people without high school degrees is only 1.2 percentage points. The data sure make it look like the recovery has disproportionately benefited the least educated.

In fact, these comparisons actually tilt the case against the less-educated. We all know the demographic story in which we are not supposed to be concerned about the decline in EPOPs from pre-recession levels because it's the result of baby boomers retiring. For the most part this is not true (the drop in EPOPs among workers 25-54 is almost as large as for the adult population as a whole), but insofar as retirement is an issue, it would disproportionately affect less-educated workers.

The people who have crossed into their sixties since 2006 are much less educated on average than the people turning age 25 during this nine year period. This means that the percentage of people with a high school degree or less who have decided to retiree would have risen much more than the percentage of college grads. An age-adjusted measure of EPOPs would surely show a much worse story for college grads than this chart.

Don't expect these cheap statistics to affect the public debate about technology, education, and the labor market (that depends on what important people say, not data), but folks should know it ain't true.

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) was a writer, known for his contribution to science fiction (including The Three Laws of Robotics, I, Robot and the Foundation series) and his staggering work in other genres and non-fiction.

Asimov had a formal education in chemistry, earning his PhD and working as a chemist for the Navy during WWII. He taught biochemistry and later became a professor at the Boston Univeristy of Medicine, all while writing stories for fantasy magazines in his spare time. He finally left the University in 1958 to focus on writing. Asimov’s output was truly mind-blowing, writing over 500 (!!!) books and 90,000 letters. He said: “Writing is my only interest. Even speaking is an interruption.”

Asimov’s non-fiction books were mostly on astronomy, but his other titles covered general science, history, mathematics, physics, Shakespeare, the Bible and mythology. He was completely self-taught in these areas and was successful for being able to take difficult scientific concepts and make them entertaining for the general public. He said he could “read a dozen dull books and make one interesting book out of them.” To get some idea of how vast Asimov’s knowledge was, his books appear in nine of the ten Dewey Decimal Classes.

The quotes used in this comic are taken from a fantastic interview Asimov did in 1988 (which you can watch on YouTube). In it, Asimov predicts how in the near-future, personal computers will help anyone learn anything ‘that strikes their fancy’ in the privacy of their own home and at their own leisure. Of course, that prediction came true with the internet, and even though the technology from The Matrix isn’t available yet, where we could upload information directly into our brain and shout “I know kung-fu!”, it has never been easier to learn whatever you want, no matter how niche. Thanks to reader Jenny for sending me the quote and the Brain Pickings article that featured the interview.

RELATED COMICS: Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot. Richard Dawkins The Lucky Ones. Albert Einstein A Human Being is Part of the Whole. Jack London I Would Rather be Ashes Than Dust.

– I admit not having read any of Asimov’s books. Where should I start? The Foundation series? His story Nightfall was voted the best short science fiction story of all-time, so maybe that?
– Asimov said that one of only two men he knew who was smarter than himself was his good friend Carl Sagan.

it’s finally coming — now you can look just 5 inches further back on your wrist to check out what’s happening with your phone

Walking Dead S1
ClipArt Cover Art

liberalhell:

(me reading a post about my astrological sign that doesn’t match me at all) haha wrong again. a triumphant day for Logic and Reason

Many years ago I had a job picking up and delivering packages in Toronto. Once the boss told me to deliver package A then C then B when A and B were closer together and delivering ACB would lengthen the trip. I delivered ABC and when the boss found out he wasn’t happy because C needed their package a lot sooner than B and distance wasn’t the only variable to be optimized. I recall (probably inaccurately) the boss yelling:

Listen college boy, I’m not paying you to think. I’m paying you to do what I tell you to do.

It isn’t easy suppressing my judgment in favor of someone else’s judgment even if the other person has better judgment (ask my wife) but once it was explained to me I at least understood why my boss’s judgment made sense. More and more, however, we are being asked to suppress our judgment in favor of that of an artificial intelligence, a theme in Tyler’s Average is Over. As Tyler notes notes:

…there will be Luddites of a sort. “Here are all these new devices telling me what to do—but screw them; I’m a human being! I’m still going to buy bread every week and throw two-thirds of it out all the time.” It will be alienating in some ways. We won’t feel that comfortable with it. We’ll get a lot of better results, but it won’t feel like utopia.

I put this slightly differently, the problem isn’t artificial intelligence but opaque intelligence. Algorithms have now become so sophisticated that we human’s can’t really understand why they are telling us what they are telling us. The WSJ writes about driver’s using UPS’s super algorithm, Orion, to plan their delivery route:

Driver reaction to Orion is mixed. The experience can be frustrating for some who might not want to give up a degree of autonomy, or who might not follow Orion’s logic. For example, some drivers don’t understand why it makes sense to deliver a package in one neighborhood in the morning, and come back to the same area later in the day for another delivery. But Orion often can see a payoff, measured in small amounts of time and money that the average person might not see.

One driver, who declined to speak for attribution, said he has been on Orion since mid-2014 and dislikes it, because it strikes him as illogical.

Human drivers think Orion is illogical because they can’t grok Orion’s super-logic. Perhaps any sufficiently advanced logic is indistinguishable from stupidity.

Hat tip: Robin Hanson for discussion.

Happy 400 strips! Oh, and shiny new website... yes...

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