Enlarge / Daniel Dennett, a leading philosopher with provocative takes on consciousness, free will, and AI, has died at 82. (credit: Alonso Nichols/Tufts University )

World renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett, who championed controversial takes on consciousness and free will among other mind-bending subjects, died today at the age of 82.

( Full disclosure: This loss is personal. Dennett was a friend and colleague of my spouse, Sean Carroll . Sean and I have many fond memories of shared meals and stimulating conversations on an enormous range of topics with Dan over the years. He was a true original and will be greatly missed .)

Stunned reactions to Dennett's unexpected passing began proliferating on social media shortly after the news broke. "Wrenching news. He's been a great friend and incredible inspiration for me throughout my career," the Santa Fe Institute's Melanie Mitchell, author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans , wrote on X . "I will miss him enormously."

Here is the audio and transcript .  She is one of my favorite contemporary American writers, most notably in The Mare, Veronica, and Lost Cat.  Here is part of the episode summary:

She joined Tyler to discuss the reasons some people seem to choose to be unhappy, why she writes about oddballs, the fragility of personality, how she’s developed her natural knack for describing the physical world, why we’re better off just accepting that people are horrible, her advice for troubled teenagers, why she wouldn’t clone a lost cat, the benefits and drawbacks of writing online, what she’s learned from writing a Substack, what gets lost in Kubrick’s adaptation of Lolita , the not-so-subtle eroticism of Victorian novels, the ground rules for writing about other people, how creative writing programs are harming (some) writers, what she learned about men when working as a stripper, how her views of sexual permissiveness have changed since the ’90s, how college students have changed over time, what she learned working at The Strand bookstore, and more.

It is perhaps a difficult conversation to excerpt from but here is one bit:

COWEN: You once quoted your therapist as saying, and I’m quoting him here, “People are just horrible, and the sooner you realize that, the happier you’re going to be.” What’s your view?

GAITSKILL: [laughs] I thought that was a wonderful remark. It’s important to note the tone of voice that he used. He was a Southern queer gentleman with a very lilting, soft voice. I was complaining about something or other, and he goes, “People are horrible. They’re stupid, and they’re crazy, and they’re mean , and the sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be, the more you’re going to start enjoying life.”

I just laughed, because partly it was obvious he was being funny, and it was a very gentle way of allowing my ranting and raving and acknowledging the truth of it. Gee, I don’t know how anybody could deny that. Look at human history and some of the things that people do. It was being very spacious about it and just saying, “Look, you have to accept reality. You can’t expect people to be perfect or to be your idea of good or moral all the time. You’re probably not either. This is what it is.”

I thought that was really wisdom, actually.

I am very pleased to have had the chance to chat with her.

The post My excellent Conversation with Mary Gaitskill appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION .

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I cited the current use of that trade-off as the thing that bugs me most about the economics profession.  Here is my Bloomberg column , and here is one excerpt:

The equity-efficiency trade-off, in its simplest form, argues that economists should consider both equity (how a policy affects various interested parties) and efficiency (how well a policy targets the party it is intended to affect) in making policy judgments.

So far so good. I start getting nervous, however, when I see equity given special status. After all, it most often is called “ the equity-efficiency trade-off,” not “ an equity-efficiency tradeoff,” and it is prominent in mainstream economics textbooks. By simply reiterating a concept, economists are trying to elevate their preferred value over a number of alternatives. They are trying to make economics more pluralistic with respect to values, but in reality they are making it more provincial.

If you poll the American people on their most important values, you will get a diverse set of answers , depending on whom you ask and how the question is worded. Americans will cite values such as individualism, liberty, community, godliness, merit and, yes equity (as they should). Another answer — taking care of their elders, especially if they contributed to the nation in their earlier years — does not always show up in polls, but seems to have a grip on many national policies and people’s minds.

And:

I hear frequently about the equity-efficiency trade-off, but much less about the trade-offs between efficiency and these other values. Mainstream economists seldom debate the value trade-offs between efficiency and individualism, for instance, though such conflicts were of central concern to many Americans during the pandemic…

Surveys have shown that a strong majority of academic economists prefer Democrats. Yet most economists, including Democrats, should pay more attention to the values of ordinary Americans and less attention to the values of their own segment of the intelligentsia. That also would bring them closer to most Democratic Party voters, not to mention swing voters and many Republicans. Equity is just one value of many, and it is not self-evidently the value economists ought to be most concerned with elevating.

Damning throughout.

The post Against current conceptions of the equity-efficiency trade-off appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION .

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