Author: cogiddo

Useful tips for economists on using LLMs for research and teaching

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Back in the remote past, I used to write posts about economics on this blog and generally about things that caught my fancy, in addition to posting some of my photography. I am returning to this pattern now, after months of inactivity, and I will try to keep the practice of writing daily here going.

For today, I start with what looks like a good page with tips on how to use LLMs for research and teaching in economics. The bits about having LaTeX code auto-produced and making graphs out of tables automatically are the most interesting to me, but you, fellow economist, will probably find more useful stuff there: https://paulgp.github.io/2024/06/24/llm_talk.html

Big thanks to Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham (@paulgp on Twitter) for consistently posting helpful material, such as the above and his lecture notes for his Applied Empirical Methods Class.

PS. I had the AI feature of WordPress generate the featured image for this post. I let it do it without additional instructions, simply based on my words (before the PS). I thought it did a good job. Comments on the post or the featured image welcome!

Video lecture on Power and Progress

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Three weeks ago, Daron Acemoglu gave a talk on Markus Brunnermeier’s “Markus Academy” on YouTube on the Acemoglu-Johnson book “Power and Progress”, about which I wrote a short post in May. I watched this talk today and I heartily endorse it both as a lively and short summary of the book and for the good questions Brunnermeier asked. I liked it enough to immediately add it to my Economic Inequality course syllabus for the fall. You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/eGqaOhTq060   

Acemoglu and Johnson on the need to control technological progress

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I’m finally returning to this blog with a post on economics and technology. It’s not much of a post, but it does represent an end to a long period of neglect of the blog.

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson have a new book out, Power and Progress, released yesterday. I just grabbed an ebook copy and started reading it. This post will be the first of a series in which I will record my reactions. Here is an excerpt from the end of the preface, to show the gist of the main argument in the book:

“We wrote this book to show that progress is never automatic. Today’s “progress” is again enriching a small group of entrepreneurs and investors, whereas most people are disempowered and benefit little.
A new, more inclusive vision of technology can emerge only if the basis of social power changes. This requires, as in the nineteenth century, the rise of counterarguments and organizations that can stand up to the conventional wisdom. Confronting the prevailing vision and wresting the direction of technology away from the control of a narrow elite may even be more difficult today than it was in nineteenth-century Britain and America. But it is no less essential.”

Excerpt From
Power and Progress
Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson

Update 2023-06-09: back from a trip, still planning to finish the book are post a review.

Osprey

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Captured in Branford, CT, July 16, 2022

I made many efforts to get sharp images of birds last week on my trip to CT, and a few came out well, such as this one.