I had a nice couple of days exploring some nice gardens and parks in greater Tokyo, which were accompanied by talks from my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting talk by Justin Chircop on the accounting costs of country-by-country reporting at Mohamed Elsalkh's business, accounting, and economics seminar https://youtu.be/VHt3ZsHyagM?si=r6xE0fEkcvgepAt9

Next was a fantastic talk by Martin Schmalz on neglected risks in private markets at the Princeton Bendheim Center for Finance. Schmalz systematically works through problems with private markets, deconstructing performance mismeasurement, diversification risks, and more. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr14tjLLOyw

Last was "An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence" by David Bates. This is an in-depth tour of the arc of philosophical thought around intelligence, with a particular focus on how we determine if a thing, human, other animal, or artificial, is intelligent. Frustratingly, the term "intelligence" is never defined here, although given that this extremely vague term is mostly undefined (or poorly defined) by thinkers throughout the centuries this is partially excusable. The majority of this book is essentially a build up to the payoff of the final section, demonstrating how discussions and theories around AI at the dawn of the computing age were not a break from the past - rather, they were deeply enmeshed in a chain of intellectual debates dating back to the Enlightenment. That being said, the final chapter takes some shine off of this achievement, with terms like machine learning being incorrectly defined (even acknowledging its fairly amorphous definition) and the explanation of deep learning that's employed is catastrophically wrong. This ultimately is a somewhat minor quibble given its place in the narrative, but still seems fairly egregious to me. Finally, I would've liked a lot more added on the empirical backing or refutation of the theorizing identified here. Still highly recommend https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo212878817.html