#AcademicRunPlaylist - 9/12/24

I had a break in my schedule yesterday, which gave me a bit of time to go on a shorter run and listen to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was the 4th workshop on open world vision at #CVPR2024. I highly recommend the whole event, and I particularly liked the talks by Walter Scheirer (open issues in open world learning) and Deva Ramanan (open world learning and large mutlimodal models) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTBRrMn9fOU

Next was an interesting talk by Guhan Subramanian on legal mechanisms to deal with economic issues in business transactions at the Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRsm3ZlBHKM

Next was a fantastic talk by Michael Saxon on rigorous measurement of multilingual and multicultural abilities in generative AI at Ai2. Saxon has done incredible work in this area, and this talk builds on that to demonstrate how to systematically quantify gaps and improvements in these models in important areas. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e3kB1YR488

Next was the 2nd workshop on generative models for computer vision at CVPR, with notable talks by Katerina Fragkiadaki (image and video perception with generative feedback) and Andrea Vedaldi (3D generative AI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEaSNJOpfsU

Next was a short conversation on how effectively skills and jobs are matched across the world with Oriana Bandiera and Ilse Lindenlaub on the VoxDev podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkLbWl7Ah6A

Next was an intriguing talk by Kris Franscisco on how improved inter-island transport connectivity in the Philippines affected local employment and job quality at Ateneo de Manila University https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYjBEgLYR8A

Next was an engaging discussion on Sekou Bermiss's Lit Review podcast with Timothy Kundro and Nancy Rothbard on the interaction between gender and power in the effects of moral objectors in organizations. As one might suspect, powerful men fare better than others, and framing moral objections in terms of organizational benefits tends to be more effective than other approaches https://thelitreview.podbean.com/e/the-lit-review-an-amj-podcast-tim-kundro-nancy-rothbard-s4e1/

Last was "The Value of Everything" by Mariana Mazzucato. This book provides, with a few exceptions, an excellent overview of the assumptions that have been baked into modern economics - in particular, the conflation of price and value - and the problems that creates for economic policy. Mazzucato convincingly points out the issues with this assumption in the traditional finance sector as well as government, and how this has likely stunted investment in the "real" economy.

The sections in this book on private equity and venture capital are fairly implausible. Mazzucato claims that VCs only bet on "sure things," but later discusses how a high percentage of startups fail. With private equity she also bemoans their ineffectiveness, while simultaneously discussing their relatively long fund time horizons.

The sections on the valuation of government services, what labor is accounted for in national accounts, and the inefficiency of much of the traditional finance sector are, in contrast, expertly argued. I would have liked a lot more time spent on how to approach teasing apart profit and rents, since while many examples are brought up there's no proposal for a general, holistic approach. Still, this book is overall an excellent addition to the canon of modern economic thought.

https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-value-of-everything/