Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesias
Why is Japan so much poorer than Germany or the USA?
8:10 PM · Mar 23, 2023
16 Reposts · 409 Likes
Sorta wild how they can do well with great transit and low crime, but they still end up pretty far behind. It's worse on productivity.
Lakshya Jain@lxeagle17
Something I can't shake is that in one sense, Biden's 2020 victory was genuinely impressive for a challenger.
Biden got 51.3% of the vote. That's the highest vote share achieved by a challenger against an incumbent president since...FDR in 1932 (Reagan got 50.8% vs Carter).
12:29 AM · Mar 23, 2023
191 Reposts · 2.13K Likes
I had not realized how well Biden had performed by this measure. Jain goes on further in a thread, the election was considered close because the tipping point state was still quite close. But winning nationally by a lot helps the down-ballot races.
Threads
• Highlights of a recent paper arguing that GPT-4 appears to be a true Artificial General Intelligence. Here's a second, longer, summary of the same work, my favorite highlight is that the version of GPT-4 trained only on text can actually draw correct simple images of things.