7 ms·

Trump's new tariff math looks a lot like ChatGPT's

70 points by thm 2y ago

duxup 2y ago
I think if you prompt any AI with some generic "make trade imbalance go away" type request you'll get this response. Same goes if you just roughly mathed it out yourself. Of course these trade numbers aren't sports game scores and just "make this different" ... anyone with a clue knows that the end results economical could be very unpredictable and potentially very much not desirable. It's striking that the administration explanation for all this is, to just not explain how they did anything.
- bathtub365 2y ago
  Yeah I think the real (or maybe just more interesting) story here is – like with a lot of stories about LLM’s – the reaction to and characterization of the results by the user of the tool. They may have asked how to correct a trade imbalance but completely changed the characterization of the calculation from “trade imbalance” to “tariffs and currency manipulation”. With any tool unless you understand how it works there is a danger you can’t accurately communicate what is happening. Or, for malicious users, it gives you an easy way to come up with a method to mislead and attain nefarious goals.
  - scotty79 2y ago
    > Same goes if you just roughly mathed it out yourself. How? It's a question like how you can control wolf population by shooting penguins. No reasonable human would attempt an answer. Only LLMs would make something up.
howmayiannoyyou 2y ago
Non-monetary tariffs are the real story here - and the tariff math accounts heavily for it. - Regulatory hurdles that prevent import (eg. CE requirements) - Currency manipulation (eg. RMB) - Domestic industrial subsidies (eg. export tax credits).
- infecto 2y ago
  Can you elaborate? The formula the government posted does not show this. Can you back up the claim?
- healsdata 2y ago
  The math doesn't account for anything. The formula they published literally has (4 * 1/4) as part of the equation, hidden behind Greek letters, to make it appear more sophisticated. It's "trade deficit / imports" without any care to why those numbers exist on a case-by-case basis. This wasn't a thought out solution that took into account the vast multivariate things that happen in the real world, including those you mentioned. They also used CCTLDs instead of countries which is how we ended up with: * a tiny Australian island got much higher tariffs than Australia * tariffs on an uninhabited island * an island that is only inhabited by a joint US/UK military base getting tariffs
  - infecto 2y ago
    Are they really CCTLDs? Not an attack, I am genuinely curious because I have been wondering how they came up with that list. Half the countries have trivial amounts of trade and it felt like a waste of time to even propose it.
    - garfield_light 2y ago
      It's ccTLDs directly or the country abbreviations from ISO 3166-1. They tariff'd Norfolk Island but not Easter Island, so it must be that.
shmerl 2y ago
Idiots making economy policies. What can go wrong.
- breadwinner 2y ago
  Wait a minute, they used greek symbols and stuff [1]. When was the last time you saw an idiot use a greek symbol? [1] https://x.com/Brendan_Duke/status/1907741651172311353 https://x.com/Brendan_Duke/status/1907741651172311353
  - shmerl 2y ago
    They know the word tariff. Can't be that dumb after all.
- gostsamo 2y ago
  I see many in the US thinking that Trump is an idiot. No, he is not. He is a blatant liar. The fact that many people cannot believe how blatantly he lies does not mean that he is unaware of reality, means that he knows how to detach other people from it. If you look at him and the people around him as people who lie with every breath that they take for the express purpose of ensuring their own wellbeing at the expense of everyone else, the underlying logic of their actions becomes painfully obvious.
  - shmerl 2y ago
    Whether he is an idiot or a "useful idiot" as in willingly helping his shady beneficiaries doesn't really matter, since he surrounds himself with real idiots (main qualification being willing to bootlick the boss) and something will for sure go wrong. He is a blatant liar though, no doubt. That doesn't really contradict being an idiot.
  - baseballdork 2y ago
    > I see many in the US thinking that Trump is an idiot. No, he is not. I have no idea how you can hold that view after seeing the hurricane forecast he sharpied. The man is legitimately a dullard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Dorian%E2%80%93Alabama_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Dorian%E2%80%93Alaba...
Mindless2112 2y ago
It's not "ChatGPT's tariff math" any more than it's "ChatGPT's Pythagorean theorem". ChatGPT learned it from somewhere.
- SirFatty 2y ago
  But ChatGPT did make it readily available to someone looking for an easy button.
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    I think anyone would have to agree that ChatGPT is infinitely more well-informed. For any reasonable value of infinity. This really puts things on a level playing field overnight, like nobody else would ever do. Not regarding the balance of international trade or anything like US manufacturing, but math itself, especially financial math. Now the best anybody can do is no better than the napkin quality math often done by a wild guesser who finagled themselves into a position where somebody would act on the figures, regardless of their certain wild inaccuracy. All of a sudden everybody's more inaccurate in economics than they have ever been, it was just so unfair before :\
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > ChatGPT learned it from somewhere It might repeating misinterpretations or wholesale making shit up [1]. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10997760/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10997760/
r0ckarong 2y ago
Extraordinary nonsense is probably the codename for all of this.
TomHenderson3 2y ago
I would like to understand why they seemed to use internet domains as proxies for nations.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
throwaway81523 2y ago
Why is this post flagged? It is, at minimum, interesting.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  I think mods & flaggers probably want to keep discussion of this topic to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43561253# https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43561253#
- aaron695 2y ago
  [dead]
hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
> US tech companies are about to be used as the biggest punching bag in history by the European Union. They’ll negotiate first, for sure, because that’s what the EU likes to do, but for sure the fines and reciprocal non-tariff barriers are going to only expand for US tech firms in the very near future if the Trump admin doesn’t want to negotiate. For sure this will happen but there is a reason. The EU turned a blind eye on a lot of dark patterns used by the biggest players (such as lenient approach to scams that are omnipresent on Facebook, Instagram, Google platforms) and whatever these companies did they knew they might get a slap on the wrist maximum. Now that good relations are over, why would the EU tolerate this shit?

70 points by thm 2y ago

I think if you prompt any AI with some generic "make trade imbalance go away" type request you'll get this response. Same goes if you just roughly mathed it out yourself. Of course these trade numbers aren't sports game scores and just "make this different" ... anyone with a clue knows that the end results economical could be very unpredictable and potentially very much not desirable. It's striking that the administration explanation for all this is, to just not explain how they did anything.

bathtub365 2y ago
Yeah I think the real (or maybe just more interesting) story here is – like with a lot of stories about LLM’s – the reaction to and characterization of the results by the user of the tool. They may have asked how to correct a trade imbalance but completely changed the characterization of the calculation from “trade imbalance” to “tariffs and currency manipulation”. With any tool unless you understand how it works there is a danger you can’t accurately communicate what is happening. Or, for malicious users, it gives you an easy way to come up with a method to mislead and attain nefarious goals.
- scotty79 2y ago
  > Same goes if you just roughly mathed it out yourself. How? It's a question like how you can control wolf population by shooting penguins. No reasonable human would attempt an answer. Only LLMs would make something up.

howmayiannoyyou 2y ago

Non-monetary tariffs are the real story here - and the tariff math accounts heavily for it. - Regulatory hurdles that prevent import (eg. CE requirements) - Currency manipulation (eg. RMB) - Domestic industrial subsidies (eg. export tax credits).

infecto 2y ago
Can you elaborate? The formula the government posted does not show this. Can you back up the claim?
healsdata 2y ago
The math doesn't account for anything. The formula they published literally has (4 * 1/4) as part of the equation, hidden behind Greek letters, to make it appear more sophisticated. It's "trade deficit / imports" without any care to why those numbers exist on a case-by-case basis. This wasn't a thought out solution that took into account the vast multivariate things that happen in the real world, including those you mentioned. They also used CCTLDs instead of countries which is how we ended up with: * a tiny Australian island got much higher tariffs than Australia * tariffs on an uninhabited island * an island that is only inhabited by a joint US/UK military base getting tariffs
- infecto 2y ago
  Are they really CCTLDs? Not an attack, I am genuinely curious because I have been wondering how they came up with that list. Half the countries have trivial amounts of trade and it felt like a waste of time to even propose it.
  - garfield_light 2y ago
    It's ccTLDs directly or the country abbreviations from ISO 3166-1. They tariff'd Norfolk Island but not Easter Island, so it must be that.

shmerl 2y ago

Idiots making economy policies. What can go wrong.

breadwinner 2y ago
Wait a minute, they used greek symbols and stuff [1]. When was the last time you saw an idiot use a greek symbol? [1] https://x.com/Brendan_Duke/status/1907741651172311353 https://x.com/Brendan_Duke/status/1907741651172311353
- shmerl 2y ago
  They know the word tariff. Can't be that dumb after all.
gostsamo 2y ago
I see many in the US thinking that Trump is an idiot. No, he is not. He is a blatant liar. The fact that many people cannot believe how blatantly he lies does not mean that he is unaware of reality, means that he knows how to detach other people from it. If you look at him and the people around him as people who lie with every breath that they take for the express purpose of ensuring their own wellbeing at the expense of everyone else, the underlying logic of their actions becomes painfully obvious.
- shmerl 2y ago
  Whether he is an idiot or a "useful idiot" as in willingly helping his shady beneficiaries doesn't really matter, since he surrounds himself with real idiots (main qualification being willing to bootlick the boss) and something will for sure go wrong. He is a blatant liar though, no doubt. That doesn't really contradict being an idiot.
- baseballdork 2y ago
  > I see many in the US thinking that Trump is an idiot. No, he is not. I have no idea how you can hold that view after seeing the hurricane forecast he sharpied. The man is legitimately a dullard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Dorian%E2%80%93Alabama_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Dorian%E2%80%93Alaba...

Mindless2112 2y ago

It's not "ChatGPT's tariff math" any more than it's "ChatGPT's Pythagorean theorem". ChatGPT learned it from somewhere.

SirFatty 2y ago
But ChatGPT did make it readily available to someone looking for an easy button.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  I think anyone would have to agree that ChatGPT is infinitely more well-informed. For any reasonable value of infinity. This really puts things on a level playing field overnight, like nobody else would ever do. Not regarding the balance of international trade or anything like US manufacturing, but math itself, especially financial math. Now the best anybody can do is no better than the napkin quality math often done by a wild guesser who finagled themselves into a position where somebody would act on the figures, regardless of their certain wild inaccuracy. All of a sudden everybody's more inaccurate in economics than they have ever been, it was just so unfair before :\
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> ChatGPT learned it from somewhere It might repeating misinterpretations or wholesale making shit up [1]. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10997760/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10997760/

r0ckarong 2y ago

Extraordinary nonsense is probably the codename for all of this.

TomHenderson3 2y ago

I would like to understand why they seemed to use internet domains as proxies for nations.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

throwaway81523 2y ago

Why is this post flagged? It is, at minimum, interesting.

bryanlarsen 2y ago
I think mods & flaggers probably want to keep discussion of this topic to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43561253# https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43561253#
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]

hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago

> US tech companies are about to be used as the biggest punching bag in history by the European Union. They’ll negotiate first, for sure, because that’s what the EU likes to do, but for sure the fines and reciprocal non-tariff barriers are going to only expand for US tech firms in the very near future if the Trump admin doesn’t want to negotiate. For sure this will happen but there is a reason. The EU turned a blind eye on a lot of dark patterns used by the biggest players (such as lenient approach to scams that are omnipresent on Facebook, Instagram, Google platforms) and whatever these companies did they knew they might get a slap on the wrist maximum. Now that good relations are over, why would the EU tolerate this shit?