alt Hacker NewsIt's even worse, they literally got their formula from a llm model (probably Grok?) => https://bsky.app/profile/dansinker.com/post/3llunnyfeoj2v
"To calculate reciprocal tariffs, import and export data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2024. Parameter values for ε and φ were selected. The price elasticity of import demand, ε, was set at 4.
Recent evidence suggests the elasticity is near 2 in the long run (Boehm et al., 2023), but estimates of the elasticity vary. To be conservative, studies that find higher elasticities near 3-4 were drawn on. The elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs, φ, is 0.25."[0]
[0] https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations
Replies
LLMs are basically just good at sourcing ideas from the internet. Me thinks this just means that this tariff idea exists on the internet, especially since grok, chatgpt, etc all come up with the same idea. We used to not have income taxes and funded the govt with tariffs so this probably isn't a new concept despite media outlets pretending like it is.
It is really silly to say that because an LLM gave a similar approach a single time and someone took a screencap of it without full context, that Elon and Trump are sitting in the whitehouse asking Grok what to. This level of hyperbole is why reading about anything to do with the two of them is really exhausting.
Wow. So they came up with zero-effort estimates of the tariff rate which would balance the trade deficit. The method is like something you'd be asked to criticise in A level economics.
Then they incorrectly labelled these numbers as reciprocal tarrifs implying this is what other countries charge the US.
The worst of it is that all of this misinformation will be happily accepted as truth by so many people. It's now going to be almost impossible to have people realise the truth, especially those people who support Trump. Ugh.
Do I understand this right: The evidence that they took it from a LLM is that all LLMs give the same answer and this answer describes what they did?
By that logic, it looks like Pythagoras got his theorem from an LLM...