Séb Krier
Huge fan of multi agent systems, agent based modelling, and social intelligence – these frames still seem really absent from mainstream AI discourse except in a few odd places. Some half-baked thoughts:
1. Expecting a model to do all the work, solve everything, come up with new innovations etc is probably not right. This was kinda the implicit assumption behind *some* interpretations of capabilities progress. The ‘single genius model’ overlooks the fact that inference costs and context windows are finite.
2. People overrate individual intelligence: most innovations are the product of social organisations (cooperation) and market dynamics (competition), not a single genius savant. Though the latter matters too of course: the smarter the agents the better.
3. There’s still a lot of juice to be squeezed from models, but I would think it has more to do with how they’re organised. AI Village is a nice vignette, and also highlights the many ways in which models fail and what needs to be fixed.
4. Once you enter multi-agent world, then institutions and culture start to matter too: what are the rules of the game? What is encouraged vs what is punished? What can agents do and say to each other? How are conflicts resolved? It’s been interesting seeing how some protocols recently emerged. We’re still very early!
5. Most of the *value* and transformative changes we will get from AI will come from products, not models. The models are the cognitive raw power, the products are what makes them useful and adapted to what some user class actually needs. A product is basically the bridge between raw potential and specific utility; in fact many IDEs today are essentially crystallized multi agent systems.
Here is the link.
*Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect*
By H.S. Jones, an excellent book. For all the resurgence of interest in government and its problems, Bryce has received remarkably little attention. But his theory of low-quality, careerist politcians, combined with imperfectly informed voters, seems highly relevant to our current day. Public opinion is slow, and largely reactive, but potent once mobilized. Leadership can truly matter, and he stresses national character and civic education. In other words, Bryce’s The American Commonwealth is a book still worth reading.
I had not known that Bryce was born in Belfast, or that he was so opposed to women’s suffrage. Or that he was so interested in Armenia, climbed Mount Ararat, and was fascinated by the inevitability of interracial marriage and its consequences (no, not in the usual racist way). He was an expert on Roman law.
Recommended, and also very well written.
Monday assorted links
Make Africa Healthy Again
In the late 1990s, South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki decided that mainstream science had AIDS wrong. A small circle of “truth-tellers” convinced him that AIDS came from poverty and malnutrition, not a virus. He warned that anti-retroviral therapy (ART) was toxic and that pharmaceutical companies were poisoning Africans for profit.
His government stalled the rollout of ART. Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang pushed garlic, beetroot, and lemon as medicine. “Nutrition is the basis for good health,” she said, insisting that exercise and diet, not Western drugs, were the real treatment. She warned that antiretrovirals had side effects, including cancer, that the establishment was hiding. When scientists showed data, she waved it off: “No churning of figures after figures will deter me from telling the truth to the people of the country.”
The result was a public health disaster: hundreds of thousand of preventable deaths (see also here and here).
A reminder of what happens when authority trades evidence for ideology.
Meta-analytical effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health
Some of us have known this for some time:
Exposure to economic inequality is widely thought to erode subjective well-being and mental health, which carries important societal implications. However, existing studies face reproducibility issues, and theory suggests that inequality only affects individuals in disadvantaged contexts. Here we present a meta-analysis of 168 studies using multilevel data (11,389,871 participants from 38,335 geographical units) identified across 10 bibliographical databases (2000–2022). Contrary to popular narratives, random-effects models showed that individuals in more unequal areas do not report lower subjective well-being (standardized odds ratio (OR+0.05) = 0.979, 95% confidence interval = 0.951–1.008). Moreover, although inequality initially seemed to undermine mental health, the publication-bias-corrected association was null (OR+0.05 = 1.019; 0.990–1.049)17. Meta-analytical effects were smaller than the smallest effect of interest, and specification curve analyses confirmed these results across ≈95% of 768 alternative models. When assessing study quality and certainty of evidence using ROBINS-E and GRADE criteria, ROBINS-E rated 80% of studies at high risk of bias, and GRADE assigned greater certainty to the null effects than to the negative effects. Meta-regressions revealed that the adverse association between inequality and mental health was confined to low-income samples. Moreover, machine-learning analyses19 indicated that the association with well-being was negative in high-inflation contexts but positive in low-inflation contexts. These moderation effects were replicated using Gallup World Poll data (up to 2 million participants). These findings challenge the view that economic inequality universally harms psychological health and can inform public health policy.
That is now published in Nature, by Nicholas Sommet, et.al., via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Popular music of 2025
Usually I wait until the year passes before dipping too deeply into these offerings, but this year I have been impressed by:
Bad Bunny, ‘DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’.
Geese, Getting Killed.
Rosalia, Lux.
Oklou, Choke Enough.
Saya Gray, Saya.
Fontaines D.C., Romance, late 2024.
Jeff Tweedy, Twilight Override.
Raye, assorted songs.
There will be more, that is my first cut at a list of interest.
Sunday assorted links
1. False claims about China and Japan, but still worth pondering.
2. False claims about birth rates and utility.
3. Can management consultants be literary heroes? (FT)
4. JFV on equilibrium in economics.
5. When does low fertility shatter the social contract?
6. Naturally occurring furin cleavage sites.
7. If somehow you do not know the works of Tom Stoppard you should, RIP, here is the NYT obituary.
What should I ask Harvey Mansfield?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. So what should I ask?
Note he has a new book coming out early next year, namely
Europe’s first elephant sanctuary
Portugal’s Alentejo region is set to become home to a groundbreaking project – Europe’s first sanctuary for elephants that have lived in captivity.
Set across 402 hectares between Vila Viçosa and Alandroal, the vast refuge will welcome its first residents – elephants from zoos and circuses across Europe – in early 2026. The initiative is led by the non-profit organisation Pangea, registered in Portugal and the UK, with support from local councils and national environmental authorities such as Directorate-General for Food and Veterinary (DGAV) and the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF).
The land was purchased in 2023 by the non-profit, which has been busy preparing it for the elephants…
In a statement, Pangea explained that the project consists of creating a natural space for “elephants in a vulnerable situation”, so that the animals can “move freely, feed and socialise, just as they would in their wild habitat”.
Here is the full story. About thirty elephants are slated to end up there. Henry Mance at the FT notes:
The elephants will have 850 acres to roam — more than 200 times the size of Tierpark Berlin zoo’s elephant enclosure or 28 times that of the UK’s Whipsnade Zoo.
And:
The median lifespan for African elephants in a Kenyan national park was three times that of those in European zoos.
Will this prove financially sustainable? Replicable? Finding an area with enough water was one of the major constraints.
*FDR: A New Political Life*
From historian David T. Beito, here is one excerpt:
FDR gave unquestioning support to President Wilson’s crackdown on free speech during World War I, including his enforcement of the Sedition and Espionage Acts. According to Kenneth S. Davis, Roosevelt “went along with prevailing trends in the realm of the national spirit, uninhibited by any strong ideological commitment to the Bill of Rights.” After reading about the conviction of the publisher of an antiwar socialist pamphlet, for example, he sent a congratulatory letter to the federal prosecutor…
There is much more here than just the standard market-oriented “Roosevelt had bad economic policies” line, and the more left-leaning critique of Roosevelt on segregation and the southern coalition. For instance, Roosevelt supported policies that required the telegram companies to keep copies of all telegrams sent, and he used the FCC licensing process to help keep radio in his corner politically.
There is more. It can be said that this book offers a very negative view of FDR.
Emergent Ventures Africa and the Caribbean, 7th cohort
Leila Character, Assistant Prof. at Texas A&M, for a project using hyperspectral-imaging drones for archaeological research in Belize.
Nour Bou Malhab, Lebanon, for promoting classical liberal thought throughout Lebanon and across the Maghreb.
Isaac Akintaro, Nigeria/England, computer science PhD Candidate, for travel to San Francisco
Nikita Greenidge, St. Lucia/England, PhD in Surgical Robotics, for a startup using AI to improve surgical techniques in the Caribbean.
Michael Konu, Ghana/USA, for bioengineering research on virtual cells and for career development.
Waldo Krugell, South Africa, Prof. at North West University, for a project improving economics education for South African high-school students.
Edmund Trueman, to develop a digital archive to showcase Congolese comics.
Justin Sooknanan, Trinidad & Tobago, undergrad electrical engineering, travel grant to UK and for career development.
Temitope Johnson, Nigeria/South Africa, for designing a phototherapy device for neonatal jaundice treatment.Mmesomachi Nwachukwu, Nigeria, for running a national training program preparing students for the International Mathematical Olympiad.
Jibrin Jaafaru, Nigeria, PhD candidate, for travel to the United States to pursue a bioinformatics fellowship
Ollie Sayeed, PhD UPenn, historical linguist, for research evaluating the effectiveness of malaria interventions in Africa
Shreya Hegde, for drone-mapping and route-optimization work in Kenya.
Jan Grzymski, Assistant Professor at Lazarski University, to run a summer program introducing Caribbean scholars to Poland’s transition from communist rule to a market-driven economy.
Arun Shanmuganathan, Rwanda, to support mathematics training at the African Olympiad Academy.
Samiya Allen, Barbados, undergrad electronics, travel grant to UK for robotics training and career development.
Rose Mutiso, Kenya, PhD UPenn in materials science, to create the African Tech Futures Lab, to improve policymaking on energy technologies.
Darren Ramsook, Trinidad & Tobago, Postdoc at Trinity College Dublin, for research on AI-driven video compression.
Cheyenne Polius, St. Lucia, for work on astro-tourism and space education in the Caribbean.
I thank Rasheed Griffith for his excellent work on this, and again Nabeel has created excellent software to help organize the list of winners, using AI.
Those unfamiliar with Emergent Ventures can learn more here and here. The EV African and the Caribbean announcement is here and you can see previous cohorts here. If you are interested in supporting this tranche of Emergent Ventures, please write to me or to Rasheed.
Does drug interdiction work?
From GPT 5.1 Pro:
“In the economic literature, the dominant story is:
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Prohibition and enforcement do make illegal drugs much more expensive than they would be in a legal market.
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But marginal increases in interdiction (seizing shipments, crop eradication, etc.), especially in the Andes, have not produced sustained higher prices or lower quantities in consumer markets.
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Instead, retail, purity‑adjusted prices for cocaine and heroin show large long‑run declines (1980s–2000s) and then roughly flat or drifting patterns at historically low levels, while global production and consumption reach record highs. Reuters+4whitehouse.gov+4whitehouse.gov+4
So between your two stylized options—“successfully limit quantity and raise prices” vs. “long‑run steady decline in prices”—the long‑run price data look a lot more like the second story, with only temporary interruptions from big interdiction pushes.”
There is much more at the link. Blowing up a few boats is not going to change that logic.
Saturday assorted links
Education Signaling and Employer Learning Heterogeneity
An interesting paper based on an idea:
We investigate the implications of heterogeneous employer learning on education signaling and workers sorting across industries. In the equilibrium of our model, higher-ability workers join industries with faster employer learning speeds, resulting in a matching distortion of workers and industries. In addition, our results are robust to varying degrees of asymmetric employer learning, and establish that industry choice itself serves as a signal of worker ability. Finally, our theoretical approach suggests a novel perspective on a heretofore neglected labor market puzzle, i.e., why few of the richest individuals have obtained higher degrees of education.
That is from Yuhan Chen, Thomas Jungbauer, and Michael Waldman. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Best movies of 2025
This was one of the weakest years in my lifetime for movies, and with few that would count as truly great. Here are the ones I liked:
Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat
Flow
I’m Still Here
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Gazer
The Shrouds
Warfare
Oh, Hi
Weapons
Sorry, Baby
Red Rooms (actually 2023 but it deserves a mention anyway)
Hamnet
The Materialists
The Thinking Game
What else? I am still waiting for various foreign films to be available online, that will make this list stronger.