Sometimes it is hard to solve for the equilibrium
Probably you all know about this:
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
According to not yet confirmed but likely true reports, it was shown that model could be jailbroken. The released Mythos already restricted bio and “AI improvement” queries, rather strictly in fact, so now we are back to the model not being available.
Here are a few of the constraints on the U.S. government, not the only ones I might add:
1. It needs for the main companies to stay in business. On top of that, it wants their IPOs to go reasonably well. And it is now much harder for the top companies to recruit foreigners, which is a significant share of their highest quality workforce (Demis, Ilya, Andrej for a start). It is also much harder for the main companies to drum up foreign business in a credible and sustainble manner.
1b. How are American multinationals operating abroad supposed to use top systems, moving forward?
2. It wants to use model access as a tool of both hard and soft power, so model access has to be possible at some level. But it is very hard to control what foreign agents will do with their partial model access, when they get it in the ffuture.
3. The U.S. needs to stay ahead of China in the AI race.
4. The U.S. needs to issue restrictions that are actually enforceable, and “U.S. citizens only” does not fit that bill. Furthermore (markets in everything!) it is easy enough to hire a traitorous American to access tools of wrongdoing, or for matter it is not difficult to fake citizenship in various ways.
5. USG cannot nationalize these companies and then proceed to run them effectively.
6. Chinese and other open source models do in fact improve at some reasonable pace, even if they are right now considerably behind the best proprietary models.
Is the most likely scenario that the government hardens some of its own systems and takes some further precautions, and then allows Mythos to be rereleased? Perhaps with some additional safeguards?
Is there such a thing as a model that cannot be jailbroken at all? I doubt that.
So basically we will be replaying this scenario periodically over time, but with each time the companies and also the government in a weaker and more precarious position.
I am willing to reject the philosophy of “safetyism” and bite various associated bullets. As it stands, these actions will not succeed in making us safer, including for the reasons mentioned above. Our regulatory institutions, attitudes, and approaches simply are not well suited to an era of radical innovation.
In any case these events do not surprise me (they do surprise me in their immediate suddenness however), as this kind of approach is what governments have been about for a long time now, USG included or perhaps USG especially.
Rising in status: Leopold, Aesop, and also Mistral. AI nationalism. Proponents of slow take-off as the likely scenario. Reticent, quiet CEOs. As for China, will they rush into this opportunity, or are they at least as scared as we are?
How did Stanislaw Lem imagine advanced computer intelligence?
…GOLEM’s behavior is unpredictable. Sometimes it converses courteously with people, whereas on other occasions any attempt at contact misfires. GOLEM sometimes cracks jokes, too, though its sense of humor is fundamentally different from man’s. Much depends on its interlocutors. In exceptional casese GOLEM will show a certain interest in people who are talented in a particular way; it is intrigued, so to speak, not by mathematical aptitude — not even the greatest — but rather by interdisciplinary forms of talent; on several occasions it has predicted with uncanny accuracy achievements by young, as yet unknown, scientists in a field which it has it self indicated. (After a brief exchange it informed T. Vroedel, age twenty-two and then only a doctoral candidate, “You will become a computer,” which was supposed to mean, more o less, “You will become somebody.”)
That is from Lem’s Imaginary Magnitude, an extraordinary book in parts, most of all see his Golem IV section on how n AGI (our term, not his) is likely to behave.
Why is America less of a 24/7 society?
It’s deeply odd to me that America is a far less 24/7 hour society today than it was 10, 20, or even 30 years ago. I vividly remember friends from the UK back in 1996 marveling at the fact that in the mid-sized Indiana town where I went college it was possible to buy groceries, clothing, a lawn mower, a snow blower, Lego sets, and bow hunting gear at 3 AM on any given Tuesday of the year. That was peak American Empire, and it’s long gone.
That is from Christopher Kratovil. What are some hypotheses here? I see a few:
1. America is older. True, but this is hardly the main explanation for anything.
2. Due to increasing leisure time, fewer people want to work weird and long hours? Tighter labor markets and the Great Moderation contributed to this.
3. It is stores that are in decline. 24/7 activity has moved into the warehouse, the fulfillment center, the server farm, the delivery network, and the home.
3b. When you can do Doordash at 10:30 p.m., you do not need to go out for snacks at 3 a.m.
4. Shoplifting has become more common? If the drug stores have to lock up their wares in NYC, why should stores try to be open at 3 a.m., when presumably shoplifting risk is higher and the quantity of monitoring labor is lower?
5. Online entertainment is much better, so why go out late at night?
6. More work from home means people are not returning from their jobs at late hours and then wanting to buy things.
I would put most of my money on #3 and #5 — what do you think?
Safety and nation-building in Mexico
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:
Consider the special nature of Mexican politics. First and foremost, Mexico is still not a mature nation-state. By one estimate, drug gangs may control as much as one-third of its territory. That might sound bizarre, but from the standpoint of Mexican history, it is not new or unusual.
Start with the 19th century. When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, what we now call Central America joined the new country only briefly and then split off, even though that land was under the same Spanish jurisdiction. Those cultures and economies were not sufficiently unified to come along.
After independence, the state of Yucatán rebelled repeatedly, almost claiming its independence. In the 1840s, the U.S. declared war on Mexico and took away about half of its territory. Texas already had seceded to become an independent republic. In 1857, Mexico fought a civil war. The French invaded in 1861, and by 1864 they helped install a Habsburg, Maximilian, as emperor. Yet Maximilian never came close to controlling the entire country, and was quickly deposed and executed. The 1910 Mexican Revolution killed about 10 percent of the population by some estimates.
The rest of the 20th century was more peaceful, but much of Mexico never fell under unitary rule as did the U.S. and Western Europe. The more remote areas were mostly on their own, and they regarded the government as a potential oppressor rather than a savior. So when the drug trade heated up in Mexico in the 1990s as Colombian traffickers were partially thwarted, drug gangs were able to operate in many parts of Mexico with impunity. Eventually, they became the de facto rulers of those territories, supplying public goods such as general protection in addition to running their illegal businesses. All for a high price, of course, as extortion is still the ruling principle in those parts of the country. If you buy avocados from Mexico, for instance, there is a good chance that part of your money is going to pay tribute to drug gangs.
Another significant fact about Mexico is the size and power of its central government. It spends just short of 23 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), relatively low for a country of its level of development. By contrast, Brazil, which has roughly comparable living standards, has a central government that spends over 32 percent of that country’s GDP. If the Brazilian government is too large, Mexico’s is too weak and too small, most of all because Mexico cannot beat back its drug gangs by brute force or preempt them in the first place.
Mexico as a topic will never become obsolete, not for the United States at least.
Friday assorted links
1. Is there too much free parking in NYC? (NYT)
2. New Malcolm Gladwell book forthcoming on violence in America. Ready for pre-order.
3. Manufacturing requirements are killing gene and cell therapy.
5. What went wrong with German trains? (FT)
6. Why do people wander in a counterclockwise direction? (NYT)
7. Seb Krier: “Over the past few months I’ve been working on a very exciting project: a new $10m fund for research on multi-agent multi-principal AGI safety! Instead of focusing on single agent alignment and centralized control, we’re looking to support research focusing on multi-agent settings, mechanism design, cooperative AI, and coordination problems.”
Here Comes the Sun(screen)
I have been banging on about FDA delay in approving new sunscreens since 2013. Well it has finally happened. Twenty six years after being approved by the European Union and thirteen years after then-FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg told lawmakers that sorting out the sunscreen issue was “one of the highest priorities” the FDA has approved a new sunscreeen ingredient.
The US has been slow because it regulates sunscreens under the the more expensive, time consuming and rigorous drug standard rather than the less expensive cosmetic standard. Does this mean that our sunscreens are safer? No.
In fact, American sunscreens may be less safe.
Sunscreens protect by blocking ultraviolet rays from penetrating the skin. Ultraviolet B (UVB) rays, with their shorter wavelength, primarily affect the outer skin layer and are the main cause of sunburn. In contrast, ultraviolet A (UVA) rays have a longer wavelength, penetrate more deeply into the skin and contribute to wrinkling, aging and the development of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. In many ways, UVA rays are more dangerous than UVB rays because they are more insidious. UVB rays hit when the sun is bright, and because they burn they come with a natural warning. UVA rays, though, can pass through clouds and cause skin cancer without generating obvious skin damage.
The problem is that American sunscreens work better against UVB rays than against the more dangerous UVA rays. That is, they’re better at preventing sunburn than skin cancer. In fact, many U.S. sunscreens would fail European standards for UVA protection. Precisely because European sunscreens can draw on more ingredients, they can protect better against UVA rays. Thus, instead of being safer, U.S. sunscreens may be riskier.
European sunscreens are also more pleasant to apply, and because they work better with makeup they are probably used more often as part of a skin care regimen, which may reduce the prevalence of skin cancer. Once again, the United States’ slower and seemingly more risk-averse approach actually increases risk.
The lesson, for those who are listening, is general.
Again, the research paper format will be dying out
‘Recently, I came across a paper co-authored by 37 authors from Stanford, CMU, Michigan, and elsewhere: *The Last Human-Written Paper*.
The core argument is pretty brutal: the paper format we’ve been using for centuries might already be obsolete in the AI era.
The authors point out two “invisible taxes” that we’ve long overlooked:
One is the narrative tax. To tell a compelling story, we delete failed experiments, dead ends, and overturned hypotheses. What AI reads is a “walkthrough guide” to beating the game, but it misses the truly valuable “pitfall logs.”
The other is the engineering tax. The implementation details in papers are usually enough to convince reviewers, but not enough for an Agent to directly reproduce. Many key tricks are still buried in the authors’ heads, code comments, and Slack threads.
So the authors propose ARA, transforming papers directly into “research packages” that Agents can read and execute: not just telling you the conclusions, but packaging in how they were reached, how the code runs, where the evidence chain is, and which paths led nowhere.
I think the most intriguing part of this paper is that it’s not discussing how AI can help humans write papers—it’s asking:
When AI also becomes a reader and executor of papers, should papers still look like they do today?
In the future, the core of research output might no longer be “how much it resembles a paper,” but whether it can be understood, reproduced, traced, and iteratively extended by AI.
Humans have been writing papers for centuries—next, we might start writing research packages for Agents to execute.
Here is my earlier post on whether the research paper will die out. By the way, as a side point has anyone mentioned that, due to writing detection abilities of AI models, anonymous referee reports are now a thing of the past?
Orwell on Dickens and progress
What is more striking, in a seemingly ‘progressive’ radical, is that he is not mechanically minded. He shows no interest either in the details of machinery or in the things machinery can do. As Gissing remarks, Dickens nowhere describes a railway journey with anything like the enthusiasm he shows in describing journeys by stage-coach. In nearly all of his books one has a curious feeling that one is living in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and in fact, he does tend to return to this period. Little Dorrit, written in the middle fifties, deals with the late twenties; Great Expectations (1861) is not dated, but evidently deals with the twenties and thirties. Several of the inventions and discoveries which have made the modern world possible (the electric telegraph, the breech-loading gun, India-rubber, coal gas, wood-pulp paper) first appeared in Dickens’s lifetime, but he scarcely notes them in his books. Nothing is queerer than the vagueness with which he speaks of Doyce’s ‘invention’ in Little Dorrit. It is represented as something extremely ingenious and revolutionary, ‘of great importance to his country and his fellow-creatures’, and it is also an important minor link in the book; yet we are never told what the ‘invention’ is! On the other hand, Doyce’s physical appearance is hit off with the typical Dickens touch; he has a peculiar way of moving his thumb, a way characteristic of engineers. After that, Doyce is firmly anchored in one’s memory; but, as usual, Dickens has done it by fastening on something external.
There are people (Tennyson is an example) who lack the mechanical faculty but can see the social possibilities of machinery. Dickens has not this stamp of mind. He shows very little consciousness of the future. When he speaks of human progress it is usually in terms of moral progress men growing better; probably he would never admit that men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be. At this point the gap between Dickens and his modern analogue, H.G. Wells, is at its widest. Wells wears the future round his neck like a mill-stone, but Dickens’s unscientific cast of mind is just as damaging in a different way. What it does is to make any positive attitude more difficult for him. He is hostile to the feudal, agricultural past and not in real touch with the industrial present. Well, then, all that remains is the future (meaning Science, ‘progress’, and so forth), which hardly enters into his thoughts. Therefore, while attacking everything in sight, he has no definable standard of comparison. As I have pointed out already, he attacks the current educational system with perfect justice, and yet, after all, he has no remedy to offer except kindlier schoolmasters. Why did he not indicate what a school might have been? Why did he not have his own sons educated according to some plan of his own, instead of sending them to public schools to be stuffed with Greek? Because he lacked that kind of imagination. He has an infallible moral sense, but very little intellectual curiosity. And here one comes upon something which really is an enormous deficiency in Dickens, something, that really does make the nineteenth century seem remote from us — that he has no idea of work.
Here is the full essay, excellent throughout.
A simple reason for skepticism about the iPhones/fertility link
Here is the background to the debate. Here is more from Noah. Here is a thread from researcher Caitlin Myers. And here is some basic information:
In 2008, 1.9% is the share of the mobile-subscribing population with an iPhone wireless subscription. As a percent of all adults that is 1.6%.
In 2009, it is 4.3%. 3.6% of all adults.
In 2010, 6.8%. 5.5% of all adults.
Plus conception to birth takes nine months (give or take!), noting that actual family planning may make this lag far longer. In 2008 fertility rates already were falling pretty sharply. The whole “maybe the iPhone messes up your dating processes” factor also requires some time to operate, especially since iPhones as a network of many many users, and whatever negative effects on socializing you think that might have, was still to lie in the future. And what you could access on the iPhone then was far more limited than today.
So when the authors talk about diffusion explaining 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among American women 15–44, I still do not get how that is supposed to operate.
The explanations I am hearing seem to be parasitic on world intuitions from 2026, not the time period under consideration.
Thursday assorted links
1. Fable 5 describes humanity. And Anthropic policy proposals, including for economics.
2. “Can you build a working chess board which then illustrates and can play the moves of the famous “Evergreen game”?” The response. Much better yet is Fable 5 explaining Riemann.
3. Marcus Nunes on Chile vs. Argentina.
4. In the video world, AI is reasonably popular rather than hated.
5. Solve for the equilibrium! It is not always easy to do.
6. How avocados stopped being seasonal.
7. New Stanford program for AI economic indicators.
8. Music and video for the Pope. Or is it for Gaudi?
The Nationalization of American Science
OMB, joined by some forty grantmaking agencies—NSF, HHS, DOE, NASA, DOD among them—has proposed a sweeping rewrite of the rules governing all federal grants, the Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance.
American science has long been state funded but not state directed. Since Vannevar Bush, money has flowed through many agencies to independent universities, allocated largely by peer review. The system has flaws—conformity, gerontocracy, waste—but it had one great virtue, the system was decentralized and not under state control. This rule proposes to bring science funding under top-down, state control.
Program goals must now be “aligned with administration policies and priorities” (§ 200.202). Merit review is subordinated to politics: “senior appointees must conduct these reviews,” ensuring “that discretionary awards advance the President’s policy priorities,” while “peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion” (§ 200.205). And every grant becomes terminable at will, whenever it “no longer effectuates program goals, Federal agency priorities, or the national interest *as they exist at the time of the termination*” (§ 200.340, emphasis added). Universities must even ensure their subrecipients don’t “significantly damage the reputation of… the Federal Government” (§ 200.332)—a loyalty clause for scientists.
All this is sold as cutting “burdensome conditions,” a goal I would support, but sadly that is bullshit. The proposed rules add more paperwork and many more layers of bureaucratic review. Payment requests must include written justifications. Every disbursement gets screened through Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” system. Every recipient must run E-Verify. Applicants must disclose any employee who worked at the awarding agency within two years. And on top of the existing review machinery sits a new pre-issuance review committee of “senior appointees” second-guessing the experts. Fixed amount awards—pay for outputs, not inputs—an innovative reward mechanism are *eliminated*, so every award now gets routine cost monitoring and financial reporting.
Political review of every award, peer review demoted, agency review promoted, termination whenever “priorities” change. Chilling. It’s a nightmare of petty low-trust review of the kind that is already drowning science. I must deal with this kind of nonsense all the time. More is not better.
The machinery is centralized too. OMB’s guidance becomes binding regulation, effective government-wide with no agency rulemaking. One dial in the White House now turns every grant program in the country.
The new rules will be sold as getting rid of DEI but that is an excuse to bring in the commissars. The new rules don’t depoliticize science they create even more politicization with the sign flipped, and the drafters admit it:
In the previous administration, executive agencies frequently chose to subsidize and expressly prioritize projects based on their ideological alignment with the categories of activities discussed in the proposed version of § 200.300. See, for example, E.O. 13985, sec. 1, 86 FR 7009, 7009 (Jan. 25, 2021) (“It is therefore the policy of [the Biden] Administration that the Federal Government should pursue a comprehensive approach to advancing equity . . . .”). In this administration, executive agencies will continue to use their discretionary authorities in a manner consistent with current Executive Branch policy. If executive agencies were entitled to subsidize those types of activities during the previous administration, there is no constitutional basis to prevent the government from reaching a different policy determination regarding which activities to fund during this administration.
Read that twice. Tip your hat to the new constitution, take a bow for the new revolution. Will science prosper when it is whipped by political turnover? Research runs on decade timescales; administrations run on four-year ones.
A decentralized funding system is inefficient the way markets and federalism are inefficient—we give up some economies of scale and get experimentation, error correction, and robustness in return. A system in which every award advances “the President’s policy priorities” is efficient the way ministries of science are efficient. We know how that experiment ends.
America is moving in the wrong direction. We should double down on what made America great. Instead we are adopting all of the loser policies of authoritarian nations.
My excellent Conversation with Katja Hoyer
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while it bred dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life in the GDR actually was, Tyler’s own bleak day-trip to East Berlin in 1984, the underrated literature of the GDR (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann), whether Good Bye, Lenin! got the era right, why it’s no coincidence that Richter and Polke came from the East, the strange coexistence of communist prudishness and Germany’s nudist culture, what Merkel’s East German background did and didn’t give her as a chancellor, why East Germans remain dramatically underrepresented in leadership positions today, what makes Weimar the cultural and spiritual heart of Germany, why relatively few Jews ever settled there, how much the citizens of Weimar knew about Buchenwald, what actually killed the Weimar Constitution, how she’d rewrite the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler’s citizenship problem, underrated German thinkers, the complacency behind Germany’s current economic decline, which side of the Weißwurstäquator she’d choose to live on, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Why did the Weimar Constitution fail?
HOYER: How much time have I got?
COWEN: Americans typically think it’s that the proportional representation system allowed too many small parties to enter into government. That’s one factor, but what else is there?
HOYER: There are plenty of factors, I think. Some of these are inbuilt flaws, like the proportional representation that you just mentioned. Another one that’s often referred to as Article 48, which was a kind of emergency article that was in the constitution that allowed the president to bypass parliament and the other democratic structures in time of emergency.
If you just follow down this route, then the fall of the Weimar Republic becomes inevitable. If you’re just assuming that there were all these flaws in the constitution already, so therefore it was bound to fail, I don’t think that is the case because when you study this closely, you do see all these kinds of forks in the road as to where things could have gone differently. I don’t think the system was set up to fail. I think these things contributed to the brittle nature of this. I think there was perhaps a degree of naivety there in 1919 to think that you could have this ultra-democratic system without any guardrails.
When you think how long it took the American Founding Fathers to sit there and really work out every angle, and “What if we got a mad president, what do we put in there to try and protect against that?” Those sorts of things. That process is so rushed in 1919 that they just put an ultra-liberal democracy in place, which allows extremists to hijack it. That is part of the reason. I think the other group of reasons is the circumstances under which the system is born. It’s basically born into crisis. It comes on the back of the First World War and then runs into economic trouble very quickly. That never really goes away despite the so-called gilded years in the middle. All of that’s propped up by American money, even the stability years of the middle 1920s. The moment that falls because of the Wall Street crash, you basically get the very economic foundation taken away again.
The subtitle I chose for the book, Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, I’m trying to hint at the fact that that’s how a lot of people felt. They were literally balancing constantly for this entire time, really, after 1919, on the edge of their own personal catastrophes. It was always unemployment, hyperinflation, trying to get enough food. People were dying of diseases. There’s the Spanish flu. There’s tuberculosis. It’s always something or other. People don’t feel that the system is giving them stability. I don’t think there ever really is a feeling that this can really work long term.
People do, at the slightest whim, think, “Oh, maybe we just need to go back to a system where someone makes the decisions.” The Weimar Republic actually dies in 1930, three years before Hitler comes into power, as a democracy. He takes over a system, I think, that’s already given up on being a democracy, even at that point. As I say, I could talk about this for two days and still be lining up factors. It is complex.
COWEN: The army is interfering in politics quite early and pretty frequently.
HOYER: Yes. They still think that because of the nature of the Prussian system previously, it’s often been said that “Prussia wasn’t a state with an army, but it was an army with a state.” That intrinsic self-confidence, if you want to call it that, of the army, that they are really calling the shots, that doesn’t really go away.
People also often forget that in the First World War, you have the so-called silent dictatorship, which is basically the army running absolutely everything under Hindenburg’s system, from the economy and culture to newspaper output and everything else. Again, that they don’t just suddenly turn that off in 1919. They do try and make their influence heard ongoingly.
Then the young Weimar Republic has to make a pact with the military because they defend them effectively against communists and also right-wing Putschers. They depend on the military in that way as well for security. They do try and build up a new military, but they never go Stalin-style and purge everybody who was there previously. They keep the existing elites largely in place, so they inherit an army that isn’t loyal to them, that’s still loyal to the old system.
I very much enjoyed Katja’s recent book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe.
What do the AIs think of us?
Asked to answer as a typical human, every cutting-edge model rated us markedly more neurotic, less open, less agreeable and less conscientious than they rated themselves. The gap on Neuroticism alone is 1.69 points on a 5-point scale.
Here is more material of interest. And this:
Across 31 models from those seven labs they answer the personality tests in unison: high openness, low Dark Triad, Universalism on top, Power dead last in every single model.
Are the AIs conscious?
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column. I will spare you the discussion of the AIs, but here is what I have to say about the humans:
I am here to tell you that there is no ghost in the machine. But perhaps more importantly, there is barely a “ghost” in your own human machine. “Are people conscious?” is a better and more scientifically plausible question than whether AIs are conscious.
If there is one near-universal tendency of humans, it is to attribute intent where none is present. Prehistoric humans anthropomorphized nature and attributed natural events to good and bad deities. These kinds of beliefs persist today, not only in the folk religions of the world, but in human obsessions with fortune tellers, tarot cards, and the supernatural…
If there is one systematic flaw that humans have, it is an excessive willingness to ascribe conscious intent and to anthropomorphize purely natural and material entities. It seems we are strongly disposed toward this bias.
Yet few of us are willing to examine what is perhaps the biggest and most significant way we make this mistake. When it comes to understanding ourselves, so many of us assume that “we are in charge.” We identify our phenomenological stream of consciousness with our actual selves, and treat that consciousness stream as the true decision maker.
The reality is that you—whatever we take that concept to mean—make most or maybe all of your actual decisions in parts of your brain that precede what you take to be the conscious choice. Among experts in neuroscience, this is not a controversial proposition. As brain surgeon Theodore Schwartz explained to me: “I do not think we have free will in the way that most people do. I think that our brains make decisions for us. We carry out those behaviors, and then we write a story that makes it into a logical timeline that makes us feel as if we were the ones, that there was a self that made that decision, whereas, in fact, that self didn’t really exist.”
…Sometimes I like to say that “I am only conscious at the margin.” Tongue in cheek, I will suggest that I am only conscious enough to avoid the self-contradiction of asserting that I am not conscious at all. I feel I am honest enough to just not be very impressed by my own flow of conscious awareness or its ability to perform complex calculations. Still, I recognize that it is all I have got, so I need to treasure it, however paltry it may be.
And by the way I do not think the AIs are conscious, no more than I believe in the Thunder God of Thor.
Wednesday assorted links
1. New edition of Copernicus on money.
2. Denazification of the United States? Denazification actually consisted of: “…dissolution of Nazi organizations, licensing/control of new political organizations, individual classification by denazification tribunals, and temporary or permanent disabilities on voting, standing for office, party membership, officeholding, public speech professions, and public/private employment.”
3. Faster replies increase your chance of being hired.
4. OpenAI Economic Research Exchange.
5. Some new growth estimates from the AI boom.
6- Behavioral economics guide 2026.
7. Damian Clarke has a new microeconometrics textbook out from MIT Press.
8. “So I gave Fable 5 the watchmaker benchmark…” And Taelin.