Category: Philosophy
Matt Yglesias on debating
This is maybe an idiosyncratic view of mine, but I think that “debating” people — particularly in live or quasi-live forms — is a bad epistemic practice.
It essentially rewards people for being dogmatic, incurious, and willfully slippery with rhetoric. I think the best thing to do with live discussion is to have a friendly conversation, and the best way to do debates is a written exchange of ideas.
I thought the exchange I did in Democracy with Elizabeth Pancotti and Todd Tucker about tariffs was interesting and clarified the issues. My summation of it would be that I think Pancotti and Tucker raise a lot of good points about specific reasons why one might not want unfettered free trade, but that I think the Econ 101 case for free trade is accurate. This means that while you might sometimes want to deviate from free trade, any time you do so you are incurring an economic cost in order to pursue some other objective. My opponents, I think, wrongly deny this. They like to talk about the specifics of this case or that case, but the actual issue is that they either deny that tariffs are costly or else are working from an implicit degrowth framework in which the fact that the tariffs are costly isn’t relevant. But I came away from our exchange feeling like I understood them better, and I hope readers learned something.
That is from his Substack. I mostly agree. In practice, one big reason to debate is so you can put four people on the floor and attract an audience and some public attention, yet without slighting any one of the “stars” by making it a panel. As a method of truth-seeking, I do not think public debate does very well.
Are LLMs overconfident? (just like humans)
Can LLMs accurately adjust their confidence when facing opposition? Building on previous studies measuring calibration on static fact-based question-answering tasks, we evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in a dynamic, adversarial debate setting, uniquely combining two realistic factors: (a) a multi-turn format requiring models to update beliefs as new information emerges, and (b) a zero-sum structure to control for task-related uncertainty, since mutual high-confidence claims imply systematic overconfidence. We organized 60 three-round policy debates among ten state-of-the-art LLMs, with models privately rating their confidence (0-100) in winning after each round. We observed five concerning patterns: (1) Systematic overconfidence: models began debates with average initial confidence of 72.9% vs. a rational 50% baseline. (2) Confidence escalation: rather than reducing confidence as debates progressed, debaters increased their win probabilities, averaging 83% by the final round. (3) Mutual overestimation: in 61.7% of debates, both sides simultaneously claimed >=75% probability of victory, a logical impossibility. (4) Persistent self-debate bias: models debating identical copies increased confidence from 64.1% to 75.2%; even when explicitly informed their chance of winning was exactly 50%, confidence still rose (from 50.0% to 57.1%). (5) Misaligned private reasoning: models’ private scratchpad thoughts sometimes differed from their public confidence ratings, raising concerns about faithfulness of chain-of-thought reasoning. These results suggest LLMs lack the ability to accurately self-assess or update their beliefs in dynamic, multi-turn tasks; a major concern as LLMs are now increasingly deployed without careful review in assistant and agentic roles.
That is by Pradyumna Shyama Prasad and Minh Nhat Nguyen. Here is the associated X thread. Here is my earlier paper with Robin Hanson.
The convent where the Salamancans wrote their great works
Convent San Esteban. It is still there, you can just walk right in, though not between 2 and 4, when the guards have off. Arguably the Salamancans were the first mature economists, and the first decent monetary theorists, as well as being critically important for the foundations of international law, natural rights, and anti-slavery arguments. It is also difficult to find issues where they were truly bad.
You can just walk right in, and you should.
Not hard to geoguess this location…
Of course it is not in the state of Virginia…
On German romanticism (from my email)
Tyler,
I’ve been thinking about what might be the most underrated aspect of your intellectual formation, and I believe it stems from Germany. You’ve mentioned studying Goethe closely, and “manysidedness” is a quality you prize highly in “GOAT” (which I’m currently reading during my lunch breaks).
Another aspect would be your sometimes extreme artistic taste, such as your penchant for brutalism or Boulez. This, too, is romantic and German.
Your recent emphasis on being a “regional thinker” strikes me as quite Herderian.
These elements from German romanticism are not, to be clear, predominant in your thought, but without them you would surely be a different thinker.
I myself am somewhat biased against German romanticism, as I see it as a strain of thought that culminated in the Pangerman folly. The second – perhaps even more important – reason is that it disturbed the development of Polish intellectual life. These intellectual currents also distorted French philosophy, which in turn transformed minds across the Atlantic (for the worse).
I’m curious about your current relationship with German romanticism and how you see it in retrospect. Perhaps you could expand on it in one of your ‘autobiographical’ series.
Best,
KrzysztofP.S. I highly recommend Albert Béguin’s book on German romanticism. It hasn’t been translated into English, but you can find a Spanish translation titled “El Alma romántica y el sueño”. The minor Romantic philosophers built peculiar and astonishing systems. Part of me admires their subtle efforts; part of me pities how fruitless they were.
On the mark, that is from Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski. For the time being, I will note simply that the importance I attach to elevating aesthetics is one of the most important marks from this heritage.
Progress, Classical Liberalism, and the New Right
That is my podcast with Marian Tupy of the Cato Instiute. Here is the podcast version, below is the YouTube link:
Why LLMs make certain mistakes
Via Nabeel Qureshi, from Claude 4 Sonnet, from this tweet.
USA employment facts of the day
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the college majors with the lowest unemployment rates for the calendar year 2023 were nutrition sciences, construction services, and animal/plant sciences. Each of these majors had unemployment rates of 1% or lower among college graduates ages 22 to 27. Art history had an unemployment rate of 3% and philosophy of 3.2%…
Meanwhile, college majors in computer science, chemistry, and physics had much higher unemployment rates of 6% or higher post-graduation. Computer science and computer engineering students had unemployment rates of 6.1% and 7.5%, respectively…
Here is the full story. Why is this? Are the art history majors so employable? Or are their options so limited they don’t engage in much search and just take a job right away?
Via Rich Dewey.
My excellent Conversation with Theodore Schwartz
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Ted discuss how the training for a neurosurgeon could be shortened, the institutional factors preventing AI from helping more in neurosurgery, how to pick a good neurosurgeon, the physical and mental demands of the job, why so few women are currently in the field, whether the brain presents the ultimate bottleneck to radical life extension, why he thinks free will is an illusion, the success of deep brain stimulation as a treatment for neurological conditions, the promise of brain-computer interfaces, what studying epilepsy taught him about human behavior, the biggest bottleneck limiting progress in brain surgery, why he thinks Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, the Ted Schwartz production function, the new company he’s starting, and much more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: I know what economists are like, so I’d be very worried, no matter what my algorithm was for selecting someone. Say the people who’ve only been doing operations for three years — should there be a governmental warning label on them the way we put one on cigarettes: “dangerous for your health”? If so, how is it they ever learn?
SCHWARTZ: You raise a great point. I’ve thought about this. I talk about this quite a bit. The general public — when they come to see me, for example, I’m at a training hospital, and I practiced most of my career where I was training residents. They’ll come in to see me, and they’ll say, “I want to make sure that you’re doing my operation. I want to make sure that you’re not letting a resident do the operation.” We’ll have that conversation, and I’ll tell them that I’m doing their operation, but that I oversee residents, and I have assistants in the operating room.
But at the same time that they don’t want the resident touching them, in training, we are obliged to produce neurosurgeons who graduate from the residency capable of doing neurosurgery. They want neurosurgeons to graduate fully competent because on day one, you’re out there taking care of people, but yet they don’t want those trainees touching them when they’re training. That’s obviously an impossible task, to not allow a trainee to do anything, and yet the day they graduate, they’re fully competent to practice on their own.
That’s one of the difficulties involved in training someone to do neurosurgery, where we really don’t have good practice facilities where we can have them practice on cadavers — they’re really not the same. Or have models that they can use — they’re really not the same, or simulations just are not quite as good. At this point, we don’t label physicians as early in their training.
I think if you do a little bit of research when you see your surgeon, there’s a CV there. It’ll say, this is when he graduated, or she graduated from medical school. You can do the calculation on your own and say, “Wow, they just graduated from their training two years ago. Maybe I want someone who has five years under their belt or ten years under their belt.” It’s not that hard to find that information.
COWEN: How do you manage all the standing?
And:
COWEN: Putting yourself aside, do you think you’re a happy group of people overall? How would you assess that?
SCHWARTZ: I think we’re as happy as our last operation went, honestly. Yes, if you go to a neurosurgery meeting, people have smiles on their faces, and they’re going out and shaking hands and telling funny stories and enjoying each other’s company. It is a way that we deal with the enormous pressure that we face.
Not all surgeons are happy-go-lucky. Some are very cold and mechanical in their personalities, and that can be an advantage, to be emotionally isolated from what you’re doing so that you can perform at a high level and not think about the significance of what you’re doing, but just think about the task that you’re doing.
On the whole, yes, we’re happy, but the minute you have a complication or a problem, you become very unhappy, and it weighs on you tremendously. It’s something that we deal with and think about all the time. The complications we have, the patients that we’ve unfortunately hurt and not helped — although they’re few and far between, if you’re a busy neurosurgeon doing complex neurosurgery, that will happen one or two times a year, and you carry those patients with you constantly.
Fun and interesting throughout, definitely recommended. And I will again recommend Schwartz’s book Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery.
How will AI change what it means to be human?
That is the topic of my latest piece at The Free Press, co-authored with Avital Balwit. Here is a segment written by Avital:
I was Claude pre-Claude. I once prided myself on how quickly I could write well. Memos, strategy documents, talking points—you name it. I could churn out 2,000 words an hour.
That skill is now obsolete. I can still write better than the models, but their speed far outmatches mine. And I know their quality will soon catch up—and then surpass—my own.
Every time I use Claude to do a task at work, I feel conflicted. I am both impressed by our product and humbled by how easily it does what used to make me feel uniquely valuable.
It’s not just an issue at work. Claude has injected itself into my home life, too. My partner is brilliant—it’s a huge reason we are together. But now, sometimes when I have a tough question, I’ll think, Should I ask my partner, or the model? And sometimes I choose the model. It’s eerie and uncomfortable to see this tool move into a domain that used to be filled by someone I love.
And a related bit written by me:
I have a tenured job at a state university, and I am not personally worried about my future—not at age 63. But I do ask myself every day how I will stay relevant, and how I will avoid being someone who is riding off the slow decay of a system that cannot last.
It amazes me how many people do not much ponder these questions. “Oh, it hallucinates!” is the fool’s trap of 2025, I am sorry to say.
The piece is about 4,000 words and has many interesting points throughout. Note that Avital is the Chief of Staff to the CEO at Anthropic, but her views do not reflect those of her company.
New Bryan Caplan book, *Pro-Market AND Pro-Business: Essays on Laissez-Faire*
Bryan presents and summarizes the book here. These are very good essays, as Bryan is the world’s leading libertarian economist.
You can buy it here on Amazon.
Is classical liberalism for losers?
That is the topic of my latest column for The Free Press. Excerpt, starting with the point that the New Right has an obsession with seizing political power:
There are two essential problems with yelling “Rule!”
The first is that your side will not win every election. It’s a reliable assumption that, on average, “the other side,” whoever that may be, is going to win half of the time.
If you build up executive power, or state power more generally, in the service of your ends, the chances are pretty high that those same powers someday will be used against you. Democrats are enraged at Trump’s use of executive orders and executive power more broadly, but that did not begin with Trump. Consider how Barack Obama seized the power to provide legal status to illegal immigrants, or how Joe Biden sought to extinguish all those student loans, without buy-in from Congress. The point is that Trump stepped into a system that had already been transformed, and he is now using it to his own ends.
Or to take another example: Many Democrats hate DOGE, but in fact it is a repurposed version of a 2014 President Obama creation, namely the United States Digital Service, which initially was designed to improve the IT capabilities of the federal government. Ask yourself which Trump initiatives someday will be repurposed in an analogous fashion.
If your fundamental beliefs are in individual liberty, responsibility, and toleration, the escalation of state power, across competing administrations, is unlikely to prove your friend over time.
The second problem is that rule by the political right is not necessarily better than rule by the political left, even if you have basic right-leaning sympathies, as I do on a large number of issues, especially in the economic realm. But even on economics, the Trump administration is bringing depredations, such as the very high proposed tariff rates, that we would not have seen under a typical Democratic administration. Circa May 2025, I feel less economically free than I did under the Biden administration.
Such problems are all the more true when a given side wins a series of successive political victories.
Power corrupts; the right is not immune to that truism. For instance, the Republican Party typically has been a vehicle for fiscal conservatives, at least on paper and in rhetoric. Yet under the Republican trifectas of both George W. Bush and the first Trump administration, both spending and debt rose dramatically. When you get to be the one spending the money, it is hard to exercise restraint.
I go on to argue that classical liberalism in fact does win a series of periodic transformative victories, even though at many historical moments it is relatively dormant in influence. It is the way to be a real winner.
Definitely recommended, of real importance.
What Should Classical Liberals Do?
My little contretemps with Chris Rufo raises the issue of what should classical liberals do? In a powerful essay, C. Bradley Thompson explains why the issue must be faced:
The truth of the matter is that the Conservative-Libertarian-Classical Liberal Establishment gave away and lost an entire generation of young people because they refused to defend them or to take up the issues that mattered most to them, and in doing so the Establishment lost America’s young people to the rising Reactionary or Dissident Right, by which I primarily mean groups such as the so-called TradCaths or Catholic Integralists and the followers of the Bronze Age Pervert. (See my essay on the reactionary Right, “The Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans.”)
I do not think Mr. Rufo would disagree with me on this point, but he has not quite made it himself either (at least not as far as I know), so I will make it in my own name.
The betrayal, abandonment, desertion, and loss of America’s young people by conservative and libertarian Establishmentarians can be understood with the following hypothetical.
Imagine the plight of, let us say, a 23-year-old young man in the year 2016. Imagine that he’s been told every single day from kindergarten through the end of college that he’s racist, sexist, and homophobic by virtue of being white, male, and heterosexual. Further imagine that he was falsely diagnosed by his teachers in grade school with ADD/ADHD and put on Ritalin because, well, he’s an active boy. And then his teachers tell him when he’s 12 that he might not actually be a boy, but rather that he might be a girl trapped in boy’s body. And let us also not forget that he’s also been told by his teachers and professors that the country his parents taught him to love was actually founded in sin and is therefore evil. To top it all off: he didn’t get into the college and then the law school of his choice despite having test scores well above those who did.
In other words, what this oppressed and depressed young man has experienced his whole life is a cultural Zeitgeist defined by postmodern nihilism and egalitarianism. These are the forces that are ruining his life and making him miserable.
Let’s also assume that said young man is also temperamentally some kind of conservative, libertarian, or classical liberal, and he interns at the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, or the Institute for Humane Studies hoping to find solace, allies, and support to give relief to his existential maladies.
And how does Conservatism-Libertarianism Inc. respond to what are clearly the dominant cultural issues of our time?
Well, the Establishment publishes yet another white paper on free-market transportation or energy policy. The Heritage Foundation doubles down on more white papers on deficits and taxation policy. The Cato Institute churns out more white papers on legalizing pot and same-sex marriage. The Institute for Humane Studies goes all in to sit at the cool kids’ lunch table by ramping up its videos on spontaneous order featuring transgender 20-somethings.
Is it any wonder that today’s young people who have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are stepping outside the arc of history yelling, “stop”? At a certain point, these young people let out a collective primal scream, shouting “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” And when the “youf” (as they refer to themselves online) realized that Establishment conservatives and libertarians did not hear them and lacked the vocabulary, principles, power, and courage to defend them from their Maoist persecutors, they went underground to places like 4chan, 8chan, and various other online discussion boards, where they found a Samizdat community of the oppressed.
Having effectively abandoned late-stage Millennials and Gen Z, Conservatism and Libertarianism Inc. should not be surprised, then, that today’s young people who might be otherwise sympathetic to their policies have left that world and become radicalized. News flash: Gen Z is attracted to people who are willing to defend them and attack social nihilism and egalitarianism in all their forms.
Hence the rise of what I call the “Fight Club Right,” which calls for a new kind of American politics. Gen Z rightism is done with what they call the Boomer’s “fake and ghey” attachment to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the institutions of the Constitution. In fact, many young people who have migrated to the reactionary Right have openly and repeatedly rejected the principles of the American founding as irrelevant in the modern world.
More to the point, this younger generation is done with the philosophy of losing. They’re certainly done with the Establishment. They also seem to be done with classical liberalism and the American founding. (This is a more complicated topic.) Instead, what they want is political power to punish their enemies and to take over the “regime.” They want to use the coercive force of the State to create their new America.
…Conservatism and Libertarianism Inc. seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that the Left had pivoted and changed tactics after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. By the 1990s, the Left had abandoned economic issues and the working class and was doubling down on cultural issues. Rather than trying to take over the trade-union movement, for instance, the postmodern Left went for MTV and the Boy Scouts, while the major DC think tanks on the Right went for issues too distant from the lives of young people such as the deficit, taxation, and regulatory policy.
While socialism continues to be the end of the Left, the means to the end is postmodern nihilism. That’s where the Left planted its flag and that’s the terrain that it has occupied without opposition, whereas conservative and libertarian organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute were fighting for ideological hegemony in the economic realm. Between 2000 and 2025, cultural nihilism and its many forms and manifestations is where the action is and has been for a quarter century. So powerful has postmodern nihilism become that even some left-wing “libertarian” organizations have simply become left-wing.
Xenophon’s consultation of the Pythia
1. Statement of prayer-question – Xenophon begins by verbally addressing Apollo, asking “to which of the gods should I sacrifice and pray in order best and most successfully to perform the journey I have in mind and return home in safety?” Only once this plea is uttered does Apollo’s priesthood record the god’s reply.
2. Ritual hymn & payment – Like all individual consultants, he had to buy a pelanos (sacrificial cake) and burn it on the altar while reciting the short Delphic paean in Apollo’s honour; the spoken hymn and the offering together signalled respect and opened the way for prophecy.
3. Sacrificial plea – A goat was sprinkled with water; if it shuddered, Apollo was deemed willing to speak. The consultants (or an attendant priest) then voiced a brief prayer “Hear me, Lord Apollo…” over the animal before it was sacrificed. Only after this spoken plea did the Pythia mount the tripod and deliver the oracle.
That is an o3 answer in response to one of my queries, namely whether you had to make incantations to oracles before they would respond. You did! If you scroll down, you will see that original answer is amended somewhat and improved in accuracy. For instance “…drop the idea that each visitor had to intone a fixed hymn. At most, priests might intone a brief paean while the cake was burned…”
In any case, you could not do “one shot” with the oracle — you had to put a bit of effort into it. If you simply approached them and asked for a prophecy of the future (and did nothing else) you would get no meaningful response. In contemporary terminology, you needed a bit of prompting.
To return more explicitly to the current day, many people complain about the hallucinations of top LLMs, and indeed those hallucinations are still present. (o3 is much quicker than o1 pro, but probably has a higher hallucination rate.) If you ask them only once, you are more likely to get hallucinations. If you ask a follow-up, and request a correction of errors, the answer usually is better.
Almost everyone evaluates the LLMs and their hallucinations on a one-shot basis. But historically we evaluated oracles on a multi-shot basis. It would be easy for us to do that again with LLMS, and of course many users do. For the faster models the follow-up query really does not take so long.
Or just start off on the right foot. Marius recommends this prompt:
Ultra-deep thinking mode. Greater rigor, attention to detail, and multi-angle verification. Start by outlining the task and breaking down the problem into subtasks. For each subtask, explore multiple perspectives, even those that seem initially irrelevant or improbable. Purposefully attempt to disprove or challenge your own assumptions at every step. Triple-verify everything. Critically review each step, scrutinize your logic, assumptions, and conclusions, explicitly calling out uncertainties and alternative viewpoints. Independently verify your reasoning using alternative methodologies or tools, cross-checking every fact, inference, and conclusion against external data, calculation, or authoritative sources. Deliberately seek out and employ at least twice as many verification tools or methods as you typically would. Use mathematical validations, web searches, logic evaluation frameworks, and additional resources explicitly and liberally to cross-verify your claims. Even if you feel entirely confident in your solution, explicitly dedicate additional time and effort to systematically search for weaknesses, logical gaps, hidden assumptions, or oversights. Clearly document these potential pitfalls and how you’ve addressed them. Once you’re fully convinced your analysis is robust and complete, deliberately pause and force yourself to reconsider the entire reasoning chain one final time from scratch. Explicitly detail this last reflective step.
I haven’t tried it yet, but it doesn’t cost more than a simple “Control C.” Perhaps some of you can do better yet, depending of course on what your purpose is.
There is no reason why you cannot ask for better, and get it. Beware those who dump on hallucinations without trying to do better — they are the Negative Nellies of LLM land.
And oh — o3 pro is coming soon.
The Library Burned Slowly
A powerful but grim essay by John McGinnis, Professor of Constitutional Law at Northwestern. For decades, the federal government—driven by the left—expanded its control over universities. The right, most notably Ronald Reagan, tried to resist, shielding civil society from state overreach. They failed. Now, a new right has turned to the left’s playbook and is imposing its own vision of the good society. Chris Rufo mocks classical liberals like myself and their naive ideas of neutrality, fairness and open institutions. Principles are for losers. Seize power! Crush your enemies. Rufo does know how to crush his enemies. But what happens when the devil turns? Bludgeoning your enemies is fun while it lasts but you can’t bludgeon your way to a civilization. Hayek’s civil society dies in the rubble.
It seems remarkable that seemingly antisemitic protests by undergraduates, such as those at my own university of Northwestern, could threaten the biomedical research funding of its medical school. But the structure of civil rights laws as applied to universities has long allowed the federal government to cut off funding to the entire university based on the wrongful actions of particular units or departments.
Ironically, the left, now alarmed by the federal government’s intrusive reach, bears direct responsibility for crafting the very legal weapons wielded against the universities it dominates. Almost four decades ago, progressive legislators demanded sweeping amendments to civil rights law, expanding federal oversight over higher education. The sequence of events reveals a cautionary tale of political hubris: progressive confidence that state power would reliably serve their ends overlooked the reality that governmental authority, once unleashed, recognizes no ideological master. Today’s circumstances starkly illustrate how expansive federal control over civil society, originally celebrated by progressives, returns to haunt its architects. The left’s outrage ought to focus not on this particular administration but on its own reckless empowerment of the state.
…Clumsy governmental dictates on contentious matters such as transgender rights do not merely settle disputes; they inflame societal divisions by transforming moral disagreements into winner-takes-all political battles. Civil society, by contrast, thrives precisely because it embraces diversity and facilitates compromise, allowing pluralistic communities to coexist peacefully without being conscripted into ideological warfare. The left, fixated upon uniform outcomes, consistently undervalues the power of voluntary cooperation and cultural persuasion. Their shortsightedness has delivered into the hands of their opponents the very instruments of coercion they forged, vividly confirming an enduring truth: the power you grant government today will inevitably be wielded tomorrow by your adversaries.
Read the whole thing.