Category: Science
*The Age of Disclosure*
I have now watched the whole movie. The first twenty-eight minutes are truly excellent, the best statement of the case for taking UAPs seriously. It is impressive how they lined up dozens of serious figures, from the military and intelligence services, willing to insist that UAPs are a real phenomenon, supported by multiple sources of evidence. Not sensor errors, not flocks of birds, and not mistakes in interpreting images. This part of the debate now should be considered closed. It is also amazing that Marco Rubio has such a large presence in the film, as of course he is now America’s Secretary of State.
You will note this earlier part of the movie does not insist that UAPs are aliens.
After that point, the film runs a lot of risks. About one-third of what is left is responsible, along the lines of the first twenty-eight minutes. But the other two-thirds or so consists of quite unsupported claims about alien beings, bodies discovered, reverse engineering, quantum bubbles, and so on. You will not find dozens of respected, credentialed, obviously non-crazy sources confirming any of those propositions. The presentation also becomes too conspiratorial. Still, part of the latter part of the movie remains good and responsible.
Overall I can recommend this as an informative and sometimes revelatory compendium of information. It does not have anything fundamentally new, but brings together the evidence in the aggregate better than any other source I know,and it assembles the best and most credible set of testifiers. And then there are the irresponsible bits, which you can either ignore (though still think about), or use as a reason to dismiss the entire film. I will do the former.
My very fun Conversation with Blake Scholl
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. This was at a live event (the excellent Roots of Progress conference), so it is only about forty minutes, shorter than usual. Here is the episode summary:
Blake Scholl is one of the leading figures working to bring back civilian supersonic flight. As the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, he’s building a new generation of supersonic aircraft and pushing for the policies needed to make commercial supersonic travel viable again. But he’s equally as impressive as someone who thinks systematically about improving dysfunction—whether it’s airport design, traffic congestion, or defense procurement—and sees creative solutions to problems everyone else has learned to accept.
Tyler and Blake discuss why airport terminals should be underground, why every road needs a toll, what’s wrong with how we board planes, the contrasting cultures of Amazon and Groupon, why Concorde and Apollo were impressive tech demos but terrible products, what Ayn Rand understood about supersonic transport in 1957, what’s wrong with aerospace manufacturing, his heuristic when confronting evident stupidity, his technique for mastering new domains, how LLMs are revolutionizing regulatory paperwork, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: There’s plenty about Boom online and in your interviews, so I’d like to take some different tacks here. This general notion of having things move more quickly, I’m a big fan of that. Do you have a plan for how we could make moving through an airport happen more quickly? You’re in charge. You’re the dictator. You don’t have to worry about bureaucratic obstacles. You just do it.
SCHOLL: I think about this in the shower like every day. There is a much better airport design that, as best I can tell, has never been built. Here’s the idea: You should put the terminals underground. Airside is above ground. Terminals are below ground. Imagine a design with two runways. There’s an arrival runway, departure runway. Traffic flows from arrival runway to departure runway. You don’t need tugs. You can delete a whole bunch of airport infrastructure.
Imagine you pull into a gate. The jetway is actually an escalator that comes up from underneath the ground. Then you pull forward, so you can delete a whole bunch of claptrap that is just unnecessary. The terminal underground should have skylights so it can still be incredibly beautiful. If you model fundamentally the thing on a crossbar switch, there are a whole bunch of insights for how to make it radically more efficient. Sorry. This is a blog post I want to write one day. Actually, it’s an airport I want to build.
And;
COWEN: I’m at the United desk. I have some kind of question. There’s only two or three people in front of me, but it takes forever. I notice they’re just talking back and forth to the assistant. They’re discussing the weather or the future prospects for progress, total factor productivity. I don’t know. I’m frustrated. How can we make that process faster? What’s going wrong there?
SCHOLL: The thing I most don’t understand is why it requires so many keystrokes to check into a hotel room. What are they writing?
What are they writing?
Confidently Wrong
If you’re going to challenge a scientific consensus, you better know the material. Most of us, most of the time, don’t—so deferring to expert consensus is usually the rational strategy. Pushing against the consensus is fine; it’s often how progress happens. But doing it responsibly requires expertise. Yet in my experience the loudest anti-consensus voices—on vaccines, climate, macroeconomics, whatever—tend to be the least informed.
This isn’t just my anecdotal impression. A paper by Light, Fernbach, Geana, and Sloman shows that opposition to the consensus is positively correlated with knowledge overconfidence. Now you may wonder. Isn’t this circular? If someone claims the consensus view is wrong we can’t just say that proves they don’t know what they are talking about. Indeed. Thus Light, Fernbach, Geana and Sloman do something clever. They ask respondents a series of questions on uncontroversial scientific topics. Questions such as:
1. True or false? The center of the earth is very hot: True
2. True or false? The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move. True
3. True or false? The oxygen we breathe comes from plants: True
4. True or false? Antibiotics kills viruses as well as bacteria: False
5. True or false? All insects have eight legs: False
6. True or false? All radioactivity is man made: False
7. True or false? Men and women normally have the same number of chromosomes: True
8. True or false? Lasers work by focusing sound waves: False
9. True or false? Almost all food energy for living organisms comes originally from sunlight: True
10. True or false? Electrons are smaller than atoms: True
The authors then correlate respondents’ scores on the objective (uncontroversial) knowledge with their opposition to the scientific consensus on topics like vaccination, nuclear power, and homeopathy. The result is striking: people who are most opposed to the consensus (7, the far right of the horizontal axis in the figure below) score lower on objective knowledge but express higher subjective confidence. In other words, anti-consensus respondents are the most confidently wrong—the gap between what they know and what they think they know is widest.
In a nice test the authors show that the confidently wrong are not just braggadocios they actually believe they know because they are more willing to bet on the objective knowledge questions and, of course, they lose their shirts. A bet is a tax on bullshit.
The implications matter. The “knowledge deficit” approach (just give people more fact) breaks down when the least-informed are also the most certain they’re experts. The authors suggest leaning on social norms and respected community figures instead. My own experience points to the role of context: in a classroom, the direction of information flow is clearer, and confidently wrong pushback is rarer than on Twitter or the blog. I welcome questions in class—they’re usually great—but they work best when there’s at least a shared premise that the point is to learn.
Hat tip: Cremieux
Matt Yglesias on aphantasia
What I tend to approach from the outside are unpleasant experiences. Life is a mix of ups and downs, but I’m not really haunted by sad experiences or disturbing things that I’ve seen. I can tell you about the time I found a dead body in the alley and called the authorities to report it, and my recollection is it was pretty gross, but I certainly don’t have any pictures of that in my iPhone.
Sometimes I see something that causes me to update my views of the world. But when I saw the body, I was already aware, factually, that drug overdose deaths were becoming common in D.C., so I felt that I hadn’t really learned anything new. At the time I was victimized by crime, the amount of violent crime in this city had been on a steady downward trend for a very long time, so it didn’t cause me to change my views at all. Several years later, that downward trend started to reverse and, after a few years of gradual growth, there were some sharp jumps, and then I got worried and started calling for policy changes.
And I think this is a strength of the aphantasic worldview. Something bad happened to me that was statistically anomalous, so I didn’t change my views. When the broader situation changed, I did change my views, even though actually nothing bad happened to me personally. And that’s because the right way to assess crime trends is to try to get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.
Here is the full essay. Here is Hollis Robbins on related issues.
There is no great stagnation (not any more — really!)
A remote-controlled robot the size of a grain of sand can swim through blood vessels to deliver drugs before dissolving into the body. The technology could allow doctors to administer small amounts of drugs to specific sites, avoiding the toxic side effects of body-wide therapies.
…The system has yet to be trialled in people, but it shows promise because it works in a roughly human-sized body, and because all its components have already been shown to be biocompatible, says Bradley Nelson, a mechanical engineer at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, who co-led the work.
We will see, but it is wonderful that such an idea is even in the running. Here is the full article, via A.J.
UCSD Faculty Sound Alarm on Declining Student Skills
The UC San Diego Senate Report on Admissions documents a sharp decline in students’ math and reading skills—a warning that has been sounded before, but this time it’s coming from within the building.
At our campus, the picture is truly troubling. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold, despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum UCOP required math curriculum, and many with high grades. In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort. A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates, though this is a figure that has not varied much over the same time span.
Moreover, weaknesses in math and language tend to be more related in recent years. In 2024, two out of five students with severe deficiencies in math also required remedial writing instruction. Conversely, one in four students with inadequate writing skills also needed additional math preparation.
The math department created a remedial course, only to be so stunned by how little the students knew that the class had to be redesigned to cover material normally taught in grades 1 through 8.
Alarmingly, the instructors running the 2023-2024 Math 2 courses observed a marked change in the skill gaps compared to prior years. While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11).
In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population, representing an alarming 12.5% of the incoming first-year class (compared to under 1% of the first-year students testing into these courses prior to 2021)
(The figure gives some examples of remedial class material and the percentage of remedial students getting the answers correct.)
The report attributes the decline to several factors: the pandemic, the elimination of standardized testing—which has forced UCSD to rely on increasingly inflated and therefore useless high school grades—and political pressure from state lawmakers to admit more “low-income students and students from underrepresented minority groups.”
…This situation goes to the heart of the present conundrum: in order to holistically admit a diverse and representative class, we need to admit students who may be at a higher risk of not succeeding (e.g. with lower retention rates, higher DFW rates, and longer time-to-degree).
The report exposes a hard truth: expanding access without preserving standards risks the very idea of a higher education. Can the cultivation of excellence survive an egalitarian world?
In defense of Schumpeter
Factories of Ideas? Big Business and the Golden Age of American Innovation (Job Market Paper) [PDF]
This paper studies the Great Merger Wave (GMW) of 1895-1904—the largest consolidation event in U.S. history—to identify how Big Business affected American innovation. Between 1880 and 1940, the U.S. experienced a golden age of breakthrough discoveries in chemistry, electronics, and telecommunications that established its technological leadership. Using newly constructed data linking firms, patents, and inventors, I show that consolidation substantially increased innovation. Among firms already innovating before the GMW, consolidation led to an increase of 6 patents and 0.6 breakthroughs per year—roughly four-fold and six-fold increases, respectively. Firms with no prior patents were more likely to begin innovating. The establishment of corporate R\&D laboratories served as a key mechanism driving these gains. Building a matched inventor–firm panel, I show that lab-owning firms enjoyed a productivity premium not due to inventor sorting, robust within size and technology classes. To assess whether firm-level effects translated into broader technological progress, I examine total patenting within technological domains. Overall, the GMW increased breakthroughs by 13% between 1905 and 1940, with the largest gains in science-based fields (30% increase).
That is the job market paper of Pier Paolo Creanza, who is on the market this year from Princeton.
My excellent Conversation with Sam Altman
Recorded live in Berkeley, at the Roots of Progress conference (an amazing event), here is the material with transcript, here is the episode summary:
Sam Altman makes his second appearance on the show to discuss how he’s managing OpenAI’s explosive growth, what he’s learned about hiring hardware people, what makes roon special, how far they are from an AI-driven replacement to Slack, what GPT-6 might enable for scientific research, when we’ll see entire divisions of companies run mostly by AI, what he looks for in hires to gauge their AI-resistance, how OpenAI is thinking about commerce, whether GPT-6 will write great poetry, why energy is the binding constraint to chip-building and where it’ll come from, his updated plan for how he’d revitalize St. Louis, why he’s not worried about teaching normies to use AI, what will happen to the price of healthcare and hosing, his evolving views on freedom of expression, why accidental AI persuasion worries him more than intentional takeover, the question he posed to the Dalai Lama about superintelligence, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: What is it about GPT-6 that makes that special to you?
ALTMAN: If GPT-3 was the first moment where you saw a glimmer of something that felt like the spiritual Turing test getting passed, GPT-5 is the first moment where you see a glimmer of AI doing new science. It’s very tiny things, but here and there someone’s posting like, “Oh, it figured this thing out,” or “Oh, it came up with this new idea,” or “Oh, it was a useful collaborator on this paper.” There is a chance that GPT-6 will be a GPT-3 to 4-like leap that happened for Turing test-like stuff for science, where 5 has these tiny glimmers and 6 can really do it.
COWEN: Let’s say I run a science lab, and I know GPT-6 is coming. What should I be doing now to prepare for that?
ALTMAN: It’s always a very hard question. Even if you know this thing is coming, if you adapt your —
COWEN: Let’s say I even had it now, right? What exactly would I do the next morning?
ALTMAN: I guess the first thing you would do is just type in the current research questions you’re struggling with, and maybe it’ll say, “Here’s an idea,” or “Run this experiment,” or “Go do this other thing.”
COWEN: If I’m thinking about restructuring an entire organization to have GPT-6 or 7 or whatever at the center of it, what is it I should be doing organizationally, rather than just having all my top people use it as add-ons to their current stock of knowledge?
ALTMAN: I’ve thought about this more for the context of companies than scientists, just because I understand that better. I think it’s a very important question. Right now, I have met some orgs that are really saying, “Okay, we’re going to adopt AI and let AI do this.” I’m very interested in this, because shame on me if OpenAI is not the first big company run by an AI CEO, right?
COWEN: Just parts of it. Not the whole thing.
ALTMAN: No, the whole thing.
COWEN: That’s very ambitious. Just the finance department, whatever.
ALTMAN: Well, but eventually it should get to the whole thing, right? So we can use this and then try to work backwards from that. I find this a very interesting thought experiment of what would have to happen for an AI CEO to be able to do a much better job of running OpenAI than me, which clearly will happen someday. How can we accelerate that? What’s in the way of that? I have found that to be a super useful thought experiment for how we design our org over time and what the other pieces and roadblocks will be. I assume someone running a science lab should try to think the same way, and they’ll come to different conclusions.
COWEN: How far off do you think it is that just, say, one division of OpenAI is 85 percent run by AIs?
ALTMAN: Any single division?
COWEN: Not a tiny, insignificant division, mostly run by the AIs.
ALTMAN: Some small single-digit number of years, not very far. When do you think I can be like, “Okay, Mr. AI CEO, you take over”?
Of course we discuss roon as well, not to mention life on the moons of Saturn…
Track the 2025-2026 Economics Job Market
“Econ Now aggregates economics PhD job market papers, job postings for economists, and economics conference information all in one place.”
Link here, I have yet to try it.
Supply is elastic, in a new and different setting
The longstanding debate over whether human capabilities and skills are shaped more by “nature” or “nurture” has been revitalized by recent advances in genetics, particularly in the use of polygenic scores (PGSs) to proxy for genetic endowments. Yet, we argue that PGSs embed not only direct genetic effects but also indirect environmental influences, raising questions about their validity for causal analysis. We show that these conflated measures can mislead studies of gene–environment interactions, especially when parental behavior responds to children’s genetic risk. To address this issue, we construct a new latent measure of genetic risk that integrates individual genotypes with diagnostic symptoms, using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health linked to restricted individual SNP-level genotypes from dbGaP. Exploiting multiple sources of variation—including the Mendelian within-family genetic randomization among siblings—we find consistent evidence that parents compensate by investing more in children with higher genetic risk for ADHD. Strikingly, these compensatory responses disappear when genetic risk is proxied by the conventional ADHD PGS, which also yields weaker—and in some cases reversed—predictions for long-run outcomes. Finally, we embed our latent measure of genetic endowments into a standard dynamic structural model of child development. The model shows that both parental investments and latent genetic risk jointly shape children’s cognitive and mental health development, underscoring the importance of modeling the dynamic interplay between genes and environments in the formation of human capital.
That is from a new NBER working paper, by
Observations on browsing economics job market candidates
The number of people on the market seems much lower this year, perhaps because of the lag with Covid, as well as more general demographic trends. Even adjusting for the lower number of candidates, I found fewer interesting papers this year than usual, as research interests continue to narrow. There is too much emphasis on showing quality technique by answering a small question well, rather than addressing more important questions more imperfectly. Harvard had by far the most interesting students, as most of them were considering questions I cared about. LSE looked pretty good too. In terms of topics, I saw a lot of papers on educational testing, urban economics and mobility, and AI. Theory seems to be permanently on the wane. The number of co-authors continues to rise.
Overall I came away with a bad feeling from this year’s perusal, noting there are some departments I have not looked at yet. In the aggregate it did not seem vital enough or exciting enough to me?
I still will be putting up some more of the papers I found of interest.
A new critique of RCTs
Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are the gold standard for evaluating the effects of interventions because they rely on simple assumptions. Their validity also depends on an implicit assumption: that the research process itself—including how participants are assigned—does not affect outcomes. In this paper, I challenge this assumption by showing that outcomes can depend on the subject’s knowledge of the study, their treatment status, and the assignment mechanism. I design a field experiment in India around a soil testing program that exogenously varies how participants are informed of their assignment. Villages are randomized into two main arms: one where treatment status is determined by a public lottery, and another by a private computerized process. My design temporally separates assignment from treatment delivery, allowing me to isolate the causal effect of the assignment process itself. I find that estimated treatment effects differ across assignment methods and that these effects emerge even before the treatment is delivered. The effects are not uniform: the control group responds more strongly to the assignment method than the treated group. These findings suggest that the choice of assignment procedure is consequential and that failing to account for it can threaten the interpretation and generalizability of standard RCT treatment effect estimates.
That is the job market paper of Florencia Hnilo, from Stanford, who also does economic history,
Some further new negative results on minimum wage hikes
We study how exposure to scientific research in university laboratories influences students’ pursuit of careers in science. Using administrative data from thousands of research labs linked to student career outcomes and a difference-in-differences design, we show that state minimum wage increases reduce employment of undergraduate research assistants in labs by 7.4%. Undergraduates exposed to these minimum wage increases graduate with 18.1% fewer quarters of lab experience. Using minimum wage changes as an instrumental variable, we estimate that one fewer quarter working in a lab, particularly early in college, reduces the probability of working in the life sciences industry by 2 percentage points and of pursuing doctoral education by 7 percentage points. These effects are attenuated for students supported by the Federal Work-Study program. Our findings highlight how labor market policies can shape the career paths of future scientists and the importance of budget flexibility for principal investigators providing undergraduates with research experience.
That is from a new working paper by Ina Ganguli and Raviv Murciano-Goroff.
When will quantum computing work?
Huge investments are flowing into QC companies today. IonQ has a $19B market cap, Rigetti has a $10B cap, and PsiQuantum recently raised $1B.3D-Wave is not relevant, despite high qubit counts. Their machines are annealers, rather than gate based, and have less computational power than the QCs that IonQ, Rigetti, PsiQuantum, etc. are working on. This is a lot of money for an industry generating no real revenue, and without an apparent path to revenue over the next 5 years. Qubit counts have not been doubling each year, but even if they did, we’d have 32 kq machines in 2030.4If qubits double each year, 1,000 qubits today grows to 32 kq in 5 years’ time. There are few – if any – commercial applications for machines of that size. Will these companies keep raising larger rounds until they achieve 100 kq? Or have they got some secret sauce we don’t know about that investors are betting on? If there has been a true breakthrough, we should see much faster growth in qubit count, as well as larger and larger quantum processors, running increasingly massive programs. Note that the QC ecosystem is reasonably public and both private companies and university labs are competitive players. Advances tend to get published rather than stowed away.
Here is more from Tom McCarthy.
Understanding and Addressing Temperature Impacts on Mortality
Here are some important results:
A large literature documents how ambient temperature affects human mortality. Using decades of detailed data from 30 countries, we revisit and synthesize key findings from this literature. We confirm that ambient temperature is among the largest external threats to human health, and is responsible for a remarkable 5-12% of total deaths across countries in our sample, or hundreds of thousands of deaths per year in both the U.S. and EU. In all contexts we consider, cold kills more than heat, though the temperature of minimum risk rises with age, making younger individuals more vulnerable to heat and older individuals more vulnerable to cold. We find evidence for adaptation to the local climate, with hotter places experiencing somewhat lower risk at higher temperatures, but still more overall mortality from heat due to more frequent exposure. Within countries, higher income is not associated with uniformly lower vulnerability to ambient temperature, and the overall burden of mortality from ambient temperature is not falling over time. Finally, we systematically summarize the limited set of studies that rigorously evaluate interventions that can reduce the impact of heat and cold on health. We find that many proposed and implemented policy interventions lack empirical support and do not target temperature exposures that generate the highest health burden, and that some of the most beneficial interventions for reducing the health impacts of cold or heat have little explicit to do with climate.
Those are from a recent paper by Marshall Burke, et.al.