“Should I put this in the junk drawer?” “I dunno. Do you think you could figure out where it goes?” That exchange is short enough to miss, and it is the entire subject of today’s post. The first post in this series introduced the junk drawer as a load-bearing component of any well-designed classification system, … Read more
The Supreme Court has twenty-three cases left to decide this month, and one of them is Trump v. Cook. The facts, briefly: last August, the President posted a letter announcing the immediate removal of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, citing uninvestigated allegations that she misstated her residency on mortgage paperwork before she joined the Board. … Read more
A new paper by Alexandre Morozov and Alexander Feigel in PNAS offers a genuinely interesting evolutionary result. If each player in a population of Prisoner’s Dilemma agents carries an opponent-indexed cooperation probability — \(p_{c,i\to j}\), one entry per partner identity — then selection and mutation routinely produce cooperative configurations. The press release framed this as … Read more
NANCY — A few days ago I promised a dispatch on the keynote, and here it is. The eighth International Conference in Philosophy and Economics met this week in Nancy, and the keynote was given by my closest collaborator, who is also my wife, Maggie Penn. Her title was “Three Paradoxes of Optimal Evaluation.” I … Read more
NANCY — I have come up out of the tunnel, across France, and into Lorraine, to a conference on economics and philosophy, and the first thing worth saying about the host city is that it is the birthplace of the man who discovered that three of anything is trouble. Henri Poincaré was born here in … Read more
BENEATH THE ENGLISH CHANNEL — Having just reoriented myself to turning my head to the right when about to cross the street, I have boarded the train at St. Pancras with Maggie, as we leave London and head to the 8th Conference on Philosophy and Economics in Nancy, France — via Paris, of course. There … Read more
LONDON — I came up out of the Underground this morning at the wrong station, a humbling way to begin a post about the meaning of position. The conference I am here for, the Warwick/Yale/Princeton meeting on political economy, takes its name, at one remove, from an English county whose old town lent its name … Read more
Six posts since the last Dispatch, four of them a single arc on AI as a classification system. The arc started with a Vice President who could not evaluate her engineers, passed through a benchmark that turned out to be measuring string length, paused on a paper about elite athletes that was Berkson’s paradox in … Read more
Earlier today, while I was working with an LLM on something, it asked me a question. Here is the question. Three options. They differ from each other in ways the menu makes plain — inherit the body’s numbers and flag, correct everywhere, or correct the appendix and flag the body as wrong. The point of … Read more
A new paper in Science — Gullich et al., “Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance” — looked at top performers in athletics, science, math, and music. The headline finding is one most parents would like to hear: among the highest adult achievers, peak performance is negatively associated with early … Read more