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
While similarly post-apocalyptic and “numbers-driven,” this post is not actually about a new NetFlix series. Rather, the main character of the story is HaluEval, a new “standard benchmark” for measuring whether a large language model is hallucinating — producing fluent, plausible-sounding text where it ought to be reporting a fact. The benchmark contains around 35,000 … Read more
When I introduced the junk drawer a few posts back, the example was a physical one. Most kitchens have a drawer that holds the screwdriver, the rubber bands, the takeout menus, the AAA batteries, and the one weird key nobody can identify. The drawer is not a failure of organization. It is the part of … Read more
There are no stupid questions… Dear NSQ, I grew up in Pittsburgh and learned to drive there. Last month I took a left turn from Tate Street onto West Market Street the way I always have — when the light turned green, I went, before the oncoming traffic could reach the intersection. The driver across … Read more
A Vice President at a large technology company sits down at the end of the quarter to evaluate her engineering team. She has twelve direct reports. They have spent the quarter using AI tools heavily, as the company’s leadership has insisted they do. She must now write performance reviews. She has to say, in writing, … Read more
Friday’s post argued that what the Court did in Louisiana v. Callais is best described as breaking a structural link — a load-bearing connection that was holding up many actions at once, not just the Louisiana map. That post was about what. This post is about why now. Why this case, why this term, why … Read more
Wednesday morning I posted “You Can Get There From Here, Or: The Theorem in the Tagline,” a piece I had been meaning to write for fourteen years. It is a short essay about why McKelvey-Schofield — the result that majority preference cycles can wander anywhere in the policy space once procedural constraints fall away — … Read more