Three items this week — all of them, in one way or another, about instruments that outlived their justifications. In the News The Toll Booth That Replaced the Threat Last week I noted that Trump’s serial extensions of the Strait of Hormuz deadline were doing something structurally distinct from simply moving the goalposts: each revision … Read more
This blog does not usually do “journal club.” (Ed: huh? …who “does journal club?” Is it voluntary?) It’s not that I have anything against academic journals — I publish in them, edit one, and spend a disproportionate fraction of my waking life reading them — but their timelines and their intended audience are different enough … Read more
There is a lot of noise about AI safety these days, and I want to contribute to it in a specific and, I hope, useful way. Maggie and I are spending this year at the Russell Sage Foundation working on, among other things, how to make our theoretical work on classifiers understandable to a broader … Read more
In a 2015 symposium on big data and measurement, Maggie Penn and I argued that social choice theory is central to the analysis of complex data precisely because any reduction of high-dimensional data into a usable measure involves aggregation, and aggregation involves choices about what to preserve and what to discard.1 We used the Florentine … Read more
Scientific American ran a piece yesterday on Simpson’s paradox — the phenomenon in which a trend that holds within every subgroup of a dataset reverses, or vanishes entirely, when those subgroups are combined. Regular readers of this blog will have encountered it before. In 2012, it showed up inside No Child Left Behind: a school … Read more
The big news in congressional procedure this week — and I recognize that “big news in congressional procedure” is a phrase that requires either explanation or apology, and I intend to provide both — is that Senate Republicans are planning to use the budget reconciliation process to pass the SAVE America Act, a voter ID … Read more
When we last checked in on the DHS shutdown, the diagnosis was a bilateral war of attrition: two parties simultaneously bearing costs, each hoping the other would flinch first, while the costs fell primarily on TSA workers and travelers who had no seat at the table. The shutdown was 36 days old. The signal, I … Read more
Four items from the news this week, plus two more on the horizon. It was that kind of week. In the News The Deadline That Wasn’t, Then Wasn’t Again Trump’s ultimatum to Iran — open the Strait of Hormuz or face renewed strikes on energy infrastructure — was due March 23. Then it was due … Read more
On March 16, a federal judge in Arizona denied Kalshi’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the state. On March 17, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed 20 misdemeanor criminal charges against the company — the first criminal charges ever filed against a major prediction market. The charges allege that Kalshi is operating an illegal … Read more
Ten years ago on this blog, I wrote about truels — three-person duels — and argued that the 2016 GOP primary was one. The basic insight: when three players are in a fight and only one can win, it matters enormously whom you shoot at, and the answer is usually counterintuitive. In particular, the two weaker players … Read more