The talk I’d come to Montreal for happened in a windowless hotel ballroom, and it opened with a small technical glitch. Behind Maggie the title slide read Revisiting Fairness Impossibility with Endogenous Behavior, and a live captioning system was transcribing the room along the bottom of the screen. As the chair read the title aloud, … Read more
On Monday I split the payoff an agent earns into a part that travels with the strategy and a part that stays with the seat, \(f_i = \alpha_{s_i} + \beta_i + \varepsilon_i\), and promised that the positional term \(\beta\) has a closed form that takes about three lines to derive. Today we derive it. The … Read more
When you face a decision you don’t know how to make, you look sideways. You find someone who is doing well — the colleague who made tenure, the neighbor whose kids turned out kind, the friend who somehow retired comfortably a decade early — and you copy what they did. But the rule has a … Read more
“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
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
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