A dispatch from the road, later than usual. The week covered the launch of the junk drawer series, a USPS post whose central mechanism acquired a fuel surcharge while the post was still fresh, a Supreme Court case in which the drawer breaks, and a Friday post on Iran that staked a prediction now counting … Read more
For more than a century, the constitutional status of religious exemptions from childhood vaccine mandates sat quietly unresolved. States offered exemptions — or didn’t — as a matter of legislative discretion. No court had to rule on whether parental religious objection was a constitutional right or merely a policy option that legislators could extend or … Read more
Monday’s post introduced the junk drawer as a structural feature of any well-designed classification system — not a failure to be corrected, but a load-bearing component. It offered a typology: the lost key, which is in the drawer because it is waiting on information that hasn’t arrived yet, and the screwdriver, which is in the … Read more
Yesterday’s post was about junk drawers — about what happens when you ask a classification system to sort an unruly world in real time, and about the organizational costs of pretending the system is tidier than it is. I had barely finished writing it when I came across a news story from two weeks ago … Read more
Every home and office has one. You know which drawer I mean — the one with the takeout menus and the dead batteries and the rubber band that used to hold something together and the key that opens something, somewhere, you just can’t remember what. It is not a disorganized drawer. It is a perfectly … Read more
This is the third of three posts this week on prediction markets. Monday was about information — the signal that travels before the message. Wednesday was about jurisdiction — the classification question that reproduces itself at every level you try to answer it. Today is about something prior to both: whether the classification of a … Read more
This is the second of three posts this week on prediction markets. Monday’s post was about information — specifically, about what kind of signal moves through a prediction market before an official announcement arrives. Today’s is about jurisdiction. Friday’s will be about something more fundamental than either. On April 3, a federal judge in Arizona … Read more
Last week’s post ended with a theorem. This one starts with a dashboard. The theorem — Arrow’s impossibility result, applied to the aggregation problem that Simpson’s paradox creates — is on the record in All Measurements Are Local if you want it. The short version: when subgroup results conflict with each other and with the … 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