Tag Archives: conservation-of-impossibility

Dispatches from the Underground: 3/20/26

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A new recurring feature, starting this week. A few items from the news — sometimes updates to arguments this blog has already made, sometimes new events the existing framework illuminates without quite rising to a full post — followed by a couple of things we’re watching that haven’t ripened yet. Everything here is shorter than a regular post, but hopefully not shorter than it needs to be.

In the News

The DNI and the Negotiator Walk Into a Senate Hearing

This week, Steve Witkoff — President Trump’s envoy to the ongoing conflict with Iran — told reporters he had asked Vladimir Putin whether Russia was providing military support to Iran. Putin said no. Witkoff said he took that at face value.

In the same week, and in the same approximate direction, DNI Tulsi Gabbard testified before the Senate and said she does not take Putin at his word — and offered to elaborate in a classified setting.

This blog has argued that a principal who publicly announces strategic ignorance doesn’t thereby escape accountability: a meta-principal is watching outcomes regardless of what the principal claims to know. Witkoff’s move is that argument’s mirror image. He isn’t strategically ignorant of something he could learn — he’s strategically credulous about something his own government has formally assessed as false. The meta-principal (Congress, the intelligence community, the public) is observing. Gabbard’s very public non-endorsement of Witkoff’s position is itself bilateral accountability in action: the DNI just went on the record, which means Witkoff now has a named co-principal who disagrees with him in an unclassified forum.

The structure is the same. The game is slightly more embarrassing.

The Surveillance System Watching Itself

Speaker Johnson is pushing a clean 18-month extension of Section 702 surveillance authorities before the April 20 deadline, using White House backing to override members of his own caucus — notably the libertarian wing — who are demanding judicial warrants before the government reviews communications involving U.S. citizens.

Two distinct structural stories are running here in parallel. The first is the setter model: the decision about which version of the bill comes to the floor — the clean extension or the warrant-amended one — is itself a policy choice, made before any vote is cast. Much of the most consequential agenda-setting, as we’ve discussed, happens in the determination of what never gets considered. The second is something we’ve been calling the self-referential problem: Section 702 permits the surveillance of foreign persons, but the system that does so collects communications of U.S. persons incidentally. Whether Congress can meaningfully oversee this program partly depends on whether it can inspect a system whose operations it cannot fully observe — and which the program itself affects (the endogenous base rates problem, in a different register, from this post). The rules are watching the rules watching themselves. Johnson’s maneuver doesn’t resolve that problem; it just decides, for another eighteen months, that we won’t look directly at it.

Moving the Debt Doesn’t Move the Problem

The Trump administration announced a three-phase plan to move the federal student loan portfolio — along with FAFSA management — from the Department of Education to Treasury.

The student loan portfolio sits inside Education not because Treasury couldn’t technically service it, but because the loans are coupled to a regulatory ecosystem that Education also runs: borrower defense adjudications, income-driven repayment oversight, accreditation enforcement, institutional eligibility determinations. Moving the asset while leaving the regulatory apparatus behind doesn’t simplify the system. It separates functions that were coupled for reasons that are now invisible to the people doing the separating. The debt moves to Treasury; the disputes, the court orders, the appeals, the eligibility questions, and the unhappy phone calls stay rooted in rules that Education still administers. When the jurisdictional collisions start, and they will, the question of who owns the problem will have a distinctly less legible answer than it does today. See also: conservation of impossibility.

In the Queue

The Bondi Subpoena

House Oversight Chair James Comer issued a subpoena to Attorney General Pam Bondi this week — and then immediately told reporters he “personally doesn’t see any reason for a deposition,” suggesting that members who voted for it were “embarrassed.” The subpoena is, in other words, a signal that is publicly announcing its own insincerity.

This inverts the core logic of “Signaling through Obstruction”: a vote or a procedural move has informational content because it is costly, and that cost is what credibly separates genuine preference intensity from performance. A subpoena accompanied by its author’s own interpretation that it shouldn’t be taken seriously is cheap talk in a subpoena-shaped container. Bondi can — and almost certainly will — treat Comer’s public statements as the authoritative gloss on how to respond.1 We’re watching whether this evaporates, escalates despite Comer’s best efforts, or produces the kind of procedural theater that generates a lot of floor speeches and no depositions.

Is a Prediction Market That Causes Its Predictions Still Predicting?

Arizona this week became the first state to allege that Kalshi — a federally regulated prediction exchange — has committed criminal violations by operating an unlicensed gambling platform. The legal question is interesting, but the structural question underneath it is more so.

When a prediction market shows a candidate at 8% odds, it isn’t passively estimating probability. It’s shaping the behavior of donors, reporters, staffers, and the candidate herself — and it may be triggering the very withdrawal it was predicting.2 Honest and Effective covered the strategic-withdrawal-as-kingmaking problem; Can a Game Know Its Own Rules? covered the general structure of penalties that open games rather than close them. The combination here is: a market that causes the outcomes it forecasts has become something other than a measurement instrument. It’s an agenda-setter with a ticker. We’ll have more to say about this one.

1 For an earlier, blog-level treatment of the same dynamic — forced votes as constituent signals rather than genuine policy moves — see “Make Me an Offer I Can’t Refuse (to Reject).”

2 On classifiers that reshape the populations they classify, see The IRS Is Here to Help. So Is ICE., and the endogenous base rates discussion therein.

Also published today: a follow-up to All Statistics Are Local on the CPI, tariffs, and whose inflation the headline number is actually measuring — Your Basket May Vary.

Bam. (A Short Post. Seriously.)

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Regular readers of this blog — yes, both of you — will know that I recently published a piece called “Can a Game Know Its Own Rules?” It was — and I say this as the person who wrote it — very long. I am told it has been read by dozens of people, some of whom finished it. This post is shorter. Think of it as the highlight reel.

Here is the highlight: on March 10, Bam Adebayo of the Miami Heat scored 83 points against the Washington Wizards, breaking Kobe Bryant’s modern record and finishing second all-time only to Wilt Chamberlain’s 100. It was extraordinary. It was also, depending on who you ask, not entirely basketball.

With the Heat up by 25 and two minutes left, Adebayo had 77 points. His teammates began intentionally fouling the Wizards — in a game they were winning by 25 — to extend possessions and get Bam the ball back. Then, with 1:25 remaining, Heat forward Keshad Johnson was fouled and deliberately missed his second free throw off the front of the rim to give Adebayo a putback opportunity. (Ed: And you wonder why I stopped watching games with you.)

None of this violated a written rule. All of it, critics argued, violated the game.

Robert Horry said it needed an asterisk. Pat Riley called the criticism bullshit. ESPN had takes. The takes had takes. And underneath all of it was a question that, as it happens, I recently spent approximately 4,800 words on: what does a rulebook do when the thing it needs to prohibit is an intention?

The rules can tell you what a foul is. They cannot tell you that a player was trying to make a free throw. They can penalize intentional fouls — the Hack-a-Shaq rules exist precisely because this problem has come up before — but they cannot penalize a player for missing a free throw on purpose, because “on purpose” is not a category the rulebook contains. To enforce it, you’d need a rule about intent, and to enforce that, you’d need a referee who can read minds, and to enforce that, you’ve left the game entirely and entered a different one.

This is what I called — at considerable length, in the previous post — the penalty ceiling problem. Any finite rule system has a flat region at the top where the marginal cost of escalation drops to zero, because the rules run out before the actions do. You can add new rules to cover new actions, but those rules create new strategic possibilities, and the gap simply migrates. You can’t build a complete rulebook. A game cannot certify, from within, that all of its rules are self-enforcing — not because rule-writers are careless, but because this is a theorem.

What happened in the fourth quarter against the Wizards isn’t a scandal. It’s an existence proof.

The critics are right that something was violated. They’re just wrong about what. The game’s written rules were followed scrupulously — no technical fouls, no ejections, nothing. What was violated was an unwritten norm: that you should be trying in the directions the game assumes you’re trying in. Trying to make free throws. Trying to defend rather than foul. Trying, in some general sense, to play basketball rather than to play with basketball.

But “respect the game” is not in the rulebook. It can’t be in the rulebook — because the rulebook can only govern actions, not orientations. The moment you write a rule against trying to miss, you’ve created an incentive to claim you weren’t trying to miss, and now you need a rule governing false claims of not trying to miss, and now you need to think about Belichick’s injury reports, and now you’re back in my previous post, and I promised this one would be short.

So: was it a legitimate record? I think this is actually the wrong question. The better question is whether a record set under conditions the record-keepers never envisioned should count as the same kind of record as one set under normal competitive play. Wilt’s 100 was chaotic and semi-staged in its own ways. Kobe’s 81 was not. Bam’s 83 sits somewhere in between — genuinely extraordinary through three and a half quarters, and then something else entirely in the final minutes. The rulebook cannot make that distinction. We’re going to have to.

Or, as a supercomputer once concluded after running every possible scenario: a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

(I said this post would be short. I didn’t say it would have a different ending.)

And, with that, I leave you with this.