TOKYO — Earlier this week I wrote that there was a man I meant to come back to before I left Japan. This is me keeping the promise. The meeting that Maggie and I came to Tokyo for is the gathering of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare, and at the turn of the … Read more
TOKYO — No guidebook leads with this, but Tokyo spent much of the twentieth century as one of the world’s quiet capitals of a strange and beautiful science: the mathematics of collective choice, the study of what a group of people actually do when they try to decide something together. The founding puzzle is older … Read more
UENO — Two kinds of time trouble follow me around, and only one of them is worth a paragraph. The first is jet lag, which is real, tedious, and has nothing to teach anybody: my body is keeping East Coast hours in a city that gave them up long ago, and it will right itself … Read more
A confession before we start: I billed this as three posts, and the arithmetic has not cooperated (Ed.: You definitely know non-cooperation, John). The last two turned up a result and a question big enough that I’d rather run long than rush them, so the series will continue past today. This post is the third, … 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
The Supreme Court has twenty-three cases left to decide this month, and one of them is Trump v. Cook. The facts, briefly: last August, the President posted a letter announcing the immediate removal of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, citing uninvestigated allegations that she misstated her residency on mortgage paperwork before she joined the Board. … 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
BENEATH THE ENGLISH CHANNEL — Having just reoriented myself to turning my head to the right when about to cross the street, I have boarded the train at St. Pancras with Maggie, as we leave London and head to the 8th Conference on Philosophy and Economics in Nancy, France — via Paris, of course. There … 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