“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
A Vice President at a large technology company sits down at the end of the quarter to evaluate her engineering team. She has twelve direct reports. They have spent the quarter using AI tools heavily, as the company’s leadership has insisted they do. She must now write performance reviews. She has to say, in writing, … Read more
Friday’s post argued that what the Court did in Louisiana v. Callais is best described as breaking a structural link — a load-bearing connection that was holding up many actions at once, not just the Louisiana map. That post was about what. This post is about why now. Why this case, why this term, why … Read more
Justice Kagan opens her Callais dissent with a hypothetical. She knows it’s stylized, and she says so. Imagine a state shaped like a rectangle, with one of its six congressional districts a near-perfect circle in the middle. The circle is ninety percent Black. The other five districts, surrounding it, are ninety percent white. Voting is … Read more
The previous post used the phrase “local data” something like thirty times. The phrase did most of the heavy lifting in the argument: local data does not determine global structure, the more holes the underlying object has the more slack between local and global, and so on. I want to start this post by interrogating … Read more