Formal impossibility results don’t get solved — they migrate. Fix the gap here, and it reappears there. Close this loophole, and you open that one. The impossibility is conserved; it just changes address. This tag collects cases where the structural problem turns out to be the same problem, wearing different clothes.
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
In a 2015 symposium on big data and measurement, Maggie Penn and I argued that social choice theory is central to the analysis of complex data precisely because any reduction of high-dimensional data into a usable measure involves aggregation, and aggregation involves choices about what to preserve and what to discard.1 We used the Florentine … Read more
Scientific American ran a piece yesterday on Simpson’s paradox — the phenomenon in which a trend that holds within every subgroup of a dataset reverses, or vanishes entirely, when those subgroups are combined. Regular readers of this blog will have encountered it before. In 2012, it showed up inside No Child Left Behind: a school … Read more
The big news in congressional procedure this week — and I recognize that “big news in congressional procedure” is a phrase that requires either explanation or apology, and I intend to provide both — is that Senate Republicans are planning to use the budget reconciliation process to pass the SAVE America Act, a voter ID … Read more
The Financial Times ran a piece last week reporting that Senegal — yes, that Senegal — had borrowed €650 million through instruments it had not disclosed to the IMF, to its existing bondholders, or apparently to anyone who might have objected. Which, it turns out, is everyone. I clicked on it because it was about … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
Hi again! The question I’m about to pose is one that, I’m reliably informed, clears rooms at cocktail parties. But I think it sits at the foundation of why institutions are so hard to reform — and why the people who try to reform them so often end up making things worse. That’s for next … Read more
In response to the concerns raised by colleagues (principally and initially in this petition, but see also Chris Blattman’s take and other responses from both sides), I wanted to clarify why I think that delaying implementation of the Journal Editors’ Transparency Statement (JETS) is a poorly thought out goal, one that will differentially disadvantage some … Read more
Vaccination, both in terms of its social good and the role of government in securing that social good while respecting individual liberty, has been a hot topic lately. In fact, it’s gone viral. (HAHAHAHA. Sorry.) In this short post, I link the debate about vaccination, liberty, and social welfare, with the work of Amartya Sen, a preeminent … Read more