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
Six posts since the last Dispatch, four of them a single arc on AI as a classification system. The arc started with a Vice President who could not evaluate her engineers, passed through a benchmark that turned out to be measuring string length, paused on a paper about elite athletes that was Berkson’s paradox in … Read more
A new paper in Science — Gullich et al., “Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance” — looked at top performers in athletics, science, math, and music. The headline finding is one most parents would like to hear: among the highest adult achievers, peak performance is negatively associated with early … 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
Five posts since the last Dispatch, organized as two arcs: Monday through Wednesday tracked the news in real time, Thursday and Friday returned to the methodological pieces those posts depended on. The tightest moment came Wednesday — the Iran prediction the April 17 post staked landed around 5pm, and the Virginia rule the Wednesday post … Read more
Yesterday Virginia voters ratified a constitutional amendment giving the General Assembly temporary authority to redraw the state’s congressional districts before 2031. Most of what you will read about the result over the next few days will concern seats — specifically, whether Virginia Democrats will in fact net four additional House seats in November under the … 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