The best way to kill a joke is to explain it. This is a series about explaining jokes. Each installment takes a game people enjoy and runs it through the machinery of cooperative game theory until the fun stops. The wager is that the autopsy is where the biology is — if you want to … Read more
LONDON — I came up out of the Underground this morning at the wrong station, a humbling way to begin a post about the meaning of position. The conference I am here for, the Warwick/Yale/Princeton meeting on political economy, takes its name, at one remove, from an English county whose old town lent its name … 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