Bluesky Summary 2025-03-31 - 2025-04-03

AI companies are best understood as a finance-political play-turned-ponzi offered not to end users but to the Accelerationist/decibillion/tech groupie crowd: much needed growth + much-desired historical centrality. It was, is, addictive to them - but now it's wearing off. via @edzitron.com

Hank Green The thing we learned from Web2 is that the most impactful businesses became the most impactful by optimizing for addiction. Which means we should all ask, how would you optimize generative AI for addiction? Whatever makes it the most addictive is probably what it will become.

Paraphrasing myself -it's my feed- Goldman's odds imply the rule of law, technical expertise in governance, basic institutional infrastructures, etc, have little short-term economic value. Think of the disjunctive event: 1/ blog.rinesi.com/2025/03/rebu... via @brianbeutler.bsky.social

Nick Timiraos Goldman Sachs raises to 35% its odds of a recession in the next year, from 20% previously, due to the broad use of tariffs from the Trump administration They last put the odds at this level during the rapid monetary tightening of 2022 and the SVB related stress of 2023

[Self-repost 1/4] A draft of some notes I've been making on how to approach a first emergency rebuild of organizational cognitive infrastructures (not the main problem going on but *a* problem nonetheless). Nothing much different from what I've already been doing but context and motivation matter.

As a minimum, state-level election integrity assurance work -of the sort that you have to start last week, including anti-DOGE IT security- in currently blue states is the only way to make technically possible for those to remain blue. via @wikisteff.bsky.social

Jamal Greene The President does not have the constitutional or statutory authority to dictate the content of voter registration forms. This EO is an incredibly dangerous power grab. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Sophisticated expertise infrastructures are a public good with huge positive economic externalities; a business community that has consistently supported or at least tolerated anti-expertise candidates was deluding itself at best about them at worst about the world. via @drjlhazelton.bsky.social

Anne Cronin Vaccine maker shares are sinking after the resignation the FDA's Peter Marks, who had long overseen approvals -- a “significant negative” for biotech and biopharma, one analyst says. By @gerryfsmith.bsky.social and John Lauerman > www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The fact that market actors haven't priced in yet that this sort of epochal infrastructural arson wasn't possible and now is -something already true in late Nov '24- has cemented my conviction that there's no market modeling without sociology as an input. via @t0nyyates.bsky.social

Paul Donovan 'End the Fed'? Casual talk of “ending” the Federal Reserve is unlikely to improve confidence in the US currency or economy www.ubs.com/global/en/we... #EconSky

This institutional self-lobotomy is maddening from the POV of an ethos of intellectual integrity, but also from simple competitive advantage arguments. The last few centuries are proof that good analysis is more valuable than not being yelled at! via @wikisteff.bsky.social

George Pearkes There is a *ton* of pressure on good-faith economists, strategists, and analysts from their management. Not necessarily because the management is imposing their personal views (though sometimes), more because there's a view that any negative analysis is "getting political". Sam problem as the media.

Among other things, we're seeing globally an attack on the professional ethos of civil servants, the judiciary, media, college administrators, etc that -together with periodic elections and the ultima ratio of popular uprisings- is what makes liberal societies work. Mixed results. I wonder if... 1/

Rob Ford On the one, this is reassuring as it shows the deep respect for the rule of law still held by many politicians & civil servants. On the other hand, it is troubling to think how much depends on such norms and attachments enduring. A govt with a Cummings minded majority could just fire civil servants

I wouldn't call it "amusing," but it's certainly *something* that Democrats' strategy focuses on what people would think about "the issues" and not what people would think about *them*. Ethical cowardice aside, that strikes me as a weird approach to political branding. People vote... 1/

Alan Allport Schumer et al live in fear of ever saying anything remotely controversial. Trump has just announced that he doesn’t care about rising prices hurting consumers. Yet life goes on. The Democrats need to stop being terrified of what the electorate might think and start doing what they believe in.

Hoping for a Reverse Morbius where the movie does so well it embarrasses Warner Bros. out of the surreal Friedmanite ritual of doing things and then burning them for tax purposes (which I hope will drive future historians to distraction trying to explain to students). via @adapalmer.bsky.social

Alex Zalben It's official! Ketchup Entertainment has purchased the worldwide rights for COYOTE VS. ACME from Warner Bros., and will distribute the film in theaters.

Proof that professionally studying the operation of/responses to oppressive thought systems doesn't make it particularly easy to grapple with the ones you're living in. [Also why data people can be the least empirical MFs in the room, and I say that as one.] via @metaomicsnerd.bsky.social

Shaily Patel academia breaks us, i think. please don’t judge, i had my reasons, but i only now started taking weekends off and the hardest thing is honoring that promise to myself. it’s important i do so. any of y’all similarly conditioned? any resources that work, especially on that damn guilt?

It speaks to Trump's lifelong privilege (and the mechanics of US society as a hothouse for white rich men of a certain type) that he could reach the presidency while being constitutionally unable to grasp the concept of effective collective responses. via @wikisteff.bsky.social

Carl Quintanilla * CHINESE STATE MEDIA: CHINA, JAPAN, SOUTH KOREA REACH A CONSENSUS THAT THREE SIDES WILL JOINTLY RESPOND TO THE U.S. TARIFFS @reuters.com

"America has never been wealthier" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person is economically screwed. Billionaire Georg, who lives shitposting & gets over 10,000 tax breaks every day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

Steve Randy Waldman "America Has Never Been Wealthier. Here’s Why It Doesn’t Feel That Way—A surge in U.S. wealth has been driven by stock and home values. But the gains are concentrated at the top, leaving others in a sour economic mood." @talsmith.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/b... cc @steveroth.bsky.social

I'm puzzled by the lack of visible freaking out. Yes, ideally you'd keep mum while you try to prepare, but - those bonds are the basic stuff the global financial system is built on. Making T-bills risky and *everything in the world* becomes nonlinearly riskier... 1/ via @t0nyyates.bsky.social

My oversimplified model is that, faced with the demographic reality that you can't simultaneously have a democracy and a society where the harassment and rape of women are unthinkable, a sufficiently large minority of men decided to do without the former. via @drjlhazelton.bsky.social

Eric Michael Garcia Something I learned in this piece (but it seems so much more obvious when I learned it): The manosphere largely surged in numbers AFTER #MeToo. Plenty of people smarter than I am have noted that young men voted for Trump partially because they HATED #MeToo. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

We're seeing indirect (& redundant) proof of the hothouse nature of the high-status bits of US society (donors, long-serving representatives, Big Law, etc): selected & trained to work within the status system, they have little/no experience of having to fight against it. via @intelwire.bsky.social

Asawin Suebsaeng Other universities can’t financially afford to do something like this necessarily but since Harvard has a massive endowment that could power the sun for a year if it wanted it to, wouldn’t this be the kind of moment to open up those ungodly reserves in the name of saying “fine. go ahead”

Something like @wwattribution.bsky.social for the impact of Trump/DOGE on public health -fast public attribution of excess deaths (aggregate & high-salience individuals)- would be scientifically and politically useful. by @leahfeiger.bsky.social @makenakelly.bsky.social @knibbs.bsky.social

Leah Feiger NEW: The CDC has been gutted this morning. Thousands of CDC employees who worked on things like preventing HIV and lead poisoning have been told they were subject to a reduction in force. Experts say people will die. from me, @makenakelly.bsky.social, @knibbs.bsky.social:

While some keep hyping up valuations by promising their hypertrophied chatbots will achieve AGI Really Soon Now, this is the sort of incremental tool development and diffusion that *is* moving the frontier of applied cognitive capabilities. Superintelligent research labs are where the action is.

Julia M. Rohrer Looking forward to giving yet another talk at the Cognition Academy at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. This is a bit of an ambitious one: causal graphs, longitudinal data, natural experiments. Slides: osf.io/mcd5h

[Self-repost 2/4] A draft of some notes I've been making on how to approach a first emergency rebuild of organizational cognitive infrastructures (not the main problem going on but *a* problem nonetheless). Nothing much different from what I've already been doing but context and motivation matter.

Short fic posted last month: Uber, but for...

There's no model of the world where institutional performance is causally influenced by the cognitive capabilities and good faith of their leadership [and the alternative is implausible] under which the US economy doesn't get progressively worse during this admin. via @wikisteff.bsky.social

George Pearkes There are pages and pages of this stuff. Hard to overstate how badly the White House is torching potential for economic activity rn. www.dallasfed.org/research/sur...

Part of the ongoing situation might be described as parts of the Net developing into social environments where existing gender hierarchies were gleefully elevated to psychopathological levels and men translating those behaviors to their relationships and politics. 1/ via @metaomicsnerd.bsky.social

Moira Donegan This has been empirically demonstrated many times! You can’t expect men to have a place of domination and superiority over women in the home and treat women as equals outside of it.

The huge gap between the maths toolbox and "doing things with numbers" gives me hope about possible methodologies filling more gaps between 1D projections and engagement with individual cases (as irreplaceable as both approaches are!). 1/ via @annaalexandrova.bsky.social @t0nyyates.bsky.social

Mark Fabian I'm rereading the transcripts of our interviews with people talking about their life satisfaction. I am again struck by how pathetic our little 0-10 scales are at capturing what they're saying. Here's a retired lady telling my assistant what it's like having a son with paranoid schizophrenia.

"The Power Of The Algorithm" has been exaggerated, but game data analysts & similar have a better grasp than many campaign analysts that the job is to change behavior, not track an index. It's a different *goal* so you need a fundamentally different *map*. 1/ via @llyfrgellbabel.bsky.social

Osita Nwanevu I have seen the concept of the "median voter" accurately explained with reference to its actual origin in maybe two posts since policy school ten years ago. This is the second time.

Leopards aside: NIH estimated 2m new diagnosis in 2024. it's '25, you can contact them all one way or another. Say 25% didn't vote/voted R. Say 3 people close to each. That's a very easy to mobilize group around the size of Trump's pop vote gap - just from 2024. via @alanallport.bsky.social

Republicans Against Trumpism Meghan McCain says she’s “absolutely heartbroken” about the Trump administration cutting funding for brain cancer research.

Is this a great classic CS-style April Fool's? Yes! Is it a reminder (working at many levels!) of the mostly unrealized idea of literate programming? Kinda! Kudos both ways to @jadgardner.bsky.social @willsmithvision.bsky.social @willrowan.bsky.social

Mutatis mutandis (and there's a lot of them) I keep thinking of some variation of the concept of combat experience. I don't know his biography, but Booker probably got where he is while being attacked by higher-social-status people in ways eg Schumer never has. It's a nontrivial muscle to develop.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux It seems to have always been true that the Americans who held most fiercely to the dream of liberty are those from backgrounds denied it. Unlike we who feel more secure, I suppose they understand better the great value of liberty, knowing - personally or from family - what it is to be denied it.

(1) We all know there are third-line ministers in Beijing who are more up to date with these plans than Trump. (2) This would break _something_ in the moral of the US military. (3) There's a good chance of Musk's tactical micromanagement, with horrifying results. via @drjennings.bsky.social

Jeff Stein Scoop: White House officials are studying the costs of taking over Greenland, attempting to determine price-tag to maintain & what revenue could be gained, per sources Government officials working on Greenland www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

I understand military/intelligence professionals [those not pushed out by Trump's racism and misogyny] have a very explicit tradition of doing the work regardless of who happens to be POTUS, but I can't imagine this entire situation isn't straining those commitments. via @intelwire.bsky.social

EM Simpson If you are being asked to work on this analysis, it's worth considering a) re-assignment or b) resignation.

Much of what Trump/Musk are doing has the net effect of making the already-tricky US voting system easier to screw with. They don't need an excuse -are already doing it- but still worth paying attention to any noises about "fraud." via @brendelbored.bsky.social @dynamicsymmetry.bsky.social

Ken Klippenstein Wasserman calls the Wisconsin race for Crawford

Anyone can become angry…That is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not easy. Nicomachean Ethics bk. 2, 1108b

No, for sure. I didn't mean it as "the origin of," just as a novel intensifying factor with a similar mechanism as the one OP described by @moiradonegan.bsky.social

Social rituals don't need sponsors or promoters past a certain self-sustaining mass, perhaps nowhere more clearly than on the Net (which once upon a time was niche and noncommercial enough to be a fertile ground for the). Whether NaNoWriMo has disappeared or not is an empirical sociology question.

Once a political/media community gives up on intellectual integrity/competence as a sine qua non regardless of popularity/viability as "content" you no longer have guardrails against the insane either. The US did, and here we are. I mean... 1/ via @nktpnd.bsky.social @t0nyyates.bsky.social

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick For the second time in the last 24 hours, Trump suggests that he thinks he will be putting tariffs directly on fentanyl smuggled into the United States illegally.

1. Expected it to be higher. Good news I guess? 2. 2025 as a natural experiment on the influence of government policy/messaging on same? 3. Understanding the 'info environment -> individual behavior -> outcomes -> info..." cycle is necessary for awful but urgent reasons via @wikisteff.bsky.social

Timothy Caulfield Study: Modeling impact of misinformation during epidemic via @nature.com "...result in an additional 14% of the population becoming infected—nearly 47 million Americans..." Price tag of vaccine misinformation = $143B "...an alarming bound on the harm of exposure to online vaccine misinformation."

There's a "Fast & Furious Chaotic Movie Titles" joke somewhere in there.

nilay patel Sony pushing both the limits of OLED image quality AND logical naming schemes with "Bravia 8 II" and "Bravia 2 II" here www.theverge.com/news/641755/...

The inverse relationship between status and courage is telling. I think it comes down to high-status organizations being led by people who has had less need to, and therefore less experience with and appetite for, punching up. Personnel is policy but it's also principles. via @t0nyyates.bsky.social

Win Monroe Watching in real time which universities, law firms, etc choose to bend the knee vs those who pay more than lip service to their principles is really something to behold.

Very sound policy analysis, but I think the proper language would be psychiatry not economy. Sadly the parsimonious model is that US policy is driven by an ignorant delusional narcissist with no personal or institutional impulse control. The rest follows. I don't... 1/ via @worgztheowl.bsky.social

James Ball The Trump tariff strategy is *extremely* confused even on its own terms – not least because it is pursuing several different goals that act in contradictory directions. None of those goals are bad, or wrong, per se – but they do clash with one another. 🧵

I'm so envious of that problem. I've had to keep credible intervals of strategically key parameters with wide posteriors out of reports because mainstream management processes don't know what to do with anything that's not a point estimate.

Julia M. Rohrer The way that psychologists talk about different “types” of validity and reliability — is that another variation of not clearly distinguishing between the theoretical estimand and the statistical estimate? Like there’s one reliability but different ways to infer it based on different assumptions…

The dependency of political systems on information flows (specially in terms of setting policy->outcome causal models) has been severely neglected by liberal political actors - most damningly as they have been (and are) deliberately wrecked. That's one problem with... 1/ via @t0nyyates.bsky.social

Asawin Suebsaeng It’s so perfect (read: godawful) the number of Republican voters you can talk to who don’t care, or fully support, when u tell them trump and the gop want to brutally slash Medicaid, partly because those voters don’t know they’re on Medicaid

> It looks more like there are tormenting him than tempting him Kinkshame not lest ye be kinkshamed via @drjlhazelton.bsky.social

Nothings Monstered The Temptation of St. Anthony — Martin Shongauer, c. 1485

The "liquidity illusion" is a side effect of still using unnecessarily poor cognitive representations. Liquidity, like e.g. forward guidance, isn't a number but a likelihood function. Cultural inertia doesn't justify an absurdly wealthy industry still using pre-computational cognitive modes. 1/

Matt Levine This newsletter on the face of it might look quite robust. But actually in extreme events it’s more and more fragile. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news...

... instead of a likelihood function we are throwing away most of the power of using computers to communicate and think with, and we don't do it right due to sociological/cultural/training issues; technically it's been possible for a long time. 4/4

I think we're far past the point where the Efficient Market Hypothesis can be put forward with any sort of seriousness. American business leadership is as vulnerable to class affinity biases ["He can't be *that* stupid" + "He wouldn't harm *us*"] as anybody else. via @intelwire.bsky.social

Seth Masket How were dumb and broadly applied tariffs not already baked into stock prices? Were traders really surprised by Trump today?

Makes perfect ideological sense though: Those processes give power to groups AI pushers want (for economic and ideological reasons) not to have any. If you hate bureaucracies as a concept it's easy to believe (or pretend to) gen AI doesn't need/will replace them. via @kevinriggle.bsky.social

Dave Guarino The thing I can't knock out of my head lately: We *have* a set of tools for managing non-deterministic systems like generative AI. It's the processes used in bureaucracies! Quality control (sampling, root cause analysis, corrective actions), secondary review, appeals/escalations, I could go on...

So this is what it feels to go mad. Uh. via @newseye.bsky.social

News Eye We’re so screwed.

I keep saying -to others but also to myself- that right now you can't analyze the US and global economy and politics without a psychiatric lens. And I do mean that as a professional recommendation, not just a cry of anguish (although it's that too) via @drjennings.bsky.social

Mike Masnick Incredibly, this appears to be true. We tariffed our own (jointly operated with the UK) military base.

[Self-repost 3/4] A draft of some notes I've been making on how to approach a first emergency rebuild of organizational cognitive infrastructures (not the main problem going on but *a* problem nonetheless). Nothing much different from what I've already been doing but context and motivation matter.

It's... it's worse than I thought it was. But you know what, that's on me. Now excuse me, I have to find a pillow to scream into for a while. via @maxberger.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social

dan sinker Guess where they got their weird trade deficit math from?

I've spent a *lot* of time ranting on AI use hollowing out institutional know-how due to the mismatch between short-term professional pressures and long-term institutional needs. So right now I'm rather offended they jumped over the mechanism and just did the most stupid possible thing right away.

dan sinker Guess where they got their weird trade deficit math from?

If I could hold a lot of big finance decision-makers at gunpoint, the first -well, second- thing I'd do is force them to tell me what the hell their model of Donald Trump was if they hadn't already priced this. (I do know: Rich white conservative guy. And here we are.) via @drjennings.bsky.social

Chris Kluwe I don’t think people realize how bad it’s going to get tomorrow when Wall Street finally collectively realizes that these people have no idea how economics work, and then it’s gonna be a scramble to not be the one left holding the bag.

We're at that point, I think, where you had just discovered that your Gibson dystopia was really a Philip K. Dick dystopia but in a sharp unending moment of clarity you realize you are in a Thomas Ligotti story. via @dynamicsymmetry.bsky.social

One thing I'd love to understand better -for both prediction and strategy- is if/how mechanisms differ by age group for (1) positions on gender roles and (2) changes in voting behavior. Quant polls + narrative models feel off (acknowledging Cox' dictum). I assume... 1/ via @drjennings.bsky.social

Kevin Banda Lots of takes floating around out there about how young men have gone hard to the right in ways that differ from everyone else, but I'm not seeing that in the 2024 CES data. Gen Z men look a lot like Millennial men on partisanship, ideological identity, and self-reported vote choice.

I believe the cognitive bottleneck is the use of narratives as the first/only layer of analysis between political results/polls and mechanistic models. Causal modeling is hard enough when done well. Done informally is almost always an exercise in bias reinforcement. via @robfordmancs.bsky.social

Cas Mudde 11. I am not surprised that “centrists” like Leonhardt believe “the narrative”, as it legitimizes their own reactionary instincts, but why do progressives continue to fall for it, particularly when it is overly clear that it doesn’t even work electorally?!? #TheEnd

Tangentially, I'm reading "Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel" and it mentions in passing how a lot of possession events happened to women about to be married, hypothesizing it as a form of resistance, which does track (speaking as an utter layperson)

*This* A complementary way to put it is that adaptive behavior is sustained through memory, culture, and formal knowledge, so after a couple generations if you pair reactionary cultural politics and disdain of knowledge you get institutional regression. Happens...1/ via @shannonvallor.bsky.social

Max Dubler 🏳️‍🌈 Tapping the sign.

First-order effect, for sure. What about second-order, basically the world's behavioral model of the US? My informal belief is that they have done much to break the [IMHO long untenable] assumption of basic policy rationality, but I've underestimated institutional cognitive inertia in the past.

It's not a risky bet to assume that colonial demands to Taiwan [chip factories?] are soon to follow. The Greenland/Panama/migration angles are par for the insanity course, but I can't imagine they'll do anything good to morale or effectiveness. via @harkaway.bsky.social

Olga Nesterova 🧵WaPo: A secret memo from SecDef Hegseth tells military: get ready for war with China over Taiwan. Everything else [Russia, Iran, terror groups] is secondary The memo copies parts of a 2024 Heritage Foundation report, now DOD guidance—almost word for word. The report’s co-author runs Pentagon policy

Do I dare hope this will help burst the self-serving bubble-sustaining delusion of AI as a viable replacement to domain expertise? It probably won't! But, quoth Sappho via Anne Carson, pan tolmaton: all is to be dared. Including, even these days, hope. via @drjlhazelton.bsky.social

Elizabeth Bear So according to the absolute bewilderment and mockery of folks at FT, it appears that the Musk administration used ChatGPT to set these tariff rates. Be sure to click through at the bottom of the article to "the stupidest chart you will ever see".

@kevinkbanda.bsky.social - this by @stano.bsky.social @cmwitko.bsky.social might point to an age-specific difference in causal mechanisms. My informal oversimplification of the 2020s: "Realizing you can't have both democracy and patriarchy, a lot of men decided to dispense with the former."

Heath Brown Must read from @stano.bsky.social and @cmwitko.bsky.social just posted on @3streamsblog.bsky.social medium.com/3streams/why...

I see this as the dual of racism/classism leading commanders to underestimate the strategic skill of opponents despite the obvious evidence: Racism/classism led business leaders to *overestimate* [to be kind] the strategic skill of Trump/Musk [fellow rich white guys] despite the obvious evidence.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux I am no economist (took some classes, but no expert am I), but uh, that 'line go down' this morning is honestly more than I expected. I wonder if, more than just the tariffs, "oh crap, these guys actually have no plan" has just settled in for a lot of investors.

Rich white men had even more relative social power than they have now back in the early unregulated industrialization era; I won't dignify any of this with "plan" [well, Heritage does have one] but that's the dream. via @markpopham.bsky.social @dynamicsymmetry.bsky.social

Barrista The worst part of this is that even if manufacturing jobs came back because of this (they won’t) and even if Americans retooled for those jobs (they won’t) those jobs sucked! It’s like demanding to return to being a farming society. People fled that life the instant they could, in the millions!

The only reverse engineering I can make of this is the assumption that the "natural" state of every bilateral trade relationship is balance (no competitive advantages or other economic differences) and therefore a deficit is a sign of "cheating" (this is how the WH describes it in fact).

That's why I think the electorate's causal model is the basic battleground of political education/messaging: you can get away with a lot if people believe the fallout is somebody else's fault. Here though the reaction to the very proudly announced action was almost immediate, so it's gonna be hard.

They already made "not all the debt is legitimate" noises, wherein the lack of a market freakout freaked me out. I hope everybody is rebuilding models today but I fear those Trump has threatened w/violence (EU) are more likely than those he hasn't yet (US executives). via @drjlhazelton.bsky.social

Sander Tordoir I’ll say it again. If you - and I’m looking at you 5D chess players in the City and on the Street - still believe this administration will not blow up the IMF and World Bank, let alone roll back the Feds swap and repo lines - think again.

It's useful to understand that Milei isn't being strategic: he honestly believes all of that. He's been calling non-Libertarians Communist or Keynesians (his favorite insult) and claiming climate change is a hoax by [also Communist] scientists to get grants since before he got into poiltics.

Ryan Mac 🙃 here's the piece if you want to be informed like the President of Argentina www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/w...