Bluesky Summary 2025-04-04 - 2025-04-12

I assume everybody taking advantage of this "offer" was already using LLMs, so the impact will be marginal - although it whatever it is OpenAI calls a "research mode" allows students to BS more volubly, then people grading papers are in for a very painful time. via @mpaarlberg.bsky.social

Michael Paarlberg OpenAI making ChatGPT+ free for college students before finals will have about the same impact on learning as Nestle giving away free baby formula to nursing mothers had on breastfeeding

[Self-repost 4/4] 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.

I'm very glad about this. It's far from the only thing that'll have to be done (e.g. you have to keep electoral rolls off DOGE's grubby little hands) but it's definitely one of the key fronts. via @paulgowder.bsky.social

Reuters Democratic state attorneys general filed a lawsuit challenging US President Donald Trump's executive order that compels voters to prove they are US citizens and bars states from counting mail-in ballots received after Election Day reut.rs/3E9PGTb

The infinite possible "to be replaced by..." jokes aside, the NSA strikes me as less the thing you use against migrants/Tesla protestors than the thing you use against local and foreign politicians. It'd be slightly out of character MO-wise, but not otherwise unexpected. via @wikisteff.bsky.social

Matt Novak They just fired the head of the NSA. I’m not sure what that means exactly, but in the Trump era I’d bet it’s not good.

I distrust oversimplifying explanations based on cognitive biases, but it does seem to be the case that most market actors are showing psychological [and perhaps more seriously, institutional] resistance to assume that what's happening is indeed what's happening. via @intelwire.bsky.social

Mark Copelovitch 👇🎯 See also: the assault on higher ed financing/NSF/NIH. Folks are wildly unprepared for the magnitude of the looming disasters if this stuff is permanent, & no one is actually acting as if they believe these things are permanent, probably bc admitting how terrible things will get is too difficult.

"When a high-flying Big City commodities trader does something shady, they get at most a short low-traffic news post. But when I, Ea-Nasir, ..." via @alanallport.bsky.social

Ian Coldwater 📦💥 FOUND EA-NASIR

"Pain points memo" <- Yes, exactly this. Trump is hitting a lot of those himself, that's something to exploit. Things as simple as leaflets in SSA queues saying Trump shut down the phones and how to call their representatives about it. Action items + highly motivated people is messaging 101.

Brian Beutler Really do hope the rest of the world focuses on things that matter to Trump supporters, both elite and grassroots. Teslas. Video games. Whatever. Put Democratic data scientists to good use and publish a pain points memo.

It also looks like a fascinating exercise in modeling behavior change in conditions of deep disinformation, which is a rather interesting problem on its own.

Pretty much a third of my posts here are some version of "I wish I could sit down with and model how the heck market actors are not more freaked out than they are" - and that's been true every day no matter how freaked out they have been. via @tompepinsky.com @drjlhazelton.bsky.social

𝙅𝙖𝙘🍩𝙗 𝙉𝙮𝙧𝙪𝙥 If you think the tariffs are stupid then just wait until Trump refuses to pay US debt

And as collectively enormously influential actors choose or are compelled to use those as the basis for their own economic and political behavior, at some time scales/topics the financial system is as much an information dilution[1] system as an information aggregation one. [1] It's even worse...1/

Tony Yates These rentaquotes from financial analysts also read like they are constrained by press offices telling them not to piss off clients who are invested in the GOP, and also not to draw the ire of the administration.

Thinking of Musk's insane retweet of the "Ladies it's time to start thinking whether the guy you're dating has postapocalyptic warlord potential" [movie-inaccurate] meme. A lot of those post-crisis power fantasies are to a large degree sexual. via @interfluidity.com

Dan Davies remember to read Kalecki as well as Keynes. if your class is defined by "control of the means of production" then production is a nice to have but control is a got to have.

As the Right added professional skill/knowledge to the ever-vaguer bag of "wokeness" whenever it contradicted a policy or belonged to the "wrong person," they went from transparently inhumane to downright suicidal. This is the speeding up FO of a very long FA. via @dynamicsymmetry.bsky.social

💀 evelynn 💀 sir don't touch that, that's load bearing wokeness, we need that.

It does match the rule of thumb of people at the higher end of socioeconomic status feeling less threatened by authoritarianism[1] and/or having less capability for fighting back than those who have been wrestling with versions of this their whole lives. [1] Wrong. via @dynamicsymmetry.bsky.social

Usha Lee McFarling Elementary school principals going where university presidents fear to tread...

"all the badly behaving children in Asia and elsewhere are coming home to papa. [...] on the phone begging for mercy." This is an administration & party with a *lot* of sex abusers, including minors, and the linguistic patterns aren't even subtle. via @jamellebouie.net @dynamicsymmetry.bsky.social

Aaron Rupar Kudlow: "Buying cheap goods is not a real prosperity, and we don't have to accept that. So you lay the law down, that's all. Look, all the badly behaving children in Asia and elsewhere are coming home to papa. They're all on the phone begging for mercy."

It does hit the overlap between class ideology (knowledge workers got too uppity), decabillonaires' compulsive pursuit of further exponential growth, uncritical tech discourse, and competitive pressure on workers/students. And of course, the apocalyptic vibes. via @llyfrgellbabel.bsky.social

ae it really does seem like the primary threat of AI ended up not being AI itself but the effect of believing in AI as an ideological concept

Organizations, countries and international systems periodically forget and re-learn those with the power aren't more stupid than everybody else, but 10x more stupid than they think they are. I don't believe in Predictable Rules of History but it's a very common sequence. via @t0nyyates.bsky.social

Nicholas Grossman Bankers and CEOs’ surprise and dismay over Trump’s massive tariffs appears genuine. They really did believe in an Imaginary Reliable Trump, one who was tossing meat to the rubes but would do what a Wall St. CEO would do, and told each other this to the point it was socially-reinforced groupthink.

"Bounded rationality" in the traditional sense is much less useful to understand the behavior of people/orgs/political systems than their causal models of reality. Being deeply misinformed in a factual sense is more common and dangerous than any cognitive bias. via @t0nyyates.bsky.social

John Oxley It's hard to voice this without sounding incredibly elitist, but it is a huge problem for politics if people just don't have an idea how complex things work.

Dems/NGOs/media could do worse than reach out to fired government IT experts and systemitically FOIA/sue to monitor, document and prevent criminogenic infrastructure changes (incompetent as they are). Infrastructure w/o reliable logging allows -is built for- crime/authoritarianism at scale.

Zoë Schiffer DOGE is planning a hackathon at the IRS: www.wired.com/story/doge-h...

A fascinating -and fascinatingly, educationally, excruciatingly *slow*- story in 2025 is how high-status market actors are slowly digesting what was obvious to a *lot* of experts: Trump is, always has been, an openly malignant uneducated idiot. Will they... 1/ via @t0nyyates.bsky.social

Dario Perkins The idea this is a master plan to reduce yields... just NO.. If you wanted to do that, you'd announce a credible plan to cut govt spending gradually & get the Fed on board alla Rubinomics. You wouldn't destroy confidence & risk a recession, while tying Fed's hands with tariffs

That's a quite reliable phenomenon even for smaller groups: deliberate or accidental investment in informational public goods -> better collective decision making -> better outcomes. Decades of deliberate public disinformation by influential... 1/ via @tressiemcphd.bsky.social @kwilz.bsky.social

Robinson Meyer Every day we learn anew just how much classified ads were perhaps the load-bearing pillar of American hegemony

An ironic but entirely predictable consequence of economic and political elites -and much of media and society- dismissing Humanities as an useful field is that to understand economic policy right now expertise in anthropology and psychiatry is more useful than in economics. via @kwilz.bsky.social

Louis Römer our problem as people not infected by the authoritarian mind virus is that we are trying too hard to make sense of Trump’s tariffs as economic policy. Instead it is primarily symbolic, an attempt to reassert the fantasy of a racial colonial patriarchal family romance onto the world.

Inexperienced coders who confuse their ignorance and disdain of the organizational/social aspect of systems with their irrelevance have existed since there have been coders, but this is what happens when that delusion of adequacy is bought into by the wider society. via @reckless.bsky.social

Waldo Jaquith This is profoundly ignorant stuff. www.wired.com/story/doge-d...

I suspect it's been a long while since any of them has been in or cared about a room with anybody else but their peers, donors, and consultants.

I don't know if it's Zeldin's position -it's not Trump- but Active Apocalypticism seems to be a common point between part of the Evangelical and Accelerationist wings of his coalition. I think for them protecting the environment means delaying the plan of God/unavoidable omnipotent future AI/etc.

One of the inherent competitive advantages of liberal societies[1] is that authoritarianism attacks independent expertise, and this severely handicaps any modern society. [1] Nb. I don' t back liberal societies because of advantages or disadvantages but out of ethical commitments.

CHOAM Nomsky turns out the United States was an incredible moneymaking engine that ran on wokeness

The apparent rediscovery by big financial actors that there's such a thing as high-multiplier load-bearing public goods built through large investments in governance expertise would be funny [where did they think US technical advantage came from?] if it weren't so late. via @drjennings.bsky.social

Robin Wigglesworth Goldman Sachs is warning that that America’s famous “exorbitant privilege” might be killed by “negative trends in US governance and institutions”. 👀https://on.ft.com/42cMYnT

Mandatory classic: via @dynamicsymmetry.bsky.social

Being a supply chain specialist in April '25 is like being an epidemiologist in late '19: everybody's reaching out to you but nobody is happy about it, including you. Now comes the "buy exceptions" phase but Trump's too clumsy and disorganized to collect efficiently. via @drjlhazelton.bsky.social

Catherine Rampell Pittsburgh-based aerospace company, which sells parts to the major aviation companies, has declared a force majeure in the wake of Trump's tariffs so it can break contract obligations www.reuters.com/business/aer...

Good point.

What fascinates me is the glacial information processing tempo since 2015: Trump was anything but opaque. My oversimplified model is Fox + X + class affinity but in any case we are seeing the consequences of a massive societal cognitive failure not least among elites. via @profsaunders.bsky.social

Ian Carrillo Reminder that elite conflict, changing public opinion, and elite blunders are important factors that topple authoritarian regimes.

The fact that a lot of society continues to consider the ultra-wealthy ipso facto reliable analysts on anything other than their own specialized business strategies (if that) is by now as self-evidently absurd as any argument based on the divine right of kings. via @robertsilverman.bsky.social

Bobby Silverman Someone asked Ackman why he didn’t think Trump would impose insane tariffs when his stated plan was “impose insane tariffs. His answer? “My bad”

"Musk's a tech gazillionaire, he must know tech" is the dual of "Trump's rich, he must know economics." Different audiences, similar dynamics & consequences. "A rich white guy can't be stupid" might be the most dangerous silent axiom in US society. via @joeuchill.bsky.social @intelwire.bsky.social

Sam (ABeardedPanda) YOU DID WHAT?

The Fed usually lowers rates to help growth, which also usually rises inflation. In 2008 and COVID times they did that - there was some inflation but they thought the tradeoff worthwhile. They might do again, but tariffs are an independent driver of inflation, which might change their calculus.

Rebuilding societal information infrastructures -from "make Wall Street understand rich people can be ignorant about key things" to "make most voters understand that, and also they can be Fascist, and also that's bad for you"- it's a big part of the rebuild. via @wikisteff.bsky.social

Brooke Listen to the counterdisinfo journalists next time

How little time of Number Going Up it takes for a privileged group to believe Number Can't Go Down, and how much of Number Going Down it takes for them to resign that belief -asymmetric cognitive inertia when Owning Those People- is a big source of collective stupid we have to figure out how to fix.

Jess Calarco Thinking today of the men in my mentions who tried to convince me that pensions aren't superior to 401Ks.

Given what business owners build algorithms to optimize -the implied demands in volume, frequency, small size, tracking shifting tastes (don't lag, don't go ahead), and narrow types of emotional resonance- I think they *are* incompatible except for a few people naturally inclined to that pattern.

Kevin Gallant Do I create content for the algorithm or just post whatever makes me happy? The real question is... can you do both anymore without losing your mind? #Writer #Booksky

"Just because you and those you want to give unconstrained power to want to screw over the same people it doesn't follow that the rest of what they do won't screw over you." seems empirically a hard lesson to learn for a lot of people. Hate affinity is a hell of a glue. via @wikisteff.bsky.social

PANICAN! At the Stock Market Liberal philosopher: We should constrain power Them: Why? *Liberal philosopher looks over glasses at everything*

Lesson number one of everything since John Law to this morning: Build your systems around the assumption that rich people and companies can't be systematically, malignantly stupid for a long period of time, and you're going to get screwed up. It's a divine right of kings sort of suicidal nonsense.

News Eye INSANE. The market exploded upwards 8% in seconds based on a “tariff pause” headline attributed to Trump adviser Kevin Hassett - BUT nobody can find the actual quote. Market is now plummeting again. 🤡🎪

1. Hard agree on "capable teams can model/strategize around him" with the caveat of novel difficulties in domain [you need psychiatry not just game theory] and sociology [your bosses have a lot of class affinity w/him - *he was always transparent*]. 2. Seemingly... 1/ via @wikisteff.bsky.social

Aaron Sojourner POTUS is a perpetual uncertainty generator, a chaos agent. Capable, highly incentivized teams will do their best to model it & strategize around it but him empowered means unprecedented, irreducible chaos for the U.S. & the world. This benefits a few with inside info but harms most everyone else.

Given the collective information processing of most of the US corporate leadership (supporting Trump despite every scrap of empirical information, now surprised that he's doing what he said he was going to do) I think it's Sociology 3, Behavioral Economics 1, EMH 0 via @robfordmancs.bsky.social

Ben Rosamond Behavioural Economics 1 Efficient Market Hypothesis 0

There are things politicians shouldn't be accosted for, things for which they should be shunned off every forum, and things for which they should be hounded out of human society. Political maturity is being able to tell the difference. This is on the understated side of what'd be warranted.

Paul Gowder This is how you do it. And before anyone says this is "intimidation," no it isn't, it's society. Tyrannical officials have neighbors and friends and people who go to church with them and people whose kids are on the same little league team and those people need to express how wrong their behavior is

I try to avoid this sort of explanation -had to read way too much Freud back in the day- but... "Men freaked out violently at the merest glimpse of gender equality" has a lot of explanatory power, and it doesn't require much hermeneutical subtlety. via @greene.haus @alanallport.bsky.social

Max Berger Everything is penis

The thing about sending a demented arsonist with a flamethrower to your annoying neighbor living in the floor below yours is that, yes, their apartment is on fire, but also now your building is on fire. via @wikisteff.bsky.social

The Kyiv Independent ⚡️ Kremlin panics as Russian Urals crude oil price nears crucial $50 mark. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov attributed the price decline to "the US decision to introduce tariffs for most countries in the world."

This isn't the usual authoritarian monitoring of possible threats; it rather combines Trump's pathological obsession with personal humiliation with Musk's pathological obsession with the disparagement and replacement of human expertise. via @alexandraulmer.bsky.social et al via @interfluidity.com

Reuters Exclusive: Trump administration officials have told some US government employees that Elon Musk's DOGE team of technologists is using AI to surveil at least one federal agency’s communications for hostility to President Donald Trump and his agenda reut.rs/4i5ORZq

Zooming out a bit, big lesson for corporate media, party structures, etc: societal information systems are load-bearing infrastructure. You can get away with some degradation for your own ends, but go too far and everybody's screwed, even you. via @drjlhazelton.bsky.social

Andrew Lawrence big lesson for america here: one reason you dont elect people who believe bull shit like "theyre eating the pets" or "theyre putting kitty litter boxes in the classrooms" is bc if they get in power theyll believe bull shit like "tariffs are a tax cut actually"

The term is mostly obsolete, was never technically useful, and it has always been intrinsically sexist and demeaning, yet -or maybe *because of that*- it's extremely tempting to label this sort of early 21st c. masculinist thought as hysterical. via @shannonvallor.bsky.social

Gillian Branstetter What a rich text

I've been long interested in computational psychiatry in its own terms/as an adjunct to system design, but when elite actors -not just politicians, also the Musks and Ackermans of the world- can go off the rails so deeply and quickly, it takes a whole new importance. via @cmwitko.bsky.social

Joe Noonan We focused too much research on how social media radicalizes the public and way too little to on how social media radicalizes politicians. Entering the White House X feed is like being in another dimension.

I meant "computational psychiatry" in its usual sense, but I just realized there's a field of "psychiatric conditions caused by interactions with computers" that could have been called that too. We just call it communication studies or political science these days.

"Immigration and procurement frauds" is a good summary of the union of Trump's obsessive xenophobia and Musk's obsessive hate of public goods. (Mind you, Musk is just as racist, and both are equally, deeply corrupt.) via @estebanjq.bsky.social

Molly White no, but actually. "the Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit shall cease cryptocurrency enforcement in order to focus on other priorities, such as immigration and procurement frauds."

We all expected the proverbial aestheticization of politics, but the specific generative AI/Mar-a-Lago IG/incel porn aesthetic going on is definitely an exercise in psychosexual symptomatology.

Alan Allport Law enforcement as SM content creation/cosplay

Sorry, forgot the fundamentally American brand of police porn [... and now I hope somebody wrote a paper on how security theater relates to law enforcement as SM practice as parallel to how mainstream gender roles in media relate to online SM porn]

I mean, when S&P Global starts losing faith on you, it means the information is filtering up to the guys with the big PANIC buttons.

Ed Zitron It feels like it should be a bigger story that S&P Global is considering downgrading SoftBank's credit rating due to their investment in OpenAI, saying that their "financial condition will likely deteriorate" as a result of their investment. www.wsj.com/business/dea...

It'd be comforting if there was some sort of extortion going on [I think the bribery is "I won't wreck your company this week"] rather than the particular spinelessness of the otherwise powerful. But 2025 has been a lesson on how hard it is to underestimate the average American elite so who knows.

Tressie McMillan Cottom Eventually, a brave person has to clearly explain what tools this president is using to keep his minions in line. We know there is bribery and reputational threats. But I suspect there is more.

"Desire" is a significant word there. Economic benefits of slack job markets aside, I've never been able to understand most corporate behavior w/o the assumption that raw social & interpersonal power is valued as much as financial utility. via @kwilz.bsky.social

Amanda Mull There are, of course, like a zillion reasons for why all this is happening, but I think a somewhat underratedly important one is employers’ desire to discipline labor. Seems to have been especially important for tech CEOs getting on board with Trump.

Some of it might be the deep and deeply weird theological entanglement between God and wealth that's literally foundational in American society [filtered via Regan] but lack of media resources/will to call BS on the pronouncements of "tech visionaries" is a significant factor in that chain.

Charlie Jane "Lessons in Magic and Disaster" Anders 🏳️‍⚧ Our biggest problem as a society is we've decided wealth is a proxy for intelligence -- when in reality, an overabundance of money causes your brain to cease functioning

You'd think "wild calls on the future of X by companies/CEOs in X is marketing" is as old a principle as journalism itself but the magic BS shield of tech -maybe derived from the historically acritical coverage of science + deference to wealth- has made that coverage particularly & dangerously bad.

Dr Abeba Birhane dear investigative journalists, any press-release or statements about any type of AI coming from big tech/AI companies is a PR that needs to be critically examined and not informative knowledge about the state of AI thank you!

Yeah. And disturbingly open, too. It's been a long while since we live in a Gibson world - I worry nowadays this is Cronenberg meets Philip K. Dick one.

That's a disturbingly plausible factor, yeah.

Anger is a factor, but I'd bet the main one is fear. When you can be taken off the street and sent to a life sentence in a gulag without defense -and this is a realistic risk in the US- staying out of the country isn't just a political gesture but basic self-preservation. via @wikisteff.bsky.social

Carl Quintanilla Another example of how the administration ignored 2nd-order effects of its trade war: “.. three months into the year, international arrivals are plummeting ..” @apnews.com apnews.com/article/tour...

Definitely nicer, although it rings less true. I'd generalize the first one to "you have more direct control over people's lives and bodies when they are in the office than when they are at their homes." It's not just the harassment, it's also the independence.

There's no plausible model of the world in which the aggregated real value of the S&P 500 companies is the same at a few hours before the opening and at the end of the trading day.

News Eye NEW: White House confirms the 104% tariff on China has now come in to force.🇨🇳 S&P 500 was 4.5% up on the day. Not any more. Almost all gains have evaporated. $2.3 TRILLION lost in the last couple of hours. #RepublicanCrash

True - and a good general principle

We're in the weird position of the charismatic populist authoritarian leader also being the senile mad king, and vice versa. It speaks ill of even he most amoral version of American grit that somebody with his mental state hasn't been sidelined.

E.J. Fagan Authoritarians struggle to make effective policy in part because they have a bottleneck of attention. If no one but the king can make decisions, every decision must wait in line. Meanwhile, things get missed and errors accumulate.

Sooner or later long-term debt is a claim - via the impact on it of economic governance - and of political choices on economic governance - on the collective cognitive capabilities of a society. Whatever financial crisis comes next the epistemic bankruptcy came first. via @paulgowder.bsky.social

Jonathan Ladd I guess, if you stop collecting much of your tax base and your Supreme Court seems poised to give presidents direct control of your central bank, people are more reluctant to buy your debt.

To some degree, I suspect it was a matter of Democratic leaders' psychological commitment to the political system their base their identities/status on: to deal with Trump post '20 as he should have been dealt with would have required acknowledging... 1/ via @brianbeutler.bsky.social

xpostfactoid In today's post, Brian Beutler pretty neatly sums up 5 years of his running critique of Democrats under Biden: www.offmessage.net/p/we-dont-ha...

+1 to all of those! I'd add that in business/industry (specially IT-adjacent) a lot of the struggle, more so these feverish days, is simply to make decision-maker downstream of "the algorithm/the AI" appreciate the first point.

Julia M. Rohrer Conclusions!

100% unironically: I *love* it when a research tool or project sounds like it could have come from a comic book just from its name. It's a great practical idea -always get your hands dirty if you can- but also "Activate the Causal Chamber!" has "It's Alive!"-level aesthetic potential.

Julia M. Rohrer OMG they’re building physical systems with known ground truths to test algorithms in controlled but non-simulated environments: causalchamber.ai I was not prepared for this level of steam punk,

That people can't achieve power without general competence is the fundamental self-serving superstition of our times, maybe on par with the older emphasis on bloodlines. Emphasis on *self-serving*. I wonder if the Right's comfort with deploying... 1/ via @robfordmancs.bsky.social

Sam Freedman Because I'd worked with Truss I knew there really was nothing there at all. But it was so hard to get people to accept it. "She must have something because she's about to become PM". Nope, not at all. That's not how it works.

*This.* All our models -formal, informal, implicit, socialized- were built assuming -for empirical and sociological reasons- certain minimum levels of competence and good will that just aren't there.

Tony Yates Have to say I hope that there is not a proper financial crisis in the US itself as I have no confidence that the US Treasury will have the competence or inclination to do what's necessary to fight it/prevent failures of large institutions.

Entirely true, also part of how we got here: "huddle with advisors" implies (1) acknowledgment of policy making as intellectual activity, (2) acknowledgment of the need for specialized expertise. Psychologically and sociologically, that's not this admin at all. via @allmyalibis.bsky.social

Anne Applebaum In any other administration, the president would already be huddled with advisors trying to stave off collapse

It's interesting how those relate to different processes in the economy as information processing system. Over-anthropomorphizing, the list goes from "the economy is bad" to "the economy thinks it will be bad" to "the thing the economy *thinks with* isn't working." via @wikisteff.bsky.social

Quantian How fucked you are based on what charts are currently being posted (least to most fucked) 1. Monthly/quarterly economic data 2. Stocks going down 3. Currencies or commodities going down 4. Interest rates or credit spreads going up 5. Weird repo market shit happening 6. Raw bond prices going down

> some 19 year old klanner who thinks that bank runs are just how nature weeds out people who don't own bitcoin I was terrified about incompetence in this part of the financial infrastructure but hadn't factored in the financial Accelerationism - I wasn't worried enough. via @t0nyyates.bsky.social

Paul Gowder Oh yeah, for example, why should we expect that FDIC insurance will exist? For all we know, everyone who would implement that has already been fired by musk and replaced by some 19 year old klanner who thinks that bank runs are just how nature weeds out people who don't own bitcoin

I earnestly think the analytical constraint [psychological, social, and/or strategic] of "not seeming unserious" has been a causal factor in this disaster.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux I kind of get it. If you are a forecaster and you run the numbers assuming the current policy is policy and that Trump is sincere about adding additional tariffs to it, your only option would be to scream in panic, and that would make you seem unserious. But it's also, like, probably true?

I distrust generational generalization, but there's probably something formative in living through such a shift. As analogy, I grew up when "computer" meant "BASIC interpreter hooked to a TV" - my baseline concept, use, and politics of them are necessarily different than those of later generations.

I agree 100% with @abeba.bsky.social 's analysis here, with the only caveat that this refers to the current definition of AI -which is always a culturally contextual term. I *don't* advocate for or expect "automated science" but I do think... 1/ via @intelwire.bsky.social

Dr Abeba Birhane Science is not collection of findings. Progress happens through theories.As we move from findings to theories things r less amenable to automation. Proliferation of scientific findings based on AI hasn't accelerated—& might even have inhibited—higher levels of progress www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I understand the appeal, but at a fundamental level the idea that linguistic modeling -which is what most of those tools do- can be an adequate proxy for the semantics of real-world processes (or even of second order reasoning) seems an unlikely hypothesis with... 1/

Andrew Porter Very positive spin on #GenerativeAI tools from @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41... New to me is @thesify.bsky.social - anyone had any experience using this? I'm trying to understand the privacy policy re: how inputs (papers, grants) are protected & whether they are used for training AI?

I suspect as much, but then I realize every generation feels the same about itself in some way or another, so I have second-order doubts *g*

That's a valid point. I'm a third-generation avid newspaper reader -at the tail-end of the medium we read 4 newspapers every day, two national and two local- but/so my online news smell test is different from both my Mom and younger people's.

It's an unconscionable aspect of contemporary society that client deadlines don't get automatic deferrals during Ongoing Events of Historical Interest.

That, yes.

Regular reminder to keep @archive.org in your list of long-term cultural infrastructure organizations to consider donating to.

At this point I think the news isn't the news but the regime change in the underlying news-generation process, IYKWIM. I.e., we aren't updating parameters, we're seeing a breakdown of the model. via @drjennings.bsky.social

Peter Thal Larsen U-turn!

They are still working of early January's assumptions, which is bad in terms of global economic expectations, but relatively good in terms of my future flow of work (as long as they hit the sweet spot at the intersection of "want analysis" and "can pay for analysis).

We are seeing differential cognitive update speeds at play, always most visible during chaotic periods. Different political & market actors are showing different levels of model inertia which means not only median models change but also the distribution of across groups. via @drjennings.bsky.social

Michael Bell He seems to think that every time he takes his finger off the Tariffs button things just go back to normal again. Those investors aren't coming back when the trust is lost. Any upshot you have is speculators just buying the dip. Your pension's longterm investment portfolio is dead

Markets have very good models of purely financial dynamics, but those have implied psychological assumptions they can't react to changes to. Market sensitivity to POTUS' sanity is 0 over a wide range of values; this is fine for small changes, totally unsuitable now. via @drjennings.bsky.social

BeijingPalmer the markets think - not *entirely* unreasonably - that he will back down on China too. what they're really irrational about is the general state of a country losing rule of law and ruled by idiots.

I'm not a trader, but as a data analysis process evaluation the fact that VIX dynamics remained substantially the same after Trump won and until not too long ago tells me the indicator might not be an efficient inference from available information. Less politely... 1/ via @drjlhazelton.bsky.social

Justin Wolfers The VIX -- a measure of expected volatility in markets over the next 30 days -- has, thankfully, receded to somewhat less extraordinary levels.

Conversely, if you set up US tariff rates through a random number generator, you'd have predictable long-term asymptotic behavior, which would be an improvement.

Katie Mack The problem with most machine-based random number generators is that they’re not TRULY random, so if you need genuine randomness it is sometimes necessary to link your code to an external random process like a physical noise source or the current rate of US tariffs on a given country.

In a very literal sense that phrase and its implications are the most important piece economic news in the world this month (and one very much ignored by the market). via @wikisteff.bsky.social

Megan Cassella TL;DR: The new U.S. tariff rate against our two largest trading partners is either 10%, 25% or 35%, and so far no one I've reached out to at the White House is able to tell me which.

Corporations aren't people[1], but there's definitely some collective denial going on over there. [1] Capitalist metaphysics are weird. via @columnist.bsky.social @drjennings.bsky.social

FinTwitter 🔴 Goldman Sachs rescinds recession call after Trump tariff pause.

I've seen professional investors getting it wrong today (which does go some way in explaining the size market bounce). My charitable explanation is that finance-specific information sources aren't built to handle this erratic personalist nonsense, so they fall back to also confused mainstream media.

Jacob Aron I don't understand why this is being so poorly reported. Yes, Trump called it a pause, but if there are still tariffs it's not a pause. You can report the facts, rather than what the president says!

We are one chips-related Trump tantrum from *Taiwan* making some discrete calls to Brussels. Xi can't ever explicitly give up Taiwan, but for the right ego stroke Trump would throw them to the wolves faster than a trade policy U-turn. via @kevinriggle.bsky.social

Olga Nesterova Now, this is news.

I'd have also lost faith on the stock market information processing effectiveness if I had had much of it to begin with. There's no serious aggregate model of the world in which the economic value of those 500-ish companies is more or less the same as last week. via @drjennings.bsky.social

Nicholas Grossman Stocks rose after Trump partially pulled back on tariffs, recovering most of the losses his tariff announcement caused, but bonds did not. US Treasuries calmed after Trump pulled back, but didn't recover recent losses. The global loss of trust in the US, and the safety of US assets, remains.

If denying Trump's evidence-less claim that an election was rigged is an actionable offense, then the day after the '26 midterms is going to be interesting. via @interfluidity.com

Peter Baker Trump's order to the Justice Department to investigate Chris Krebs identifies as one of his supposed offenses that he "falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen."

In a country with better reflexes and/or more trauma -e.g. Argentina- you'd have people tomorrow morning queuing in front of the banks to get their money out. Personally, this rises my inflation expectations... 1/ via @tyleraking.com @intelwire.bsky.social

Marisa Kabas BREAKING — DOGE will descend upon Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) buildings tomorrow, an agency source tells me. FDIC is responsible for insuring all commercial/personal US bank accounts for up to $250k and regulating banks. Scary in light of Trump’s manipulation of markets this week.

Twelve hours ago I had to spend some time explaining to a table of executives why I had taken the logarithm of a monetary value. What I wouldn't give to eat crayons more often... via @dingdingpeng.the100.ci

Peter Tennant, PhD Attending #EuroCIM2025 highlights the terrifying chasm between the technical front end of causal inference and the state of causal inference in applied science. People accuse me of making things too complicated. But I'm eating crayons compared with true 'causal inference methods' folk. #CausalSky

Other than Trump's mental state, the most important unmeasured metric today is what I think of as ζ, the sensitivity of your model conclusions to how much of what the Agentic AGI Alliance says is BS. That report is almost pure ζ, as much of the economy these days. The level of correlation... 1/

Andrew Porter "Processing data, mainly for AI, will consume more electricity in the US alone by 2030 than manufacturing steel, cement, chemicals and all other energy-intensive goods combined, according to a report from the International Energy Agency (IEA)." www.theguardian.com/technology/2....

If we still used business cards I'd put that in mine.

100% true under the standard threat model. What scares me is that right now it's unconscionable not to assume a deliberate, systematic attempt at rigging the election from Trump/Musk -that's not paranoia, that's the "if it walks like a duck"... 1/ via @kirkpams.bsky.social

Matt Blaze Any honest conversation about US election security has to engage with two realities: - There are real vulnerabilities in some parts of our election infrastructure, and it's possible that this could result in malicious alteration of an election outcome - There's no evidence this has actually happend.

PS: @mattblaze.org is talking about the Big Lie, not '26-'28. My bad! Although I do hope he feels better about those than I do.

That's an very nice way to put it. Tongue-in-cheek, given a set of variables you could build a taxonomy of philosophical/ethical systems on it by enumerating over and classifying underlying causal models and permissible paths.

Julia M. Rohrer Unfairness as an effect of X on Y along an impermissible path

Anybody taking bets on how passport request processes are going to be working? From the perspective of countries with much simpler and robust voting systems, the US seems (and I believe it was) designed with a multitude of mechanisms for partial interference... 1/ via @wikisteff.bsky.social

Public Citizen BREAKING: The House passed the SAVE Act, which requires Americans to show a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. Over half of all Americans do not have a passport. Millions more do not have access to their birth certificate. 21 MILLION citizens will be impacted.

No, for sure! I'm very confident the Big Lie is indeed a lie. My concern for '26 isn't the infrastructure between people voting and the vote being counted, but rather with (1) technically authorized messing with voter registration lists ("Big Balls has the password and runs DELETE FROM... 1/

True - that was unwarranted hyperbole. OTOH, we do see what DOGE *got* access to, and how fast. So I guess part of the question is: how strong in the current context are the guardrails that would impede them from controlling any key voter list they chose to based on its marginal impact?

Better than even odds that at some point [some groups of] citizens will have to go to deliberately overwhelmed SSA offices to prove they aren't dead - and that voter registration rolls will be regularly purged of "dead people." It's a neat trick: each bit is... 1/ via @interfluidity.com

Joshua J. Friedman What a grim paragraph www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/u...

It's not going to come from inside the DOD, but I would be very interested on professional assessments on how much this macho cosplay is going to degrade strategic impact, which is after all what the military is there for. via @interfluidity.com

Defense News DOD civilian employee roles that do not facilitate "lethality" should be assessed for restructuring or elimination, the memo states.

I don't envy them: figuring out the impact of a huge change in tariffs for both activity and inflation and then gaming the impact of your potential actions would be difficult enough -inputs straining... 1/ via @wikisteff.bsky.social

George Pearkes FOMC really doesn't want to talk about cuts *FED'S COLLINS SAYS RENEWED INFLATION COULD DELAY FURTHER CUTS *COLLINS: SIGNAL MUST BE 'COMPELLING' TO CUT PREEMPTIVELY *COLLINS: MIGHT STILL BE APPROPRIATE TO CUT LATER THIS YEAR *COLLINS: SHOULD GUARD AGAINST UNMOORING OF INFL. EXPECTATIONS

My personal BUG OUT BAG economic signal is when they start calling Argentinean macro specialists for interviews. via @wikisteff.bsky.social

Shadow Hedgie 🌻 Every global news org needs to recall their EM correspondents and put them on the DC beat

Yeah, but that precludes the scenario of, say, a single intrusion in Election Day modifying vote counts. What I'm worried about is: 3 months before, with papers from the President and under open news coverage, DOGE people go physically to 53's offices, log into their system on their computers... 1/

What makes this double-extra-dumbass is that this is a group of people obsessed with Snyder's Fantasy Sparta - they are speed-running the worst ideas of both. via @cstross.bsky.social

mel~ 🪑 yknow every once in a while i think wow. nobody could be this stupid. surely no one in human history was this dumb and then i remember this is word for word what happened to the athenian empire

My angle is information processing: from there what terrifies me is that "T-bills are zero risk" -as synecdoche for US patterns- is [was?] a deep cognitive assumption. If that breaks -and it could- the impact could be deeper than a panic - an epistemological breakdown. via @estebanjq.bsky.social

Andrew Gelston New all time highs and marching up I'm an applied economist so i wish Gold was not money, it's stupid. But trust does not exist .. you need something This is extremely worrying not cause of any impact people will feel immediately, because it is saying We have lost our status as a reserve currency

/Monkey's paw starts opening and closing its fingers like a piano player warming up

I know little to nothing about Japanese politics: I'm wondering if on balance this will strengthen isolationist nationalism or an active search for new partners [1]. On Canada the impact was the latter, but of course both countries are very different. [1] The... 1/ via @brianbeutler.bsky.social

Jeffrey J. Hall Trump has once again questioned the US-Japan Alliance: "We defend them but they don't have to defend us...We pay hundreds of billions of dollars to defend them...We pay all the money. They don't pay anything." [Japan pays money to support the US bases. Significantly more than other allies.]

Assets are priced however implicitly conditional on a certain model of likely (or even *possible*) government behavior. Recent observations have proven the US market's model wrong; IMHO it's not adjusting this assumption yet, simply realizing it was making one. ...1/ via @brianbeutler.bsky.social

Brian Scheid Stock market bottom difficult to see: @ritholtz.bsky.social "What makes guessing the bottom so hard is that this isn't your normal cycle. This isn't a recession or even a pandemic, this is basically the market reacting to the individual choices... of one person." www.spglobal.com/market-intel...

[Tentative conditional on pharma expert views'] My first reading is that this is good for short-term financial tactics (stock bumps) but not a good option if you aren't a one-drug company: simulations aren't a substitute for animal testing yet and skipping them augments cost on expectation.

Quick hypothesis: men are more likely to --for half-unconscious self-serving reasons-- mistake confident verbosity for actual expertise. via @intelwire.bsky.social

Hypervisible 🫠

@hypervisible.bsky.social makes a good point: given current tech politics this increases female harassment/male radicalization. "What do women want? I'll ~talk with women~ ask ChatGPT" is a feverish deepening of the AI bubble's ouroboros epistemology. via @intelwire.bsky.social

Hypervisible Rather terrifying that men are turning to chatbots for dating advice at the same time that the companies who make these systems are promoting the increased toxicity of the tech as a *feature*

Breaks my heart as much as it enrages me. Astrophysics is for me an almost a transcendental field at the upper bounds of scale and ingenuity. As a layperson this makes my life forever poorer; I can't imagine how it feels to those who dedicated their lives to it. via @dereklowe.bsky.social

Dr. Jessie Christiansen First the rumour was a 20% budget cut. Then, 50%. Now the president's NASA budget is out and it's a 68% cut to astrophysics ($1.5B to $487M). Even if this gets reversed in four years, we will *never* recover the missions, partners, people who will be gone. www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

It's interesting that Trump's behavior might be *less* constrained by internal politics than Xi's [although I'm confident the latter is as driven by personal ideology as the former, mutatis mutandis].

Andrew Lawrence this is just an episode of the apprentice to him, he just wants fox to be able to report china is begging for a call

Firing everybody who "obstructs the President's agenda" through adaptation to local conditions is going to go *brilliantly* during an actual conflict. via @t0nyyates.bsky.social

Frank Witte Ялта?Нет! The only thing that would make this story even better is if the US troops on Greenland would #DefectToDenmark 🇩🇰 😀

via @davallone.bsky.social who actually wrote it! I have a soft spot for Pulp and a definite weakness for modern iterations. Doc is a great example of the Best At Everything But Let's Face It There's Something Really WEIRD With Him archetype behind many of my favorite characters.

Tony Isabella aka Jenny Blake. THINGS THAT MAKE ME HAPPY: Doc Savage: The Ring of Fire by David Avallone and Dave Acosta. Lost in my VAOS since 2017, this is a great adventure of the pulp magazine legend. Especially choice is the emphasis on Pat Savage and another legendary heroine. 4-9-25.

I think it's unnecessary and probably counterproductive to engage the fraud-fighting justifications as if they were in good faith, just as tariff "rationales." Keeping people they don't want to vote from doing it is the point. Best call and fight it as what it is. via @jessicacalarco.bsky.social

Von Welch And remember, all these barriers to voting are to fight the specter of voter fraud for which there is no evidence that it is happening. The SAVE cure is much, much, much worse than the disease.

*This.* The US' voting process, particularly the Paperwork You Have To Do So They Let You Vote[1] -which is *not* a thing in a lot of the world- is by design a big tangle of voting suppression vulnerabilities. [1] Which can be silently undone at any time, btw. via @wikisteff.bsky.social

Pam Keith If you are not registered to vote, you might want to do it right the fuck now. Because who controls access to passport?

To call what's coming up a recession is to fundamentally misunderstand not just the scale but the nature of what's going on. It's not a cyclical drop in demand but the wholesale destruction of intangible but critical infrastructure assets. Dimon's blind spots... 1/ via @ndrew.bsky.social

Leslie Picker JAMIE DIMON ON Q1 CALL: "I really almost don't care fundamentally about what the economy does in the next two quarters. That isn't that important. We'll get through that. We've had recessions before and all that. It's the ultimate outcome. What's the goal? How do we get there?"

That's a very good point. Perhaps instead of de-dollarization we'll see people still use it, e.g., as store of value, but a *riskier* store of value. That'd probably still have global macro consequences, although of a different kind.

It's not that the Chinese government understands the US government much better than vice versa but rather the latter's expertise is useless as Trump ignores every form of it. In technical terms, the US as collective is now significantly more stupid than a few months ago. via @ndrew.bsky.social

Carl Quintanilla CNN: “.. Trump has told his team that China must be the first to make the move .. But Beijing has repeatedly refused to arrange a leader-level phone call, according to three sources familiar with the official communications.” @cnn.com www.cnn.com/2025/04/10/p...

My dual take is that market incentives and cultural patterns led to domain knowledge-light software which can be done faster/appeal to more people but has less transformative impact. Rare is the software company built around deep expertise in a non-software domain. via @wikisteff.bsky.social

George Pearkes Whole experience has made me incredibly bearish towards ~anything in the SaaS space because it's getting so easy to just develop your own solution and rely on commodity providers for hosting. My brother is actually the source of this idea but this experience totally confirmed it.

Agreed, but the issue is the long run to election day. Betting on spontaneous responses to events leaves gives GOP the initiate, who given media behavior have an advantage in agenda setting. Left on its own, this sort of response might wash out by the midterms. via @metaomicsnerd.bsky.social

Conor Sen Useful when thinking about “Dems need to be better at comms.” If events are clear-cut, people figure it out:

This is a very good description! You can keep doing it for as long as people evaluate your actions based on their impact on their relative position. via @estebanjq.bsky.social

James Medlock Trump has perfected the art of Pareto Worsening, a change in allocation making at least one person worse off without making a single person better off. Trade war, Medicaid cuts, science cuts, there are no winners here, only losers.

A great point both technically -doesn't correlate w/skill- and sociologically: it sustains a culture fetishizing "an screenshot of your best code" over deeper/wider expertise that risk acknowledging the value of non-coders and even [horror!] fields outside IT. Via @marypcbuk.bsky.social

Vicky Harp I feel like coding in interviews is a form of ritual hazing whose time has passed. I expect you can get just as much information with questions proving judgment, domain knowledge, and pattern/anti-pattern recognition, perhaps with some pseudocode.

via @wikisteff.bsky.social

Yeah. It does feel like we're in a phase where here-and-now choices, even if undertaken for short-term tactical reasons, will have long-term structural impacts.

The thing about cultures -and global finance is one- is that it takes a lot to make the unthinkable thinkable but once you do you can't push it back. A mere possibility, once it can be uttered in polite company,can shift collective behavior. via @marypcbuk.bsky.social @neilirwin.bsky.social

Kai Ryssdal You gotta pay attention, but this is really good. h/t @neilirwin.bsky.social “Any country other than the US precipitously raising and lowering tariffs, gutting its Internal Revenue Service and nonchalantly considering territorial grabs would have seen smoking-hot capital flight months ago.”

That whistling sound a few months ago was Foucault's Boomerang on its way back. "I supported the Unaccountable Mass Targeting of Innocent Civilians Bipartisan Consensus Leopard and now it's mass targeting me, an innocent civilian! Without accountability!" via @drjennings.bsky.social

makena kelly SCOOP: Palantir software is being used by IRS to ingest and sort agency data as part of the mega API project. www.wired.com/story/palant...

There's probably lot of strategic equilibria nobody has examined for a generation that are quietly being reevaluated. I do fear high-status liberal actors will fight harder/more effectively to defend their position against other liberal actors than against the regime. via @alanallport.bsky.social

Michael Clemens Exactly this. What is bringing global and generational shame on the United States at this moment is not the actions of one person, but the limp abdication by countless powerful Americans walking away from their duty to stop it.

Yeah, and across all kinds of directions. Feels like we have to deal with changes in matters of fact (e.g., the structure of the international system) *as* the very tools of public discourse and analysis we'd use to do that are being obscenely twisted.

The gleeful ignorance of high-status Americans of practically every single thing underpinning their wealth and power is, I guess, what happens when a group starts buying its own myth of merit, but you can't sustain power if you don't know where it comes from. via @bretdevereaux.bsky.social

Sam (ABeardedPanda) "Warrior virtue" is charging into the enemy with nothing but elan "Citizen-soldier virtue" is letting your industrial base make an enormous amount of equipment so your fellow citizen soldiers can suppress them with fires while you maneuver in armor around their defenses

DOGE comes from a culture where doing something quickly, visibly and at scale is infinitely more important than doing it correctly. What's the Silicon Valley/AI ethos if not that? Even the collateral damage is a win: a show of power. This... 1/ via @joshuaerlich.bsky.social @paulgowder.bsky.social

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick Hours ago, @politico.com revealed that DOGE is working with DHS on automating mass deportation efforts — likely explaining why many US citizens, green card holders, and even a Canadian (in Canada) got threatening emails last night terminating “your parole” and telling them to leave the US in 7 days.

By the way - DOGE's indubitably going to "help deal with voter fraud." Expect the same level of semi-deliberate chaos. The US political system couldn't handle chads. I'm not sure how it'll deal with massive automated flagging of "suspected illegal voters," but that's certainly going to be a thing.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick Hours ago, @politico.com revealed that DOGE is working with DHS on automating mass deportation efforts — likely explaining why many US citizens, green card holders, and even a Canadian (in Canada) got threatening emails last night terminating “your parole” and telling them to leave the US in 7 days.

I feel the same, but I think it's a function of having grown up at a [relatively!] cosmopolitan time and in a [very!] cosmopolitan subculture [internet friendships, Star Trek, etc]. Historically, period bouts of rabid xenophobia might be the baseline [to be changed] via @llyfrgellbabel.bsky.social

Stephen The fact that many people who aren't sociopaths in every domain of their lives not only *prefer* deportation of people they view as "foreign" as a political policy, but are *gleeful* about it and can't get enough of it--it's utterly perplexing.

A lot of media got into literal political correctness -not saying anything political power will object to- well before we got to the current point where it's a tactically (if not ethically) legitimate concern. It's underappreciated how political... 1/ via @intelwire.bsky.social

Julia Lynch “Freak” sell-off? Have the headline writers not been watching the news for the last 6 months??

I unironically believe modern versions of this kind of computer should be kids' first non-phone computer. It's harder to develop an intuitive understanding of their affordances w/o experiencing them as "programmable device" before "device programmed by somebody else." via @alanallport.bsky.social

Everything C64 ❤️ Let's show some Love for the Incredible Commodore VIC-20! #Commodore #VIC20 #1980s #80s #RetroComputing

Less consequentially, this is endemic in business [and at the core of the AI mirage]: the idea that "data + algorithms" make other knowledge unnecessary - a natural consequence of the smirking market epistemology of "if what you know/do/are mattered you'd be rich." via @drjlhazelton.bsky.social

Steven Rich once again: you’re bound to find wild (and untrue) things if you analyze data that you do not understand

This is a great summary of the shift in policy process from scalable, impersonal bureaucratic analysis to (heavily!) limited, personal (& corrupt) command: even w/a smart ruler (and Trump isn't) it's simply stupider -nobody can match what a competent bureaucracy can do. via @t0nyyates.bsky.social

Tony Yates This is sort of exemption by political proximity and stuff that Trump and the media have heard of. Part xyz30006 that is actually needed for a US made car - not exempt.

Democrats (most of the party, too many voters) are I think underestimating an early, multi-pronged, and deliberate attempt at adding group-targeted friction to any and all processes that make voting possible. Your ad spend doesn't matter if your voter can't vote. via @drjlhazelton.bsky.social

Democracy Docket Who could be disenfranchised by the SAVE Act? ❌69M women who changed their name after marriage ❌21.3M Americans who don't readily have access to proof of citizenship documents ❌3.8M Americans who don't have proof of citizenship documents at all www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

I was writing that the consequences of this stupid idea making his strategic calculus regarding China unsound could be catastrophic, but then I realized I was thinking "Trump's strategic calculus" and that's an even stupider concept, sorry. via @marypcbuk.bsky.social

Mark Chadbourn Trump’s latest plan is to stripmine the deep sea bed for rare earth minerals and then stockpile them to counter China, the FT reports. He won’t be satisfied until every corner of the earth has been ravaged in pursuit of riches and power.

Every time Trump does something like this, regardless of the agency, inflation expectations should jump at least a little bit. It's endlessly fascinating that they don't really do that. via @marypcbuk.bsky.social

Molly Jong-Fast Oh this is VERY worrying

The bit near the end of this by @adamtooze.bsky.social is IMO the scariest one long-term: the more market self-censors its analysis due to fear of being attacked by the government the more dangerous it becomes to investors, the economy, and society.

Yeah. It's extremely disheartening but here we are. Best I guess to just embrace it.

Yeah. OTOH, I'm very interested in computational psychiatry [in both readings of the phrase] and I did do a year of a psych BA in a gap while studying maths, so this feels (in an intellectual sense at least) as s very interesting opportunity as well.

That, too, although there aspects driven less by available information than by sociological priors, specially for high-status people and orgs: up until I'd say last week there were many things about Trump/Musk that were well-known but high-status actors did not, perhaps could not, integrate.

Space too is yuri via @dynamicsymmetry.bsky.social

emily pathetic i saw this on my TL and went "hell yeah" so hard before realizing it was about the soviet cosmonaut named Yuri Gagarin

At what level is that enforced? Is that implicit editorial policy in news organizations, already ingrained in the training, some combination?