Claude and I planted 100 known errors into 10 open-access psychology papers and then ran them through frontier models and two commercial AI review tools. In brief:

• The best single system caught 71 of 100 errors, while the worst caught 30.
• Pooling every system’s output caught 93 of 100. Models are only partly correlated in the errors they find, making ensembling a big lever for finding issues in papers. Check your papers against multiple models!
• Seven errors could not be caught by any system. All were omissions — information deleted from a paper rather than mistakes inserted into it.
• Refine.ink contributes more unique catches than any other single system, though it’s expensive.
• I didn’t measure false positives and I don’t know how this error distribution compares to the distribution of errors in real papers.
• I’ve made the papers, errors, model outputs, and the full experiment log public. I hope people can build on this work to create a comprehensive eval benchmark across disciplines.

That is from Paul Litvak, here is more.  Note that is not even using the very latest generation of models.

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We trace the family origins of Members of Congress (MC) born between 1830 and 1950, linking each MC, their parents, and their brothers to the complete-count censuses. Future MCs have always been economic outliers. By 1940, close to 60 percent of MCs aged 18–40 held a college degree, against under 5 percent of comparable young men outside Congress. In the 19th-century censuses, MCs as adults held roughly three times the wealth of demographically matched controls. They also come from economically elite families: their fathers earn more, attain more education, and hold more wealth. The brothers of future MCs sit between the population and the MCs themselves. Across the socioeconomic measures we compare, we calculate that roughly half of an MC’s adult premium is shared with his brother and the other half is his own. Even as the American economy and political system have changed, the family background gap has widened over the last century and a half. Wealth, household servants, and four separate occupation-based scores all show the gap holding or growing across cohorts. We study four Progressive-Era reforms in a triple-difference design—women’s suffrage, the secret ballot, direct primaries, and the direct election of senators—and none produce detectable shifts in who reaches Congress. Our results document a Congress drawn from the most fortunate families in American society in every cohort we observe.

That is from a new NBER working paper by James J. Feigenbaum, Andrew B. Hall, Daniel M. Thompson & Jesse Yoder.

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I am automating investigative journalism at http://Effort.News

We’re breaking five stories today based on verifiable financial data which everyone missed for years.

Here is the entire thread, which also describes the five stories.

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2. “Our findings suggest that equality-oriented governments adopt an approach that insures the middle, buffers the poor, but spares the rich. The result is a rhetorical commitment to equality that eschews its most redistributive instrument(s).”

3. Francesco Cabella conversation with (an older) Victor Niederhoffer.

4. New homes in Tatu City, Kenya.

5. Bill Goichberg, RIP (NYT).  America’s greatest chess organizer, he was always very nice and encouraging to me.

6. John Crowley, RIP.

7. Data on literacy and reading.

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We study whether Democratic college professors make their students more liberal. We link voter data to salary records from 33 state flagships and show that faculty skew Democratic, especially in the humanities and social sciences. We then use student transcripts from one flagship to estimate causal effects. Students become more liberal during college regardless of major and sort toward ideologically similar instructors. Exploiting plausibly random variation in when instructors teach courses, we find no effect of faculty partisanship on student partisanship. Text analysis shows exposure to liberal topics reflects student demand rather than instructor supply, leaving little room for indoctrination.

That is from a new paper by Micah Baum, Joaquín Endara, and Annaliese Paulson. Via Jay Fan Bavel.

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So I have a simple request.  If you are worried, and wish to persuade the doubters, try the methods of science.  I would like to see the following:

1. Your outline of how, say two or three years from now, we might estimate the additional cybersecurity costs from the AI break-ins.  I am convinced that number is not zero, but give me your method please.  If it helps, here is an estimate of past cybersecurity costs, done by top economists.

2. Your current numerical estimate of what those costs might end up being, of course to be tested against what actually happens over time.  Obviously, you can do this for a few different regulatory/safety scenarios.  This is one simple way to prove yourself largely correct, albeit with a lag.  (NB: you do not have to take this as a substitute for your preferred safety measurres.  But please try to be specific in your predictions.)

3. A list of what stocks or other assets you have shorted, now.  Obviously if your answer to #2 is sufficiently low, you could answer here zero, as I would do.  I expect costs, but not so high that we cannot muddle through and have expected positive stock returns.

This would all help to make the discourse more scientific and less like an extended exercise in personal anxiety management.

If it is all so important, surely this exercise is worth the effort?

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2. Modernist Gothic in Copenhagen.

3. AI-generated Odyssey in Vietnam.

4. Questions from Seb Krier.

5. Time magazine has a special version that only the AIs can read.

6. Tymofiy Mylovanov has a good summary of my greatest fear.

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• “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
• “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”
• “United, there is little we cannot do… Divided, there is little we can do.”
• “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

and from the 1962 moon speech at Rice University;

• We choose to do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard.

and from Lyndon Johnson’s inaugural speech:

• John Kennedy’s death commands what his life conveyed—that America must move forward.
• On the 20th day of January, in 1961, John F. Kennedy told his countrymen that our national work would not be finished ‘in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet.’ But, he said, ‘let us begin.’ Today, in this moment of new resolve, I would say to all my fellow Americans, let us continue.

Sound familiar?

Were John F. Kennedy’s speeches written by an AI? Probably not. But were AI’s trained on the speech writer Ted Sorensen? It would appear so. Or to be more accurate, AIs have absorbed the Sorensen toolkit: symmetry, parallelism, antithesis, repetition, and the neatly turned reversal.

Sorensen is considered a great stylist, and these are iconic lines. The problem with AI voice is not the techniques themselves. It is the overuse of them—their deployment to describe a trip to 7-Eleven with the same rhetorical flourishes once used to send men to the moon.

I suspect that will be an easy problem to fix, so don’t expect AI voice to continue.

Hat tip: murgh

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I agree with Tyler’s earlier review: A truly excellent movie, one of the best of the year.  Specifically, it concerns the meteorological forecasts (!) leading up to the D-Day invasion.  Thematically, it is about the differences between Americans and Brits, how bureaucracy operates, the nature of leadership, and the proper role of science in government.  It is like an old-style Hollywood movie.  Most of the action takes place in only a few rooms, and with superb dialogue and performances.  Although you all know how D-Day turns out, the movie still generates suspense on some of the major plot points.

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The Balkans may be the only region other than central Asia where fertility has increased from 2015 to 2026.*

All of the highest fertility rates in Europe are in the Balkans. As of 2024: Montenegro (1.8), Bulgaria (1.73) Moldova (1.73), and Serbia (1.64) are top four. France was next at 1.61.

Other balkan countries were generally about 1.5 (Slovenia, Croatia, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Slovakia), comparable to the highest non-gallic TFRs in Western Europe: Britain (1.55) and Ireland (1.47).

The lowest Balkan countries (Macedonia, Romania, Albania, and Hungary) sit at ~1.35-1.4, which would be lowish for Western Europe, but extremely high for Southern Europe or the former Warsaw pact/USSR.

During the post-soviet nadir, the Balkans had perhaps the lowest fertility in Europe. The rates rose circa 2010, and have recently continued to slowly rise.

Ostensibly similar cultures/economies have no parallel increase (Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and the Baltics).

I don’t have any theory that would explain this pattern. Balkan men are famously unhelpful husbands and fathers, and the Balkans aren’t any more religious than Poland, Italy and Belarus.

What could possibly be the deal?

That is from Thomas Hanes.

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As weapon systems increase in effectiveness, they will generally target one another rather than humans. Lower loss of life will ease conflict entry and hinder exit.

Warfare will veer further from industrial competition into techno-industrial; the current appearance of parity between low tech and advanced actors reflects near zero deployment of advanced systems. As these deploy, their martial advantages will present clearly.

The need for advanced ecosystems will lead to blocs able to combine human capital, techno-industrial capacity, and inputs. Logistics may be contested at elevated levels, changing the incentives around geographic size and increasing the value of inputs.

Blocs may well engage in near constant warfare of various intensity levels. Bloc composition will be necessity driven, perhaps with increased fluidity.

That is from an anonymous reader.

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2. HuggingFace co-founder on what happened, very good post.

3. What do private insurers want from a Hormuz agreement?

4. GPT Pro on burrito price worries.

5. NoVa vs. MD, once again.

6. Do people listen to female economists more?

7. North Korea might be growing at 3.5% (Bloomberg).

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In preparation for this chapter, I spent weeks poring over the research literature pretaining to smartphones, social media, and teen mental health.  It is clear to me that there is something close to a consensus among scientists most immersed in this research, which includes the following three conclusions: (1) Extensive research refutes the theory that effects of smartphones and social media account for a meaningful portion of the decline in teen mental health in the years following 2010.  (2) Smartphones and social media can have both beneficial and harmful effects on teens’ mental health, which tend to cancel out when averaging.  (3) Future research should focus on understanding better the ways teens use these tools and how to help them maximize the benefits and minimize the harm.

Note that teen suffering also hit a peak around 1990 by many measures, yet that cannot have been caused by phones or social media.  And European teen suicide rates were falling just as those in the United States were rising.  This evidence is considered in further detail of course.

Recommended, it is both easy to read and substantive.

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2. Vasily Grossman, From the Front Line, Stalingrad-Treblinka-Berlin 1941-1945.  Self-recommending, the best third of this volume is just stunningly good.  You do not have to read the whole thing, as there is some degree of repetition.

3. Forough Farrokhzad, Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season.  She died in a car crash in 1967 at the age of thirty-three, but it turns out she was an amazing poet.  I usually do not enjoy poetry in translation, but this is so fiery and full of passion that I am happy to recommend it.  Surely in the original Farsi it is better (and quite different?) yet.

4. André Breton, Nadja.  It is short, and fun enough to read.  But one learns most books from the past are not masterpieces, and that surrealism as a movement — most of all in painting — was more important than the literary outputs of surrealism.  Nadja, to me, sounds like a drag.  Which is fine.  But.  What does Breton really think he is immortalizing here?  At the end he writes “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not at all.”  I do appreciate Breton for his understanding of Mexico, and for his cultivation of Haitian art.

5. Emma Southon, Servus: How Slavery Made the Roman Empire.  A very good and aggressively readable book about how terrible slavery was in the Roman Empire.  A useful corrective to other sources as well.  While my general view is that interpretative disputes over antiquity are difficult to resolve, I find her interpretations more intuitive and more convincing than the other side of the debate.

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