TFD

Update: Fixed exponentiation of estimated parameters. Summary I use data from METR's recent developer productivity experiment to assess the possibility of heterogeneity in the effect of AI on time to complete a task. Relative to a sample-wide 6% speedup, I estimate a 12% speedup in tasks which were predicted by...

This post is a sequel to my previous smash hit, don't accuse your interlocutor of being insufficiently truth-seeking. Like many good sequels, I've mostly just reskinned all the same points with a slightly different presentation. This time, I argue that you shouldn't accuse your interlocutor of making arguments that aren’t...

Anthropic is embroiled in a standoff with Secretary Hegseth over how the company's AI offerings may be used in military applications: > For months, [Anthropic CEO Dario] Amodei has insisted that using AI for domestic mass surveillance and AI-controlled weapons are ethical lines the company will not cross, calling such...

The recent Supreme Court ruling in the tariffs case is a solid win for conservative proponents of the court. Having applied the major questions doctrine to ruled against the Trump administration, this case is the perfect counterpoint to the persistent left-wing critique that the conservative justices twist originalist judicial philosophy...

A Ponzi scheme is fraud where the fraudster induces investors to give the fraudster money with promises of profits, and then uses money from later investors to pay out earlier investors. This pattern, as well as the phrase "Ponzi scheme" have become ubiquitously associated with fraud and grift in modern...

Several states appear to be considering so-called "right to compute" laws. The rhetoric around these laws attempts to draw a comparison with other rights such as the right of free speech and property rights. For example, Montana's SB212 has this to say: > Government actions that restrict the ability to...

Assume we want to know the probability that two events co-occur (i.e. of their conjunction). If the two events are independent, the probability of the co-occurrence is the product of the probabilities of the individual events, P(A and B) = P(A) * P(B). In order to estimate the probability of...