No longer posting here. At mastodon.social/@delong. Subscribe to braddelong.substack.com. Buy “Slouching Towards Utopia" bit.ly/3pP3Krk
Joined December 2007
- Tweets 140,263
- Following 5,119
- Followers 136,492
- Likes 23,486
2,298 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
30 Nov 2023
What say the remnant denizens of this dumpster fire? Is it time to leave Twitter for good?
23%
Hell, YES!
14%
What took you so long?
17%
Yes!
46%
Other
109 votes • Final results
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Quite possibly the most important thing I have to say this week: Really big brains, imitation‑driven culture, and ultrasociality look to me as initially evolutionary gambles with very serious downsides, whose eventual success depended on a narrow, contingent, lucky path... 1/
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...Even as recently as 75,000 years ago, we look, to me at least, evolutionarily very marginal: not terribly successful among the great apes, who are a not very successful edge branch of the monkey lineage, who are a mammal group pretty much restricted to tropical forests... 2/
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...unable to survive even up in the trees once you move far enough from the equator for there to be a winter:
**Would You Have Bet on the East African Plains Ape 75000 Years Ago?: Most Important Thing**
<braddelong.substack.com/p/wo…>
2026-06-14 3/END
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Jun 11
Wall Street sell-side analysts are now unmoored from reality. Next four-year S&P500 nominal earnings growth totalling exp(0.23 x 4) - 1 = 150%? The technical term is “nuts”:
Earnings Sentiment; or, This Is Nuts!! When's the Crash?!: CHART OF THE DAY**
<braddelong.substack.com/p/ea…>
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Jun 11
The subhead: When 30 States Raised Minimum Wages, What Happened to Pay and Jobs? The minimum wage job-loss apocalypse that never arrived. At work here we see monopsony, not mayhem. Assessing Card, Krueger, Dube, and the end of the textbook minimum wage story:
**CROSSPOST... 1/
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Jun 11
...ARINDRAJIT DUBE: A Minimum Wage Natural Experiment Has Been Running for Over a Decade**
<braddelong.substack.com/p/cr…>
2026-06-11 2/END
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Jun 11
A labor market in rough balance is a strange place to look for an AI-driven jobs collapse. The full-time typist has disappeared, but very few jobs are like that—fully automatable by “AI”:
**The AI Jobs Apocalypse Is Not in the Data: CHART OF THE DAY**... 1/
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Jun 10
Monetary policy risk returns as new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh begins cosplaying Arthur Burns in the 1970s. Inflation is back. The oil shocks are too. The lying never left. The price level jumps, new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh wobbles, Trump and the Trumpists cry “Cut interest... 1/
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Jun 10
...rates!”, and Kevin Warsh has promised them that he would:
**So Far Inflation's Return Limited to Energy. So Far: CHART OF THE DAY**
<braddelong.substack.com/p/so…>
2026-06-10 2/END
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Jun 9
The Age of Harness Engineering: taming the stochastic parrots before they eat your sead-corn codebase. We’ve scaled the models and blown out the context windows—and discovered that reliability lives somewhere else entirely. Context and prompt tricks got us very... 1/
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Jun 9
...impressive demos, but were clearly not enough; now we say “this time! for sure!” and bet on the new frontier of “harness engineering” to turn a stochastic parrot into a halfway dependable co‑worker:
**My Notes on the Progression from Context to Prompt to Harness... 2/
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Jun 9
...Engineering in making GPT LLMs Useful: (TUESDAY) MAMLMs**
<braddelong.substack.com/p/my…>
2026-06-09 3/END
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Jun 8
From 2018-05-29: When Andrew Sullivan’s definition of “civility” means “you know and stay in your place”, or good faith for me, bad faith for thee. A fond memory of “generous argument” dissolves when you ask who had to swallow what to stay in the room. And do recall... 1/
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Jun 8
...Sullivan's post‑9/11 denunciations of a domestic “fifth column” of the “decadent left” from its “enclaves along the coasts”, and his cheerful embrace of strategic dishonesty over the Bush tax cuts. The through‑line is simple: the people who demand civility for... 2/
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Jun 8
...themselves have rarely felt bound by it. Those who challenged the arithmetic—or the racism—never got reciprocity:
**The Public Sphere & "Civility": HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES**
<braddelong.substack.com/p/th…>
2026-06-08 3/END
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Jun 8
Stage Theories After Steampower: Meek, Marx, Hicks, the Info‑Bio Tech-Attention Economy, & much much MOAR:
**Thoughts Springing from Ronald Meek's Take on the Scottish & French Stage Theorists of the Enlightenment: HICKS LECTURE OUTTAKE**
<braddelong.substack.com/p/th…>
2026-06-08
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Jun 8
New empirical evidence on AI‑boosted coding, the apparent absence of a matching surge in valuable products, and the persistent unreliability of large models in real‑world use. Burn‑Murdoch’s chart and Noah Smith’s “tokenmaxxxing” frame a world where we’re flooding the zone... 1/
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Jun 8
...more software artifacts and software-created information streams no one particularly needs…
**"AI" Is Eating Platform Monopolist Free Cash Flow, Not the World: CHART OF THE DAY**
<braddelong.substack.com/p/ai…>
2206-06-08 2/END
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Jun 8
Noah’s subhead for this piece of his post: “Borjas again”.
Failed replications are embarrassing, but they happen. However, they need to be not too common, and they very much need to not always lean the same way. Then they are not inadvertent errors or “mistakes”: they are... 1/
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Jun 8
...violations of the principles that justify academic freedom. And if this be method, then there is a madness in it:
**CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: Friends Don’t Let Friends Cite George Borjas**
<braddelong.substack.com/p/cr…>
2026-06-08 2/END
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