An infovore on a quest for discovery: writing about the social sciences, culture, philosophy, AI, and more.
Joined August 2025
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- Followers 250
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Pinned Tweet
Jun 4
I'm wading in to this debate! Spillover frictions inhibit convergence, as implied by endogenous growth theory. This is especially the case for nontradeables where national deflators are better. Constant PPP is also more robust than current PPP. open.substack.com/pub/microfโฆ
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I defended the idea that LLMs produce output via probabilistic Markov chains in R^n, to a computer scientist. He eventually agreed. His reasoning was via the layers. I reasoned via the overall lattice structure. Yet I can't hold down a job. That kills me inside.
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Jun 13
We all rationalise what's in our self-interest in some manner. I wouldn't be a libertarian if I didn't think it'd benefit me somehow. If I thought social democracy would benefit me more I'd support that.
Andreesen is the worst kind of libertarian, the one who believes only he should be exempt from the rules
If the president personally banned his company's newest product with 0 warning, he'd throw the biggest hissy fit in history, but he cheers it on when it happens to others
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Ciaran retweeted
Amodei has built a panic around AI since he blocked GPT2's launch in 2019 as OpenAI research director, calling it too dangerous (!). Bad decisions by politicians on data centers permitting, on trade controls and more will be natural consequence of this panic.
Jun 13
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-mytโฆ
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Ciaran retweeted
Jun 12
Shocked to hear David Hockney has died. His huge achievement was to make serious painting look effortless. He carried forward one of the most sustained investigations into vision, space and representation by any post-war artist. British art has lost a giant.
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Ciaran retweeted
Jun 11
A lot of economists should understand the incentives that explain top academics becoming left-wing slopulists.
It's the best way to sell millions of books, get feted across the globe at conferences/UN etc, and get widespread coverage from the progressive mainstream media.
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Itโs because as everyone knows, 35-39 year olds arenโt very into smartphones.
Jun 11
iPhone launch (2007) and a sharp drop in US birth rates line up pretty close.
But looking at the age-specific rates, it gets really interesting...
Teen birth rates had been falling for years.
Early 20s rates declined more sharply after 2007.
Late 20s flipped from flat/rising to steadily falling.
30 rates just kept rising.
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Ciaran retweeted
Jun 11
I've been telling people for 25 years that Jane Street is not interested in formal methods.
No more!
And we're actively hiring to form a new formal methods team!
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Ciaran retweeted
๐จOut today in @Nature our new paper uses deep learning to map four decades of global human migration.
By building the first comprehensive dataset of global annual flows (1990-2023), we reveal that migration has nearly tripled since 2000.
๐nature.com/articles/s41586-0โฆ
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Ciaran retweeted
You read it here first. You're in majority and part of left-dominated academia, your leaders are leftists too, but there is this thing (the system? deep state? equilibrium force?) that stops you from showing what you think until you get the Nobel prize
Ekonom tuh sebenarnya banyak yang politiknya kiri wkwkwk tapi kalau di akademia gabisa menunjukkan ke-kiriannya jadi baru diunleash setelah menang Nobel misalkan
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Jun 11
I dunno, but I'm getting the impression that despite the pompous headline, they didn't ask ALL the economists
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I hate how a lot progressives larp as knights of global good while totally ignoring the fact that inequality between nations is a lot higher than the inequality within nations. And global inequality has declined in theast 25 years, a period they derogatorily call "neoliberal" era
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Ciaran retweeted
Piketty et al claim "the promise that economic growth would 'lift all boats' has not been kept." Yet Piketty's own data show that for the first time in 4 centuries global inequality improved in recent history. We want more global growth, not less.
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Jun 11
Periodic reminder that Jason Hickel has a PhD in anthropology, and there is no evidence that he has ever taken an economics course in his life
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Jun 11
For us economists, I know we see degrowth as some fringe nonsense, but it's increasingly everywhere in UN and EU policy circles, esp. in the legal studies and human rights law world that produces so much of their staff. Very important to correct this. 2/3
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Ciaran retweeted
Jun 11
"We live in an age of manufactured scarcityโ
I honestly struggle to think of one sentence that could be a worse description of recent decades.
Literally more than a billion persons have been lifted out of poverty over a few decades. Itโs just an extraordinary achievement even at the scale of human history.
Surely we can do even better but I cannot see how their text can be read seriously.
Itโs like we invented fire and theyโd complain the night has never been darker and colder.
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Ciaran retweeted
Jun 11
Stiglitz and Piketty go full de-growth. Scandalous.
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