Stephen Kleinschmit

AI's misuse in the legal system portends similar behavior in public agencies, where administrative discretion and a comparatively weak culture of verification incentivizes ethical lapses. Consequently, more of our lives will be controlled by decisions anchored in AI-generated falsehoods.

@susanamendoza10 Thank you, I wish you the best in your quest to improve transit and quality of life for all Chicagoans.

@profstevek You are absolutely right that Chicagoans deserve better. And I'm very sorry to hear you had that horrific experience. Thank God you're alive to tell the story.

This video has gone viral for all the wrong reasons. This scary incident is not an isolated incident. Fortunately, it doesn't have to be this way and can be fixed. No parent would feel comfortable riding the CTA with their children as long as this behavior, now all too common on too many lines, continues. Too many Chicagoans rely on public transportation to get to and from work safely and affordably. Having to tolerate incidents like this is unacceptable. Hoping that by not making eye contact with the aggressor, you might get lucky enough to avoid getting hurt, is not a strategy for improving safety and increasing ridership on the CTA. It's also terribly unfair to working class people who can't afford safer transportation options. We need to restore control of our trains by getting Chicago police officers back on them, starting with the worst lines. I rode the Red Line last week, starting on 69th, and spoke with a woman who looked visibly scared. She said she no longer takes the EL because it's unsafe. Her car broke down, and after spending $150 in Uber rides over the prior 3 days, she couldn't afford another Uber ride to get back home from work so that's why she took the CTA. She took it out of desperation. This woman needs to work. She can't afford to lose her job. She is a taxpayer. She, and all Chicagoans and visitors to our city, deserve a clean, safe and reliable transportation system. This clearly mentally ill repeat offender, should not be on our trains, double-fisting hammers, making death threats, after already having been arrested 30 times. He needs mental health services and accountability. Everyone else needs clean, SAFE, reliable trains. It's not too much to ask. It's a bare minimum expectation.

All 8.1 million US Census blocks. Visualized smoothly in 3D. Instant population and housing totals from a lasso selection. All running seamlessly in the browser, no traditional backend. While everyone’s talking about AI, it’s an incredible time for geospatial tech.

Northwestern to offer artificial intelligence major next academic year trib.al/jvi6dpi

@Saveourrepubli3 @LynnBecker 🤣

@LynnBecker @profstevek hahaha

Life at Marina City. And no, it isn't me. Years ago, I would sometimes encounter a friendly, elderly neighbor, who seemed absolutely normal until the day he told me in the elevator that someone was breaking into his apartment to steal his umbrellas. I never saw him again.

Many faculty self-censor, afraid of the professional and personal consequences of their speech; what has traditionally been a minor phenomenon has become widespread since 2020. I have spoken to numerous academics over the past several years and believe it reasonable to say that a culture of fear exists, particularly within the social sciences, that stifles important professional conversations. In fields such as public policy, managing disagreement is a defining characteristic of the discipline, which makes its absence particularly troubling. One need not be disagreeable by nature; norms have shifted and many forms of academic speech are no longer permissible. Within institutions with activist cultures the threat is particularly real, tolerance for dissent is effectively zero, and negatively impacts academics across the ideological spectrum.

From the family of Lou Holtz

AI journal articles are a bigger risk to the career evaluation process than they are to the research process. AI can produce articles comparable to those in many decent journals, but most of these articles are not that good—neither the AI ones nor those in journals. In the post, @causalinf uses Claude to write a shift-share paper. Regrettably, the publication success of shift-share papers far exceeds their real-world accuracy or reliability. There is a whole class of methods like this, which are good for careers because they reliably produce good t-statistics and nice stories for editors and referees—e.g. distance IVs, poorly identified structural models, diff-in-diff with few time periods, etc. [hans_unpopular_opinion.gif] It's not universally true, but for the most part, the class of papers that AI can rapidly reproduce were not adding all that much social value in the first place. Flip through recent editions of the top econ journals and find the articles that you think are really correct and important. Very very few of those are in the category of "AI could have written this." Instead, they are good original ideas, creative (and often difficult) data collection, original solutions to real problems. Maybe someday AI will produce these as well, but right now it's not even close. AI articles are mainly exposing the fact that a whole lot of econ research is formulaic and not that informative about the world. Original work that says something new and important about the world will continue to stand out, at least for the time being. Maybe the AI slopcopalypse will force more researchers to do work with lasting value.

In 2017, I published a piece on a little-known phenomenon known as Government Organized Nongovernmental Organizations. Think if foreign governments, intel agencies, and terror groups had nonprofits. GONGOs are boundary-spanning entities that use the pretext of governance and cultural exchange to execute soft power strategies and influence foreign policy. They are effective because Western institutions generally assume good faith and favor inclusivity, which is weaponized against their host nations. We are in the age of hybrid warfare; "nonprofits" like Samidoun (links to PLFP, Hamas, PIJ) have helped to organize attacks on our institutions, most recently as an organizing force for student protests. Higher education is a soft target that provides substantial access to actors from a host of hostile states. There needs to be additional scrutiny of NGOs, exchange programs, and partnerships in higher ed to ensure they are not creating needless risks to national security. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

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Real-time geopolitical OSINT through “dirty” indicators, ostensibly informing prediction markets of the likelihood of military action.

A.I. Companies Are Eating Higher Education dlvr.it/TQxNY1

Anthropic CEO: Software engineering will be completely obsolete in 6-12 months…

@PhilipWeiss5 @CTULocal1 @ChicagoContrar1 You are next @UofILSystem and @thisisUIC!

Thanks for attacking and demonizing me, you are now exposed!! @CTULocal1 @ChicagoContrar1

Meanwhile, in North Carolina... #snow

@sfmcguire79 I wish people would stop putting such important pieces behind paywalls.

Great column: wsj.com/opinion/is-a-f…

Dartmouth President Sian Beilock: “Assuming that most Americans value our mission is a recipe for irrelevance and decline. We must demonstrate to students and families—and to the broader public—that we’ve heard their criticisms and will address them.” Five steps: 1. “Make college affordable” 2. “Return on investment matters…there must be an undeniable return.” 3. “Re-center higher education on learning rather than political posturing.” 4. “Emphasize equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.” 5. “Testing is important.”

Winter Storm Fern response in the Carolinas.

When surveys allow Americans to express their policy preferences on a continuum, most are moderate across a wide range of issues. Democrats & Republics show overlap on every issue, with modest average disagreement; positions across issues are constrained link.springer.com/article/10.100…