Ciaran Marshall
2.9K posts
@microfounded
Economist. Classical liberal. An infovore on a quest for discovery: writing about the social sciences, culture, philosophy, AI, and more.
The Terence Tao episode. We begin with the absolutely ingenious and surprising way in which Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion. People sometimes say that AI will make especially fast progress at scientific discovery because of tight verification loops. But the story of how we discovered the shape of our solar system shows how the verification loop for correct ideas can be decades (or even millennia) long. During this time, what we know today as the better theory can often actually make worse predictions (Copernicus's model of circular orbits around the sun was actually less accurate than Ptolemy's geocentric model). And the reasons it survives this epistemic hell is some mixture of judgment and heuristics that we don’t even understand well enough to actually articulate, much less codify into an RL loop. Hope you enjoy! 0:00:00 – Kepler was a high temperature LLM 0:11:44 – How would we know if there’s a new unifying concept within heaps of AI slop? 0:26:10 – The deductive overhang 0:30:31 – Selection bias in reported AI discoveries 0:46:43 – AI makes papers richer and broader, but not deeper 0:53:00 – If AI solves a problem, can humans get understanding out of it? 0:59:20 – We need a semi-formal language for the way that scientists actually talk to each other 1:09:48 – How Terry uses his time 1:17:05 – Human-AI hybrids will dominate math for a lot longer Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
a curiously poor picture of Clegg, unveiled at the National Liberal Club yesterday
1 in 5 working age adults are economically inactive. Why isn’t this being treated as a national emergency?
Zack Polanski says Greens would ditch GDP targets & focus on wellbeing instead. BRAVO! Green leader prioritises public services & reduction of inequality over growth UK has enough wealth. It's just unfairly distributed REDISTRIBUTE WEALTH ! theguardian.com/politics/2026/…
Pistachio rose ice cream
US messageboard 4Chan mocks £520,000 fine for UK online safety breaches bbc.in/4lyLyNK
The UK's censorship agency, Ofcom, issued 4chan with a giant fine today. We responded to Ofcom with a giant hamster today.
🚨An Obama-era loophole later expanded under Biden allows Chinese nationals to travel visa-free to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory. Pregnant women have exploited this policy to give birth on U.S. soil and secure American citizenship for their children. As these children grow up, many are raised in Communist China with limited ties to the U.S., yet could still be eligible to vote in American elections and even hold sensitive positions in the U.S. government. The problem has become so widespread that in recent years more babies have been born in the Northern Mariana Islands to Chinese mothers than to legal U.S. residents. During a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing last week, @peterschweizer revealed that more than 1,000 birth tourism companies operating in China are specifically targeting the U.S., and that approximately 1 million U.S. citizens are being raised in Communist China. That’s why I introduced the One Nation, One Visa Policy Act with @SenRickScott and @RepChipRoy to close this loophole. It’s time to end birth tourism abuse once and for all.
