naturalized ethics and natural law digifesto.com/2026/01/02/n...

If I actually finish any of these 4-5 projects I'm working on, it's going to be so great.

Thank you KAIST for hosting our Legal Challenges in the AI Era workshop! @jeannefromer.bsky.social, @michaelweinberg.org, @sbenthall.bsky.social, & Florencia Marotta-Wurgler are representing NYU in Seoul

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

I'm very +1 the LeCun world model pivot.

Europe once again realizes that it can get a lot of money out of US big tech companies by enforcing laws

Great piece by Fred Turner on the pivot from Californian ideology of connection (which built the web) to Texan ideology of extraction and theocracy thebaffler.com/salvos/the-t...

I was thinking today that we need something like Marr's levels, but for software system design. Level one is for functional specification. Level 2 technical design. Level 3 is implementation. Level 0 is incentives and politics of design. System errors can happen at all levels.

[2510.27628] Validity Is What You Need arxiv.org/abs/2510.27628

RIP Alison Knowles. Damn. hyperallergic.com/1054017/alis...

When will the Government shutdown end? share.google/2WvCZK7Lrzp0...

Honestly relieved that my child fell asleep on the way to the Halloween parade and won't let himself be woken up so I too can nap in the car.

There are ever increasingly impressive demos of high-tech machines promising a transformed future. But somehow sustaining automation of even universal basics remains a challenge. Kitchen appliances break down. We haven't yet mastered the smoke alarm that doesn't go off when you fry stuff. Etc.

I'm glad the political symbolism of the frog changed. I was pretty sick of the ugly meme cartoon.

Today I saw _Robots_ (2005) for the first time. Free with ads on YouTube. Quite underrated children's movie. Brilliant animation. Mel Brooks and Robin Williams voice acting. My son enjoyed it.

Looks like California has learned something from the EU Cookie Banner disaster therecord.media/california-s...

AT Protocol hosts splitting away from Bluesky over content moderation politics is actually what the AT Protocol needs to achieve its objective of decentralization. Feature not bug.

Sociology is a martial art. youtu.be/PA4s3I3-X2U?...

Speaking of primatology, my main opinion about jobs and automation is that a large share of "economic activity" is elaborate social grooming to establish hierarchy, and that the share of human labor devoted to this will increase with automation, because it cannot be automated.

Groundbreaking! The UK Armed Forces has sworn in its first-ever humanist pastoral carer – Dr Neil Weddell. This means thousands of non-religious service personnel will have access to like-minded pastoral support that genuinely reflects their values and worldview. 🧵

Baumol's cost disease, but one job. Everything that can be automated and streamlined about your work takes less and less time. The more efficient they get, the stagnant parts of one's work takes up relatively more time. Progress is blocked by the most tedious blockers. Is there a name for this?

Claim: true ethical statements refer to facts about which behaviors and institutions produce adaptively stable social systems, under varying environmental and technical regimes. These are sometimes unknown but largely discoverable facts.

"Low effort, unhelpful AI generated work is having a significant impact on collaboration at work. Approximately half of the people we surveyed viewed colleagues who sent workslop as less creative, capable, and reliable than they did before ...AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity

So are CA, IL, and NY going to lead a shadow cabinet with all the fired federal experts developing state policy based on expertise? Then raise state taxes to match what was cut from federal?

Sovereign Wealth Funds can hold domestic equities. Ideological inconsistencies aside, the Intel thing seems like a fine or at least justifiable move. Cf. "Sovereign Wealth Funds as domestic investors of last resort during crises" | Cairn.info share.google/3JfOQmVu97BQ...

Does anybody have an leads or ideas about policies for open source software communities about the use of GenAI in contributions or participation?

Sure wish people would listen to the experts saying how important it is to trust the institutions with the experts in them. Timely PSA.

In neoclassical economic modeling, the assumption of rational decision-making, and the aggregation of multiple actors into a representative agent, are not orthogonal. By taking both steps, the model sheds its ability to represent the sections of society that are less rational and thereby diminished.

There are lots of reasons not to like Vladimir Putin. But I think I would actually prefer him as a President to who we currently have. Fewer embarrassing tweets, etc.

🤓 Fascinating read about OpenAI, Anthropic and the business of LLMs ethanding.substack.com/p/openai-bur...

"Oligarchy" is a nice, fitting word because it implies both a concentration and multipolarity of power, unencumbered by totalizing ideology or even claim to personal virtue.

A difference between the Trump epistemology and the Party epistemology in 1984 is that in the latter, there was unified and singular totalitarian control over records, ideology, belief, perception. There's a collectivist solipsism, ergo "Reality" is at stake. We have absolutely nothing like that.

Quite the broadside from Stoller against the Abundance crowd, and I had a bit of a jumpscare to see effective altruism return to the Discourse too. There's an underlying point about to be made, like, what sort of things fool what sort of people. www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-abundan...

The Workshop on Law-Following AI this past week in Cambridge was excellent. Very interesting kernel of a community around AI compliance issues.

Traveling in the UK. It's comparatively quite nice over here.

Zohran didn't win by relying on standard turnout patterns. We had to fundamentally transform the Democratic electorate. I was part of a group of NYC-DSA members that applied lessons from our previous campaigns to design the “universe” of voters to talk to. Here's how we won 🧵

Josh Tenenbaum's inspiring keynote at #cogsci2025 on growing vs scaling AI, the big questions of cognitive science, and the many open questions for the field.

I have been thinking about "National Brotherhood Week" for a couple of months now, so today's news hits hard.

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

The 99-1 flop of the restriction on state AI laws in the BBB shows that the industry is not as (legislatively) powerful as they seemed at the start of this year.

Beautifully succinct statement of the core problem with the blind application of statistical learning in AI!!

Ok, GenAI is useful for coding. CoPilot's pull request reviews on GitHub are surprisingly good. Asking specific questions about solutions to problems, where some conceptual idea needs an explanation, is useful. There's a lot of ways to use it that aren't "vibe coding" at all.

What, if anything, can lead to a successful populist electoral revolt against elites? Some have thought that class consciousness can do it. But that rarely happens in a consumerist society. "The people" are a crowd beast not a rational actor. What might do it is tabloid-level viral scandal content.

Does anybody else think this picture is... funny?

The word for the NYT article about Mamdani's college app is "clickbait". It was super memetic. The only solution is getting a life.

"In July, Musk stated that the America Party could focus on "two or three Senate seats" and "eight to ten House districts" to serve as the "deciding vote on contentious laws" and represent general will." Buy out the "Freedom Caucus" and turn them into futurist libertarians? Notes of Yang Gang.

Ranked choice voting is good. Matching funds for candidates is good.

Maybe what's happening is that money can't buy elections as well as it used to? Both Trump 2 and Mamdani were underfunded relative to their rival. Maybe voters aren't buying donor class messaging in general.