2026-04-13 05:47:37
And that is in Hungary, which does not have much of a democratic tradition. People who suggest that democracy seriously is in danger in the United States need to rethink their world views (this claim however is slightly exaggerated). The problem instead is that democracy does not always bring you desired results…
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2026-04-13 01:45:48
At Harvard Law School, Jonathan is consistently excellent.
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2026-04-13 00:14:35
1. Have recessions disappeared?
2. Humans are losing the fight against flying fish (WSJ).
3. In this study expert judges preferred the AI writing.
5. Does using AI for legal research and work limit later comprehension? (No, it seems)
The post Sunday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-04-12 15:12:43
We examine the economic impact of non-consumable visual cues through home staging on high-stakes housing transactions. Using hand-collected listing photos for 15,777 transactions and a machine-learning algorithm to detect furniture, we provide the first large-scale evidence that staged homes sell for roughly 10% more and one week faster than comparable homes without furniture. Our pre-registered online experiment establishes causality and uncovers mechanisms. We find that furniture clarifies spatial use, while decor enhances emotional attachment, jointly driving the higher willingness-to-pay. These findings demonstrate how visual cues impact high-stakes decisions and systematically shape valuations in the largest asset market for households.
That is from Puja Bhattacharya, et.al., via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
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2026-04-12 12:21:46
I would not wish to bet on this, but it is an interesting idea:
I wonder if the cyber capabilities of Mythos and future models ultimately lower the returns to ‘hacking,’ perhaps below the point where such efforts are worth investing in.
Say you’re a nefarious actor and uncover a critical, zero-day exploit in an important system. How do you extract the most value from that exploit? There are more valuable and less valuable times to deploy it, and usually the best time won’t be “immediately.” You may only get to deploy it once or a small number of times. You have to consider:
The answer to (1) is now “a much shorter time than before”, while 2 and 3 are mostly unchanged. In the new world, yes, exploits are much easier to find, but the expected value of a given exploit has also shrunk. The odds of an opportune moment falling within the ‘window of usefulness’ of that exploit are much lower. It’s plausible that the new equilibrium becomes “it’s not even worth spending money to find vulnerabilities in most systems, because the chances of being able to do something useful with it before it’s patched is close to zero.”
Much of the fear around cybersecurity vulnerabilities is something like: our adversaries accumulate a pile of highly damaging (to physical infrastructure, military assets, communication systems, …) exploits, which in the event of a conflict they then rapidly deploy to cause damage. Mythos would seem to favor defense here, because the usable lifetime of any exploit is much shorter. Any cyberattack that is timing-dependent now has lower utility.
Yes, there are more mundane cybersecurity concerns like ransomware or data theft, but these aren’t hugely significant in the scheme of things. And I would expect within a few years we’ll have fairly robust tools for automated vulnerability discovery and patching that any large business that cares about these things can deploy.
No doubt this assumes you can trust those in control of the leading-edge models. But even if you’re a bit behind, the situation may not be so bad. There isn’t an infinite supply of exploits, and again, most of them only need to be found ‘fast enough’ in order to mitigate the damage.
From Jacob Gloudemans.
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2026-04-12 03:09:53
renaissance rationalization is a process that commodified itself rapidly: despite the europeans discovering most technology during the early modern period it spread everywhere within a few centuries, and the rate of spread has been increasing dramatically
knowledge of the scientific frontier dissipates around the world faster as science has enabled better communication technologies. it’s getting even faster with INTELLIGENCE technologies which actually explain themselves and help you build them
as we approach more powerful intelligence, the ability to train powerful models is self commodifying rather than building a huge and runaway advantage for a handful of recursive self improvers. this is one reason why you should expect almost all of the benefits of superintelligence to be captured by the public
Here is the tweet. That said, it would be useful to relax constraints on the supply of both energy and land, so that the benefits could diffuse more widely yet.
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