2026-03-06 04:05:30
Here is a link.
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2026-03-06 01:11:18
2. The economics of context engineering.
3. Claims about contract differences.
4. Finnish education quality possibly has declined?
5. What did prehistoric Europeans eat?
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2026-03-05 20:13:19
A NY State Senate proposed bill (Senate Bill S7263) would
prohibit a chatbot to give substantive responses; information, or advice or take any action which, if taken by a natural person, would constitute unauthorized practice or unauthorized use of a professional title as a crime in relation to professions who licensure is governed by the education law or the judiciary law.
Claude, what do you think of the legal logic of this bill?
The legal logic is shaky. The bill’s operative test asks whether a chatbot’s output, “if taken by a natural person, would constitute a crime” under New York’s unauthorized practice statutes. But those statutes set a high bar — mere advice-giving by a layperson is not criminal; what’s prohibited is holding yourself out as a licensed professional while charging fees. Your neighbor who happens to be a doctor can tell you what he thinks your rash is. A retired lawyer can walk you through a lease. None of that is a crime. So either the bill is mostly toothless — most AI responses wouldn’t meet the criminal threshold — or courts will interpret “substantive advice” far more expansively than the underlying statutes warrant, effectively creating a new and harsher legal standard for AI that applies to no human equivalent. Neither outcome reflects good lawmaking, and the ambiguity will systematically over-deter, pushing operators to sanitize outputs well beyond what the statute actually requires.
Claude, who will be hurt by this bill?
The deepest problem is who gets hurt. The populations with the most to gain from AI-assisted professional guidance are precisely those who cannot afford lawyers, doctors, or therapists — the tenant trying to understand an eviction notice, the rural patient triaging symptoms, the small business owner reviewing a contract. For these users, the choice the bill actually creates is not “AI advice versus licensed professional advice”; it’s “AI advice versus no advice at all.” A watered-down chatbot that responds to every medical or legal question with a referral to a licensed professional is not a safety feature — it’s a luxury tax on information, paid disproportionately by people with the fewest alternatives. New York should be asking how to ensure AI advice is accurate and clearly disclosed, not how to suppress it on behalf of incumbents who’d prefer less competition.
Thanks Claude. Where did you learn this excellent analysis?
Public choice theory is part of my general training on economics and political science literature — Buchanan, Tullock, Olson, and the broader tradition are well-represented in the texts I was trained on.
But I’d be remiss not to note that you’re at the home institution of public choice. The Buchanan House is literally on your campus, and the tradition Buchanan and Tullock built at GMU is probably the most direct intellectual ancestor of the kind of analysis I was applying to this bill — concentrated benefits, diffuse costs, regulatory capture, rent-seeking by incumbent professionals. That framework is so natural for analyzing occupational licensing legislation that it almost applies itself.
If anything, my read of S7263 is pretty much a straightforward public choice story: organized professional associations with strong lobbying presence get statutory protection written in the language of consumer welfare, while the costs fall on millions of unorganized users who will never know what information they didn’t receive. Buchanan would have recognized it immediately.
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2026-03-05 16:06:25
April 14, register here.
And what would you suggest I ask him for this Conversations with Tyler?
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2026-03-05 13:41:44
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. In the first half of the episode we discuss Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and then move on to other topics. Here is the episode summary:
Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Reader, has thousands of subscribers drawn in by Henry’s conviction that great literature is where ideas “walk and talk amongst the mess of the real world” in a way no other discipline can match. Tyler, who has called Henry’s book Second Act “one of the very best books written on talent,” sat down with him to compare readings of Measure for Measure and range across English literature more broadly.
Tyler and Henry trade rival readings of the play, debate whether Isabella secretly seduces Angelo, argue over whether the Duke’s proposal is closer to liberation or enslavement, trace the play’s connections to The Merchant of Venice and The Rape of Lucrece, assess the parallels to James I, weigh whether it’s a Girardian play (Oliver: emphatically not), and parse exactly what Isabella means when she says “I did yield to him,” before turning to the best way to consume Shakespeare, what Jane Austen took from Adam Smith, why Swift may be the most practically intelligent writer in English, how advertising really works and why most of it doesn’t, which works in English literature are under- and overrated, what makes someone a late bloomer, whether fiction will deal seriously with religion again, whether Ayn Rand’s villains are more relevant now than ever, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Now, before doing your current work, you were in advertising for almost a decade. How do you feel that work in advertising has shaped how you read literature?
OLIVER: [laughs] I try to keep them very separate. I try not to let advertising—
COWEN: You try, but I’m sure you fail.
OLIVER: —pollute my readings of literature.
COWEN: Why is it a pollution?
OLIVER: Because advertising is not a great art, and to apply the principles of advertising to literature would be a diminishment.
COWEN: You don’t have to apply the principles. Advertising gives you insight into what people value, how people respond, and that’s also a part of literature.
OLIVER: It is if you take advertising not to mean headlines and banner ads and things like that, but to mean the calling of attention to some particular thing of importance. You can see that a lot of the great writers were very good advertisers of their own work, of their own ideas.
COWEN: Swift in particular.
OLIVER: Swift is very, very good at advertising. If you wanted to be obtuse, you could reframe his whole career as an exercise in lobbying and PR, and realize that no one’s ever been as good at it as he was.
COWEN: So, your favorite authors are the ones who are best at advertising is what you’re now telling us.
OLIVER: I have a very catholic view of literature, and I admire those writers who are practical and can do a lot of different things. I love Samuel Johnson, and one reason is that he can write a sermon, a legal opinion, an advert—almost anything you want. I think the literary talent can often be turned to those multiple uses.
COWEN: Why isn’t there more creativity in advertising? So much of it, to me, seems stupid and boring.
OLIVER: Yes.
COWEN: You would think, well, if they had a clever ad that people would talk about, it would be better, but that doesn’t happen. Is it a market failure, or it’s actually more or less optimal?
OLIVER: I don’t think it’s optimal. We don’t know how well advertising works, and we’re still impeded in that because of the laws about who you can and cannot target on the internet. I think most people would actually be surprised, if they went into an advertising agency, to learn just how poorly we can target people. Everyone thinks they’re being targeted all the time, but being followed by a toaster advert is really quite basic, and everyone uses the same toaster example because everyone’s being followed by the same bloody toaster. That’s not targeting.
I think they’ve been taken over by bad ideas. There are two competing schools of advertising. One of them is the hard sell, where you put a lot of information and facts, and you name the product a lot. “Buy this aspirin. It cures headaches three times quicker than other brands. We did a study—38 percent of people . . .” And you just hammer it all the time.
The other advertising school is image-based. Arthur Rubicam wrote those wonderful Steinway adverts. The instrument of the immortals. Have you brought great music into your home? The woman in the dress at the piano. You’re buying a whole mood or a vibe. The peak of that is like the tiger on the Frosty cereal packet. You don’t need words. Or the Marlboro Man—you buy these cigarettes. You’re going to look like that cowboy in that shirt, and you’re going to smoke. You’re going to feel like a man, and it’s just going to be great. Coors Light does that now.
Then there was this terrible, terrible thing called the Creative Revolution in the 1960s, where supposedly—this is like the modernism of advertising.
Definitely recommended, and do get out your copy of the Shakespeare.
Addendum: Here are comments from Henry.
The post My Conversation with the excellent Henry Oliver appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-03-05 01:12:26
1. Singaporeans to receive free premium AI subscriptions from second half of 2026.
2. “In a secular world, equality is a last attempt to offer some dignity to the weak.”
4. Mr. Beast, banker (NYT).
5. Chimpanzees are fascinated by crystals (NYT).
7. Dario okie-dokie.
8. Polymarket removes market on nuclear detonation (WSJ).
By the way, I like 5.3 Instant very much.
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