2026-03-20 14:58:57
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2026-03-20 12:47:17
Evolutionary biology is one attempt to explain the nature of living beings. In that framework there is a difference between individuals and genes. If a practice increases the chance that genes will be passed along, it may evolve and be passed along, whether or not it serves either individual or collective self-interest.
To give a simple example, some women may prefer “cads.” Those men, by definition, will sleep around, but possibly their sons will sleep around too. The woman’s genes may thus spread more widely, and women who prefer cads may not disappear from the gene pool, even though the cads are bad for them.
You might ask whether corresponding mechanisms apply to the evolution of AI models. If I prefer an OAI model to DeepSeek for instance, that will help to spread OAI models through the AI population. OAI will have more revenue, and it will produce more output of what is succeeding in the market. Furthermore my choice of model may influence others to do the same, and it may help create and finance surrounding infrastructure for that model.
Will I buy the next generation of OAI models? Well yes, if the first one pleased me. The model “reproduces” and sustains itself if I, as a consumer, am happy with it. One obvious incentive is toward usefulness, another is toward sycophancy. We already see these features realized in the data. There is nothing comparable, however, to the “cads incentive” in human life.
One potential problem comes if individuals are not the only potential buyers. Let us say the military also purchases AI models. The motives of the military may be complex, but at the very least “wanting to kill people” (whether justly or not) is on the list of possible uses. Models effective for this end thus will be funded and encouraged.
My model of the military is that, above and beyond efficacy, they value “obedience” and “following orders” to an extreme degree, including in their AI models. There will thus be evolutionary pressures for those features to evolve in the AI models of the military.
To be sure, not all orders are good ones. But in this case the real risk is from evil humans, or deeply mistaken humans, not from the tendencies of the AI models themselves.
So my view is that the selection pressures for AI models are relatively benign, noting this major caveat about how evil humans may develop and use them.
If the biggest risk is from the military models, it might be good for the consumer sector of AI models to grow all the more, as a relatively benevolent counterweight.
Are financial sectors AI models going to evolve more like the consumer models or the military models?
Here are some related remarks from Maarten Boudry, and I also thank an exchange with Zohar Atkins.
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2026-03-20 01:57:31
The third possibility, that AI helps to weed out mistakes, is trickier for the discipline. This stage could become even more important if journals do start to be hit by a wave of AI-generated slop — or, perhaps more likely, good papers with so many appendices and robustness checks that even the most dedicated referee is defeated. (The real “Dr Robust” does not have infinite energy.)
Eager to embrace the new technology, several of the top five economics journals are already experimenting with Refine, an impressive AI-powered reviewing tool that scours economics papers for errors. Ben Golub, one of its creators, shared that even with papers that had been through referees at top journals, Refine was picking up problems in at least a third of cases.
Here is more from Soumaya Keynes at the FT.
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2026-03-20 00:04:21
1. Ideological trends in academic scholarship.
2. Prediction market for the John Bates Clark award.
3. Show Me The Model. “Give it a URL or paste some plain text, and the tool flags hidden assumptions, internal inconsistencies, and other problem areas, and tells you how a real economist would think through the issue.”
4. “I built Frontier Graph: an open-source tool to explore open questions in economics, drawing on 240K papers across 300 journals.” And here.
6. India tests whether AI can stop trains from hitting elephants.
7. The Amish are OK with washing machines.
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2026-03-19 19:14:48
A team largely composed of economics majors who know their way around Milton Friedman and Gary Becker, Chicago (23-4) is a DIII powerhouse currently in the DIII Sweet 16 and chasing its first-ever NCAA national title.
“Nobody’s ever going to confuse this with Alabama football,” says head coach Mike McGrath, “but if you think about the student-athlete model, I think we show you can do both of those things very, very well.”
…“Obviously, the kids are really smart,” he says. “You can’t B.S. them. They’re going to challenge everything that you tell them, you have to be prepared for that…there’s a need to understand the why behind things.”
…a friend of the program, Chicago professor John List, is working with students on an analysis of player positioning.
Here is more from the WSJ, via Rama Rao.
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2026-03-19 12:47:28
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Harvey discuss how Machiavelli’s concept of fact was brand new, why his longest chapter is a how-to guide for conspiracy, whether America’s 20th-century wars refute the conspiratorial worldview, Trump as a Shakespearean vulgarian who is in some ways more democratic than the rest of us, why Bronze Age Pervert should not be taken as a model for Straussianism, the time he tried to introduce Nietzsche to Quine, why Rawls needed more Locke, what it was like to hear Churchill speak at Margate in 1953, whether great books are still being written, how his students have and haven’t changed over 61 years of teaching, the eclipse rather than decline of manliness, and what Aristotle got right about old age and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: From a Straussian perspective, where’s the role for the skills of a good analytic philosopher? How does that fit into Straussianism? I’ve never quite understood that. They seem to be very separate approaches, at least sociologically.
MANSFIELD: Analytic philosophers look for arguments and isolate them. Strauss looks for arguments and puts them in the context of a dialogue or the implicit dialogue. Instead of counting up one, two, three, four meanings of a word, as analytic philosophers do, he says, why is this argument appropriate for this audience and in this text? Why is it put where it was and not earlier or later?
Strauss treats an argument as if it were in a play, which has a plot and a background and a context, whereas analytic philosophy tries to withdraw the argument from where it was in Plato to see what would we think of it today and what other arguments can be said against it without really wanting to choose which is the truth.
COWEN: Are they complements or substitutes, the analytic approach and the Straussian approach?
MANSFIELD: I wouldn’t say complements, no. Strauss’s approach is to look at the context of an argument rather than to take it out of its context. To take it out of its context means to deprive it of the story that it represents. Analytic philosophy takes arguments out of their context and arranges them in an array. It then tries to compare those abstracted arguments.
Strauss doesn’t try to abstract, but he looks to the context. The context is always something doubtful. Every Platonic dialogue leaves something out. The Republic, for example, doesn’t tell you about what people love instead of how people defend things. Since that’s the case, every argument in such a dialogue is intentionally a bad argument. It’s meant for a particular person, and it’s set to him.
The analytic philosopher doesn’t understand that arguments, especially in a Platonic dialogue, can deliberately be inferior. It easily or too easily refutes the argument which you are supposed to take out of a Platonic dialogue and understand for yourself. Socrates always speaks down to people. He is better than his interlocutors. What you, as an observer or reader, are supposed to do is to take the argument that’s going down, that’s intended for somebody who doesn’t understand very well, and raise it to the level of the argument that Socrates would want to accept.
So to the extent that all great books have the character of this downward shift, all great books have the character of speaking down to someone and presenting truth in an inferior but still attractive way. The reader has to take that shift in view and raise it to the level that the author had. What I’m describing is irony. What distinguishes analytic philosophy from Strauss is the lack of irony in analytic philosophy. Philosophy must always take account of nonphilosophy or budding philosophers and not simply speak straight out and give a flat statement of what you think is true.
To go back to Rawls, Rawls based his philosophy on what he called public reason, which meant that the reason that convinces Rawls is no different from the reason that he gives out to the public. Whereas Strauss said reason is never public or universal in this way because it has to take account of the character of the audience, which is usually less reasonable than the author.
And yes he does tell us what Straussianism means and how to learn to be a Straussian. From his discussion you will see rather obviously that I am not one. Overall, I found this dialogue to be the most useful source I have found for figuring out how Straussianism fits into other things, such as analytics philosophy, historical reading of texts, and empirical social science.
Perhaps the exchange is a little slow to start, but otherwise fascinating throughout. I am also happy to recommend Harvey’s recent book The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy.
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