Henry Farrell | Lightnews

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 4h

My favourite example (formatting rendered wonky by time) is the old advice to use LaTeX rather than word in working papers to make it look as if you're intelligent goodauthority.org/news/the-gar...

The Gary King equilibrium

“Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/03/good-sentences.html picks up on the ‘technical note’ in Andrew’s zombie paper. bq. We originally wrote this article in Word, ...

goodauthority.org

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 4h

probably much more than you wanted - but the Campante et al. paper is likely useful in thinking through the broader problem and how journalism could respond. [recipes are different - the Bloomberg piece doesn't really talk about copyright problems or existing pre-AI weird SEO padding etc]

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 4h

LLMs make it much more difficult than in the past to distinguish sincere hard effort from automated boilerplate, so that it is harder to tell a sincere boss committed to helping you work better from one who is lazy and couldn't care less about you. There are similar dynamics for other situations.

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 4h

The intuition is crudely that -say, if a boss gives you a negative annual review, you will treat it differently if you think the boss spent a lot of time and sweat working on the report to make it thoughtful and constructive, than if you think the boss is just throwing boilerplate at you.

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 4h

Completely separately, there is a very interesting Wojtowicz and DeDeo paper - arxiv.org/pdf/2407.14452 - arguing that LLMs make it harder to signal sincere willingness to cooperate across a variety of social situations, by making it cheaper to send previously costly signals.

arxiv.org

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 4h

There is some interesting recent research from @filipecampante.bsky.social et al. suggesting that the market for news may resemble a separating equilibrium to some limited extent filipecampante.org/wp-content/u...

filipecampante.org

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 4h

distinguish themselves from slop providers, leading to a general degradation of information. A separating equilibrium would be one in which reliable sources could send costly signals, and in which news consumers would select reliable providers, creating a market for reliable news.

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 4h

If the setup means that honest types will send costly signals and bad types will not, you end up in a separating equilibrium where you can tell one kind of player from another. So in this context, a pooling equiibrium would be one where reliable sources don't have means/incentive to ...

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 4h

depending on setup, the other players may send costly signals. If all types of players have incentives to send the same kind of signals, whether they are diligent or feckless, you end up in a pooling equilibrium - the signals don't have useful information that allow you to distinguish good from bad

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 4h

sorry - game theoretic jargon. In signaling games, you might want to distinguish between 'types' of players - for example, are workers lazy or hard-working? Or are news-slingers unreliable or diligent? You don't know the type of other players, though the players themselves do and can communicate.

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 5h

What you think the likely consequences are depends on whether you expect to see a pooling or separating equilibrium.

Alexis Madrigal @alexis-madrigal.bsky.social · 6h

One of the big tidal forces of the coming years is that the baseline reliability of things you see on a screen is going to decline.

I think this has not been adequately metabolized.

This is one version, but there are a bunch of them.

Davey Alba @davey.bsky.social · 12h

NEW: AI “recipe slop” is overrunning search and social. Food creators say Google’s AI Overviews and glossy fake food pics are drowning out real, tested recipes — collapsing traffic and setting home cooks up for disaster, especially this Thanksgiving.

Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 5h

An excellent and very clear piece on LLM's and thinking. See also Farrell et al. in Science, our piece making the point about LLM's as a form of communication rather than cognition. alisongopnik.com/Papers_Aliso...

Alexis Madrigal @alexis-madrigal.bsky.social · 6h

One of the big tidal forces of the coming years is that the baseline reliability of things you see on a screen is going to decline.

I think this has not been adequately metabolized.

This is one version, but there are a bunch of them.

Davey Alba @davey.bsky.social · 12h

NEW: AI “recipe slop” is overrunning search and social. Food creators say Google’s AI Overviews and glossy fake food pics are drowning out real, tested recipes — collapsing traffic and setting home cooks up for disaster, especially this Thanksgiving.

Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

AI Slop Recipes Are Taking Over the Internet -- And Thanksgiving Dinner

Food bloggers see traffic dip as home cooks turn to AI, inspired by impossible pictures

www.bloomberg.com

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 6h

[I meant to write back to say return the book when good, but no desperate hurry, and was pleased that I'd accidentally spurred your memory]

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 6h

nb that the first are not films del Toro has any intention of making, unlike ATMOM, but they are films that he _ought_ have the intention of making. The one for the monsters, the other for the monstrosity of myth.

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 6h

this. I would also demand his Perdido Street Station and The Course of the Heart, and Revivified David Lynch's Book of the New Sun five season miniseries.

Dave Weigel @daveweigel.bsky.social · 6h

Guillermo Del Toro's "At the Mountains of Madness."

Ben K. @benjaminkabak.com · 9h

If you were a despotic president, what movie would you force Hollywood to make? I want to see Quentin's Star Trek movie or maybe Kill Bill Vol 3.

Dave Weigel @daveweigel.bsky.social · 6h

Guillermo Del Toro's "At the Mountains of Madness."

Ben K. @benjaminkabak.com · 9h

If you were a despotic president, what movie would you force Hollywood to make? I want to see Quentin's Star Trek movie or maybe Kill Bill Vol 3.

Jo Walton @bluejo.bsky.social · 7h

Tachyon Press are having a year end sale for the rest of 2025, 30% off sitewide with the code YEAREND30 tachyonpublications.com including wonderful books by Theodora Goss, Patricia McKillip, Jane Yolen, me, Peter Beagle, Michael Swanwick, James Morrow, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Nancy Kress, etc

Home - Tachyon Publications

Tachyon Publications, founded in 1995, is an award-winning publisher of smart science fiction, fantasy, horror, and more. We're saving the world, one good book at a time.

tachyonpublications.com

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 8h

Also, while on GLK - I thought this essay was both excellent and highly disturbing - deserved more attention than it got at the time www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The End of Children

Birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried?

www.newyorker.com

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 8h

careers.insidehighered.com/job/3430267/... Come be my boss as director of the SNF Agora Institute. It is a great place, and a big opportunity to reshape debate.

Director, The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute - Baltimore, Maryland (US) job with Johns Hopkins University | 3430267

Johns Hopkins University seeks the next director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Agora Institute, an effort to address the deterioration o...

careers.insidehighered.com

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 9h

I haven't read the book, but reheated Sombartism does not sound particularly delectable.

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 9h

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202... On balance among New Yorker writers, I'd slightly prefer to be on the wrong side of Isaac Chotiner to the wrong side of Gideon Lewis-Kraus.

What Does “Capitalism” Really Mean, Anyway?

In a new global history, capitalism is an inescapable vibe—responsible for everything, everywhere, all at once.

www.newyorker.com

BISA - British International Studies Association @mybisa.bsky.social · 11h

🚨New Shepherd.com article by James Pattison article out now! 🚨

Exploring 'The best books to understand how the global order is changing' w/ Anne Applebaum, Lucia Rafanelli Henry Farrell Abe Newman and more! 🌟

Read more about his book and his picks here 👉 https://ow.ly/MMMW50XxyAS

The best books to understand how the global order is changing

James Pattison gives us his best books to understand how the global order is changing.

ow.ly

Christopher Mims @mims.bsky.social · 12h

There are only a couple of media subscriptions where every time they ask for my money I'm like "hell yes" and @theverge.com is one of them

Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 14h

Grateful to The Verge for publishing my essay on why large-language models are not going to achieve general intelligence nor push the scientific frontier.

www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Is language the same as intelligence? The AI industry desperately needs it to be

The AI boom is based on a fundamental mistake.

www.theverge.com

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 1d

The work that they are doing is important.

Liberal Currents @liberalcurrents.com · 1d

Larger media outlets have wavered since the first Trump term, but we've remained steadfast in our categorical rejection of MAGA in all its aspects and our affirmation of liberal democracy and the principles that it rests on.

In the second Trump term, we are growing: www.gofundme.com/f/the-libera...

“Liberal Currents is raising funds to continue its work promoting a principled, humane liberalism: one that refuses to pick and choose whose freedom matters.” —Sharon Kuruvilla

Liberal Currents @liberalcurrents.com · 1d

Larger media outlets have wavered since the first Trump term, but we've remained steadfast in our categorical rejection of MAGA in all its aspects and our affirmation of liberal democracy and the principles that it rests on.

In the second Trump term, we are growing: www.gofundme.com/f/the-libera...

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 1d

Have you read Charles Palliser's The Quincunx? Fallen into obscurity for no good reason, but in principle sounds like your kind of thing. Dickensian but with lots of twistiness.

Laurent Pech 🇺🇦 @profpech.bsky.social · 1d

Bonus: Paper includes multiple tables contrasting Comm or Council's positive/panglossian assessments with expert assessments. One of paper's key points: increasing politicisation of toolbox comes with increasing gaslighting to hide this politicisation/gap btw EU rhetoric & reality of its (in)action

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 2d

thank you!

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