Henry Farrell
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himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell
@himself.bsky.social
35K followers 600 following 5.5K posts

Professor of democracy and international affairs. http://www.henryfarrell.net and newsletter at http://www.programmablemutter.com. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Holt, Penguin). https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250840554. .. more

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Henry Farrell is an Irish-born political scientist at Johns Hopkins University. He previously taught at the University of Toronto and earned his PhD from Georgetown University. His research interests include trust and co-operation; e-commerce; the European Union; and institutional theory. He is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations. .. more

Political science 57%
Economics 15%
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himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 5h
good to see "partyism" taken up (and if anyone can come up with better branding for the tendency, they have my blessing fwiw)

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 7h
Yes - also the future of Paul McAuley's Cowboy Angels, which I suspect was an important influence on The Peripheral (Gibson mentions McAuley in the acknowledgments, though not for this book]

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 7h
basically unavailable in the US right now, which is an enormous shame.

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 7h
[also, while we're on the topic of older SF that is unexpectedly on-the-nose, yesterday finished a re-read of @unlikelyworlds.bsky.social Cowboy Angels, about an America that semi-colonizes alternative versions of itself, including a former Nazi US once run by a "Dear Leader" with three idiot sons.]

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 7h
I have occasionally wondered if this is one of the implications of the title of @greatdismal.bsky.social The Peripheral, where no-one quite understands what is happening in China, except that it is way ahead on tech, and is weird.
interfluidity.com Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 7h
China is the center. Everywhere else is the periphery.

Reposted by Henry Farrell

interfluidity.com
Steve Randy Waldman @interfluidity.com · 7h
China is the center. Everywhere else is the periphery.

Reposted by Henry Farrell

princetonupress.bsky.social
Princeton University Press @princetonupress.bsky.social · 8h
@daschloz.bsky.social and @samrosenfeld.bsky.social's The Hollow Parties is a major history from the Founding to our embittered present that “explains the void” (Politico) at the center of America’s political parties.

Now in #paperback!

Read a free preview: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...
The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics by Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld. A major history from the Founding to our embittered present that “explains the void” (Politico) at the center of America's political parties.

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 8h
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68_Mill....
en.wikipedia.org

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 8h
The more that gerrymandering tries to squeeze more seats out a fixed pool of voters by lowering expected margins of victory, the more vulnerable it becomes to a wave in which the expectations are upset. There are self-interested reasons why many Republican incumbents haven't wanted to redistrict.
kevinmkruse.bsky.social Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 9h
This race is close and, given how much Democrats outperformed the polls a few weeks ago, a win is actually possible.

But even a narrow loss in a gerrymandered district Trump won by 22 points last year would be a sign of significant progress.
polltracker.bsky.social Poll Tracker 📊 @polltracker.bsky.social · 13h
Emerson poll | 11/22-11/24 LV

Tennessee’s 7th congressional special election (Trump +22)

(Leaners pushed)
🟥Matt Van Epps 49.4%
🟦Aftyn Behn 47.0%
Others 3.5%

emersoncollegepolling.com/tennessee-7t...

Reposted by Henry Farrell, Dan Immergluck

kevinmkruse.bsky.social
Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 9h
This race is close and, given how much Democrats outperformed the polls a few weeks ago, a win is actually possible.

But even a narrow loss in a gerrymandered district Trump won by 22 points last year would be a sign of significant progress.

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 9h
Top 5 side 2 last track.
1. "Soon."
2. "Soon."
3. "Soon."
4. "Take 3"
5. "Soon"

Reposted by Henry Farrell

Reposted by Henry Farrell

dsquareddigest.bsky.social
Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 9h
at the 'stack, I continue to worry around some of my issues with Data Guyism ... backofmind.substack.com/p/ways-of-vi...
ways of vibing
treatments and responses in the real world
backofmind.substack.com

Reposted by Henry Farrell

dsquareddigest.bsky.social
Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 10h
If I were the custody provider for the $115bn collateral portfolio of a $182bn financial institution, I would simply officially confirm that I was.

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 10h
[eaten by owls]

Reposted by Henry Farrell

eaterofsun.bsky.social
Oliver Morton, Eater of Sun @eaterofsun.bsky.social · 12h
Thinking about the BBC's self censorship, it strikes me to wonder when Apple TV+ will release "The Savant"

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 1d
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

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 1d
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]

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 1d
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.

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 1d
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.

Reposted by Brian Weatherson

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 1d
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

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 1d
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

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 1d
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.

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 1d
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 ...

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 1d
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

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 1d
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.

Reposted by Jonathan Hopkin

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 1d
What you think the likely consequences are depends on whether you expect to see a pooling or separating equilibrium.
alexis-madrigal.bsky.social Alexis Madrigal @alexis-madrigal.bsky.social · 1d
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.bsky.social Davey Alba @davey.bsky.social · 1d
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...

Reposted by Henry Farrell

alisongopnik.bsky.social
Alison Gopnik @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 1d
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...

Reposted by Melanie C. Green, Henry Farrell, Greg Linden

alexis-madrigal.bsky.social
Alexis Madrigal @alexis-madrigal.bsky.social · 1d
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.bsky.social Davey Alba @davey.bsky.social · 1d
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

himself.bsky.social
Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 1d
[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]