Favorites: AI Persuasion, Canada's Conservative Party Collapse
April 29 2025: Pell-grant bots flood colleges, Waymo tops 250K rides a week, and Jamie Dimon calls a recession “best-case.”
All the more wild because of how Trump seems to have directly caused the Canadian Conservative Party to lose the election.
The design seems a bit… fraught, but not in a way that makes it seem like the claim is false. But it does seem unethical to let loose AI systems attempting to persuade people of stuff. The AI structure is interesting, I don’t think I’ve seen single elimination tournaments before in response selection. But Mollick noted another item about this research
In part, I think he was commenting on this because of Hank Green getting absolutely mobbed for trying to discuss AI (cached) in a relatively evenhanded manner on Bluesky. Here’s an example of when someone less famous says something relatively tame (cached) about AI.
Hyundai cars can now do 15 minute charges, which is pretty good, but 5 minutes would still be a further step change in behavior change for users
A quarter of community college applicants in California are bots enrolling to get money from the Pell grant system.
Longer Reads
• Highlights from Apollo Management’s 40 page deck about the impacts of tariffs. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Some good news on California housing law. 677, a new “density near transit” bill, passed its committee. (src)(cached)
– Sure, Europe has tariffs, but also they’re relatively poor, and their standard of living is falling against peer nations. The tariffs aren't even that high. The US shouldn't dive into copying that. (src)(cached)
– It's been over a year since I last mentioned that New Zealand accidentally ran an experiment between two cities where one up-zoned and the other didn't but were otherwise the same. I don't think I had seen this graph from Financial Times before. (src)(cached)
– Comparing the S&P 500 to quotes by Trump and Treasury Secretary Bessent (src)(cached)
– Real estate transfer taxes can absolutely kill multifamily/apartment development. (src)(cached)
– Early reviews of Andor Season 2 promised that a first episode was mostly boardroom meeting. Upon seeing it, Armand Domalewski was blown away. (src)(cached)
– Dan Schwarz seriously doubts that OpenAI can achieve the revenue growth they’re predicting. (src)(cached)
– Trump destroyed the federal office responsible for securing rare earth metals in case China cuts off our supply. Which of course is what they did when Trump started a trade war with them. (src)(cached)
– Waymo reports that they’re doing 250k rides per week, Tim Lee calculated that they have maintained a 15% per month growth rate for 2 years now (src)(cached)
– It’s very important for your political movement to focus on outcomes, not on which things they say (src)(cached)
– Highlights from an SF chronicle article covering the requirement that teachers are trained in the modern science of reading, phonics, essentially. (src)(cached)
– If you’re wondering why I focus more on Twitter than Bluesky, a big part of it is how backwards beliefs about AI are over there. (src)(cached)
– Domino’s pizza reports no impact from tariffs, and once again an opportunity for the relevant Snow Crash quote. The four things america does better than anyone else continue to be Movies, Music, Code and High Speed Pizza Delivery. (src)(cached)
– Ethan Mollick asked ChatGPT o3 to redesign and modernize Mordor’s org chart. o3 understood that the goal was satire and exceeded expectations. (src)(cached)
– Manufacturers are asking the Fed to lower rates, but that’s not really going to help, it’ll just cause more inflation. (src)(cached)
– TikTok, which Trump is allowing while sidestepping a bipartisan law, is now full of news from China arguing that tariffs are bad. Tariffs which Trump is again sidestepping Congress on (src)(cached)
– Jamie Dimon now believes a recession is a best case scenario for the US economy. (src)(cached)