I appreciate a contrarian take, but this one from FT on European overregulation (the take — it’s not any worse than America) is just plain wrong. For example:

It’s not just Europe. The most recent “revolt” is explicitly premised on the claim that Europe has been falling behind US growth because it is more heavily regulated. But stop and think for a second: aren’t Americans complaining just as much about red tape? The US, too, is a master of throwing bureaucratic spanners in the wheels […]

In fact, those who measure such things find that the EU has more streamlined regulation than the US. Every five years, the OECD collects data on how competition-friendly its member states’ regulation is. Below is the 2023 vintage, for both the overall indicator and the sub-indicator “Administrative and regulatory burden”.

Pulling a lumbering bureaucracy’s stats sheet to show you’re not bureaucratic is a beautifully European thing to do. Never mind that the chart it shows are each individual country’s rules and regulations. The EU by itself has yet another set or rules, cast as a pall over any hope you may have that doing business in a member country will be smooth painless.

The “Real World Risk Institute” — RWRI — is Nassim Taleb’s answer to the question of what his Incerto would look like if it were a course. The twentieth workshop starts on July 7 and lasts for 2 weeks. This is what I wrote on that other site in response to the announcement:

Strongly endorse. Took the first one in July 2020 and if it weren’t for it I’d still be a federal employee on a visa. It’s not the knowledge you get (you have the Inecrto (sic!) for that), it’s the thinking

And I meant every misspelled word. Go if you have time: scholarships are available, math is not required.

Also on that other site: Grok 3. I wish I could say it was pure hype and bragging from a man-child in need of attention. Alas it’s the real deal: it gave me less BS, and faster, to my now standard set of querries. Brave new world, etc.

On a Mission to Heal Gila Monsters:

The Gila monster, which is native to the deserts of North America, can survive on just a few meals a year, thanks to a digestion-slowing hormone in its venom.

The discovery of this hormone paved the way for Ozempic, making the Gila monster an enormously profitable gift to modern medicine. And last summer one particular Gila monster, a former pet named Pebbles, needed medicine in return.

Riveting stuff.

My Kind of Conservatism:

Meanwhile the old-guard Democrats are holding solemn press conferences, still wearing suits and pantsuits, standing behind podiums to speak to the rolling cameras of television networks. They are ghosts addressing ghosts. “Sure, it’s not 1985 now,” Homer Simpson once said, when Marge tried to throw out his old calendars, “but you never know what the future might bring.” This is the message we are currently getting from Chuck Schumer and the others.

“Ghosts addressing ghosts” applies to more than just politicians speaking on mainstream media.

Deep Research continues to impress: here is a 4000-word essay on how the word “Pumpaj” — Serbian for “Pump!” — became the slogan of the 2024/25 protests. Even the prompt was LLM-engineered, as described in this Reddit post. So it goes…

The headline: “Cheap blood test detects pancreatic cancer before it spreads”.

The reality:

The nanosensor correctly identified healthy individuals 98% of the time, and identified people with pancreatic cancer with 73% accuracy. It always distinguished between individuals with cancer and those with other pancreatic diseases.

The 98% number means that two out of 100 healthy people who take the test would have a false positive result. It also misses more than 20 out of 100 people with cancer, giving them a false sense of security. If used in a mostly healthy population — a reasonable assumption to make for a screening test — a positive result would more likely than not be a false positive, and yet you would still miss plenty of actual cancers.

These are abysmal assay characteristics and the test should never see clinic, but you would never know it from the headline. (↬Tyler Cowen)

It isn’t only grad students who should be worried about Deep Research:

Students cannot be expected to continue paying for information transfer that AGI provides freely. Instead, they will pay to learn from faculty whose expertise surpasses AI, offering mentorship, inspiration, and meaningful access to AGI-era careers and networks. Universities that cannot deliver this specific value will not survive. This isn’t a mere transformation but a brutal winnowing—most institutions will fail, and those that remain will be unrecognizable by today’s standards.

Yikes! This is from Hollis Robbins, much more in-depth and thought out than my rapid review, though I take issue with her sticking the G in between the A and the I, because we are no there yet. (ᔥTyler Cown)