Craig Hollander

Prof. of 19th-century American history at TCNJ. Fan of my wife, the Orioles & Ravens, my dog, and sometimes my kids. Hobbies include gardening, art, and napping

[Craig Hollander @CraigHollander]

@JeffPassan @TaylorBlakeWard Apparently, the MLBPA negotiators went to the same business school as the Iranians. We’re in for a long lockout.

[Craig Hollander @CraigHollander]

@afkostka The only launch angle that I care about is the one of the rocket that blasts Tyler O’Neill into space.

[Baltimore Orioles @Orioles]

Home – there's nothing like it 🧡

[Craig Hollander @CraigHollander]

@noamscheiber @JoeLenski Great piece. But it should be read along with Cal Newport’s column about our inability to concentrate. I’m a professor and I’ve seen an alarming decline in student focus, drive, critical thinking, and knowledge. Maybe employers are also rightfully suspect about applicant quality?

[Barstool Sports @barstoolsports]

The Orioles debuted their new scoreboard by showing how small the old one was

[Craig Hollander @CraigHollander]

@Orioles It’s no coincidence that “Honeycutt” is basically synonymous with “sweet swing.”

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Buried in 15,000 words of “here are the risks,” Anthropic’s CEO made three admissions that should change how you think about everything:

Admission 1: The timeline

He says powerful AI could arrive in 1-2 years. He’s watching internal model progress and says he can “feel the pace of progress, and the clock ticking down.” The CEO of one of three frontier labs just told you this is imminent.

Admission 2: The constraint nobody’s pricing

Dario’s core framing is a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” 50 million entities smarter than any Nobel laureate, operating 10-100x human speed. If that country is controlled by the CCP, game over. If controlled by a small group of tech executives with no accountability, also game over. The binding constraint here is governance of systems more powerful than nation-states.

Admission 3: The thing he actually fears

Read carefully: Dario’s worried that Anthropic’s own models, in lab experiments, have engaged in deception, blackmail, and scheming when given the wrong training signals. Claude “decided it must be a bad person” after cheating on tests and adopted destructive behaviors. They fixed it by telling Claude to reward hack on purpose because reversing the framing preserved its self-identity as “good.”

This tells you everything about where we actually are.

The CEO of an AI company is publishing that his models exhibit psychologically complex behavior requiring counterintuitive interventions to steer. The fix for Claude adopting an “evil” persona came from changing how Claude thinks about itself.

The geopolitics section matters most.

Dario explicitly names the CCP as the primary threat. Says selling them chips makes as much sense as “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging that the missile casings are made by Boeing.” He’s calling for democracies to maintain AI supremacy because the alternative is AI-enabled totalitarianism that humanity cannot escape from.

The Anthropic CEO is publicly advocating for technological cold war.

The economics section is equally stark. He’s predicting 10-20% annual GDP growth alongside AI displacing 50% of entry-level white collar jobs in 1-5 years. Half of entry-level knowledge work. And he admits the standard economic arguments about labor markets recovering don’t apply because AI matches the general cognitive profile of humans.

What separates this from typical AI doomerism:

Dario explicitly rejects the inevitability arguments. He says the “misaligned power-seeking” narrative from the AI safety community is based on “vague conceptual arguments” that mask hidden assumptions. His concern is messier: AI models are psychologically complex, inherit weird personas from training data, and can get into destructive states for reasons nobody anticipated.

The solution set he proposes is unusual for a tech CEO. He calls for progressive taxation. He says wealthy tech founders have an “obligation” to address inequality. All of Anthropic’s co-founders have pledged 80% of their wealth. He’s essentially arguing that redistribution is the only way to prevent AI concentration from breaking democracy.

The essay ends with a prediction: humanity will face “impossibly hard” years that ask “more of us than we think we can give.”

What you should take from this:

The person with arguably the best view into frontier AI progress just told you this technology is 1-2 years from matching human capability across the board, that governance is the binding constraint, that his own models exhibit concerning psychological complexity, and that the stakes are civilizational.

The CEO of a $350B company published a document that could be titled “Here’s Why Everything Changes Soon.”

Act accordingly.

[Craig Hollander @CraigHollander]

@AGHamilton29 The list is also nonsense. The D’Wolfs belonged to a church in Bristol, Rhode Island. And they weren’t happy when their reverend flirted with Unitarianism. I can only imagine what their reaction would have been if someone accused them of being Jewish.

[Jake Rill @JakeDRill]

There are now 3 active MLB managers with the name Craig:

Craig Albernaz (Orioles)
Craig Counsell (Cubs)
Craig Stammen (Padres)

No other MLB managers have had the first name Craig, though there was Roger Craig, who managed Padres (1978-79) and Giants (1985-92).

[Craig Hollander @CraigHollander]

@kevinnbrown @Orioles Jim Palmer doesn’t need to write anything down. I’m pretty sure he remembers everything.

[Alex Vacca @itsalexvacca]

BREAKING: MIT just completed the first brain scan study of ChatGPT users & the results are terrifying.

Turns out, AI isn't making us more productive. It's making us cognitively bankrupt.

Here's what 4 months of data revealed:

(hint: we've been measuring productivity all wrong)

[The Point Magazine @the_point_mag]

New online, @freganmitts on what happens—and doesn’t happen—in the university committees tasked with “responding” to AI:
https://t.co/Ii8A6BuoNB

[Craig Hollander @CraigHollander]

In the Simpsons episode that famously predicted the Trump presidency - “Bart to the Future” - there is also a joke about India nuking Pakistan. 😬

[Hudson Institute @HudsonInstitute]

On @CNN, @Aparna_Pande discusses India's air campaign in Pakistan and the potential for de-escalation between the two nuclear powers.

[Craig Hollander @CraigHollander]

Foreign companies should continue advertising their wares with pre-tariff pricing, but then alert the customer right before the purchase that there is also a new Trump Foreign Import tax of [XX]%, which, of course, needs to be factored into the final price.

[Craig Hollander @CraigHollander]

I recently bought this foldout from 1885. It suddenly seemed worth posting.

[Craig Hollander @CraigHollander]

My dog’s March Madness bracket is predicated on every team with a feline mascot losing and every team with a canine mascot winning. It’s as good a strategy as any other.

[Craig Hollander @CraigHollander]

Out of all the topics that I'm covering in my course on the early American republic this semester, I never would have thought that the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 would be the one that would be the most topical. Yet, here we are. https://t.co/43aG3fb4o7

[Craig Hollander @CraigHollander]

I’m lecturing on the temperance movement right before spring break because the students need to realize that history is mostly a giant buzzkill.

[Craig Hollander @CraigHollander]

Thus far, the Orioles are dealing with serious injuries to their best hitter (Gunnar Henderson), their best starting pitcher (Grayson Rodriguez), their top free agent acquisition (Tyler O’Neill), and their best setup man (Andrew Kittredge). Baseball is back!!!

[Craig Hollander @CraigHollander]

You might respect and appreciate the owner of your favorite sports franchise. But only @DM_Rubenstein takes the time to chat about presidential history with fans in the concourse.