Jimmy Alfonso Licon 🦚🌵

Philosopher @ASU_SHPRS. Ethics, AI, God. Emergent Ventures fellow @mercatus. Views my own. Wife: @Liconlaw

[Jimmy Alfonso Licon 🦚🌵 @Doc_Licon]

Do you enjoy philosophical rants from a good natured contrarian? Then subscribe to my Substack for lots of free and paid content! 😎

https://t.co/KU4S9dQU1X

[Jimmy Alfonso Licon 🦚🌵 @Doc_Licon]

It doesn't. Next question.

[Rakesh Kumar @Rakeshhkumaar]

If capitalism is so efficient at economic calculation, why does it produce homelessness alongside empty homes, hunger alongside food surpluses, and poverty alongside immense wealth?

[Jimmy Alfonso Licon 🦚🌵 @Doc_Licon]

That was true the internet, too, and yet most people learned nothing lol

[JB @baird43107]

@politicalmath Another crumbling argument in favor of academia is the pursuit of knowledge. We have access to most knowledge on our phones if we care to look for it, and youth can educate themselves on any topic they are interested in at little or no cost. Colleges give credentials - that’s it.

[Jimmy Alfonso Licon 🦚🌵 @Doc_Licon]

Whatcha reading? I'll go first

[Alex Imas @alexolegimas]

This is not a mystery: because of grade inflation, many students don’t do the reading because they’re not incentivized to do the reading.

Students are just as smart and ambitious as they always have been, they’re just put in an environment where working hard isn’t explicitly rewarded. We are not cooked if faculty can reverse course (as many are already doing). Assign the readings, design the course to reward hard work and learning, and you’ll be amazed at the results.

[Jimmy Alfonso Licon 🦚🌵 @Doc_Licon]

Completely? Partially? For every task? The devil is in the details.

[Jennifer A. Frey @jennfrey]

Every academic press and journal needs a clear ban on AI writing.

[Local Knowledge Problem @MaxUtilitarian]

Public choice theory shows politicians aren't a different species — they're just as self-interested as the rest of us. The difference is the massive incentives government creates for corruption: insider trading on policy, pork-barrel spending, regulatory capture, revolving doors, and unchecked power.

Fix? Shrink the government's scope and discretion so it corrupts less. Less to buy, less buying.

[Alex Hollings @AlexHollings52]

In Sept. of 2023, a Marine pilot ejected from his F-35B and the U.S. military couldn’t even find the aircraft for about 30 hours… in South Carolina.

But people still think Donald Trump can identify Canadian F-35s anywhere in the world and just power them down.

[Jimmy Alfonso Licon 🦚🌵 @Doc_Licon]

@chenphilosophy Couldn't disagree more. I suspect that even less interesting philosophy would result.

[Anthony DiGiorgio, DO, MHA @DrDiGiorgio]

This is one of the most persistent myths about Medicare: it has low overhead.

Medicare offloads all the billing, coding, compliance, quality metrics, EHR costs… all of it on private doctors and hospitals.

Of course their numbers look pretty.

Meanwhile, doctors spend 2h on the computer for every 1h of patient care time. That’s not captured in the Medicare overhead metrics. The median hospital employs 7 people full time just for quality metric compliance. That’s also not captured.

Those are just a few examples.

For the real story, talk to doctors that have dropped Medicare. They report a reduction in compliance costs of 90%.

That’s a massive burden on our healthcare system.

So spare me the low compliance cost tall tale. It’s a myth.

[Pontus Rendahl @pontus_rendahl]

AI will be the end of universities! MOOCs will be the end of universities! YouTube will be the end! Libraries! The printing press!

And each time life continues almost as before. Universities provide peer interaction, evaluation, coordination and commitment. That’s the value.

[Jimmy Alfonso Licon 🦚🌵 @Doc_Licon]

It's all about the farmer carry baby!

[Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. @hubermanlab]

@sweatystartup I generally don’t leap on technicalities but I’m wondering what that quote repost incentive here is given that deadlifts don’t place any bar on the back. And I disagree. I’m 50 and deadlifts done right are great. & 80+ yo Twyla Tharp deadlifts 200+ at less than 140lbs.

[Jimmy Alfonso Licon 🦚🌵 @Doc_Licon]

@PhillipsPOBrien You have a time machine? Cool

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

We wanted to conclude the first Drone Deal with the United States. The U.S. wanted to test all types of our drones. We agreed to the way they wanted to test, train with, and use our systems in the air, on land, and at sea. But we still don’t have a bilateral Drone Deal – a big framework document.

The Drone Deals we have are with some countries in the Middle East and Europe, and now we are preparing a big Drone Deal with the EU. I hope we will reach the same agreement with our American partners. I count on it.

American companies have advanced AI technologies we don't have. In turn, we have many things they don't have, due to our extensive experience on the battlefield.

I think this cooperation can be huge — the most powerful of its kind in the world. We need to negotiate, not just talk about it. Take the necessary steps and do it as quickly as possible. For this, we need President Trump to say yes.

From an interview with Face the Nation. (5/5)

[Alex Imas @alexolegimas]

You know what other tools know better than most instructors? Coursera and YouTube courses from top faculty, *the internet*, books from the library. How many students used those tools instead of formal ed? Very very few. How many will use Claude independently to learn the material? Probably the same amount.

I know it doesn’t sound glamorous, but the primary role of faculty is to get students in the seats and create incentives to actually absorb the information. This is your job. AI can help as a tool, I’ve seen some great harnesses of AI for education, but it will not do this.

[Jimmy Alfonso Licon 🦚🌵 @Doc_Licon]

Using AI is fine. Whatever. It's the doing all the writing part that is very disappointing.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Update: After scanning almost 23,000 dissertations, I can now say... it's REALLY bad out there.

More than 1-in-5 dissertations uses AI nowadays, much of the time to do all of the writing.

[Hunter📈🌈📊 @StatisticUrban]

Arizona wastes an extraordinary amount of water growing alfalfa in the literal desert. It's ~27% of the state's total water use.

This is extremely uneconomical, and if farmers were forced to to pay anything close to the actual value of that water, it would disappear overnight.

[Jimmy Alfonso Licon 🦚🌵 @Doc_Licon]

The majority of Americans are wrong. Many such cases.

[Rob Henderson @robkhenderson]

"majority of Americans think it is immoral for businesses to raise prices in response to scarcity (say, charging more for shovels after a big snowstorm). But since having prices that will go up in response to scarcity is the single most important advantage of having a capitalist economic system, this...reveals something of a public relations problem for fans of the free market." https://t.co/nomdK8pxp7

[Jimmy Alfonso Licon 🦚🌵 @Doc_Licon]

@BrianJBerletic @DWalpiri

[John Cochrane @JohnHCochrane]

Important? I guess nobody murdered 100 million in Hayek’s name. As far as having something useful to say about how society works, I’ll go with Hayek

[Jimmy Alfonso Licon 🦚🌵 @Doc_Licon]

@mattbencole That hardly shows Marx is more important than Hayek, but ok lol