Daniel Lyons

Husband & father. Professor & Assoc Dean @bclaw. Nonresident senior fellow @AEI. Telecom/Internet law, Energy, Admin Law.

"An appropriate number of dad jokes."

[Daniel Lyons @ProfDanielLyons]

Do as adversaries do in law, strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.

William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Act I, sc. 2

[Free State Foundation @FSFthinktank]

Last chance to register for 6/4 w/@ArielleRoth @NTIAgov @MPORielly @JonathanTurley @ProfDanielLyons @AdamMossoff Michelle Connolly @DukeEcon John Duffy @UVALaw @CooperFSF. #FSFCelebrates20

https://t.co/eQVrsGJJQ4

[Daniel Lyons @ProfDanielLyons]

@marcorandazza

[Daniel Lyons @ProfDanielLyons]

@greggnunziata Amazing story of unintended consequences

[Int'l Ctr Law & Econ @LawEconCenter]

When users choose Google even where rivals are equally accessible, what does that reveal about foreclosure?

ICLE, among other Law & Econ scholars, filed an amicus brief urging the D.C. Circuit to ground its Section 2 analysis in counterfactual effects, not query coverage. 🔗 ⬇️

[Daniel Lyons @ProfDanielLyons]

@EsotericCD Maniac Mansion was so good

[(((Not That Crown, Maybe))) @CrownMaybe]

There was no need to choose Platner or Paxton or Talarico or any other degenerate submoron for any kind of office and yet the voters just keep begging for the chance to do so.

[Orin Kerr @OrinKerr]

https://t.co/DB3PW6dHgy

[Daniel Lyons @ProfDanielLyons]

Not quite sure how one gets apricated but pretty glad I'm not zone 7 @Delta

[Free State Foundation @FSFthinktank]

Don't Miss FSF's 20th Anniversary Luncheon Celebration with An All-Star Lineup on June 4! Must register to attend! #FSFCelebrates20
@ArielleRoth @NTIA @JonathanTurley @gwlaw @ProfDanielLyons @AdamMossoff Michelle Connolly @DukeEcon John Duffy @UVALaw Joe Kennedy @CooperFSF

https://t.co/fiUO5K3Bs9

[Daniel Lyons @ProfDanielLyons]

@Pasghetti45 @daveweigel Even at 409K impressions, this is an underrated tweet

[Handre @Handre]

The Soviet whaling fleet killed 180,000 whales between 1948 and 1973, delivering rotten carcasses that nobody wanted to eat. Soviet citizens had zero demand for whale meat. The ships hunted anyway, fulfilling quotas handed down from central planners who counted tons of dead whale as economic output.

This was bureaucratic box-checking that nearly drove multiple whale species to extinction. Soviet whalers targeted endangered right whales and humpbacks specifically because they were larger, helping them hit tonnage targets faster. The meat rotted on deck during long voyages back to port, where officials dutifully recorded the numbers and sent reports to Moscow declaring another successful harvest.

Central planners measured success in tons harvested, not consumer satisfaction or long-term sustainability. Factory managers got promoted for exceeding whale quotas, regardless of whether anyone actually wanted whale meat (they didn't). The feedback mechanism that normally connects production to human needs had been severed entirely. When bureaucrats replace market prices with administrative targets, you get mass slaughter with zero purpose.

You still see this today every time politicians promise to "create jobs" in industries that lose money year after year. When government agencies measure their success by dollars spent rather than problems solved. When university administrators chase enrollment numbers instead of student outcomes.

Remove the profit motive and price signals, and you get 180,000 dead whales rotting in the sun while commissars celebrate meeting their targets. You don't get rational planning.

Socialism is fundamentally destructive to the environment and inevitably leads to ecological disasters.

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

If this is true, using the best public estimates we have of LLM resource use, solving this Erdos problem took 0.6–6.3 kWh of electricity and about 3–31 liters of water.

So that is less than three almonds worth of water and the electricity equivalent of 2-20 miles of EV driving.

[Daniel Lyons @ProfDanielLyons]

This sounds comfortable

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts.

So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world.

What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations.

The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.

Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described.

The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding.

The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months.
Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now.

She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

[Daniel Lyons @ProfDanielLyons]

Just an amazing shift over the last month

[Daniel Lyons @ProfDanielLyons]

Polymarket broke against Massie over the last hour

[Daniel Lyons @ProfDanielLyons]

@CSMFHT

[Brad Lemley @BradCLemley]

Here is a huge positive to modern life that gets no press.

I have an old 2009 Toyota, and the AUX port crapped out about a year ago. Went to YouTube. Young, enthusiastic guy explains how to fix it.

It is not obvious - involves taking the dashboard apart in a counter-intuitive way, but once you see it, it's a 15 minute fix.

There are actually dozens of videos showing how to do this, and they collectively have well over 200k views.

Had this happened in 1995, I would have just lived with it. But the combo of the replacement AUX jack available from Amazon and the video of the simple (but not obvious) fix, I fixed it.

I HAVE DONE THIS DOZENS OF TIMES. Replaced the control panel of my dishwasher. Replaced the ice maker in the fridge. Fixed a wonky sanding head on my drill press. Mastered a bandsaw technique that I use for my sculpture. On and on and on...

I think it is likely no exaggeration to say billions of fixes and skill upgrades have been performed worldwide that would not have been performed if it were not for the instruction freely given peer-to-peer on YouTube.

Take a moment to be happy about this. The busted item keeps performing, rather than going to the landfill. The person learning and doing the fix gains a sense of mastery and saves money. It's an unmixed blessing.

Stop doomscrolling. Think of what is busted in your house, find the YouTube video on how to fix it, and fix it.

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

I just had the craziest experience at the airport.

We are about to board a flight to Atlanta when the pilot from the incoming plane walks out of the jetway. Guy is probably late 50s, salt and pepper hair, military look. The kind of pilot you instantly feel good about seeing on your flight.

Pilot walks over to the counter, gets on the PA system, and starts addressing everyone. “Folks, I’ve been doing this a long time. Flying one of these jets is easy. The hard part is looking at 130 people and telling them their flight is going to be delayed.”

Audible groans throughout the boarding gate. Most people here are flying to Atlanta as a layover before another flight. 130 people just had their day become a complete mess.

The pilot goes on. “I get it, trust me. But here’s the deal: During our landing, we had a small mechanical issue. I’m not your pilot for the next leg, but I don’t feel confident the jet’s safe to fly until we have a mechanical team look it over, and I don’t feel comfortable asking the next pilots to fly you guys until we get confirmation.”

He points at the agents next to him behind the counter: “Now, none of this is the agents’ fault. Please be kind to them. I’m the one who made this decision, not them, so any inconvenience you experience is my fault. Just please know that I don’t do this lightly, and I’m only doing it because I believe it’s in the best interests of everyone’s safety.”

Now this is where the story gets crazy. The pilot puts the microphone down, grabs his suitcase, and all the people in the gate…

Start clapping.

I’m not joking, everyone starts clapping for the guy. 130 people who just had their travel plans ruined give an ovation to the guy who made the decision and delivered the message.

All because he addressed them with decency and transparency, took ownership of the decision, made it clear that it was necessary, and explained why it was in everyone’s best interest.

It’s honestly one of the best examples of strong communication—of strong leadership, for that matter—that I’ve seen in a long time.

@Delta, whoever your Atlanta to Wichita pilot was this morning, he’s one of the good ones. Please tell him the delayed passengers of flight 1637 appreciate what he did.

[AEI Tech Policy @AEItech]

Last week, ABC accused the FCC of violating its First Amendment right over scrutiny of a particular show, “The View.”

This is something that AEI scholar @ProfDanielLyons predicted earlier this year.

Read his initial thoughts on this here: https://t.co/UQx4szHY6j