Josh Tasoff

Economics professor begrudgingly here to follow AI and research news.

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

Good news for animal welfare.

[Lewis Bollard @Lewis_Bollard]

Some great news for factory-farmed pigs last night.

In Iowa and Kansas, voters rejected the lead sponsors of the Save Our Bacon Act in both the House and Senate: Rep. Ashley Hinson and Sen. Roger Marshall.

These were the politicians who did the pork lobby’s bidding and tried to wipe out every state ban on selling pork from crated pigs.

Yet even in two of the most pro-agriculture states in the country, it cost them more votes than it won them.

The politicians who follow the factory farming lobby aren’t as safe as they thought.

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

@CassSunstein I'm so glad you're focusing your intellectual firepower on this important issue! I will read it.

[Rikiya Takehi @rikiyatakehi]

We asked GPT-6 Astra to edit Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to improve math.
It directly changed only 0.016% of weights, fixing 0.8B's reasoning loops & improving math up to 6x and even instruction following 3x, without gradients or training.

We call this Weight-Space Programming: frontier LLMs can now natively read/write neural network weights! 🧵
Blog: https://t.co/bOWCcFhCVq

[Dan Roy @roydanroy]

@rikiyatakehi @a1zhang @lateinteraction @jayden_teoh_ wtf?

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

@roydanroy It's worse in economics. It takes us multiple years to get papers published. The world is accelerating. We already can't keep up, but our institutions our forcing our research to greater irrelevance.

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

@eschwitz Rooting for you! BTW, just came across mentions of your work with Hurlburt.

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

@CassSunstein Big time Star Trek fan here. I grew up with Capt. Picard. May we all continue to go boldly.

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

I remember greatly enjoying Vernor Vinge's 2006, "Rainbow's End", a near future sci-fi take. High-powered data science, persuasive technology, alongside possible rogue AIs sounded exotic. Now fact mimics fiction. Time for a re-read. Vinge was a prophet.

[Lewis Bollard @Lewis_Bollard]

Jose Andres says we can’t ban foie gras because we need to solve ICE, global hunger, and ‘so many other issues’ before we can worry about animals.

It reminds me of when I collected signatures in Chicago to preserve the city’s foie gras ban.

In wealthy parts of town, high-minded liberals would chide me: 'You’re collecting signatures for ducks? People are getting shot in this city. You should be ashamed.’

When I went to the poor parts of town — the places where people were actually getting shot — no one said that.

Instead, when I explained how foie gras was made, the near-uniform reaction was: ‘They do that to a bird just so some rich asshole can eat foie gras? That’s f’d up.’ Almost everyone signed.

For political elites, banning animal cruelty is a distraction from the Big Serious issues they’re focused on.

For most people, it’s just common sense.

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

@jankulveit A few thoughts:
1. There is no outlet for speculative academic economics.
2. The minimal publishable unit in econ is big and the speed is super slow.
Both of these make us institutionally poorly suited for transformational change.

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

@eschwitz I love this. I take it more as an issue with the anthropic principle though. When one has free reign to choose the dimension under consideration something fishy is happening. It feels like there should be a "multiple-hypothesis test adjustment" applied to anthropic reasoning.

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

@benleo_econ Love it! You can tell who this is marketing to: Silicon Valley types who like stats.

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

@benleo_econ @JayShooster That's what I'm talking about. Get your PPE before the bioterrorism, not after.

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

@eschwitz Awesome! Will there be an audio version?

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

@joachim_voth @JEEA_News @RWacziarg It's bizarre and I noticed it with the recent QJE newsletter too. Do we want to double down on last-name alphabet effect? Not fun for us who are in the neighborhood of Z.

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

@Ingar30 @NHHnor Awesome. Are you going to upload your slides? I'd love to see them.

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

@eschwitz I'm sorry to hear. This I wish you a strong recovery.

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

Is this what the beginning of a technological singularity looks like?

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

@itaisher Good point. Perhaps the least accessible thing to the AIs are our own preferences. This is a slightly different point I've been thinking about. There may be a tendency for some to defer to AI for ease or speed.

[Josh Tasoff @joshtasoff]

@jeffrsebo Two awesome dudes doing awesome work.