Karthik Rajkumar

AI agents eval science @Glean. @Stanford PhD.

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

My @nytopinion colleague @ezraklein on how an obsession with efficiency can cost us our humanity — in this case, in how we (mis)treat pigs on factory farms, and how some in Congress aim to make this trade off worse. https://t.co/HjUthpHWNy

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[Lewis Bollard @Lewis_Bollard]

Big vote for animals this week. On Thursday, the House will likely vote on whether to strike the Save Our Bacon Act from the farm bill.

Rep. Luna (R-FL) is leading a bipartisan amendment to strike the Act, which would wipe out state laws banning the sale of pork from crated pigs.

Pork industry lobbyists are already hard at work against her. They're counting on no one speaking up for the pigs. Prove them wrong.

Call the House at 202-224-3121. Give them your zip code and they'll connect you to your member's office. Ask them to vote YES on the Luna Amendment to remove the Save Our Bacon Act from the farm bill.

[Karthik Rajkumar @k__rajkumar]

@johnjhorton @ycombinator Congrats, @johnjhorton !

[Karthik Rajkumar @k__rajkumar]

@johnjhorton True definitely, but one thing about academia is that researchers go out of their way to make salient the institutions they work at on papers, etc. An effect this has is the lay reader consumes that info as co-equal to the authorship info itself.

[Karthik Rajkumar @k__rajkumar]

@johnjhorton Don’t know what I love about Claude more. The constant “you’re absolutely right!” validation, or how it totally changes its opinion 180° when I push back against something it did.

[Karthik Rajkumar @k__rajkumar]

@alz_zyd_ Because they lie all the time, and not in the way an intelligent human would. With LLMs, you can just never ever let your guard down because they lie so spectacularly and unpredictably.

[Karthik Rajkumar @k__rajkumar]

@RobDonnelly47 There seems to be this experimental (and unmaintained) library, which converts pandas code to SQL? https://t.co/lIZijwZeli

[Karthik Rajkumar @k__rajkumar]

@alz_zyd_ Cmd + space on a mac should do it for ya much faster.

[Karthik Rajkumar @k__rajkumar]

@alz_zyd_ And Twitter, even pre Musk, is very small compared to the industry as a whole. The hiring slowdown is more due to the postpandemic hiring boom + interest rates.

[Karthik Rajkumar @k__rajkumar]

@alz_zyd_ By some estimates, Twitter’s active users have dropped by a quarter and revenue by more than half, both far worse than comparable platforms, since the privatization.

[Karthik Rajkumar @k__rajkumar]

@AnthonyLeeZhang Now, now, let's not forget canids and corvids and cetaceans in our quest to anoint a flashy text generator as intelligent

[Karthik Rajkumar @k__rajkumar]

@AnthonyLeeZhang The central point of statistics that has to be impressed upon ML engineers over and over again is just because you crunched some numbers doesn't mean you've uncovered what you care about. "just import sklearn" helps with executional speed but when your model fails

[Karthik Rajkumar @k__rajkumar]

@AnthonyLeeZhang (because of poor calibration, selection bias in training data etc.) it remains as important as ever to understand what parameters you actually care about. Not to say academic textbooks aren't full of irrelevant theoretical bloat, but that doesn't undermine thinking about modeling

[Karthik Rajkumar @k__rajkumar]

@AnthonyLeeZhang The central point of statistics that has to be impressed upon ML engineers over and over again is just because you crunched some numbers doesn't mean you've uncovered what you care about. "just import sklearn" helps with executional speed but when your model fails

[Karthik Rajkumar @k__rajkumar]

@EconBerger Made me literally LOL

[FIRE @TheFIREorg]

Tonight, @Penn President Liz Magill signaled that one of our nation's most prestigious institutions is willing to abandon its commitment to freedom of expression.

“For decades, under multiple Penn presidents and consistent with most universities, Penn’s policies have been guided by the Constitution and the law,” explained Magill in a video posted to X.

But now, she continued, the university “must initiate a serious and careful look at our policies,” a process to start “immediately.”

This is a deeply troubling, profoundly counterproductive response to yesterday's congressional hearing on “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.”

Were Penn to retreat from the robust protection of expressive rights, university administrators would make inevitably political decisions about who may speak and what may be said on campus.

Such a result would undoubtedly compromise the knowledge-generating process free expression enables and for which universities exist.

To be clear: Universities will not enforce a rule against "calls for genocide" in the way elected officials calling for President Magill's resignation think they will.

Dissenting and unpopular speech — whether pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, conservative or liberal — will be silenced.

Conservatives like Rep. Elise Stefanik should ask themselves:

Do you honestly believe this rule won’t be weaponized to ban an Israeli cabinet official from speaking at Penn? An Israeli Defense Force soldier?

The power to censor always invites abuse and never stays cabined.

FIRE was founded in the wake of the infamous 1993 “Water Buffalo” incident at Penn.

In that case, Israeli-born Jewish student Eden Jacobowitz was charged with harassment for shouting “Shut up, you water buffalo” at a group of rowdy sorority students outside his dorm room window.

The sorority students were black, and the argument was that “water buffalo” was a racial epithet.

But it was not.

Jacobowitz, who speaks Hebrew, explained that water buffalo is a rough English translation of “behema,” a Hebrew slang term for a loud, rowdy person.

The story captured headlines, and Penn was widely condemned for its persecution of Jacobowitz.

FIRE co-founder Alan Charles Kors, a history professor at Penn, helped advise Jacobowitz.

The charges were eventually dropped and the story would go on to serve as the opening chapter of “The Shadow University: The Betrayal Of Liberty On America's Campuses” — the book that launched FIRE.

Over the years, Kors and FIRE helped Penn get past the water buffalo debacle.

The school reformed all of its speech codes and was one of the first universities to earn FIRE’s highest, “green light” rating for speech-protective policies.

But in recent years, Penn has backtracked.

It’s no longer a green light school.

It adopted new harassment policies that are ripe for abuse.

And what free speech and academic freedom protections remain, it doesn’t consistently follow.

Now President Magill suggests an institutional willingness to abandon free expression altogether.

This will not end well.

Vesting administrators like Magill with more power to police speech will result in more Jacobowitzes.

The intended targets for these codes will not be the actual casualties — and Penn students, faculty, alumni, and donors will come to regret the day they ever entrusted campus bureaucrats with the power to police speech on campus.

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

As a professor who favors free speech on campus, I can sympathize with the "nuanced" answers given by U. presidents yesterday, about whether calls to attack or wipe out Israel violate campus speech policies.

What offends me is that since 2015, universities have been so quick to punish "microaggressions," including statements intended to be kind, if even one person from a favored group took offense. The presidents are now saying: "Jews are not a favored group, so offending or threatening Jews is not so bad. For Jews, it all depends on context." We might call this double standard "institutional anti-semitism."

University presidents: If you're not going to punish students for calling for the elimination of Israel and Israelis, it's OK with me, but ONLY if you also immediately dismantle the speech policing apparatus and norms you created in 2015-2016. Please read The Coddling of the American Mind. @glukianoff and I laid out exactly where the oppressor/victim frame came from (ch. 3), how it spread out of a few departments to gain power over administrators and campus culture (chapters 4 and 5), and how it drove the creation of the bureaucratic structures and processes that now have us all teaching and learning on eggshells (ch. 10). In chapter 13 we offer advice to leaders on how to to return universities to their academic mission and regain public trust.

[Karthik Rajkumar @k__rajkumar]

@JonasMtzgr 2) We have a highly intelligent species right with us,—dogs—and non-specialists are no closer to having a decent conversation with them today. Now canine communication is body language, audio and smell, and not text, but we can collect all the data we want. Are LLMs helping here?

[Karthik Rajkumar @k__rajkumar]

@JonasMtzgr Two points come to mind. 1) Humans already have dozens of scripts from ancient civilizations that remain undeciphered. I don't know if it's because we might not have trillions of samples for them, but are LLMs bringing us closer to deciphering them?