Theodor von Böngitz Adorno

RTs aren’t endorsements. Math, science, maps, nuance. Pragmatic Green & Autodidact.

[Theodor von Böngitz Adorno @tzraick]

When you dig down into the thought process most of them took, you realize, most of them are just really fucking stupid, and clueless, and afraid and bombarded with nonstop fearporn 24/7. The boomers have big screens and the zoomers have little screens and WE ALL FALL DOWN.

[Kashif Pirzada, MD @KashPrime]

Made a short video on why Intercept is such an amazing milestone in the fight against respiratory pathogens. Finally there is recognition that the best defence against future pandemics and bioterror threats is ubiquitous indoor clean air.
Considering the trillions of dollars and millions of lives lost recently, this investment will likely have the greatest ROI ever.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

JD Vance: "I think Nixon's historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and deservedly so. I joked that if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12 hours news story. The idea that it took down a presidency is crazy."

[Eric Topol @EricTopol]

We stress tested many frontier AI models for multimodal medical reasoning (including GPT-5, Claude 3.5, Gemini 2.5 Pro). They’re not ready. Faulty reasoning, use of inappropriate shortcuts, hallucinations. Published today @NatureMedicine https://t.co/P6eHZEmfbW

[Laura Miers @LauraMiers]

I was born in the early 80s. I attended Monsanto protests in the 90s-00s & warned everyone who would listen for decades.

It didn’t matter. Corporations always win. The public is always conned, & the people are always killed. Covid/climate collapse/AI is the same. I’m TIRED.

[Zdenek Vrozina @ZdenekVrozina]

Researchers built a mouse with a human immune system to finally watch how human defenses fight COVID. They expected the virus to get wiped out. Instead, the human immune cells helped it spread from the lungs into other organs and muffled the body's own early alarm system🧵

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

A lot of people who say they never use AI are using AI, but secretly. https://t.co/JbH6WtGITu

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

“The Al bubble is by far the biggest stock-market bubble that mankind has ever seen - both in scale and scope, in terms of the leverage that's in there and in terms of the sheer excessive exuberance that's driven valuations" - Paul Gambles via Bloomberg.

[Theodor von Böngitz Adorno @tzraick]

Probably because CS majors are one-trick ponies who’re largely incapable of understanding anything outside of their wheelhouse.

Philosophy majors are taught critical thinking & epistemology, which ai can’t imitate, not even poorly.

[Shashank Joshi @shashj]

"Earlier this year the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published figures showing that American philosophy graduates are more likely to have jobs than their peers who studied computer science." https://t.co/LQDIsWBxig

[Eric Topol @EricTopol]

In today's @NatureMedicine
"The effect of live-attenuated shingles vaccination on dementia incidence provide a level of evidence that we have never had before in observational dementia research." —@PGeldsetzer1, senior author for 3 of the natural experiment publications
https://t.co/T5bWafBEac

[Eric Topol @EricTopol]

Here's a summary of the 4 natural experiments which all report ~20% reduction of dementia
https://t.co/GQ5apkwgB7

[Chris Blattman @cblatts]

It’s genuinely hard (impossible?) to predict ex ante who will be a productive and creative researcher. Accepting 10x candidates for TT positions makes perfect sense in this world. Historically (and I think in equilibrium) those who don’t go into to TT academic jobs mostly get fulfilling jobs that pay a multiple of academic positions. Because (guess what?) TT jobs are not the only nor the best Econ careers. So market mostly clears extremely well considering the ex ante uncertainty.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

You have noticed that too. Google Search is getting worse. The results look professional but say nothing. The answers are longer but less useful. Every page reads like it was written by the same voice.

You thought Google was broken. It is not broken. It is being replaced.

Researchers published a paper at the ACM Web Conference 2026 proving what is happening. They call it Retrieval Collapse.

Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI-generated content is flooding the internet so fast that search engines are now showing you mostly AI-written pages. And the search engine cannot tell the difference.

They ran a controlled experiment. They started with a pool of real, human-written web pages. Then they gradually added AI-generated content until it made up 67% of the pool.

By that point, over 80% of the top search results were AI-generated. Not 67%. Over 80%. The ranking algorithm did not just let AI content in. It preferred it. The AI-written pages were better optimized, more fluent, and more keyword-rich than the human pages. They outranked the originals.

Here is the part that makes this invisible.

Answer accuracy stayed the same. The search results still looked correct. The information was still technically right. If you measured quality by accuracy alone, nothing appeared wrong.

But source diversity collapsed. Nearly every result came from the same type of content. AI-written. AI-optimized. AI-structured. The human-written pages, the ones with original reporting, personal experience, and genuine expertise, were buried.

The researchers describe a two-stage collapse. Stage one is Dominance. High-quality AI content silently takes over the top results. Everything looks fine. Accuracy is stable. Nobody notices. Stage two is Corruption. Once AI dominates the pipeline, adversarial and low-quality content starts slipping through. By then, the system is too dependent on synthetic sources to course-correct.

A separate analysis found that 74.2% of newly published web pages now contain AI-generated content. Organic click-through rates on pages with AI summaries have dropped 61%. The human internet is being outranked by the machine internet.

Model Collapse described what happens when AI trains on AI. The models get dumber. Retrieval Collapse describes what happens when search engines index AI. The results get emptier.

Both are happening right now. At the same time. And neither one looks broken from the outside.

The search engine still returns ten blue links. The links still load. The pages still answer your question. But the thing that used to make those answers trustworthy, a human who actually knew something, is being quietly replaced by a machine that sounds like it does.

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

“If an AI cannot apply an abstract lesson to a new situation, it is not truly reasoning or learning”, new study with further evidence backing up what I have been saying for 25 years.

cc @dwarkesh_sp

[Theodor von Böngitz Adorno @tzraick]

It’s so funny to me that I heard of the fair model once in principles of economics and never again in my entire life online and in media.

And btw I took principles three times at three schools and only ever heard it mentioned by an old eccentric jersey boy at Columbia.

[Juan Felipe Riaño R. @JuanFelipeRiano]

🚨New NBER working paper alert 🚨

🤔2021–2024 was the worst U.S. inflation in four decades. The question: Did voters react to the rising prices, or to the shrinking paychecks?

😱We approached this paper with one major surprise: there is no official measure of inflation at the county level in the U.S.

🌟To study the relationship between inflation and electoral outcomes during, we first had to construct local inflation measures using county-level data on family budget costs and incomes.

The answer? -> Check it out! 👇
🔗 https://t.co/itZi8KOZfS

[Theodor von Böngitz Adorno @tzraick]

Paywall

[Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins @daniel_dsj2110]

"A Professor Should Work Hard and Grade Easy": https://t.co/4EJj9ETqt4

[joseph francis @joefrancis505]

I fear that the new cellphones-cause-low-fertility NBER working paper has found a potentially genuine divergence between the fertility rate in rural and urban counties in the US, then labelled it "iPhone."

The problem is that AT&T coverage was heavily urban, resulting in an imbalance between the control and treated group.

The matched Poisson regression is supposed to address that by overweighting the small number of notionally urban counties that did not have iPhone coverage. But I believe that by "urban," they mean counties in which just 33% or more of the population were in towns of 2,500+ people. It would therefore included a lot of places that are, in fact, rural.

To me, it seems like there's a failure of identification.

Hence, the SDiD result could reflect iPhones or a differential effect of the Panic of 2007 on rural and urban areas. We don't know.

The other-carrier placebos are also uninformative because they are structurally incapable of reproducing the urban-rural confound, given how they are mapped.

The paper is here: https://t.co/IXXlro3fUn.

[Sam @Discoplomacy]

Britain launches the AI Economics Institute, the first government-backed Institute of its kind in the world.

• Joint org between Treasury x DSIT, follows AISI model, incorporates DSIT’s Future of Work Unit.

• Professor Simon Johnson, Nobel Prize-winning economist, former Chief Economist of the IMF, and co-director of MIT’s Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work, will serve as Chair of the AIEI.

• AIEI will work with AI companies in support of evidence-based policymaking and responsible AI development, has agreed Joint Statement of Collaboration with Anthropic, OpenAI, Google + Microsoft.

• Not setting policy. Will build and analyse data on AI adoption, conduct research on how AI affects specific sectors, occupations and groups of workers, develop models to assess economy-wide impacts, and work closely with industry, academia and government to inform policy.

[Gregor @bygregorr]

@RonnieChatterji might be wrong but if OpenAI controls which datasets researchers can actually access, 'independent' is doing a lot of work there. who decides what they don't get to see?

[Yekyung Kim @YekyungKim]

AI essays can sound reasonable, but when viewed collectively, they flatten public discourse, making it much less representative of the diversity of human perspectives. We release the code, AI essays and features.
Paper: https://t.co/dNpn2KxLJe
Data/Code: https://t.co/bTtd4SfMRz

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

Now that the public is waking up to the enormous costs to society of AI, the new dirty trick is to spin the costs of AI as if they were marginalized leftist issues.

They are not. They affect us all.