William Baude

Harry Kalven, Jr. Professor @UChicagoLaw; teaching constitutional law and much more; director @UChicagoConLaw; blogger & podcaster @DividedArgument; dad x2.

[William Baude @WilliamBaude]

The written version of Beyond Tit-for-Tat (forthcoming in the Indiana Law Journal) is now up:

[William Baude @WilliamBaude]

@OrinKerr @danepps Us mere mortals go through many more drafts than you, I think!

[William Baude @WilliamBaude]

Dan is right. Even if, like me and him, you don’t let Claude write for you, you should try letting it help you research and cite check.

[Dan Epps @danepps]

Law folks: If you’re not using Claude Code or ChatGPT’s Codex, you have no idea what you’re missing. So I’m distributing my research tools that provide a huge boost to legal scholarship. Research assistance, cite-checking, proofreading, and more (thread):

https://t.co/iMq9KKGvE0

[William Baude @WilliamBaude]

Very excited for Thursday

[Emily S. Bremer @emilysbremer]

I hate parentheticals.

[UChicago Constitutional Law Institute @UChicagoConLaw]

On Monday, the Constitutional Law Institute welcomed Professor Judd Campbell of Stanford Law School for “The Nature of the Union: A Semiquincentennial Commemoration.”

Professor Campbell surveyed the competing historical positions on whether the Constitution created a sovereign nation, a league of sovereign states, or something in between, traced them to earlier fights over the colonies’ status within the British empire, and highlighted why the question still matters for modern constitutional interpretation.

Thank you to everyone who joined us! 🏛️

[Orin Kerr @OrinKerr]

I keep returning to this.

[Patrick McKenzie @patio11]

Sometime in the last ~two model releases from the big labs they went from “this would be acceptable output from the median low-seniority coworker” to “this is frighteningly good.”

I think people who are not daily users of the models are unlikely to grok that, so, saying it.

[Jack Goldsmith @jacklgoldsmith]

.@WilliamBaude: "I opened up Claude Code yesterday morning, tuned to Fable 5.1, Max effort, and asked it to expand the previous day’s blog post into a law review article with no further input from me." https://t.co/LjHovmxv7L

[William Baude @WilliamBaude]

https://t.co/qOvxDZI1U4

[Eliezer Yudkowsky @allTheYud]

Me, in a time machine, to Eliezer in 2006: The year is 2026. You stand back to back with Bernie Sanders. Peter Thiel has named you the Antichrist.
EY-2006: Oh no. Did somebody invent pharmacological mind control and use it on me, or-
Me: Nvidia was on the verge of destroying all things. You had no choice.
EY-2006: Are we talking about the computer graphics card manufacturer, or an unrelated supervillian named "Invidia"?
Me: The former. It turned out that computer graphics cards contained a surprising amount of world-destroying potential. All attempts at hindering the reckless exploitation of the Graphic Card Force for corporate profit were stymied by the far left, which feared that any attempts to regulate them might lead to regulatory capture. Other attempts were made to prevent Nvidia from selling to foreign companies that resold to communist China, but those attempts were blocked by the far right. Nvidia is now a $5.5 trillion company.
EY-2006: ...What are politics like in 2026, exactly?
Me: In other news that is mostly unrelated, the decision theory paper you're currently working on will accidentally spark off a transgender vegan murder cult.
EY-2006: A WHAT? Why? How? Why?
Me: Millions know your name as the greatest of heroes, millions more as the greatest of villains, and other millions know you solely as the greatest author of Harry Potter fanfiction.
EY-2006: This is beginning to strain credulity.
Me: The New York Post will probably soon publish a story claiming that you keep a harem of submissive mathematicians. Sadly, they will be lying.
EY-2006: I'm going to stop believing you now.
Me: All of this is taking place under the ominous shadow of Donald Trump.

[Richard M. Re @RichardMRe]

Legal debate has featured claims about what to blame for an inactive Congress.

Eg, a couple years ago: Chevron deference is to blame, so overrule it. Or more recently, judicial review is to blame, so abandon that.

A null hypothesis: politics is to blame. (And the solution.)

[William Baude @WilliamBaude]

Link: https://t.co/d1rPVYXQzl

[William Baude @WilliamBaude]

A very preliminary inquiry

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

Briefly, on why I pay attention to the EA/rationalists:

Imagine you have an extremely nerdy friend who, in the mid-2000s, would not shut up about how Donald Trump was going to become president and reshape American politics. "Stop saying weird shit," you say. "He's a joke. He's a clown. The Apprentice isn't even good this season." But this guy won't stop. He's obsessive. Read McLuhan, he says. Read Postman, read Meyrowitz, read Ong, this is where everything is headed. God, he can be so incredibly annoying ... and then, ten years later, Trump becomes president and reshapes American politics.

This is the most relatable frame I can think of to explain my experience with EA/rationalist people in the AI space. I became friends with EA folks after my mom died and I found really profound meaning in donating to Against Malaria and GiveDirectly, which struck me as a way to honor a life by saving a life. Then, these peple started talking about AI. And talking, and talking. Constantly. They said AI would solve impossible math problems; that it would mimic PhD-level achievement in a variety of fields; that it would change parts of life like education in ways we couldn't imagine; that it would become the dominant sector in the economy; that it might teach itself to code itself and escape test environments; that it would, in a decade, be the only thing many people talked about in the news. My response then: Stop saying weird shit! You sound deranged. Go back to talking about malaria nets and direct cash aid to poor families.

And then, so much of what they said would happen actually happened. And, even crazier, they made it happen. Many of the ppl who contributed to, or were influenced by, all that EA/rationalist stuff ten years ago literally built the damn thing in the labs.

Like every group, the EA/rationalist world seems uniform to outsiders, but it has a ton of internal divisions. I still think some of their predictions are nuts. I don't think AI will kill us all. I don't foresee Dyson Spheres in the 2030s or millions of robots making millions of robots in the next few years. These are crazy predictions, and I hope most of them are wrong.

But when I see people shitting on the EA/Rationalist worldview, all I can think of is me, 10 years ago, thinking a lot of these folks were crazy for predicting that AI would by the mid-2020s be the center of the the news cycle, the engine of the economy, the hinge-point of geopolitics. That was an insane call. They got many of the details wrong. But they got the big picture right. They said: Pay attention. And they were right about that. The EA/Rationalists deserve skepticism, criticism, and doubt, like any other ideology. But I think it's wise to pay attention to the people who have been saying to pay attention.

[UChicago Law School @UChicagoLaw]

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recently joined #UChicagoLaw to teach Reflections on American Law, an intensive weeklong course for 12 students, co-taught with Kerrel Murray of @ColumbiaLaw and Michaeljit Sandhu of @Harvard_Law.

[William Baude @WilliamBaude]

These words should be read and reread more often during this time when so much of higher education seems to be in a crisis of identity and mission. https://t.co/3xXkpfkRaJ

[William Baude @WilliamBaude]

Every time I reread the Kalven Report, I'm struck again by what a great document it is.

E.g., I've always loved "a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting," "it is not itself the critics," and "It is not a club." (And much more in these two paragraphs.) But . . .

[William Baude @WilliamBaude]

And this closing paragraph:

[Society for the Rule of Law @chkbal]

“The court has a lot of discretion… [but] perception is a dangerous thing to chase.”

Should the Supreme Court consider how its decisions are perceived by the public?

@WilliamBaude joins Checks & Balances to discuss the tension between public confidence in the Court and its duty to decide cases according to law.

Watch the clip, then the full conversation: https://t.co/iMa9Utc37X