The harder-problem fallacy (which is about to become relevant again)

If you’re trying to distinguish between different students’ levels of understanding—particularly in situations where knowledge can possibly substitute for reasoning and comprehension—simply making questions harder will seldom help and will often do just the opposite. For example, if a Math Olympiad style test switched from geometry questions to trigonometry questions, the exam would mainly be good at identifying which students had taken pre-cal. 

In these cases, a well-designed test will find a way of leveling the playing field so that additional information and training will not give one person an advantage over another. One of the best examples of this is the old SAT reasoning test, before David Coleman—The New York Times darling—“fixed” it.

An old English professor of mine (who, not entirely coincidentally, introduced me to Raymond Smullyan) accurately described it as the toughest ninth-grade math test you’ll ever take. In terms of knowledge, it didn’t require anything beyond Algebra I and a few really basic geometry concepts that were helpfully provided on the first page of the test. On top of that, forms of notation were invented so that the student who hadn’t taken a math course for a year or two was on a more or less equal playing field with the kid who was well into the first semester of calculus. 

Back in 2014, we talked about how the SAT worked around the harder-problem fallacy (though not by that name) and about how the reporters covering the test (which was at the time out of fashion with the NYT et al. before shifting again) kept missing the point.

As you have guessed, we'll be connecting this to our AI thread in a few days.  

Perhaps we should add "opaque" to the list of journalists' vocabulary questions  

Last week, Andrew Gelman criticized Todd Balf for picking words and phrases for their emotional connotation rather than for their actual meaning in his New York Times Magazine article on the changes in the SAT. 'Jeffersonian' was the specific term that Gelman choked on. I'd add 'opaque' to the list though the blame here mainly goes to David Coleman, president of the College Board and quite possibly the most powerful figure in the education reform movement:

For the College Board to be a great institution, [Coleman] thought at the time, it had to own up to its vulnerabilities. ... “It is a problem that it’s opaque to students what’s on the exam."

There's a double irony here. First because Coleman has been a long-standing champion of some very opaque processes, notably including those involving standardized tests, and second because test makers who routinely publish their old tests and who try to keep those tests as consistent as possible from year to year are, by definition, being transparent.

This leads to yet another irony: though the contents of the tests are readily available, almost none of the countless articles on the SAT specifically mention anything on the test. The one exception I can think of is the recent piece by Jennifer Finney Boylan, and it's worth noting that the specific topic she mentioned isn't actually on the test.

Being just a lowly blogger, I am allowed a little leeway with journalistic standards, so I'm going to break with tradition and talk about what's actually on the math section of the SAT.

Before we get to the questions, I want to make a quick point about geometry on the SAT. I've heard people argue that high school geometry is a prerequisite for the SAT. I don't buy that. Taking the course certainly doesn't hurt, but the kind of questions you'll see on the exam are based on very basic geometry concepts which students should have encountered before they got to high school. With one or two extremely intuitive exceptions, all the formulas you need for the test are given in a small box at the top of the first page.

As you are going through these questions, keep in mind that you don't have to score all that high. 75% is a good score. 90% is a great one.

You'll hear a lot about trick questions on the SAT. Most of this comes from the test's deliberate avoidance of straightforward algorithm questions. Algorithm mastery is always merely an intermediary step -- we care about it only because it's often a necessary step in problem solving (and as George Pólya observed, if you understand the problem you can always find someone to do the math) -- but when students are used to being told to factor this and simplify that, being instead asked to solve a problem, even when the algorithms involved are very simple, can seem tricky and even unfair.

There are some other aspects of the test that contribute to the reputation for trickiness:

Questions are written to be read in their entirety. One common form breaks the question into two parts where the first part uses a variable in an equation and the second asks the value of a term based on that variable. It's a simple change but it does a good job distinguishing those who understand the problem from those who are merely doing Pavlovian mathematics where the stimulus is a word or symbol and the response is the corresponding algorithm;

Word problems are also extensively used. Sometimes the two-part form mentioned above is stated as a word problem;

One technique that very probably would strike most people as 'tricky' actually serves to increase the fairness of the test, the use of newly-minted notation. In the example below, use of standard function notation would give an unfair advantage to students who had taken more advanced math courses.

One thing that jumps out when us math types is how simple the algebraic concepts used are. The only polynomial factoring you are ever likely to see on the SAT is the difference between two squares.

A basic understanding of the properties of real numbers is required to answer many of the problems.

A good grasp of exponents will also be required for a perfect score.

There will be a few problems in basic statistics and probability:

I've thrown in a few more to make it a more representative sample.

We can and should have lots of discussions about the particulars here -- I'm definitely planning a post on Pavlovian mathematics (simple stimulus/algorithmic response) -- but for now I just want to squeeze in one quick point:

Whatever the SAT's faults may be, opaqueness is not among them. Unlike most of the instruments used in our metric-crazed education system, both this test and the process that generates it are highly transparent. That's a standard that we ought to start extending to other tests as well.

 

If you want to get a feel for the post–Musk Silicon Valley, you really should watch these videos.

It’s all here: the transparent scams, the intellectual laziness, the stunningly bad engineering, the messianic delusions of grandeur, the painfully overused tropes and buzzwords—all backed by Y Combinator and reported on by a credulous press.

The team at Common Sense Skeptic has done their usual well-researched job of pointing out the absurdities and fallacies here, though they miss probably a good 30 percent of what deserved mockery. Though, in their defense, each video is only 25 minutes long.

 

Pay close attention when the narrator talks about the Kardashev scale. This figures prominently in the Elon-verse.

Pleasantly surprised to see the NYT actually connect the dots here

 See, I do occasionally give the paper of record credit.

  Gallup Will No Longer Track Presidential Approval Ratings by Ruth Igielnik 

 After nearly 90 years, the Gallup Organization will no longer track presidential approval ratings, which served as a steady way to measure Americans’ views of their elected leaders.

The polling firm, which has been tracking presidential approval since Franklin D. Roosevelt, said that the decision was based on a shift in corporate strategy, intended to focus more on issues and policy polling.

“We’re focused on providing analytics that inform and drive meaningful change,” Justin McCarthy, a spokesman for Gallup, said.

...

Gallup’s decision comes as President Trump has escalated his threats against the press, and sued at least one respected pollster, J. Ann Selzer. He accused Ms. Selzer and The Des Moines Register of election interference after publishing a poll just before the general election showing Kamala Harris leading in Iowa. Mr. Trump won the state by 13 percentage points.

Gallup’s last presidential approval rating, in December 2025, put Mr. Trump’s rating at 36 percent, among his lowest ratings as president.

 

 

The Voss Chronicles

 

I was watching some videos to unwind before bedtime last night, and the following ad popped up. I normally would have skipped it, but something about it piqued my curiosity and, since it was less than 3 minutes, I decided to let it play.

I was not disappointed.

The simple, man-of-the-soil pitchbot explained that he had been working for an inexplicably wealthy farmer who claimed that the secret of his success was a system that had allowed him to win the lottery multiple times using AI. The implausibility of the pitch would have been enough to hold my interest, but it got better. The genius behind this amazing AI was a scientist named Dr. Leonard Voss.

Readers of the blog and students of generative AI esoterica will remember Elara Voss:

What’s so odd about this is that--for a name now so common across the megaplatforms--before 2023, “Elara Voss” did not exist. There is no person named Elara Voss in the United States. No birth certificate has ever been issued under that name; if you search for it in public records databases, you’ll turn up no results. There aren’t even any characters named “Elara Voss” in any book published before 2023. Until two years ago, the two words didn’t ever appear next to each other even by accident.

But if you direct almost any L.L.M. to generate a sci-fi story or narrative for you, it will name the main character “Elara Voss”--or a similar variation like “Elara Vex,” “Elena Voss,” or “Elias Vance”--with an alarming degree of frequency.

I can't say for certain that Dr. Leonard Voss is an ancestor of Elena's, but a quick Google search did show him popping up in similar roles. Perhaps some future LLM-generated novel will reveal that the Voss family dynasty was built on Powerball winnings.

The AI and the Super Bowl Commercial Bubble Curse

 

 

One of these days, I need to do a serious thread on my take on the capacity and likely impact of LLMs (tldr version: big advance in natural language processing; major productivity boost for coding and a few other fields; but loads of ugly unintended consequences; probably a Langley steam airplane). For now, though, I'm keeping the focus on the AI bubble.

For those of us old enough to remember the dot-com bubble, there are some disturbing parallels. I am always reluctant to make too much of historical precedent—there are certainly some differences here—but the differences themselves aren’t all that reassuring.

The ads of the dot-com Super Bowl, at least those that have lodged in memory, were mainly about establishing brand awareness, be it the notorious sock puppet or the dancing chimpanzee followed by the tagline “we just wasted 2 million dollars.”

The ads of this weekend’s Super Bowl, at least those I got around to watching, seem to be about convincing potential customers that this is a product they would like to use. The difference in tone reflects the fact that while the excesses of the dot-com boom were widely mocked, people didn’t hate the underlying products the way surveys indicate they do AI.

One exception was the Anthropic ad, which seemed to want to start a pissing war with OpenAI. It’s the sort of competitive back-and-forth you might expect in a mature industry, with a company trying to gain an edge over its competition—think about those “I’m a Mac” and “I’m a PC” ads from back in the day. Anthropic and OpenAI, however, are two money-imagining startups that are still raising cash primarily on the assumption that some product they will come up with in the future will be the killer app.

One key similarity between a quarter of a century ago and today is that I suspect both sets of ads are primarily intended to convince investors that not only is this the next big thing, but that the payoff is just around the corner. That corner turned out to be quite a few years later than promised for the dot-com companies. We’ll see how things work out for this generation.

Chris Isidore writing for CNN:

 

If there was an overriding message throughout the Super Bowl ads last night, it’s that artificial intelligence is your friend.

...

Americans have widespread concerns about how AI is changing society, from jobs to social relationships, surveys show. But AI companies, flush with cash from surging stocks, used the Super Bowl not to sell specific products but instead sell a vision of a kinder, gentler AI future.

The ads were about selling peace of mind – the kind people will need to adopt more AI tools and splash out on AI-enabled devices, subscriptions and other fare. Without that buy-in, AI companies could struggle to turn a profit. After hundreds of billions of dollars in investments, that’s a concern that’s already starting to spook markets.

Two-thirds of respondents in a September Marist poll said they “believe AI will eliminate more jobs than it creates.” Members of Gen Z and women were especially likely to feel that way. And about four in 10 people polled said they “rarely or never” use AI tools.

...

In real life, though, some experts worry there could be widespread job loss from AI in the years ahead. Rapid data center buildouts are also prompting concerns that rising electricity and water use will push up Americans’ bills.

These were not the first Super Bowl ads promoting AI services. But they were an overwhelming presence Sunday night, prompting some social media backlash.

...

But the AI companies apparently believed that the reported $8 million they spent for 30 second spots was worth it: In the streaming age, the Super Bowl is the one event a year that not only brings in top viewership but includes viewers willing to watch the ads rather than skip past them.

And the AI industry needs the help winning Americans over.

“Americans are much more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, with a majority saying they want more control over how AI is used in their lives,” said Pew Research Center, summing up a recent survey on the topic. “Far larger shares say AI will erode than improve people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships.”

More thoughts from The Internet of Bugs

When threads collide: Epstein, Musk, and the New York Times.

After I posted last week’s piece on how the New York Times broke the news of Epstein’s first conviction in the most disgustingly sympathetic way possible, the name of the reporter Landon Thomas started popping up in my email and Bluesky feed, and it made me realize I had left a big chunk of the story out of my account.

From Margaret Sullivan:

One of the best investigative reporters I know, Pulitzer Prize-winner James Risen, wrote to me about Landon Thomas, after the Epstein emails raised serious questions about that reporter-source relationship.

“This raises so many questions,” Risen told me. “Did this guy tell his editors he might have stuff on Trump and Epstein? What did they do about it? Did they ignore it?”

We may never know. The Times has said very little so far, despite being pressed. After the Intercept and other news organizations asked these kinds of questions, their spokeswoman declined to get into it, only noting that Thomas left the Times years ago. He departed in 2019 after he revealed to his editors that he had solicited charitable donations from Jeffrey Epstein; the Times put out a statement back then saying his solicitation was “a clear violation” of their ethics policy. But what about all he knew about Epstein and about Epstein’s dealings with Donald Trump? (“Would you like to see photos of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen?” Epstein asked Thomas in one recently released email.)

Given what we knew even back in 2019 about the ethical lines Thomas had been crossing for almost two decades (behavior the NYT knew about before they hired him), the idea that soliciting donations was the one that went too far is a bit much. If I were the cynical type, I'd assume that Thomas's bosses were relieved to have an excuse to get rid of him just as their previous coverage of Epstein was about to go under the microscope. 

An email I got in response to last week's post pointed out that Thomas was also the author of the notorious 2002 New York Magazine puff piece, Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery, an article that helped lay the foundation for the highly useful myth of Epstein as a financial genius and all-around brilliant thinker.

He comes with cash to burn, a fleet of airplanes, and a keen eye for the ladies — to say nothing of a relentless brain that challenges Nobel Prize–winning scientists across the country — and for financial markets around the world. 

... 

A former Dalton math teacher, he maintains a peripatetic salon of brilliant scientists yet possesses no bachelor’s degree. For more than ten years, he’s been linked to Manhattan-London society figure Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the mysteriously deceased media titan Robert Maxwell, yet he lives the life of a bachelor, logging 600 hours a year in his various planes as he scours the world for investment opportunities. He owns what is said to be Manhattan’s largest private house yet runs his business from a 100-acre private island in St. Thomas.

 ...

The wizard that meets the eye is spare and fit; with a long jaw and a carefully coiffed head of silver hair, he looks like a taller, younger Ralph Lauren. A raspy Brooklyn accent betrays his Coney Island origins. He spends an hour and fifteen minutes every day doing advanced yoga with his personal instructor, who travels with him wherever he goes. He is an enthusiastic member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.

 ...

At the time, options trading was an arcane and dimly understood field, just beginning to take off. To trade options, one had to value them, and to value them, one needed to be able to master such abstruse mathematical confections as the Black-Scholes option-pricing model. For Epstein, breaking down such models was pure sport, and within just a few years he had his own stable of clients. “He was not your conventional broker saying ‘Buy IBM’ or ‘Sell Xerox,’ ” says Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne. “Given his mathematical background, we put him in our special-products division, where he would advise our wealthier clients on the tax implications of their portfolios. He would recommend certain tax-advantageous transactions. He is a very smart guy and has become a very important client for the firm as well.”

...

But it is his covey of scientists that inspires Epstein’s true rapture. Epstein spends $20 million a year on them — encouraging them to engage in whatever kind of cutting-edge research might attract their fancy. They are, of course, quite lavish in their praise in return. Gerald Edelman won the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1972 and now presides over the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla. “Jeff is extraordinary in his ability to pick up on quantitative relations,” says Edelman. “He came to see us recently. He is concerned with this basic question: Is it true that the brain is not a computer? He is very quick.” 

 

More than any other journalist, Thomas appears to be the key figure in allowing Epstein to cultivate his image as business genius/philanthropist/charming rouge. This role kicked into higher gear when the first round of accusations came to light.

John Power writing for Al Jazeera. (And yes, I do take this publication with a grain of salt on certain topics, but they don’t seem to have an agenda here, and the details are accurate as far as I can tell.)

A New York Times reporter told Jeffrey Epstein that he could write an article that would define the financier on his own terms as he faced allegations of sexually abusing minors in the months leading up to his 2008 conviction, newly uncovered emails reveal.

After a negative article about Epstein was published in September 2007, then-New York Times journalist Landon Thomas Jr advised Epstein to “get ahead” of more bad publicity by doing an interview that would define the story “on your terms”.

“I Just read the Post. Now the floodgates will open — you can expect Vanity Fair and NYMag to pile on,” Thomas wrote to Epstein in an email dated September 20, 2007, referring to the magazines Vanity Fair and New York Magazine.

“My view is that the quicker you get out ahead of this and define the story and who you are on your terms in the NYT, the better it will be for you.”

Thomas, who left the Times in 2019, urged Epstein to quickly do an interview to prevent the “popular tabloid perception” about him from hardening, and expressed sympathy over his legal troubles.

“I know this is tough and hard for you, but remember jail may [be] bad, but it is not forever,” Thomas wrote.

...

“Remember how for a while my NY Mag piece was the defining piece on you? That is no longer the case after all this,” Thomas wrote to Epstein.

“But I think if we did a piece for the Times, with the documents and evidence that you mention, plus you speaking for the record, we can again have a story that becomes the last public word on Jeffrey Epstein.”

... 

Among other revelations, those emails showed that Thomas let Epstein know that the late investigative journalist John Connolly had contacted him for information for Connolly’s 2016 book Filthy Rich: The Jeffrey Epstein Story.

“He seems very interested in your relationship with the news media,” Thomas wrote to Epstein in an email dated June 1, 2016. “I told him you were a hell of a guy :)”.

 

The Epstein–Thomas correspondence also hit one of the longest-running threads here at the blog: how Elon Musk became the world’s richest man through stock manipulation.

In 2018, Musk was sued by the SEC for a tweet stating that funding had been secured for potentially taking Tesla private. The lawsuit characterized the tweet as false, misleading, and damaging to investors, and sought to bar Musk from serving as CEO of publicly traded companies. Two days later, Musk settled with the SEC, without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations. As a result, Musk and Tesla were fined $20 million each, and Musk was forced to step down for three years as Tesla chairman but was able to remain as CEO.

About that:

Ed Niedermeyer, who wrote the definitive book on Tesla, takes it from here. 

finally doing a little of my own perusing of the Epstein Files, and I'll be darned if Elon Musk's personal elite influence monger Juleana Glover wasn't keeping ol' Jeff E apprised of all the latest developments in Tesla's stock pump narrative

— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) February 4, 2026 at 10:58 AM

Glover to Epstein: "Tesla is becoming an Energy company" www.justice.gov/epstein/file... Glover to Epstein: Model 3 teardown shows 30% profit margin (lmao) www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

[image or embed]

— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) February 4, 2026 at 11:01 AM

Welp, looks like Elon Musk and Jeffery Epstein were definitely in touch around the time of the "Funding Secured" faux Saudi Takeover Why did Tesla suddenly need as much as $10b in cash? Investors sure weren't ever told! Nobody was, other than Elon's pedo buddy. Very cool!

[image or embed]

— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) February 4, 2026 at 11:06 AM

We will get into the New York Times’ coverage of that story another day.

 

In the war on data, even the CIA isn't safe

As lots of people have pointed out, when trying to attack the truth, lying is often less effective than eliminating sources of trustworthy information.

Harmeet Kaur writing for CNN:

Taylor Hale was in the middle of teaching a Western geography lesson on Wednesday afternoon when his sixth-grade students informed him that the online reference they usually consulted was gone. He’d instructed them to compare the gross domestic products of Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, and so they turned to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook. But instead of finding the usual index of countries, they hit a blue webpage announcing that the Factbook was no more.

After decades of serving as a reliable, authoritative public repository of basic information about countries, their economies, and their people, The World Factbook disappeared from the internet on February 4 with no advance notice. Teachers, students, librarians, researchers, and curious citizens in general were abruptly cut off from a reference they had taken for granted.

“The CIA Factbook is not bulletproof perfect, but it’s way better than a lot of other sources out there and it’s free,” Hale, a social studies teacher in Oklahoma City, said. “It was always there, and now it’s not.”

Before this week, teachers like Hale routinely directed their students to The World Factbook for school assignments, international travelers used it to assess security risks and vaccine recommendations, and journalists relied on its data to add context to their reporting.

John Devine, the government information research specialist for the Boston Public Library, recalled a patron who was particularly curious about population statistics. Over the years, the city’s librarians found that The World Factbook was “the singular best source for this” — the CIA updated its numbers annually, and no other entity offered data that was as accurate year after year.

“It’s a tough loss,” Devine said. “We’re going to have to find things from other sources. Again, how well can we trust them? How well are we going to be able to get data on developing or even barely developing countries?”

Originally called “The National Basic Intelligence Factbook,” the Factbook began in 1962 as a classified publication for government and military officials. An unclassified version followed in 1971, and in 1975, it became available to the public in print. It was renamed “The World Factbook” in 1981, and in 1997, The World Factbook went digital.

The CIA’s announcement that the Factbook was shutting down came quietly, with no warning and no explanation of the change, and the agency declined to comment on the record for this story. Instead, it posted an obituary of sorts, on a webpage titled “Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell.”

...

It also follows the loss of other US government information, once considered relatively reliable and trustworthy. Since President Donald Trump came into office again, he has directed US government health websites to be taken down or modified, imposed his views on what should and shouldn’t be displayed at the Smithsonian Institution and ordered the National Parks Service to remove references to slavery, among other directives.

...

“It’s so hard to use corporate or private company resources, whether they’re talking about international data or banking or currency exchanges or whatever, because they have a vested interest to lie,” Hale said. “I can go debunk stuff, I can go redact stuff, but I don’t want the kids exposed to the lie in the first place.”

Alexi Lenington, a high school social studies teacher in Texas, likewise lamented the loss of The World Factbook as a central, agreed-upon authority. “It was just raw data, so nobody could accuse me of having an agenda or anything, which is important if you’re teaching in Texas,” he added.

...

News organizations are also feeling the loss. Lizzie Jury, director of CNN’s editorial research team, said the research desk recently did away with subscriptions to other databases because similar information was available through the Factbook, which she called “the gold standard for country statistics.” On Thursday, she checked Britannica’s World Data to see if it could serve as an alternative but found that it, too, used The World Factbook as one of its sources.

 

When you're trying to weather a scandal, it helps to have the NYT on your side.

In order to understand, let alone judge, people's attitudes around a past event, you need to start by figuring out not just what information was available, but how widely disseminated it was and what space in the popular mind it occupied. When trying to get a handle on that context, you should probably start with how the mainstream press, particularly the paper of record, covered the story. 

If you want to explain how people continued to associate with Epstein after that first conviction, possibly the best place to look is how the New York Times broke the story. The article also spells out in painfully embarrassing detail how complicit the paper of record was in whitewashing and enabling the serial pedophile's crimes, and how hypocritical and self-serving it has been with its retrospectives.

When evaluating an article, what is included is often less important than how it is framed — and often, even more significantly, when it is presented. In particular, this last point often makes it impossible to assign blame for really egregious examples. We know from leaks within the organization that many of the most widely and deservedly criticized aspects of NYT articles came from unnamed editors rather than the reporters whose names appeared in the bylines.

Lots of publications (and the New York Times is arguably the worst offender here) like to burnish their reputations by selectively quoting old stories on a subject, leaving out the central context both within the article and in the coverage from competitors. That's how the NYT, which effectively buried the Pam Bondi scandal in 2016 until the Washington Post and other papers forced them to address it, can depict itself as having broken the story.

The primary purpose of journalism is to inform its audience. Therefore, any evaluation of reporting has to take into account how that audience consumes the news. While there are readers who carefully pore over every line beginning to end and make a genuine effort to make up their own minds and to understand what they've read, it's reasonable to assume that considerably more skim the story, read the first few paragraphs, or passively let themselves be led to the writer's conclusions.

With that established, what impression would most NYT readers have come away with when they first learned about the Epstein arrest?

For starters, most probably wouldn't realize just how disturbing even that initial round of details was. They would have to get six paragraphs in before finding out about this pertinent bit of information.

But Mr. Epstein also paid women, some of them under age, to give him massages that ended with a sexual favor, the authorities say. 

But it gets worse.

There's been a great reluctance in the coverage of this story to make certain uncomfortable but essential distinctions. Hopefully almost all of us can agree that statutory rape is wrong, but we need to acknowledge that some cases are far worse than others. Unknowingly having sex with a 17-year-old is quite different than deliberately procuring a 14-year-old.

Readers would have to wait ten more paragraphs to learn the age of the girl who filed that first complaint.

The legal drama began in 2005, when a young woman who gave Mr. Epstein massages at his Palm Beach mansion told the local police about the encounter. She was 14 at the time, and was paid $200.

The police submitted the results of their investigation to the state attorney, asking that Mr. Epstein be charged with sexual relations with minors. 

I have just quoted every time the article mentioned the fact we were talking about under-aged girls. Only those readers who were paying close attention and made it at least halfway through the article would have any idea just how bad the scandal was.

But what was emphasized might be even worse than what was downplayed. The compulsion to sympathize with rich people — to see things from their side and lend them support and comfort — is deep in the DNA of the New York Times and is prominently on display here. While the victims were barely an afterthought, Epstein is depicted as introspective and remorseful, a decent guy who fell victim to temptation, trying to do better in the future and manfully standing up to a challenging and even traumatic turn of events.

Think I'm exaggerating? Judge for yourself.

“I respect the legal process,” Mr. Epstein, 55, said by phone as he prepared to leave his 78-acre island, which he calls Little St. Jeff’s. “I will abide by this.” 

... 

He has paid for college educations for personal employees and students from Rwanda, and spent millions on a project to develop a thinking and feeling computer and on music intended to alleviate depression. 

...

People from all walks of life break the law, of course. But for the rich, wrapped in a cocoon of immense comfort, it can be easy to yield to temptation, experts say. 

...

 Sitting on his patio on “Little St. Jeff’s” in the Virgin Islands several months ago, as his legal troubles deepened, Mr. Epstein gazed at the azure sea and the lush hills of St. Thomas in the distance, poked at a lunch of crab and rare steak prepared by his personal chef, and tried explain how his life had taken such a turn. He likened himself to Gulliver shipwrecked among the diminutive denizens of Lilliput.

“Gulliver’s playfulness had unintended consequences,” Mr. Epstein said. “That is what happens with wealth. There are unexpected burdens as well as benefits.”

...

His lawyers say Mr. Epstein never knew the young women were under age, and point to depositions in which the masseuses — several of whom have filed civil suits — admitted to lying about their age. ["She was 14" -- MP]

...

As it became clear that he was headed for jail, Mr. Epstein has tried to put on a brave face.

“Your body can be confined, but not your mind,” he said in a recent interview by phone.

... 

 Looking back, Mr. Epstein admits that his behavior was inappropriate. “I am not blameless,” he said. He said he has taken steps to make sure the same thing never happens again.

For starters, Mr. Epstein has hired a full-time male masseur (the man happens to be a former Ultimate Fighting champion). He also has organized what he calls a board of directors of friends to counsel him on his behavior. 

This by no means closes the book on the New York Times' complicity in this story. Lots of questions remain to be answered about what various people at the paper knew and when they knew it. It does, however, provide us with a useful tool for understanding how such damaging revelations could have such little impact on the social standing of the wealthy and prominent. 

P.S. After posting this, someone pointed out that the reporter, Landon Thomas, had a bit of a history with his subject. More on that later.  

A quick midweek film review by Bob Chipman

Pretty much covers it. 

If you're in the mood for something a bit longer from Mr. Chipman and you still haven't gotten around to it, I still recommend the Hop-Along Cassidy video essay.

"because a 'stock' no longer refers to a unit of ownership in a company so much as it is a chip at a casino where the house constantly changes the rules."

This is taken from an enormous (19,000-word), highly recommended post by Ed Zitron. There is much here that merits comment, but I wanted to single out this section, and in particular the quote in the title, because it reflects a shift I've observed in my lifetime in the way people think about stocks and investments.  

Analysts have, on some level, become the fractional marketing team for the stocks they’re investing in. When Oracle announced its $300 billion deal with OpenAI in September — one that Oracle does not have the capacity to fill and OpenAI does not have the money to pay for – analysts heaved and stammered like horny teenagers seeing their first boob:

John DiFucci from Guggenheim Securities said he was “blown away.” TD Cowen’s Derrick Wood called it a “momentous quarter.” And Brad Zelnick of Deutsche Bank said, “We’re all kind of in shock, in a very good way.”

“There’s no better evidence of a seismic shift happening in computing than these results that you just put up,” Zelnick said on the earnings call.

These are the same people that retail and institutional investors rely upon for advice on what stocks to buy, all acting with the disregard for the truth that comes from years of never facing a consequence. Three months later, and Oracle has lost basically all of the stock bump it saw from the OpenAI deal, meaning that any retail investor that YOLO’d into the trade because, say, analysts from major institutions said it was a good idea and news outlets acted like this deal was real, already got their ass kicked. 

And please, spare me the “oh they shouldn’t trade off of analysts” bullshit. That’s the kind of victim-blaming that allows these revered fuckwits to continue farting out these meaningless calls.

In reality, we’re in an era of naked, blatant, shameless stock manipulation, both privately and publicly, because a “stock” no longer refers to a unit of ownership in a company so much as it is a chip at a casino where the house constantly changes the rules. Perhaps you’re able to occasionally catch the house showing its hand, and perhaps the house meant for you to see it. Either way, you are always behind, because the people responsible for buying and selling stocks at scale under the auspices of “knowing what’s going on” don’t seem to know what they’re talking about, or don’t care to find out.

 
Obviously, there will be exceptions to the following, but in general, when I was a kid, people thought of stocks primarily as owning a small part of a business, mainly so that you could share in the profits in the form of dividends while hopefully seeing the stock price at the very least outpace inflation. Later on, we got growth companies like Walmart, Apple, and Amazon, which didn't pay dividends, but that was okay because they were taking those profits and investing them back into the companies on things like infrastructure and research and development. We might not be getting quarterly checks, but the companies we partially owned were becoming more efficient and offering better products and more market share.

In the 21st century, however, especially with the rise of the meme stock, the fundamental sense of ownership seems to have largely gone away. You buy because “number go up.”

Sure, we have grandiose narratives, outrageous promises, and financial analysts and journalists cranking out a great sea of numbers, but I think those are mainly just feeding the Keynesian beauty contest taken to its absurd limits. I'm sure that some trusting souls actually believed in Zuckerberg's metaverse and Marc Andreessen's Web3, and today believe in Elon Musk's robot utopia, but I suspect most investors only believe that other people will believe them.

And, yes, I know this makes me sound like just another grumpy old man, but I do not believe this will end well. 

Elon doesn't think things through

[As embarrassing as the fluffing is, I suppose we should be happy Grok isn't up to something worse.]

 Elon Musk does deserve what we have to call “credit,” for lack of a better word, for his role in all this. His comments about the Epstein files, made at the height of the Trump–Musk feud, played a non-trivial role in getting this ball moving. Musk also deserves credit for shooting himself in the foot in the most satisfying way possible.

Mike Pearl writing for Gizmodo:

 

“No one pushed harder than me to have the Epstein files released and I’m glad that has finally happened,” Elon Musk

Sorry but “misinterpreted”? Even if you do your absolute damndest to read this guy’s freshly released Epstein emails in a positive light, what you get is the story of a tech tycoon stating unambiguously that he wanted to attend an absolute rager on a sex criminal’s private island.

“What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Elon Musk asked Jeffrey Epstein on on Nov. 25, 2012. 

In 2019, Musk told Vanity Fair that in their past interactions, he had detected that Epstein was “obviously a creep.” Indeed, it wouldn’t have taken much sleuthing to pick up on this attribute of Epstein’s back in 2012. He already had a conviction on his record at the time for soliciting prostitution, and it was also widely reported in the media that the prostitution conviction stemmed from a generous plea bargain, and that the charges Epstein had been facing included sexual relations with minors.

So with that in mind, here’s what Musk and Epstein wrote as they attempted to make plans in 2012 for Musk to visit Epstein’s island with British actress Talulah Riley, Musk’s wife at the time (typos and other text issues are left intact. I don’t want to be accused of misinterpreting):

Epstein: you are welcome to stay or just come for the day, plenty of rroom i will=send heli to get you

Musk: Do you have any parties planned? I’ve been working to the edge of sanity th=s year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hi= the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is=much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what=l’m looking for.

Epstein: Understood, , I will see you on st Barth, the ratio on my island might m=ke Talilah uncomfortable

Musk: Ratio is not a problem for Talulah

It may be true that Musk declined one or more invitations to visit, but he also tried to make plans to visit multiple times. In addition to the aforementioned change, he emailed Epstein on December 14, 2013 saying he was going to be in the Virgin Islands “over the holidays,” and asked “Is there a good time to visit?” In my opinion it sort of undermines the inherent morality of rejecting offers to be taken to Epstein’s island if you also repeatedly attempt to visit Epstein’s island.

This all raises the obvious question: why in the hell, given what Musk should have known was in the Epstein files, would he bring this up in the first place?

I have no special knowledge here, but I have spent over a decade now following the misadventures of Musk and the other tech saviors of greater Silicon Valley, and based on that, here is my take. Elon Musk is vindictive and childish, lacking impulse control and displaying a level of narcissism that often qualifies as a messianic delusion. Add to that, along with Donald Trump, he has often proven himself to be one of the luckiest sons of bitches in recorded history.

I don't think that most commentators realized how hot and deep feelings ran during the feud. It is essential to consider the context of the New York Times exposé, which, among other things, confirmed that the man was an out-of-control drug addict. That article was obviously based not just on leaks but on actual recordings taken in the White House. Musk's enemies in the administration clearly dropped the dime on him, possibly with the permission of Trump himself.

Musk has a long history of lashing out at even minor slights and holding grudges for decades. I assume most of you remember his absurd overreaction when he was criticized by one of the actual heroes of the Thai cave rescue. Those more familiar with the biography will remember the twenty-year-and-counting vendetta against the actual founders of Tesla and a proclivity for totally irrational rage firings, often based on nothing more than employees crossing their CEO's line of sight when he happened to be angry.

Add to his humiliation from the New York Times piece the possibility of chemically induced mood swings and a history of getting away with countless lies and shady deals, and it's not difficult to imagine the world's richest man not realizing the consequences of his actions. 

Tesla to transition out of the making of real things in order to focus on vaporware

Hadas Gold writing for CNN:

On Tesla’s earnings call on Wednesday, Musk laid out a literal replacement of Tesla cars by robots – announcing Tesla would discontinue the Model S and Model X in favor of making more of its Optimus robots.

“We’re gonna take the Model S and X production space in our Fremont factory and convert that into an Optimus factory … with the long-term goal of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots in the current SX space in Fremont,” he said.

It’s the quintessential, science-fiction dream of the future: Musk says Tesla’s Optimus robots will do everything from cleaning your house to performing surgery.

He’s called Optimus the key to eliminating world poverty, making human work optional and reaching Mars. And he claims they’ll be on sale by the end of 2027.

“Every human on earth is going to have their own personal R2-D2, C3PO,” Musk said in November, referring to the personal robots from Star Wars. “But actually, Optimus will be better than that.”

But critics say these are fever-dream distractions from Tesla’s core automotive business. And plenty of companies, like Boston Dynamics and Figure, are already deep into the humanoid robot business.

Musk’s own success and pay are directly at stake. Tesla must deliver one million Optimus robots within 10 years for Musk to fully realize an almost $1 trillion Tesla pay plan approved by shareholders late last year.

For those of you just joining our program, the humanoid robot boom is a sub-bubble of the AI boom, only sillier. While there's plenty of absurdity to be had in the dealings of OpenAI and the rhetoric around large language models, these algorithms are genuinely impressive and, at the moment, do, at the very least, represent the cutting edge of natural language processing.

The surge of investment and even more over-the-top promises being made about these C-3PO-style robots runs counter to the opinions of pretty much every roboticist who isn't somehow on the payroll. Engineers tend to look down their noses at naive biomimicry. It is telling that very few years ago only perhaps two or three dozen researchers were working in the field at all, and they seemed to be approaching it more as an engineering challenge and something interesting to do rather than a serious attempt to create something useful.

That all stopped more or less overnight when Elon Musk brought out a dancer in a robot suit and said he was about to revolutionize the industry. Despite the basic concept being as flawed as it had ever been, the announcement opened the floodgates of capital and hype.

Even if you accept the absurdity of bipedal humanoids soon dominating the labor market, Tesla is nowhere near the leading player in the field. It's probably not top five. If you count Chinese companies, it's probably not top ten.

Even in its current incarnation, Tesla is wildly overvalued, but compared to what's being proposed, it is the very model of rational valuation.

As if Mike Johnson didn't have enough to worry about...

Unfortunately, though the thought of the porn obsessed hypocrite getting, if you'll pardon the expression, exposed, the victims here (many of them minors) haven't helped suppress the Epstein files or turned a blind eye to war crimes or [too long a list to enumerate]. They just made the mistake of trusting a tech company with some of the most personal data imaginable.

Emanuel Maiberg writing for 404:

An app that purports to help people stop consuming pornography has exposed highly sensitive data, including its users’ masturbation habits. Some of the data exposed includes the users’ age, how often they masturbate, and how viewing pornography makes them feel. According to the data, many of them are minors. 

An example of the personal data of one user said they were “14,” that their “frequency” of porn consumption was “several times a week,” with a maximum of three times a day, and that their “triggers” were “boredom” and “Sexual Urges.” This user was given a “dependence score” and listed their “symptoms” as “Feeling unmotivated, lack of ambition to pursue goals, difficulty concentrating, poor memory or ‘brain fog.’”

We’re not naming the app because the developer has not fixed the issue, which was discovered by an independent security researcher who asked to remain anonymous. The researcher first flagged the issue to the creator of the app in September. The creator of the app said he would fix the issue quickly, but didn’t. The issue is a misconfiguration in the app’s usage of the mobile app development platform Google Firebase, which by default makes it easy for anyone to make themselves an “authenticated” user who can access the app’s backend storage where in many instances user data is stored.

Overall, the researcher said he could access the information of more than 600,000 users of the porn quitting app, 100,000 of which identified as minors. 

The app also invites users to write confessions about their habits. One of these read: “I just can't do this man I honestly don't know what to do know more, such a loser, I need serious help.”

When reached for comment by phone, the creator of the app told me he had talked to the researcher but that the app never exposed any user data because of a misconfigured Google Firebase, and that the researcher could have faked the data I reviewed. 

“There is no sensitive information exposed, that's just not true,” the founder told me. “These users are not in my database, so, like, I just don't give this guy attention. I just think it's a bit of a joke.”

When I asked the founder why he previously thanked the researcher for responsibly disclosing the misconfiguration and said he would rush to fix it, he wished me a good day and hung up.

After the call, I created an account on the app, which the researcher was able to see appear in the misconfigured Google Firebase, showing that user information is still exposed. 

This Google Firebase misconfiguration issue has been known and discussed by security researchers for years, and is still common today. 

 

The Musk Credibility Market

 David Ingram writing for NBC:

 There’s a popular saying among fans of tech billionaire Elon Musk: Never bet against him.

But in the booming world of online prediction markets, some people are not only betting against Musk, but also bringing in big paydays doing so.

On the prediction market websites Kalshi and Polymarket, some bettors are making tens of thousands of dollars by wagering that Musk will fall short on his many ambitious — but so far unrealized — plans, including a robotaxi service in California and a third political party in the United States.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has for years issued sweeping public pronouncements on social media, podcasts and earnings calls. His track record is notoriously spotty, with his unfulfilled promises about self-driving cars becoming a meme in their own right. His car service in California still has humans in the driver’s seats, and his political party idea appears dormant. And yet he also oversaw the creation of reusable, self-landing rockets and the meteoric rise of Tesla.

Now, the accuracy of his bluster is getting tested in real time as prediction markets grow in popularity.

David Bensoussan, a Polymarket user whose account is No. 51 on the site’s all-time profits leaderboard (what many call a “whale” for their sizable bets) as of Friday, said he didn’t believe Musk when, during a rift with President Donald Trump last summer, he threatened to form a new political party. So, he bet nearly $10,000 that Musk wouldn’t follow through. He made a 10% return when Musk didn’t.

Bensoussan said he’s not a fan of Musk and takes some pleasure in winning bets against those who may have been seduced by the tech baron.

“He does have a solid fan base, and so if I can help separate them from some of their money, I’m always happy to do that,” he said in a phone interview from Europe, where he’s based.

 The Ingram piece is sharp and well reported, but there are a few points that, at the very least, need to be emphasized.

When we talk about examples of why you shouldn’t bet against Elon Musk and limit ourselves to reality-based incidents, pretty much all of them come from either early in the development of SpaceX or refer to the stock price of Tesla.

It’s possible that no company in history has better demonstrated the principle that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Over the past few years, the company has reached an insane valuation totally unmoored from any business fundamentals.

Other than market cap, the overwhelming majority of the claims Elon Musk has made about not just his two main companies but about XAI, Twitter, the Hyperloop, the Boring Company, DOGE, Optimus, etc., have been so far off the mark as to suggest either deliberate lying or a lack of any real relationship with the truth.

It's true that lots of traders have lost money shorting Tesla, but if you were betting against the actual claims behind Musk's enterprises, the odds have been remarkably good. 

The War on Data -- part [I've lost count]

 Natalie Alms writing for Nextgov/FCW:

The federal statistical system is facing “unprecedented strain, uncertainty and transformation” in the face of staffing losses, funding pressures and threats to statistical integrity, according to a report from the American Statistical Association released in early December. 

“Immediate action must be taken to halt the severe decline in the federal statistical agencies’ ability to meet their basic mission,” it reads. 

Most of the 13 statistical agencies have lost from 20% to 30% of their staff since fiscal 2024, according to the report, as the Trump administration has sought to shrink the size of the federal workforce. 

One of the most extreme examples is the National Center for Education Statistics at the Department of Education, which terminated all but three employees in March, the report says. The organization produces data like the congressionally mandated Nation’s Report Card, meant to show what K-12 students know in subjects like math and science. 

Other statistical agencies also saw workforce losses. The workforce at the Office of Research, Evaluation and Statistics at the Social Security Administration, for example, is now about half its former size.