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Fascinating. Do you have any suspicions as to what the cause might be instead?

Full disclosure, I worked briefly with Ello / Catalin some years back.

They've done a lot of work on at least two dimensions: (1) handling the nonstandard sounds and habits of speech of very early readers, who might be as young as four, and (2) connecting this to a specialized teaching system based on the science of reading, e.g. decodable readers.

The explanation I've heard is that the national curriculum switched away from phonics and to a teaching method called "balanced literacy", and this went terribly [1]. IIRC it involved teaching kids to recognize words by their overall visual shape. I believe this is what mature readers do, but the problem is that for this to work, one first needs to have bootstrapped a robust vocabulary. And that happens via being able to sound out words, i.e. phonics.

(I'm not sure whether Cato is generally reliable, but FYI there are lots of other writeups online on the same topic. It was the first non-paywalled and reasonably complete one I found)

[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/phonics-failure-public-schools

Full disclosure: I worked on a small project with Ello / Catalin a few years ago.

At the time of writing, the sentiment in this post is that this is a terrible idea, and that kids need human tutors. The latter is 100% true. But also, you might want to know some facts about the state of children's literacy in the US (Ello is a math and reading tutor):

1. We're in crisis. As of 2025, 40% of fourth graders are reading below basic levels [1].

2. There's a massive teacher shortage. 2025 US state data shows ~400k teacher positions either unfilled or underqualified [2] – over 10% of the workforce.

3. Bloom's 2-sigma shows that 1-1 tutoring delivers outcomes at the 90th percentile of classroom teaching. Early research is finding that AI can deliver some of this benefit [3].

4. This can't always be solved by parents: 54% of US adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level, and 20% are below 5th-grade level [4].

At Ello, I heard stories of children figuring out they were behind at school, and when given the app, they holed themselves up in their room and used it to get themselves caught up. And then they could read! Can you imagine falling behind at this critical juncture, and being stuck illiterate while your friends grow past you? We're currently setting kids up for lives of shame and deprivation.

My take: this really is a life-changing technology. And we need this problem solved. Democracy doesn't function without an educated populace.

[1] https://www.nagb.gov/news-and-events/news-releases/2025/nati...

[2] https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/overview-teacher...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X2...

[4] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...

It exists and is a great read – https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/Goliath

Check the archive.org link at the bottom!

Hello! I'm one of the main authors of the paper. Thanks for engaging with our work so thoughtfully – that's a very clear and valid question.

We didn't get around to addressing this within the paper itself – 80 pages is a lot, and deadlines, etc. But I have unpublished experiments that show that in a reasonably broad setting I'm doing some work in, verbalized probabilities are restoring a distribution that looks almost identical to the base distribution. It is not possible to demonstrate this on frontier models, since their public models are already mode-collapsed, and they don't share the base model or logprobs anyway. But I've established this to my personal satisfaction on large local models which offer base / post-trained pairs.

To share some intuition on why one might believe this is occurring: there are a bunch of tasks implicit in the pre-training corpus that encourage the model to learn this capability. Consider sentences in news and research articles like: "Scientists discover that [doing something] increases [some outcome] on [some population] by X%". It seems quite natural that the model might learn a pathway by which it can translate its base probabilities into the equivalent numeric tokens in order to "beat" the task of reducing loss on the "X%" prediction. I can even almost visualize how this works mechanically in terms of what the upper layers of an MLP would do to learn this, i.e. translating from weights into specific token slots. And this is almost certainly more parameter-efficient than constructing an entire separate emulated reality for filling in X. Although I'm not ruling out that the latter might still be happening – perhaps some future interp research might be able to validate this!

I'm actually working on a paper that packs up some of the above findings in passing. But if helpful in the meantime, this is also building on related work by Tian et al. 2023, "Just Ask for Calibration" [1] and Meister et al. 2024, "Benchmarking Distributional Alignment of LLMs" [2], that give some extra confidence here. Their findings indicate that whether or not they are rooted in the model's base probabilities, they seem to be useful for the purposes that people care about. (Oh, and you can probably set up an experiment to verify this independently with vLLM in a few Claude Code requests!)

Hope that was helpful – feel free to ping with follow-ups! (Although replies might be a little delayed, I happened to see this at a good time; having quite a crunchy week)

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14975

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05403

This is very funny to me. It took about a decade for them to receive a scientific name – because people were too busy eating them the whole time! The "note on the Bathynomus fishery" really makes the circumstances of this "discovery" quite clear.

Sadly, within the taxonomy itself the authors restrain themselves from sharing their findings on the most delicious parts and preparations of the animal. Darwin would have been disappointed [1], but at least as a species we've gotten our time down from 300 years [2].

1. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/08/12/430075644/di...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPggB4MfPnk

I'm quite curious, what are people doing with AI-powered browser automation at the moment?

This is such a new capability that I'm having a hard time getting a sense of interesting use cases. I'm quite sure this is more than just a shim for web services which don't expose APIs. But I also wonder whether LLMs are good enough to be trusted with more open-ended tasks at this stage.

If the claim that the blogosphere is dying is true, does that imply the public intellectual commons is dying too? I suspect that while the cosyweb is more pleasant for most, this retreat might hinder vital testing and cross-pollination of ideas, and make it much harder for people to polarize into being intellectually active. For example, I've never been an active participant on ribbonfarm, but Rao's writing has made me a little smarter and inclined towards certain vectors of thought. And you can see ripples of his work in later writing by others.

What a shame it would be for this culture to be lost; while there's a lot of dross in the blogosphere, I don't know if the brightest jewels will still be possible in a future system of local, private, transient clusters of thought.

In your experience, are doctors generally willing to do this?

Thanks, I'm certainly going to try that. I was more asking if anyone has experience getting tests done properly in light of their low accuracy. From what I understand, an antigen test is still a stool test, meaning they are only 50% accurate. As a commenter on this post shared, managing the health system is challenging in this area. I just did a bit of googling, and found a couple of leads here:

CDC recommends collecting three stool samples from patients over several days for accurate test results. Commercial testing products for diagnosing giardiasis are available in the United States. [1]

Perhaps running three tests is the standard of care, or if not one might advocate for this based on the CDC recommendation. And if dismissed, perhaps there are commercial products available at the consumer level.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/giardia/hcp/diagnosis-testing/index.html

Speaking as someone who went through this, running experiments with your diet is absolutely worth trying. It worked for me. There is actually a specific medical practice for this: look up "FODMAP". The idea is to temporarily cut out all likely suspects for a short period, see if that fixes things, and then gradually reintroduce them to identify the culprit. A gastroenterologist recommended this to me. It didn't help with my issues at the time as gluten is not covered by this cluster, but struck me as a very sensible approach.

In my experience the medical system is unusually useless and dismissive with digestive issues. I think this is probably related to how little it can do in this area. 10-15% of the US has IBS, and this is a disease of exclusion. That literally means that the medical system acknowledges a cluster of symptoms, but has no idea what is causing them or how to cure them. I can imagine that blaming patients is easier than the alternatives for some doctors.

Oh wow, I have the first half of this situation. I went through a period where my digestion was so bad that it was affecting my ability to function from day to day. I didn't get anything useful from my gastro; I even had a negative celiac antibody test. Eventually I started rigorously tracking everything I ate against my symptoms, and after a few months I was able to draw a strong correlation with gluten intake. From memory it was in the 0.7 range. The day I cut out gluten, a set of awful digestive symptoms completely left my life. They return any time I am glutened.

I was fortunate that over time I managed to return myself to full capacity, through reading a ton of research and running dozens of experiments like the above. But it was so damn hard. The symptoms reduced my ability to use my brain to fix myself. And if you're not a careful eater, it's not at all intuitive which foods contain gluten. This was also almost a decade ago while living in a developing country, so it wasn't even apparent that gluten might be a suspect.

I'm currently based in the US - does anyone know how one might get properly tested for chronic giardiasis, as a person who isn't themselves in microbiology? I almost certainly encountered poorly treated water in that period of my life.

Also - I can't help but suspect that a nontrivial percentage of the developing world is living below their full capacity due to something like this. Neglected tropical diseases are a horrendous category.

I'd love to hear more about your experience with this platform. Is there any public information about this platform or research? How did you guys manage the bad behaviors that come with anonymity, like trolling?

I'm currently feeling out a little research project around the use of AI in improving group decision-making, specifically with the hope of improving our political systems. There are so few IRL case studies, it'd be great to have more intuition for this!

(I'm @dch on twitter if you'd prefer to DM)

That's very interesting - the Chinese "oi" has pretty much exactly the same usages, down to the little details! (I'm most familiar with the Cantonese 喂 wai2, though it's not my first language)

I wonder if that suggests this is one of those universal pre-linguistic words, like "huh" [1]. That feels especially believable given the utter simplicity of the mouth sound. It's almost just a yell, in the same way that "huh" is almost just an outbreath.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/everybody-almo...

FYI OP is answering my question on what the historian's theory was! (They were downvoted)

This route makes sense to me; I do think the deal has been getting worse and worse lately, and periodic renegotiation is required to keep things running properly.

This is so insightful! What did they believe the main process was, that was causing things to break?

My guesses - this is about (a) inequality reaching a breaking point, where non-elites are starting to reject the social contract, making elite signaling dangerous, and (b) that elites at that moment don't have enough justification for their elevated status (mystification, misrecognition, etc)

On flights within the U.S., airlines are responsible for lost-luggage reimbursement up to $2,500 per person; on international flights, airlines owe you a mere $9.07 per pound, with a ceiling of $640. (That rate was set by an international treaty in 1929.)

Beyond that, airlines owe you nothing for your most valuable items. Most contracts of carriage specifically exempt from compensation things like antiques, art, books, documents, money, cameras, collectibles, electronics, or "fragile or perishable items." [1]

Also this is not a guaranteed payout, you may need to provide receipts for your things [2]. In general I would prefer to keep the contents of my bag vs receiving "up to" $2,500. We're mostly working people here. The time and money cost of travel disruptions, replacing stuff, navigating bureaucracy etc. is not low. And my stuff has emotional value.

I agree that this setup seems reasonable in a perfect world. But knowing how large, complex companies function, I feel it is unwise to create any kind of loop which rewards airlines as a function of luggage lost.

[1] https://www.frommers.com/tips/airfare/the-bottom-line-what-d...

[2] https://www.peopleclerk.com/post/airline-lost-delayed-luggag...

I agree in the abstract, but people and companies operate under bounded rationality. Customers can't easily price the expectation of lost luggage. Companies are made of subunits with independent budgets, each optimizing for incentives with short time horizons.

McDonald's is actually a good example, they did exactly this. IMO one reason their brand has been devalued is death by a thousand cost cuts. Each cut is imperceptible and seems like a win. But over several decades the net effect is a disaster. (IIRC Fast Food Nation documented some ideas about this process)

I think OP is right but hasn't fully unrolled what they mean. This seems like it creates a moral hazard [1], because it reduces the penalty to airlines for losing luggage.

If airlines were prepared to accept X in costs from lost luggage before, and now get paid Y, they can now accept about X+Y in lost luggage costs. Meaning more lost luggage! After the system dynamics resettle, from a certain angle this is basically stealing: customers pay the same ticket price, but are paying some percentage more in expected lost luggage.

And on top of that, this is just considering the financial cost - what is actually happening is that more travelers are being deprived of their personal belongings. These are worth more to people than insurance payouts! It's surprising, but when you zoom out this seems downright awful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

This seems unnecessarily reductive. Yes, like any tool, marketing can be used for evil. And people often associate marketing with scummy advertising or spin (which often actually fall under sales or PR). But at its best marketing creates an incredible amount of value.

If you actually study it, the discipline of marketing is actually about things like (1) the rigorous search for product-market fit, many decades before this was popular with tech startups, (2) finding ways to efficiently target and inform audiences about goods and services which absolutely add value to their lives, and which can often be extremely challenging (e.g. everyone hates thinking about death, but life insurance can be ridiculously important for your dependents), (3) developing clear, stable, predictable anchors at a company level, which people can trust and build mental shorthand for, at longer timeframes - we all have expectations for what Apple products are "about", for example. These are all absolutely vital market functions.

I think we might still consider this counterculture as long as its norms are not mainstream culture. And I think it's fair to say the dominant culture of many cultural institutions in the US currently has a distinct leftward lean - Hollywood, news, education, research, social media, advertising, other large swathes of industry. (Which again, I'm not saying is a bad thing)

Also, Trump represented many things to many people, as opposed to just this emerging alt-right counterculture idea cloud. And by the numbers, most voters soundly rejected him in 2020.

No, the counterculture is actually thriving. But many people just don't understand it yet, because of how, well, counter it is to their ideas about culture: its roots are now in conservatism. It currently seems to be cool and edgy amongst the kids to be alt right in pretty much exactly the same way that it was cool and edgy to be very liberal in the 60s.

I'm not saying I agree with or subscribe to the tenets of conservatism (I don't). But it's a natural process for the pendulum to swing as society advances. Liberal counterculture "won" and went completely mainstream. Which is great! Gay marriage is legal, we care about sustainability, and so on. But every system has gaps and blind spots, and movements which oppose the incumbent mainstream are, by definition, not liberal counterculture.

Some touchpoints - President Obama's failure to penalize banks in the Great Recession. One percenters and the new cathedral. Joe Rogan. The intellectual dark web (Jordan Peterson et al). The red pill. The alt right.

I feel many of the above are often stupid, but in the same way that there were a lot of stupid 60s counterculture movements. It doesn't invalidate the fact that valid ideas exist within both. Also, they aren't using your signaling channels. For example, music doesn't seem to be a relevant cultural rallying point any more.

1. I did not use the word "normal" or "advanced" once in any comment, nor did I ever imply it. You are, in fact, continuing to make assumptions about me.

2. "Pretty much every culture worldwide that is prominent economically today has mostly moved away from entomophagy" is carefully stated so as to be a measurable claim. Sort by GDP per capita and consider the percentage of insect protein in diets. The cultures at the top of the list are not merely Western or colonial remnants.

3. My point is about energy efficiency, which is value neutral. It seems obvious that human cultures have an incentive to use resources efficiently, or else be outcompeted by cultures which do (ala historical materialism). Given that (a) most every culture has passed through entomophagic periods, (b) most cultures have known how to farm insects for millenia, and (c) recent studies show this practice is incredibly energy efficient, this should imply that every economically prominent culture today should already be getting the majority of its protein from insects. We should predict millenia of insect-based cuisine as the global mainstream default, and entire supermarket aisles of produce. The fact that we do not see this is surprising, and therefore invokes caution via Chesterton's Fence.

4. It is known that some percentage of people enjoy foods which trigger the evolutionary disgust response, such as extremely bitter foods, or snakes. Perhaps this is because said response is not uniform across the population, or perhaps it can be overcome via other means. But the fact that some people do so does not preclude that the response exists for some good reason.

5. What you are calling "weasel words" are what I call being careful with the level of confidence with which one makes assertions in conversation. I am not an expert, and will not make assertions with the certainty this would permit. You too are certainly not an expert.

6. I am not interested in continuing this conversation further; I'm writing this to clarify my thinking on #3 and #4, and for the benefit of future readers. If you selectively choose to disbelieve science when it doesn't support your beliefs, without examining the underlying facts, this implies that your beliefs are not rooted in fact. I also find your insults and personal attacks distasteful.

Sorry, but this is a discussion board, and I have no obligation to provide citations for every last sentence I write. Particularly given the low confidence I tagged these items with. Nor do you have any right to demand this standard of others. My comment contains more than enough keywords to retrace my Googling, there are lots of relevant papers, and I am not an expert. Please do your own supplementary research.

As to your points - first, I think it's more than clear from context what I meant by "arthropod"; I could have used the term "chelicerate" instead but this is far less useful. And second, yes, I know such cultures exist. My point was about "prominent economically" and "mostly" moved away. If you sort countries by GDP per capita, how far down is the first country whose dominant eating habits include a lot of insect protein? And don't you find this result surprising considering its known energy efficiency?

FYI, this is called "orientalism" [1]. Most people would also be surprised to learn that the Swiss eat more cats and dogs per capita than China, and that Norway kills more whales per year than Japan (although there are some valid conservation arguments against Japan on the latter).

I implore any angry readers to do some Googling before flaming or instinctively downvoting: I don't plan on spending my weekend fighting some culture war, and I promise that there are reasonable sources for both claims just one Google search away.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism

I found the National Geographic piece interesting. But you've made a lot of unnecessarily condescending and incorrect assumptions about me: I was not raised in the West. I enjoy many of the foods on your list, and am also very familiar with induced disgust originating in religious taboo.

Yes, some cultures do farm and raise insects. The point I'm making is that it's unusual that pretty much every culture worldwide that is prominent economically today has mostly moved away from entomophagy, considering its apparent sheer efficiency. (Whereas we pretty much universally all still farm honey)

Also, the assumption that eating insects is merely a cultural taboo may not hold water: a quick Google finds scholarly research around insect and arthropod disgust being a worldwide phenomenon, which lines up with my initial speculation. I also see academic hypotheses that this was indeed evolved due to the "parasite avoidance theory of disgust". Just like culture can be used to create disgust taboos, it can also be used to override them.

I can't help but feel that there's a very good reason that many of us have a deep, instinctive revulsion to eating insects. I am not familiar with the research, but my feeling is that this is probably an evolved builtin (I recall that the aversion to snake movement has been shown to be). And regardless, there are very few cultures globally which engage in this practice. This seems surprising considering they are a source of protein that is widely available, and seems reasonably easy to farm. And so to me, Chesterton's Fence suggests we should be very careful about making sudden moves here. For example:

Parasites were detected in 244 (81.33%) out of 300 (100%) examined insect farms. In 206 (68.67%) of the cases, the identified parasites were pathogenic for insects only; in 106 (35.33%) cases, parasites were potentially parasitic for animals; and in 91 (30.33%) cases, parasites were potentially pathogenic for humans. Edible insects are an underestimated reservoir of human and animal parasites. [...] Conducted parasitological examination suggests that edible insects may be the most important parasite vector for domestic insectivorous animals.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6613697/

Is it just me, or does this article look like a textbook example of a press hit / submarine marketing (as described by pg [1]), for Hilton's recently-launched anti-AirBnB campaign [2]?

I don't know if I can trust this. It's almost ridiculously anecdotal, and in a big enough market it's unfairly easy to find anecdotes to support almost any claim. There are no metrics about typical cleanup expected or whether cleaning requirements are truly growing; running a dishwasher and cleaning your own messes seems patently reasonable as part of the "deal" of this kind of rental. And as a very infrequent AirBnB user, it's not clear to me how the $143 cleaning fee works. Is it only applied if you make a huge mess? Are the expectations on cleaning and possible fee made clear going in? Or is this always charged and part of the standard fee?

I wish this kind of PR nonsense didn't exist; if so, the organic decision to write about this might be signal about a real trend. But given that it does, this may just be an attempt to pipe lies into my brain. I am suspicious.

Edit: This line is extremely telling when carefully parsed: "[AirBnB] said around 55% of its active listings charge a cleaning fee, which on average makes up less than 10% of the total reservation cost."

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AirBnB/comments/wwqibv/hilton_launc...

This sounds interesting, why is this no longer true?