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John Cochrane Blog
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20 September
18 September
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korrents.com
Progressive political thinking has neglected the value of persuading others that one is rightTheir words
I think the big thing that has gone weirdly missing from a lot of progressive thinking about the political system is the concept of "persuade people that you are correct."
17 September
16 September
15 September
13 September
11 September
10 September
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Their words
If there is a 3x productivity boost now, the correct assumption is that in the future the productivity boost, in places it carries over, will a lot more than 3x. Indeed, given how this scales, a better model might be in practice 10x or 100x or even 1,000x or more.
1 September
25 August
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korrents.com
The S&P 500’s price-to-sales ratio no longer signals what it once did, because today’s companies earn higher margins.Their words
Therefore, the only correct interpretation of the P/S ratio over the last decade is that it doesn’t signal what it used to.
Why I Was Wrong to Be Bearish on U.S. Stocksofdollarsanddata.com
19 August
From one piece From Chrome DevTools to AI Engineering, with Addy Osmani 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
you want to get to a point where you know, your your machine, your org is self-sufficient enough that you know, you just need to occasionally tap the blimp, make sure that things are working. You can course correct if it's not, but that frees you up to then focus on the next important sets of problems that the org needs to, you know, tackle heads on.
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korrents.com
An agent can tell you whether a thing looks correct against a spec; it cannot tell you whether the thing is any good.Their words
An agent can tell you if a thing looks correct, if it's matching a spec. It doesn't necessarily mean it can tell you what's good.
12 August
11 August
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Their words
when AIs are extremely extremely capable my view is that those AIs will be harder to align than current systems. So for current systems, we have this feedback loop where we basically like we create an AI. We do some evaluations on it. We see that it has some kind of messed up behavior that we can kind of quickly understand. Then we like can like go look in training and be like, "Oh, the these training environments led to this problematic behavior. Let's like tweak that training data. Let's introduce some additional training data to like correct this other issue and then move forward from there." But in a regime where the AIs are extremely situationally aware, very very very very capable and um you know uh we don't necessarily understand what they're doing, this feedback loop breaks down.
10 August
2 August
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Their words
Top-down works well if leadership is good enough to be in the weeds and be specifically correct. I think where it falls apart is where you don't actually know ground truth and then you attempt to manage people from above and that's where I think the term micromanagement comes from.
29 July
From one piece Formal methods with Hillel Wayne 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
but I can tell you with first hand experience nuclear power plants do not care about this stuff. They're actually just fine with with with thorough testing.
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Their words
when you start talking about like most interesting domain problems, you have to pull in so much context that basically even writing what the function is supposed to do becomes a nightmare. The imperative program you write that will get correct 99% of the time is probably good enough to use in almost all cases.
28 July
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korrents.com
Y Combinator's much-mocked insistence that founders move to San Francisco was, in hindsight, plainly correct.Their words
it used to be very heretical that YC told people they had to move to San Francisco. And looking back, it was clearly right.
24 July
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korrents.com
A reader's own mental image of a character is as valid as the author's depiction of them.Their words
Some readers like this, others don't, and if the Samantha in your head looks nothing like the one on the page, yours is the correct one.
15 July
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Their words
there's four things in your context window that matter. There's like the size of it, how many tokens? There's like the quality of the information is like is there any incorrect information? Like if the model had some thinking trace where it decided the wrong thing was true. Is there missing information? Does this like have context missing that it should have? And then there's the trajectory.
7 July
1 July
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Their words
and I thought programming sitting fingers on keyboard staring at code that's that's where I do my learning because that's where you can no longer fool yourself that you actually understand either you compute the correct value or you don't compute the correct value. So I wanted to elevate that moment of reality meets program and that's where the programming comes from.
30 June
From one piece Grant Sanderson (@3blue1brown) – AI disproved a famous math conjecture. Now what? 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Which actually goes to show you that you there's not a correct huristic for science. You actually just need multiple independent research programs with their own huristics.
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korrents.com
Writing well means knowing the exact moment to be unpredictable, which is not the same as raising the temperature.Their words
like when you're writing you sort of you sort of know in order for it to be good, you have to have an element of the unpredictable. And it's it's not just like increasing temperature in your mind or something, right? It's like knowing exactly the correct point when you want to make an unpredictable move.
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Their words
And so having anything that's able to give you that green check mark that says even if this is going to be complicated to understand, even if it's going to be a pain, you at the very least know it is correct. Like every other field would kill for that, right?
+ 2 more
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Their words
that like if it's capable of building mountains uh that are, you know, the correct new theory that like crystallizes how we should be thinking about a subject, that's just such a level of intelligence that then it starts to feel like it would be surprising if that didn't permeate into other aspects of the economy besides like just the mountain building for math itself.
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Their words
And I think a good exposition you care a little bit less about like correctness on the way, but you can like deliberately craft things that are a little bit wrong that you correct along the way that gets like edited out in a crowd source environment.
24 June
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Their words
Everything is a trade-off. It's not really In engineering, there's no correct answer like there is in math or science. Engineering is about the best solution at the time.
27 May
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Their words
There's always negative sentiment that exists for any business that's getting hyped. They have no incentive to correct it. Um so again it's complicated because I know the training costs are a big part of it. Uh the R&D department is is hugely expensive but long-term inference makes sense as a business and I think it it always will.
25 May
22 April
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korrents.com
Clocks are right most of the time, and that is precisely why a distributed system may never rely on them.Their words
it's very easy to assume that your clocks are correct and most of the times the clocks are pretty correct but we just can't rely on it because actually they're just not precise enough uh on the whole.
8 April
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Their words, before
It may no longer have as much economic value as it once did. I think that I'm quite convinced is true that we perhaps have seen the peak.
Their words now
So, I do think it is correct for the average programmer to think maybe we've seen the best of the golden days.
1 April
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Their words
Let's say if my requirement for the engineer was build a system that will scale infinitely to the test of time, it might take a year. We never get there. We'll die before then.
23 March
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Their words
writing programs in this style makes it much easier to write correct and safe concurrent code
From error-handling to structured concurrencyblog.nelhage.com
11 March
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Their words
Which is, you know, you’re the game designer who’s playing God, and players are the ants in your ant farm, and you want to see what they’re gonna do, which is not the correct way to be a good multiplayer designer.
12 February
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Their words
Second, technologies and market structure are contextual, where the US can't simply emulate China's manufacturing.
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Their words
We show that equilibrium generically occurs at neither the Harberger nor Glaeser-Luttmer benchmark. Cost-minimizing suppliers drive allocations to vertices, not interiors. Corners are not an assumption but an outcome about what cost-minimizing suppliers choose. The correct benchmark is corners, not random, and corners generate qualitatively different welfare properties: losses far larger than either efficient or random distributions, and discontinuous jumps from small parameter perturbations.
23 January
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korrents.com
Frequent conversations with customers continually correct a founder's mistaken assumptions about the market.Their words
Your assumptions will constantly clash with reality, and they will be refined slightly every single time you have a conversation.
19 January
13 January
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korrents.com
Knowing that poverty and child mortality have actually fallen is what makes people think the future can improve.Their words
Only 17% of those who got no correct answers on historical development changes thought the world would be better off. 62% of those with more than five correct answers did.
25 November 2025
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Their words
And then the top down belief is the thing that sustains you when the experiments contradict you. Because if you just trust the data all the time, well, sometimes you can be doing a correct thing, but there's a bug.
10 October 2025
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Their words
When the Ukrainians say that they are defending Europe’s borders they are correct.
5 October 2025
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Their words
The system matters just as much as any given experiment. Probably even more. Right. I think starting with a growth model so you have an understanding of how your company grows in the first place and which channels you're going to leverage is critical. You need to make sure that you are instrumenting your product in and out otherwise you're going to run experiments and have wonky results.
12 September 2025
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Their words
And when you make a mistake and correct it, well, first you you've achieved the task because you've corrected, but you've also gained knowledge that allows you to avoid that mistake in the future. With driving, because of the dynamics of how it's set up, it's very hard to make a mistake, correct it, and then learn from it because the mistakes themselves have significant ramifications.
12 July 2025
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Their words, before
I think we need to correct that ratio somewhat by some testimony of just how God damn amazing it is to literally create life
Their words now
those of us who've chosen to do the traditional thing to get married and to have children have an obligation to kind of talk it up a little bit, which would've seen ridiculous again 50 years ago that you'd have to talk up something so fundamental of that.
14 June 2025
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Their words
Yeah, this decade I can see it making a conjecture between two things that people would thought was unrelated.
11 June 2025
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Their words
clients want a lot more from a software vendor than a solution that performs ABC by XYZ date.
1 May 2025
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korrents.com
Large language models cannot reliably self-correct their own mistakes without external feedback.Their words
this self-correction capability turns out to not exist intrinsically among LLMs and does not easily work out of the box, due to various failure modes
30 April 2025
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Their words
Clearly as well we see that the more people know about the medieval period, the more likely they are to be correct about it.
On what Americans know about medieval historygoing-medieval.com
29 January 2025
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Their words
And so, while the Jevons paradox case was 100% correct in the long run, 97% of the fiber laid in 2001 was unlit.
9 December 2024
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korrents.com
Nic Carter correctly identified the product behind the FDIC’s redacted crypto pause letters.Their words
I think Carter is very likely (90%+) correct with respect to identifying the subject of these letters.
21 July 2024
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Their words
The bar I typically suggest is that the people manager doesn't need to have the most technical depth on the team, but they need enough depth that they can follow most discussions without slowing them down, understand who's correct in most debates without needing to rely on trust, and generally stay oriented easily.
22 April 2024
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Their words
I think that that story about the latter part is completely wrong, almost 180 degrees wrong. I think that Einstein understood quantum mechanics as well as anyone, at least up through the 1930s. I think that his philosophical objections to it are correct. He should actually have been taken much more seriously about that.
23 January 2024
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Their words
The trouble with Xi Jinping is that he is 60 percent correct on all the problems he sees, while his government’s brute force solutions reliably worsen things.
1 December 2023
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korrents.com
Current large language models still struggle to compose operations into correct multi-step reasoning paths.Their words
Overall, current LLMs still struggle with composing operations into correct reasoning paths.
17 November 2023
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korrents.com
Ukraine should have kept its nuclear weapons in 1993, and keeping them would have made this war far less likely.Their words
So that's why I argued in '93 that if Ukraine kept its nuclear weapons that made war down the road much less likely. And I believe I was correct.
9 November 2023
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Their words
Yeah. I mean, I would say that I’m pathologically optimistic on schedule. This is true.
1 October 2023
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korrents.com
Milton Friedman's best-known policy prescription, targeting the money supply, is no longer regarded as correct.Their words
Friedman’s best-known policy idea – targeting the money supply – no longer is regarded as correct.
29 June 2023
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korrents.com
There is no correct list of best investing books, only the books that speak to a given readerTheir words
In the end, there is no "right" list of the best investing books. There are only those books that speak to you and those that don't.
30 May 2023
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Their words, before
Samuelson was the one claiming realism.
Their words now
I no longer think the main substance of my earlier post was correct.
9 August 2022
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korrents.com
A run of correct forecasts is not evidence of expertise, because among many forecasters some are right by chance.Their words
I may have I may be an investor. I have a track record of calling the market right in the last five times. People say, "Wow, he really knows what he's talking about." But there are lots of people who are trying to predict which way the market is going to go. And some of them are going to get it right by chance. And people assume it's because they know what they're what they're doing, and in fact they're just the lucky ones.
19 July 2022
Nothing matches.
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