Interessant3 #148 | 🤖 Strategic LLMs, 💰 Racial Diversity Economics, 🍯 Honey Ethics
Three Interesting Things for W/C 2025-07-06
1. Kenneth Payne & Baptiste Alloui-Cros: “Strategic Intelligence in Large Language Models: Evidence from Evolutionary Game Theory”
🤖 Frontier models faced classic Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma tournaments with randomised horizons, letting cooperation or betrayal evolve naturally.
🎯 GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Ultra and Claude 3 Opus all survived and often beat Tit-for-Tat, hinting at emergent goal-seeking savvy beyond memorised rules.
🖐️ Gemini exploited freely, GPT stayed friendly even when risky and Claude forgave quickly, showing corporate fine-tuning prints a strategic fingerprint.
📑 Thirty-two thousand internal rationales reveal time-horizon and opponent modelling drive their choices, offering a rare window on “machine psychology”.
🔄 The work bridges game theory and alignment auditing, stressing that LLM text traces are behavioural gold.
🔗 Strategic Intelligence in Large Language Models (arXiv)
2.
: “The Price of Racial Diversity”💸 Uses IPUMS tax data and crime-weighted spending to claim Hispanic immigration adds half-a-trillion dollars to the annual deficit while Asian surpluses vanish once indirect costs are folded in.
📉 High-quality wage studies and monopsony models suggest immigrant inflows push natives into lower-productivity regions and mute pay growth.
💡 Innovation gap highlighted: in analyses of patents and H-1B recipients non-Europeans lag on per-capita breakthrough output when nativity is controlled.
🎓 Asian academic “striving” is cast as a signalling arms race that burns national time and tuition for marginal credential gain.
🧭 Even if you question inputs, the piece is a great deep dive into the thornier topics in migration debates.
🔗 The Price of Racial Diversity (Heretical Insights)
3.
: “Don’t Eat Honey”I strongly disagree with this piece, but as J.S. Mill wrote: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”. If it were true, it would essentially conclude that a Vegan diet is a veritable holocaust, since so many suffering bees are required to pollinate plants that produce our fruit and vegetables.
🐝 Claims a kilogram of honey triggers two-hundred-thousand bee-days of bleak husbandry, dwarfing chicken or beef suffering on a utilitarian ledger.
🧮 Combines 30 percent hive winter die-off, parasite load and forced queen culling with estimates that bees feel 7-15 percent of human-level pain.
🚩 Equates insect-day suffering straight to vertebrate metrics and downplays pollination benefits and husbandry variation, so numbers likely overstate harm.
🧪 Sparks overdue debate on insect ethics and cross-species discount rates, even if its arithmetic leaps are shaky.
🤔 Net takeaway for omnivores and vegans alike is a prompt to interrogate hidden welfare costs, not a blanket honey ban.
🔗 Don’t Eat Honey (Bentham’s Newsletter)
Join us next week for three more intriguing topics that challenge the norm and expand your horizons! ✌️
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