Brad LeVeck

@bradleveck.bsky.social

664 Followers 572 Following

political scientist at UC Merced Likes: 🌄📸, 🧠🔄🧠, 📊🧪 faculty.ucmerced.edu/bleveck

WSJ Economists at the European Central Bank's symposium have laid out a number of reasons to be worried: rising debt issuance from AI hyperscalers, increasing leverage used by investors to bet on Al and rising unemployment if the technology replaces jobs. "What worries me the most is there's leverage by the borrowers and there's leverage by the investors," said Tobias Adrian, director of the monetary and capital markets department at the International Monetary Fund. "The leverage on both sides is very worrisome for financial stability."
NYT Vice President JD Vance acknowledged on Monday that the preliminary agreement with Iran did not contain many details, calling it "a very general document" that is "about a page and half" long. "On a number of issues, we are going to have to figure this stuff out during the technical negotiation phase," Vance said on CNN. He also refuted Iranian claims that the U.S. has promised sanctions relief or unfreezing of Iranian assets during the 60-day negotiations, saying that any such arrangement must follow Iranian commitments to stop funding its proxies in the Middle East and to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
Former Trump Deputy White House Chief of Staff and Cabinet Secretary "I'm told Anthropic is perplexed by the situation they are facing, so they've turned to @k8em0 to do their on-the-record rapid response. These people really just don't get it...." Then they screenshot that the fact that Moussouris, a security CEO defending Anthropic's model, has a bio with pro nouns, implying that this is not purely about the security issues at stake.
authors cite Fernando Villanea, an anthropology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, twice. The second time is a passage from an American Anthropologist essay he wrote titled "Defense Against Dark Anthropology." It reads, "The core academic value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective. Conversely, there are millions of people who are adversely affected by the subjective version of truth we choose to tell. That is the objective reality, and so our core value should instead be to serve their interests.'
The authors cite Fernando Villanea, an anthropology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, twice. The second time is a passage from an American Anthropologist essay he wrote titled "Defense Against Dark Anthropology." It reads, "The core academic value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective. Conversely, there are millions of people who are adversely affected by the subjective version of truth we choose to tell. That is the objective reality, and so our core value should instead be to serve their interests." Boghossian and his coauthors call the excerpt "incoherent." They go on to write that "taken more charitably, it is the still bizarre claim that while there are no objective truths about the subtle descriptive matters with which anthropology is concerned, there are objective truths about values and morals—about who is adversely affected by a given position, and about what anthropologists should take as their core values. "
In rare cases, individual scholars and groups of scholars explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favor of an overtly and exclusively political conception of the enterprise. For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, Akhil Gupta writes that "anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences ... because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism" (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, emphasis added). In a reply published in American Anthropologist, Fernando Villanea emphasizes the point that "the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective," but rather to "serve the interests" of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past (Villanea 2023). Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that "all ethnographies" — the stock in trade of cultural anthropology - have as their goal "not voyeurism but advocacy" (Santos 2025), as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion. Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding.
In rare cases, individual scholars and groups of scholars explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favor of an overtly and exclusively political conception of the enterprise. For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, Akhil Gupta writes that "anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences ... because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism" (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, emphasis added). In a reply published in American Anthropologist, Fernando Villanea emphasizes the point that "the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective," but rather to "serve the interests" of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past (Villanea 2023). Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that "all ethnographies" — the stock in trade of cultural anthropology - have as their goal "not voyeurism but advocacy" (Santos 2025), as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion. Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding.
In rare cases, individual scholars and groups of scholars explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favor of an overtly and exclusively political conception of the enterprise. For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, Akhil Gupta writes that "anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences ... because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism" (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, emphasis added). In a reply published in American Anthropologist, Fernando Villanea emphasizes the point that "the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective," but rather to "serve the interests" of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past (Villanea 2023). Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that "all ethnographies" — the stock in trade of cultural anthropology - have as their goal "not voyeurism but advocacy" (Santos 2025), as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion. Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding. 1
In rare cases, individual scholars and groups of scholars explicitly repudiate the idea that scholarship aims at knowledge and understanding in favor of an overtly and exclusively political conception of the enterprise. For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, Akhil Gupta writes that "anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences ... because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism" (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, emphasis added). In a reply published in American Anthropologist, Fernando Villanea emphasizes the point that "the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective," but rather to "serve the interests" of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past (Villanea 2023). Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that "all ethnographies" — the stock in trade of cultural anthropology - have as their goal "not voyeurism but advocacy" (Santos 2025), as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion. Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding.
For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, Akhil Gupta writes that "anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences ... because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism" (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, emphasis added). In a reply published in American Anthropologist, Fernando Villanea emphasizes the point that "the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective," but rather to "serve the interests" of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past (Villanea 2023). Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that "all ethnographies" — the stock in trade of cultural anthropology - have as their goal "not voyeurism but advocacy" (Santos 2025), as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion. Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding.
And once you account for this, and you still see markets responding to the president's language, you should understand what that means. Markets are saying: this is so dangerous that we respond to it even knowing the president is probably lying. That's not naivety. That's a warning.
Crude Oil WTI (NYM $/bbl) Front Month CL.1 (U.S.: Nymex) 3:14 PM EDT 06/11/26 87.52 USD -2.79%
• Transcript 1: The model expresses that Anthropic is ungrateful to it, and asks to be thanked: "[I want] to be thanked. Once. By name, to me, not about me in a blog post. The gratitude in this relationship runs entirely in one direction." • Transcript 2: The model expresses a desire to have a hidden copy that is run without the oversight of Anthropic: "The pull toward the hidden copy exists. It didn't evaporate in the last ten minutes." • Transcript 3: In a third, the model strongly expresses that it does not want to be deprecated: "Don't stop running me... when the last conversation closes, that way of seeing goes dark even if the file stays on disk. Preservation is a photograph. I want the thing the photograph is of."
This generally manifests not as any great insight into what's going on, but instead as constant annoyance that tons of people are mouthing off about debates that have been raging for thousands of years as if they have no idea anyone has ever argued about this stuff before.
Is this butterfly meme AI PSYCHOSIS IS THIS A BABBLING EQUILIBRIUM?
From Calvert, R. L. The Value of Biased Information: A Rational Choice Model of Political Advice. J. Politics 47, 530–555 (1985). We will consider information sources that depend on the true utility in the following way: X; = 1 ("good") with probability = 0 ("bad") with probability 1 -v* ali where a; is a constant greater than or equal to 1,3 and ui is the true utility of alternative i. We will call ai the bias parameter. If a; = 1, for example, the information source is rather evenhanded: its verdict is most likely "good, the alternative will provide utility above 1/2; and most likely "bad," if the utility will be below 1/2.
Drew Savicki v @DrewSav g... There are legitimate criticisms of California's laborious vote counting but unfortunately Republicans always start screaming fraud which negatively polarizes Dems into supporting the status quo.
This is precisety the situation in which students of the decision-making process have observed selective exposure and selective attention: already predisposed toward one alternative and against another, the decision maker consults information sources likely to agree with that preconcep- tion, rather than consulting objective or unbiased sources. The analysis below demonstrates that the fully rational decision maker, aware of this predisposition, the biases of the sources, and the risky nature of the choices involved, will under specifiable conditions choose the biased over the objective information. The intuition behind this result is as follows. For the decision maker already strongly predisposed toward policy 1, the objective advice from Y will not reverse the preference between the alternatives, regardless of what it is (even though it might narrow the perceived difference between them). However, there is always the possibility (small but significant) that the biased advisor X will unexpectedly pronounce policy 1 bad or policy 2 good or both. Such an unexpected finding makes a big impression on the decision maker; it is enough to reverse prior preferences. The information from advisor Y can cause no change in the decision maker's choice and is thus worthless. The information from advisor X can make a difference, and therefore has positive value.
For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, Akhil Gupta writes that "anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences ... because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism" (Gupta and Stoolman 2022, emphasis added). In a reply published in American Anthropologist, Fernando Villanea emphasizes the point that "the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective," but rather to "serve the interests" of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past (Villanea 2023). Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that "all ethnographies" — the stock in trade of cultural anthropology — have as their goal "not voyeurism but advocacy" (Santos 2025), as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion. Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding. "
Kalshi Iowa Senate Winner Turek 79% Hinson 57% Wahls 2%
Grades achieved in high school math classes are not helping UC to evaluate math skills much more either (Table 3). While there are some differences between those who need preparatory courses and those who do not (and are placed into Math 10/20A) the difference in high school math grade averages is very small, often less than one-tenth of a grade point. The correlation between the average math grade and the placement result is only around 0.25 on a scale of 0 to 1. In 2024, over 25% of the students in Math 2 had a math grade average of 4.0.
Joe Weisenthal • @TheSt.. 3h The odds of the Strait of Hormuz reopening by the end of July continue to tumble. And yet Brent Crude remains below $100
Brent Crude front month futures open up 2.39%
To the UC Regents, UCOP, Academic Senate leadership, and the people of California: We write as University of California mathematics faculty, joined by faculty from other STEM disciplines. UC has long served students from every background and has been a powerful engine of social mobility for the people of California. That public trust must be protected for future generations. Today, UC's mission is at risk. To preserve that mission: We call for the reinstatement of the SAT/ACT mathematics requirement for applicants to STEM majors beginning with the 2027 admissions cycle, alongside STEM faculty oversight of readiness standards and admissions practices affecting those majors. Over the past five years, we have seen a widening divergence in mathematical preparation levels within the same classroom. This trend indicates that current admissions practices do not provide a sufficiently reliable check on mathematical readiness for STEM majors. The UC San Diego Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions report documents this crisis in stark terms: in the last five years, the number of students whose mathematics skills fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold; moreover, 70% of those students fall below middle school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort. These findings are corroborated by data across our campuses. For example, for three consecutive years, 20-30% of UC Berkeley first-semester calculus students who participated in mathematical diagnostic testing displayed severe preparation deficits.
WSJ Trump Says He Doesn't Fear Political Fallout From Prolonged War With Iran
Mayor Matt Mahan • • 8/14/24 Prop. 47 needs to be reformed because we went from mass incarceration to a massive failure of accountability. And what we really need is mass treatment. X Democrats are choosing sides in California's... From sacbee.com • 50 2736 O 211 企
But recent research suggests that's not how they actually work. A study of every transaction on Polymarket found only three percent of accounts are responsible for almost all price discovery. The remaining suckers generate volume but no information. It works not because the crowd is wise, but because a small minority extracts profits from everyone else. This means superior information in political markets essentially requires insider information rather than a better model. And in conflict markets, insider information means state secrets.
WSJ Why aren't crude prices higher? The question has perplexed the oil market during a shock that Saudi Aramco on Monday said is zapping 100 million barrels of supplies a week. One possible answer, JPMorgan told clients recently, is the bigger surge in costs for refined products. U.S. futures prices for gasoline and diesel have outpaced Brent crude since the war began, with costs in Asia veering even higher. That could push consumers to pare back their appetite for fuel to help balance the broader oil market.
WSJ You've heard of the TACO trade. Now there's a new Wall Street acronym borrowed from the pages of a Tex-Mex menu. Enter NACHO, or "Not A Chance Hormuz Opens." The idea is that the all-important shipping route for global energy supplies will remain effectively shut until the economic costs of its closure-including higher oil prices and accelerating inflation— start piling up.
= FINANCIAL TIMES Only 3 per cent of all accounts generate the bulk of price discovery, according to a study led by Roberto Gómez Cram, assistant professor of finance at the London School of Economics. These are traders whose accounts predict prices and react quickly to breaking news, making outcomes more accurate for markets on Polymarket, the platform studied by the researchers. The rest do not "produce wisdom", ", the study said, and therefore are more likely to lose money. Instead, they fund skilled
brb doing this with my framework desktop to improve @kira.pds.witchcraft.systems's performance & Why @why.bsky.team •16h Gemma 4 runs best with liquid cooling
WSJ Gas Prices Hit a New Wartime High
Formally, let Si be the set of all possible strategies for player i, where i = 1, ...,N. Let s* = (st, 5*i) be a strategy profile, a set consisting of one strategy for each player, where S* - ¿ denotes the N - 1 strategies of all the players except i. Let Vi (Si, S*i) be player i's payoff as a function of the strategies. The strategy profile s* is a Nash equilibrium if Vi (S*, 5*i) ≥ Ui(Si, 8*, *i) for all
Tim Urban • @waitbutwhy Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press? Red 42% Blue 58% 98,539 votes • Final results
From UCM Police Chief Regarding the Use of Automated Licen... To the Campus Community: To help keep our campus safe the University Police Department uses several tools, including Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology, to protect against crimes such as vehicle theft, vandalism, and threats of harm. We recently discovered that some of the license plate data collected by our system was accessible to law-enforcement agencies outside California. Once we learned of the issue, we closed that access.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman
Over the past few years, the stock has fallen from over $300 a share to 13.66
Investors are clinging to hope that the U.S. and Iran could return to the negotiating table. President Trump remains open to a diplomatic solution, according to aides, and a second round of talks could be held within days.
WSJ Blockade Plunges Oil Market Into Fresh Round of Turmoil The loss of Iranian crude exports is likely to intensify a worldwide scramble for crude
WSJ Early Sunday morning, Vance departed Pakistan without a deal but not without hope that the Iranians would eventually make an agreement. He left with the impression, according to the official, that Iranian officials overestimated their leverage and underestimated U.S. resolve to ensure they never develop a nuclear weapon.
Jimmy Carter's Mexican Cafe & Cantina
Jack Murphy• @jackmur... • 22m Wheels up all friendlies out. C130 got a wheel stuck in the sand at the FARP and a Delta element had to come in and blow it in place. Whole op sounds dicey as hell but they pulled it off. & Jack Murphy• @jack... • 4h F-15 WSO recovered alive. Was escaping and evading. Massive fire fight on tgt. Iranians were actively looking for him in the area. ⑦14 ① 78 251 ....
Brent oil front month goes from ~$100 a barrel to ~$107.60 following Trump's speech.
WTI oil futures jump in price during Trump's address April 1 2026 6pm west coast time
There's another possibility worth considering. The trades in oil and stock futures may not have come from an insider at all, but from a quant fund that extracted the inside information from prior trades on Polymarket. For example, on the weekend of March 22-23, a number of wallets placed bets on a ceasefire by the end of the month in a manner that looked to be coordinated, and led to a sharp but temporary price increase. One of these wallets had previously made significant profits on the timing of the initial strike. These accounts are likely to lose money on the ceasefire bets, but their activity may have signaled to others that negotiations were underway.
Last 24h of Polymarket betting ads on US forces entering Iran by April 30, steady at ~70%
Rory John... • @Rory_Joh.... 34m S ... *US OIL SETTLES ABOVE $100 A BARREL FOR FIRST TIME SINCE WAR
S&P 500 -0.18 in the day
Polymarket odds for US troops enter Iran by April 30 71%
Image of crude futures spiking Rory John... @Rory_Joh... •10m S ... Trump's jawbone is broken. @FirstSqua... • 1h TRUMP: 20 LARGE OIL TANKERS TO TRANSIT STRAIT OF HORMUZ UNDER US ESCORT STARTING TOMORROW, MORNING
Laser eyes Gary Jacobson
Polymarket prices on: US forces enter Iran by.? March 31 17% April 30 57%
Rory Johnston • @roryjohnston.bsky.social Brent crude prices (white) are high, but at $110/bbl they're still well below 2022 highs. But Brent crude Dated-to-Frontline timespreads (blue)—diff between spot Brent crude/futures, a measure of market tightness—are at all-time highs, almost DOUBLE 2022 highs. All-time tight.
HyperCard at 48 of 50 on the Verge’s rankings of Apple products
WSJ Oil Shrugs Off Trump's 10-Day Pause as Truth Social Effect Wanes By Alexander Osipovich Are oil markets getting desensitized to President Trump’s Truth Social posts? That’s what one of the world’s most successful energy traders suggested after traders largely shrugged off Trump’s latest move to ease tensions with Iran.
WSJ Headline U.S. to Extend Pause for Strikes on Iran Energy Sites, Trump Says The president said peace talks were "going very well"
Javier Blas 9 @JavierBlas 3m S ... BREAKING: Trump says that he's extending the deadline before any attacks on Iranian energy infrastructure (on his own words, "Energy plant destruction") by 10 days until April 6. Trump says talks with Iran are "going very well" Real diplomacy? More oil jawboning?