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.

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  • 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)