Ayse Tezcan 🐬

My NYT oped: 1)What RFK doesn't know about Autism is everything 2)Vaccines didn't cause 60X increase in rates during last 30 yrs 3)DSM-IV did- thru looser definitions 4)Also pushed by internet/need for school services 5)Many harms from careless diagnosis nytimes.com/2025/06/23/opini…

With a certain amount of trepidation, I'm posting this open letter to @elonmusk, someone I have admired, but who, right now, is causing me concern. I know I'm not alone in thinking these thoughts. Please like or repost if you're willing... And Elon, if you're listening, please know this is offered in a constructive spirit. ----- Dear Elon, A thought hit me this morning. On top of all your achievements in technology and entrepreneurship, you have become this century's single most influential writer.  You have more than 200 million followers on a powerful platform that you yourself control. And the words that you write flow well beyond just those followers into almost every user of X and far beyond courtesy of extensive media coverage.   This makes Rupert Murdoch at his prime seem inconsequential. It must feel exhilarating. You made a huge gamble buying Twitter and it seems to have paid off spectacularly to the point that you can use it to massively impact the world, including changing governments.  You believe that X can largely replace most mainstream media. It is the new platform for citizen journalism, and you are citizen number 1.  You don’t need the hassle of editors and fact-checkers. Every single thing you post garners millions of likes and reposts. In a heartbeat you can change the global conversation.  No one in history has had this much power. So there’s a lot at stake here, and, as it happens, journalism is something I care deeply about. I began my career as a journalist because I believed that good journalism was essential for the healthy functioning of democracy. Today I am worried — quite deeply worried, actually — that in your triumphant seizing of the global conversation, some of the core tenets of journalism are being forgotten. Without them, I think your efforts to make X the respected home of citizen journalism will fail. There are numerous journalistic principles that matter — Grok can summarize them quite nicely. But there’s one in particular that’s been troubling me. It’s the fairness doctrine. The one that says that before you publish savagely critical claims about an individual, or an institution, you reach out to them for their side of the story. After all, just possibly, you may have missed a key fact or two that would change how people assess what has happened. Just possibly your sources were motivated to cause damage to that individual. Just possibly there’s an alternative explanation of what happened. So, for example, when you tell hundreds of millions of people that someone should be hanged or jailed for outrageous crimes against humanity, just possibly you should first sound out what those who know those people really well would say about them. Some of your recent posts could literally get someone killed. Do you really want to risk that? How is it possible that you can do this at the very same time that you’re calling on people to make X more positive, more beautiful?  You say you want to maximize un-regretted user-seconds on X.  By far the simplest way you could do this, Elon, is simply to thoughtfully edit what you yourself post. I get that from your eyes the issues you are championing are unbelievably important and worthy of extreme efforts. But the way you are presenting them is not citizen journalism. It's playground bullying. It’s crass and it’s cruel, and it’s therefore not nearly as effective as it could be.  You’re hearing the cheers of your most loyal followers, but missing the fact you’re making yourself a laughing stock among many who you really want on your side. Long-term that’s going to damage X, your other businesses, and indeed your long-term dreams for humanity.  No one wants to follow a playground bully to Mars. I miss the old Elon. You can be funny, interesting, insightful and inspiring. You've fought incredibly hard for what you've built. And you may feel you're entitled to do whatever the hell you want with it. But I also know that you understand the danger of holding too tightly to the ring of power, how it can distort someone's judgement and turn them ugly. I’m hoping you can loosen that ring just a little. For the love of humanity that you profess, I really urge you to embrace the fairness doctrine and showcase a better face of X. Thanks for listening. Chris

This is a thread about remaking the tech sector. Silicon Valley still claims the mantle of “disruption”, as if it is made up of competitive small companies rushing to innovate in order to edge into established industries. The truth is that Silicon Valley is now home to the largest corporations humanity has ever seen. At the beginning of the 20thcentury, when US society and lawmakers were alarmed about the growing power of “trusts” (large corporations), the two leading companies, Standard Oil and US Steel, had market capitalizations of around $1 billion, which in today’s currency would be worth about $32 billion. In comparison, Alphabet/Google’s and Amazon’s market valuations are hovering around $2.3 trillion, Apple’s is above $3.6 trillion, and Microsoft’s is close to $3 trillion. Today’s tech giants also have revenues that are more than 100 times those of early 20th century trusts, including Standard Oil and US Steel. Tech boosters might argue that this is because of the innovativeness of these companies or an inevitable consequence of network economies, generating winner-take-all dynamics for companies that acquire the biggest clientele or the largest amount of data about users. The truth is more nuanced. Tech companies have been innovative. Nevertheless, there is recent evidence suggesting that they have done so by employing a large fraction of the supply of innovators and scientists, and once an innovator starts working for these large corporations, they are less innovative than they used to be in smaller companies: ufukakcigit.com/s/Akcigit_Go… Worse, tech giants have also grown their size partly by aggressively acquiring rivals: ftc.gov/system/files/documen… Numerous acquisitions, like Facebook’s purchase of Instagram, did not just help tech giants grow rapidly. They may have also extinguished competition: (see sciencedirect.com/science/ar… or insights.som.yale.edu/insigh… also papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.… for the contrary view). My overall assessment from this evidence is that these companies have grown so much at least partly because of a failure of antitrust in the United States and Europe. A tradition dating back to US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis recognizes that a failure of antitrust will not just mean higher prices for consumers and bigger distortions. It would also pose a challenge to democracy, as these companies wield oversized political and social power. This is what we have to come to accept as normal today, with the tech sector becoming the second-largest vendor on lobbying in the United States (after pharma) and the values and viewpoints of Silicon Valley dominating every part of our social lives, including unfortunately journalism. (The data on lobbying expenditures come from Open Secrets, opensecrets.org/federal-lobb…). Two key antitrust cases against Google’s monopoly in advertising on the two sides of the Atlantic could reshape the web and in the process kickstart a turnaround in antitrust philosophy and practice. (See npr.org/2024/10/09/nx-s1-514… ec.europa.eu/commission/pres…). It is about time. The background to the story is very well known. Digital ads dominate the web, and Google/Alphabet dominates digital ads (with Meta/Facebook being a distant second). The question is whether this state of affairs reflects Google’s amazing innovativeness in AdTech (the marketplace for digital advertising) or whether it also reflects the company’s monopolistic abuses. Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic are converging to the latter interpretation and are accusing Google of abusing its market power to generate monopoly profits and harming consumers, publishers and competition as a result. US judge Amit P. Mehta ruledin August that Google had illegally monopolized the search engine market, among other things, by paying billions to be the default search engine on various platforms. After years of tech giants consolidating their hold over key markets, this could be a first step towards limiting this growth or even a prelude to a series of breakups. True, the incoming Trump administration has promised to be much more friendly to various parts of the tech eco-system, and especially to artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto currency. Nevertheless, there is no love lost for Big Tech among some Trumpers. VP-in-waiting JD Vance, for example, recently praisedthe current head of the FTC, Lina Kahn, who is partly responsible for reenergizing anti-trust in the United States: fortune.com/2024/08/11/jd-va… Next will be Europe’s turn. EU moved early against Big Tech, fining them for competition breaches and passing the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. Yet the tech sector is as consolidated as ever and European consumers are still dependent on these mega platforms. EU could take a more decisive step towards ending the dominance of these tech companies with the Google AdTech case. The root problem is Google’s overwhelming dominance of the entire AdTech ecosystem, which enables the company to act simultaneously as buyer, seller, and market-maker in an industry worth over $800 billion today and projected to grow to $2.5 trillion in the next several years: fortunebusinessinsights.com/… Google’s control over the entire market leaves advertisers and publishers with little choice but to accept its terms. This dynamic has been ruinous for many industries, including journalism. Independent publishers are a cornerstone of any democratic marketplace but can no longer survive squeezed by Google. In 2023, Google accrued 237 billion dollars from its AdTech monopoly, while the revenues of independent publishers and newspapers have declined. As a result, we have a new phenomenon: news deserts, which are areas where communities lack access to credible local news sources, once again damaging democracy and civic citizenship: cmpf.eui.eu/news-deserts-on-… Big Tech defenders have historically claimed that breaking up these companies will harm consumers, slow innovation, and lead to economic stagnation. But monopolies are typically bad for innovation. If the AT&T monopoly wasn’t broken up in 1982, the digital and then the subsequent Internet revolutions may not have taken place. Why should the dominance of today’s Big Tech be any different? Breaking up tech giants wouldn’t by itself be sufficient for a competitive marketplace in new technologies. In the US, bipartisan draft legislation proposes structural firewalls to prevent companies from operating on both sides of the AdTech market. Portions of the Digital Markets Act mandates ad transparency. If adopted on both sides of the Atlantic, these measures could help but are not sufficient. I have argued repeatedly that the key challenge for today is to innovate in new technologies that provide better information and services to consumers and create new tasks and productivity-enhancing for workers: amazon.com/Power-Progress-Th… Yet, such technologies are unlikely to be forthcoming rapidly when digital ads are the only game in town and most of the revenues online are from digital advertisements. This isn’t just because of the social negatives of massive data collection and the attention economy undergirding huge digital ad revenues, which are now well understood. It is also because the current structure is anti-competitive. New companies experimenting with new technologies and business models are at a disadvantage relative to big platforms when they can only raise revenues by monetizing data via digital ads, because they have less data than established incumbents. Worse, as unknown quantities, they cannot develop new business models based on subscription fees or sales of new services when leading platforms are making money using digital ads. One way of breaking this cycle is to impose a sizable digital ad tax in order to increase competition in the online economy, as Simon Johnson and I have argued. We proposed a tax of 50% for all ad revenues above $500 million a year, which EU can unilaterally impose, changing the whole digital game at one fell swoop: shapingwork.mit.edu/research… Other reforms are also necessary. The future of the Internet and AI is entangled with creating a fair data economy, as a new report under the auspices of the Project Liberty Institute argues (to which I also contributed): projectliberty.io/news/proje… To make such an aspiration a reality, we need new laws that simultaneously protect the privacy of individuals and lay the foundations for more inclusive markets, in which individuals and data collectives (or data unions) can control data, so that large platforms and AI companies cannot expropriate people’s information and the fruits of their labor. I believe that this shouldn’t be bad for tech companies. The right architecture of data markets would ultimately help the tech sector by encouraging people to invest in and produce higher-quality data, which are a key input for more useful AI tools and more valuable online services. But there would be a lot of opposition from many tech companies today against any attempt to protect people’s data and introduce property rights over data. Here, too, Europe can play the leading role, not only disrupting the current oligopoly in the tech sector but also taking steps towards a new, more productive, more competitive and fairer data economy.

Happy New Year! Some MATH for 2025: 1. 2025 itself is a PERFECT square: 45² = 2025 2. It is a product of two squares, namely: 9² × 5² = 2025 3. It is the sum of THREE squares, namely: 40² + 20² + 5² = 2025 4. The last perfect square? 1936 44² = Year 1936 5. It is the sum of the cubes of all the digits from 1 to 9: 1³ + 2³ + 3³ + 4³ + 5³ + 6³ + 7³ + 8³ + 9³ = 2025 6. It is also the squared sum of all the numbers from 1 to 9: (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9)²=2025 The year 2025 is MATHEMATICALLY remarkable. Let's hope it is also remarkable on the human level! Health, happiness, prosperity and peace for all! 😀🎉

I was born and raised on a farm in a small town in Ohio. I've worked to get H-1B visas and green cards for my team members my entire career. There are three simple economic arguments for increasing legal immigration by highly educated workers:

Celebrating mindless striving culture reeks of Asian chauvinism and begs the question of why the most high impact individuals - from technologists to artists - do not have cookie cutter childhoods that were mainly spent being groomed for the Ivy League. Contrary to what Vivek says, the jock or cheerleader being fêted in American high schools isn’t a sign of mediocrity; it’s actually the essence of what makes America so exceptional. While the school valedictorian is an objective choice based on academic excellence, the high status archetypes that Vivek belittles, have actually achieved prominence and popularity in *ways that cannot be taught* Their future success is based on something truly transformational that cannot be gleaned from textbooks: charisma, talent (non-academic), boldness, EQ, etc. There’s a concept in vector mathematics called path dependency. In “striving cultures” that are synonymous with the “immigrant mentality,” success is not only very narrowly defined but also extremely path dependent. Your outcomes depend heavily on the previous step, and the previous step depends heavily on the previous one, and so on so forth. At any point in the path, degrees of freedom are very low. In America, what you have is path independence, and in my opinion, it is one of the most underrated reasons that makes America so great. It’s a society characterized by a normal distribution with very wide standard deviation - a lot of singular Great Men of History types at the high end of the tail, and lots of dumbfucks at the bottom tail. Compare this to striving cultures that produce normal distractions with very low variance, tightly clustered around the mean. That said, @VivekGRamaswamy is right that you can tell a lot about a society about who they idolize and who they shame. America - and the West - does get this wrong when moral degenerates whose only claim to fame is something like leaking a sex tape, are not only NOT marginalized and shamed, but actually adored by millions and rewarded financially and socially.