Economics, philosophy, AI, EA, & nascent food critic. Platonist, utilitarian, & structuralist: reviving neoplasticism one morphism at a time.
United Kingdom
Joined August 2025
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Ciaran Marshall retweeted
Large numbers of healthy people are abusing the welfare system by claiming they or their children have autism and/or ADHD. The cost of this shameless behaviour is unsustainable.
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
Despite staggering advances in basic science, drug development research is only getting slower. The main culprit? Increasing clinical trial timelines. The median clinical development pathway has increased from 8.4 years to 9.3 years and pipeline creation has slowed 32% even as R&D spend has gone up.
This is the point I keep making about the main bottleneck to drug discovery and why AI on its own won't be enough. These timelines aren't going anywhere (ofc AI can be used creatively to ease such bottlenecks -- eg via better endpoints that allow smaller cohorts for trials, followed up for shorter periods of time).
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
This is big.
The proof of the classification of finite simple groups is so complicated, and spread across so many papers by so many mathematicians, that when I was a PhD student at Caltech twenty years ago, I remember hearing that there were only six people in the world who even roughly understood the whole thing. One of them was Michael Aschbacher, a professor there.
It is wonderful, and a real relief, to see the whole thing formalized.
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
I genuinely think that mathematical superintelligence might just completely demolish complexity theory.
AI will solve NP complete problems with an algorithm that runs in time
nˡᵒᵍ ˡᵒᵍ ˡᵒᵍ⁽ⁿ⁾
... which is technically slower than any polynomial.
basically it could be that human complexity theory is mostly just an artefact of certain proofs and algos being hard for humans to find, and when you add that stuff in, it all just becomes one giant mess and none of the clean mental separations we have between slow and fast algorithms in practice have any relationship to asymptomatics.
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
Interestingly, Claude has also refuted the exponential-time hypothesis.
hexagonmath.org/2610.00577v1
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
I think I'm realizing that my issue with baby Rudin's expositional strategy: a lot of the topology nonsense in it is not really useful for multivariate calculus, but is useful for probability theory/functional analysis later where you have weirder notions of distance
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
Workers in six occupations do 79 tasks the government's official occupational taxonomy has yet to add. That work is worth about $140B a year in wages.
That taxonomy is called O*NET, the U.S. Department of Labor's database of the tasks each occupation involves. Workers use it to help with job transitions, and economists use it to estimate which jobs AI will change. If the lists are incomplete, so are the estimates.
Today we're releasing TaskNet, an open-source task catalog built on O*NET and updated for how AI is changing work.
Built with researchers from Stanford, the O*NET Resource Center, and NBER. Thank you to @robinsonaisaac @erikbryn @diyi_yang @jennjwang @andreas_h0wpt @Digeconlab @stanfordnlp @stanfordhai @stanfordAIlab for contributing to this work.
Read the blog: mercor.com/blog/introducing-…
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
Important, but not unexpected, finding that experts working with AI agents are swayed by the positions of the AI, even if they think they are working independently.
If your independent judgement matters on a task, you need to be deliberate about when in the process to use AI.
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
Can AI conduct qualitative interviews with thousands of people? In a new REStud paper, Friedrich Geiecke and @XJaravel develop an open-source approach that combines the depth of qualitative interviews with the scale of surveys.
1/6
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
+100! Also if you're experienced in running multi-agent simulations, familiar with reward hacking/safety literature, and econ-minded - please comment below so I can keep you mind for some future work I'm exploring. 🃏
i feel so excited for econ majors these days — there’s so much alpha in knowing the discipline well and applying it to ai alignment
seems important to study
- game theory
- collective action problems
- invisible incentives
to better understand
- swarm behavior
- revealed preferences
- how the invisible hand guides agent behavior more than individual alignment
what are ppl reading in the overlap of these two domains?
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
Only 2.5 years ago, AI labs would highlight their frontier LLM performance on grade school math benchmarks (GSM8K). I can't wait to see where we'll be in another 2.5 years.
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
A pessimistic hypothesis for complexity theory: every simple and beautiful algorithm can be made log(n)^epsilon faster by making it incredibly ugly
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (aka The Supreme Council of Math) is calling for the immediate release of Yang–Mills AI output from yesterdays announcement.
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
It is such a funny twist of fate that OpenAI, led by an ex-YC product guy, is putting out groundbreaking math/physics/cs research while Anthropic, led by a physics PhD, is primary putting out a coding product.
Announcing three major scientific discoveries, one each in mathematics (harmonic analysis), computer science (complexity theory), and physics (quantum field theory).
AI starting to help us improve our understanding of the universe! openai.com/index/building-sc…
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
openai's internal model still has not produced a single result in gender studies
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
"This is at least ten times, perhaps 100 times as momentous as the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem,” said Abhishek Saha, professor of mathematics at Queen Mary University of London. Joshua Gans of the University of Toronto went further: “This is probably the biggest day of scientific advancement in history"
spectator.com/article/the-fi…
Ciaran Marshall retweeted
New paper:
Cities in South Asia are hotbeds of upward mobility for everyone, but especially for women.
This is the urban-minus-rural difference in the adult education rank of a child growing up in a bottom-half household. 🧵 1/
