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Yu-Ming Liou

@yumingliou.bsky.social
1.3K followers 635 following 1.6K posts

Unfrozen caveman political economist. In my day, we didn't have fancy tools like causal identification, but we knew how to ask: “cui bono?" Former political scientist. Now I do research for an internet thing. The good one, though. 🇹🇼-🇺🇸 Washington, DC

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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 8h
The truck driver here really is the American median voter: willfully ignorant about the stakes of his political choices, probably pretty abstractly racist, but also recognizably human and horrified when Trump’s policies confront him personally. The mom is median MAGA, which is basically a demon.
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autumn coded @hoovybaby.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
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Jeff Fecke @jkfecke.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Never let anyone tell you that American voters are uniquely bad.
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
OTOH it’s very on-brand for non-college white dudes named Kyle to vote for Trump 3x, the last time while Trump spread bizarre racist lies about his neighbors (this is Springfield, OH). OTOH, it’s a fucking catastrophe for Republicans that non-college white dudes named Kyle are canvassing for Dems.
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
A take based on extremely perfunctory me-search: My bet is that the people working at Chinese AI companies: 1) do not believe LLMs are sentient 2) even if they do, they’re losing zero sleep over any ethical implications of this
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
We’re extremely lucky to have this guy in DC. Slinging takes at the same level as his tapas.
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Michael Caley @michaelcaley.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
this is by far the best "I quit my AI job over safety concerns" essay yet because it is the first one that is able to talk about safety concerns in practical terms and that understands "safety" as a topic with extensive literature in analogous fields www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
Two changes are urgently needed. First: AI companies need to rely more on the safety expertise that already exists in other fields. And second, before we create systems significantly more capable than the ones we have today, we need new science to ensure that more capable models (and their successors) will make safe choices when we aren’t looking.

Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster. Right now, AI companies don’t know how—but other people do. In a nuclear-power plant, the technical systems and rules people follow are set up so that, if equipment breaks or someone pushes the wrong button, we still won’t risk a meltdown. OpenAI and other labs are growing and deploying frontier AI with far less redundancy and rigor than this, even though the harm from an irreversible loss of control would be much greater than the harm from any single meltdown. Even short of a full loss of control, we could see autonomous swarms of AI agents that act without human permission. Imagine “rogue” agents that work like teams of hackers (for example, holding hospital computer systems for ransom) but never need to sleep.
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
I believe Zach Bryan means this in the good way because another less-sophisticated robot (music recommender system) told me I should
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worm @rfksbrainworm.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
If you ever wondered why visible light is those particular wavelengths, it's because life evolved to see in the narrow range where water is transparent
Diagram of absorption of emf by water. There's a gap right that dips in the 500 nm range
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Civic nationalism just fucking rips, man. It really raises the ceiling on what your society can be to a ridiculous extent. You just have to live up to it.
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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
The phrase “ethnic cleansing” appears in the first sentence of the Wikipedia definition.
Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing'"! via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry. [21[3) Originating in Europe, the concept has since spread to the United States and Canada, where it has gained increasing prominence, and is especially popular within the Identitarian movement. 41[5] Some proponents of remigration suggest excluding some persons with non-European background from such a mass deportation, based on a varyingly defined degree of assimilation into European culture. 6]
[7][8]
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Every single Democrat elected this November should be followed by a staffer whispering: “Remember, liberalism has a specific solution for those who want to return to the state of nature by attacking the liberal state itself.”
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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Writing something where I will be liberally citing @lilymasonphd.bsky.social's latest and realizing that I can't cite every single thing I would like to because then I'm just reprinting her work. So, I've gotta thread about it instead. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...
Screenshot of the article website. Title is: Polarization Is Not the Problem. Author is Lilliana Mason. Journal is the Journal of Democracy, Volume 37, Number 4, October 2026. From Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Rodger Sherman @rodger.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
A goose saying "what adversity?"
the same goose chasing a man yelling "what adversity was Deshaun Watson dealing with?"
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Based on this my suspicion is that they fed their conspiracy theory (about coordination with Fani Willis) to an LLM and asked it to look for evidence.
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🌅 Patricia Wallinga 🌇 @pwallinga.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
It's a John Henry story. These newfangled slop machines can churn out word salad faster than any man. But Donald Trump is no ordinary man. He's the king of garbled stream-of-consciousness misinformation. He'll race that machine for 32 days until his heart gives out, but in the end... he'll win.
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
What literally is the proposed causal mechanism here? Bowser admin can’t GTFO quickly enough.
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NDEddieMac @ndeddiemac.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
we sold coke together
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Waschesalon Grammy Campaign Manager @reginageorgebush.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
from AdImpact, a nice chart of how Republicans' reliance on super PACs to fund their TV ad campaigns is heavily blunting the impact of their massive spending advantage, because FCC rules actually *require* stations to price-gouge the shit out of super PACs
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
It seems to me that there's a ton of people out there who not only are dissatisfied with the market rate of return, they think they're entitled to above-market returns and are offended by being offered the market rate. (This is a post about dating app discourse).
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Look, Amy Chua just wants to have certainty about how much longer she has to lever her ambitious freakazoids into positions of prestige and influence. If we expand the court enough the positions might lose prestige and influence.
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Bikepedantic @pedantic.bike · 01/10/2026
brb, tattooing “we don’t need to study the study" on my lower back
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Suburban built environments are factories for shitty politics
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Ben K. @benjaminkabak.com · 30/09/2026
I feel dumb even just having to say this but the reason passports are mailed out in plain regular envelopes is that so that people do not attempt to steal easily recognizable passports in the mail. bsky.app/profile/carn...
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Jjinandtonic @jjinandtonic.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
You can sense the undertone throughout of “haha those fucking rubes got what they deserved” but the more interesting (and unexplored) idea hiding throughout is just how bad the information ecosystem is — almost all the people interviewed are drawing on the idea of criminal illegals!
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Neil Stenhouse @nstenhouse.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Eric Schmitt thinks the Wisconsin football mascot is Bucky Buckeye
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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
there's a thing in moderate democratic politics where it is considered fundamentally illegitimate to deliver results to your own voters; instead, you must propose a better way to implement your adversaries' entire ideological program
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 30/09/2026
Love this. Also, to go all neuroscience on this, the “what color is the dress“ thing was about learned color expectations due to lighting environments, and this is due to learned spatial configurations.
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Noah Berlatsky @nberlat.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
wrote about why dinging Doja Cat for being too elitist for country music is pretty fucked up. www.everythingishorrible.net/p/there-are-...
everythingishorrible.net
There Are A Lot of Reasons Not To Have Heard “Choosin’ Texas”
Country music’s racism is one.
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Live look at SCOTUS in January 2029.
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
@cleguardians.com completely SEC-free. I think former NE Ohio resident John Brown would approve.
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I’d restate the vibecession puzzle slightly: not just the gap btw macroeconomic conditions and perceptions of the economy, it’s a gap btw (sociotropic) perceptions of the economy and perceptions of one’s own economic conditions. Americans are much more sanguine about their personal conditions!
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Hannah Vardit @hannahvardit.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
i worry that men think being A Good Guy is dramatically and heroically intervening on behalf of an endangered woman and then being publicly rewarded on a grand scale when actually being A Good Guy is just usually saying, “hey man that’s not funny” or “wow that’s fucked up” and there is no reward
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Robert Farley @drfarls.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
"For 2000 years, the people of Europe have yearned to be governed by a Roman Emperor."
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Ok that’s cool. I’ve got an easy solution for you then where you don’t have to be subject to public markets.
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GOLIKEHELLMACHINE @golikehellmachine.com · 29/09/2026
this simply should not be legal
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Frontier research questions: because all research questions to one side are boring and settled and those to the other side are the indecipherable ramblings of barbarians.
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Sleestak @sleestak.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
and behold a pale horse. and the name that sat on him was death. and hell followed with him
cat on a statue
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
No longer young here, but I like country music! But not Nashville "modern country". That shit is reactionary for sure.
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Reconstructionist @unavaleable.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Every French presidential poll LADY HITLER - 35% JEAN D'AUSTÉRITÉ - 18% CHUD COMMUNISTE - 17%
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Is it a power switch?
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This article is premised on a bizarre (but familiar) right wing populist claim that mainstream white culture is at once: 1) the universal and default culture thus demanding your attention 2) unfairly maligned by tastemakers; Nashville country is just a smol bean it is you who are problematic
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the abbot of unreason (an archaeologist) @merovingians.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Beshear may be able to sustain a 2028 primary campaign that earns him a cabinet nod purely by being the only guy in the centrist lane not to cave here.
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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
basically anyone who makes a living doing statistics who doesn't know statistics is
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Joshua G. Schraiber @jgschraiber.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
So this is stupid in a very serious way, but I think there's a grain of truth here: we should make humanities students study some at least somewhat nontrivial math and modeling. I think that learning differential equations genuinely makes life better and more interesting and expands your mind
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The woke causal inference mob is trying to cancel me for my brave “actually big dumb OLS models with macro variables are pretty good” opinions. I’d like my vacation house now, please.
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The funniest bit of this is where he says “…my SAT scores would be as common as mud…” Bro. They are! Anybody who works in a professional setting or went to college knows this! Amazing that these guys are like “look at us super geniuses w 1600s” instead of “uh basically table stakes”
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I Scare You Like Sound Dog @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 27/09/2026
If you were in camp “focus on the important things” when they were restoring Confederate monuments and base names here but can recognize the danger there you may want to interrogate some things.
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I think the lesson for people everywhere is that it’s elite cordon sanitaire all the way down. The way you deal with the constituency for fascism is that you don’t let them vote for those preferences. When it’s off the menu, they’ll either stop voting or vote based on something else.
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Yu-Ming Liou @yumingliou.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Remind me of how Reform, AfD, One Nation and FN are polling again in 🇬🇧, 🇩🇪 , 🇦🇺, and 🇫🇷 ? And who the PMs of Italy and Japan are? This is not to exonerate the many Americans who embrace the far right, just to point out that fascism obviously appeals to a substantial body of voters everywhere.
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