Why Execution Got Cheap and Intent Got Live
USAID Whistleblower Says It Was Even Worse Than People Knew
Political appointees wanted a quiet drawdown, the whistleblower says. DOGE wanted an execution.
Malicious Streetlight Effects Vs. "Directional Correctness" - A Semi-Non-Apology
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What Is Intent Engineering? The Discipline That Replaced Prompt Engineering
Intent engineering is how product teams turn judgment under evidence into specs precise enough for AI agents to execute — and verify. Here's the complete guide: what it is, why it matters, and how to practice it.
Revealed: Leaked Chats Expose the Daily Life of a Scam Compound’s Enslaved Workforce
A whistleblower trapped inside a “pig butchering” scam compound gave WIRED a vast trove of its internal materials—including 4,200 pages of messages that lay out its operations in unprecedented detail.
Integrative experiments identify how punishment affects welfare in public goods games
Despite decades of research, the conditions under which punishment promotes cooperation remain unclear. Through an integrative experiment varying 14 design parameters of public goods games across 360 experimental conditions (147,618 decisions from 7100 participants), we reveal substantial heterogeneity in punishment effectiveness: Its impact on welfare ranges from 43% improvement to 44% reduction depending on the game parameters. To characterize these patterns, we developed models that outperformed human forecasters in predicting punishment effectiveness in new experiments. Communication emerges as the most important factor, followed by contribution framing (opt out versus opt in), contribution type (variable versus all-or-nothing), game length, and outcome visibility, though these factors often interact. The results reframe the debate from whether punishment works to when it does, demonstrating how integrative experiments enable discovery of generalizable patterns in social phenomena. , Editor’s summary People face conflicts between maximizing personal gain versus supporting collective interests. If we cooperatively recycle or donate to charities, it benefits society, but it also costs us time and resources that could be selfishly preserved for ourselves. We impose penalties to deter those undesirable or selfish behaviors, but under what conditions do punishments or penalties effectively modify behavior to benefit group welfare? Alsobay et al . systematically and simultaneously varied 14 factors together instead of in isolation. Punishment was unequivocally most effective when paired with consistent communication, particularly over time. Another effective factor was “opting out” or withdrawing some, but not all, endowments already in the public fund. These methodological advances revealed when, rather than whether, punishment works. —Ekeoma Uzogara , INTRODUCTION Human societies face many situations where individual and collective interests conflict, often referred to as social dilemmas. Costly peer punishment has been studied for more than 25 years in public goods games (stylized behavioral experiments in which individuals decide how much to contribute to a shared pool that benefits everyone) as a mechanism to promote cooperation. Prior research has identified many contextual factors that moderate punishment’s effectiveness, including game length, communication, group size, punishment cost, and so on. However, the specific conditions under which punishment improves group welfare remain unclear. RATIONALE We argue that this lack of clarity derives from the dominant experimental paradigm, in which any given study manipulates only one or a few theoretically informed factors. Because such studies differ in many ways (different experimental procedures, populations), their results are often difficult to compare or integrate. Consequently, one can list many factors that have some effect, but cannot say how much each matters relative to the others, or how they work together, and as a result, cannot predict when punishment will help or harm welfare in new settings. To address this fundamental knowledge gap, we use an integrative experimental design and systematically vary 14 parameters across 360 conditions (147,618 decisions from 7100 participants) to elucidate when punishment improves versus undermines welfare in public goods games, which factors matter most, and how they interact. RESULTS The effect of punishment on welfare ranged from 43% improvement to 44% reduction depending on the specific combination of game parameters. To characterize this heterogeneity, we trained a model that outperformed all 553 human forecasters (laypeople and experts) in predicting whether punishment would help or harm welfare in new experiments. Communication emerged as roughly three times more important than any other factor, followed by contribution framing (opt in versus opt out), contribution type (variable versus all-or-nothing), game length, and peer outcome visibility (whether participants can see others’ earnings). These factors often interact. For example, longer games enhance punishment’s effectiveness only when communication is available, and contribution framing effects depend on both contribution type and outcome visibility. CONCLUSION Many phenomena in social science are shaped by many factors whose interactions are consequential, yet the dominant experimental paradigm often limits its inquiry to “does a given effect exist?” and examines hypothesized factors in isolation. As a result, research programs can accumulate many partial explanations without a clear picture of how they combine to determine outcomes across settings. Knowing that factors matter individually is fundamentally different from knowing how much each matters and how they interact. The integrative approach implemented here offers one way forward. It varies many factors simultaneously within a shared design space, evaluates models by their predictive accuracy on new experiments, and probes those models to constrain and develop theory. Our hope is that integrative experiment designs, combined with models that integrate prediction and explanation, represent a path toward more cumulative social science. Integrative experiment reveals when punishment helps versus harms. We systematically varied 14 design parameters across 360 experimental conditions. The effect of punishment on cooperation efficiency ranged from −44% to +43% depending on the specific game parameters. Communication emerged as three times more important than any other factor, followed by contribution framing, contribution type, and game length.
18 Lawyers Caught Using AI Explain Why They Did It
Lawyers blame IT, family emergencies, their own poor judgment, their assistants, illness, and more.
Product teams struggled to create intent. AI let them think they could skip it.
Teams struggled to produce intent. AI let them think they could skip it.
Small Probabilistic Discounts Stimulate Spending: Pain of Paying in Price Promotions
AbstractWe find that small probabilistic price promotions effectively stimulate demand, even more so than comparable fixed price promotions (e.g., “1% chance it’s free” vs. “1% off,” respectively), because they more effectively reduce the pain of paying. In three field experiments at a grocer, we exogenously and endogenously manipulated the salience of pain of paying via elicitation timing (e.g., at entrance or checkout) and payment method (i.e., cash/debit cards or credit cards). This modulated the attractiveness of probabilistic discounts and their ability to stimulate spending. Shoppers paying with cash or debit cards, for example, spent 54% more if they received a 1% probabilistic discount than a 1% fixed discount (experiment 2). A fourth experiment showed that consumers’ sensitivity to pain of paying modulates the greater comparative efficacy of small probabilistic than fixed discounts. More broadly, the results elucidate a novel affective route through which price promotions stimulate demand––pain of paying.
Worse on Purpose
Investigative essays on corporate enshittification — how the brands you trusted made everything worse on purpose, and who profits when they do.
From Haymarket to Prairieland: How dissent has unleashed the long arm of the law
The Prairieland sentencing has dark historical parallels, Kim Kelly writes. But we can change the end of the current story.
Arguing With Agents · blowmage
Truly. White hot actual anger. I had a clean plan, a well-structured prompt, explicit rules in the project’s context file. I queued the work and let it run. First task came back good. Second came back good. Somewhere around hour four the quality started sliding. By hour six the agent was cutting corners I’d specifically told it not to cut, skipping steps I’d explicitly listed, behaving like I’d never written any of the rules down.
Signal Developer Explains Why Early Encrypted Messaging Tools Flopped
'The intuition was to take the complexity and push it onto the user,' Moxie Marlinspike says at Black Hat. 'We were just wrong.'
What the Verdict Against Meta and Google Says About the Way We Live Now
Serving as a signal of a taste in the courts and among the public to have tech companies bear some of the costs of harm that they have allegedly caused, the recent verdict against Meta and Google in California says a lot about the central anxieties of our time.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster Illegally Monopolized Ticketing Market, Jury Finds
In a verdict that could have far-reaching consequences in the music industry, the live colossus that includes Ticketmaster was found to have violated antitrust laws.
