bits and pieces

27 May, 2026

1. I have continued my practice of walking every day, without music or podcasts. It's great. I'm now going 5 miles/day, and I continue to find I do my best thinking and mental organizing during that hour. I continue to see this is completely separate from exercising.

2. This piece by Astral Codex Ten on using AI to examine election candidates is very good. My intuition lately is that too many people are parroting a "don't use AI in stupid ways, you have to learn advanced prompting/coding techniques," when the best use case for AI might just be "really good Google." Looking up candidate positions and comparing them for a primary/local election is a great use of AI as an efficiency machine for gathering information even if it's not at all representative of cutting edge machine intelligence in the analytic (or sci-fi) sense.

3. President Trump has shown genuinely impressive influence this month in GOP primaries. But conditional on that, the influence has been exaggerated. Endorsing Paxton one week out was surely a smart personal political move for Trump; the goal of endorsing is to (a) be influential and (b) be seen as influential, and savvy leaders endorse likely-winners in order to buff their own power cred. Trump has improved at this. But that's different than being "completely dominant" as some are describing him. For instance, could he have endorsed Cornyn last week and gotten him over the top? That would be the sign of true influence, and I'm skeptical. Of course, Trump would never have done that, because the worst outcome for a leader is to endorse late and have your candidate lose. Then you get the benefit of neither (a) or (b).¹

4. My brother-in-law and were pondering an interesting sports puzzle this week: the New York Knicks are almost certainly not the most popular sports team in New York, but a Knicks playoff run ignites the city to a magnitude none of the other teams can touch. What gives? Some theories that emerged in our discussion and on the internet:

• the Knicks unify the city, other NYC sports have divided loyalty;
• NYC is the Mecca of basketball, it's the game;
• the Knicks have lots of fairweather fans;
• the Knicks have not won in a long time, longer than other teams;
• the Knicks play in Manhattan, at the iconic MSG;
• the other sports are disproportionately suburban fanbases;
• basketball is a city game, lots of recreational play;
• the NBA playoffs are uniquely exciting;
• NBA playoffs draw a highly-visible celebrity interest;
• the NBA playoffs are in the spring, and benefit from it.

5. This piece by Lee Drutman on the impossibility of banning gerrymandering is very important.