Holy F%$#ing Sh%$

We have a report that a a grad student synthesized dimethylmercury and possibly exposed themselves.

Dimethylmercury makes the Minimata Disease look like a trip to a pre-Amazon Whole Foods.

We had a weird story develop over the weekend here in the Cambridge area (and among organic chemists in general). I’m glad that I wasn’t trying to blog it as it happened, because it’s taken some turns!

This all started last Wednesday night, but most of us only heard something on Thursday when word came of an MIT chemistry building that was being closed off because of a report of someone who had been exposed to hazardous material. It became clear that said material was possibly dimethylmercury, which a graduate student had claimed to have synthesized, and who subsequently reported themselves to a local emergency room. And you can see why that caused a stir (but read on!)

Dimethylmercury is very, very bad news. It is obviously something I will not work with, but it’s never been the subject of a blog post here in that category because unfortunately there’s nothing lighthearted about the subject. Not after the death of Karen Wetterhahn in 1997. That story should be well known to chemists everywhere, but the short version is that Prof. Wetterhahn (at Dartmouth) was accidentally exposed in August of 1996 to a few drops of liquid dimethylmercury on her latex-gloved hand. What she didn’t know (and what none of us really knew) was that this compound rapidly penetrates such gloves, which meant that Wetterhahn was exposed to skin contact within seconds. Toxicologically, it is probably the worst of the organomercurys, which are of course a dangerously toxic group of compounds overall. Her precautions for handling the compound were the standard at the time, it should be noted.

Prof. Wetterhahn began to notice general symptoms within weeks. Early in 1997 she began to show neurological problems, and within weeks she had collapsed into a vegetative state. She was removed from life support in June. She had very high levels of mercury in her blood, and all attempts at chelation therapy to remove it were ineffective. That’s surely because it had spread throughout her body by the time the problem was recognized, but frankly no one can be sure if there were any measures that could have been effective enough after the initial exposure. This horrifying incident led to a complete re-evaluation of the use of dimethylmercury in synthetic and analytical chemistry, where among other things it had been the reference peak standard in mercury NMR experiments.

It appears that there was no exposure to anyone, and possibly that there was no actual synthesis of the ferociously toxic material, but someone was trying to make some.

Whoever they are should be blackballed from chemistry for the rest of their natural life. 

I don't just mean that they should be banned working in ans academic or industrial programs related to chemistry.  I mean that they should be banned from any work with chemicals at all, up to and including working as a pastry chef.

Clever

Alcorn State University professor Jason Gibson was concerned about students cheating on take-home exams by using ChatGPT.

His solution was elegant. He embedded a prompt about Madagascar in a white font in his midterm exam.

Given that the midterm exam was about the industrial revolution, responses invoking the African island would be a clear sign of major shenanigans.

Who could’ve guessed that students who use AI to cheat on their assignments are incredibly lazy?

Jason Gibson, a history professor at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, says that he used white font to hide a prompt telling an AI model to spew nonsense in the instructions for his mid-term.

Unfortunately, it ended up working a little too well.

“Thirty-two of my 35 students between two classes failed a portion of their midterm because they all used AI to generate their entire response,” he explained in a viral TikTok, sounding incredulous. “And apparently they didn’t proofread it.”

The hidden prompt told the AI to sneak in random digressions about Madagascar. The midterm, by the way, was about the Industrial Revolution. And apparently none of the indolent cheats put in the bare modicum of effort required to at least check if what the AI wrote made any sense at all. All they did was copy-paste the midterm instructions into a chatbot, then copy-paste the chatbot’s spiel back into the answer window.

32 of 35?  That's a 94% cheat rate.

Not Surprised

Nope, no cheating here A professor at Brown University moved to take-home exams, and suddenly his class tripled in popularity and the scores for the mid-terms climbed into the 95%+ range.

He announced that the final would be in person, and a significant portion his students dropped the class or did not show up for the final, and now he suspects cheating.

Gee, ya think?

For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so “it was appropriate,” he said, to allow students to take their exams at home.

But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can—and should—respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale.

His welfare economics class typically attracted up to 30 students, but this spring he taught 86—an increase he attributes to the promised take-home exams. When the midterm came along, the average score was 96 percent.

Gee, nothing suspicious here.

“Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because … take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time,” Serrano said.

………

In a message to students after the midterm that he shared with Inside Higher Ed, he told them he suspected many of them of using AI to cheat and, with the blessing of his dean, changed the final exam to an in-person test.

………

Serrano heard crickets from his students, but 18 of them subsequently dropped the class. Nine students remained enrolled but did not take the final exam. And Serrano said the results proved him right; three students earned a zero, and the average score on the final was 48.6 percent—by far a historic low, he said. Previously, the average final exam score had never dropped below 65 percent. Only a few students scored similarly to how they did on the midterm. 

Generation Alpha is going to make Idiocracy a reality. 

Pshaw!

Researchers at Boston University have combed through the death certificates, and Covid deaths were severely undercounted during the height of the pandemic.

Thank-you Captain Obvious. 

This was clear from the most cursory examination of excess death data.

The covid-19 pandemic was perhaps the greatest natural disaster to befall America and the world in modern times. Research out today, however, indicates that we’re still underselling just how deadly it truly was.

Researchers at Boston University and others examined national death certificate data collected in the first two years of the pandemic. They estimated that the official tally missed nearly 20% of covid-related fatalities between 2020 and 2021, amounting to 155,536 uncounted deaths. These missing cases were more common among minority and disadvantaged communities, likely reflecting longstanding disparities in how deaths are investigated in the country, the researchers say.

This sh$# ain't rocket science.

Both the death toll and the bad statistics are a natural consequence of having a public health establishment opposed to the idea of public health.

Bye, Felicia

And by Felicia, I mean Lawrence Henry Summers, who is is leaving Harvard as a result of the fallout from his close ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Even if Summers were a co-conspirator with Epstein on trafficking children, and there is NO evidence that he was, that would be a small percentage of damage that he has done as an economist and a political figure.

Former Harvard President Larry Summers will resign from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of the academic year, relinquishing his University Professorship — Harvard’s highest faculty distinction — and remaining on leave until that time, a Harvard spokesperson confirmed to The Crimson.

Summers also resigned Wednesday from his role as co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, a position he has held since 2011, according to the spokesperson. He will not teach or take on new advisees.

The resignation marks an extraordinary unraveling for Summers, long one of the most influential figures in American economics. His career spanned prize-winning research, service as United States Treasury Secretary, and the presidency of Harvard.

………

Summers’ standing began to collapse after a cache of emails disclosed in November revealed details of a long-standing personal relationship between Summers and convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein.

The correspondence revealed that Summers regularly exchanged messages with Epstein about women, politics, and Harvard-linked projects over at least seven years — staying in contact as late as July 2019, the day before Epstein’s final arrest.

Summers was asking Epstein for dating advice, and how to best seduce one of his subordinates.

Summers is pond scum.  He was pond scum when he shot the breeze with Epstein, and he was pond scum when he covered for another protege, Andrei Shleifer, who was stealing money while he was supervising the privatization of the Russian economy following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Say, "Hi," to Henry Kissenger when you get to hell. 

As Anna Russel Would Say, “I’m Not Making This Up, You Know.”

It appears that the "War on Woke" in Texas has led Texas A&M to ban Plato in philosophy class.

I'm not a fan of Plato.  In high school, I came to that he was the direct ancestor to western Fascism, and I find his dialogues to be contrived and self serving.

That being said, banning Plato from philosophy class?  What the fuck? 

I guess that it's time to start making Aggie jokes again.

A professor at Texas A&M University was forced to remove Plato readings from his syllabus after a crackdown on academic freedom in the university system and Texas at large. Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor at the university, fell victim to a proposal adopted in November that limits teaching “advocat[ing] race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Campus presidents, in accordance with the new measure, are required to sign off on courses that fit this description as well as those related to sexual orientation or gender identity. According to a report from The Texas Tribune, the university “had identified roughly 200 courses as potentially affected by policy restrictions.”

For Peterson, his story has garnered national attention after his syllabus was reviewed and his department head, Kristi Sweet, gave him two choices — either remove “the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these,” according to a New York Times report, or teach another course.

In an interview with the Times, Peterson expressed, “A philosophy professor who is not allowed to teach Plato, what kind of university is that? Is that really what they want?”

………

The president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Todd Wolfson, issued a statement on Jan. 12 regarding Peterson’s situation, stating,

“Silencing 2,500-year-old ideas from one of the world’s most influential thinkers betrays the mission of higher education and denies students the opportunity to engage critically with the foundations of Western thought… A university that censors Plato — as well as other significant texts — abandons its obligation to truth, free inquiry, and the public trust… A college or university of this sort harms its students, faculty, and traditions, and consequently can no longer be regarded as a serious institution of higher learning.”

After all that effort to have a physics department that their football team would be proud of, it's come to this.

So sad. 

 

Speaking of Harvard

Harvard is investigating the students who filmed Larry Summers self indulgent apology to one of his classes.

Officials at Harvard University launched a secret disciplinary investigation into students who recorded Larry Summers discussing his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, The New York Times reports.

Summers, who served as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton , is under intense scrutiny for his dealings with Epstein. He resigned from his position at OpenAI in November following the appearance of his name in emails with Epstein and was included in photos recently released by Epstein’s estate.

The students, Rosie P. Couture and Lola DeAscentiis, posted videos online last month of the former Harvard president addressing his ties to late sex trafficker. The university is looking into whether those recordings violated school policies.

Yes, they are defending Larry fucking Summers over this. 

More AI Humbug

A year ago, a PhD student at MIT produced a study claiming to show that Artificial Intelligence, by which we mean large language model AI, resulted in an increase in discoveries by researchers.

It was a pre-publication release, so there was no peer review, but much fanfare.

Following an investigation, MIT us doing its best to to get it withdrawn, with the Economics Department stating that it has, "No confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper."

This sort of statement from academia is both rare and strong:

Last year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was touting the research of a PhD student on the impact of AI on the workforce that “floored” professors in the field. Now the university is backing away from it and calling for it to no longer be published. On Friday, MIT announced that it reviewed the paper following concerns and determined that it should be “withdrawn from public discourse.”

The paper, titled “Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation” snagged all sorts of attention and headlines for its finding that scientists aided by AI tools were considerably more productive than their peers working without the technological aid—but those same researchers making more discoveries were significantly less satisfied by their work. The work was considered a breakthrough, and Daron Acemoglu, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who recently won the Nobel Prize in economics, described it as “fantastic.”

But the findings didn’t quite sit right with some. According to the Wall Street Journal, a computer scientist with experience in materials science approached MIT professors with questions about how the AI tool used in the experiment worked and just how big of a boost in innovation that it was actually responsible for. The professors took those concerns to the university, which started a review process that ultimately led to MIT stating that it “has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper.”

Given the financial and professional incentives associated with the current AI frenzy (Bubble?), any claim made by a research paper claiming that AI is a game changer should be viewed with the same skepticism as Donald Trump's wedding vows.

Headline of the Day

Bitter Fight over 2020 Microsoft Quantum Paper Both Resolved and Unresolved

— The Register

Short version is that the editors split the baby.  The longer version is available at the link and is incredibly boring, but the hed is marvelous. 

Wear Your F%$#ing Mask

You know all those reports of an unprecedented surge in lung cancer among young non-smokers? (See here and here where I called noted this)

Well, we now have an explanation, and it's what I, as well as professional health experts who actually know what the f%$# that they are talking about, suggested that this was tied to the Covid pandemic.

A study is not saying that dormant cancer in lung cells can be activated by COVID and flu.

Gee, you think:

Hidden in the lungs of some breast cancer survivors are tumour cells that can remain dormant for decades — until they one day trigger a relapse. Now, experiments in mice show that these rogue cells can be roused from their slumber by common respiratory illnesses such as COVID-19 or the flu.

The findings, published in Nature on 30 July1, seem to extend to humans too: data from thousands of people show that infection with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is linked with a nearly twofold increase in cancer-related death, possibly helping to explain why cancer death rates increased early during the COVID-19 pandemic.

………

DeGregori and his colleagues wondered whether acute inflammation caused by a respiratory infection could also reactivate dormant cancer cells. To test this, the researchers genetically engineered mice to develop breast tumours similar to those in humans and to seed dormant tumour cells into other tissues including the lungs. Then, they infected the animals with either SARS-CoV-2 or influenza.

Within days of infection, dormant cancer cells in the lungs of the mice kicked into high gear, proliferated and formed metastatic lesions. But it wasn’t the pathogens directly that caused this to happen, the researchers learnt: it was a key immune molecule called interleukin-6 (IL-6), which helps to rev up the body’s response to foreign threats. They confirmed this by engineering mice to lack IL-6. In these animals, the dormant cancer cells did not multiply nearly as quickly.

Obviously, this applies to a very specific lung cancer case, but it does appear that this mechanism might be at least part of the explanation for the Covid cancer surge.

F%$# Me

I agree with Pete Hegseth about something, his order to prevent military personnel from participation in think tank events.

I guess a stopped calendar is right once a month. 

Think-tanks are a cesspool and an affirmative action program for stupid Ivy League graduates.

At their very best, they are lobbying organizations that use the promise of future employment to influence Congressional staffers.

If they went away, or at the very list left the immediate proximity of Washington, DC, the world would be a better place.

A wide swath of Defense Department officials fear that new rules banning employees from participating at think tank and research events — a key way the Pentagon delivers its message and solicits feedback — will leave the military muzzled and further isolated from allies.

The move, according to more than a dozen officials and think tank leaders, hampers the department’s ability to make its case both in Washington policy circles and to allies struggling to understand how they fit into President Donald Trump’s worldview. That’s particularly important now as the Pentagon assesses whether to end decades of U.S. policy and remove thousands of troops stationed abroad.

“The DOD can’t tell its message,” said Becca Wasser, a former Army official, now a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a national security think tank. “They can’t tell the critical points they want the general public to know. This is essentially shooting themselves in the foot.”

To translate this from inside-the-beltway speak, they are saying, is, "We use these to lobby politicians and journalists, and we really like the free champagne at their soirees."

If someone in the DoD has making presentations to think tanks as a significant portion of their job, then they are extremely over-employec. 

We Are F%$#ed

See the blue spot south of Greenland and Iceland As my reader(s) may recall, I have suggested that the potential for anthropogenic climate change causing a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could change climate significantly, particularly in Europe, where it could cause a temperature drop of 5-15°C (9-27°F).

The problem is that the anything near a remotely accurate measurement of the AMOC has only been done over the last few decades, so there is not good data to see how this massive current has changed. 

Total volume of the AMOC is about  18 Sverdrup (Sv) or 18,000,000 m³/s, which made observations extremely difficult in the past.

Well , a group of researchers believe that they have found a correlation between AMOC flow rate and the temperature of the cold spot in the Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland.

Given that we have surface temperature readings going back centuries for the Atlantic, this allows us to see trends, and the trends ain't good: 

For months – if not years – debate has raged among scientists over the general health of an ocean current system critical to regulating Earth’s climate – arguing over whether or not the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (or AMOC) is slowing down.

This week, researchers looking into the root cause of a centuries-old patch of cold water south of Greenland and its resistance to the overall warming trend of the Atlantic Ocean, has come to one simple conclusion. That it is.

Landing on only one explanation for the observed ocean temperatures and patterns in salinity across the region, researchers from the University of California, Riverside concluded that the AMOC – a massive current system responsible for moving warm, salty water northward and cooler water southward at depth, is indeed weakening.

“People have been asking why this cold spot exists,” said University of California, Riverside climate scientist Wei Liu, who led the study with doctoral student Kai-Yuan Li. “We found the most likely answer is a weakening AMOC.”

The AMOC acts like a giant conveyor belt, delivering heat and salt from the tropics to the North Atlantic. A slowdown in this system means less warm, salty water reaches the sub-polar region, resulting in the cooling and freshening observed south of Greenland.

………

Together, Li and Liu analysed a century’s worth of this data, as direct AMOC observations go back only as far as 20 years. From these long term records, they reconstructed changes in the circulation system and compared those with nearly 100 different climate models.

Their paper – published this week in Communications Earth & Environment – shows that only in the models simulating a weakened AMOC were outcomes generally matched to the real-world data. Models that assumed a stronger AMOC didn’t come close.

“It’s a very robust correlation,” said Li. “If you look at the observations and compare them with all the simulations, only the weakened-AMOC scenario reproduces the cooling in this one region.”

………

With limited direct data on the AMOC, temperature and salinity records provide a valuable alternative for detecting long-term circulation change, and for helping to predict future climate scenarios.

This does not bode well for our society or our planet.

Not a Surprise

The entire Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board has resigned in response to political interference in the grants that they make.

The board of the Fulbright Program, the international educational exchange initiative sponsored by the US government, has resigned in protest at what it has described as the Trump administration’s political interference in its operations.

In a statement the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board said the government had been meddling in its selection process, which it states is “based on merit, not ideology”, and has traditionally been insulated from political interference. It said the integrity of that process was “now undermined”.

Political appointees at the state department had cancelled Fulbright scholarships for dozens of academics and students, mainly on the basis of their research topics, according to people familiar with the matter. 

………

People familiar with the matter said the Fulbright awards were being cancelled in many instances by Darren Beattie, acting under-secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. He worked as a speechwriter for Trump during his first term but left his post in 2018 after it was reported that he had spoken at a conference attended by white nationalists. 

So, not just a political hack, it's a literal Nazi who is doing this.

Ours is the worst, and stupidest, timeline. 

No

Over at Asterisk they ask the question, "Can We Trust Social Science Yet?"

This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.

Given the current state of evidence production in the social sciences, I believe that many — perhaps most — attempts to use social scientific evidence to inform policy will not lead to better outcomes. This is not because of politics or the challenges of scaling small programs. The problem is more immediate. Much of social science research is of poor quality, and sorting the trustworthy work from bad work is difficult, costly, and time-consuming.

Also, social sciences are more vulnerable bias because the experimental design and analysis techniques are far more subjective. 

Quote of the Day

Apparently, Stephen Miller thinks that Donald Trump can suspend the writ of habeas corpus. There’s just one problem with that idea, as a little known law professor wrote in the Cornell Law Review in 2014: “Congress alone can suspend the writ.” The name of that professor was Amy Coney Barrett.

—Corey Robin

I hope that Mr. Robin is correct here, but we do know that the conservative wing of the court frequently operate under the legal principal of, "It's OK if you're a Republican." (IOKIYAR) 

It is naive to expect conservative Supreme Court Justices to act in a non-partisan manner or with integrity.

Hope for Humanity

A group of law students are are organizing to create a list of law firms that are caving to Donald Trump. 

The implication, of course is that this list will be used to allow graduating lawyers to be will not be applying to these firms: 

The day after Donald Trump’s election last year, three Georgetown Law students started a political movement to brace for impact.

The students texted each other, started organizing, and eventually discovered the ability to perform a simple act to put the world’s wealthiest and most powerful law firms on the defensive.

They created a spreadsheet.

After Trump signed executive orders singling out law firms for political retribution, the students recorded BigLaw’s responses in a document they titled “Legal Industry Responses to Fascist Attacks Tracker.”

The Google spreadsheet currently names more than 800 firms, assigning them to one of five stark categories: “Caved to Administration,” “Complying in Advance,” “Other Negative Action,” “Stood Up Against Administration’s Attacks,” or “No Response.”

The document started out a resource to help fellow Georgetown Law students make informed decisions about potential future employers.

In case you are wondering, there has been an impact on where recent law school graduates are applying:

………

Forbes first picked up on a trend of students turning down the possibility of six-figure salaries from the likes of Skadden Arps, Paul Weiss, Milbank, and Willkie, Farr and Gallagher, which all entered into settlements providing the Trump administration with tens of millions of dollars in pro bono legal services. One Geogetown first-year law student (1L) interviewed for the story reportedly skipped a Skadden interview. (The firms did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment.)

Politico then reported that these individual choices resonated industry-wide, speaking to students, recruiters, and partners at major law firms.

I am stunned, but for the first time in a long time, this a good thing.

To quote Ann Frank, "In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

Music Review From a Man Who Lived in a Cave Since 1977

1977 is the year that composer and professor R. Douglas Helvering was born, and 2024 was the year that he first heard the iconic Mason Williams song Classical Gas.

It boggles my mind that he manged to make it through 47 years of life without ever hearing the song.

How the F%$# does this happen?

His analysis is very interesting.

I would note that my favorite version is the Mason Williams version, but it is the guitar only rendition on his album Handmade.

Today in Evil, Elsivier Edition

It looks like the Ebola of the academic publishing world, Elsevier has so mismanaged one of their journals that the entire staff has resigned en masse.

They cut staff, upped the work load, removed copy editing support, and used AI to process articles, which has consistently introduced errors otherwise acceptable articles.

All but one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the “sustained actions of Elsevier are fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE’s success.” 

“Elsevier has steadily eroded the infrastructure essential to the success of the journal while simultaneously undermining the core principles and practices that have successfully guided the journal for the past 38 years,” the journal’s “joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or active in the field, and all but one Associate Editor” said in their resignation statement posted to X/Twitter yesterday.

Among other moves, according to the statement, Elsevier “eliminated support for a copy editor and special issues editor,” which they interpreted as saying “editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting.” The editors say the publisher “frequently introduces errors during production that were not present in the accepted manuscript:”

In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage. 

 Seriously, these guys make McKinsey & Company look good.

Headline of the Day

If MMT Is Wrong, Why Is It So Much Better at Predicting the Economy - And Economic Disaster?

—Dougald Lamont’s Substack

This is at the center of the dispute between classical monetarism and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

It's not that you can contort your theory to match the facts ex pos facto, it is that your theory should have predictive value.

In 2016, Paul Romer, who was then Chief Economist at the World Bank wrote “The Trouble with Macroeconomics” in which he eviscerated the current state of macroeconomics in the U.S. and around the world, writing that orthodox macroeconomics had been in “30 years of intellectual regress,” and was so disconnected from reality that it was “post-real”. Romer wrote his paper, inspired by a similar critique of “string theory” in physics. 

 ………

The reason for this, Romer argues, is that orthodox economics - the formulas used by government budget offices, political parties, central banks and business, are based on a series of assumptions that are not backed up by facts. 

Yeah, this sounds a lot like string theory.

………

By this, Romer means that economists are inserting what he calls “facts of unknown truth value” which is to say, they are breezily assuming something and putting it into a mathematical formula.

And as a model, it has continually failed to predict crises and inflation that other “heterodox” models of the economy have succeeded in doing.

Romer is making an assumption here, which is that orthodox economic theory is actually an honest attempt to understand and predict our economy.

Lamont, on the other hand, is not making the same assumptions:

………

The opposition to MMT is not about theory: it is about control, and who controls what. MMT recognizes that money is a creature, and monopoly of the state - not the private sector.  

Above all, MMT is not a policy prescription. It is not saying “we should try doing it this way.”

MMT is a different, and arguably more accurate way of modelling the economy and financial system we have right now. It is “we should try seeing the economy this way, and when you do, you’ll see that we have different options.”

This is a very good read on the sad state of affairs of conventional economics, and I recommend that you read the whole thing.

No

Can Stanford Tell the Difference Between Scientific Fact and Fiction? Its Pandemic Conference Raises Doubts

—Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times

Stanford has been captured by conservatism and by its role as the birthplace of many tech bros, and as such, we find that its support for pseudoscience has been purchased by its reactionary and delusionary (and very rich) alumni.

The first two paragraphs tell you all you need to know:

On Oct. 4, Stanford University’s newly minted president, Jonathan Levin, opened an on-campus conference about pandemic policies by expressing the hope that the proceedings would “bring together people with different perspectives, engage in a day of discussion, and in that way, try to repair some of the rifts that opened during COVID.”

He was followed to the lectern by the conference organizer, Stanford public policy professor Jay Bhattacharya, who described the event’s goal as fostering “dialogue with one another rather than having a situation where the goal is to destroy people who disagree with you.”

Jay Bhattacharya is one of the prime movers behind the "Great Barrington Declaration" which said, "Just get everyone sick, it will be fine, and I want to go to the movies."

The Great Barrington crowd was wrong and dangerous and ignorant, and and remains wrong and dangerous and ignorant.

That Stanford's president gave his stamp of approval to a group of people whose scientific credibility ranks somewhere around that of flat-earthers is yet another sign that Stanford is overrated.