James Bailey

It's now JOE official. We're hiring two Assistant Professors, one Macro, one Applied Micro (Labor/Public/Sports): aeaweb.org/joe/listing.php?J…

RI's problems are fixable. Leadership has been the missing ingredient. We cannot solve problems unless someone is working on the solutions. We cannot solve problems if our governor literally doesn't know what to do, or even how to think about it. We have a unique chance, right now, to elect a different type of governor. Someone dedicated to solving our toughest problems. No other candidate has proposed sweeping tax policy changes to remove the regressive taxes hidden in our utility bills. No other candidate has proposed truly out-of-the-box solutions like a regional health insurance marketplace or my "One Stay, One Bill" proposal, which would require hospitals to send a single bill within 30 days of discharge that covers every charge from every provider during that stay. No other candidate has proposed slowing our rush to meet a green energy goal that no other state comes close to matching, which could cost us up to a billion more than if we moved our goals to where other states have theirs. No other candidate, and certainly no other governor, has tackled poor educational outcomes in our state. Our government has been a reactive mess for decades. Everyone is feeling it - state workers, the public who has to interact with our government, taxpayers, businesses, and cities and towns. Our government has let hackers make off with the confidential information of more than half of us. They have thrown money at terrible proposals. They have failed to keep businesses here and made little progress in attracting new ones. Too many of our governors have not had what it takes. To compensate for their shortcomings, they hide behind the money and power wielded by RI's special interests. We have all seen the cost of special interest-driven policymaking. Look no further than the Washington Bridge. We can shake off our governmental stupor. Vote for real change. Vote to eject special interests from the governor's office and your checkbooks. Let's get this done. We are so close.

The wait for $4.99 rotisserie chickens in RI may soon be over Costco to open a store in Smithfield in 2028 providencejournal.com/story/…

interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works already-clean.goodfire.com/