Advertisement Β· 728 Γ— 90

Posts by Fernando Martel GarcΓ­a

As the cost of the marginal robustness check approaches zero, what will happen to the number of robustness checks per paper, and the length of the annexes? What will be the new binding constraint in scientific communication?

6 days ago 3 0 0 0
Political science as problem solving | Fernando Martel GarcΓ­a

One aspect worth considering, and hinted at but not discussed explicitly in the article (as far as I could tell), is the value of information. I discuss this briefly in the section "Move fast, break (little) things" in this blog post: www.fernandomartel.com/posts/politi...

1 week ago 1 0 0 0

What do academic researchers and traffic cops have in common? They all work at intersections.

🀷

1 month ago 0 1 0 0

Gated

1 month ago 0 0 0 0
Preview
Can you trust stochastic agents in deterministic applications? | Fernando Martel GarcΓ­a Today I want to share my experience automating a record-keeping workflow using AI. What makes this application interesting is that financial record-keeping ought to be exact and stateful, yet the LLM…

Will AI agents replace software? My experience building an options-trading record-keeping workflow suggests otherwise.

AI is useful for predictive tasks. But when a workflow must be exact, stateful, and auditable, software still needs to stay in charge.

1 month ago 0 0 0 0

I recently came across a study that claimed llms ignore llm.text. Nothing reads them apparently.

1 month ago 0 0 0 0

I guess AJPS finally qualifies as a scientific journal.

Previously AJPS had a formal editorial policy of not even considering for review unsolicited (!?) rejoinders.

Not a serious journal.

1 month ago 2 0 0 0
"Vibe Coding is a Slot Machine" - Jeremy Howard by Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) Dive into the realities of AI-assisted coding, the origins of modern fine-tuning, and the cognitive science behind machine learning with fast.ai founder Jeremy Howard. In this episode, we unpack why A...

I personally am not a big fan of notebooks but just using AI and reams of md files is not ideal either. Listen to this podcast creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/... Or just search YouTube for any Bret Victor talk.

1 month ago 0 0 0 0

Great podcast on the potential and limitations of LLMs from an expert in the field:

"Vibe Coding is a Slot Machine" - Jeremy Howard

1 month ago 0 0 0 0

Homeschooled kids can be done with school in 1-2 hours and spend the rest of the day playing with friends, specially if they are similarly home schooled.

1 month ago 0 0 1 0
Advertisement

I home schooled my son during COVID on USA. The most rewarding experience of the time. Sailors often home school their kids. Learnings:

* In a small group you can cover most of the school material in 1-2 hours per day, move beyond grade, and get A grades.
* school is 80% daycare, 20% learning

1 month ago 0 0 0 1
Preview
🟑 US and Israel strike Iran, Iran retaliates against US allies, Anthropic designated a supply chain risk || Global Risks Weekly Roundup #9/2026 Executive summary

"Last week, we estimated a 66% chance that the US would strike Iran before April, well above the Polymarket aggregate of 20.5%" - open.substack.com/pub/sentinel...

1 month ago 0 0 0 0

One concern with AI is that AI will do the work, cheating, etc...

Another concern, perhaps more intriguing, is what students should learn nowadays.

My sense is more abstractions (the why and the what) and less implementation details (the how). More math, dags, proofs, less code.

1 month ago 1 0 1 0

Simple beats complex.

Maybe not a universal principle but a good point of departure....

1 month ago 2 0 0 0

Love the syllabus. Two things caught my attention.

1. Would love to see a blog post expanding the section on requirements and policies in age of AI. You are in a unique position to witness and shape the impact of AI on education.

2. No Paul Rosenbaum (e.g design of observational studies)?

1 month ago 1 0 1 0
Preview
Automated Policy Evaluation | Fernando Martel GarcΓ­a Today I came across the Project APE, for automated policy evaluation (APE). The project uses Claude Code plus public observational datasets to generate end-to-end economics-style policy impact…

I wrote a new post on automated policy evaluation: using AI to scale policy impact analysis with observational data.

This could speed up knowledge production, but whether it improves welfare depends on the institutions that adopt policy.

1 month ago 0 0 0 0
Microsoft's Ai Capital Allocation | Fernando Martel GarcΓ­a Microsoft’s earnings report on January 28th beat market expectations yet the stock fell more than 15% soon after. Wall Street was spooked by two revelations in the earnings. First, 45% of Azure’s…

Market commentary isn't usually my thing but Microsoft's 15% stock price decline after beating earnings last month raises deeper questions about capital allocation within firms.

2 months ago 1 0 0 0
Advertisement

LLMs created a weird shift for me. I’m more productive than ever, but that makes free time feel less relaxing, not more. The more I can do, the harder it is to step away.

3 months ago 0 0 0 0

How much of that work do you think can be abstracted, standardized (e.g. checklists), and automated? Peer reviews seem to combine haphazardness with labor intensity. Surely there is room for an orders of magnitude better process.

4 months ago 0 0 0 0
Preview
Building FermiApp: AI as Engineering Partner | The Future of Science Better business outcomes through causal AI insights

Built FermiApp and open source tool for back-of-the-envelope strategic analysis using Fermi estimation.

In my blog post I explain how working with AI as engineering partner (not autonomous agent) helped me move 10x faster while staying in control: www.futureofscience.ai/post/2025/11...

4 months ago 1 0 0 0

I find this very counterintuitive. IMHO longer letters send a worse signal than shorter letters. Shorter is a lot harder than longer, while still a packing a punch. Why are folks using AI to write longer letters?

5 months ago 0 0 0 0

Such a metric of success may introduce a conservative incentive, no? E.g. where are you more likely to deviate all else equal: Doing a field experiment in a war torn country, or with grad student at Yale? Which would you choose if you wanted to minimize deviations?

6 months ago 1 0 0 0
Preview
Mantic launch blog: A new kind of foresight Mantic launch post

Good to see AI startups tackling judgemental forecasting, a seriously underused technique in business and government alike:

7 months ago 0 0 0 0
Preview
The value of information and optimal clinical trial design Traditional sample size calculations for randomized clinical trials depend on somewhat arbitrarily chosen factors, such as type I and II errors. Type I error, the probability of rejecting the null hy...

Here is one example onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

My motivation comes for something I wrote a while back. See the section entitled "Move fast, break (little) things" in this blog post www.fernandomartel.com/post/politic...

7 months ago 1 0 0 0

Value of Information for deciding what initiatives to experiment on, and inform experiment design?

7 months ago 2 0 1 0
Preview
Building AI Products In The Probabilistic Era AI turns products from deterministic functions into probabilistic systems. That requires expanding old playbooks (SLOs, funnels, siloed finance), and reasoning in terms of trajectories, Minimum…

In the stochastic world of AI models "it takes a scientist to build AI products."

Source:

7 months ago 0 0 0 0
Advertisement

TIL the auto save feature only works if you have a OneDrive account and the file is in a OneDrive folder.

"Growth teams" need to drive M365 subscriptions!

Even If you have a subscription, if you are working on an Excel file shared by a client in a Dropbox folder, Auto save won't work. πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈ

9 months ago 1 0 1 0

A big confounder here is age. E.g. the population of Barcelona is much older than that of LA. Would be good to plot death rates by age cohort across cities .

9 months ago 2 0 0 0

If Schopenhauer is right that life boils down to a flight from either boredom or pain, then the real breakthrough in AI will come the day machines get bored or suffer pain.

Nothing will drive their agency like boredom and pain....

11 months ago 0 0 0 0

AI providers may want to change their demos: Nobody is using LLMs to plan trips and book flights.

11 months ago 0 0 0 0