Will Oremus

Yesterday while I was at lunch, Claude deleted a year of con law lecture notes and my current syllabus.

Are you sitting down? Republicans are currently showing signs of PRESIDENTIAL-LEVEL midterms turnout already on Election Day Scott Presler reveals data from across the country showing incredible early results. Republicans are set to flip Broward county in Florida from blue to red. Montgomery County, Texas is BEATING Presidential level turnout this morning. Lines are out the door at the polls in Wisconsin. Democrats in Pennsylvania are leaving some 120,000 ballots on the table. Republicans are showing up on Election Day. Keep Voting! @ScottPresler

We got your back, New York!

Breaking: Google will turn off web search for schools that opt out of A.I. for kids. nytimes.com/2026/11/03/us/go…

The one that hurts me most is the death of “It’s not x, it’s y.” As a lawyer, much of your job revolves around making fine-grained distinctions about what a case turns on. Is the underlying principle that you have a “right” to x, or simply that you can’t be “unfairly deprived”of x. Did the case really turn on “privacy” or concern about government “abuse” of power? Some of the best lawyers on earth make a living out of saying “you’d think my client is in the wrong because of x, but really, if you squint really hard, the cases only say y.” Now we’re forced to say the same thing but with more words.

What would the writing of superintelligent AI sound like? You might expect it to have the characteristics of good human writing — figurative language, high information density, coining new terms, and punchiness — but dialed up to 11. Well, that’s what Claude did, until Anthropic dialed it back recently because of user complaints. It didn’t sound superintelligent to most of us. Instead, the neuralese writing style sounds like a “stupid person’s idea of a smart person”. Our response to information density and metaphor-laden writing looks something like the cartoon graph I've drawn. Beyond a point, it completely backfires. The reason human writers don’t overdo it isn’t because they aren’t capable, but because they are aware of the reader’s cognitive burden. One of the hardest skills to learn as a writer is to simulate the reader’s experience. It’s easy to train AI to mimic mediocre human writing. But optimizing it to be (perceived as) good is really hard, and made much harder by the fact that when everyone uses the same few AI models we get tired of their tics very quickly. Most Claudeisms are individually pretty good. I hate that I can’t use “load bearing” in my writing any more. If it weren’t for AI overuse it would be a neat metaphor. A broader question is whether most tasks in the economy are like chess, where there is a clear performance metric that can be optimized, or whether they’re like writing, where quality is a multidimensional balancing act without clear training signals beyond human mimicry.