Every Fact Checks Out, Every Causal Arrow Is Forged: I Had Two AIs Write My Podcast Reflections

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:00:00 +0800

30-second summary: I had three AIs, under three different information conditions, each write a reflection on the same podcast episode. The fake one was easy to spot — it had never heard the audio and invented, from the show notes alone, a mechanism that sounded clever and turned out to be the opposite of what the episode actually said. The hard one was the most convincing: written by an AI holding years of memories about me, it fabricated no facts whatsoever, got every timestamp right, and tagged all its sources. What it forged was the causal arrow — the essay reads “I heard this, and so I thought that,” when every one of those thoughts predated the episode. It reads like insight because it is accurate about me, not because it told me anything.

Once Experiment Cost Approaches Zero, What Does Research Itself Become?

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0800

30-second version: What AI really lowers isn’t the cost of writing code — it’s the search cost across the entire hypothesis space. An idea that used to have a 20% success rate and take two days to test wasn’t worth trying before; now it is. So the bottleneck moves from execution to selection: when you can run two hundred experiments a day, the hard part is which two are worth looking at. And alpha discovery has gotten cheap — alpha validation hasn’t. As the search space grows, multiple testing, overfitting, and selection bias all get worse; you can always fish a pretty equity curve out of pure noise. So the researcher’s job shifts from “finding one good result” to “ranking a pile of results by strength of evidence.” What’s scarce is no longer the ability to search, but the prior knowledge of where to search, and the discipline to actually kill a signal.

Research Methods on WM's Blog

Every Fact Checks Out, Every Causal Arrow Is Forged: I Had Two AIs Write My Podcast Reflections

Once Experiment Cost Approaches Zero, What Does Research Itself Become?