marginal revolution read out: Monday assorted links
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This episode of marginal revolution read out covers Monday assorted links, the post from October fifth, twenty twenty-six. The author's opening note is just the list itself: five numbered items, with the first carrying two separate basketball clips. So the actual run of links goes through a pair of Nikola Jokic highlights, a piece on AI consciousness, two new working papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a short documentary about Karl Ove Knausgaard.
The first link is titled simply Jokic. The author's commentary is almost as short: Jokic, and another angle. The clip was shared by Sam Vecenie, who writes that less than twenty-four hours into the NBA preseason, Nikola Jokic has broken his brain, and that he doesn't know how one does this. The play is a no-look, crosscourt, behind-the-back dime to the opposite corner. The author doesn't add much beyond the link, which fits the post's style—let the highlight speak for itself.
The second item is another angle, posted by the NBA's own account. It shows the same pass, described as Joker's ridiculous dime to the opposite corner, with the league account adding a second caption: no-look, crosscourt, behind-the-back dime, are you serious, Joker. The author's take is just the pairing of the two clips. It's a reminder that a single angle can undersell a play; watching it twice makes the difficulty clearer.
The next link is Six questions for believers in AI consciousness. The author includes it without any further comment. The text for this piece did not come through, so only the title and the author's pointer remain. The title indicates a set of six questions aimed at people who believe AI systems are conscious, but the article itself is not available here.
Then the post shifts to economics with Prediction markets do not seem to be politically biased, a working paper by Eric Zitzewitz from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The author's note is just the paper's title. Zitzewitz examines prediction market returns from 1880 through 2025. He asks whether these markets systematically overprice left- or right-leaning candidates, or perhaps candidates of a particular gender, race, or age. Across subsamples, he finds no evidence of political bias. There is a favorite-longshot bias in most political prediction markets, and near-term polling markets show a very small overpricing of left-leaning outcomes, but that effect is only detectable because the sample is so large. For elections, despite drawing participants who may not look like the voting population, prediction markets produce forecasts without systematic bias. The author's link is a useful checkpoint as prediction markets become more prominent.
The next NBER paper is quoted directly by the author: AI writing is absent before 2023, present in 29% of dissertations filed in 2026, and rapidly growing. The paper is by Daniel Gross, Dror Shvadron, and Hansen Zhang, and it asks how heavily PhD students are offloading their scientific writing to AI. They analyze a near-census of STEM PhD dissertations in the United States from 2019 through 2026, and link each graduate to subsequent employment. The headline is stark: no AI writing before 2023, but by 2026 it appears in twenty-nine percent of dissertations, and the trend is rising. Use is more common among students from non-English-speaking countries and at lower-ranked programs. Within the same program and cohort, graduates whose dissertations contain AI writing are less likely to enter academic research careers, and more likely to end up in non-tenure-track roles or in industry. The authors offer a clear tension: AI may raise research productivity, but it may also be displacing a chunk of the work through which scientific expertise is developed. The author's commentary is just the quoted sentence, but it carries the paper.
The final link is Short Knausgaard documentary and interview. The author describes it as a short documentary and interview. The fetched page offers no transcript or details beyond that, so this episode can only note the title and the author's framing. It closes the roundup on a literary note, following basketball and economics with a compact look at Karl Ove Knausgaard.
All together, Monday assorted links is a good example of the format: a no-look pass seen from two angles, a list of questions about AI minds, two empirical papers on prediction markets and AI in science, and a literary documentary. The author mostly stays out of the way, offering a line or two of framing per link and letting the material carry the episode.