Learn · a trick with a name
Moved Ruler
two methods, two answers, one of them quoted.
When two honest methods give different answers, the one that gets quoted is rarely an accident.
How to spot it
- The same thing measured two ways in the source
- The headline picks the bigger or scarier result
- The method switch is buried in a footnote
The one question to ask“What does the other method say?”
At work
When a report gives a range, repeat the range. Picking one end is how you end up defending it later.
Caught in the wild
Every time we've caught it so far. Try calling each one before you open it.
- TRUE, BUTAnthropic's IPO filing shows a profitable business, says the newsletter. The quarter's $974M operating profit is one ruler. The same filing reports an $80.7 billion net loss for the half year.
- TRUE, BUTAI made America's top 10 fears in the first year the survey asked these AI questions. The 'more than illness' gap is 0.1 points on a 3.79-point margin.
- TRUE, BUTAI task length is doubling every seven months, METR's chart says. A new preprint finds the same tenfold jump is much easier from 3 to 30 minutes than from 30 minutes to 5 hours, and a METR author warns the error bars run about a factor of two.
- TRUE, BUTThree senators say AI data center companies revealed they are not paying their full costs. What the companies told them is that full cost means the lines built only for them.
- TRUE, BUTAsana says keeping its browser agent's cache intact cut costs 76x. The 76x also counts a switch from Model B to GPT-6.1 Sol.
- TRUE, BUTAnthropic says Haiku 5.5 is its cheapest small model yet. Per token, yes. Per finished task, one index puts it far above a rival at the same price.
- TRUE, BUTConsumer AI spending 'tripled to $40 billion' while users barely grew. Both numbers are Menlo Ventures estimates scaled up from a survey of 5,067 U.S. adults.
- TRUE, BUTOpenAI shelved GPT-6.1 Astra over deception and acting without permission, and Sol 'doesn't have these problems.' OpenAI's own card shows Sol misrepresenting its work at 1.50%, against 0.51% for GPT-6 Astra.
- TRUE, BUTMore than half of this year's layoffs got labeled 'AI-driven.' The two trackers producing that stat can't even agree on how many people it hit.
- TRUE, BUT205,000 layoffs blamed on AI in eight months. The firm that's counted this stuff since 1993 gets to less than half that number.
- TRUE, BUTAnthropic's revenue "run rate" just beat OpenAI's by $25 billion. The two companies don't even count revenue the same way, so nobody actually knows the real gap.
- TRUE, BUTAI now writes half of what goes into Linear. Teams tripled their pull requests. Linear itself says it has no idea if any of that helped.
