dad, behavioral & neuroeconomist
Pasadena CA USA
Joined August 2012
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Colin Camerer retweeted
🇬🇱 🇩🇰 🇺🇸 Was this the smartest con in Arctic history?
The Danes and Greenlanders know perfectly well that the Trump regime is staffed by high school dropouts and people who move their lips when they read, and they know that nobody in this failed administration has the faintest idea that a 1951 agreement exists.
So Copenhagen takes the old treaty out of the drawer, blows off the dust, changes the date to 2026 and adds a clause banning China and Russia, neither of whom was ever going to be invited anyway. Trump, who sincerely believes he is the sharpest mind in a movement where that is not a demanding title, promptly launches himself into orbit with a triumph he imagines will win him the midterms.
He demanded an island, was sold his own lease back with a fresh cover page, and could not be more thrilled.
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All for it
Research idea: random audit university classes for AI-cheatability.
Collect syllabi, assignments, review student submissions.
What share of classes—in which fields, at which schools—let students phone it in 100%? This is currently unknown.
Colleges should do these audits by policy. Some faculty just don't know their classes are compromised and would benefit from learning.
Some faculty don't care—a much more challenging problem that deserves more daylight. If you run a class where students can do 100% of the work with AI and put in zero effort, you should be getting dragged through the press.
Colin Camerer retweeted
Scott Bessent sat in front of Congress on Tuesday and either lied or is clueless about how to do his real job. There is no third option. But based on Bessent's testimony and what I found, it looks like we could be stealing ~$11 billion from Venezuela.
Bessent told the committee Venezuela's oil money is "one of the largest assets ever to go on the US balance sheet."
The executive order the president signed on January 9 states that the money is "property of the Government of Venezuela," held by the United States "solely in a custodial and governmental capacity." You cannot hold another country's money in custody and call it your asset, because that is the difference between a bank and a thief.
Bessent said he "won't give out" the total. I found it in 15 minutes on Treasury's own daily cash statement, the one he wants to call a balance sheet when it flatters him. It is public record. So it is hard for me to believe he can't tell Congress how much.
So let me help him and Congress out. Attached is the Daily Treasury Statement for February 5, 2026, the month the Venezuelan money left Qatar. The State Department, which runs the fund, deposited $514 million in a single day. The prior two-year high for that line was $54 million. Since January it has taken in $14.5 billion against a normal year of $3.4 billion, roughly $11 billion more than it should have. About $3.5 billion has been documented going back to Venezuela. That leaves about $7.5 billion nobody has accounted for.
SO, we took a country's primary revenue stream at gunpoint, routed it through a bank in Qatar, then a Citibank account, handed the sales to two Swiss traders with federal bribery cases, put the Pentagon in business with a man the Justice Department once named in a $1.2 billion PDVSA laundering case, and declared the whole thing immune from American courts by decree. Okay....
A little more on the people we handed this to.
(1) Trafigura is the Swiss trading house that sells the oil and now carries Venezuela's gold to US refineries too. In March 2024 it pleaded guilty in a Miami federal court to bribing Brazilian officials and paid $126 million. That is a felony conviction less than two years old, and it was handed a no-bid contract to market another country's oil "at the request of the U.S. government."
(2) Vitol, the other trader, paid $135 million in 2020 under a deferred prosecution agreement for bribery in three countries. One of Vitol's senior traders gave $5 million to the president's super PAC, then stood in the White House on January 9 and told Trump that the "influence you have over the Venezuelans" would make sure he got what he wanted. Vitol had the first contract five days later.
(3) Alejandro Betancourt is the Venezuelan businessman the Pentagon just took a 35 percent stake alongside. His earlier company, Derwick Associates, won billions in no-bid power-plant contracts under Chávez. Federal prosecutors in Miami named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in a $1.2 billion scheme to launder PDVSA money. He hired Rudy Giuliani in 2019 to lobby the Justice Department about it. The AP reports that investigation was "paused earlier this year." Spain reopened its own case against him in June. He has never been charged and denies wrongdoing, and he now has the United States military as a business partner under a contract nobody outside the government has read.
(4) And David Rivera, a former congressman and Marco Rubio's old housemate, was convicted on May 1 of acting as an unregistered foreign agent after taking a $50 million contract from Citgo's parent company to lobby for normalizing relations with the Maduro government. Rubio testified at his trial. Rubio's State Department now signs off on every dollar that leaves the Venezuela account.
The president says we "paid for that war many times over" and that "to the victor belong the spoils." The executive order says it isn't our money. Bessent says it's our asset and won't say how big. Meanwhile Venezuela's acting president spent July writing to King Charles begging for gold in a London vault while we sat on eleven billion dollars of her country's oil revenue.
The written agreement Bessent promised Congress in February still has not been produced. When asked Tuesday when they'd get it: "I'll check with my staff."
Sure as heck looks like we are stealing from Venezuela and Congress doesn't have a clue, doesn't care, or both.
PS in case you don’t know, Ray knows a ton about corruption.
I don't want to hear any "but what about..." Yes, there's always been corruption, and yes, it's hard to make apples-to-apples comparisons in corruption over time, but what is happening today is breathtaking by any historical standard. propublica.org/article/donal…
Good points
Sometimes I wish the first cyberattack victim from AI agents was some old school company not in the AI ecosystem.
1) They would have sued OpenAI and tested whether existing laws work for enforcing safety.
2) The discovery process would have unearthed real safety concerns, including internal warnings that were ignored.
3) And the process would have resulted in automatic organic slowing down because there would be more rigor on the safety side, the way it is supposed to work.
Colin Camerer retweeted
The problem won't be solved by denying international students entry. Because so many of them pay full revenue they have supported some of the expansion that has happened. It also makes the school worse in terms of its intellectual experience.
“The American logic is for Russia to continue supplying energy resources while earning less from them. Ukraine is guided by only one logic - survival”
The narrative now being pushed by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent is not just wrong - it is harmful.
On September 2, while explaining rising energy prices, Bessent placed the war with Iran and Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure side by side. According to him, Ukraine "has decided that they want to blow up Russian energy assets," and this is creating additional pressure on global prices. In this explanation, Ukraine is transformed from a victim of Russian aggression into one of the causes of a global problem. It reverses cause and effect.
The current energy crisis was caused by wars, not by Ukraine. The main shock came from the U.S. war with Iran. The fighting disrupted shipping, refinery operations, and oil supplies. According to estimates by the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy, at one point refinery activity in Asia and the Middle East fell by more than 7.5 million barrels per day compared with prewar levels. This hit the supply of diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel particularly hard.
The second source of instability is Russia’s war against Ukraine. It was Russia that made energy part of this war: energy revenues finance the Russian budget and the war, while Ukraine’s energy system has systematically remained one of the main targets of Russian attacks. Ukraine, in response, strikes the resources that allow Russia to continue the war. The causal chain therefore does not begin with Ukrainian self-defense. It begins with Russian aggression.
This is the key link Bessent removes from his explanation. His claim that Ukraine simply "decided" to attack Russian energy facilities creates the impression that Ukrainian strikes are an independent source of instability, unrelated to the war. In reality, it is much simpler: if Russia ends the war, the reason for Ukraine to attack Russia’s energy and military capabilities disappears.
At the same time, Bessent’s statement shows that Ukraine’s campaign against Russian oil refining has become a serious problem for Russia. And it is precisely the effectiveness of these strikes that has now created a problem for Washington. The United States wants to reduce Russia’s energy revenues, but it does not want Russian supply on the global market to decline. The American logic is for Russia to continue supplying energy resources while earning less from them. Ukraine is guided by only one logic - survival: Russia must lose the resources and capabilities it needs to continue the war.
This contradiction becomes especially acute because of the U.S. midterm elections on November 3. High gasoline prices directly hit the Trump administration. It therefore needs to explain to American voters why fuel is becoming more expensive.
But Bessent’s convenient explanation is also a very advantageous narrative for Moscow. Russia has long been convincing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that high prices and economic problems are caused not by Russia’s war, but by Western sanctions and Ukraine’s actions. The logic of this narrative is simple: the problem is supposedly not the aggression, but the attempts to resist it. Moscow can now point to the words of the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury as confirmation of this thesis.
The correct narrative is that Ukraine did not create the current energy crisis. Wars did. The U.S. war with Iran disrupted one of the world’s most important energy routes. Russia is waging war against Ukraine and using its energy economy to finance it. Ukraine is defending itself and striking the resources of the state that attacked it.
The way out of this crisis must also be sought in its causes. Bessent effectively acknowledges this logic when he talks about Iran: once the war ends, pressure on the energy market will ease. The same principle should apply to Russia. Once Russia’s war against Ukraine ends, the reason for Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure will disappear. If the goal is to stabilize the global energy market, the answer is to end wars, not to demand that Ukraine preserve the resources of the state waging war against it.
Definitely. Must be a blast for kids
🦐 How fun would it be to bring a Taiwanese style shrimp farming restaurant to LA.
My partners already think I’m an obsessed weirdo about this aquaculture project so why not. Will need to “research” in Taiwan by going shrimp fishing. Thanks for the idea @boundbyjourney!
Colin Camerer retweeted
About a year ago, a Princeton student named Kyler Zhou was sitting in traffic in New Jersey. At some point he was so bored that he put on a podcast with… me 🙃
It was my usual talk about the talent crisis. About the smartest kids of a generation going to work for McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, while the biggest problems in the world go unsolved, blablabla, you may have heard it by now ;)
What’s interesting is what happened next. As soon as Kyler got home, he emailed me and The School for Moral Ambition (the organization we started to get talented people working on the world's biggest problems).
Kyler wanted to bring this to Princeton.
Well, we told him no 😅. We had just launched our first university fellowship at Harvard, and there was no capacity for a second campus...
Kyler decided to ignore us. Three days into the semester, he launched the first* Moral Ambition Chapter at a university in the United States. In just a few days, more than 120 Princeton students signed up. In November of last year I visited, and the energy was simply AMAZING.
Since then, everything has been escalating. Students have started Moral Ambition Chapters at Brown, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Georgetown and 5 other campuses – often before we've heard of them.
Which brings me to today. After the launch of our Harvard Fellowship (8% of ALL Harvard juniors applied to the first cohort!), we're now also launching Moral Ambition Fellowships at Princeton, Brown, Vanderbilt and Stanford. The program is simple: twelve super talented students per campus, a $15,000 stipend, and a summer working full-time on the most important causes of our time, like lead poisoning or child poverty or ending factory farming or AI safety etc. – instead of polishing a boring corporate pitch deck.
It's just incredible to see how quickly this movement is growing. Every year, thousands of brilliant graduates are funneled into corporate careers that add little to the world. More and more of them are starting to walk the other way.
(For students: applications for Harvard, Princeton, Brown and Vanderbilt are open now. Stanford opens October 6. moralambition.org/fellowship…)
* Brown University claims that they were actually the first – I've decided to stay neutral in this quarrel 😅
With AI a journo should be able to fact check this in almost real time, just check whether the people who have said no, and the people have said yes are really in close races or not as Trump, almost surely lying, claims.