Spencer Starr's an Intellectual Superstarr

13/05/2026

Earlier today, I followed all of the steps laid out in super brief YouTube video (a vertical short) tutorial on how to transfer your chat history from ChatGPT to Claude, and fortunately and surprisingly, it worked (I already posted a link to that YouTube tutorial on my feed earlier, but I'll repost a link to it in the comments on this post as well).

The neat part that I wasn't expecting was that at the end of the process, Claude gives you a concise summary of what it learned about you from doing this, and I was pleasantly surprised by what it said about me.

Here is roughly 80% of what Claude said it learned about me from reading my ChatGPT chat history:
Top of mind
Spencer has been engaged in a range of intellectually curious, research-oriented conversations spanning economics, housing policy, political science, and film. Recent topics include macroeconomics (monetary aggregates, M1/M2, FRED data), U.S. county-level income and wealth rankings, LA County housing stock and building codes in relation to wildfire rebuilds, and James Bond film plot details. Spencer also recently drafted and shared a Facebook post arguing that statistical literacy above a certain threshold is a necessary condition for consistent evidence-updating, inviting scored evaluations and editorial feedback from Claude.

Brief history
Recent months
Spencer has shown a consistent pattern of bringing real-world claims — often from social media or informal discourse — to Claude for scored, evidence-based evaluation. Examples include a macroeconomics Facebook comment dismissing M1's role in inflation (scored ~8/100), a Bing/Copilot response on congressional majority history (rated 4/10), and a statistical literacy argument Spencer authored (rated ~75/100).

Spencer demonstrated strong independent econometric intuition, correctly identifying that the Fed's May 2020 redefinition of M1 introduced a structural break creating non-stationarity in FRED's M1SL series before asking Claude to confirm. Spencer also showed interest in novel ML evaluation metrics, specifically designing a hallucination-penalizing classification metric combining False Positive Rate and False Discovery Rate as an additive penalty term to supplement F1 and accuracy in LLM training signals. Spencer frequently uses LLMs to fact-check their own work. Spencer has expressed a strong preference for epistemic honesty, sourced responses, and explicit acknowledgment of uncertainty — consistently flagging concern about hallucination across multiple conversations.

Earlier context
Spencer explored the "filtering" concept in housing economics (how new luxury units gradually become accessible to lower-income renters), and asked about the distinction between republic and representative democracy, in both cases either anticipating the answer before Claude confirmed it or requesting explicit epistemic care. Spencer also asked Claude to verify U.S. terrorism vs. homicide vs. total death statistics, again with explicit instructions to avoid hallucination and cite evidence.

Other instructions
• Spencer prefers exports and structured data in clearly separated categories and ordered formats when requested.
• Preserve Spencer's words verbatim where possible, especially for instructions and preferences.
• Spencer prefers technical discussions to use precise terminology and domain-specific language where appropriate.
• Spencer's primary analysis tools are R, MySQL, Excel, Tableau, and Power BI, with occasional Python usage.

13/05/2026

I am a moron, I can barely read. It was extraordinarily difficult and stressful for me to pass 3 semesters of calculus in college and I couldn't hack it as a math major because I failed all of my upper division courses, thinking is hard for me and gives me headaches when I do it too intensely for too long.

And yet, by now, I am quite confident that I am smarter and more reasonable than 80 or 90% of the popular commentators and podcasters of the day. This does not make me feel good either, it's terrifying. I'm an unknown and unemployed loser, these people are being listened to by millions and yet they aren't as good at reasoning their way through an argument as some random du***ss.

There are tens of millions of Americans who are way more reasonable and analytically skilled than I am. But that does not seem to be what the consumers of long form content are demanding. Some very influential voices right now are downright stupid, but the problem with being stupid is that you often don't know enough to even realize you are stupid, and THAT is dangerous.

07/05/2026

Bravo!! Quite possibly the best podcast episode of the year so (for any podcast) far imho

The Michael Shermer Show # 583 In this episode, Michael Shermer walks through the core ideas behind his new book Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why I...

07/05/2026

Skeptical empiricism, reasonableness, rigorous tand/or critical thinking, whatever you want to call it or them, is much less a set of concepts that one can learn and more of a set of skills that one must practice repeatedly, deliberately, and diligently in order to get good at and get in the habit of doing.

06/05/2026

If the numbers behind this graph are even remotely accurate (I downloaded it from a Substack article written by Scott Alexander, so I presume that they probably are), then in many ways, they recent concerns about increasing crime rates in general and violent crime in particular are warranted, but often overblown and painfully in need of historical context like this.

Crime rates even in 2022 at their recent local maximum were NOTHING like crime rates from the 70s until the early 90s. But they also were really way higher, sometimes more than double, what they were in 2018, and that is bad and deserves our concern.

05/05/2026

Cities with perpetually high violent crime rates should statutorally force incoming mayors to live in an apartment right in the middle of their highest crime zip code.

Same for high crime counties and their district attorneys. Put some skin in the game.

10/04/2026

I have lost all interest in and even patience for members of political tribe A explaining to each other why the members of political tribe C REALLY believe what they believe.

People cannot read other people's minds, so cut it out.

10/04/2026

Last summer, probably during July, I did something stupid, I opened up my X app, and in a comment under a tweet, I saw somebody say something about how important it is for us to "deport 20 million illegals."

I had no idea how many illegal aliens were in the US at the time, so I asked both Grok and ChatGPT to estimate a 99% interval of the true number of illegal aliens in the US based on all available recent estimates. If memory serves me, both of their 99% confidence intervals ranged from around 9 million at the low end to 17 million at the high end.

That means there is a 99% chance that the real figure is somewhere between those two numbers. Once I got the answer, I asked the guy where he got his 20 million figure from and he said those published estimates are probably wrong. I agreed, that's why I asked ChatGPT and Grok to calculate a confidence interval based on several different prominent published estimates and why I asked for a 99% CI rather than the more common 95% CI.

I asked him why he thinks the true number is 3 million above the top of the very wide range I produced. He didn't have a good answer, so he said it doesn't even matter what the real number is exactly. This part was quite puzzling to me, if the precise number doesn't matter, then why exaggerate it??

Since then, I have seen people say 20 million, 30 million, 50 million, and 100 million many times online, and each time I ask them the same question. I've never gotten a source back after asking this question dozens of times now. What's strange to me is that 9 - 17 million already is a lot of people, so I genuinely don't understand the need to exaggerate it in a cartoonish way.

09/04/2026

Tons of really important factual information in this video, I learned a lot from it!

Don't comfort yourself with wishful thinking that millionaires and billionaires could take the entire burden of the deficit off our hands. ---https://reason....

09/04/2026

Eye opening, wow!

The nation's leading scholar of mass shootings explains how media coverage of horrific events such as El Paso and Dayton stoke unwarranted fear and anxiety.