#AcademicRunPlaylist - 9/16/25

Author

Ben Waber
September 16, 2025

Two bright orange Chicken of the Woods mushrooms growing on a log on the forest floor, which is strewn with pine needles, dead leaves, and sticks. A few green plants are also growing close to the ground.

I finally found some good Chicken of the Woods mushrooms (to be eaten tomorrow), and while gathering my spoils I listened to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was the first day of the Institute for Science and Ethics (IWE) sustainable AI conference, with notable talks by Benedetta Brevini (the values of an artificial society) and Lynn Kaack (greenhouse gas emissions effects of AI) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ8JjvSJDLU

Next was an excellent discussion with Miguel Sousa Ferro on private enforcement of competition law in EU member states at the Digital Markets Research Hub https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLAwX0J2L0I

Next was a great panel on recent US labor news at the Power At Work with Seth Harris, Mel Buer, Andrew Ziaja, and Alexandra Martinez https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lROoh1Je-RA

Next was a slate of talks on platform competition, regulation, and antitrust at The Strategic Management Society with Chiara Farronato, Tobias Kretschmer, Joost Rietveld, Ke Rong, and Maggie Zhou https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A5Tza3J7Xc

Next was a fantastic conversation with Aditi Raghunathan on the need to rethink LLM pre-training on the TWIML podcast. Raghunathan made the extremely important point that optimizing models to out of the box perform higher on vanity benchmarks appears to perform worse in fine tuning (which is frankly what people should be using them for anyway). Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Iit9as9hFA