Maximum Truth Newsletter

In August, President Trump sent the National Guard to DC. He also invoked an emergency law to federalize control of DC’s police force for one month. Arrests, and federal prosecutions, also rose. Did that have an impact on crime? I haven’t seen anyone else analyze that, so I pulled up the numbers. Below, the gray lines show cumulative DC homicides in 2024. The blue lines show the same for 2025, up until August 11. The green lines show what happened after National Guard deployment on August 11.

I read claims that AI progress has slowed. The New Yorker wonders, “What if A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?” while the WSJ reports that “Large language models’ pace of improvement has moderated...” Through the data generated by my site, TrackingAI.org, I can quantify AI progress on intelligence.

I've been tracking AI IQs for about a year on my site TrackingAI.org, so I can see that AI is progressing rapidly. ChatGPT’s latest paid model, o3, was released this week. It scored a stunning 136 on the Norway Mensa IQ test: An IQ of 136 is in the top 1% for humans. In contrast, here's how the leading AIs scored on the exact same test just 11 months ago, in May: Incredible progress.

The AI world is exploding over news of the new Chinese AI “Deepseek”. The US stock market plunged Monday, likely on news that the US now has serious competition when it comes to AI. Deepseek has set some impressive performance benchmarks, and is also nearly tying ChatGPT-4o in the Chatbot arena, where users rank AI answers. But how does Deepseek do on measures of pure intelligence? I’ve now run the IQ tests. On my site TrackingAI.org, we regularly give AIs IQ tests.

There have been many twists and turns in the Presidential betting over the last month. I’ve been following them all closely, because I run ElectionBettingOdds.com, so I’ll share what I’ve observed: Here’s where the betting odds stand right now, along with the graph over the last month: Looking at the start of the graph, bettors bid up Trump’s odds for a while, front-running the polling changes.

Note: The counterpart to this essay, The Rational Case forHarris, is also available on the homepage at maximumtruth.org. The US election is coming up! We’re flooded with talking points, but I haven’t seen a singlearticle going through the issues and earnestly making a case for a candidate. Everyone thinks it’s “obvious” why their candidate is better. It’s not obvious! So today, I’m simultaneously posting the strongest possible case for Harris, and also for Trump.

Note: The counterpart to this essay, The Rational Case forTrump, is available on the homepage at maximumtruth.org. This is a guest post by Sean Culleton, a childhood friend, and a writer with a degree in Philosophy from Boston University. You can follow his work at seanculleton.com or subscribe to . I am posting his essay unedited and as-is, in terms of editorial content.

The conventional wisdom is “everyone should vote. Do your civic duty!” But I’m in enough contrarian circles that I also hear “I don’t vote, because voting is irrational. A single vote never determines an election.” Are the critics right? Before researching this post, I assumed that they were right about a single vote being irrelevant for Presidential elections.

Worried about AI taking over the world? You probably should be. That’s my new takeaway after testing OpenAI’s new model, “o1” this morning. It blows all other AIs out of the water on the Norway Mensa IQ test: I had become blasé about AI progress after my initial tests in February, because there was approximately zero IQ improvement since then. This week, that all changed. Specifically, o1 got 25 out of 35 IQ questions correct, far above what most humans get.

While the betting odds are the best single way to predict of what will happen in the election, I’m fascinated enough by politics that I also dig into the polling. From following it for years, I’m well aware that there are persistent polling biases in certain states. But which states? How much? For which party? So, I graphed it out. The yellow bars below show the current polling average in each state, where above zero means Trump leads, and below zero means Harris leads.