Kyle Saunders

When College Coaches Act Like Employers It’s (Still) All Coming Back to Game Theory, Again

College sports keeps drifting toward an employment model while insisting it doesn’t want one.

Fines, discipline, eligibility rules, NIL, enforcement — all of it points the same way.

Deion isn’t the (only) point.

kylesaunders.substack.com/p/when-colle...

Objective numeracy exacerbates framing effects from decision-making under political risk - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Objective numeracy exacerbates framing effects from decision-making under political risk

We probably ought to mention our other government shutdown paper too, eh? (god I am so bad at this...)

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our BPP paper on government shutdowns, need for chaos, and prospect theory (w/ Erin Fitz, @stecula.bsky.social, Matt Hitt, and me). Here's the abstract and link for "Mindset to Gain? Framing Effects, Need for Chaos, and the Limits of 'Burning It All Down'." www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Propaganda is normal. Authoritarianism is what happens when it stops being contestable.
When no institution is trusted to referee disputes, every claim looks like a “psyop.”
kylesaunders.substack.com/p/propaganda...

Deion’s Colorado Player Fines Push College Employee Issue to the Fore Deion Sanders intends to monetarily fine Colorado players who miss practices and other infractions. From a legal standpoint, that's not a great idea.

Deion Sanders' monetary fine schedule for Colorado football players is like a fact pattern on a sports law final exam. Here's my @sportico.bsky.social take on why the schedule, which resembles the one for NFL players (except that one is bargained), could invite legal problems:

To me artificial intelligence feels like the political story of the next decade (even though, and let's be honest, many don't want it to be).
That's why I did this deep dive, putting on my political scientist hat to map the political dimensions of these fast changes. substack.com/home/post/p-...

AI isn’t going to become political because of prompts or AGI debates, it’s going to become political because it hits jobs, power grids, zoning boards, & institutional legitimacy all at once and faster than institutions can adapt.

My piece on AI politics: kylesaunders.substack.com/p/artificial...

I thought I'd better re-up this piece today--the number of reads and the level of engagement on this post has been really heartening. Thanks for your time.

Colorado is testing what happens when party competition weakens asymmetrically. When opposition collapses, politics moves inside the dominant party. My piece (after @smotus.bsky.social's excellent piece) CO's progressive primaries, Trump & accountability: kylesaunders.substack.com/p/colorado-a...

You don't want to watch. All caveats about what we don't know during a breaking news event, but it looks very very very bad.

Community colleges are one of the few parts of the system that still plausibly lower risk and expand access. The problem is less CCs and more whether the transfer and signaling pathways actually work as advertised.

I’m a first-gen college grad. The old higher ed model worked for me.

That’s why it hurts to say: the value proposition is breaking & we gotta fix it.

I argue universities are being unbundled & AI accelerates this process leading to further bifurcation.

kylesaunders.substack.com/p/the-collap...

Higher ed is being unbundled: knowledge is cheap, credentials proliferate, networks are positional, and four years of “time to mature” is now a luxury good. Universities must explain what they uniquely sell-and if they don't-the value proposition collapses.
kylesaunders.substack.com/p/the-collap...

The stress test is whether academia stays upstream in a sustainable way, or becomes just one input among many in a platform-mediated knowledge ecosystem. (fin)

But production and authority can decouple. AI can depend on universities upstream while users stop deferring to them downstream as "validators of truth." (2)

Good point. Right now AI is parasitic on academic knowledge production. If universities stopped producing research, AI would decay into remix and noise pretty fast. (1)

Best thing I've read on higher ed in years. Years. Rarely do you see systems thinking and institutional analysis this sharp.

Oh jeesh, that’s very kind Cullen. Thank you.

The sooner we actually come to grips with this, the better.

Higher ed is being unbundled: knowledge is cheap, credentials proliferate, networks are positional, and four years of “time to mature” is now a luxury good. Universities must explain what they uniquely sell-and if they don't-the value proposition collapses.
kylesaunders.substack.com/p/the-collap...

Thanks @troycoverdale.bsky.social, very kind.

(I wish I could figure out how to get more folks to understand all this...if you have any ideas for how I could spread this around more, let me know.)

Everyone in college athletics wants rules.
No one wants to enforce them first.
The real problem isn’t chaos. It’s a first-mover problem under legal risk.

A game-theoretic look at NIL, the transfer portal, and why enforcement keeps getting deferred.

kylesaunders.substack.com/p/enforcemen...

2/ I’m wary of “engineering fixes,” though. Identity isn’t a switch, but it sure is an exploit.
Better, but much more difficult, lever: change incentives and institutions so agreement on process comes before agreement on outcomes.

1/ Problem is that money at the extremes matters a lot, polarization is heavily subsidized. Outrage and moral certainty pay better than uncertainty. (e.g., this here site)...

Identity and motivated reasoning are the “weak” nuclear force of politics.

Easy to overlook. Operating at small scales.

But under the right conditions, they quietly shape belief, evidence, and why disagreement hardens instead of resolving.

New piece 👇

kylesaunders.substack.com/p/the-weak-n...

7/ If there’s a way forward, it isn’t a return to naïve objectivity or postmodern irony. It’s a slow, fragile, metamodern project of rebuilding how we know together.
Essay here: 🔗 open.substack.com/pub/kylesaun...

6/ AI doesn’t fix this. In fact, it inherits it. In a broken epistemic environment, AI becomes a high-speed normalizer—not a truth machine.

5/ Postmodern critique matters here—not because it’s “wrong,” but because when institutionalized without adjudication, it dissolves error correction.

4/ Using Alvin Gouldner, I argue that critique survived institutionally when prediction failed—especially as ideas moved from movements into universities and bureaucracies.