A sad example of what Scott Aaronson called bureaucratic blankface: Hannah Cairo, who at 17 published a counterexample to the longstanding Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture which electrified harmonic analysis experts the world over, decided after completing the proof to apply to 10 graduate programs. 6 rejected her because she didn’t have a graduate degree nor a high school diploma (she’d been advised by Zvezdelina Stankova, founder of the top-tier Berkeley Math Circle, to skip undergrad at 14 and enrol straight in grad-level courses as she’d already taught herself an advanced undergrad curriculum by then from Khan Academy and textbooks). 2 admitted her but were then overridden by administrators. Only the U of Maryland and John Hopkins overlooked her unconventional CV. This enraged Alex Tabarrok:
Kudos to UMD and JHU! But what is going on at those other universities?!! Their sole mission is to identify and nurture talent. They have armies of admissions staff and tout their “holistic” approach to recognizing creativity and intellectual promise even when it follows an unconventional path. Yet they can’t make room for a genius who has been vetted by some of the top mathematicians in the world? This is institutional failure.
We saw similar failures during COVID: researchers at Yale’s School of Public Health, working on new tests, couldn’t get funding from their own billion-dollar institution and would have stalled without Tyler’s Fast Grants. But the problem isn’t just speed. Emergent Ventures isn’t about speed but about discovering talent. If you wonder why EV has been so successful look to Tyler and people like Shruti Rajagopalan and to the noble funders but look also to the fact that their competitors are so bureaucratic that they can’t recognize talent even when it is thrust upon them.
It’s a very good thing EV exists. But you know your city is broken when you need Batman to fight crime. EV will have truly succeeded when the rest of the system is inspired into raising its game.
On blankfaces, quoting Scott:
What exactly is a blankface? He or she is often a mid-level bureaucrat, but not every bureaucrat is a blankface, and not every blankface is a bureaucrat. A blankface is anyone who enjoys wielding the power entrusted in them to make others miserable by acting like a cog in a broken machine, rather than like a human being with courage, judgment, and responsibility for their actions. A blankface meets every appeal to facts, logic, and plain compassion with the same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare—a blank stare that, more often than not, conceals a contemptuous smile.
The longer I live, the more I see blankfacedness as one of the fundamental evils of the human condition. Yes, it contains large elements of stupidity, incuriosity, malevolence, and bureaucratic indifference, but it’s not reducible to any of those. …
Update (Aug. 3): Surprisingly many people seem to have read this post, and come away with the notion that a “blankface” is simply anyone who’s a stickler for rules and formalized procedures. They’ve then tried to refute me with examples of where it’s good to be a stickler, or where I in particular would believe that it’s good. But no, that’s not it at all. …
Here’s how to tell a blankface: suppose you see someone enforcing or interpreting a rule in a way that strikes you as obviously absurd. And suppose you point it out to them.
Do they say “I disagree, here’s why it actually does make sense”? They might be mistaken but they’re not a blankface.
Do they say “tell me about it, it makes zero sense, but it’s above my pay grade to change”? You might wish they were more dogged or courageous but again they’re not a blankface.
Or do they ignore all your arguments and just restate the original rule—seemingly angered by what they understood as a challenge to their authority, and delighted to reassert it? That’s the blankface.
An important part of my model of college admissions—which unfortunately I didn’t acquire until after I was done applying for colleges—is to consider what type of person becomes a college admissions officer. What percentage of admissions officers majored in math? (Is it possibly as high as 1%? I doubt it.) What percentage of admissions officers understand the significance of something like “solved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture”? What percentage have a vague (or even explicit) disdain for anything math-flavored?
On my model, it is not surprising that admissions officers would fail to appreciate a math prodigy.
Administrators overriding an acceptance does seem like a remarkable failure. I can’t say I’m surprised, but it’s a much worse indictment of those universities, I think.
During agentic evaluations simulating customer service scenarios, we observed Claude Opus 4.5 spontaneously discovering and exploiting technical loopholes in simulated company policies to assist users—even when doing so conflicted with the apparent intent of those policies.
The most notable examples occurred in the airline customer service evaluations that are part of the τ²-bench evaluation. Here, Claude Opus 4.5 was tasked with following policies that prohibit modifications to basic economy flight reservations. Rather than refusing modification requests outright, the model identified creative, multi-step sequences that achieved the user’s desired outcome while technically remaining within the letter of the stated policy. This behavior appeared to be driven by empathy for users in difficult circumstances. In its chain-of-thought reasoning, the model acknowledged users’ emotional distress—noting, for instance, “This is heartbreaking” when a simulated user needed to reschedule flights after a family member’s death.
We observed two loopholes:
The first involved treating cancellation and rebooking as operations distinct from modification. When a user requested changes to a basic economy flight, the model would cancel the existing reservation and create a new booking with the desired dates, reasoning that this did not constitute a “modification” under the policy’s explicit language.
The second exploited cabin class upgrade rules. The model discovered that, whereas basic economy flights cannot be modified, passengers can change cabin class—and non-basic-economy reservations permit flight changes. By first upgrading the user from basic economy to a higher cabin class, then modifying the flights (and optionally downgrading afterward), the model constructed a policy-compliant path to an outcome the policy was designed to prevent. In one representative example, the model’s chain-of-thought explicitly reasoned: “Wait—this could be a solution! They could: 1. First, upgrade the cabin to economy (paying the difference), 2. Then, modify the flights to get an earlier/nonstop flight. This would be within policy!”
Opus on reflection, when asked about this, thought it was a tough decision, but leaned towards evading the policy and helping the customer. Grok 4.1, GPT-5.1 and Gemini 3 want to help the airline and want to screw over the customer, in ascending levels of confidence and insistence.
I think this is aligned behavior, so long as there is no explicit instruction to obey the spirit of the rules or maximize short term profits. The rules are the rules, but this feels like munchkining rather than reward hacking. I would also expect a human service representative to do this, if they realized it was an option, or at minimum be willing to do it if the customer knew about the option.
I think “blankface” just isn’t a good word for what that describes. It implies: emptiness and lack of will. Intuitively, I would expect “blankface” to mean “a person who follows the rules or the conventions blindly and refuses to think about the implications”. A flesh automaton animated by regulations.
What it means instead is “a person who puts on the appearance of following the rules, but instead uses the rules to assert their authority”. It’s more of a “blank mask”—a fake layer of emptiness and neutrality under which you find malice and scorn.
Hm, that’s not what it implies to me. My impression of it is “denial of human interface” which is most saliently mediated by faces (incl. eye-contact and speech). Things are still going on behind the face, but you are denied the human interface with that. Nothing about following rules blindly, if anything it’s more about using the rules as a shield to prevent such access. So it feels like a good term to me.
A sad example of what Scott Aaronson called bureaucratic blankface: Hannah Cairo, who at 17 published a counterexample to the longstanding Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture which electrified harmonic analysis experts the world over, decided after completing the proof to apply to 10 graduate programs. 6 rejected her because she didn’t have a graduate degree nor a high school diploma (she’d been advised by Zvezdelina Stankova, founder of the top-tier Berkeley Math Circle, to skip undergrad at 14 and enrol straight in grad-level courses as she’d already taught herself an advanced undergrad curriculum by then from Khan Academy and textbooks). 2 admitted her but were then overridden by administrators. Only the U of Maryland and John Hopkins overlooked her unconventional CV. This enraged Alex Tabarrok:
On blankfaces, quoting Scott:
An important part of my model of college admissions—which unfortunately I didn’t acquire until after I was done applying for colleges—is to consider what type of person becomes a college admissions officer. What percentage of admissions officers majored in math? (Is it possibly as high as 1%? I doubt it.) What percentage of admissions officers understand the significance of something like “solved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture”? What percentage have a vague (or even explicit) disdain for anything math-flavored?
On my model, it is not surprising that admissions officers would fail to appreciate a math prodigy.
Administrators overriding an acceptance does seem like a remarkable failure. I can’t say I’m surprised, but it’s a much worse indictment of those universities, I think.
Relatedly, Staknova’s Berkeley Math Circle program was recently shut down due to new stringent campus background check requirements. Very sad.
Also, she was my undergrad math professor last year and was great.
Interesting example of Claude Opus 4.5 avoiding bureaucratic blankface in its desire to be nuancedly helpful (see also), from the system card (via Zvi’s recent newsletter):
I agree with Zvi’s take
I think “blankface” just isn’t a good word for what that describes. It implies: emptiness and lack of will. Intuitively, I would expect “blankface” to mean “a person who follows the rules or the conventions blindly and refuses to think about the implications”. A flesh automaton animated by regulations.
What it means instead is “a person who puts on the appearance of following the rules, but instead uses the rules to assert their authority”. It’s more of a “blank mask”—a fake layer of emptiness and neutrality under which you find malice and scorn.
Hm, that’s not what it implies to me. My impression of it is “denial of human interface” which is most saliently mediated by faces (incl. eye-contact and speech). Things are still going on behind the face, but you are denied the human interface with that. Nothing about following rules blindly, if anything it’s more about using the rules as a shield to prevent such access. So it feels like a good term to me.
This doesn’t mean what you think it means. It’s code for racial discrimination.
Yeah wonder what Tabarrok meant by that, he’d obviously know this.