@dfstone
Behavioral economist at Bowdoin College. Interested in beliefs, sports, media, polarization, socially responsible capitalism. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047500/undue-hate/ https://www.bowdoin.edu/profiles/faculty/dstone/index.html
Two things can be true: we can be *both* introspective about ways we can improve and defiant against authoritarianism, lawlessness, corruption, brutality, and illiberalism
www.chronicle.com/article/the-...
When you collect data online, are the results from humans or AI? In a project led by Booth PhD student Grace Zhang, we estimate the prevalence of AI agents on commonly used survey platforms:
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧵
Re Platner - and politics in general - from Ron Currie 👏
archive.is/JhWAH
Highly recommend @kylesaunders.bsky.social on why AI is so unsettling to higher ed - one of the best pieces I have read on this issue:
"[U]niversities don’t merely teach. Universities certify, sort, and signal. And AI interferes with all three at once."
kylesaunders.substack.com/p/why-higher...
AI's potential to extend human judgment and enable new tasks is transformative yet underexploited. This paper defines pro-worker AI and discusses how to build it, from Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson www.nber.org/papers/w34854
fishing for it...
My tariff story
Ordered a $250 C trumpet from German co Thomann for my kid
1 day later, got hit with $101 'extra import fee' from UPS
Paid it since I'd already paid for the trumpet...
So: I'm out extra $101, and trade deficit is definitely unchanged 🙃🙃
www.thomannmusic.com/trumpets.html
I regularly see people wondering how it's possible that there are so many musicians and writers and film makers and artists from a tiny nation like Iceland.
And the answer is really simple: State funding for art education and artists. I literally get a salary from the government to write books.
Lost my phone in London, with four credit cards and £150 cash in the case. Returned to me within 21 minutes. This hellhole of a city eh.
"The authoritarian minority that has seized control of the GOP scarcely worries about shifts in public opinion from outside its base. They are protected by the zero-sum, binary choice inevitable in a two-party system." substack.com/home/post/p-...
(Maybe/probably there are some non-obvious results in the paper - if so please come up with a better title)
Breaking news 🙃
Yesterday morning kids were sent running from their bus stop in panic because ICE showed up. This guy at today’s ICE Out of Lindenwold protest is a must watch 😭. @maddow.bsky.social
NEW: Hundreds of judges around the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since October that President Donald Trump’s administration is detaining immigrants unlawfully, a Reuters review of court records found.
The government keeps doing it nonetheless.
www.reuters.com/legal/govern...
Is Immigration Good for Health? The Effect of Immigration on Older Adult Mortality in the United States David C. Grabowski, Jonathan Gruber, Brian E. McGarry #34791 Abstract: We measure the impact of increased immigration on mortality among elderly Americans, who rely on the immigrant-intensive health and long-term care sectors. Using a shift-share approach we find a strong impact of immigration on the size of the immigrant care workforce: admitting 1,000 new immigrants would lead to 142 new foreign healthcare workers, without evidence of crowd out of native health care workers. We also find striking effects on mortality: a 25% increase in the steady state flow of immigrants to the US would result in 5,000 fewer deaths nationwide. We identify reduced use of nursing homes as a key mechanism driving this result
Immigrants save Americans' lives: "...a 25% increase in the steady state flow of immigrants to the US would result in 5,000 fewer deaths nationwide. We identify reduced use of nursing homes as a key mechanism driving this result."
www.nber.org/papers/w34791
substack.com/@abio/note/c...?
🥴
White people are putting Mexican flag stickers on their cars to get pulled over and waste ICE's time.
They call it "ICE fishing."
I used it in two classes last semester, went great 👍👍
www.chronicle.com/article/can-...
Data on student responses
www.swaybeta.ai/research/stu...
This is good
It's hard to admit you're wrong; harder when you've been wrong longer
If you want people to do it, make them confident you won't make them feel bad about it
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wQh...
"In other words, when the good leave and the bad don’t, the institution rots."
Don't resign, fight from the inside
marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo...
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
White House spokeswoman mocks people asking about this:
“uM, eXCuSe mE??? iS tHAt DiGiTAlLy AlTeReD?!?!?!?!?!”
"Enhanced reasoning emerges not from extended computation alone, but from multi-agent [LLM] interactions - a society of thought - which enables diversification and debate among internal cognitive perspectives characterized by distinct personality traits and domain expertise"
arxiv.org/abs/2601.10825
