Peanut butter contains no peas, no nuts, and no butter

Everyone thinking about becoming a professor should read this nymag.com/intelligence...

Having a good ol' fashioned Manhattan BBQ

We've all been there... 🫂

Today's date, 9/25/2025, is probably the last date of our lifetime where the month, day, and year are all square numbers 😱 The next time this will happen is on 1/1/2116.

In which I identify all of the countries in Africa

I just overheard a guy saying "I don't love how you worded that." I don't love how he worded that. Should I tell him?

It is fucked up what they did to the headphone jack

I just saw a V train in NYC which is interesting because there is no V train in NYC 🤔

Assistant/Associate Professor in Strategy/Entrepreneurship & AI, Management @ Stony Brook University (posting for a friend) apply.interfolio.com/173991

My family and I are always wondering about why places in the city go out of business. Take Bareburger. Always a line. All the locations. Then it started getting easier to get a table. Then it was mostly empty. Then one by one they closed. Who cannot wonder why? The need for narrative is so strong.

Many years ago I published a comedic essay in McSweeney's that retold the Iran-Contra affair in the style of an 80s teen angst movie. It was full of absurdities like Oliver North being Fawn Hall being a couple. They just got married in real life! www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/u...

My kid just started at a new school and said "I'm going to need a permutation lock for gym" 👍

Oh. So a donut?

Job alert at Microsoft 🚨 Senior Director, Chief Economist - AI for Good Lab jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/jo...

Restored a metal yardstick today

Was visiting my old neighborhood and came across one of my favorite intersections: West 4th Street and West 11th Street intersecting as if they weren't violating the laws of nature

one of my favorite (both actually and in quotation marks) math answers in the world. Speaking of platonic truths, beautiful theories and whatnot

In @natrevpsychol.nature.com, Team Scientists @szaszibarnabas.bsky.social, @dggoldst.bsky.social & @dilipsoman.bsky.social and Susan Michie argue that improving how we study nudges—through better design, collaboration, and open science—can help us learn when and where they’re most effective.

So tariffs i) decrease your net worth through stock market declines ii) decrease your purchasing power through price increases iii) increase your retirement age because of i and ii

I will not take your survey for a chance at a gift card but if you give me a gift card I will take your survey with some probability

European countries that subtitle rather than dub English-language TV content have better English skills. This paper argues the effect is causal and large: www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo...

New paper just dropped: Szaszi, Barnabas, Daniel G. Goldstein, Dilip Soman, Susan Michie. (2025). Generalizability of Choice Architecture Interventions. Nature Reviews Psychology. Thanks to @szaszibarnabas.bsky.social for doing the lion's share! www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Do you have strong programming skills but need research experience doing meaningful & exciting CSS projects before heading off to a top graduate school for computational social science PhD? Apply now to predoc with me, @dggoldst.bsky.social @jakehofman.bsky.social www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

This is a terrible outcome. In my research, I've shown the subscription cancellation problem is big The click-to-cancel rule was poised to make meaningful progress on this problem Now we're back to the sludge The result will be less competition, higher prices, and lower quality.

"To understand America today, study the zero-sum mindset." My piece in @theeconomistevents.bsky.social this week on how zero-sum thinking arises and why it matters so much for policy and politics. Based on our research at the Social Economics Lab. www.economist.com/by-invitatio...

The Society for Judgment and Decision Making is pleased to announce that the latest newsletter is ready for download: sjdm.org/newsletters/ This issue contains announcements, conferences, jobs, and a new section entitled HotFresh Research News! www.decisionsciencenews.com?p=7220

move slow and fix things

Fantastic that this will be in Montreal! Congrats to our colleague Su Lin Blodgett!

Spanish Class Appropriate Joke Juan: Do bears get tired? Pilar: They get oso tired

11yo daughter: What's a talk show? Me: One of those TV shows where someone at a desk interviews a guest sitting next to them 11yo: So like a visual podcast?

To put that into perspective that's more than half the size of California

Is Python going to become vastly more popular than R for statistics and data science? Has it already?

I love how these two flights only promise to get you *somewhere* in Northwest Arkansas

And they say you can't have an academic lifestyle outside the academy

11 yo daughter: Dad Me: What? Her: It makes sense that Rush would have a fast drummer

Kind of strange that an octopus is the takoyaki chef

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer and people you are indifferent to closer than your friends but not as close as your enemies

You can see parts of academia as a racket. You can see all of academia as a racket. I invite you to join me in seeing everything as a racket.

Academia will form these little pockets -- people whose theorizing is outrageous & supported by methods outdated since the 90s -- but once it reaches a critical size those people just review each others papers & grants, form societies, hand out awards etc, like a self-contained parallel society.

Benson Boone performed on the street just outside my office today

Found this on the sidewalk, dusted it off, and it still works! How to describe it? It's kind of like a static LLM that asks you the questions instead of the other way around.

I created a Substack! for now it's mainly a place I post lightly edited versions of my long threads. The next post will be an explainer of @Natkhov and myself's paper on the introduction of serfdom in Russia in response to nomadic slave raids. Sign up here andreamatranga.substack.com

Jury duty so partaking in a local lunch

Interesting Paper Out: The power of numbers in natural hazard communication www.tandfonline.com/doi/ref/10.1...

Behavioral Science Researcher job at Fidelity jobs.fidelity.com/en/jobs/2111...

🚨The Agentic Economy🚨 new paper w/ 9 co-authors: what happens to economy with expanded agent use for both consumers & businesses? The architecture of agentic communication will determine extent to which generative AI democratizes (or restricts) access to economic opportunity arxiv.org/abs/2505.15799

A lot of my money-making ideas presuppose the existence of a time machine

i fell in love with autocorrect because it completes me