i have been playing the powered cube on Arena, and my takeaways: 1. i don't understand why but i am much worse at cube than any other format. i'm so bad. this has always been true. 2. but basically free, and still pretty fun 3. unless there's an oko or a psychic frog on board. awful cards.

A big personal and professional change coming for me. I've accepted a professor position in the School of Business and Creative Industries at the University of the Sunshine Coast which means that next year (visa willing), the family and I will be heading to Australia.

My elevator arrived looking like this. Welp I guess we all have to die someday

the garfield meme but it says "you are not immune to ragebait misinfo"

yknow sometimes when you're doing a peer review and you know immediately upon reading the abstract that it's gonna be a reject but you still have to spend time reading the rest of the paper and justifying it

I have no particular reason to think it's wrong, and I do teach it myself, but "peacock feathers are an example of costly signaling" has the flavor of something that turns out to actually not be true but we keep using it because it's such a good example. I should find an ornithologist or something

Look if you don't want me to share the code you can't give me a code like this

I got another question on Lateral! This one is straight from my principles of microeconomics slides haha

well that's unexpected

I am looking at some API documentation which has the exact call you want written in Python, JS, etc... and also an "AI prompt" tab which is just an AI prompt that says "write me requests code in Python...", the correct response for which would be the exact code that's already in the other tabs

Hell yeah the class action payment came through. I'm gonna be rolling in it

A variant of the two-girl problem is making the rounds these days and I am unable to not click on the comments sections every time. I'll say that I definitely prefer this (an actual interesting question) vs. pointless PEMDAS "math" internet arguments. But man people love being confidently wrong.

Lateral used one of my submission questions! Also lol I am apparently two months behind on my podcasts youtu.be/CiSJ2enIkg4?...

my most seinfeld-like behavior is that when i schedule-send an email i will schedule it for like 10:34am instead of 10am so it doesn't look like i scheduled it

i'm doing one of those HR video training courses. this one's on hazing. the woman who is doing the voiceover has a natural speaking cadence that makes it sound like she secretly thinks the hazing activities she's describing are actually pretty funny

New The Effect materials today: introductions to basic coding and data manipulation in R, Stata, and Python. Get the wheels turning on using these languages with data with these intro pages and exercises: nickchk.com/Coding%20and... nickchk.com/Coding%20and... nickchk.com/Coding%20and...

it's wild how difficult it is to make a graph in excel. like this is supposed to be easy mode right?

Nearly 600 economists, Nobel Laureates sign open letter supporting due process for Lisa Cook and Federal Reserve independence for the good of our economy and democracy. Great work from @tderyugina.bsky.social organizing such a quick response. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

at my house🎶everybody's got covid inside, except for me and my baby🎶https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyV3zCq1OHM

I am in a cafe and a few tables away is a pair of people, one of whom is giving astrology-based therapy to the other to help them cope with their anxiety related to using AWS s3 buckets

I've stumbled upon an odd data resource. The FCC "Mapping Broadband Health in America" tool purports to be about mapping broadband internet access, but actually is the easiest source I've ever found for linking state-level averages across a zillion different topics c2h.fcc.gov/broadband-he...

i like to explore the errors and failure cases of LLMs as much as the next guy, but if you're gonna be serious about assessing whether this stuff is useful you really can't ignore that there are a ton of cases where 40-50% as good for 1% of the cost (or even 10-20% with QA) is extremely exciting

I am genuinely shocked how robust this lil puzzle is. GPT-5 thinks for 5 mins and then fails it as well.

So we're gonna have to figure out what is the best "amount of light in nighttime satellite photos"-level economic activity indicator is for a rich country right? None of the options are good.

I have joined an journal editorial board for the first time I have sent 15 requests to review the first paper I'm handling and every single one has been ignored or turned down

took the kids to the grocery store today in the hand-pull wagon and kept getting static shocked by the handle. finally i figured out i'd left one of the wheel brakes on which i think means i accidentally created a van de graaff generator and then sat my kids in it

it JUST now occurred to me that the R "rio" package for reading and saving files is called that because it's an R package for doing (i)n/(o)ut

I got into an conversation at a party with Dr. Demento about 90s queercore punk and we argued about whether the song Groovy Underwear was by Pansy Division or someone else

I got an exciting box in the mail today! Looks like The Effect: Second Edition is live! I've updated the website as well, so you can check out the changes and the new Partial Identification chapter (+ a new mini-chapter on finding material in the book) at theeffectbook.net

can you guess the classic late 90s/early 00s rap/R&B song based on how my 5-year old daughter requests i play it for her? for one of these she's seen the video "st. patrick's day" "the chinese music one" "the song for yessing" "the baby song"

I can't go more than a few months without thinking of the thirty maidens of Geneva, who I first learned about in @rlspang.bsky.social 's book. rodama1789.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-...

I shall now be dadding twice as hard 🏳️‍🌈

The second edition of The Effect has been delayed a bit... because there were so many orders they had to switch to a bigger print run! Thank you everyone for your support, and check out the second edition here: www.routledge.com/The-Effect-A...

you're so vague, you probably think this song refers to someone

8.6% of my students this term (so far) have booked travel during finals week.

Been reading the graphic novels of The Babysitters Club with the kid. It's wild the little stuff that dates it: - landline phones as a central plot element - payments in cash - a prank where you order a pizza to someone's house - milk and soda as equivalents - chicken pox

Do you think you would be capable of fabricating data exciting enough to get published in the QJE without getting caught?

I check back in on this every once in a while to see if the new models have improved their performance on this "three card blind" task: GPT-o3: nope, still fails Gemini 2.5-pro: does an enormous amount of thinking and carefully mapping out every play pattern... and does worse!

...what? pandas cmon now

Question for anyone shifting to frequent in-class assessment: how do you handle absences? I only give exams a few times per term and I have to handle absences and reschedules on nearly all of them. Would I have to do that for every single class now?

Either the principles students this term are using GPT less for their essays or they're learning to use GPT to convincingly write exactly like college students used to.

i don't know if this is actually true but i am learning that the common knowledge among my students is that macs crash a lot and windows doesn't, which is very funny

i've previously said I was disappointed that LLMs weren't great at writing exam questions, the exact kind of thing i don't want to do but should be able to offload to them. it's still not great at it, but it does turn out it's good at *re*writing exam questions to be different-enough term to term!

the university has "updated" its web print feature so that now if you ask for 5 copies of something to be printed, that shows up as 5 separate print jobs

You've heard of the many analysts projects, right? Scholars give the same dataset/question to a bunch of researchers & they still get different answers. Why is that? Data cleaning! This is consistent with Gelman's "garden of forking paths." Small coding decisions often drive results.

thought i'd try out sending my paper through gpt for spellchecking/grammar/confusing phrases/etc. 1. it's good at it, not a huge surprise; better than Word 2. i thought i saw it incorrectly correcting me on a common phrase but it turns out i am wrong. TIL that it's "free rein" not "free reign"

CIsgender is when you can't claim to be any specific gender but there's a whole range of genders that nobody can prove you're not

switched from 1password to dashlane a month or so ago as a password manager and jesus dashlane is such a better piece of software. it actually works instead of, like, not working.

On one hand, my laptop is stuck in tablet mode and I cannot use the keyboard. On the other, I just got tenure again

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