In economics we call these Manski Bounds.

New office trinket: I 3D-printed "Lewitt's missing cube". Quite happy with how it turned out. Many thanks to Paul for sending me the stl file! Skip to 49:55 in his video to appreciate why this is fun.

Excellent report on experiences of @guidoimbens.bsky.social & Mary Wootters co-teaching "Causality, Decision Making, and Data Science" to undergrads at Stanford fall 2024: hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/uynpjlow... Course material here: stanford-causal-inference-class.github.io

ICYMI: Drop everything and spend 13 minutes with Amy Sherald--with her singular vision and talent, with her clarity about her central place in the jagged American story. You will be stirred by it all. www.cbsnews.com/video/amy-sh...

Connecticut is approach peak fall. Shots from Lake Wintergreen this morning. A glorious start to the day.

New paper alert!!! 🚨 “A Short History of Misinformation-at-scale and Efforts to Mitigate it” in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing drive.google.com/file/d/1Klg9... This article traces the social construction of misinformation-at-scale through changes to content moderation.

Have you ever wondered how to ensure a loss in Candyland though? github.com/mkiang/candy...

Join the Social Algorithms Workshop at Yale to learn how algorithms amplify ideas, and (sometimes) mislead us, organized by @jugander.bsky.social w/ talks by @brendannyhan.bsky.social & @informor.bsky.social. Use code sawitonX on last registration page for 25% off yalefds.swoogo.com/socialalgori...

Re-upping for 2025.

"Many people still have an elderly relative who survived a bout of severe childhood illness; not one of us has an elderly relative who did not." This is the best and perhaps most important illustration of sample selection i have seen in a good long while.

Happy Birthday Google For many of your 27 years you were called a lazy vice. Finally you have attained the status of a thoughtful virtue of the good old days. 🥂 🥳

I'm really looking forward to this workshop Oct 16-17! Poster submission deadline today 🗓️ 9/22, travel funding available for students and postdocs! Join us!

Happy 4^ / 3^2 / 5^2 day!!! (3^2/ 4^2 / 5^2 for us weird Americans) Not too many days satisfy the Pythagorean thm. @amermathsoc.bsky.social @austms.bsky.social @stevenstrogatz.com @monsoon0.bsky.social ht Peter Baxter for noticing. Looking forward to coming back to the US for joint maths in Jan.

The School of Information at Michigan is looking for its next John Derby Evans Professor in Information. It's open at the Assistant and Associate levels, and its a broad search: anyone working at the intersection of tech and society can apply. Please share! www.si.umich.edu/people/facul...

📣 Yale workshop, Oct 16-17! 📣 How could/should content ranking work? What's new in content moderation? How can platforms promote civility? Hosted by Yale's Institute for Foundations of Data Science (FDS). Great speakers! Submit posters by 9/22! Spread the word! yalefds.swoogo.com/socialalgori...

An outstanding new @3blue1brown.com guest video by Paul Dancstep on Sol Lewitt's incomplete open cubes. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BrF... For more on the "mistake" discussed at the end, see Rozhkovskaya & Reb (2015) "Is the List of Incomplete Open Cubes Complete?": link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Google autocomplete is asking the important questions.

What’s the worst centrally symmetric convex shape for packing the plane? A hexagonal grid of circles covers 90.69% of the plane when optimally packed. An octagon with rounded corners covers a smidgen less: 90.24%. But is this shape the worst one? www.quantamagazine.org/why-is-this-...

thinking of calling this "The Illusion Illusion" (more examples below)

Great interview with @stevenstrogatz.com with a lot of discussion of research advising. Parts reminded me of @eegilbert.org and @informor.bsky.social's (excellent) guides to PhD mentorship, with a big focus on ideation. Eric's: docs.google.com/document/d/1... Mor's: s.tech.cornell.edu/phd-syllabus/

A beautiful visualization of the state space of puzzles, 11 min of joy, h/t @danlarremore.bsky.social

Come work with my fantastic colleagues! We have a job opening for someone in any area of operations research with a broad teaching porfolio. See the ad: math.hmc.edu/tenure-track...

New job ad: Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science, Dartmouth College apply.interfolio.com/172357 Please share with your networks. I am the search chair and happy to answer questions!

New piece, out in the Sigecom Exchanges! It's my first solo-author piece, and the closest thing I've written to being my "manifesto." #econsky #ecsky arxiv.org/abs/2507.03600

Interesting analysis of Mamdani/Cuomo polling. Mamdani won +12. The YouGov/Yale team predicted Cuomo +14. When they re-weighted their poll to the demographics of the actual turnout, it was still Cuomo +4. So seems their polling errors weren't just turnout. yalepolling.substack.com/p/postmortem...

more broadly, people have worried about human creative activities being emulated by nonhuman automata for centuries. here's Johann Joachim Quantz writing in the 18th century about the philosophical implications of musical automata (from David Yearsley's "Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint")

We're recruiting a new tenure-track faculty member to MIT Sloan! apply.interfolio.com/170116 We're looking for someone doing research in quantitative marketing, broadly considered. Faculty in our group work on economics of privacy, mathematical psych, networks, and applications of ML & AI.

New in TiCS w @dgrand.bsky.social @gordpennycook.bsky.social It’s been ~10yrs since misinfo research exploded but our paradigms are stuck in the post-2016 “fake news” model Time for new approaches: o True/False → Content that misleads o Belief → Behavior o Eval interventions in ambiguous settings

If you are #KDD2025 this week, stop by David Liu's talk on "Bypassing Skip-Gram Negative Sampling: Dimension Regularization as a More Efficient Alternative for Graph Embeddings". This is joint work with Johan Ugander and Arjun Seshadri. doi.org/10.1145/3711...

Does anyone know studies of how FB/X/threads/etc downrank (or don't) external links? According to Adam Mosseri in 11/2024, threads then didn't explicitly downrank links, but notes threads prioritizes like/comments, not clicks, and says people simply don't like/comment much on posts with links.

This is too cool. Reminds me of what we did in the first years of geotagged Flickr (raise your hand if you remember) photos although we had to rely on text and tagging. No more!

i'm sorry my review is late i meant to read it weeks ago but the writing was actively hostile to comprehension each paragraph a slow erosion of my will to live

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...

The photos from Ukraine of drone fibre optic debris remind me of Italo Calvino's Ersilia: "In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether… 1/

📣 Update: I've moved to Yale, joining the Department of Statistics & Data Science as an Associate Professor today (July 1)! The last year's sabbatical here has been great for me and my family, and I am excited for great things ahead! Come visit! Trading the wind of freedom for light and truth!

Given that RCV (technically: IRV) is in the spotlight tonight, here's a pointer to a 2015 paper about how it's quite nontrivial to compute margins of victory under IRV. Very consequential for risk-limiting audits (RLAs) as well as poll margins of error! arxiv.org/abs/1508.04885

As @jugander.bsky.social likes to say, projecting RCV outcomes with ballots remaining is hard, but hard not to read into the Mamdani + Lander first place votes

New by @ericfeltham.bsky.social, Laura Forastiere, and @nachristakis.bsky.social: an extraordinarily ambitious effort to scale up and bring Krackhardt's classic work on cognitive social structures (CSSs) into the 21st century. Super excited to see it in print. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In new work from #HNL in @nathumbehav.nature.com ‬ spearheaded by @ericfeltham.bsky.social and with Laura Forastiere, we performed the largest and most detailed study of cognitive social networks -- evaluating network cognition in 10,072 adults in 82 Honduras villages. rdcu.be/eq93O 4/

My notes on Anthropic's substantial essay about how they built their multi-agent research system, which has finally talked me around to taking multi-agent LLM prompt engineering seriously simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/14/...

This is the kind of content that makes me consider quitting my job to become a typesetter in 1623.

"Social media has made everyone dumb as shit. Millennials were the first cohort it really ruined. [...] This has put them in crisis: a sex crisis, a crisis of creativity, a crisis of self. Is this the reason contemporary art is so bad?" thepointmag.com/criticism/cr...

Hamilton, Tawn, Firth (2023) "The many routes to the ubiquitous Bradley-Terry model": arxiv.org/abs/2312.13619 Very cool! I've considered writing notes on how BT models can be motivated in myriad ways, with diff motivations leading to diff generalizations. This looks like a fantastic crack at that.

A nice explainer about the tennis racket theorem ("intermediate axis theorem") as it applies to skateboarding tricks: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFRP... cc @danlarremore.bsky.social @kamdh.bsky.social

I occasionally browse subreddits about personal finance, and my favorite genre of post is when the poster asks “Help me optimize this thing.” and the top answers are (correctly, insightfully, politely) telling the person “I think you are optimizing the wrong thing.”

Good observation but you have it wrong. Magic is just the grind of hard work! jacobian.org/2021/apr/7/e...

Fun! My 2012 paper "Four degrees of separation” w/ Lars Backstrom, Paolo Boldi, Marco Rosa, and Sebastiano Vigna, a big crunch of the distance distribution of FB, has been awarded a Test of Time Award from the Web Science Trust. webscience.org/wst-selects-... Paper: stanford.edu/~jugander/pa... 1/ 🧵

Llama 3.1 70B contains copies of nearly the entirety of some books. Harry Potter is just one of them. I don’t know if this means it’s an infringing copy. But the first question to answer is if it’s a copy at all/in the first place. That’s what our new results suggest: arxiv.org/abs/2505.12546

Bluesky data now on @icpsr.bsky.social -> "A Blue Start: A large-scale pairwise and higher-order social network dataset" by Smith, Amburg, @diesagar.bsky.social, @foucaultwelles.bsky.social, @nwlandry.bsky.social. arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2505.11608 Social Media Archive: socialmediaarchive.org/record/78