Making sports gambling open and accessible to all will be seen as the "smoking is actually good for you" of our time

Whatever you're doing, STOP RIGHT THIS SECOND and watch a sperm whale gulp down a squid, I promise you will not regret it

They are literally canceling culture

Ok, this is actually dope. First real solution I’ve seen to ensuring human writing in the age of LLMs. Maybe the college essay isn’t dead after all? youtube.com/shorts/AhA1l...

Hassett prepping lies for confirmation hearing.

Could not agree more with this piece

Excellent piece by Ezra Klein: if Dems really believe that Trump is creating an authoritarian government they should not continue to fund it. The shutdown is their only leverage right now to draw attention to what is happening and maybe force change. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/o...

Many studies claim a steady decline of cognitive ability with age, starting from as earlier as one’s twenties. But this research is flawed, argues Aaron Dymarskiy—more accurate research finds it does not peak until at least age 60: buff.ly/SiVx5ve

The biggest analytical weakness of Americans in trying to understand the current moment is that their powers of analogy begin and end with US history. The idea that something qualitatively different might be arising simply doesn’t occur to them.

We usually rely on GDP, trade, or wages to study the past. This amazing paper flips the script. It analyzes 630,000 paintings (1400-2000) to extract emotions and shows how art tracks living standards, wars, inequality, and even climate shocks. (How is this economics? Everything is economics!)

About this Florida vaccine story: When they were little - 1 yr and 3 1/2 - my two older boys, who’d had all their shots, got whooping cough. We asked their pediatrician what would’ve happened if they hadn’t been vaccinated. “Oh, they’d have died.”

I’ve got a new working paper with @danielavidart.bsky.social, hot off the press. We develop a new method for measuring the risk preferences of agents in the past, and apply it to the U.S. from 1890-1920. Check it out! Feedback is welcome. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/chcof...

Essay which clearly outlines the scientific and ethical problems with selecting embryos for polygenic traits. Scientists associating themselves with embryo selection companies, and those who’ve previously defended sociogenomics but are staying silent on these companies, come in for criticism here

I think this is naive. Human curiosity isn’t going away, but science requires real resources. The US is the world’s largest economy, and US scientific output dwarfs that of any other country. A major contraction in US science means a major contraction in global science.

Statement from the largest economics association about the BLS firing As context: AEA approximately never makes such public statements This is a big deal

Yet another shoe.

There are no job losses in Ba Sing Se

So when are we starting to monitor US GDP with nightlights?

Okay, *now you can start to worry about data being manipulated.

WTAF

I suspect we won’t see true AGI until we have quantum computing on lock

In my time in the Senate I've never seen a Senator treated this way. @padilla.senate.gov is carrying out his constitutional responsibility to conduct oversight and defend the people he represents. Absolutely shocking and disgusting way to handle a sitting member of Congress.

Everything that’s happened over the past six months has been a response to an imaginary crisis. There is no immigrant invasion. No trade crisis. No scientific or governance crisis. Just people completely high off their own supply trying to fundamentally reorder society. None of this had to happen.

I love this imagery: seeing Buddha meditating under a tree and about to achieve enlightenment Mara's army attacks. But such is the power of peaceful calm around Gautama that as arrows and spears approach they transform into flowers, and fall gently to the ground around Buddha. I reflect on it often.

🤣🙃🤡

This is very bad Once they start screwing with the data, that’s the whole ballgame

We should redefine the Singularity as the inevitable moment when one banana will in fact cost $10, Michael.

Great short popular article on the current status of possibly-Denisovan fossils, and which species they may represent. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Many others are posting abt this too but this graphic viscerally shows how dire the presidential budget is for NASA 🔭🧪and worldwide astronomy. I can’t express how sad this makes me, as an American scientist. And it’s mostly already paid for projects, so also no logic in terms of saving money.

Novelty Car Horn Playing ‘La Cucaracha’ Sends Stephen Miller Into Dissociative Fugue State theonion.com/novelty...

Credit where credit is due: o3 is incredible. Hard to believe you get access to this technology for $20/month.

The obliteration of this survey is a terrible loss to social science.

Countdown to when another university picks her up Which uni? Based on revealed preference, I’m betting on Duke www.wgbh.org/news/educati...

America cannot long remain free, nor first among nations, if it becomes the kind of place where universities are dismantled because they don't align politically with the current head of the government.

Trump is not protecting American Jews against antisemitism. On the contrary, he’s spreading and normalizing it.

Man, this brand of commentary is so tedious. LLMs are obviously an extremely useful technology. Pretending like they’re not, or that there’s some kind of unique shame in using them, is just silly. More broadly, moralistic environmental critiques that emphasize austerity are tired and ineffective.

This is an astonishing deliberate reversal of technological progress, the stuff Dark Ages are made of. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/u...

🎓It’s a rare privilege to mentor someone like Ana—brilliant, curious, and kind. Ana’s research asks tough questions about gender, work, and family. Congrats, Dr. Karaban! 👏 #PhDone #EconSky @akaraban.bsky.social @remylevin.bsky.social @deliafurtado.bsky.social

The Trump adminstration's attack on colleges and universities is going to make America poorer in the short run and a lot poorer in the long run.

In case you, like me, are a high-anxiety human who missed this piece of moderately reassuring news: Despite many broken things, the FDA *did* make a flu shot recommendation for this fall. www.cnn.com/2025/03/13/h...

And that thing is our system of government and economy being actively transformed from a high-growth liberal democracy to a low-growth oligarchic kleptocracy.

Similar error in this piece, imo, as in critiques of carbon capture and removal. It’s not either/or-we need both. And the evidence that de-extinction is taking away funds or focus from “pre-extinction” conservation efforts is nonexistent.

Long-run consumer expectations in the UMich survey rise to their highest level since April 1995. Note that when @weakinstrument.bsky.social & I dug in, we found that the shift to online methodology did *not* significantly affect short- or long-run expectations in the survey, just sentiment.

Curious that both NOAA and NCAR have had "scheduled maintenance" in the last week that had not been previously announced. 🤔

The banning of "Confirmation bias" when you've already blamed "bias" is a confirmation of one's bias

Banning the term “Confirmation bias” is an epistemic closure 👨‍🍳🤌

NOAA does a lot more than weather forecasting. Here's the list of line offices. Its value extends to so many different sectors that the public would be shocked to realize the volume of decisions made based on what NOAA provides. This is an agency where the "trickle down" theory legitimately occurs.

Good question! Here’s another preregistered bet: “Fuck” will be one of the first words we’ll definitively decode in Whalesong.

Hell yeah: humpback whale songs exhibit complex statistical patterns identical to human language. Zipf’s Law strikes again! Love this paper and this agenda. Can’t wait until we can have full-on conversations with whales. I bet we’re about 10-20 years away from that at this point.

The US government has been turned over to a group of extraordinarily ignorant people, and they are working to destroy science in this country. Cutting over half the NSF budget would save < 0.1% of the federal budget, but do incalculable harm. Simply heartbreaking. arstechnica.com/science/2025...