Excited to be giving a NoBeC talk soon — tune in here: normsandbehavior.sas.upenn.edu/event/nobec-...

Consensus AI Deep Search is a cool agentic search function that runs full literature reviews across 200 million papers in minutes. To try it, select "Deep" mode in Consensus and ask any research question!. Get your free account here: consensus.app (I am pleased to be an advisor to this company.)

Sharp and beautifully written — a nice read.

Submit abstract by Jul 4 for the Int’l Wrkshp on Logic & Philosophy: Social Norms (Logical Structures & Philosophical Foundations), Tsinghua–University of Amsterdam Joint Research Center for Logic. Acceptance decisions Aug 29. #philsky #econsky Committees & details: www.tsinghualogic.net/JRC/4thlp/

The device, about the size of two shoe boxes, was developed in a bid to create 'synthetic biological intelligence' — a new form of computing that could offer opportunities beyond conventional electronics and other developing technologies such as quantum computing https://on.ft.com/4kc8obJ

Some optical illusions fool Westerners but not the Himba people of Namibia. Bad eyesight? No, just a different edit (or model) of reality. More evidence for John Dewey’s insight: reality isn’t experienced the same, and perception isn’t passive—it’s shaped by what culture trains us to frame and see.

CITY-QMUL Theory wksp Robert Evans, Cambridge Tan Gan, LSE Nenad Kos, Bocconi Sophie Kreutzkamp, Manchester Elliot Lipnowski, Yale George Mailath, Penn Paula Onuchic, LSE Francisco Poggi, Mannheim Ludvig Sinander, Oxford Aidan Smith, Edinburgh Leeat Yariv, Princeton sites.google.com/view/qmul-ci...

Join us on May 16 at the City University (City St George’s, University of London) for our Theory & Experiments workshop—bringing together leading researchers in micro theory and behavioral economics. Registration, venue details, and program sites.google.com/view/theory-... #EconSky #AcademicEvents

Here’s how historians use #DataScience to mine the past in ways never before possible. A PNAS Science and Culture piece: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #Digital Historians #ComputationalModel #DigitalHistory #AI #NetworkAnalysis #LLMs

A great new search tool for economics papers just launched. Worth a look.

Economic theory to the rescue.

Join us on May 1 at the City University (City St George’s, University of London) for a Behavioral Insights for Policy workshop—bringing together top academics & practitioners working on behaviorally informed themes such as consumer choice, online safety, market regulation, computational models & AI.

Looking for other economists on Bluesky? If they have added their Bluesky handle to their RePEc profile, they are listed here, including by field, country and more: ideas.repec.org/i/ebluesky.h... #RePEc #EconSky

New research confirms what we all knew after hammering a nail *and* our thumb, grabbing a hot pan bare-handed, then stepping barefoot on a plug: swearing dulls pain. Turns out, it also boosts strength. So next time you’re at the gym, let the expletives fly—purely to replicate the results, of course.

Quantum computers have gained the powerful abstractions that allow programmers of classical computers to design and integrate new apps and hardware, and connect devices into networks with ease https://go.nature.com/43INRaa

Stumbled on a treasure trove of archival history. Want to time-travel through old (even Napoleonic) civil records from the Belpaese? Births, marriages, deaths—it’s all there, waiting to reveal forgotten family roots or prove that your great-great-grandpa’s name was so long it spilled onto a 2nd line

Draghi: “The IMF estimates that Europe’s internal barriers are equivalent to a tariff of 45% for manufacturing and 110% for services. These effectively shrink the market in which European companies operate: trade across EU countries is less than half the level of trade across US states.”

At $8M a spot, the Super Bowl ad market is a neat case of inelastic demand for attention. In a world drowning in noise, focus is a rare asset. But still, some would probably love a marathon of those artsy commercials—punctuated only by the occasional football break. Meanwhile, I’m restocking queso.

Researchers have long debated over whether the language we speak shapes how we perceive the world. Now that some 1.5 billion people speak the same language, English, this question has taken on a new urgency.

Read mixed reviews of the “ultimate” Spotify book, where the author dismisses it as a glorified playlist generator. Initially designed as an advertising company, it rewired music with major economic impacts. Artists are underpaid, but is this equilibrium worse than the previous (piracy-fueled) one?

“An impressive scholarly achievement” says Steven Nadler in his review of Leibniz in His World in the latest issue of @thetls.bsky.social. Read more (£): www.the-tls.co.uk/philosophy/h...

Walk through a megacity with cotton in your ears… then yank it out and brace yourself for the soundscapes. That’s the vibe of The Atlantic’s 1870 piece on “street cries” (lyrical calls merchants used to hawk their wares in markets)—a nostalgic glimpse into how Information Economics worked back then.

By mapping the meanings of the words used to communicate emotions across more than one-third of the planet’s spoken languages, a study in Science found that there is significant variation in how emotions are expressed across cultures. #ScienceMagArchives scim.ag/41X6dDk

Festive econometrics: a wine study published this week raises a glass to moderate wine consumption correlating with health benefits—but let’s not uncork causation yet. Even murkier is whether the holiday season causes a surge in wine studies, or if their publication just correlates with festivities.

Intriguing (and likely valuable) new initiative to do what is (for now) a quick and dirty project to evaluate whether AI models (e.g., o1 or o1-pro) can usefully identify errors in a random selection of published scientific papers. www.aisoup.org/black-spatula

“Everything after my morning coffee is pretty much a pain” Seinfeld said. But sometimes the pain starts even before coffee—why do some form neat coffee shop lines while others turn it into a BlackFriday stampede? Maybe some love coffee more than anything while others follow invisible traffic lights.

A philosophy professor has developed an app that helps him teach logic, and which can be customized for various "low stakes" assignments, like reading questions...

Last century, science inspired surrealist art—Freud’s psychoanalysis & Einstein’s relativity reshaped creativity. As AI now drives a new surrealist wave, could the flow reverse? Can social scientists draw on random visual associations to uncover new social & economic insights? #Art #Science #EconSky

I made a theory starter pack. It includes some CS/Econ, pol-econ, and behavioral types as well... Lmk if you'd like to be added (or removed!) and I'll do my best - the edit functionality is a bit wonky atm go.bsky.app/KAGmZH4