Old man post incoming: if you are someone who enjoys talking about ideas or lively debate, grab your university years by the horns! One of the greatest gifts of your uni years is the selection effect of being near other smart people who share your interests! #reminiscing
It is one of the weirdest divides, I speak to two companies in the exact same industry and one has been using AI for the past 18 months and the other has a committee that has to approve every use case individually and talk about how AI companies will train on their data.
This is consistent with earlier psychometric work that suggests 5-7 is the best response scale options, but good to see that the finding holds up in contemporary research. Also, good to see that labeling scales whether anchored or not has little impact on findings. academic.oup.com/ijpor/articl...
Not making any sort of claims or trying to imply anything about this one certain study. But for these type of ai studies, I think it's even more important for open data practices to be in place since the exact wording of prompts, system setup etc matter. Replication should be faster too and expected
Every few months, I write an updated, idiosyncratic guide on which AIs to use right now.
My new version has the most changes ever, since AI is no longer just about chatbots. To use AI you need to understand how to think about models, apps, and harnesses. open.substack.com/pub/oneusefu...
We spent months training grad student RAs and GPT-5 mini still beat them by a lot
We have a new pre-print! 📝🖨️
We find that conversing with a disagreeing LLM helped improve people's inaccurate predictions!
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Let me tell you all about it:
Yeah no shade your way. I retweet in the same way.
Given your other posts lately on blue Monday and stuff, it was interesting to see this without the caveat of "hey this may or may not be a real thing".
But yeah realistically it's just me reading another blog post at 4am while watching the baby and getting cranky.
As I said originally, it doesn't seem crazy that there could be some small effect. But this post is not evidence for one in my view.
More thoughts: 6) no statistical tests here. 7) no time series modelling 8) effect for any actual business would be tiny!! 9) February Mondays include presidents Day in US, how is that accounted for? 10) no comparison to other holiday Mondays 11) no comparison to other Mondays for last minute PTO
I feel so many ways about this. 1) seems highly believable. 2) seems like one of those cutesy findings that with more poking into data could disappear. 3) this company only cover 34,000 very non representative companies. 4) effect size is small. 5) this company wants a splashy marketing story
Introducing “Pretend Battleship”: you’re told where all the ships are but then have to play like you never got that information. Could you do it? And what would your performance reveal about your understanding of your own mind? A joy to be part of this creative project led by @matanmazor.bsky.social
Large Language Models have shown both remarkable reasoning ability, and significant reasoning failures.
Research by @psong1.bsky.social et al has categorized this phenomenon in a clear taxonomy to explore how and why the performance is so variable:
buff.ly/hI7DYYN
Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty — across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....
Looks very promising! Thanks for sharing it here
Forthcoming in AER: Insights: "The Lasting Effects of Working while in School: A Long-Term Follow-Up" by Mery Ferrando, Noemí Katzkowicz, Thomas Le Barbanchon, and Diego Ubfal.
Users of survey data, lovers of DAGs, and general methodological enthusiasts, gather round!
I'm so excited to share this new paper, joint work with my brilliant colleagues @rjsilverwood.bsky.social, @pwgtennant.bsky.social, and Liam Wright.
🧵
Very important work
🥳 Stoked to share that our paper with Christina Strobel, "A Taxonomy of Al Experiments," has been accepted at the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics!
Huge thanks to Christina for collab and to the reviewers for extremely helpful feedback!
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
#EconSky
Forthcoming in AEJ: Economic Policy: "When the Effects of Informational Interventions Are Driven by Salience – Evidence from School Parents in Brazil" by Guilherme Lichand, Nina Cunha, Ricardo A. Madeira, and Eric Bettinger. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
I need everyone in the political communications world who found the moral foundations reframing approach promising (which includes me) to read this paper
It doesn't replicate in new research. It just doesn't work.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Excited to announce that this year's Advances with Field Experiments conference will take place at the University of Chicago on September 17-18, 2026.
@johnlist.bsky.social and I will send out a call for abstracts early in the Spring.
bfi.uchicago.edu/events/event...
@katymilkman.bsky.social
Spotify limit old music so you listen to new things
The AEA has posted eight "Recent Developments" lectures exploring highly topical issues in economics, presented by the best scholars in the field:
www.aeaweb.org/conference/w...
Well worth a watch!
"Survey incentives can worsen bias! Randomized incentives help detect & account for nonresponse bias. Methods using both incentives & reminders outperform existing approaches."
New paper by Dutz, Huitfeldt, Lacouture, Mogstad, Torgovitsky & van Dijk
www.restud.com/selection-in...
#EconSky #REStud
Published @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social with @drewlinsley.bsky.social & @tonyfeng.bsky.social: As vision models scale to human/superhuman accuracy, they’re becoming worse models of primate vision—benchmark engineering isn’t neuroscience. @carneyinstitute.bsky.social @browncopsy.bsky.social
Had an interesting, hard interview with @adamconover.net on his podcast. I think he is a great example of a smart AI skeptic.
My main messages were that AI is a really big deal, it has good & bad impacts, and that, by sitting things out, skeptics can’t guide use. open.spotify.com/episode/5cFK...
This is a very special conference which you should absolutely consider attending if your research is at the intersection of behavioral science and AI
See you in Berlin!
Non-paywalled version:
osf.io/preprints/ps...
