Today, I have texted the King of Sweden: Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Prize in Economics even though I have 8 PLUS great publications, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of economics, but can now think about whatever comes to mind.
The sudden passing of John Leahy reminds us of life’s fragility and of the importance of distinguishing what truly matters from what does not.
John Leahy, the chair of Michigan’s economics department, has suddenly passed away. I deeply mourn his loss. He was exceptionally smart and humorous, but most importantly, he had deep empathy. It is so difficult to process what happened. May he rest in peace.
On Saturday, protests in the US will demand "no kings." The Rose asks in its new release, "O," that "Until the day the king resigns//let kingdoms fall for dreams to rise." www.youtube.com/watch?v=Busw...
Werner Von Braun would like a word.
Also, do the Manhattan Project.
Von Neumann, Fermi, Szilard, Wigner - and Einstein, whose letter got the ball rolling. To name just a few.
Or American mathematics: Courant, Kac, Lax, Wald...
Pope Leo joined X today, but I can't see him on Bluesky. He needs to be encouraged to use alternatives to X.
My sense is that I have no idea what future college teaching, or future research, will look like, once systems like ChatGPT have matured. (I should have had, but strangely did not have, a similar sense of big unknown future developments when the internet, and mobile internet access, were invented.)
One thing that has surprised me is how confidently ChatGPT cites results from maths books which, when I look those books up, don't actually exist.
Educating international students is a massive export of services. They pay us money earned in a foreign nation for a product the US has, until now, had an absolute advantage in. We cannot effectively sell these services if these students can be deported, detained, and even kidnapped at random.
I am profoundly saddened and alarmed by Columbia University and Paul Weiss law firm’s capitulation to the increasingly dictatorial Trump administration.
Jörg Oechssler and Georg Weizsäcker have created a new opportunity for us to donate for Ukraine: yourcontributionsquared.eu/en/
I have signed this wide-ranging open letter that protests against recent developments at US universities: sites.google.com/view/we-who-...
I wonder how much anxiety among foreign students and faculty in the US has been caused by Trump's executive order regarding visa policies. It sounds dangerously vague. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...
The new US administration seems set o join the group of authoritarian regimes that don't respect the law, internationally and internally. This Episcopalian bishop's sermon yesterday was a beautiful expression of the worry that many people have. www.pbs.org/newshour/pol...
I wonder how NATO will take this.
Can you elaborate? In which way is the understanding of AI "shallow"?
The September 11 attacks in the US in 2001; the July 2005 attacks on the London underground which I experienced directly; the November 2015 attacks on Paris; the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the rise of the caliphate in Syria and Iraq; it all seems a sequence of related tragedies.
I read Emmanuel Carrère's "V 13" over the holidays. It is a remarkable re-telling of the trial of the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015. It prompted me to look back at some aspects of the history of first quarter of the 21st century:
Ambition or hubris?
Few things are as moving as this.
Let me re-phrase: do you think it is pure coincidence that coin tosses tend to produce evenly distributed results, or is it the result of some objective reality, and we can usefully describe that reality using probabilities?
(Creamer-McLean is not a non-existence result.) The fact that two modeling approaches both imply counterintuitive results does not tempt me into thinking that I have to affiliate myself with one of them.
If probabilities are purely subjective, then no auction is expected revenue maximizing with risk neutral bidders. The mechanism designer can improve upon any auction by further exploiting differences in bidders' subjective probabilities.
I want to assail the fortress :) Is it pure coincidence that people's probabilities for some events are closely aligned, whereas for other events people differ widely? Relatedly: If probabilities are purely subjective, wouldn't we expect to see more betting than we do in practice?
Why not relitigate the common prior assumption? Isn’t it fun?
Let a hundred flowers bloom.
My sense is that having strong opinions on notation is a good way to make one’s life as a theorist unhappy.
But if beliefs are part of the representation of preferences, is there a justification for common priors? And without common priors, don’t some parts of economic theory make some very counterintuitive predictions?
Paper worth reading: "The Optimality of Majority Rule" by Nina Bobkova.
It offers a new perspective on why simple majority-rule may be best: it not only aggregates information but it also motivates voters to learn about what really matters.
Link: drive.google.com/file/d/1pVVE...
#polecon