Listening to a legend Ken Ono at the LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business

University of Virginia Darden School of Business University of Virginia

OpenAI Staffers to Sell $6 Billion in Stock to SoftBank, Other Investors SoftBank, Dragoneer and Thrive Capital are set to buy OpenAI shares from current and former employees at a $500 billion valuation.

Current and former OpenAI employees plan to sell about $6 billion worth of shares to investors including SoftBank, Dragoneer and Thrive Capital.

July 2025 Webinar Society of Decision Professionals (SDP) and the Decision Analysis Society (DAS) invites you to joi

Join me and George Wu, Prof. of Behavioral Science U of Chicago Booth School of Business, on Jul 16 from 8am-9am (PT), for a joint SDP and the DAS Webinar: on “Risk Matters Less When Options Differ Qualitatively”

Register here: www.decisionprofessionals.com/events/event...

***Hot Paper of the Day****
🔥 📜
My colleague Rupert Freeman's Management Science paper studies the problem of designing incentive-compatible forecasting competitions, in which a single prize must be awarded to the winning forecaster.

Read more about it here: pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/...

Danny's last surprise.

I had long considered myself in favor of Swiss-style assisted suicide laws, but this story stirred up all sorts of contrary, complicated feelings.

Remember clubhouse?

The wisdom of forced diversity in crowds

Extremized crowds (through high and low anchoring) exhibit increased mean individual error and predictive diversity, yet also produce smaller collective errors, research finds:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I think Cher definitely can turn back time @nbcsnl.bsky.social

Our snap judgements of people’s facial *traits* (not states) bias our understanding of their thoughts and feelings in daily interactions, research by @chujunlin.bsky.social et al suggests:

Weather forecasts have become much more accurate; we now need to make them available to everyone A four-day forecast today is as accurate as a one-day forecast 30 years ago.

Weather forecasting has gotten much better over time.

We underestimate how much weather forecasts have improved how societies run, produce food reliably, and protect themselves from disaster.

My article from last year on this topic:
ourworldindata.org/weather-fore...

I think Uber has a different measurement of min

We cannot make decisions outwith a frame of reference—which has two key components: the decision context and our own psychological context (both shaping each other). That is why Decision Making is always personal (and subjective): https://buff.ly/40enXaT

An incredible opportunity for the right person:

The Santa Fe Institute is seeking applications for full-time resident faculty positions at all academic levels

For me, this has been the best possible job ever.

More info here: santafe.edu/about/jobs/r...

California’s First Carbon Capture and Storage Project Approved by the EPA California received permission to move forward with a project that would inject carbon dioxide into the state’s deep rock formation using a technology that has long tantalized the fossil fuel industry...

If you missed this on NYE, California got its first Class XI well approved by the EPA. Who cinched it? An oil and gas producer's point source CCS project in Kern County.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Hard agree!

So Silo is basically an ad for ChatGPT?

what are the key items to prepare when faced with a snow forecast?

I am enjoying @netflix.com Black (!!) Doves, but cannot hear Ben Whishaw without thinking of Paddington.

Kahneman would resist so long as he can't see it because wysiati

Thaler would resist so long as it is stored with the cashews

Zimbardo would write up how he resisted, but it would be fake

Freud would be torn, but Id would win

Mischel would pretend it was a picture of a ring, but would give in

Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty Women faculty are more likely to leave their jobs than men, most often due to workplace climate, rather than work-life balance.

Women leave academia at higher rates than men at every career stage, and attrition is especially high among three groups: tenured faculty, women in non-STEM fields, and women employed at less prestigious institutions, a #ScienceAdvances analysis finds.

Wow, what just happened? Sora is now available and amazing.

Within seconds, Sora is helping me imagine the University of Virginia Darden School of Business classroom of the future.

Digital Economics and AI Meeting, Spring 2025

NBER Digital Economics and AI meeting at Stanford. Deadline December 16. www.nber.org/conferences/...

Me rereading my own code from 2 months ago:

Stunning and goose-bumps inducing night at the University of Virginia

Excellent talk by Larry Samuelson asking the tough questions to economists at the Econometric Society Australasia Meeting:
“How do we think about welfare economics if utility is adaptive?”

Registration ends TODAY!! (TUESDAY Dec 3):
The Value Chain of Ethical AI Conference
www.eventbrite.com/e/the-value-...

Watching the substance the year I turned 50 is beyond.

Let the data talk: embrace exploratory research Open-ended research is essential to building solid hypotheses in the social sciences — without it, even the best-planned analyses can fail.

I agree that exploratory research is important, but the phrase "letting the data talk" is a bad way to frame this.

Data never speaks on its own, there is always interpretation, even at the most basic descriptive level of statistical analysis.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Join me at The Value Chain of Ethical AI on December 6th at UVA Darden to discuss AI priorities for you and your organization.

Registration is open at drdn.mba/4ea1P6u
Learn more at drdn.mba/4ebQ4MN

Should public policies be designed to increase the happiness of the population?

Unfortunately, happiness is not a quantity that can be maximised. We always habituate. Our pursuit of happiness is like running on a hedonic treadmill.
My new post: www.optimallyirrational.com/p/the-aim-of...