Nick Tenev

One reason for that pressure may be trust—it's reasonable to place more trust in those who agree with you

Suppose the sources I'm learning from start using echo chambers of their own, making the high-quality sources more accurate and the low-quality sources less accurate (as above). Then I'm more inclined to want to filter out the low-quality sources by using an echo chamber myself. (4/n)

So echo chambers can bring those close to the truth closer, but also prevent the misinformed from learning much. We show that this can make echo chambers contagious. (3/n)

Echo chambers can increase the accuracy of beliefs on average, since people are more willing to heed information they trust. However, those who start with really inaccurate beliefs may be worse off using echo chambers, since the sources they trust are also misinformed. (2/n)

Optimal Echo Chambers When learning from others, people tend to focus their attention on those with similar views. This is often attributed to flawed reasoning, and thought to slow learning and polarize beliefs. However, w...

New version of our paper on echo chambers is posted, and it has a couple new results. The first is about inequality of beliefs (1/n) arxiv.org/abs/2010.01249

To be fair, one reason for the disconnect in appreciation for LLMs is that coding has always been unreasonably pedantic in a way that is probably hard to appreciate until you've wrestled with it

Some airlines may have bereavement fares for family, but either way condolences

PLEASE RT :)

Submit to the annual Network Science and Economics Conference, the largest US event for network theory and empirical research in and adjacent to economics

Deadline Jan 30 (soon!)

Conference Apr 11-13 at Stanford

The rational agent paradigm is often maligned as unrealistic, with experimental evidence of seeming irrationality cited as support. But this new work argues that people just can’t absorb or remember all the information that’s thrown at them, and have to make choices about what to focus on.

Some real interesting papers in this session “Neurofinance, Cognition” today, pushing on the idea that seeming departures from rational behavior wrt risk are actually just evidence of cognitive constraints, like limits on memory or attention

I’m guessing the increased engagement for low quality sources is not just people quoting them to explain their shortcomings?

OCC Solicits Research on Artificial Intelligence in Banking and Finance The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is soliciting academic research papers on the use of artificial intelligence in banking and finance for submission by December 15, 2024.

One week left to submit your research on AI/ML use in banking and finance to the OCC’s symposium next June! Submit here by Dec. 15:
www.occ.gov/news-issuanc...
#econsky

These examples of when AI screws up easy questions because of their similarity to well known trick questions reminds me of the classic test-taking technique: they’d never ask this question if the answer were A instead of B

Always relieving to learn a behavioral anomaly was just two cognitive constraints in a trench coat all along

It’s a lot of work to get to the bottom of why you disagree with someone—hard to think it’s worth it, when they’re probably just misinformed, or arguing in bad faith

So for example, maybe you don’t want to criticize your party’s candidate in front of undecided voters. But among friends, you’re willing to admit you have doubts about their ability to win, or don’t love all their policies.

But there are other good ones, too. Echo chambers can provide people with similar beliefs or preferences a place to credibly share information they might otherwise have misrepresented in attempt to persuade others.
See doi.org/10.1016/j.ge... and olejann.net/wp-content/u...

Optimal Echo Chambers When learning from others, people tend to focus their attention on those with similar views. This is often attributed to flawed reasoning, and thought to slow learning and polarize beliefs....

That’s the tradeoff we study in this paper: arxiv.org/abs/2010.01249

Echo chambers trade usefulness for credibility. It’s reasonable to place more trust in those who agree with you, but they don’t let you know when you’re wrong.

Sure there is. Conditioning your participation on the policies of the candidate you prefer gives them an incentive (your vote) to pursue policies you like.

Referee reports on papers are famously negative, but one I’m looking at now includes the phrase “In the future (if any)…” which surely deserves some kind of prize for pessimism

Sure anytime

(proof: if the widest parts are at different heights, then you save space by alternating. And if not, you don't use any more space.)

Tiny bit of practical math: if you have more than one type of wine glass you want to store in a line, it saves space to alternate

University of Michigan: Inflation Expectation University of Michigan: Inflation Expectation

For the US, FRED is a good place to start for macro data, including survey data on consumer expectations e.g. fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MICH

The existence of free will may have moral implications (is it right to lock somebody up for a crime if they couldn’t have chosen not to commit it?). But free will or not, people do tend to respond to incentives.

But we know from a vast body of experimental evidence that changing incentives or constraints does change people’s behavior.

Gleick: “Legal institutions, theories of government, and economic systems are built on the assumption that humans make choices and strive to influence the choices of others. Without some kind of free will, politics has no point. Nor does sports. Or anything, really.”

The Fate of Free Will | James Gleick Nobody was holding a gun to your head when you started reading this. You made a choice. Surely it felt that way, at least. A sense of agency—of control

I liked reading the recent pieces on free will (apparently still a debate!), but they seem to imply that free will is necessary to make choices, or respond to incentives. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...