Jason Abaluck

Thanks to
@jabaluck.bsky.social from @yalesom.bsky.social for coming on the Make It Make Sense to explain why Trump's Rx price plan is a bad idea.

Find it wherever you get your podcasts!

Someone else suggested prophets for the same reason

The reaction against social justice warriors has ironically vindicated their diagnosis of the problem, while falsifying the practical claim that a good way for social scientists to do something about this is advocating for political change.

Social justice warriors are uncommon in econ but more common elsewhere in the social sciences. They think there is a lot we don't know, but that the most important problem is that other people don't know the stuff that we do know. They favor political change over plumbing.

The modal economist is a pornographer with plumbing in the back of their mind. "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?" We care because growth matters. The purest pornographers insist such motivations are unnecessary. Here's my structural model. I learned something. I hope you care.

Plumbers are motivated by problem solving and trying to make things better (pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/... ). What is wrong with the world? Let's understand it better so we can fix it, tinkering and adjusting and being mindful of details.

Most of the best work by econ theorists or methodologists is pornography. The worst pornography is self-pleasure under the false pretense that someone else will remember. Really good pornography makes plumbers get involved.

Nearly all mathematicians and most physicists are pornographers. And they have to be. If mathematicians and physicists only asked questions where there was a practical motivation, both fields would be impoverished.

Pornographers don't think you need a normative motivation to ask positive questions. If your model explains something, it doesn't matter if it's useful. Pornographers emphasize watching good pornographers, and trying to copy them (in spirit, not substance).

Pornographers do research for intellectual pleasure. They care about doing positive science and unpacking how the world works. If someone says "Why do you care?", they bristle. Why are some facts more important than others? Pornographers know good pornography when they see it.

There are three types of social scientists:

Pornographers, plumbers, and social justice warriors

🧵

Many people are thinking about these issues, but the fraction of smart people thinking about alignment is still far too small compared to stakes and proximity of the problem.

Many AI researchers understand this. Most economists do not. This is a problem, as there are aspects of this problem in which economists are natural specialists (e.g. what regulations prevent an uncoordinated arms race where safety is ignored).

A plausible (but highly uncertain) extrapolation of current trends is that AI is a few years from autonomously programming GPT n+1 better than humans. If this happens, we may have either utopia or extinction, depending on alignment.

AI 2027 A research-backed AI scenario forecast.

Link: ai-2027.com . We do not know if we are close to self-improvement being possible -- there may be real conceptual bottlenecks that prevent AI from doing the job of the best scientists working at openAI or Anthropic or Deepmind for many years.

All economists should read AI 2027. Slow adoption and diffusion is a correct prediction for all past transformative technologies. But AI is different. The essential difference is the capacity for self-improvement w/ superhuman software engineering.

It remains a civilizational failing that you can't challenge people like @oren_cass and Peter Navarro to proper intellectual duels to reveal them as the complete charlatans they are.

Replacing the H1B lottery with something based on wages makes sense, but we need exceptions for brilliant young people who often are underpaid due to career stage dynamics (in econ lit: "career concerns"). If you are under 30 and score high enough on the GRE, we should let you in.

My take is "Foucault's Pendulum." Trump believes in the narrative he and his followers create for themselves. He believes tariffs are good because that's what he said (for reasons beyond his recollection). His followers built rationalizations. He can't change course.

If you don’t think economics nomenclature is important, think about how GDP growth would be 1 percentage point higher this year if “trade deficits” were called “trade differences.”

Just heard from a family friend who is literally a prince from Denmark, first-rate fencer, skilled theater director, and can talk to ghosts -- rejected at all the Ivies, waitlisted at Stanford, accepted at Duke (they should rename it "Commoner"). Ridiculous!

Nice, I think most researchers log analyses in the status quo. The problem is the expectation that the working logs are private. If everyone knew that every specification you ran would be shared (not only replication instructions), I think they would behave differently.

Nope, what does it do?

I think even without those checks, having researchers submit logs documenting every specification would be a huge step forward in disincentivizing the behavior where researchers run many specifications and pick the most favorable for their narrative.

One can also imagine mechanisms that would make active defrauding higher cost -- e.g. making log files a default that can only be turned off by notifying a central server, and keeping server-based records whenever they are edited.

Requiring a log file to include all analyses done for a paper means that researchers have three choices:
1) Only run specifications when you have a good reason
2) Data mine, but know that an LLM can easily find your data mining
3) Actively commit fraud by not logging

This is easily gameable, but gaming it requires researchers to *actively seek to defraud*. The perniciousness of data mining is the moral wiggle room -- people can say, "Oh actually maybe this is a better specification..."

An underdiscussed alternative to pre-registration for observational data analysis: research assistants should keep a log file for all data analysis they do, and this file should be posted publicly along with any published papers.

There is a common cognitive error I call, "The Bridge Builder's Fallacy": the idea that you can easily tell from observation whether something works. If you build a bridge and it doesn't collapse, it's a good bridge. Many successful people believe everything works this way.

Good AI writing (coming soon) shows how much authors draw on literature rather than life. It proves right "The Anxiety of Influence": writers want to express dimensions of experience, but instead they are imitating and recombining writing they have seen before.