Me: I can’t believe Uncle Sam is taxing my The Nobel Prize. Not taxable in most other countries… 18-year-old: Hasn’t Uncle Sam funded a big chunk of your research? Me: 😑

Getting scooped is a fact of life for every researcher. It feels like being punched in the gut. After decades of being terrified, I’ve learned that there are many things we can do to reduce the risk. More importantly, getting scooped is not nearly as big a deal as I thought. 🧵

Remember when they were trying to figure out why there was a giant drop in crime like 30 years ago and they tried to say it was due to better policing… And then the Freakonomics dudes figured out it’s because an entire generation wasn’t forced to give birth to unwanted kids.

As you grow more senior & more prominent as a scholar, it gets more daunting to switch your area of expertise, because the inevitable early mistakes feel more embarrassing. Yet, the alternative — staying in your comfort zone throughout your career — is a sure path to irrelevance.

The actual value of defi is creating a market for promises. A clever and provocative essay by Johnny 🍌Bananas🍌. As someone who is mostly a crypto-skeptic, it moved my priors. anthonyleezhang.substack.com/p/the-market-f…

"Wired for Connection: How Our Brains Create Communities" I was on a great panel at The Aspen Institute #AspenIdeas focused on how to harness the full potential of teams, groups, and organizations with Charles Duhigg + Annie Murphy Paul You can watch it here: aspenideas.org/sessions/wired…

Leaders know they need to define their organization’s identity - but it might be even more vital to have an “anti-identity” that defines what you are not. Anti-identities are often better for pivoting than identities, since they allow more flexibility. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

What's causing all these logos to look the same?

Why are universities failing? Well I have lots of thoughts on the matter and they begin with the fact that we have allowed governments to usher in neoliberal capitalist administration who care not about any academic mission.

Limitations & future directions are expected when discussing scientific experiments. Startups are also experiments, and sharing “what could go wrong” shouldn’t be rare or impressive. It should be expected.

What parts of a PhD are the "training" parts? Because teaching classes and all that goes with it isn't training. Writing a dissertation isn't training. Conducting research isn't training. Seems relatively little training is involved and mostly a whole lot of actual work & admin.

The tragic thing about academic tenure is that it does really come with a crazy amount of freedom to do deep and meaningful things, but you can only get tenure after being on the publish-or-perish treadmill for so long that you've most likely forgotten how to do anything else.

While studies have suggested that the belief in conspiracies is related to an individual's conspiratorial mindset, social-identity motives also appear to play an important role. Our newest paper examines how social identity shapes conspiratorial beliefs. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Dear scientists,👇

Homophily is the principle that we like people who are like ourselves, and it is a powerful force in explaining how society is structured. This paper shows it goes deeper than skin: You are more likely to be friends with people who literally think like you pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29382820/

A paper I think about often: early wins make all the difference in life. This paper gave out tiny initial donations to Kickstarters, gave Wikipedia editors awards, signed random petitions, etc. The seeded winners were 9%-31% more likely to get future wins researchgate.net/publication/26…

You can be proud of the science you conduct & the people you work with, while also pointing out the flaws of #academia. Don't champion the system that inhibits so many from participating in scientific endeavors.

🚨Working paper! In Twitter field studies + lab experiments we find that social media users systematically overperceive moral outrage online, and this amplifies perceptions of collective outrage norms, affective polarization and ideological extremity osf.io/k5dzr 🧵👇

AI journalism has a hype problem. To move past the cycle of reacting to each story, Sayash Kapoor and I analyzed over 50 pieces from 5 prominent outlets. We've compiled a list of recurring pitfalls that readers should watch out for and journalists should avoid. aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/eighteen-pit…