Hey, this is the real Brian Portnoy here at Brian Portnoy. My long-standing account Brian Portnoy was stolen and @x (@support) won't help me recover it, so for now, I'm starting over. Nice to meet you (again). 🚀

this is a neat paper. to me it reads like the implication is "many social science experiments have very little new information in them since they can be directly predicted from past data"

This paper started in 2019, we ran a field experiment from scratch, got access to amazing data, found surprising results, learned a lot. Very happy to see it published in Journal of Public Economics🥳

🚨Job Market Paper: Using language to generate hypotheses🚨 This paper explores how language shapes behavior. Our contribution, however, is not in testing specific hypotheses- it's in generating them (using #LLMs + #ML + #BehSci) But how exactly? 🧵👇 rafaelmbatista.com/jmp/

TikTok Shows Less ‘Anti-China’ Content Than Rivals, Study Finds bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

paging Mohammad Akbarpour Scott Kominers and my excellent colleague not on Twitter

new paper arxiv.org/abs/2408.07892

Major new survey from National Education Association gives very strong support for phone-free schools. Any policy that lets kids have phones BETWEEN classes disrupts what happens IN class. Give teachers a chance. Go phone-free. nea.org/resource-libra…

Corinne Low Kamala HQ It would be cool if the penalties for price gouging were like penalties in soccer, where if you get too many flags you are sent to the penalty box to be investigated for market power.

Paul Novosad Leopold Aschenbrenner *doesn't like gazillion parameter models that just output random things with no hint about validity* *goes into gen AI*

🚨New working paper alert!🚨 Does 'canceling' an artist on social media affect their music consumption? Daniel Winkler, roamer_09, and I explore this in our new paper. Spoiler: The answer is more complicated than you think.

In college, Chevy Chase played drums in a jazz-rock trio called Leather Canary. Seeing no future in it, he quit to go off and become a globally successful comic actor. The remaining members decided to keep going as a duo, but changed their name to Steely Dan.

“Thaler has himself said that he is in “virtually complete agreement” w Fama on the implications of EMH — that beating the market is hard — even if he disagrees with the starting premise that stock markets are efficient” Same. Very nice interview. Fama is sensible on EMH

I'll be recruiting a graduate student and a postdoc to start in Fall 2025! Looking for applicants w/interests in cultural evolution, narratives, morality, AI, social media, & epistemic (in)justice. See here for more info & please share 😊 crockettlab.org/joining-the-lab

Florian Ederer Jessica Jeffers Current executives on the board of other firms continues to strike me as a not-obviously-good idea (🏷️Journal of Corporate Finance)

Proves my point beautifully: we make assumptions in our models. The stronger the assumptions, generally, the stronger the conclusion, but the more likely it is to be wrong. I'm saying there's a bias-variance tradeoff. You know what's great at this? Formalism! Economics!

Excited to share that my second-year paper has been published in Experimental Economics! One of my PhD goals was to graduate with a published paper, and it feels great to achieve it! Great experience working with Daniel Martin. link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Thank you for presenting your awesome work, Jenny!

Almost everything I thought I knew about the Library at Alexandria—its size, importance, destruction—turns out to have been a tall tale. The Library is more of a useful metaphor, a synecdoche for all the knowledge that was lost in Europe’s Dark Ages jstor.org/stable/1558311

I’m looking at these amazing AI advances, and this new era of wealth creation, and I’m thinking.. they really tried to change math for my kids and kids who look like them, shutting them out of preparedness for these opportunities, while claiming they were doing the opposite 🤯