Just finished a tenure letter in an hour less than targeted, please clap.
Beth Popp Berman
@epopppp.bsky.social
Professor @ a large Midwestern U Author of Thinking like an Economist, Creating the Market University Trying to understand how ideas about economic value have shaped capitalism + its regulation, from the first Gilded Age to the second Have more hair now
Kind of liked it better when we just had varieties of capitalism. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Using anything correlated with race is discrimination in admissions; while nothing that is correlated with race is discrimination in gerrymandering.
Neil Stenhouse@nstenhouse.bsky.social · 3mo agoEspecially rich given that SCOTUS just ruled that disenfranchising voters is OK if you use racial proxies
You've got to be freaking kidding me.
Jacquelyn Gill@jacquelyngill.bsky.social · 3mo agoCool, so NSF is now going to be used to essentially launder money to tech bros because universities are just too cumbersome and disciplinary oversight and regulations and accountability are all just too stifling for innovation. $1.5B for “X-Labs.”
interesting rationale from a prospective juror in the Elon Musk Twitter stock manipulation case
What can we learn from automating an entire quantitative social science paper, from prompt to finished product? Thread about ongoing work with @natewilmers.bsky.social 1/12 Paper: osf.io/preprints/so...
This scale is so hard to wrap your head around.
Christopher Mims@mims.bsky.social · 3mo agoMorgan Stanley projects that next year, the 5 AI hyperscalers - Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Google - will spend more building out AI data centers than the federal government spends on all of the Department of Defense www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-i...
The one professor with a box of bluebooks who keeps all their grades in an Excel spreadsheet
a man in a black uniform says so say we all in front of flags
Alt: William Adama says so say we all in front of flags
media.tenor.com
Anton Strezhnev@astrezh.bsky.social · 3mo agoGenAI will force us into pen-and-paper exams one way or another.
they’re calling it “Roberts redistricting,” and someone doesn’t like it
Lawrence Hurley@lawrencehurley.bsky.social · 3mo agoNEW: Chief Justice John Roberts bemoans that Americans don't understand how the Supreme Court operates and see justices as "political actors". The court at times simply has to make "unpopular" decisions, he adds: www.nbcnews.com/politics/sup...
Re the Voting Rights Act: I've used this graph a lot to illustrate how the VRA largely ended the historic pattern of blocking and burdening Black voters in the south. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
It’s a disastrous day for democracy. The Voting Rights Act made the U.S. an actually functioning democracy. And civil rights activists face impossible odds to gifting it to us. The Supreme Court‘s decision is vile.
The Voting Rights Act is essentially dead and it’s quite possible that we will, like when a similar SCOTUS gutted civil rights at the fall of Reconstruction, see a disappearance of much of the Black congressional representation, especially in the most heavily Black states, which are in the South.
Today, a spring scouting report on some of the hottest new LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. Congrats to all the authors on such wonderful placements 🎉
Some of the Best New LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship
A selection of worthy additions to your “important PDFs” folder.
lpeproject.org
Wasting time this morning by hanging out asking a pre-1931 LLM questions like "Is finance productive"
Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · 3mo agoHere is an AI trained just using text from 1931 or earlier, which leads to a lot of interesting experiments: can the model independently develop later inventions? Can it learn to code from examples alone? You can talk to the model here: talkie-lm.com/chat Details here: talkie-lm.com/introducing-...
Whoever called the faction of the press who still want to attend the White House Correspondents Dinner the ‘Access of Evil’ I salute you
We could just ... not let them do this.
New Gas-Powered Data Centers Could Emit More Greenhouse Gases Than Entire Nations
A WIRED review of permits for data center projects using natural gas and linked to OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI shows they could emit more than 129 million tons of greenhouse gases per year.
wired.com
It was so nice to go to my kid's woke high school and hear them say all the words we're not allowed to say any more.
Every day brings a new AI product, use case or outcome. But one method endures for knowing what these systems actually do and to whom: auditing. Thrilled to share my new coauthored book, Auditing AI-a roadmap for accountability across this dynamic terrain #openaccess mitpress.mit.edu/978026205172...
Every system that was regulated, either explicitly or implicitly, by the fact that they were effortful for humans (letters of recommendation, government filings, essays, or, as this paper finds, lawsuits) will break under a wave of AI.
Bicycles. Vaccines. What *hasn't* been affectively polarized at this point? Colors? Shoes? Can't wait to see what's next
Yonah Freemark@yonahfreemark.com · 4mo agoUS DOT's new "Freedom to Drive Initiative" focuses on addressing congestion by: —"Building new roadway capacity" —"Recover[ing] roadway capacity from other purposes [e.g., biking & transit] to support driving" [There is no evidence that either of these strategies work to address congestion.]
Alright, so after many many drafts, my NEPC education “policy review” covering Year I of Trump II is out. A “Not great, Bob!” gif might have served as well. I end up arguing that doing the life-giving work of good education requires intensely local effort in a newly obvious kind of way.
Studying the First Year of Trump’s Second Term: The Renewed Importance of Participatory Governance
The first year of Trump's second administration has marked a sharp departure from six decades of federal education policy. This policy brief examines how the administration has expanded executive auth...
nepc.colorado.edu
It's the time of year when I'm grateful for that great civilizational advance, Claritin.
a bunch of ppl & institutions knew dual class stock was bad from the get-go and yet everybody crumbled in the face of the most ridiculous argument in the world that these founders were just so smart and special we should cede control of our economy (and retirement funds) to them
Greg Shill@gregshill.com · 4mo agoPalantir’s investor base is public, but its multi-class stock structure gives the founders total control of the company. In The Social Costs (and Benefits) of Dual-Class Stock, I argued that model has powerful consequences for society, not only shareholders: law.ua.edu/wp-content/u... One solution…
“Of course in the old days Bluesky was only on for three hours a day. We used to get dressed up in our Sunday best to log on to it. Then when it shut down again we’d all stand up and sing the national anthem”
