Mengyi sun
100 posts
Good evidence for the value of blinded review
Thao Nguyen (Shibe)@thaoshibe
My friend said there is a PhD student (reviewer) cancelled her trip to NeurIPS because she was threatened by authors. This is unacceptable. Please report immediately to ICLR -- All "unethical" authors should be banned for years!!
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CROWDSOURCING REQUEST: PAPERS WITH FUNNY TITLES!
Folks, science can be very dry. But some authors make it less so by giving their papers funny titles. I'm hoping to find/highlight these gems, maybe via a "best of year" list.
Do you know any such papers?! Pls share :-)
e.g.
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@JSheltzer Totally agree private R&D can’t replace public R&D given the need for spillovers. Also, your dataset is interesting! I built a small curation tool (github.com/mengysun/DataP…) and wonder if it could help scale analysis. I’m at CSHL with David McCandlish—think you two overlapped!
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I love biotech but I don't think that biotech is capable of completely replacing academic research -
statnews.com/2025/11/04/are…
Jason Sheltzer@JSheltzer
Many incredible biomedical scientists have left academia for biotech/pharma. While also noting many caveats, I want to share the observation that among top scientists who left academia for industry, their biggest new discoveries almost always happened in academia:
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@MishaTeplitskiy seems like the same point made in：The categorical imperative: Securities analysts and the illegitimacy discount
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ZXX
May also make interdisciplinary research harder 🤔
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@MishaTeplitskiy Stand out is all you need: academic.oup.com/restud/article…
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Going to a really good high school may have countervailing effects on getting into elite U.S. colleges
1. Improves skills (hopefully)
2. Makes you stand out less, i.e. "small frog in a big pond"
Here's some evidence for (2)
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If diffusion can't—and shouldn't—be constrained, perhaps it's time we simply embrace it.
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Yet, more profoundly, as Thomas Jefferson observed: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
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direct.mit.edu/qss/article/do…
Fantastic collaboration with @HonglinB and @MishaTeplitskiy !
Key insight: Knowledge diffusion is nearly impossible to constrain—where there's a will, there's a way. From the atomic bomb to ChatGPT, determined minds always find a path.
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Mengyi sun retweetledi
Zero-sum thinking is a key mindset that shapes how we view the world. Excited to share a new paper on the roots and consequences of Zero-sum thinking with @sahilchinoy, @DrNathanNunn @SMGSequeira. A summary thread🧵1/23 scholar.harvard.edu/files/stantche…
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@MishaTeplitskiy I guess we would have to look at right near the price jump to see if there's a response toward the price increase......
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@MishaTeplitskiy I think this is kind of tricky: the reason that the price is rising is because of the increasing demand?
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Random/free research idea!
Q: Do financial barriers in publishing science affect geographical/status diversity of who's published?
Data: Journal of Financial Economics charges authors $850 (!!!) just to submit a paper. (thx @dfehder for pointer)
jfinec.com/submissions
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Mengyi sun retweetledi
We've lost one of the best humans and scientists I've ever met way too soon. Kevin Wood was the most sincerely kind, thoughtful, and sharp colleague I had the pleasure to call a friend.
If you ever met Kevin, you know exactly what I mean.
gofundme.com/f/support-futu…
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In general, if you can explain a complex phenomenon to the uninitiated, you understand it. The converse is also true, in my experience. As it has been said by many, explaining something to a smart but naive partner is a great way to sharpen your own understanding of the subject.
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This nicely summarizes the essence of what it means to be a great theoretician.
Ash Jogalekar@curiouswavefn
Hans Bethe on Enrico Fermi’s strengths and style of doing physics (Bethe was a postdoc with Fermi in 1931).
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Mengyi sun retweetledi
ChatGPT’s access is unequal among countries – but did ChatGPT diffuse to those places without legal access? What is the benefit of scientists adopting AI tools? I'm excited to have a new preprint w/@SunMengyi and @MishaTeplitskiy link arxiv.org/abs/2406.11583 A thread (1/n)
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Mengyi sun retweetledi
ChatGPT has been blocked in several countries including China and Russia. Do the blocks work?
TLDR: no, not at all
Paper led by @HonglinB and @SunMengyi shows ChatGPT use in scientific writing was *higher* in countries "without" access
arxiv.org/abs/2406.11583
(1/3)
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@skryazhi I think Econ has the tradition to that—it could be a bit overdone but generally very illuminating. I learned a lot from a several online NBER seminars where there’s the ‘discussant’ mechanism. It basically teaches you how to read a paper😂.
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Such a culture seems very difficult to establish though... I'd love to hear if anyone has suggestions for how to facilitate this. So far, I have only a collection of failed attempts :)
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Very true! It is so hard (a) to get people to actually engage with you and (b) to then get honest feedback face to face.
Clearly, some individuals do engage and provide feedback regularly. But what is more interesting is some departments maintain this robust questioning culture.
Dmitri Petrov@PetrovADmitri
I concur. I always hope for a robust questioning of my work when I present. And often I don’t get it. But it’s not bc people necessarily agree as evidenced by often harsh anonymous reviews of the same work. I wish we normalized sharp questioning wo it being personal & ad hominem.
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@skryazhi @UCSanDiego @Google Same for umich (alumni) . It did left us like~15G, which isn't that bad given we are alumni😂
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Several years ago @UCSanDiego and @Google gave everyone unlimited Google Drive storage. Now, "unlimited" turns into 1 GB. Unbelievable letdown! Huge impairment of my lab's operation since *everything* we do is on the lab's Shared Drive.
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