Victor Chernozhukov #peace 🇺🇦

A woman, holding a sign "«The 6th commandment. Don't kill» next to the Christ Cathedral in Moscow yesterday, got arrested.

Trump called it…

Breaking: The President's son is on a heater Donald Trump Jr's fund invested in one of the only U.S. rare earth magnet startups at a $200M valuation Three months later, the Pentagon awarded Vulcan a $620M loan and the Commerce Dept took a $50M equity stake In February, Trump announced a $12B rare earth strategic reserve Today, the company is now valued at $2 billion. That's a 10x for Trump Jr in under a year Vulcan is building the largest rare earth magnet factory outside of China. The U.S. says it needs to stop relying on China, which controls 90% of global rare earth processing The timing is either the greatest coincidence in investing history, or it isn't

Rep. Thomas Massie says Trump called him on the House floor after he pushed to release the Epstein files. Trump told him three times: "I'm coming at you like you've never seen in your life." This video was deleted from twitter yesterday, you know what to do ‼️‼️

By now, I have published a fair number of papers, and one more acceptance would have close to zero marginal impact on anything that matters professionally. But getting my survey on “Deep Learning for Solving Models” accepted into the Journal of Economic Literature made me genuinely happy, for reasons that have nothing to do with my CV. I had the misfortune of studying my undergraduate degree in economics at a quite awful institution. Two professors, David Taguas and Alfredo Arahuetes, were outstanding, and I owe them a great deal. The rest were well below any reasonable professional level, and some violated the basic standards of ethical conduct. They had no business teaching economics at any level, let alone at a university that charged tuition and claimed to prepare students for professional life. I had to work out most of my education on my own. The surveys published in the Journal of Economic Literature were how I did it. I spent hours in the library’s reading room going through one survey after another on topics I had never been properly taught. Some helped more than others, but collectively they gave me a solid enough foundation that, when I arrived at Minnesota for my PhD, I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that I was ahead of nearly all the other first-year students, including some who held master’s degrees, despite the fact that I had finished my undergraduate degree just six weeks before. I owe the Journal of Economic Literature a debt I will never be able to repay. Publishing a survey there is the closest I can come to trying. So, the thought that some student somewhere, working on her own in a library or on a laptop, might find my survey useful gives me tremendous satisfaction. But there is a broader point worth making. Even in the world of AI, the profession has an important mission in making educational material widely available. Textbooks, surveys, teaching slides, these are public goods in the economist’s sense: high social value, insufficient private incentive to produce. This is also why I post all my slides and teaching material online: sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/deepl… We do not reward these activities nearly enough, and their supply is well below what any reasonable social planner would choose. I do not have a good proposal for changing this, and I would welcome suggestions. What I do find heartbreaking is that many of the great economists of the past couple of generations never wrote textbooks on their areas of expertise. I do not mean this as criticism. All of them maximize, and perhaps they all suffer from the same bias I suffer from: the belief that one can always do it next year. But I often think about the hours of pure intellectual pleasure I would have had reading “Time Series Econometrics: An Advanced Textbook” by Chris Sims or “Methods in Structural Estimation” by Pat Bajari. Those books do not exist. They should.

Lebanese cellist Mahdi Saheli playing Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian's Andantino in the ruins of southern Beirut.

"There is now unambiguous, solid economic evidence, not just abstract economic theory, that rent control would make the affordability problems facing [Massachusetts] worse, not better." - Jon Gruber, Chairman of the Economics Department at MIT

I'm sad to hear that Prof. Takeshi Amemiya of @Stanford has passed. He was a brilliant econometrician and gifted teacher. As a student, I took several classes with him. My favorite memory: Whenever a student would ask him a hard question, he would stop short and stare straight up at the ceiling in awkward silence. Suddenly, when the answer came to him, a look of glee would appear on his face. "Ahh!" he'd say and meticulously write out a fully worked-out proof on the chalkboard. He had such a clean way of thinking about probability, statistics, and econometrics. I will always be grateful for everything he taught me. I wish all comfort to his family and to all who knew and loved him.

En @EconUdesa , el año pasado hicimos un seminario de lectura (conjunto, de profesores y alumnos) para revisar este paper con detalle. Es una gran inversion, me alegra verlo en el JEL.

log (😅) = 💧log 😄

BREAKING🚨: ALL FIVE types of nucleic acid bases, the building blocks of LIFE 'DNA and RNA', have been found in samples collected from asteroid Ryugu

@arindube Opposite? No?

Not great news for LLMs in Econ.

I cannot understand how the huge statistical spaghetti mess that is a transformer can be so correct in the formal causal analysis of a huge piece of source code.

If I may offer an additional X-long explanation: Potential outcomes is an intermediate step in causal analysis. One starts with a structural model and derives both the potential outcomes (via hypothetical interventions) and the validity (or invalidity) of conditional exogeneity. Plus an analogy: POs are like "fast food," while structural models are like "slow food." The real roots of econometrics lie in the latter—as exemplified by the early work of Philip Wright in 1920s, which is unfortunately (for the most part) ignored in empirical practice in econ. The ignorance is the modulus operandi, to the point that that Wright's IV formula is called the Wald IV formula, and conditional exogeneity is called ignorability (pun intended😄).

Here is my last post on the topic: My attention was caught by the paper on "conditional ignorability" by Elias Bareinboim and Drago Plecko causalai.net/r120.pdf. Why? Because I've been trying for years to convince Imbens that it makes no sense for researchers to articulate assumptions whose plausibility they cannot judge. Bareinboim and Plecko's paper explains formally why this is so. Another gem is this paper: ucla.in/3Rarp0C. Ask any PO economist if he/she can distinguish "good control" from "bad control" -- they can't, because conditional ignorability is cognitively formidable. @analisereal

The Causal Inference Playbook: Advanced Methods Every Data Scientist Should Master | @TDataScience #AI #CausalAI #TechHartford c: @yudapearl towardsdatascience.com/the-causal-inf…

I mean the AER referees scored 0 and took 8 months

Wow! One of the most exciting BioAI news announcements of the year! From @GoogleDeepMind in collaboration with @emblebi, @Nvidia and @SeoulNatlUni ! “Millions of protein complexes added to AlphaFold Database. Four-way collaboration brings together world-leading AI and biological expertise to make AI-predicted protein complex structures openly available to the global scientific community.”

We should stop taxing human labor and start taxing the bots. blog.andrewyang.com/p/tax-the-bots

💔💔💔

We need more positivity in the world like this.

Periodic reminder this all started when Dr. Bender, unprompted, decided to single me out as someone didn't deserve tenure for using LLMs. Her followers tagged my employer with calls to fire me and sent threats to me and my family. Everything since has been a response to that.

In my new quest to train as a plumber-one of the most coveted jobs now, I' m creating plumbing videos & lessons using @NotebookLM. Here is an amazing short video! Turns out to be more interesting than I thought! Thanks to @GeminiApp, we are making plumbing great again (MPGA)!😅