iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by @jdpowers.bsky.social

Hoodlum 🇺🇸 @nothoodlum.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

In 2001, Walter Cronkite appeared on the David Letterman show and shared his thoughts.

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Fetterman gonna end up as a pundit on a conservative news network as the token "Democrat" making millions as long as he wants since there is infinite appetite among conservatives for people pretending to be Democrats criticizing everything Democrats do. This must have been his plan all along.

010

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

Microsoft Edge is not perfect but definitely good.

020

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

This isn't stupidity. They knew this would happen, that's why they were saying during the campaign that some "hardship" would be worth it to Make America Great Again. They are purposefully destroying the US's position in the world, economically and otherwise; high crimes and misdemeanors.

110

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

If you set your house on fire, all your food will burn too, leaving you without a meal to eat. Therefore, there is an illusion that heating up raw food will make it safer and better to eat.

110

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

It's incredibly embarrassing to even hold this belief at all, but you took the extra step to advertise it to the world.

060

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

If it's problem sets, give them both the questions and answers and explain how to use the answers effectively to learn the material. Instead of wasting your own time trying to determine if a submission is AI-generated, irresponsible students will waste their own time submitting copied answers.

000

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

It's not crazy and I have done it before. It can help you calibrate your expectations but also help them calibrate theirs. Bombing a week one quiz on requisite math skills puts things in perspective for some students very quickly.

000

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

Perpetual motion machines don't exist because of the law of conservation of energy. There is no equivalent law in economics. Complementarities, network effects, externalities, are possible sources of increasing returns; a unit increase in inputs can result in a more than unit increase in output.

100

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

#econsky For those tapped into pre-registration of experiments and empirical projects, what measure is used to determine the quality of a pre-registration submission? Likelihood of producing a new result? Of replicating an existing result? Of producing a precise estimate? Something else?

010

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

1. If you are committed to work on Saturday (which is fine), take the morning off. 2. Spend your Saturday work time on low-cognitive-load activities if your brain is fried from the week prior. 3. Do any necessary prep work for high-cognitive-load activities you plan to do the following week.

010

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

My last publication, I almost submitted with a math error that changed the main results until I coded it up, drew some graphs, and noticed the inconsistency. My current project, a result I was sure held but couldn't prove turned out to be true based on simulations. Sometimes the computers save us!

010

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

I have a contract theory joke but whether it is funny or not is not verifiable.

020

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Way easier for me to read on a computer. More convenient highlighting, way easier to quickly search cited papers, way easier to take notes.

000

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Her biggest mistake was running a campaign on issues and facts in a race with a voting base that is interested in neither. The US has the most gaslit voting block in the entire democratic world in Republicans and "moderates". They are the ones to blame when someone offers to help and they say no.

020

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 30/11/2024

These days I specifically assign the "boilerplate" questions to my TAs to grade and reserve the more interesting/challenging questions for myself to grade. It can be very rewarding to see students giving really thoughtful answers to those questions.

000

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

This was punished in 1955, only a few years after Nash published his theorem. The author may have thought Game Theory was still confined to zero-sum games like Matching Pennies. Still, give the Theory of Games a little more credit than that 😩

110

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

There are certainly increasing returns to income once you reach stratospheric levels. It allows you to buy or create social media platforms to influence elections and policy. Someone worth a few hundred million, more than any human could spend in a lifetime on consumption, couldn't do that.

000

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Perhaps they took a queue from some recent research on dishonesty and ethics out of Harvard Business School.

100

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

If that's true then the number of vacant homes will be much smaller than millions.

000

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

Under the circumstances that we are transported to an alternate universe where the basic incentives people face when making decisions in the face of scarcity don't apply.

010

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Very likely a social norm will emerge among atomistic speakers that closely matches (at least qualitatively) current conference scheduling, while extremely accomplished/famous economists will probably exert their market power over attention and speak for longer.

000

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

As economists, it is almost by definition our goal to understand the world beyond the most basic intuition because, as we find time and time again, that intuition is often wrong.

010

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

I agree that there is fraud and waste in government the same I'd agree there is fraud and waste in the private sector. The narrative that it is more prevalent in government is based on the simplest intuition about motivation and incentives...

200

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

These people seemed not to have taken an introductory economics class, where students learn that the marginal cost of eliminating the last unit of crime, pollution, fraud or waste, etc., is extremely high.

010

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

I agree it would be difficult to assess, but the "rah rah government waste" people never mention that their notion of "efficiency" costs money. Here is an example I can think of off the top of my head: www.aclu.org/news/smart-j...

aclu.org

Just as We Suspected: Florida Saved Nothing by Drug Testing Welfare Applicants | ACLU

200

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Taking those numbers, 500B fraud is at the top end. At the bottom end of 233B, it's close to 5%, matching your number on the private sector. Seems like the confidence intervals around point estimates for government fraud rate and private sector fraud rate probably overlap.

100

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

People who voted for Trump didn't even know about his policies re: mass deportations, tariffs, etc. I don't think it's at all reasonable to expect any of them would have changed their mind based on another candidate's policies.

010

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

iv) In what universe is a Trump administration that was rife with grift and fraud the firs time around when it was still pretending to be a "mainstream Republican" admin because less rife with fraud and grift now?

100

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

iii) In what universe is the "Department of Government Efficiency" plan to fire federal workers at random based on their social security number a recipe for a more efficient government workforce?

220

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

i) What would it cost to eliminate this fraud holding fixed the size of the federal workforce? ii) How does this inefficiency due to fraud compare to those in the private sector? Say, as a fraction of revenue?

400

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

I did some simulation to try to get a sense of what the conditions might look like and it helped build some intuition. I think the paper moves up a notch in quality if I can find a clean analytical condition but showing some examples could still be nice.

000

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

Thanks for the suggestions! Back to work on it tomorrow!

000

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Theorists of #econsky You are looking for analytical conditions for a theoretical result to hold. The conditions exist (because you have a numerical example) but they seem sensitive to several parameters at once in a complicated way. How do to get the best version of the result for the paper?

311

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

If it's the former, my view is still that I cannot prove the existence of anything but my own thought process, and moreover I can only prove that to myself. If it's the latter, then I agree that triangles (triangular objects) exist, and horses are real whereas unicorns are not.

000

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

My view on discussions like this is that another question has to be answered first: Are we discussing the literal existence of something? Or are we discussing how we interact with and make decisions based on the concept being discussed?

100

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

If this is the direction of the conversation then the logical conclusion of it will be that the only thing any consciousness can be sure exists is its own stream of thought.

100

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Some abstractions are eventually confirmed to exist in the real world. Black holes were an abstraction less than 100 years ago and now we have a picture of one. Common knowledge is an abstraction that cannot exist based on the definition provided above (and the kind of snarky Corollary I proposed).

100

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Corollary: since forming beliefs takes a strictly positive amount of time and lifespans are finite, common knowledge does not exist.

210

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

It's a minor hobby of mine to apply slang to economic concepts. Now I'm trying to figure out what type of equilibrium and in what type of game could we apply the word "pwned".

100

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

"N" for the set of players and "n" for a generic player. Are those available?

030

jdpowers.bsky.social @jdpowers.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Because one party has people that are somewhat economically literate (or just regular literate), and the other doesn't. The incoming administration is proposing disastrous policies, so the literate ones are reasonably and correctly revising their outlook downward.

030