iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I joined the Silk Road Revival podcast to talk about how I ended up in economic history and about two of my recent papers. Here is the link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tddw...

youtube.com

Podcast Interview with Professor Noel Johnson

YouTube video by Silk Road Rev.

021

Reposted by Noel Johnson

ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪʟʟɪᴍᴇᴛ ✡️☮️❤️ @dlmillimet.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

We can't even make them read the syllabus!

1205

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Some days you just need to stay low and keep your eyes on things.

021

Reposted by Noel Johnson

Jeffrey Lin @jeffrlin.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

I’m presenting this paper Tuesday 1:40pm at the NBER SI and live on YouTube. Tune in! www.nber.org/conferences/...

nber.org

SI 2026 Macroeconomics and Productivity

12314

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Managed to image M51 and M13 from rural Ohio last night. Great conditions until the clouds rolled in!

250

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

The Swiss head coach is the most European looking person I’ve ever seen.

000

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

It is, once again, leaf blower season. As tradition dictates, a haiku… Blowers hum and wail, Thoughts drift like leaves in the gust— Workday blown away.

120

Reposted by Noel Johnson

Atlas Shvitzed @therafischwartz.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Unfortunately, a stunned Paris is how they all got into this whole mess to begin with

360159463256

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

I really enjoyed spending the last 30 minutes figuring out that in order to submit my paper to an Elsevier journal, the MS can be pdf, but the separate title page cannot be a pdf, but must be either a Word file or sent to them by post as cuneiform tablets.

161

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Really awesome that schools and summer camps frequently have special dress-up “theme” days for my 11 year old. Nothing better than waking up and learning it’s “wacky Wednesday” and she needs to dress up as her favorite holiday. Really keeps me on my toes. Grateful.

010

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Thanks Dan! All credit and glory should go to my coauthor @malikaltaf.bsky.social

010

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

7/ Here's the paper. Comment welcome! noeldjohnson.github.io/assets/paper...

noeldjohnson.github.io

021

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

6/ The wider point: you don't need a medical scandal (e.g. Tuskegee, or, colonial sleeping-sickness campaigns) to seed vaccine hesitancy. A purely political act of state violence did it here, more than a generation later. With a shadow that lasted about as long as the people who remembered it.

121

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

5/ And it's the violence, not colonial cities in general. The same test on proximity to Delhi, Calcutta, or Bombay shows nothing like it. Only Lucknow is positive and peaks in the 1880s.

111

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

4/ Why "half-life"? The effect peaks in the 1880s and is gone by the 1910s, tracking the cohort that was 10–25 in 1857 as they moved through their child-rearing years. A memory of state violence, decaying at roughly the speed of one human generation.

111

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

3/ Within the same province, holding geography, rail access, and gov spending constant, vaccination falls the closer a district sits to Lucknow, about 9 to 11 fewer infant vaccinations per 1,000 a year in the 1880s. It's sharpest in the Awadh core, the region collectively punished after the revolt.

111

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

2/ @malikaltaf.bsky.social and I digitized a district-level panel of infant smallpox vaccination (1870–1919) from colonial sanitary reports and measured each district's least-cost travel distance to Lucknow, the epicenter of British retribution.

111

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

🧵1/ The half-life of a grudge. Britain crushed the 1857 revolt in northern India with mass reprisals centered on Lucknow. For decades after, districts closer to that violence vaccinated their children less against smallpox and the effect faded as the generation that lived through 1857 died off.

196

Reposted by Noel Johnson

Adam Weinstein @adamweinstein.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

I'm so disillusioned, I almost don't even care who gets the FIFA Peace Prize next year

268239993246

Reposted by Noel Johnson

Men in Blazers Media Network @meninblazers.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

The goals and sending-off won over countless American fans, but Flo Balogun's comments today should win over even more ❤️🤍💙 📸: @tombogert.bsky.social

281266241

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

I just hugged my dog because there was nobody else in the room.

010

Reposted by Noel Johnson

Jonathan S Doucette @jdoucette.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

In terms of its role in Europe's development, the Dominican order is perhaps most known for its part in the inquisition. However, it also had a more benevolent impact on regime change and the development of human capital 1/N

192

Reposted by Noel Johnson

Dan Giedeman @dangiedeman.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

I'm not the best lip-reader, but I believe what she is saying is "I disagree with the offsides call" in Croatian.

151

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

2/ And I checked the rest. Nearly every ≤2-char Italian function word (di, da, il, la, lo, le, un, e, o…) is already in our stopword list, so the length filter is redundant with it. "re" (king) is the only ≤2-char token that isn't a stopword. It's the filter's one unique casualty.

000

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

1/ Deliberate but blunt. It's an explicit str_length(word) > 2 line in our cleaning step, not a tokenizer default (tidytext keeps short words). But it's one global rule across all 7 languages, not a per-language call. So "re" was collateral, not considered.

100

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

2/ Stemming wouldn't help (re's already minimal). A subword/char model (fastText-style) would, but the length cutoff precludes it. That cutoff exists because 1–2-char title tokens are mostly noise (Roman numerals, abbrevs). Negligible for the title-level metrics I'm using in my actual research.

000

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

1/ Good catch! The answer is simpler than a collapse though. "re" isn't a stopword, it's dropped by a >= 3 character min-length filter at tokenization. So it never got a vector to recover. For this quick demo I just accepted the loss.

200

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

7/ Still — a gender axis, recoverable from the semantic geometry of 500 year old book titles, cleanly enough that Latin hands you regina. The market for ideas had structure. The vectors can see it. Reply with a language + word-pair and I'll run it. /end

110

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

6/ Caveats for the pedants (I love you): these are small, noisy vector spaces built from short titles — cosine similarities ~0.3–0.5, not modern-LLM clean. Italian even fell over because "re" (king, two letters) got filtered out of the vocabulary.

200

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

5/ And the woman direction keeps surfacing actual women — the neighbors fill up with names: Elisabetha, Christina, Louise, Sybilla — plus French damoiselle (damsel) and veuve (widow). Early-modern titles are full of dedications to and about noblewomen. The math found them.

100

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

4/ Where it "fails" is just as revealing. Spanish doesn't return reina — it returns Felipe, Filipe, Phelipe (King Philip) and "III, IV." The Spanish title corpus is wall-to-wall royal proclamations, so "king" basically is a specific man named Philip.

100

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

3/ And Latin isn't alone. Queen lands in the top handful in three languages: • Latin: rex − uir + femina → regina (#1) • English: king − man + woman → queene (#3) • French: roi − homme + femme → reine (#4) (Dutch's koninginne sneaks in at #8, just outside.)

100

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

2/ I trained word embeddings on ~800,000 early-modern book titles across seven languages and ran the analogy in each. Latin is textbook-perfect: rex − uir (man) + femina (woman) → regina (queen) — the single closest word. From book titles. From 500 years ago.

100

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

🧵 1/ The most famous party trick in AI: take word vectors and compute "king − man + woman." You (often) get queen — evidence the model learned gender as a direction in space. Could you pull that off using nothing but the titles of books printed in Europe, 1450–1650?

110

Reposted by Noel Johnson

James Feigenbaum @jamesfeigenbaum.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Want a politically (and economically) productive investment? Absolutely massive universities in low population states. Land grant universities x1000

142

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Way ahead of you, GMU Emergency Alert System. The World Cup is on and I've decided to limit all activities both outside AND inside.

010

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Claude Code just told me that the version of Ruby I've been using on my laptop is "ancient". And now I feel old too.

000

Reposted by Noel Johnson

Christian Vedel @christianvedel.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Machine Learning is causing massive leaps everywhere. Also in Economic History. There is a conversation we need to have. What ought to be the new scientific standards? Together with two coauthors . Our argument: We should maybe care a bit less about accuracy 📝🧵

41113

Reposted by Noel Johnson

Nicholas A. Christakis @nachristakis.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

"The share of Harvard undergraduates receiving disability accommodations rose from roughly 3% in 2014 to 21% in 2024 — a sevenfold increase in a decade... Meanwhile, at community colleges, the rate is 3 to 4% and has not changed in a decade." www.bostonglobe.com/2026/06/29/o...

bostonglobe.com

The disability accommodation trap on college campuses - The Boston Globe

Once enough students receive extra time, private testing rooms, and deadline extensions, their classmates face a choice: seek the same advantages or fall behind.

1101

Reposted by Noel Johnson

NBER @nber.org · 29/06/2026

A new practitioner's guide to using LLMs in economic history covers the workflow, pitfalls, and validation, with four worked examples from paintings to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime speeches, from @andyferrara.bsky.social www.nber.org/papers/w35374

0189

Reposted by Noel Johnson

Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 30/06/2026

The great economist Alberto Alesina passed away unexpectedly six years ago. The next day, his former PhD student @sethsd.bsky.social posted an explanation for Alesina's incandescence as a scholar and mentor. I've thought about his words many times over the years. medium.com/@sethstephen...

I concluded that the parts of the mind that in most people are devoted to trouble — the parts that hold grudges, worry needlessly, or explore narrow paths heading towards dead ends — were missing in Alberto’s mind. His brain, as best I could tell, was entirely devoted to stuff that mattered: having creative insights on fundamental topics and making and enjoying wonderful relationships. Alberto showed us all you can do in a life when you clear the cobwebs that waste a good portion of most people’s mental space.

27014

Reposted by Noel Johnson

Department of Economics, Trinity College Dublin @tcdeconomics.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Congratulations to Prof @selimgulesci.bsky.social on his promotion to Professor in Economics at TCD and to Kevin O'Rourke on his appointment as Honorary Professor of the Department of Economics! 🥳 Read more: www.tcd.ie/economics/ne... @tcdschoolssp.bsky.social

0124

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Just wait till you go on vacation without the kid someday. You’ll be arriving everywhere early and will think you’ve developed superhuman speed.

010

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Was watching an instructional video on reverse de la riva and my wife walked in and looked at me like I'm weird. I have no idea why...

100

Noel Johnson @ndjohnson.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Caveats: these are edition counts from the Universal Short Title Catalogue (a catalogue of surviving books), so some of the German drop may be lost/uncatalogued print. "Holy Roman Empire" is a war-zone proxy. Preliminary and descriptive, but the timing and geography are striking.

000