iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Statistical concepts such as the t-test can be explained so intuitively that a first grader can understand. In the app's "Experiment" mode you play with things. In "Guess" mode, you only see the balls, and guess the location of the carts. homepageambuehl.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/webapps/tTes...

homepageambuehl.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com

Interactive t-test Galton Board

010

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

1/ New review paper out today! "Mental Models of Causal Structure in Economics and Psychology" with MIT cognitive scientist @RahulBhui and econ theorist @HeidiThysen. How do people come to believe that one thing causes another—and what happens when those beliefs are wrong? 🧵

142

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Department of Economics @Universität Zürich🇨🇭 @econ.uzh.ch · 21/05/2025

Delighted to announce that Ingvild Almås will join the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich in June 2025 as the 𝐋𝐚𝐫𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐧-𝐑𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐅𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐡. Welcome, Ingvild! More information and official press release: www.econ.uzh.ch/en/news/insi...

0115

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Josh Merfeld @merfeld.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

I am just a simple man, begging you not to include constants in your tables when you include a bunch of fixed effects.

1141

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Uma Karmarkar @umakarma.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Unsolicited sci writing advice: Writing that something always or never happens (e.g., Ɐ(x)) makes your claims vulnerable because it only takes one counterexample to break them. The most dangerous version of this? "No prior research has addressed this question."

051

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

economists' creed

2817

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

DeepResearch is helpful but you really can't trust it. A review I just had it do claims that "promise tactics" are a well-used influence strategy, but the paper it cites does not contain the word "promise" at all. For a different paper, DeepRes claims the opposite of what's in the paper's abstract

000

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Daniele Girardi @dgirardi.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Reviews of Economic Literature has been launched True open access, managed by academics for academics, it follows our mass resignation from JES where the commercial publisher imposed very problematic conditions. Submit your literature reviews in economics! rel.journals.sup.org/index.php/re...

rel.journals.sup.org

About the Journal | Reviews of Economic Literature

13717

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Keenan Crane @keenancrane.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

Here's a nice "proof without words": The sum of the squares of several positive values can never be bigger than the square of their sum. This picture helps make sense of how ℓ₁ and ℓ₂ norms regularize and sparsify solutions (resp.). [1/n]

416531

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

What do people think is the probability the SAVE act will get passed? Can't find anything on prediction markets, but the act seems to be an important (and scary) step to entrench the current admin (by making voting harder disproportionately for more liberal-leaning groups such as married women)

000

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

The currently most famous swiss person is probably Roger Federer. But the most important Swiss person to ever have lived is probably the guy below (Euler), besides the Bernoulli dynasty, perhaps. Remarkably, all of them came from the city of Basel.

010

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

We know a lot about how fake news spread, what makes propaganda effective, etc. But what to do about it? This is one of the few pieces I've come across that offer solutions, based on what the British tried in Germany before and during WWII. www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgHH...

youtube.com

How to Fight (and Win) an Information War | Peter Pomerantsev | TED

YouTube video by TED

000

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

Harvard completely caved... they're even regurgiating the propaganda

000

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 30/03/2025

Current US federal admin clearly respects the Pareto ordering: if a policy harms somebody without benefitting anyone, they’ll do it

020

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 30/03/2025

I think the main point about ridiculous plagiarism debates such as the one currently affecting Mark Carney is to trivialize academia. What non-academics will perceive is that acad. work = copying + rephrasing others and that the "value added" is in the rephrasing. Which nobody would want to pay for.

020

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 23/03/2025

TIL Velcro is a Swiss invention modeled after those pesky little burdock flower seeds that are so hard to get off your clothing once they cling to it: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velcro_...

en.m.wikipedia.org

Velcro Companies - Wikipedia

010

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Roberto Weber @robertoweber.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

We had an wonderful couple of days hosting a strong group of PhD applicants. I am looking forward to an exciting incoming cohort at the Zurich Graduate School of Economics this fall!

021

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

Here's another instance of these "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" cases. The guy has 17 papers in 2024 alone. Not so hard if you don't care about whether the results are actually true... (the development econ scandal described here: bsky.app/profile/i4re...)

131

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

The longer I'm in this line of work, the more often I see instances of "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is"

000

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

NBER @nber.org · 05/03/2025

Experimental validation, which links economic preferences to choices in incentivized elicitations, may fail to produce reliable new measures, from Jonathan Chapman, Pietro Ortoleva, Erik Snowberg, Leeat Yariv, and Colin Camerer www.nber.org/papers/w33520

1229

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Filipe Campante @filipecampante.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

Sounds about right…

0193

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Dina Pomeranz @dinapomeranz.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

PhD admits visiting day at @econ.uzh.ch Drinks in the Dozentenfoyer #NoFilter

0252

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

Trump's 1987 (!) NYT ad. Stunningly similar to what he's doing now (except for the "let's help .. our sick, our homeless" part). [Of course, this is not an endorsement]

010

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

LLM agents behave unlike humans in standard experimental finance (bubble) experiments.

050

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Elliot Lipnowski @elliotlip.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

The main purpose of the "comment" function in LaTeX is making it psychologically easier to delete things that should be deleted.

4282

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Filipe Campante @filipecampante.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

It’s so important for people to realize that authoritarianism in America will look like this, not like a police state with martial law and people disappearing into prisons. It will be a dispirited opposition that people are afraid of supporting, bc otherwise they’ll get in trouble.

20346108

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

When you board a Swiss ski lift, a ski instructor might hand you a random child. It's now your responsibility to make sure the child stays safe and doesn't fall to death. You hand the child back at the top. I think this is awesome-but it has to feel pretty weird to non-Swiss, no?

110

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

I did a NYT video interview—along with voices from Hungary, Nicaragua, and Russia— about how repression works in authoritarian states. www.nytimes.com/video/opinio...

nytimes.com

Video: Opinion | How Tyranny Begins

Tyranny doesn’t happen overnight. Take it from the people who missed the first signs.

1020162

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Ellen Peters @ellenpeters.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

Thank you ABA. "We have seen attempts at wholesale dismantling.. This is chaotic. It may appeal to a few. But it is wrong. And most Americans recognize it is wrong. It is also contrary to the rule of law." www.americanbar.org/news/abanews...

americanbar.org

The ABA supports the rule of law

It has been three weeks since Inauguration Day. Most Americans recognize that newly elected leaders bring change. That is expected. But most Americans also expect that changes will take place in accor...

063

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Prof Dynarski @dynarski.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

22 states suing over NIH overhead cut www.chronicle.com/article/22-s...

1336

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Katy Milkman @katymilkman.bsky.social · 08/02/2025

The implications of this for academia are likely to be catastrophic. If you care about science, pay attention 👇🏻👀

0144

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 29/10/2023

Here's another cool one, from D-TEA Paris. Ann looks at Bob. Bob looks at Mary. Ann is married. Mary is unmarried. Does at least one married person look at an unmarried person? Most people say "can't say." Until you point out that either...

120

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 29/10/2023

From Fiery Cushman's talk: One of the shapes below is the magic symbol. It's the middle one. Select exactly one of the three words below such that somebody who does not know which is the magic symbol will know it for sure. [People do it well, though it needs quite a high level k]

110

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 26/10/2023

Here's a trick if matlab is very slow to start, or slow to start a parallel pool or other package: switch off the internet and try again. It might be slow because it's trying to check licenses but fails. When you shut off the internet, it no longer tries that.

000

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

Ray Fisman @rfisman.bsky.social · 23/10/2023

I really like the way this paper (out this morning via NBER) conceptualizes the idea of corporate social impact - the social welfare loss from the firm's exit. By that definition, most existing 'social impact' metrics are way off the mark (according to the authors) www.nber.org/papers/w31803

091

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 21/10/2023

I had zombie observations in Stata--more data points than I should have. Here's why: max(1, missing) does NOT evaluate to missing, but to 1. (I don't even want to know how many wrong results there are out there due to such Stata quirks...)

120

Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 12/10/2023

3yo: "I want to hear this book" Me: "No, it will scare you" 3yo: "No, I won't be scared because of the wolf"

000

Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

The Onion @theonion.com · 04/10/2023

"We are proud to announce that the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine will be awarded to insurance broker and Findlay, OH resident Darren Weston for his astounding discoveries that vaccines don’t work and will kill you."

theonion.com

54-Year-Old Facebook User Wins Nobel Prize For Own Extensive Internet Research Into Dangers Of Covid...

STOCKHOLM—Lauding the man as one of the greatest minds working in medicine today, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences reportedly awarded 54-year-old Facebook user Darren Weston the Nobel Prize Mon...

142102535