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

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

10/ Causal networks are one of those mathematical frameworks—like random graphs or information theory—that other fields used productively long before economists picked them up. The area has much to offer to economics.

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

9/ We also cover methodology—how do you measure someone's causal beliefs? Numbers, words, or pictures each have trade-offs, and the choice matters more than you might expect.

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

8/ Applications span the discipline: false beliefs, stereotyping, demand for counterproductive policies, cycles of populism, belief polarization, asset-pricing anomalies, strategic persuasion, and more.

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

7/ On the empirical side: Do people actually think in terms of causal structure? Evidence says yes—even young children show hallmarks of causal reasoning. But performance is noisy: people violate screening-off, under-do explaining away, and perceive causal effects where none exist.

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

6/ Some questions we find fascinating: When does a wrong causal model still give you the right answer? (More often than you'd think.) How far can it lead you astray?

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

5/ We custom-tailor our introduction of the workhorse model— causal DAGs— to economists’ tastes. It is the same model that lies at the foundation of much cognitive science, but cross-citations are rare. We integrate the fields.

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

4/ We organize the paper around three nested questions: • How do people reason within a known causal model? • How do they estimate the strength and forms of causal connections? • How do they figure out the structure—which variables cause which—in the first place?

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

3/ A firm that advertises heavily every December credits the campaign for sales that would’ve happened anyway. A voter who sees interest rates and prices rising together blames the Fed for the inflation it's fighting. Same facts, different interpretation, different behavior.

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

2/ Economic models of belief updating usually assume people know the structure of their environment and ask whether they update by the right amounts. But often, the structure itself is uncertain. People rely on simplified mental models—often incomplete or wrong—to interpret data.

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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? 🧵

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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...

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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.

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

Is my own experience an outlier or is it a different mechanism? I always felt that once I did something, that thing was taken, so my younger brothers didn’t want to do that thing anymore and searched for something else to focus on

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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."

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

And don't forget the abundance of violent crime

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Reposted by Sandro Ambuehl

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

economists' creed

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

I guess the most space-saving way to pack 17 equally-sized squares into a single bigger square is a good example of such platonic horror

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

An Israeli friend once told me that they have an expression to describe a particular kind of person: “full throttle in neutral.” The jewish culture seems to great with such expressions

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

Econ is called the dismal science because it was anti-slavery early on, and some historian thought that was against the “natural order.” en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dis...

en.m.wikipedia.org

The dismal science - Wikipedia

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

It's extremely useful -- for all tasks that can be independently checked (does the code work, does the cited paper actually make that point, etc.). Given the many errors the frontier versions still make on tasks that can be checked, I don't think it can be trusted on tasks that can't be checked yet

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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

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Same issue in switzerland. Bequests usually play the key role.

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Someone who graduated from Stanford only about 10 years earlier than me told me that at the time there was a saying: "There are 2 kinds of econ professors. Those who marry their students, and those who marry their secretaries." Hard to imagine from todays point of view.

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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

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

Almost all of the Julia Donaldson / Axel Scheffler books are great! There are many more, highly recommended!

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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]

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

The behavioral/experimental economist named Werner that I’ve known for a while is actually this guy: sites.google.com/view/peterwe... Surprising accumulation of Werners in the field!

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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)

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

I think it's asymmetric. If there's a flaw in a paper, every selection of referees has a good chance to detect it. Also, there are only a small handful of journals at each level, so you can't dip as many times as you'd like. Redrawing detects flaws, but prevents vetos. Or, yes, editors deciding.

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

If someone has some idiosyncratic beef with a paper (e.g. they don't like structural estimation in principle), but it keeps going to that person, that person acquires essentially a veto-right over the paper (I know some names). I think science works better if nobody has such a veto right.

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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.

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

... don't forget the climate change deniers in the earth science departments

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

Not sure this is what you mean, but there's a literature on good vs. bad control variables. Here's a great and very short article on it coauthored by one of the spearleaders of that literature, Judea Pearl: ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser...

ftp.cs.ucla.edu

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

This is amazing!! Huge congrats! Great place for experimental economics!

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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

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

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

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

…and all those people that used to be really old but look like teenagers now

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

In my experience, a challenge is to play such that its sounds as good to the audience as it sounds to yourself when you play it. These two ways of perceiving the same music can leave very different impressions…

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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

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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.

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Very much agree regarding fields that publish many small papers a year. In econ, we luckily have a quality first approach, with very deep papers. Not without issues though: excessive length (often 100+ pages) and the curse of the top 5 journals (only those really count for some decisions)

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

Very much agree -- but we're in the minority. Just finishing a paper on this. Others (e.g. Liscow/Pershing) show that people are willing to give substantially more if they can place in-kind restrictions.

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Sandro Ambuehl @sandroecon.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

... apparently you're also very rich

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

Because they fear retaliation? (Not saying that's the right thing to do, just that it might explain their behavior)

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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

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