iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Great read for those who like both markets and true crime.

Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Consciousness debates proliferate as AI advances. But perhaps much of the debate eases if one avoids reading scientific models as literal ontologies. Similarly in positive economic theory, models give us “as if” claims about behavior, not literal accounts of cognition. #PhilSci #EconSky

noemamag.com

Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet) | NOEMA

To understand life, we must stop treating organisms like machines and minds like code.

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

A true pioneer whose work shaped multiple fields. Great loss.

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Econometrica @ecmaeditors.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

Restricting beliefs may change the predictions of strong rationalizability non-monotonically. Yet, this paper shows, restricting initial beliefs on types can only sharpen the predictions. This allows to solve an open problem in robust-implementation theory.https://buff.ly/mO017Pu

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City St George’s Economics @cityeconomics.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

🚨 Job alert We’re hiring 5 permanent faculty positions at Assistant Professor level: • 3 x Open field • Health Economics • IO Come work in a large, research-intensive department! ⏰ Applications reviewed on a rolling basis (deadline 18 Jan 2026) #econjobs econjobmarket.org/positions/12...

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

For those of us who’ve been taunted by Google Scholar refusing to show results unless the title was nearly word-for-word exact… this is good. scholar.google.com/scholar_labs...

scholar.google.com

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City St George’s Economics @cityeconomics.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

Apply for a PhD with us! 🎓 Join a 45+ faculty community doing cutting-edge research in micro, macro, and beyond. Funding includes: 1️⃣ SENSS (info at the link) 2️⃣ Departmental studentships (tuition waiver, paid teaching, research expenses) 📅 Deadline: 12 Dec 🔗 www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPG428/p... #EconSky

jobs.ac.uk

PhD in Economics at City St George’s, University of London

jobs.ac.uk are now advertising a PhD in Economics. Discover exciting PhD opportunities on jobs.ac.uk.

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Nicholas A. Christakis @nachristakis.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

Consensus AI Deep Search is a cool agentic search function that runs full literature reviews across 200 million papers in minutes. To try it, select "Deep" mode in Consensus and ask any research question!. Get your free account here: consensus.app (I am pleased to be an advisor to this company.)

consensus.app

Search - Consensus: AI Search Engine for Research

Consensus is a search engine that uses AI to find answers in scientific research.

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

Sharp and beautifully written — a nice read.

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

Submit abstract by Jul 4 for the Int’l Wrkshp on Logic & Philosophy: Social Norms (Logical Structures & Philosophical Foundations), Tsinghua–University of Amsterdam Joint Research Center for Logic. Acceptance decisions Aug 29. #philsky #econsky Committees & details: www.tsinghualogic.net/JRC/4thlp/

tsinghualogic.net

The Fourth International Workshop on Logic and Philosophy – JRC for Logic

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Financial Times @financialtimes.com · 29/06/2025

The device, about the size of two shoe boxes, was developed in a bid to create 'synthetic biological intelligence' — a new form of computing that could offer opportunities beyond conventional electronics and other developing technologies such as quantum computing on.ft.com/4kc8obJ

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

Some optical illusions fool Westerners but not the Himba people of Namibia. Bad eyesight? No, just a different edit (or model) of reality. More evidence for John Dewey’s insight: reality isn’t experienced the same, and perception isn’t passive—it’s shaped by what culture trains us to frame and see.

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City St George’s Economics @cityeconomics.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

CITY-QMUL Theory wksp Robert Evans, Cambridge Tan Gan, LSE Nenad Kos, Bocconi Sophie Kreutzkamp, Manchester Elliot Lipnowski, Yale George Mailath, Penn Paula Onuchic, LSE Francisco Poggi, Mannheim Ludvig Sinander, Oxford Aidan Smith, Edinburgh Leeat Yariv, Princeton sites.google.com/view/qmul-ci...

sites.google.com

City-QMUL Theory Workshop

Details Date: 9-10 June 2025 Location: City St George's University Clerkenwell Campus Tait Building Room C312

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

Join us on May 16 at the City University (City St George’s, University of London) for our Theory & Experiments workshop—bringing together leading researchers in micro theory and behavioral economics. Registration, venue details, and program sites.google.com/view/theory-... #EconSky #AcademicEvents

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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences @pnas.org · 09/05/2025

Here’s how historians use #DataScience to mine the past in ways never before possible. A PNAS Science and Culture piece: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #Digital Historians #ComputationalModel #DigitalHistory #AI #NetworkAnalysis #LLMs

A room filled with shelves of books. With data science tools in hand, historians can ask questions that would be difficult to answer with a lifetime of perusing tomes or scrolling through microfiche. Image credit: Shutterstock/BPTU.

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

A great new search tool for economics papers just launched. Worth a look.

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

Economic theory to the rescue.

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

Join us on May 1 at the City University (City St George’s, University of London) for a Behavioral Insights for Policy workshop—bringing together top academics & practitioners working on behaviorally informed themes such as consumer choice, online safety, market regulation, computational models & AI.

citystgeorges.ac.uk

Bridging Theory and Practice: Behavioural Insights for Policy Workshop | City St George's, University of London

This workshop will bring together academics and practitioners working on behavioural, policy-relevant issues.

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Christian Zimmermann @czimm-economist.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

Looking for other economists on Bluesky? If they have added their Bluesky handle to their RePEc profile, they are listed here, including by field, country and more: ideas.repec.org/i/ebluesky.h... #RePEc #EconSky

ideas.repec.org

RePEc-registered Economists on Bluesky

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

New research confirms what we all knew after hammering a nail *and* our thumb, grabbing a hot pan bare-handed, then stepping barefoot on a plug: swearing dulls pain. Turns out, it also boosts strength. So next time you’re at the gym, let the expletives fly—purely to replicate the results, of course.

washingtonpost.com

Swearing is linked with increased pain tolerance and strength

The science behind swearing and its impact on pain and strength is complex, but research has shown that it is linked with a number of positive effects.

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Nature @nature.com · 14/03/2025

Quantum computers have gained the powerful abstractions that allow programmers of classical computers to design and integrate new apps and hardware, and connect devices into networks with ease go.nature.com/43INRaa

go.nature.com

An operating system for networked quantum computers is a huge practical step forward

An operating system for quantum computers allows for easy app networking.

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Stumbled on a treasure trove of archival history. Want to time-travel through old (even Napoleonic) civil records from the Belpaese? Births, marriages, deaths—it’s all there, waiting to reveal forgotten family roots or prove that your great-great-grandpa’s name was so long it spilled onto a 2nd line

antenati.cultura.gov.it

Main Page - Ancestors

The Ancestors Portal makes available online the enormous documentary heritage of civil status records existing in Italian state archives, indispensable for conducting registry and genealogical researc...

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Matt Steinglass @mattsteinglass.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

Draghi: “The IMF estimates that Europe’s internal barriers are equivalent to a tariff of 45% for manufacturing and 110% for services. These effectively shrink the market in which European companies operate: trade across EU countries is less than half the level of trade across US states.”

on.ft.com

Forget the US — Europe has successfully put tariffs on itself

High internal barriers and regulatory hurdles are far more damaging for growth than anything America might impose

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

At $8M a spot, the Super Bowl ad market is a neat case of inelastic demand for attention. In a world drowning in noise, focus is a rare asset. But still, some would probably love a marathon of those artsy commercials—punctuated only by the occasional football break. Meanwhile, I’m restocking queso.

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The New Yorker @newyorker.com · 23/01/2025

Researchers have long debated over whether the language we speak shapes how we perceive the world. Now that some 1.5 billion people speak the same language, English, this question has taken on a new urgency.

newyorker.com

How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking?

English continues to expand into diverse regions around the world. The question is whether humanity will be homogenized as a result.

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

Read mixed reviews of the “ultimate” Spotify book, where the author dismisses it as a glorified playlist generator. Initially designed as an advertising company, it rewired music with major economic impacts. Artists are underpaid, but is this equilibrium worse than the previous (piracy-fueled) one?

theverge.com

What Spotify took from us by giving us everything

Liz Pelly’s new book examines how playlists reshaped our culture.

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Princeton University Press @princetonupress.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

“An impressive scholarly achievement” says Steven Nadler in his review of Leibniz in His World in the latest issue of @thetls.bsky.social. Read more (£): www.the-tls.co.uk/philosophy/h...

Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant by Audrey Borowski

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

Walk through a megacity with cotton in your ears… then yank it out and brace yourself for the soundscapes. That’s the vibe of The Atlantic’s 1870 piece on “street cries” (lyrical calls merchants used to hawk their wares in markets)—a nostalgic glimpse into how Information Economics worked back then.

theatlantic.com

The Street-Cries of New York

None

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Science Magazine @science.org · 26/12/2024

By mapping the meanings of the words used to communicate emotions across more than one-third of the planet’s spoken languages, a study in Science found that there is significant variation in how emotions are expressed across cultures. #ScienceMagArchives scim.ag/41X6dDk

scim.ag

Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure

Analysis of the terms used for emotions across a sample of 2474 spoken languages reveals low similarity across cultures.

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

Festive econometrics: a wine study published this week raises a glass to moderate wine consumption correlating with health benefits—but let’s not uncork causation yet. Even murkier is whether the holiday season causes a surge in wine studies, or if their publication just correlates with festivities.

academic.oup.com

Wine consumption and cardiovascular health: the unresolved French paradox and the promise of objective biomarkers

This editorial refers to ‘Urinary tartaric acid as a biomarker of wine consumption and cardiovascular risk: the PREDIMED trial’, by I. Domínguez-López et a

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Nicholas A. Christakis @nachristakis.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

Intriguing (and likely valuable) new initiative to do what is (for now) a quick and dirty project to evaluate whether AI models (e.g., o1 or o1-pro) can usefully identify errors in a random selection of published scientific papers. www.aisoup.org/black-spatula

aisoup.org

The Black Spatula Project | Notion

Summary

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

“Everything after my morning coffee is pretty much a pain” Seinfeld said. But sometimes the pain starts even before coffee—why do some form neat coffee shop lines while others turn it into a BlackFriday stampede? Maybe some love coffee more than anything while others follow invisible traffic lights.

iea.org.uk

Food for Thought with Dr Alessandro Sontuoso

The Many Facets of Social Norms: Bridging Complementary Theories and Traditions About the discussion The talk will delve into recent … Continue reading "Food for Thought with Dr Alessandro Sontuoso"

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Alessandro Sontuoso @sontuoso.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Last century, science inspired surrealist art—Freud’s psychoanalysis & Einstein’s relativity reshaped creativity. As AI now drives a new surrealist wave, could the flow reverse? Can social scientists draw on random visual associations to uncover new social & economic insights? #Art #Science #EconSky

forbes.com

Artist Niceaunties Uses AI-Crafted Surreal Worlds To Rebel Against Societal Norms Imposed On Women

Singaporean artist Niceaunties creates detailed AI works that fete the eccentricities and strength of non-conformist “aunties”, reimagining their lives to show their fun-loving and risk-taking side.

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Marciano Siniscalchi @marciano.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

I made a theory starter pack. It includes some CS/Econ, pol-econ, and behavioral types as well... Lmk if you'd like to be added (or removed!) and I'll do my best - the edit functionality is a bit wonky atm go.bsky.app/KAGmZH4

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