Ben Golub
@ben_golub
econ prof @NorthwesternU social and economic networks from Ukraine past: @Harvard | @Stanford'12 | @Caltech '07
I think this is helping to manage sycophancy in Claude code:
Have people had any success modifying the claude.md system prompt to get Claude Code to be less of a sycophantic booster? I'm pretty sure I could propose both A and not A and get "that's a brilliant insight" in both cases.
This is horrifying
ICE detain U.S. citizen outside grocery store—beat him with baton, shove his head into the ground & give him a concussion. "I told them where I was born, I had an ID, a social, a birth certificate," he said. "They didn't' care about none of that." Now in the hospital after his…
Also a reminder that Ukraine, unlike Russia, is a democracy with a strong civil society, despite all its problems. No such protests would be allowed for a second in Moscow.
Large protest in Kyiv tonight, the first signs of public dissent against Zelenskyy’s government since the full scale invasion, as demonstrators rally against the passing of a bill stripping anti-corruption bodies of their powers
The work of @thekaransinghal is one of the most important workstreams at @OpenAI . Healthcare is a crucial application of AI but it's important to get it right: work together with providers and patients, and do careful studies as was done here.
We saw significant relative error reductions: history-taking (-32%), investigations (-10%), diagnostic (-16%), treatment (-13%) for clinicians with vs. without AI. At Penda alone, AI Consult would avert diagnostic errors in 22k visits and treatment errors in 29k visits yearly.
As AI automates junior-level tasks, it destroys the training grounds that create future experts. Who will train the next generation when entry-level work provides no value for firms to capture? Today on Silicon Continent on the 'AI-Becker problem': siliconcontinent.com/p/the-ai-becke…
It’s striking that some past jobs seemingly had few demands - eg Tolkien could write LotR. I’d guess management has grown more efficient, contributing to growth. But otoh it may have made those jobs more strenuous, meaning growth numbers overestimate life quality improvements.
New paper & surprising result. LLMs transmit traits to other models via hidden signals in data. Datasets consisting only of 3-digit numbers can transmit a love for owls, or evil tendencies. 🧵
Stein’s lemma for a scalar variable is a well-known characterization of the Gaussian: x ∼ 𝒩(m,σ²) ⇔ ∀f 𝔼[(x−m)f(x)] = σ² 𝔼[f'(x)] Interestingly, there’s also a multivariate version, but it’s 2nd order: x ∼ 𝒩(m, σ² I) ⇔ ∀f 𝔼[(x−m)ᵀ∇f(x)] = σ² 𝔼[∇² f(x)] 1/2
Historians: Alternate histories based on counterfactuals are pointless speculation. Also historians: Let’s vigorously debate the primary causes of past events, each of which implicitly involves counterfactual reasoning.
Our paper "Is Mobile Money Changing Rural Africa? Evidence from a Field Experiment" is now in print in the Review of Economics and Statistics! Main finding? Mobile money increased out-migration from rural areas and reduced agricultural investment. 🔗 doi.org/10.1162/rest_a…
Our paper "Is Mobile Money Changing Rural Africa? Evidence from a Field Experiment" is now in print in the Review of Economics and Statistics! Main finding? Mobile money increased out-migration from rural areas and reduced agricultural investment. 🔗 doi.org/10.1162/rest_a…
@Jon_Hartley_ computed this Fed cost plot CPI rose 32% from 2004-2018, and 30% from 2018-2025 Eyeballing 250, 730, & 990 for 2004, Jay's start & end Pre-Jay real cost growth rate (730/(1.32*250))^(1/14) ~ 1.058 Jay real growth rate (990/(1.30*730))^(1/5) ~ 1.008 0.8% < 5.8%‼️
🚨 Olympiad math + AI: We ran Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro on the fresh IMO 2025 problems. With careful prompting and pipeline design, it solved 5 out of 6 — remarkable for tasks demanding deep insight and creativity. The model could win gold! 🥇 #AI #Math #LLMs #IMO2025
Maybe they are on blue sky or maybe its just quieter because republicans are in charge and the ones doing the spending, but you don't hear as much about MMT these days
As development experts we have pushed nonexperts away, saying it was too complicated for regular people to understand. That is not good for building support. Radically simplifying would help us communicate better and make for more effective aid.
@rglenner.bsky.social advocates for radically simplifying how we do aid (and how we communicate it). youtube.com/live/uvyFva08x… (starts at 10m30s) #ABCDE2025
The most essential stabilizing feature of a society is a status hierarchy that young people—especially young men—can reliably climb by following a clear and pro-social set of rules. 1/