[GUEST ACCESS MODE: Data is scrambled or limited to provide examples. Make requests using your API key to unlock full data. Check https://lunarcrush.ai/auth for authentication information.] #  @alz_zyd_ alz alz posts on X about math, inference, solve, finance the most. They currently have XXXXXX followers and 1812 posts still getting attention that total XXXXXX engagements in the last XX hours. ### Engagements: XXXXXX [#](/creator/twitter::1661136128/interactions)  - X Week XXXXXXX +112% - X Month XXXXXXXXX -XX% - X Months XXXXXXXXX -XX% - X Year XXXXXXXXXX +5.60% ### Mentions: XX [#](/creator/twitter::1661136128/posts_active)  - X Week XX +19% - X Month XXX +69% - X Months XXX +107% - X Year XXX +32% ### Followers: XXXXXX [#](/creator/twitter::1661136128/followers)  - X Week XXXXXX +1% - X Month XXXXXX +2% - X Months XXXXXX +7.10% - X Year XXXXXX +14% ### CreatorRank: XXXXXXX [#](/creator/twitter::1661136128/influencer_rank)  ### Social Influence **Social category influence** [finance](/list/finance) [countries](/list/countries) [technology brands](/list/technology-brands) [stocks](/list/stocks) [social networks](/list/social-networks) [gaming](/list/gaming) [travel destinations](/list/travel-destinations) **Social topic influence** [math](/topic/math) #556, [inference](/topic/inference) #6, [solve](/topic/solve) #140, [finance](/topic/finance) #1646, [history](/topic/history), [theory](/topic/theory), [just a](/topic/just-a), [twitter](/topic/twitter), [education](/topic/education), [sports betting](/topic/sports-betting) **Top assets mentioned** [Robinhood Markets, Inc. (HOOD)](/topic/$hood) [Alphabet Inc Class A (GOOGL)](/topic/$googl) [Ampco-Pittsburgh Corp. (AP)](/topic/ampco) ### Top Social Posts Top posts by engagements in the last XX hours "@karkwonk true I agree all innovations begin as hallucinations" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998498004387463284) 2025-12-09T21:00Z 31.6K followers, 2699 engagements "This clears up a lot for me: apparently some people don't "get" math because it sounds like language but behaves like code" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1994818651850256661) 2025-11-29T17:20Z 31.5K followers, 53.8K engagements "You want an example of slop Inter-universal Teichmuller theory is slop. Hundreds thousands of pages of slop disguised as high-level mathematics. Pure slop which took two of the top mathematicians alive today weeks to unmask as slop. Its author still won't admit it is slop" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1995177252271567266) 2025-11-30T17:05Z 31.5K followers, 81.7K engagements "It is true it is not that hard to solve decades-old unsolved problems in technical fields. Many PhD students can do it. As it turns out there are just a lot of unsolved problems out there. Many of them are not THAT hard; they're unsolved just because they're not that interesting" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1995204734442246176) 2025-11-30T18:54Z 31.5K followers, 18.9K engagements "In America there is maybe one exception to this rule which is Boston. In Boston you can find groups of random PhD students who meet over the wekeend to read journal papers for fun. Good place to do a PhD" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1995246076081971385) 2025-11-30T21:38Z 31.5K followers, 137K engagements "Mutual funds that buy or sell stocks move prices. They know this and can execute in a way which moves prices more or less This interesting paper argues that funds strategically exploit this effect: they purposefully create more price impacts with their buys than sells" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1996360776269906004) 2025-12-03T23:27Z 31.5K followers, 16.5K engagements "I agree this is an issue with undergrad econ education. Interestingly good finance courses do a better job with this. An undergrad investments class is both very practically useful for finance job interviews and teaches some deep principles about the theory of financial markets" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1996949023161225355) 2025-12-05T14:25Z 31.5K followers, 21K engagements "They possess the intellectual horsepower to move armies and shape history but for some reason choose to spend their days reading books in a mountain cave somewhere" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1997007803911897435) 2025-12-05T18:18Z 31.5K followers, 13.8K engagements "- Kalshi and sports betting involve a lot of stupid gambles but not stupider than buying options on Robinhood - If you're going to allow retail to trade options I guess might as well let them do sports betting also - It would also make sense to ban or limit both" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1997499077701820778) 2025-12-07T02:51Z 31.5K followers, 1091 engagements "Societies make choices. The overall choice the US made (with some caveats) is that people are free to make approximately arbitrarily stupid financial decisions. IMO legalizing prediction markets seems consistent with this stance towards consumer financial regulation" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1997499290932191580) 2025-12-07T02:51Z 31.6K followers, 1003 engagements "Gambling is like porn. In obvious cases you know it when you see it. But there are many edge cases where it's not entirely clear whether they're porn or not. There's also things that are legally not porn that are obviously intended as porn. This makes porn annoying to regulate" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1997709883941257294) 2025-12-07T16:48Z 31.5K followers, 3418 engagements "@Ju11am Math/prob is more foudational econ/CS is more applied stats is squeezed awkwardly in the middle" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998089192426111095) 2025-12-08T17:56Z 31.5K followers, XX engagements "The real programming languages take is that they're all obsolete you should just use whatever the LLM defaults to" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998153510148522116) 2025-12-08T22:11Z 31.6K followers, 3197 engagements "so tldr starcraft died because the boomers who played it got too old to keep up the apm needed to play" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1995950637864157240) 2025-12-02T20:18Z 31.6K followers, 2422 engagements "Even if all OpenAI ends up doing to tech history is waking up the sleeping giant within Google and then failing OpenAI will still have made a massive impact on tech history" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1997497838666915857) 2025-12-07T02:46Z 31.6K followers, 3164 engagements "- All forms of investing are gambling - Most other things in life like picking a college or major can be thought of as gambling - Some gambles are necessary - Some like buying the S&P XXX are generally good - Some like sports betting are on average really stupid" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1997498722180030699) 2025-12-07T02:49Z 31.6K followers, 22K engagements "This is not a meaningful distinction - Most risks are "unnecessary". You don't need to drive to the grocery store and face the risk of car accident death; you could stay at home and order instacart instead. Hence driving to the grocery store is needless risk hence "gambling"" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1997695497507844333) 2025-12-07T15:51Z 31.6K followers, 4246 engagements "At some level the economics of food delivery have to make sense. If people are willing to spend the time driving to a restaurant to get food they should also be willing to pay something in the ballpark of their hourly wage to get the food at home instead" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998057864053543418) 2025-12-08T15:51Z 31.6K followers, 5212 engagements "Andrew Gelman: "a causal model is a special case of a predictive model"" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998948395738943935) 2025-12-11T02:50Z 31.6K followers, 1692 engagements "the obnoxious thing about math textbooks is that there is always some kind of step function increase in difficulty somewhere. It's trivial until it's suddenly not. Like here's integers here's sets and then boom stone-weierstrass comes like a jumpscare" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999145798852895150) 2025-12-11T15:54Z 31.6K followers, 4068 engagements "Would you rather have your kid learn math from someone with a math PhD or someone with a PhD in math education" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1993355516081258754) 2025-11-25T16:26Z 31.6K followers, 286.4K engagements "The basic Asian "life strategy" is to grind early. It's not to grind forever: by late 20's parents stop pushing kids to do well at work and start pushing them to settle down and have kids instead. In a sense rather than less work on average it's just more frontloaded work" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1997725804487385335) 2025-12-07T17:52Z 31.6K followers, 336.3K engagements "@jt_kerwin If we're willing to relax the "100% confidence" bar we could in principle make progress. It's a social decision whether to" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998871892502188516) 2025-12-10T21:46Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "@ashdgandhi @Afinetheorem yeah I agree with this. I think I disagree with "why" as being important for observationally equivalent models. Or being possible to figure out at all scientifically" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999165110959362490) 2025-12-11T17:11Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "Honestly I'm pretty opposed to the idea of taking notes in class philosophically and I basically never take notes on any talk I go to. IMO taking notes distracts from actually listening carefully and thinking deeply about the content while it's being presented" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1991915090791330109) 2025-11-21T17:02Z 31.6K followers, 96K engagements "do you still remember those papers going around on twitter niecly proving mathematically that the structure of LLMs implies they'll never be good at math some of you believed those papers" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1995621615657459952) 2025-12-01T22:30Z 31.6K followers, 3460 engagements "AI is going to take over a large fraction of pure math within the next X years However this will not lead to meaningful scientific or technological progress because pure math is mostly useless for science/technology" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1995623243584340429) 2025-12-01T22:37Z 31.6K followers, 13K engagements "The RTS genre (starcraft etc) seems to be basically dead. Why" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1995633659840528879) 2025-12-01T23:18Z 31.6K followers, 38.7K engagements "Math will fall first to LLMs and the humanities last. It turns out it is fairly easy to produce math that a math professor thinks is good; but only humanities professors can produce work that other humanities professors think is good" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1995676910182170933) 2025-12-02T02:10Z 31.6K followers, 24.1K engagements "For decades the way we taught kids to get rich was to go to school and do well. We called this the "knowledge economy" and things like that. But now intelligence is cheaper than water at $XX per million tokens. The knowledge economy is over" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1996971012655587553) 2025-12-05T15:52Z 31.6K followers, 43.8K engagements "We fetishize thinkers. As if they were the root of all human progress. As if if only we had a thousand more Aristotles in the past few millenia history would run faster we would have colonized the stars by today. As if. Thinkers have never been the bottleneck of history" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1997080246168781313) 2025-12-05T23:06Z 31.6K followers, 15.6K engagements "if silicon is the substrate of universal intelligence will there come a time when silicon is the scarcest and most expensive resource in the universe where intergalactic wars are fought over sand" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1997330881917137152) 2025-12-06T15:42Z 31.6K followers, 1819 engagements "- You could also define gambling as "taking on bad risks" by which definition the stupid half of any prediction markets are gambling and the smart half are just investing. So not all prediction markets are gambling" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1997695685953802566) 2025-12-07T15:52Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements "- You could also define gambling as "markets which have no positive return on average only risk" in which case derivative markets and car insurance are all gambling markets despite the fact that they play useful risk-transfer roles in society" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1997695832313978931) 2025-12-07T15:52Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements "An interesting thing about Asian TFR is that (anecdotally) it seems that parents of 20- to 30-ish year olds generally desperately want to have grandkids at least in China but for some reason the 20-30 year old kids are not complying" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998071343066284242) 2025-12-08T16:45Z 31.6K followers, 22.8K engagements "Apparently the British government was not very happy about Britain lending money to France to wage war against Britain" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998089940308214187) 2025-12-08T17:58Z 31.6K followers, 36.1K engagements "Excel is a vastly better modelling language than Stata. It's not remotely close. As a WYSIWYG modelling system Excel is actually pretty nice. Whereas it's basically impossible to use Stata for any kind of nontrivial modelling. It's a mistake to ever try" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998165798766948721) 2025-12-08T23:00Z 31.6K followers, 3561 engagements "A meaningful fraction of the most impactful applied data analysis in society today is done in Stata. This is because economics professors do a large % of society's most important data analysis questions and a large % of them still use stata" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998169659921858665) 2025-12-08T23:15Z 31.6K followers, 16.3K engagements "Linear algebra is shape rotator math Real analysis is wordcel math" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998455227003933080) 2025-12-09T18:10Z 31.6K followers, 34K engagements "The normies' confusion with AI is totally understandable. Suppose I told you in 2015 that in 2025 gradient descent would produce black magic billionparameter bots which could think and talk and solve math questions. You'd obviously think I'm a complete nutcase" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998483967247589749) 2025-12-09T20:04Z 31.6K followers, 70K engagements "@DeepDishEnjoyer In my defense I'm not biased because I've also taken X linear algebra classes in my life" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998485053597163658) 2025-12-09T20:09Z 31.6K followers, 1596 engagements "Causal inference is a subfield of prediction where you try to predict what happens when a treatment is applied. So all of econometrics really is just a narrow subfield of predictive machine learning" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998608078833438770) 2025-12-10T04:17Z 31.6K followers, 80.3K engagements "a lot of you assume all stem has math in it. this is very wrong Large parts of chemistry and biology involve very little math. The idea that all scientists must be good mathematicians is silly" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998753651784134772) 2025-12-10T13:56Z 31.6K followers, 5191 engagements "@hagertynw @arpitrage it's not impossible" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998828265205895576) 2025-12-10T18:52Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "A sect of thinkers claimed: "The essence of Science is the search for the elegant Natural Laws which govern the universe." And so was founded the church of Structuralism" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998854083936231648) 2025-12-10T20:35Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements "A sect of thinkers claimed: "The essence of Science is the process of Experimentation and only through Experiments can we predict the nature of things." And so was founded the church of Causality" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998854129503056343) 2025-12-10T20:35Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements "The church conducted myriad beautiful experiments; but their experiments could only predict the results of other experiments and did not result in the discovery of new Natural Laws; and could not ultimately reach the castles in the sky that the Great Scientists once built" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998854333774041590) 2025-12-10T20:36Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements "@jasndoc Put another way: no non-boundary definition of "enough" fully rules out non-causal methods for counterfactual prediction" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998896152763363529) 2025-12-10T23:22Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "Part of the issue is that people mean two different things when they say "causal inference" The Pearl group believes "causal inference" is something like identifying the underlying DGP The economists have a narrower practical approach which is just predicting effects of policy" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998983206767620145) 2025-12-11T05:08Z 31.6K followers, 6197 engagements "@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ Which claim The extrapolation I use LLMs to prove theorems in my papers which I assume are novel results so to me it's doing a fair amount of OOS extrapolation. But people seem to disagree on this" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999181340630241720) 2025-12-11T18:15Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "We want to ban gambling. Gambling is bets that are: - Zero- or negative-sum - Driven by irrational assessment of very small probabilities - Which derives from ppl's emotional biases rather than rational decision making Thus let's all agree society should ban car insurance" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1997700477698666536) 2025-12-07T16:11Z 31.6K followers, 54.2K engagements "@austinc3301 but this would be solved by just observing all the U's" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998831789968871494) 2025-12-10T19:06Z 31.6K followers, 1079 engagements "@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ The other evidence is a market test: lots of money is betting on these machines I guess doing something like OOS extrapolation and I assume they have reasons to believe this" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999181604040679483) 2025-12-11T18:16Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "The magic of finance. America borrowed $XX million from British financiers to pay France for its American territories. France under Napoleon immediately used this $XX million to wage war against Britain" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998056727221027240) 2025-12-08T15:47Z 31.6K followers, 958.4K engagements "The difference between Stata and R: - Stata is a garbage programming language which is a great piece of data analysis software - R is a garbage programming language which is also a mediocre piece of data analysis software" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998112088225722779) 2025-12-08T19:26Z 31.6K followers, 39.5K engagements "@austinc3301 You've just proved that "causal modelling" is in a sense a "hack" to resolve the issue that we sometimes have bad data. But when we have good data - when we see all the U's - predictive modelling is all we need" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998832302877811193) 2025-12-10T19:08Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements "The Structuralists found myriad beautiful Natural Laws that ought to govern the universe. But the Sturcturalists found that their propensive Laws did not in fact describe the nature of things; and their castles of thought were build only upon foundations of clouds" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1998854103099912240) 2025-12-10T20:35Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements "@larrybirdvsjpow @instrumenthull @arpitrage @quant_____" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999162337878556940) 2025-12-11T17:00Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "@larrybirdvsjpow @instrumenthull @arpitrage @quant_____" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999162444938154215) 2025-12-11T17:00Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "@larrybirdvsjpow @instrumenthull @arpitrage @quant_____ I think I (and hopefully Arpit) are essentially substantively in agreement with Lihua if that helps" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999162568158408893) 2025-12-11T17:01Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "@quant_____ @larrybirdvsjpow @instrumenthull @arpitrage yeah I think that's what Arpit must reasonably have meant in that there seems no other sane interpretation of his tweet afaict" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999164016682307723) 2025-12-11T17:06Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements "@larrybirdvsjpow @quant_____ @instrumenthull @arpitrage I think you're either missing his point or reading in bad faith because without coordination it was clear to me that was the only thing he could have meant with that statement" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999164453812617703) 2025-12-11T17:08Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "@larrybirdvsjpow @quant_____ @instrumenthull @arpitrage Efficient communication requires good-faith attempting to figure out what the other side is trying to say" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999164548905926756) 2025-12-11T17:09Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "@larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ @instrumenthull Peter doesn't seem to agree with this but I think we and Peter agree so there's disagreement about the extent of agreement" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999170894954979454) 2025-12-11T17:34Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements "@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ So I substantively disagree but that's not the claim I seriously tried to defend and only time will tell really on that one. It might work eventually in some cases who knows" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999175891579007107) 2025-12-11T17:54Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ But you could say the same about structural models and their "predictions." There are just many competing schools of thought about the best way to make "predictions" and it looks like there will be a new "double-descent" one soon" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999176118968938845) 2025-12-11T17:55Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ This is obviously not a substantively resolvable debate: it's about vibes and time will tell which groups do better" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999176247277174822) 2025-12-11T17:55Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ But the structural vs reduced form debate is substantively mostly vibes" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999177285228741122) 2025-12-11T17:59Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ My substantive disagreement is that the ultimate goal - policy counterfactuals - may be done better by black box overparametrized models. Skipping the entire pipeline you construct here identification estimation and all" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999179272989388834) 2025-12-11T18:07Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ I don't think we have a sufficiently strong understanding of why overparametrized models are able to extrapolate OOS surprisingly well in practice to have any meaningful predictions about what they will be able to do in five or ten years" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999179538966704383) 2025-12-11T18:08Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ So it doesn't seem possible to me to substantively rule out the possibility I'm proposing" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999179637742797037) 2025-12-11T18:09Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements "@instrumenthull @arpitrage @larrybirdvsjpow @quant_____ I feel like if LLMs actually make it we'll find some way to define it as "causal inference" too and then we should be good" [X Link](https://x.com/alz_zyd_/status/1999196467467096405) 2025-12-11T19:15Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
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@alz_zyd_ alz
alz posts on X about math, inference, solve, finance the most. They currently have XXXXXX followers and 1812 posts still getting attention that total XXXXXX engagements in the last XX hours.
Engagements: XXXXXX #
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- X Month XXXXXXXXX -XX%
- X Months XXXXXXXXX -XX%
- X Year XXXXXXXXXX +5.60%
Mentions: XX #
- X Week XX +19%
- X Month XXX +69%
- X Months XXX +107%
- X Year XXX +32%
Followers: XXXXXX #
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CreatorRank: XXXXXXX #
Social Influence
Social category influence finance countries technology brands stocks social networks gaming travel destinations
Social topic influence math #556, inference #6, solve #140, finance #1646, history, theory, just a, twitter, education, sports betting
Top assets mentioned Robinhood Markets, Inc. (HOOD) Alphabet Inc Class A (GOOGL) Ampco-Pittsburgh Corp. (AP)
Top Social Posts
Top posts by engagements in the last XX hours
"@karkwonk true I agree all innovations begin as hallucinations"
X Link 2025-12-09T21:00Z 31.6K followers, 2699 engagements
"This clears up a lot for me: apparently some people don't "get" math because it sounds like language but behaves like code"
X Link 2025-11-29T17:20Z 31.5K followers, 53.8K engagements
"You want an example of slop Inter-universal Teichmuller theory is slop. Hundreds thousands of pages of slop disguised as high-level mathematics. Pure slop which took two of the top mathematicians alive today weeks to unmask as slop. Its author still won't admit it is slop"
X Link 2025-11-30T17:05Z 31.5K followers, 81.7K engagements
"It is true it is not that hard to solve decades-old unsolved problems in technical fields. Many PhD students can do it. As it turns out there are just a lot of unsolved problems out there. Many of them are not THAT hard; they're unsolved just because they're not that interesting"
X Link 2025-11-30T18:54Z 31.5K followers, 18.9K engagements
"In America there is maybe one exception to this rule which is Boston. In Boston you can find groups of random PhD students who meet over the wekeend to read journal papers for fun. Good place to do a PhD"
X Link 2025-11-30T21:38Z 31.5K followers, 137K engagements
"Mutual funds that buy or sell stocks move prices. They know this and can execute in a way which moves prices more or less This interesting paper argues that funds strategically exploit this effect: they purposefully create more price impacts with their buys than sells"
X Link 2025-12-03T23:27Z 31.5K followers, 16.5K engagements
"I agree this is an issue with undergrad econ education. Interestingly good finance courses do a better job with this. An undergrad investments class is both very practically useful for finance job interviews and teaches some deep principles about the theory of financial markets"
X Link 2025-12-05T14:25Z 31.5K followers, 21K engagements
"They possess the intellectual horsepower to move armies and shape history but for some reason choose to spend their days reading books in a mountain cave somewhere"
X Link 2025-12-05T18:18Z 31.5K followers, 13.8K engagements
"- Kalshi and sports betting involve a lot of stupid gambles but not stupider than buying options on Robinhood - If you're going to allow retail to trade options I guess might as well let them do sports betting also - It would also make sense to ban or limit both"
X Link 2025-12-07T02:51Z 31.5K followers, 1091 engagements
"Societies make choices. The overall choice the US made (with some caveats) is that people are free to make approximately arbitrarily stupid financial decisions. IMO legalizing prediction markets seems consistent with this stance towards consumer financial regulation"
X Link 2025-12-07T02:51Z 31.6K followers, 1003 engagements
"Gambling is like porn. In obvious cases you know it when you see it. But there are many edge cases where it's not entirely clear whether they're porn or not. There's also things that are legally not porn that are obviously intended as porn. This makes porn annoying to regulate"
X Link 2025-12-07T16:48Z 31.5K followers, 3418 engagements
"@Ju11am Math/prob is more foudational econ/CS is more applied stats is squeezed awkwardly in the middle"
X Link 2025-12-08T17:56Z 31.5K followers, XX engagements
"The real programming languages take is that they're all obsolete you should just use whatever the LLM defaults to"
X Link 2025-12-08T22:11Z 31.6K followers, 3197 engagements
"so tldr starcraft died because the boomers who played it got too old to keep up the apm needed to play"
X Link 2025-12-02T20:18Z 31.6K followers, 2422 engagements
"Even if all OpenAI ends up doing to tech history is waking up the sleeping giant within Google and then failing OpenAI will still have made a massive impact on tech history"
X Link 2025-12-07T02:46Z 31.6K followers, 3164 engagements
"- All forms of investing are gambling - Most other things in life like picking a college or major can be thought of as gambling - Some gambles are necessary - Some like buying the S&P XXX are generally good - Some like sports betting are on average really stupid"
X Link 2025-12-07T02:49Z 31.6K followers, 22K engagements
"This is not a meaningful distinction - Most risks are "unnecessary". You don't need to drive to the grocery store and face the risk of car accident death; you could stay at home and order instacart instead. Hence driving to the grocery store is needless risk hence "gambling""
X Link 2025-12-07T15:51Z 31.6K followers, 4246 engagements
"At some level the economics of food delivery have to make sense. If people are willing to spend the time driving to a restaurant to get food they should also be willing to pay something in the ballpark of their hourly wage to get the food at home instead"
X Link 2025-12-08T15:51Z 31.6K followers, 5212 engagements
"Andrew Gelman: "a causal model is a special case of a predictive model""
X Link 2025-12-11T02:50Z 31.6K followers, 1692 engagements
"the obnoxious thing about math textbooks is that there is always some kind of step function increase in difficulty somewhere. It's trivial until it's suddenly not. Like here's integers here's sets and then boom stone-weierstrass comes like a jumpscare"
X Link 2025-12-11T15:54Z 31.6K followers, 4068 engagements
"Would you rather have your kid learn math from someone with a math PhD or someone with a PhD in math education"
X Link 2025-11-25T16:26Z 31.6K followers, 286.4K engagements
"The basic Asian "life strategy" is to grind early. It's not to grind forever: by late 20's parents stop pushing kids to do well at work and start pushing them to settle down and have kids instead. In a sense rather than less work on average it's just more frontloaded work"
X Link 2025-12-07T17:52Z 31.6K followers, 336.3K engagements
"@jt_kerwin If we're willing to relax the "100% confidence" bar we could in principle make progress. It's a social decision whether to"
X Link 2025-12-10T21:46Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"@ashdgandhi @Afinetheorem yeah I agree with this. I think I disagree with "why" as being important for observationally equivalent models. Or being possible to figure out at all scientifically"
X Link 2025-12-11T17:11Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"Honestly I'm pretty opposed to the idea of taking notes in class philosophically and I basically never take notes on any talk I go to. IMO taking notes distracts from actually listening carefully and thinking deeply about the content while it's being presented"
X Link 2025-11-21T17:02Z 31.6K followers, 96K engagements
"do you still remember those papers going around on twitter niecly proving mathematically that the structure of LLMs implies they'll never be good at math some of you believed those papers"
X Link 2025-12-01T22:30Z 31.6K followers, 3460 engagements
"AI is going to take over a large fraction of pure math within the next X years However this will not lead to meaningful scientific or technological progress because pure math is mostly useless for science/technology"
X Link 2025-12-01T22:37Z 31.6K followers, 13K engagements
"The RTS genre (starcraft etc) seems to be basically dead. Why"
X Link 2025-12-01T23:18Z 31.6K followers, 38.7K engagements
"Math will fall first to LLMs and the humanities last. It turns out it is fairly easy to produce math that a math professor thinks is good; but only humanities professors can produce work that other humanities professors think is good"
X Link 2025-12-02T02:10Z 31.6K followers, 24.1K engagements
"For decades the way we taught kids to get rich was to go to school and do well. We called this the "knowledge economy" and things like that. But now intelligence is cheaper than water at $XX per million tokens. The knowledge economy is over"
X Link 2025-12-05T15:52Z 31.6K followers, 43.8K engagements
"We fetishize thinkers. As if they were the root of all human progress. As if if only we had a thousand more Aristotles in the past few millenia history would run faster we would have colonized the stars by today. As if. Thinkers have never been the bottleneck of history"
X Link 2025-12-05T23:06Z 31.6K followers, 15.6K engagements
"if silicon is the substrate of universal intelligence will there come a time when silicon is the scarcest and most expensive resource in the universe where intergalactic wars are fought over sand"
X Link 2025-12-06T15:42Z 31.6K followers, 1819 engagements
"- You could also define gambling as "taking on bad risks" by which definition the stupid half of any prediction markets are gambling and the smart half are just investing. So not all prediction markets are gambling"
X Link 2025-12-07T15:52Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements
"- You could also define gambling as "markets which have no positive return on average only risk" in which case derivative markets and car insurance are all gambling markets despite the fact that they play useful risk-transfer roles in society"
X Link 2025-12-07T15:52Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements
"An interesting thing about Asian TFR is that (anecdotally) it seems that parents of 20- to 30-ish year olds generally desperately want to have grandkids at least in China but for some reason the 20-30 year old kids are not complying"
X Link 2025-12-08T16:45Z 31.6K followers, 22.8K engagements
"Apparently the British government was not very happy about Britain lending money to France to wage war against Britain"
X Link 2025-12-08T17:58Z 31.6K followers, 36.1K engagements
"Excel is a vastly better modelling language than Stata. It's not remotely close. As a WYSIWYG modelling system Excel is actually pretty nice. Whereas it's basically impossible to use Stata for any kind of nontrivial modelling. It's a mistake to ever try"
X Link 2025-12-08T23:00Z 31.6K followers, 3561 engagements
"A meaningful fraction of the most impactful applied data analysis in society today is done in Stata. This is because economics professors do a large % of society's most important data analysis questions and a large % of them still use stata"
X Link 2025-12-08T23:15Z 31.6K followers, 16.3K engagements
"Linear algebra is shape rotator math Real analysis is wordcel math"
X Link 2025-12-09T18:10Z 31.6K followers, 34K engagements
"The normies' confusion with AI is totally understandable. Suppose I told you in 2015 that in 2025 gradient descent would produce black magic billionparameter bots which could think and talk and solve math questions. You'd obviously think I'm a complete nutcase"
X Link 2025-12-09T20:04Z 31.6K followers, 70K engagements
"@DeepDishEnjoyer In my defense I'm not biased because I've also taken X linear algebra classes in my life"
X Link 2025-12-09T20:09Z 31.6K followers, 1596 engagements
"Causal inference is a subfield of prediction where you try to predict what happens when a treatment is applied. So all of econometrics really is just a narrow subfield of predictive machine learning"
X Link 2025-12-10T04:17Z 31.6K followers, 80.3K engagements
"a lot of you assume all stem has math in it. this is very wrong Large parts of chemistry and biology involve very little math. The idea that all scientists must be good mathematicians is silly"
X Link 2025-12-10T13:56Z 31.6K followers, 5191 engagements
"@hagertynw @arpitrage it's not impossible"
X Link 2025-12-10T18:52Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"A sect of thinkers claimed: "The essence of Science is the search for the elegant Natural Laws which govern the universe." And so was founded the church of Structuralism"
X Link 2025-12-10T20:35Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements
"A sect of thinkers claimed: "The essence of Science is the process of Experimentation and only through Experiments can we predict the nature of things." And so was founded the church of Causality"
X Link 2025-12-10T20:35Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements
"The church conducted myriad beautiful experiments; but their experiments could only predict the results of other experiments and did not result in the discovery of new Natural Laws; and could not ultimately reach the castles in the sky that the Great Scientists once built"
X Link 2025-12-10T20:36Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements
"@jasndoc Put another way: no non-boundary definition of "enough" fully rules out non-causal methods for counterfactual prediction"
X Link 2025-12-10T23:22Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"Part of the issue is that people mean two different things when they say "causal inference" The Pearl group believes "causal inference" is something like identifying the underlying DGP The economists have a narrower practical approach which is just predicting effects of policy"
X Link 2025-12-11T05:08Z 31.6K followers, 6197 engagements
"@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ Which claim The extrapolation I use LLMs to prove theorems in my papers which I assume are novel results so to me it's doing a fair amount of OOS extrapolation. But people seem to disagree on this"
X Link 2025-12-11T18:15Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"We want to ban gambling. Gambling is bets that are: - Zero- or negative-sum - Driven by irrational assessment of very small probabilities - Which derives from ppl's emotional biases rather than rational decision making Thus let's all agree society should ban car insurance"
X Link 2025-12-07T16:11Z 31.6K followers, 54.2K engagements
"@austinc3301 but this would be solved by just observing all the U's"
X Link 2025-12-10T19:06Z 31.6K followers, 1079 engagements
"@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ The other evidence is a market test: lots of money is betting on these machines I guess doing something like OOS extrapolation and I assume they have reasons to believe this"
X Link 2025-12-11T18:16Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"The magic of finance. America borrowed $XX million from British financiers to pay France for its American territories. France under Napoleon immediately used this $XX million to wage war against Britain"
X Link 2025-12-08T15:47Z 31.6K followers, 958.4K engagements
"The difference between Stata and R: - Stata is a garbage programming language which is a great piece of data analysis software - R is a garbage programming language which is also a mediocre piece of data analysis software"
X Link 2025-12-08T19:26Z 31.6K followers, 39.5K engagements
"@austinc3301 You've just proved that "causal modelling" is in a sense a "hack" to resolve the issue that we sometimes have bad data. But when we have good data - when we see all the U's - predictive modelling is all we need"
X Link 2025-12-10T19:08Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements
"The Structuralists found myriad beautiful Natural Laws that ought to govern the universe. But the Sturcturalists found that their propensive Laws did not in fact describe the nature of things; and their castles of thought were build only upon foundations of clouds"
X Link 2025-12-10T20:35Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements
"@larrybirdvsjpow @instrumenthull @arpitrage @quant_____"
X Link 2025-12-11T17:00Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"@larrybirdvsjpow @instrumenthull @arpitrage @quant_____"
X Link 2025-12-11T17:00Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"@larrybirdvsjpow @instrumenthull @arpitrage @quant_____ I think I (and hopefully Arpit) are essentially substantively in agreement with Lihua if that helps"
X Link 2025-12-11T17:01Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"@quant_____ @larrybirdvsjpow @instrumenthull @arpitrage yeah I think that's what Arpit must reasonably have meant in that there seems no other sane interpretation of his tweet afaict"
X Link 2025-12-11T17:06Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements
"@larrybirdvsjpow @quant_____ @instrumenthull @arpitrage I think you're either missing his point or reading in bad faith because without coordination it was clear to me that was the only thing he could have meant with that statement"
X Link 2025-12-11T17:08Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"@larrybirdvsjpow @quant_____ @instrumenthull @arpitrage Efficient communication requires good-faith attempting to figure out what the other side is trying to say"
X Link 2025-12-11T17:09Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"@larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ @instrumenthull Peter doesn't seem to agree with this but I think we and Peter agree so there's disagreement about the extent of agreement"
X Link 2025-12-11T17:34Z 31.6K followers, XXX engagements
"@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ So I substantively disagree but that's not the claim I seriously tried to defend and only time will tell really on that one. It might work eventually in some cases who knows"
X Link 2025-12-11T17:54Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ But you could say the same about structural models and their "predictions." There are just many competing schools of thought about the best way to make "predictions" and it looks like there will be a new "double-descent" one soon"
X Link 2025-12-11T17:55Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ This is obviously not a substantively resolvable debate: it's about vibes and time will tell which groups do better"
X Link 2025-12-11T17:55Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ But the structural vs reduced form debate is substantively mostly vibes"
X Link 2025-12-11T17:59Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ My substantive disagreement is that the ultimate goal - policy counterfactuals - may be done better by black box overparametrized models. Skipping the entire pipeline you construct here identification estimation and all"
X Link 2025-12-11T18:07Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ I don't think we have a sufficiently strong understanding of why overparametrized models are able to extrapolate OOS surprisingly well in practice to have any meaningful predictions about what they will be able to do in five or ten years"
X Link 2025-12-11T18:08Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"@instrumenthull @larrybirdvsjpow @arpitrage @quant_____ So it doesn't seem possible to me to substantively rule out the possibility I'm proposing"
X Link 2025-12-11T18:09Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements
"@instrumenthull @arpitrage @larrybirdvsjpow @quant_____ I feel like if LLMs actually make it we'll find some way to define it as "causal inference" too and then we should be good"
X Link 2025-12-11T19:15Z 31.6K followers, XX engagements