Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 4d

Important thread for people using causal inference methods in applied work

Paul Hünermund @p-hunermund.com · 5d

And, therefore, there can also not be hierarchy of methods, because it depends on the specific case whether the assumptions are fulfilled.

Chelsea Parlett @chelseaparlett.bsky.social · 5d

It’s not the method that makes you causal it’s the assumptions

5

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 5d

That is a very interesting short paper, and it reflect the mixed experience I’ve had and many academics around me have had with LLMs.
Fully agree with @mjamurphy.bsky.social here ; perhaps we’re all better off sticking to open source that the web of Bernard-Lee was made to be

Mike Murphy @mjamurphy.bsky.social · 5d

It's hard for me to reconcile "OpenAI is worth a half trillion dollars" and "OpenAI's state-of-the-art model does marginally better than open-source on high-value tasks" #EconSky

Vidgen et al. "The AI Productivity Index"

Link: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.25721

arxiv.org

7

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 6d

The best post I’ve seen on Bluesky in a very long time! Brilliant idea and brilliant accounts out there !

Conrad Hackett @conradhackett.bsky.social · 8d

What's your favorite Bluesky account that primarily posts about something other than current events/politics?

2 13

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 7d

Fascinating piece on the very unique influence if the tech industry on the school system

Sgitr @dumbster.bsky.social · 9d

“Learn to code” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/p...

Big Tech Told Kids to Code. The Jobs Didn’t Follow.

www.nytimes.com

4

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 14d

S’truth

Olivier Simard-Casanova @o.simardcasanova.net · 14d

The “I did my own research” crowd in a nutshell

Effin' Birds @effinbirds.com · 14d

2

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 14d

If ever anybody believed Trump’s claims at the UN here is a short article debunking each lie.

www.euronews.com/green/2025/0...

Trump tells UN climate change is the 'greatest con job ever'

Trump called renewable sources of energy like wind power a “joke" and blasted the UN's climate efforts.

www.euronews.com

4

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 17d

My experience in Paris has been that you can enter the metro, but then you arrive at a station that says “accessible” and you discover that the elevator is broken 😬
Or you wait at the bus stop for while until you discover that it’s been temp moved (god knows where exactly) because of road works 🙈

1

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 18d

😅🤦‍♀️

1

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 18d

And let’s not forget people who struggle moving around — elderly, disabled, or simply moms with prams. It’s great to plan the city for most people not to use cars, but it’s even better if we allow those who need it to use cars (self driving or not, that seems pretty irrelevant to me)

4 4

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 20d

Ou les émissions politiques où on met Zucman en face de citoyens lambda ou de chefs d’entreprise qui se pensent économistes 😬

2

Reposted by Alexandra de Gendre

Daniela Scur @danielascur.bsky.social · 25d

This is why one should follow the dictionary account

Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 26d

‘Booty’ and ‘butt’ are synonyms.

‘Call’ and ‘dial’ are synonyms.

But, a ‘booty call’ and a ‘butt dial’ are VERY different things.

6 53

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · 27d

Just spent two very inspiring days at the Summer School on Networks organized by my friend and coauthor @yveszenou.bsky.social at Monash Uni. Great lectures by Matt Jackson (Stanford), Sanjeev Goyal (Cambridge) and Yves — I learned so much! Thanks Yves!!!

www.monash.edu/business/eve...

Network Economics Conference and Summer School 2025

www.monash.edu

1 2

Reposted by Alexandra de Gendre

Ryan Estrada @ryanestrada.com · Sep 6

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI

Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

www.theatlantic.com

230 9.8K 12K

Reposted by Alexandra de Gendre

Nick Huntington-Klein @nickchk.com · Sep 5

New The Effect materials today: introductions to basic coding and data manipulation in R, Stata, and Python. Get the wheels turning on using these languages with data with these intro pages and exercises:
nickchk.com/Coding%20and...
nickchk.com/Coding%20and...
nickchk.com/Coding%20and...

Introduction to Working with Data: R Version

nickchk.com

1 16 46

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · Sep 3

Incredible!!!

Florian Ederer @florianederer.bsky.social · Sep 3

We usually rely on GDP, trade, or wages to study the past. This amazing paper flips the script.

It analyzes 630,000 paintings (1400-2000) to extract emotions and shows how art tracks living standards, wars, inequality, and even climate shocks.

(How is this economics? Everything is economics!)

1 6

Reposted by Alexandra de Gendre

Paul Gribble 🇨🇦 @gribblelab.org · Sep 3

academia is a v. strange mix of “we expect you to behave like an employee” (forms, webinars, insanely bad admin software, etc) but also “go fund your entire research operation yourself including paper towels for the sink in the lunchroom we don’t have the budget for that”. #academicsky

1 4 28

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · Sep 2

The sleep can be mostly readjusted faster than that, but the rest of their cycles take the 2-3 weeks to fully adjust (appetite, toilet, …)

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · Sep 2

Yep, that’s usually what we do. Spend a lot of time outside (also to get toddler tired 😇), and be patient. It feels eternal but they do get over it within 2-3 weeks.

1 1

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · Sep 1

If you want to learn Bayesian data analysis, this guy wrote one of the best textbooks! 👉🏽👉🏽👉🏽

Aki Vehtari @avehtari.bsky.social · Sep 1

My Bayesian Data Analysis course at Aalto is starting in 20mins. There are now 375 registered students, but as the course is not compulsory for most, I expect about 230 students to finish it. All the course material is available online at avehtari.github.io/BDA_course_A...

Bayesian Data Analysis course

avehtari.github.io

3 9

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · Sep 1

Excellent @newyorker.com piece citing lots of recent studies with very mixed evidence on the productivity gains of Gen AI — and a great complementing thread by @kmcelheran.bsky.social whose work is cited in the article. Thanks for adding many refs to studies Kristina!

Kristina McElheran @kmcelheran.bsky.social · Sep 1

Beware of coverage of AI-related pre-prints...unless they are mine. ;-)

The A.I.-Profits Drought and the Lessons of History

Like the steam engine, electricity, and computers, generative artificial intelligence could take longer than expected to transform the economy.

www.newyorker.com

3

Reposted by Alexandra de Gendre

Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · Sep 1

Shout it from the rooftops: the real AI revolution will be later, less, spotty and uneven

Kristina McElheran @kmcelheran.bsky.social · Sep 1

Beware of coverage of AI-related pre-prints...unless they are mine. ;-)

The A.I.-Profits Drought and the Lessons of History

Like the steam engine, electricity, and computers, generative artificial intelligence could take longer than expected to transform the economy.

www.newyorker.com

2 8

Reposted by Alexandra de Gendre

Nina Willburger @drnwillburger.bsky.social · Sep 1

A few days ago I learned you can skip the AI summary feature in Google by adding "-AI" to your search. I love it!

24 69 280

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · Aug 31

Oui

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · Aug 31

Simplement retirer des places de parking pour forcer tout le monde à prendre les transports en commun, alors qu’on aurait pu par exemple remplacer des places par des espaces réservés aux personnes à mobilité réduites, c’était préférer la solution coercive plutôt que de penser à tous les usagers

1

Alexandra de Gendre @adegendre.bsky.social · Aug 30

Je suis tellement d’accord avec vous. C’est triste qu’on a rendu la ville plus verte au prix de son accessibilité pour de nombreux usagers — personnes handicapées, personnes âgées, femmes enceintes et parents avec poussettes. Il faut arrêter de penser solution unique

1 3