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

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.

Here's another instance of these "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" cases. The guy has 17 papers in 2024 alone. Not so hard if you don't care about whether the results are actually true... (the development econ scandal described here: bsky.app/profile/i4re...)

Trump's 1987 (!) NYT ad. Stunningly similar to what he's doing now (except for the "let's help .. our sick, our homeless" part).

[Of course, this is not an endorsement]

LLM agents behave unlike humans in standard experimental finance (bubble) experiments.

From Fiery Cushman's talk: One of the shapes below is the magic symbol. It's the middle one. Select exactly one of the three words below such that somebody who does not know which is the magic symbol will know it for sure. [People do it well, though it needs quite a high level k]

I had zombie observations in Stata--more data points than I should have. Here's why: max(1, missing) does NOT evaluate to missing, but to 1.

(I don't even want to know how many wrong results there are out there due to such Stata quirks...)