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Ben Golub

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David Blackwell would be turning 102 today.He's best known for the Blackwell information ordering, the way to formalize when some signals give you more information than other signals.A thread on

Suppose we take N i.i.d. normal draws and look at the difference between the highest and the second-highest draw. Does this converge to a nonzero constant as N grows?Answer: No.Proof:

Our perceptions of some of the things we experience are deeply inaccurate. Case 1: The vast majority of restaurants get few visits and go out of business quickly. This seems

"Reductionist" (i.e., most economic) theories of collective action explain acts like voting by individual incentives, perhaps including "social" phenomena via payoff terms like social pressure or warm glow.A short thread

A thread on what we can learn about polarization of opinions from a simple behavioral network model.Remember the DeGroot model? It says you decide what to think tomorrow by taking

The implication @arpitrage draws from his striking research on migration & COVID parallels something I've been thinking since the start of this:regional epidemics may be manageable. When new sparks take

An application of Aumann's agreeing-to-disagree result: certain kinds of war between rational countries are puzzling.Since war involves destruction, better for one to surrender and bargain. But maybe each believes it'll

A short thread on an obvious selection effect with some big consequences.The social networks that are huge and very powerful now are the ones that grew the fastest. All else

Just sent Knuth's advice on writing mathematical stuff to a student list and felt moved to retweet it more broadly.Some favorite bits in the screenshots. 1/3https://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematical_writing.pdf the

Recently I've been thinking about (with @Jabaluck,@itaisher, and many others) the seeming need in economic theory for a better language for taking about values than the one we get from

Networks of business relationships are the tissue of a modern economy. The current crisis is a common shock to these relationships. This new paper develops a network theory of why