B.N. Johnson

Nicolas 30 ans. I'm something of an economist. I change frames like a girl changes clothes. Etc eTc etC.

[Freddy Gray @Freddygray31]

'Warsh, so I hear from inside the Fed, has commissioned a generative AI bot based on the entire corpus of Friedman’s work and named it “Milton.”

A similar initiative incorporates the work of liberal Keynesian economist James Tobin. Yet another covers the recorded thoughts of George Schultz, a conservative eminence in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, who mentored Warsh at Stanford.

As a senior Fed official explained to me, “[Warsh] likes to sit in his office having long talks with ‘Milton’ about the economy and Fed policy.”

https://t.co/FZQNAlEs5f

[nonchalant @nonchalant_exe]

This is why you should be able to squat 150kg at least because what if a baby elephant wants to ride your back and you don't have enough strength to pick it up. Couldn't be me.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Looks like we won't stop doing this until the last maternity ward is torn down and replaced with a hospice center.

[Arpit Gupta @arpitrage]

You’re deluding yourself if you think AI advances like in math aren’t coming to economics and other social sciences

[Naval @naval]

Except for love, the world is empty.

[Nicholas Decker @captgouda24]

This paper has been presented FIFTY SEVEN different times. 57!

[Brady Long @thisguyknowsai]

A German psychologist proved in 1885 that cramming erases what you learned within 48 hours. He published the fix in the same book. Almost no school on Earth has adopted it in 140 years.

His name was Hermann Ebbinghaus.

He had no lab. No funding. No colleagues.

He worked alone in a room in Berlin and ran every experiment on himself. He spent years memorizing thousands of nonsense syllables — made-up combinations like DAX and BUP, strings with no meaning — so that prior knowledge could not contaminate the results.

Then he tested his own recall at intervals. Twenty minutes. One hour. Nine hours. One day. Six days. Thirty-one days.

What he found became one of the most replicated findings in the history of psychology.

Two-thirds of everything you learn is gone within 24 hours if you do not return to it. Within a week, the curve flattens near zero. The brain does not store what it does not revisit. It treats unused information the way it treats everything else it does not need. It discards it.

He drew this curve in 1885 and called it the forgetting curve.

Then he found something else in the same data.

Students who spread their study sessions over multiple days retained far more than students who spent the same total hours studying in one block. Not slightly more. Dramatically more. The brain needed time between exposures to consolidate the material into something durable.

He called this the spacing effect.

Same information. Same total hours. Completely different outcome depending on when you spread the hours out.

The finding has been replicated over 250 times. A 2006 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin covered 254 studies across every age group and every subject. The effect held every time.

A German journalist named Sebastian Leitner built a physical flashcard system around it in 1972. An open source app called Anki turned that system into software in 2006. Medical students who use Anki to pass board exams are not working harder than everyone else. They are working in the only pattern the brain actually responds to.

The most uncomfortable part of all of this is what happened after Ebbinghaus published.

Educators read the research. They understood what it showed. They kept the cramming.

The school calendar was already built around it. Semester exams. Finals week. One concentrated block of review before the test and then nothing. The entire architecture of how most schools schedule learning is optimized for the forgetting curve, not against it.

The lesson is not that you need more time to study.

It is that the same time, distributed differently, produces a completely different brain.

Ebbinghaus proved this in 1885 with no budget and no institution. He ran the experiment on himself because no one would run it for him.

The fix has been available for 140 years.

Almost nobody who designs schools has used it.

[B.N. Johnson @BN_Johnson]

Up to 18% of yearly dementia cases ~90k per year (usa) from lead exposure. Dont forget the leaded gasoline was only fully phased out in 96. https://t.co/5dB2vHHWff

[Dan Roy @roydanroy]

Warning: once you learn category theory, you'll never be able or willing to talk with people who don't know category theory.

[First Squawk @FirstSquawk]

U.S. HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS FACE TOUGHEST SUMMER JOB MARKET SINCE 1948: FORTUNE

[Paul Graham @paulg]

If big companies can't make a net return on their LLM token costs, that doesn't mean it's impossible to. In fact this is exactly what you'd expect to happen with a new technology. Incumbents can't use it well, and are replaced by upstarts who can.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

never waste a good crisis

[Ludwig Wittgenstein | Philosopher 📖 @Wittgensteinnn]

"When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there."

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Plunder rarely benefits the plunderer.

Colonialism and imperialism are not what made modern nations rich.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

I wanted to see how many American doctors were objectively unintelligent

I assembled 9 large-scale American datasets and I found that there are plenty of actually unintelligent people with doctorates

The least intelligent non-disabled, valid-score doctor I found had an IQ of 66

[kache @yacineMTB]

Thankfully I'm neither. I wrote a script that scraped indeed's salary to job data right before I graduated and picked the career with the best looking income distribution (it was scaling saas)

[Paul Graham @paulg]

@RoKhanna You haven't answered my question. It was a simple yes/no question.

If you start a company that grows really fast and your stock becomes valuable as a result, is that hoarding wealth?

[B.N. Johnson @BN_Johnson]

Reminder (4mio not u) to look into bloatware trackers and cookies.

[Jacob Turner @TheJacobTurner]

A PARENT’S JOURNEY THROUGH YOUTH SPORTS:

Age 5: “He’s got a cannon.”
Age 6: “He’s the fastest kid out there. Coach said so.”
Age 7: “Rec ball isn’t challenging him anymore.”
Age 8: “We tried out for select. Obviously made it.”
Age 9: “$2,800 for the season. Plus uniforms. Plus tournaments. Plus hotels.”
Age 10: “Cooperstown is basically a family vacation, right?”
Age 11: “He needs a hitting guy. And a pitching guy. And probably a mental performance coach.”
Age 12: “I’m not a crazy sports parent. The OTHER parents are crazy.”
Age 13: “We changed schools. For academics. (And also baseball.)”
Age 14: “Showcases are a requirement at this age.”
Age 15: “Ya his ranking just ticked up. We’re cooking.”
Age 16: “He just needs to get seen by the right school.”
Age 17: “The D1 schools want him to walk on. He’ll earn a spot by sophomore year.”
Age 18: “Okay, D2 is actually really competitive.”
Age 19: “He’s redshirting. Strategic.”
Age 20: “He’s focusing on school now.”
Age 21: “You know what? He’s so much happier.”

Roughly 7% of high schoolers play in college.

About 1.5% of those get drafted.

Less than half of draftees ever play one day in the big leagues.

The odds of our kids going pro are somewhere between “struck by lightning” and “find a $100 in old shorts.”

I love youth sports (all my kids play a bunch of them) just keep a good perspective my friends. ✌️

[Justine Moore @venturetwins]

Me using Claude Opus 4.8 to rename a file