B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science

PhD Economist • Data Scientist • Director @ePC_UCB • Open data & AI for development (Bolivia & LatAm) • #rstats | Data → Evidence → Policy impact • Speaker

[B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science @BBranisa]

Publications (Google Scholar): https://t.co/uHCegF7R5D

For speaking/collaboration, feel free to DM.

[DaVinci @BiancoDavinci]

A visual comparison of the past and present.

[B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science @BBranisa]

🌎 💰🧐

[The Economist @TheEconomist]

Foreign direct investment in Latin America rose from $167bn in 2024 to $204bn in 2025. During the same period, flows to the rest of the developing world shrank https://t.co/lwiX1UktGe

[Linguistic Discovery @lingdiscovery]

Here’s a neat book a friend pointed out to me last year: “Water, whiskey, and vodka: A story of Slavic languages”

[Davide Piffer @DavidePiffer]

How genetically different were people living 1,000 km apart?
Today: not very.

9,000 years ago: about as different as modern Europeans and East Asians.
Using ancient DNA, I found that the same distance corresponded to much greater genetic differentiation in the deep past.

The world used to be a much bigger place.

https://t.co/0zk5xPJf9r

[Christopher D. Long 🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈🌹 @octonion]

We choose a random number from Uniform [0,1]. Subsequent random numbers are sampled from Uniform[0,s], where s is the smallest number seen so far. Show the sample mean of the first n numbers decays polynomially, whereas the sample median decays exponentially.

[Cliff Pickover @pickover]

Math.

Two 70-year-old papers by Alan Turing on the theory of code breaking have been released by the government's communications headquarters, GCHQ. Info: https://t.co/wszZ7jsdam

[Karl Popper Quotes @QuotePopper]

"Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstand you."

—Karl Popper, Unended Quest.

[Stanislas Dehaene @standehaene.bsky.social @StanDehaene]

In this new JEP:General paper, we show that geometric shapes are organized as tree structures in a language of thought.
We apply several linguistic tests for nested constituents, including structural ambiguity, constituent subparts, and syntactic movement.
https://t.co/LZrECP66ww

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

MIT, Stanford, New York Univ, Princeton paper says AI can make people feel more efficient even when they are not actually becoming much more efficient.

that people often use AI for simple tasks because it feels like it saves time and effort, but the measured benefit is often tiny, missing, or even negative.

The biggest point is the feedback loop: once people use AI, they become more likely to use it again, even for easy tasks where doing it themselves would often be just as fast or faster.

i.e. AI dependence can grow from a mistaken feeling of convenience, not just from real productivity gains.

Across three preregistered studies with 2,691 participants, people used AI for basic arithmetic, spelling, recall, and short rewriting at higher rates than they predicted, especially on easy tasks.

They also expected AI to save 55.7 seconds on average, when the measured saving was only 7.5 seconds.

For simple work, the hidden cost is not intelligence but interface friction: writing the prompt, waiting, reading, checking, and deciding whether the answer is acceptable.

Once that loop begins, it can feel like effort has been outsourced, even when effort has only been rearranged.

Here’s the key part: the study suggests that AI use can train its own justification.

After using AI on just two tasks, participants became more likely to use it again, even when independent completion was faster.

The danger is not dramatic dependence, but quiet recalibration.

A person who asks AI for a trivial answer today may not become less capable tomorrow, but they may become less accurate at judging when their own mind is already the faster tool.

----

Paper Link – arxiv. org/abs/2605.22687

Paper Title: "The efficiency-gain illusion: People underestimate the rate of AI use and overestimate its benefits on simple tasks"

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

I read Zinsser (together with every other major style manual) while writing The Sense of Style, and his book is indeed very good. (It's the only one that advises on how to get one sentence to flow into the next, which differentiates smooth and coherent from choppy prose.) But like every manual that is innocent of linguistics, it botches the obligatory advice to avoid the passive, and like Orwell and Strunk and White, it can't help but use the passive in its own advice to avoid the passive ("what is being perpetrated").

[Olivier Blanchard @ojblanchard1]

A must read (or must listen): https://t.co/2uGt1XhA8V . A dystopian but unfortunately surprising convincing of what could happen if Europe does not catch up on AI. It moved my prior. (and it is, despite the gloomy conclusions) a fun read.

[Quanta Magazine @QuantaMagazine]

In chaotic systems, the smallest fluctuations get amplified. As scientist Edward Lorenz put it in the 1960s and 70s, even a seagull flapping its wings might eventually make a big difference to the weather. Here's how scientists came to understand what chaos is, and how to wrangle it: https://t.co/7DrDEptTcB

[aoattes @andyoattes]

Karl Popper’s, ‘Open Society and Its Enemies’ remains one of the most compelling defences of open discourse as a civilisational mechanism of error correction.

For Popper, Truth is never possessed in its entirety. It can only be understood through a logical process of criticism, disagreement, and the continual testing of ideas. A society that is capable of correcting its mistakes entirely depends upon the freedom to question prevailing assumptions and to expose falsehood through reasoned debate.

It is therefore entirely regrettable that one of the more insidious realities of our age is that certain individuals and institutions invoke the language of the open society while inverting its essential principles. Under the banner of tolerance, safety, equity or consensus, group-think, they have deliberately narrowed the range of permissible inquiry and badly damaged the very processes through which truth is discovered.

Popper understood that certainty is the enemy of progress. Indeed, a civilisation that loses its capacity for honest discourse loses its principal means of self-correction.

Once criticism is treated as heresy and dissent as a threat rather than a necessity, the foundations of the open society begin to crumble from within.

beg you to read Popper. To read @DavidDeutschOxf. To listen to and absorb the work of @ToKTeacher @naval @ConjectureInst and the many other great critical rationalists.

We ought to understand the great peril we face.

[Walter Sosa Escudero @wsosaescudero]

¡Buen dia! Aca un divertimento borgeano, en ocasion de los 40 años de su fallecimiento. Gracias a @sebacampanario por la hospitalidad. cc: @EconUdesa @sigloxxiarg https://t.co/fDuAreRVhH

[Martin Varsavsky @martinvars]

Anthropic acaba de publicar que el Gobierno de Estados Unidos le obligó a suspender el acceso a sus modelos Fable 5 y Mythos 5 para cualquier extranjero, incluso empleados extranjeros de Anthropic dentro de la propia empresa. Si esto se confirma tal como lo describe Anthropic, es una señal enorme para Europa. Durante años Bruselas confundió poder tecnológico con regular la tecnología de otros. Pero el poder de verdad es poder fabricar chips, comprar energía barata, entrenar modelos, atraer ingenieros y decidir quién puede usar la herramienta. La IA ya no es solo software. Es infraestructura crítica, como electricidad, telecomunicaciones o satélites. Un hospital, un banco, una fábrica o un ejército que depende por completo de modelos que otro país puede apagar con una orden administrativa no es autónomo. Europa no necesita otro documento grandilocuente sobre soberanía digital. Necesita capital, energía, centros de datos, universidades más conectadas con empresas y menos miedo al éxito privado. Regular sin construir es una forma elegante de aceptar dependencia.

[Almudena Castro Conde @almucastro01]

Este editorial de @Nature sostiene que estamos viviendo uno de los mayores cambios en el acceso a la información.

Si la comunicación científica quiere seguir siendo relevante e influyente, deberá adaptarse a estos nuevos formatos sin renunciar al rigor científico.

https://t.co/ga5ZTNt0w2

[Observant sojourner @ObservantSojo]

Took almost half a year but finally finished studying. Now going through the lectures. Worth the climb!

[euronews @euronews]

'Wake-up call': Europe reacts to Anthropic halting access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 AI models

https://t.co/yVFxNjIvz4

[Quanta Magazine @QuantaMagazine]

In Plato’s cave, prisoners see the world only through shadows. Extending this metaphor to AI, the shadows are streams of data, and AI models are the prisoners. Perhaps they are creating one self-consistent representation of reality using disparate chunks of information.
https://t.co/hUKiYnosYJ

[B. Branisa | Economics & Data Science @BBranisa]

😅

[Dr. Eli David @DrEliDavid]

Thanks to socialism, the average Zimbabwean became a trillionaire before @elonmusk 💪