Tom Dric

Economist.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@MattZeitlin Directionally agree, though the strength of the counterexample is attenuated by the fact that the attention Pratt received was disproportionately from people outside of LA.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@stephen_richer @WakeUp2Politics Ask people on the street to respond to a poll about the Supreme Court.
I'm sure some pretending is going on, but the people who actually take their time out to answer 13 questions about the Supreme Court are not going to be representative Americans.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@arthur_spirling @ajlamesa There were 317 heat related deaths in London in 2025 (Pop 9.1M). There are ~500 heat related deaths in NYC annually (Pop 8.8M). NYC is obviously hotter, but certainly not lacking in A/C.
There are parts of UK where A/C has been lacking, but London is not really one of them.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@FrankBednarz @dilanesper You would not be exposed to a Bob Dylan cover unless some people thought it was better than his version. And obviously, this is generally applicable to non-Bob Dylan musicians.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@iamHBY Maybe not factually incorrect, but "California Love" taught me that California is the Sunshine State until I went to Florida and saw their license plates.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@The_Kyle_Mann Season 7 of Teen Calvin is a worthwhile tradeoff if it means millions more kids will discover and read the original Calvin and Hobbes comics.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@devahaz Cooking is a skill issue with a learning curve like everything in life. And if you never really cooked before (aside from microwaving frozen food and cooking ramen) the first several weeks will likely be frustrating with trials and errors and will not feel like it's "worth" it.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@dilanesper Good thread. I would add a third important thing: the negative externality of secondhand smoking. If tobacco smoke were as unobtrusive as vape, our effort would have been far less extraordinary.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@DanFriedman81 Think you are overstating things given that Jamir Nazir is the regional winner in Caribbean region. A writer from Trinidad and Tobago compared to others from Caribbean region is as exotic as a writer from India is compared to others from Asia.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@littmath @tszzl Yes, but from my understanding, the interesting ideas would not have occurred to the human mathematicians in the comments without the model's argument. It does not trivially follow from the model's argument, but it also did not require a huge leap for the domain experts, either.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@krishnanrohit Extraordinary claims not only require extraordinary evidence, but they also demand extraordinary actions.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@dilanesper I don't think Netanyahu is a genius, but he is smart enough to know that a "good" analysis was never going to convince Trump to go to war with Iran. And you may be right that the war is bad for Israel, but the relevant question for Bibi was always 'is the war good for me?'

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@BenShindel @max_spero_ A clear example of how most so-called “AI-induced psychosis” is simply people with psychosis engaging with AI until it reinforces beliefs they already held.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@alexolegimas Reasonable/smart people regularly learn new important things.
Learning new important things will/should convince you to change your mind regularly.
This is a reminder that there are many important things that reasonable/smart people (e.g. yourself in the past) do not know.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@_glorianas Yes, it is your job to ensure your period pieces is not too unbelievable that it ruins the immersion.
But the standard for that should be based on the bottom ~95%’s knowledge of that time period, which in most cases, is not much and a lot less than what top 5% would think.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@littmath @krishnanrohit I do not necessarily disagree with you, but I think what you and other academic mathematicians work on is a small, especially hard-to-automate subset of what most people would call “math stuff”, which is largely composed of things that mathematicians would not consider math.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@stephen_richer Almost all? Aside from Blockbusters, which other companies were considered monopolies, let alone insurmountable?

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@macrocephalopod I largely agree with you on how true/false EMH is, but I don't see how 'EMH is laughably false' leads to 'if so, you should have made shit ton of money' without a bunch of other assumptions that most people do not satisfy.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@agraybee The idea that writers should read was completely uncontroversial until social media came along where otherwise not noteworthy people receive orders of magnitude more attention and engagement for expressing novel controversial opinions.

[Tom Dric @dric_tom]

@ariehkovler Mostly because Taiwanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc. get annoyed every time they hear Chinese New Year.