Eric Singler

Senior Advisor @Ipsos Bva I Author I @Tedx Speaker I BeSci I PSG fan I Proud father | | Founder @BVANudgeConsult & @PRSINVIVOgroup I CEO @NudgeFrance I

[Eric Singler @Thobava]

« Comment mettre Echec et Mat les mauvaises décisions et prendre des #décisions éclairées avec les #sciencescomportementales".
Merci à @Paris_Dauphine
pour cette opportunité (et le petit stress associé) d’une conference @TEDx
https://t.co/D9JrIudxAF
@BVANudgeConsult

[Adélaïde Z @AZulfikarpasic]

🗳️#Présidentielle2027 : quels enjeux ?

➡️ Après le désir de changement en 2017, le besoin de continuité face aux polycrises en 2022, quel grand thème va structurer la campagne ?

➡️ Protection ? Souveraineté ? Travail ? Modèle de société ?

👉 Panorama non exhaustif à lire ici

[Eric Singler @Thobava]

A FANTASTIC NEWS :

@Ph_Aghion at #TheHumanAdvantage conference by @Ipsos on October 2nd !

Nothing more to add…for the moment (stay tuned)

Except, you can register here (and it is 🆓): https://t.co/MJNjFbbHRW

[Angela Duckworth @angeladuckw]

Michael Phelps not only had grit… He had a tremendously wise mom and coach. NO JOURNEY IS TAKEN ALONE. https://t.co/h3bElYGfeB

[Cass Sunstein @CassSunstein]

Coming in a month - UK book tour in the fall.
https://t.co/fpe24njlLy

[John A. List @Econ_4_Everyone]

One common question I received during my recent Asian travels is how to leverage AI in experimentation. AI can truly be a positive forcing mechanism for both lab and field experiments.

We recently released this study that has 12 best practices to show how: https://t.co/BwQP4xmOfE

Enjoy! Happy 4th of July everyone!

[Daron Acemoglu @DAcemogluMIT]

Dear followers,
Please see this interview with Goldman Sachs on AI and jobs.
How Will AI Impact the Labor Market? | Goldman Sachs https://t.co/yoN7o7wbwL

[Yoshua Bengio @Yoshua_Bengio]

We are at a turning point: many of the decisions we make about AI today will permanently shape our future.
Governments and the public need to clearly understand the impacts, risks, and opportunities of AI to make the right choices to reap its collective benefits while mitigating its major harms.

That’s why we’re launching the Preliminary Report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI — an initial evidence-based assessment of the current state of AI science — to help the public and policymakers better understand the unprecedented moment we’re in.

We have the power to steer toward a better future with AI together, open-eyed, for the benefit of all of humanity. This report begins that work.

I want to thank my Co-Chair @MariaRessa as well as all my other esteemed colleagues for their exceptional contributions and our precious collaboration.

You can read the Panel’s Full Report linked in the tweet below.

Link to the Message from Maria Ressa and me ⬇️ https://t.co/GnF0WycjSF

[Samantha Power @SamanthaJPower]

Starting in early 2025, Elon Musk and the Trump administration began terminating USAID's programs and firing its staff — with Musk himself boasting about "feeding it into the woodchipper." One year ago today, USAID was officially dissolved, its remaining programs haphazardly folded into the State Department. Amid all the lies and misinformation that have followed, some facts about what has actually been lost:

• USAID saved more than 3 million lives a year at a cost of less than $10/month per American. That is what was destroyed. On purpose.
• According to Boston University's Global Impact Counter — which tracked deaths attributable to the cuts until it stopped operations in February 2026 — an estimated 781,000 people died preventable deaths in the first year, including 518,000 children.
• Global child mortality (the number of children who die before their fifth birthday) rose in 2025 for the first time in 35+ years — by 200,000 additional deaths.
• USAID's 50-country disease surveillance network — the system that cut outbreak response times from 2 weeks to 48 hours — is gone. We are now watching an unprecedented Ebola outbreak unfold in real time — with the highest first-month caseload and death rate in modern history.
• Programs reaching 93 million women and children were cut 92%. TB programs cut 56%. Water and sanitation cut 86%. Over 2,000 health facilities permanently closed.
• 25 million fewer people received humanitarian assistance in 2025. The overall humanitarian budget was slashed 74% — from $14.1 billion to $3.7 billion.
• 363 million people face acute hunger in 2026. The famine early-warning system that would have seen it coming went dark for five months.
• $1.7 billion in democracy and governance funding (election monitoring, anti-corruption work, support for independent media and civil society) was terminated.
• 360+ independent media outlets lost funding. Hundreds of legal clinics closed.
• Far from saving money, the Trump administration itself has already said the dismantlement will cost taxpayers at least $19.2 billion in cancellation fees, severance, and penalties. That's more than half of USAID's annual budget — spent on destruction and closeout, not support for vulnerable people.
• American farmers, universities, and businesses are among the casualties too. USAID partnered with more than 3,500 U.S. companies and maintained 17 university-based research labs. Its work with U.S.-based contractors and the private sector generated hundreds of thousands of American jobs and multiplied the return on every dollar spent. Those markets and partnerships are gone.

[Eric Singler @Thobava]

📚 As every year around this time, I’m happy to share my favorite books from the first half of the year for your summer reading list.

And I’d love to hear from you:

👉 Which books have most influenced your thinking during the first half of 2026?

[Yuval Noah Harari @harari_yuval]

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending Marc Bloch's reburial ceremony at the Panthéon – Paris' monument to the most outstanding citizens of France. Bloch was honored not only as one of the greatest French historians, but also as a man who chose resistance over safety when his country fell into darkness.

Bloch fought in two World Wars, and received multiple awards for bravery. By the time the pro-Nazi Vichy regime came to power in 1940, Bloch was already recognized as perhaps the preeminent historian of medieval France. He continued to teach history, and during that time wrote 'Strange Defeat', a book explaining the French defeat in 1940, and 'The Historian’s Craft', a meditation on history and historiography. Bloch also joined the Résistance and became one of its leaders.

On March 8, 1944 Bloch was captured during a crackdown on the Résistance by the Nazis and their French collaborators. At the time, collaborationist French newspapers celebrated Bloch’s capture. They highlighted his Jewish identity, and referred to the historian as a traitor to France, describing the Résistance as a Jewish-Bolshevik terrorist organization. Bloch was imprisoned and tortured at the Gestapo headquarters in Lyon, and was executed on June 16, 1944, ten days after the Allied landing in Normandy.

I am a medievalist by training, and have been deeply influenced by Bloch. What moved me most about Bloch is his uncompromising commitment to truth. For him, history was never nostalgia or mythmaking, but a discipline of honesty – a way of resisting propaganda, prejudice, and the comfort of convenient fictions. For Bloch, truth was not just an intellectual position, but a spiritual practice. Anticipating his death at the hands of the Gestapo and the Vichy regime, the Jewish historian and freedom fighter left behind detailed instructions for his burial. He wrote:

“I have not asked to have read above my body those Jewish prayers to the cadence of which so many of my ancestors, including my father, were laid to rest. All my life I have striven to achieve complete sincerity in word and thought. I hold that any compromise with untruth, no matter what the pretext, is the mark of a human soul’s ultimate corruption. […] That is why I find it impossible, at this moment of my last farewell, when, if ever, a man should be true to himself, to authorize any use of those formulae of an orthodoxy to the beliefs of which I have ever refused to subscribe.
But I should hate to think that anyone might read into this statement of personal integrity even the remotest approximation to a coward’s denial. I am prepared, therefore, if necessary, to affirm here, in the face of death, that I was born a Jew: that I have never denied it, nor ever been tempted to do so. […] A stranger to all credal dogmas, as to all pretended community of life and spirit based on race, I have, through life, felt that I was above all, and quite simply, a Frenchman. A family tradition, already of long date, has bound me firmly to my country. I have found nourishment in her spiritual heritage and in her history. I can, indeed, think of no other land whose air I could have breathed with such a sense of ease and freedom. I have loved her greatly, and served her with all my strength. I have never found that the fact of being a Jew has at all hindered these sentiments. Though I have fought in two wars, it has not fallen to my lot to die for France. But I can, at least, in all sincerity, declare that I die now, as I have lived, a good Frenchman.”

By his request, a Latin epitaph was carved on Bloch’s grave: dilexi veritatem (“I have loved the truth”).

Watching Bloch's memory honored at the Panthéon yesterday did not feel like a tribute to the past as much as a challenge to the present. As dark clouds gather once again, how many of us today can demonstrate Bloch's level of integrity and fearlessness?

[Daron Acemoglu @DAcemogluMIT]

Thanks Economist for featuring my views, but they make me sound more negative than I am. I think AI is transformative, but I argue near-term productivity growth will be less than what industry insiders believe.
Meet the world’s top AI-pilled economists https://t.co/CR9bLnlaFD

[Daron Acemoglu @DAcemogluMIT]

Dear followers,
Please find enclosed this conversation with Fortune on AI, productivity, inequality and the future of our society.
Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu on 'brainless' AI discourse, myth of capitalism and Gen Z revolution | Fortune https://t.co/bbok93Cm6p

[Angela Duckworth @angeladuckw]

Grit ≠ Talent.

After two decades of research, we know that the correlation between grit and any measure of talent is about zero.

It's passion and perseverance that make super achievers.

[John A. List @Econ_4_Everyone]

**New NBER Paper Alert**: "Don't Give Up on Lab Experiments: Why the Field Still Needs the Lab."

This one might surprise people, as I have spent my career pushing field experiments and urging organizations to conduct natural field experiments.

Yet, I think the pendulum has swung too far. In some quarters, the lab has even started to look obsolete. I think that's wrong.

I make the case why via a simple model that shows each major design type (lab, artefactual field, framed field, and natural field experiments) has a key place in our pursuit to change the world with experiments.

[Eric Singler @Thobava]

🎙️ “Saving Democracy: Restoring Truth in an Age of Misinformation and Polarization” at The Human Advantage conference on Oct 1st with Didier Truchot @Ipsos, @jayvanbavel, @mnathan and @Sander_vdLinden !
Register here: https://t.co/MJNjFbbHRW

[Eric Singler @Thobava]

Save the date !

The Human Advantage Conference is back!

For 2 days, the world's leading conference on the application of Behavioral Science and AI to today's business and societal challenges will bring leading researchers, and practitioners from around the globe.

October 1–2

[Eric Singler @Thobava]

Ready to win in Budapest ⚽️
Let’s go @PSG !

[Cass Sunstein @CassSunstein]

I am biased, but this is a really terrific note from @R_Thaler - clarifies something important.

[Cass Sunstein @CassSunstein]

Coming in August: THE PRICE OF HAPPINESS. (Amazing cover to be unveiled soon; US and UK book tours are planned.) @CambPressAssess @CUP_Law
https://t.co/gwOSVArafL

[John A. List @Econ_4_Everyone]

Launch day! Experimental Economics: Theory and Practice, the textbook I wish I had as a first-year PhD student, is shipping from warehouses.

This is a project that started in my head as an undergrad and on the page in 2015. The @BeckerFriedman team was kind enough to sit down with me to chat about the new book. We focused on how experiments can change the world, from the ivory tower to the White House to the living room. We also stumbled upon my own miscalibrations over the years, why most ideas don't scale, and what a decade of writing (and 35 years of being an "anthroeconomist") has taught me: https://t.co/w6oJV244HR