networks, contagion, causality. @MIT professor not often on X deaneckles, eckles & eckles.bsky.social elsewhere
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People in some places in the US have more long ties — ties between people without mutual contacts.
This is a map from our newly published paper: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.22…
Why does this matter? How do people end up with these different network structures? 🧵
ALT Fraction of long ties, measured across counties in the United States, after controlling for average degree. The adjusted (residualized) fraction of long ties across administrative units in each country is binned into 10 deciles, with lower values shown in purple and higher values shown in green. Administrative units with less than 200 Facebook users sufficiently active over the measurement period or with less than 500 individuals are shown in white.
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Dean Eckles retweeted
📢 Call for abstracts for the Conference on Digital Experimentation (CODE@MIT), which takes place Nov 13-14.
📨 Submit your best work by *Sept 13th*!
ide.mit.edu/events/2026-conf…
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Dean Eckles retweeted
📢 Call for abstracts for the Conference on Digital Experimentation (CODE@MIT)
📨Submit your best work by *Sept 12th*!
ide.mit.edu/events/2025-conf…
Here are three topics we're particularly interested in getting more submissions on this year:
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We're recruiting a tenure-track faculty member to @MITSloan!
apply.interfolio.com/170116
We're looking for a researcher working in quantitative marketing, broadly considered. Our existing faculty include experts on privacy, mathematical psych, networks, and applications of ML & AI.
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Dean Eckles retweeted
🚨 New working paper 🚨
Demand for LLMs: Descriptive Evidence on
Substitution, Market Expansion, and Multi-Homing
A key question for the business of AI is the extent to which LLMs are differentiated from each other. I use data from @openrouter to take a first look. cc @alexatallah
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Dean Eckles retweeted
PSA: I am only hearing rumors, but they are circulating that NSF social and behavioral sciences is next on chopping block, maybe this week, maybe a bit longer. Here is what I wish I’d done and I recommend you do if you have a grant:
Alas, along with recent USAID and State Dept cuts to my organized crime and criminal justice research in Latin America, on Friday DoD terminated a new $2.1 million grant to study programs to counter organized crime and gang recruitment science.org/content/article/…
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Dean Eckles retweeted
Associated Press reporters at the White House were barred from an Oval Office event today with the President - because the AP won't use Trump's new name 'Gulf of America'
ap.org/the-definitive-source…
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RT @salonium: AMFAR has published a report on how the foreign aid freeze affects PEPFAR, which actually still hasn't resumed.
They estima…
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Dean Eckles retweeted
In a large US sample, approximately half of all women discontinue antidepressant usage during pregnancy (no change in usage for spouses).
This is in a new paper that I just published with @claireeboone and @ccolina_pe that is primarily descriptive.
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Dean Eckles retweeted
I'm hiring for two front-line engineering manager roles in PyTorch: someone to manage TorchTune and someone to manage TorchRec. Link in follow up post.
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Dean Eckles retweeted
chain of thought is hilarious
(distilled deepseek 14b running via ollama)
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Dean Eckles retweeted
This should be a national scandal: Today, the LA County Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution asking the state to suspend various legal protections for property owners in burned areas—their right to build a duplex or ADU, to reasonable permit timelines, and more.
basically every state housing law: the HAA, the Housing Element Law, the Density Bonus Law, the commercial-corridors upzoning laws, the parking-reductions-near-transit law, the 5-hearing limit & objective-standards definition of SB 330, and more.
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Dean Eckles retweeted
You will get FOMO if you don't listen to our new pod about the social media trap. cc @SBenzell
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Dean Eckles retweeted
We've revamped the **fect** package in R and integrated **gsynth** into it. The original **gsynth** is retired.
The new package implements a series of imputation estimators, including FEct, IFEct, MC & Gsynth.
New user manual: yiqingxu.org/packages/fect/
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Dean Eckles retweeted
It's a good time to mention that @SBenzell and I have a podcast called Justified Posteriors discussing the economics of AI and other technologies. Our latest episode considers @timobres's paper on AI and Aggregate. Link below and available at all fine podcast purveyors.
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Dean Eckles retweeted
A few of us were at this event where Dwarkesh interviewed Tyler. I love that he got feisty here - right before the interview, some EA guys were trying to convince him of some craziness and he was giving them the business. But all good - important ideas discussed by smart people!
I hassled @tylercowen about why he doesn't expect explosive economic growth from AGI. How could we possibly add 100 billion extra workers and only get 0.5% more growth?
Also featuring Stalin's library, EU decels, and how Churchill was an underachiever.
Hilarious and provocative throughout.
My 4th interview with Tyler. He surprises me every time.
Enjoy!
Timestamps
0:00:00 - Economic Growth and AI
0:15:45 - Founder Mode and increasing variance
0:30:19 - Effective Altruism and Progress Studies
0:33:53 - What AI changes for Tyler
0:45:45 - The slow diffusion of innovation
0:50:41 - Stalin's library
0:53:07 - DC vs SF vs EU
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Dean Eckles retweeted
Super interesting post about a real-life implementation of a social impact bond.
Kudos to @Arnold_Ventures for getting this done.
A shame the CBT intervention was underwhelming, but extremely useful to know it!
Many social programs are presented as investments that will pay for themselves via better outcomes in the future. But is it true? What if govt funding was tied to outcomes rather than inputs? We @Arnold_Ventures and others tested that model in a first of its kind project. 1/12
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Dean Eckles retweeted
Guys.
We — as in Californian voters who voted in 1988 — voted for a system where every time an insurance company wants to raise rates for automobiles or homes, they have to have a public hearing and an elected insurance commissioner has to approve that rate increase.
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Dean Eckles retweeted
i broadly agree that there is a common language among the quantitative social sciences, but I think this growth hasn’t just been “hail the conquering econ heroes.”
1) econ became more influential in QSS as it shed its more structural tendencies and embraced the reduced form…
What we call "economics" increasingly refers to a bunch of policy-focused quantitative social sciences:
- Economics
- Finance
- Accounting
- Marketing
- Public policy
- Health policy
As well as maybe parts of:
- Political science
- (?) Education policy
I may have missed some
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Dean Eckles retweeted
Feeling a bit surreal—just heard that JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley issued equity research notes on our paper with @hristakevas and Leo Feler.
This is probably the closest my research will ever come to influencing markets! 📉📈
🚨Closing out 2024 with new paper with @hristakevas and Leo Feler: How GLP-1 medications like Ozempic are reshaping food demand and changing the rules of the game for the food industry.
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