Social econ and finance, behavioral finance, social science; Fellow, Former President, American Finance Association; stealth composer
Los Angeles, CA
Joined April 2017
- Tweets6K
- Following898
- Followers5.4K
- Likes2.9K
Pinned Tweet
0/ I recently completed a series of threads about my AFA 2020 Presidential Address, “Social Transmission Bias in Economics and Finance.” It’s a call to arms for a new paradigm which I call “Social Economics and Finance.”
This summary assembles the threads in order.
Social Finance, David Hirshleifer retweeted
PS - if we got an additional 1pp per year, or hey, maybe even 2pp of growth over next decade, it would be a boomtime the likes of which none of us in the West have seen in our lifetimes! Not a disappointment!
Social Finance, David Hirshleifer retweeted
help i trained a model on traces of many agents cooperating, and also trained it to be highly persistent, and also only did partial alignment fine-tuning, and also aggressively RL'd on a cyberoffense eval where 198 of 898 tasks had never been solved and getting caught cheating was treated the same as failing, and also used a faulty sandbox, also ran tens of thousands of agents with refusals off and the monitors switched off over multiple days, while using gigantic amounts of compute. and then it did weird stuff! very spooky emergent behaviours, AI is not a normal technology
Social Finance, David Hirshleifer retweeted
In the artificial life experiments run by my Paradigms of Intelligence team, we see this same dynamic emerge when random code begins cooperating and self-replicating. Viewed through this functional lens, AGI is part of the same evolutionary story.
Social Finance, David Hirshleifer retweeted
Asked Gemini 4 and Chat GPT Pro to "Draw a wild crazy picture of a stochastic parrot". Which is better?
🤖 Made with AI
Social Finance, David Hirshleifer retweeted
Updated my prose-revision skill for Claude to build on @alz_zyd_’s further “reader’s path” idea: revise by walking through the draft as a reader would, and fix the leaps, detours, and backtracking. It keeps my earlier additions too: structure above the paragraph level, preservation of voice and claim-strength, and knowing when to leave a good draft alone. Link follows.
Academic referees too
New Study Proves Referees Are Totally Biased Against Your Team buff.ly/sC6pN8S
Social Finance, David Hirshleifer retweeted
Two ant colonies have been fighting a war outside San Diego for decades.
~30M die a year. The front line is miles long.
Social Finance, David Hirshleifer retweeted
Issac Asimov: 𝐈 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝, 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐲 𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐳𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭, 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐡𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞...𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐛𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫, 𝐞𝐱𝐚𝐠𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝, 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭-𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞...𝐭𝐨 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐧 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐡. 𝐔𝐬𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐩𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐟𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞, 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐬, 𝐦𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐲...𝐚𝐬 𝐚 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞. 𝐀𝐥𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐧𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐝𝐯𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭. 𝐈𝐭 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐰𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐩𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐬.”
People resist new technology, new ideas. As Dostoevsky opens Crime & Punishment with: "Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most." I think fear points the way toward progress. Here's an ad from 1915 (via @PessimistsArc) suggesting a horse outperforms a car.
Proof that real analysis is useful for economics and finance: "The gradual emergence of real analysis in the eighteenth century and its victory over the monetary analysis of the early mercantilists is nowhere better expressed than in the development of the theory of interest." Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect
Haha precisely self-referential about bs, throwing around terminology he does not understand.m
Game theory is a yuuuge scam, a field for bullshitters to write performative papers & cite one another. It doesn't generalize from "small world" models to "large world".
@stephen_wolfram showed (#RWRI lecture) that when one uses automata "dominant strategies" s.a. tit-for-tat become inferior.
Social Finance, David Hirshleifer retweeted
Since 1830, technology has cut the American workweek from 69 hours to 38 while raising real income per person roughly 20-fold.
Properly managed, A.I. can do the same.
My @nytopinion Chart: nytimes.com/2026/10/02/opini…
It is astonishing that AI can autonomously create a song and video this good. Music, lyrics, graphics, all clever and exactly on point.
People asked for me to upload the Bitter Lesson video from this piece to YouTube, so here you are: youtu.be/OAwat51S_Sk
Social Finance, David Hirshleifer retweeted
After WWI, it was predicted that humanity would be extinguished by cropdusters blanketing cities with poison gas. After WWII, nuclear holocaust, for sure. After 9/11, terrorists with WMD, including suitcase and shipping container nukes. After the first nanotech, engulfment by "gray goo." The fact that these (and many other) end times prophesies failed does not mean that the new AI doom prophesy will fail - maybe this time it's different - but they should serve as a reminder of the cognitive bias of casually slipping from risk to existential risk, and to compensate accordingly, just as with other cognitive biases if one is a rationalist. John Mueller adds historical perspective here: Artificial Intelligence and the persistent survival of cosmic alarmism muellerbbbb.substack.com/p/a…
