Assistant Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. I like game theory. 🇭🇺 🇩🇪 🇳🇱 🇫🇷 🇪🇦 🇪🇺
Barcelona, Spain
Joined July 2019
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Job market paper is up! #econtwitter #jobmarket
What our friends do matters for many of our economic decisions. But what factors determine who our friends are, how many there are, and what the broader network looks like? Enter game theory, specifically, network formation games.
Péter Bayer 🇺🇦 retweeted
An oldie but a goodie. In 1968 a bunch of entitled hippy bastards sent a letter detailing their specious demands to the Warden and Fellows of Wadham College, Oxford. This was their letter of reply, which speaks to how far the academy has since fallen.
Péter Bayer 🇺🇦 retweeted
“Dear Italian students, who today take to the streets carrying flags with the hammer and sickle and wearing T-shirts emblazoned with ‘CCCP’,” began an open letter in Italian by Lithuanian expat Neringa Budryt.
“I would like to ask you a question: do you truly know what the symbols you carry represent? And do you know what would have happened to many of you had you openly demonstrated in countries living under the oppression of communist regimes?
Let me tell you something. It is easy to display a red flag when, for you, communism is merely an abstract idea of equality, social justice, and rebellion against the system. It is easy to wear a T-shirt with "CCCP" on it when you have never experienced the reality of a communist regime.
We come from that part of Europe where communism was not a T-shirt, a symbol of rebellion, or a romanticized notion of equality. It was the system in which we lived—a system we never chose.
We know the history of Soviet repression, Stalinist purges, the Gulags, and mass deportations. Above all, we know the word "Siberia"—a place to which thousands of innocent people were forcibly deported, simply for thinking differently.
In Siberia—amidst freezing cold, starvation, and forced labor—many lost their lives; those who survived carried the scars of that experience forever. Entire families were torn apart, and generations were denied the chance to live freely in their own homeland.
In the countries of the Soviet bloc, censorship, political police, surveillance, and the suppression of dissent drastically curtailed individual freedoms.
We grew up in a system where state control permeated even our daily lives. At school, we were required to wear the red necktie of the "Pioneers." We were monitored; they tracked where we went and even whether we attended church. Even faith—a choice that should belong to an individual’s own conscience—could become a cause for suspicion.
We used to celebrate Christmas with our windows blacked out, to ensure no one would see us and report us. Because it was forbidden—just like so many other things: jeans, rock music, and all the symbols of a Western lifestyle. My mother returned from a Soviet labor camp. And do you know what happened to her? She was barred from continuing her education because she had been labeled an enemy of communism.
Under a communist regime, you could not protest. You risked arrest, imprisonment, interrogation, persecution—and, in certain historical contexts, even death. In the Soviet Union and other communist regimes, political dissent could cost you your freedom and your life.
Demonstrations independent of the authorities were not a guaranteed right; they were often suppressed by force.
That is why it strikes me to see young Italians proudly displaying the hammer and sickle—symbols associated with regimes that persecuted and imprisoned millions of people.
Today, you are free to take to the streets, shout against the government, criticize institutions, and wave your flags precisely because you live in a democracy that grants you these freedoms. Under an authoritarian regime of that kind, protesting against those in power could have landed you in prison.
This is not about denying the existence of social injustices, inequalities, or the right to fight for a better world. You are free to take to the streets to demand a more just society—but you should not idealize a system that denied so many people the very things you are free to exercise today: the right to choose, to believe, to speak, and to dissent. Before wearing a T-shirt with "CCCP" on it, listen to those who experienced that world. Talk to the deportees and their descendants; read the accounts of those who endured the gulags and forced exile to Siberia. Learn what it meant to be stripped of your freedom, your home, your loved ones—and even any prospect of a normal life—simply because of your background or your beliefs.
Before waving the hammer and sickle, please, study history thoroughly.”
Péter Bayer 🇺🇦 retweeted
Only if somebody pays you for doing that and it has value added. Where it might happen is with government spending because it's assumed there it is value added. The other place where it used to happen was in flawed Soviet-style statistics that looked at production not value added
Péter Bayer 🇺🇦 retweeted
economistas:
u′(Cₜ) = β(1 + r)·𝔼ₜ[u′(Cₜ₊₁)] ⟹ 𝔼ₜ[Cₜ₊₁] = Cₜ ⟹ Cₜ₊₁ = Cₜ + εₜ₊₁, con εₜ₊₁ = (r⁄(1 + r)) · ∑ⱼ₌₀^∞ (1 + r)⁻ʲ · (𝔼ₜ₊₁ − 𝔼ₜ)[Yₜ₊₁₊ⱼ]
sociólogos: buah, es que soy yo literal
Péter Bayer 🇺🇦 retweeted
The no 1 goal of Russian interference in our democracies is that it triggers a toxic fight about Russian interference in our democracies.
Péter Bayer 🇺🇦 retweeted
If confirmed, this is telling: Russian data centres get hit, and online activity around AfD suddenly plummets. 📉
So much talk about German patriotism… then the connection from Russia goes down. 🤔🇷🇺
Péter Bayer 🇺🇦 retweeted
Bon dia. El servei de trens funciona segons l'horari previst a totes les línies.
ℹ️ Trobareu els horaris al cercador del web fgc.cat o de l'#AppFGC. #ServeiFGC #FGC
Péter Bayer 🇺🇦 retweeted
I love how the guy writing a preprint to complain about too many people writing preprints wrote 53 papers in the last four years.
arxiv.org/abs/2609.35787
Péter Bayer 🇺🇦 retweeted
I don't expect Jean-Luc Melenchon will be commenting on the four consecutive days of wave after wave of bombs raining down on the Ukrainian capital like he does every time Ukraine bombs a Moscow oil refinery.
Hospitals, schools, universities. Russia's military targets in Kyiv.
Péter Bayer 🇺🇦 retweeted
Melenchon is a far-left lunatic with economic policy somewhere between suicidal and terroristic, pro-russian anti-european foreihn policy and immigration stances that literally take schizo far-right consiparcy theories and adopt them as policies.
He is just as bad as Le Pen.
Péter Bayer 🇺🇦 retweeted
A vote for Le Pen is a vote for Putin.
A vote for Melenchon is a vote for Putin.
🔴 EN DIRECT
Marine Le Pen redit que la France ne peut "plus aider financièrement l'Ukraine"
l.bfmtv.com/WkAA
Péter Bayer 🇺🇦 retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
Péter Bayer 🇺🇦 retweeted
Deleting my 400 word footnote that has nothing to do with my argument and makes sense to no one but me
Péter Bayer 🇺🇦 retweeted
Medicine is even worse than economics. Only real doctors are allowed to treat patients. Alternative approaches, like prescribing leeches because “you can never run out of blood because you can always make more” just get excluded from the practice of medicine.
