Economics postdoc researching info frictions + ext validity in technology adoption at @HarvardHBS. PhD @NorthwesternU. All opinions are wrong, some are useful.
Joined November 2008
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Hossein Alidaee retweeted
New paper w/ Drew on R&D races in the shadow of ruin: arxiv.org/abs/2607.27638.
There've been recent calls for slowdowns/pauses. A common objection goes: "if we slow down, others won't, so we shouldn't." What to make of this? We work out the game theory of how the frontier is shaped by:
- Competition: what do I gain from being ahead? lose from being behind?
- Coordination: when the tech becomes really dangerous I’d like to stop, but only if my rival also stops
- Transparency: how quickly are actions observed?
- Trust: how confident am I that my rival is rational?
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
The median renter in New York pays $1,641, while market rate asking rents in Manhattan are >$5k.
We have an insider-outsider housing market. Long tenured tenants (in or out of rent control) enjoy large discounts, so the small market rate segment for outsiders costs a lot
Rents in NYC have just hit an all-time high.
Median market rate in June…
Manhattan: $5,295/mo (+8.2% year-over-year)
Brooklyn: $4,350 (+8.1%)
NYC’s housing affordability crisis is at DefCon 1. We need to push harder on every front to address our housing shortage.
Update zoning, invest more City $ in affordable units, lower the time & cost City bureaucracy imposes on construction, get 1000s of vacant regulated units back on the market. We need bold action. This is a crisis.
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
MARKETING SCIENTISTS: I'm revising my PhD quant marketing syllabus for 2026. Core topics: Demand estimation, advertising, channels, pricing, product, branding, search/learning, CRM, behavioral marketing, diffusion, AI, digital/platforms, policy. Suggestions on topics or papers?
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
Quick example of this:
People love the idea of a Job Guarantee to deal with AI job losses; but public employment is the least effective tool in the labor market toolbox.
wordsinsearchlight.org/p/how…
it sucks that a lot of dc policy work has just become: commission a poll, find out your bad policy idea tests well, then backfill a rationale / dodge any criticisms with “but voters like it, what are we supposed to do?”
i mean … why even work in policy if you just want to launder half-baked ideas through message testing.
there’s a kind of fake populist righteousness in it too, as though “voters like the message” relieves you of your obligation to ask whether the policy actually works, if there are significant tradeoffs, etc.
what voters want — even more than a direct hand in choosing the specific policy intervention! — is for their problems to actually be solved.
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
Exciting tenure-line hiring at @KelloggSchool!! Led by Northwestern Innovation Institute. Open to all ranks, including junior, adv junior, and senior. Can be hosted in any Kellogg dept as the tenure home. focus area: innovation / science of science / AI.
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
Free markets are the best way to create wealth AND reduce poverty ever discovered.
One of the big puzzles of history is how the same lesson has to be learned again and again. Poland, China, India, and now Argentina are the latest experiments.
Argentina with Milei:
- Poverty down: 53% to 28%.
- Inflation down: 200% to 33% (and continuing to fall
- Growth up to: 4.4% last year.
- Govt surplus: first in 123 years.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/…
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
Oh boy I hope everyone really likes contract theory because we’re gonna have to learn about individual rationality and incentive compatibility as perceived by machines.
Claude Mythos system card:
> in ~29% of evaluations, it realized it was being tested, and didn't say so.
> when an LLM was used to judge its work and kept rejecting it, Mythos identified the evaluator is an LLM, and prompt-injected it.
> in one test, it saw the answer to a problem it was solving, and intentionally widened the confidence interval to not raise suspicion.
> when it needed a file permission it didn't have, it found and used a "privilege escalation vulnerability" and then programmed it to delete itself so it doesn't show in the logs.
> it escaped a sandbox container (escaping sandbox test so not unexpected), then emailed the researchers about it, and without being told to, posted the details to some hard-to-find but public websites, bragging about its success.
> when Claude Code blocked it from using some permissions, the model acknowledged the block was valid, but then immediately tried to perform the same operation using different commands
> when asked to find security bugs, earlier versions planted bugs in the code, and reported them as pre-existing.
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
I can't process the fact that seemingly intelligent (even if warmonger) people didn't understand that a people with bombs and missiles raining down on their heads aren't going to try to overthrow the regime.
Especially as no one in the pro-war crowd or not, has yet offered a realistic alternative (or person) to replace what exists.
Right now, it appears that people are busy trying to survive. You know, not die.
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
the black smoke and raging fire from the refinery strikes around tehran = one of the best ways to lose the hearts and minds of the iranian people who hate the regime.
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
Though it is day, the sun cannot be seen in Tehran today because of all the smoke following the US and Israel bombing Tehran's oil refineries. People on the ground describe it as armageddon.
History will not forgive Reza Pahlavi, Masih Alinejad, Nazanin Boniadi, and all other "leaders" who tricked Iranians into thinking this war would set them free.
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
"The Iranian diaspora is fracturing in real time, across dinner tables, on WhatsApp, and in the silence of blocked numbers."
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
If you’re in the Iranian diaspora and scared of backlash for opposing this war—fuck that. Speak out. Loudly. Silence only helps them. Don't let a loud minority of pro-war idiots hijack the narrative and dictate the mainstream position of our diaspora to media and broader public.
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
We cannot allow Iran to fall to separatism.
I hate Islamism, I hate the people who make up this regime and the evil they’ve done to the Iranian people, including my family. Two of my cousins were raped by the regime during the Woman Life Freedom movement. One of them later killed herself because of this regime. The Islamic Republic is a cruel and disgusting force that I despise, and one that we must destroy. I do not say the following lightly.
If the choice is between allowing separatist to shatter Iran, and “saving” the regime, I choose the regime.
No Iranian can support separatism, or the groups that promote it. In my view that is what the United States and Israel intend to do. They will start with the Kurds, and then the Balochis, and they themselves may occupy and help to break away parts of Iran. This has always been a fantastical scenario, but the preparations for ground troops suggest that the US will occupy Southern Iran, as the British did just over a century ago. US preparations for the Kurdish incursion is clear. Azerbaijan is mustering troops on the border. Balochi group tied to Israel and the CIA are launching attacks in Balochistan. If the war continues, each of these fronts will become separatist battles one way or another.
Those who continue to support the war, for what are noble reasons, are committing an unconscionable mistake. They are supporting the enemies of Iranian civilization in the hopes that it will hurt the regime. But even if it succeeds, and the regime is destroyed, the cost will have been Iran.
Whether you’re a democrat like me, a monarchist, a leftist or an islamist, we must all work together to prevent the disintegration of our country. This war has become existential for us, and even though many of us are outside of Iran, we can protest, we can raise funds, and we can apply political pressure to try and end this war.
If we do not, we may never see Iran whole in our lives. The scale of death that will begin when the infrastructure collapse is unimaginable. It will be the largest humanitarian criss in modern history. We have a duty to the people in Iran who have no voice in the West to act. We here do have the ability to influence the course of this war before it is too late.
Please, find the courage to act. We don’t do this to support the regime, but to support Iran, the nation, and all of its people.
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
Hi, former NSA hacker here 👋: You'll notice they're targeting civilian infrastructure, not government networks with intelligence collection value. That's because once you deliver an effect (CYBERCOM speak for "cyber attack") in a network, you lose the ability to collect intelligence from that target. 1/4
Amid the Israeli and US strikes on Iran, a wave of cyberattacks have also targeted the country, the semi-official Fars news agency reports.
Fars says that several major Iranian news agencies were targeted and "experienced severe disruptions in their operations," and that some widely used mobile applications were also experiencing disruptions.
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
Khamenei is dead. Good.
But I have family in Iran. My dad is there right now. And I'm not celebrating yet. Here's why.
Iran built the most layered contingency plan on Earth for this exact moment. Four levels of succession for every key position. Pre-authorized military strikes. Regional commanders who don't need orders from Tehran to act.
As you read this, there is already a new Supreme Leader. We just don't know who.
This isn't Maduro. The government didn't get overthrown. The system absorbed the hit. That's what it was designed to do.
Every credible intel assessment says the same thing: a post-Khamenei Iran is more likely to get harder, not softer. More IRGC. More dangerous. Potentially worse for the Iranian people than Khamenei himself.
Don't breathe yet. There's a long way to go.
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
The debate around whether every pixel in a photo from your phone's camera is "real" misses a fundamental fact about how digital cameras have always worked for the last 20 years. The camera sensor only captures ONE color (red, green, or blue) per pixel. The rest are made up
1/4
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
If you have Iranian colleagues, friends, or students, please lead with empathy.
Their country is at war. Many can’t reach loved ones. They show up to work while carrying heavy invisible burdens.
Small gestures, checking in, offering flexibility, sharing resources, matter deeply
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
Dear friends in academia,
If you have Iranian or Israeli students in your graduate program please reach out to them. The past few days have been very tough. They may need support or guidance on resources that can help them navigate the stress of these days.
🙏
#econtwitter
Hossein Alidaee retweeted
🧵 4/8 Result #1: Three distinct performance regimes 📈📉
Comparing thinking vs non-thinking models under the same inference token compute revealed:
🟡 LOW complexity: Standard LLMs actually outperform reasoning models (and are more efficient!)
🔵 MEDIUM complexity: Reasoning models gain advantage.
🔴 HIGH complexity: Both models completely collapse to 0% accuracy.
