Shengwu Li @ShengwuLi Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

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@BGvhcPuVwxVHJ0w

Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

7 months

While a PhD student at Stanford, I had to attend an interview to check whether I could teach in English. This was because my BA was from a foreign university; the University of Oxford.

Connor Ewing

@ConnorMEwing

7 months

Today I get to pay $300 to take a 3-hour English test in order to be eligible to stay in the country where I am employed to teach English language courses at an English language institution, a prerequisite for which was the PhD I earned at an English language university.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

8 months

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 year

Daron Acemoglu already has a social media account for economics posting. It’s called Econometrica.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

Many families have vindictive relatives. My relatives just happen to control a small authoritarian government. 🇸🇬 🧵

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

7 months

Tenured. Now that it's no longer tempting fate, let me say this: Be kind to yourself. It's easy on the tenure track to work to the point of negative marginal return. Focused work is hard. If you can work on a proof for four real hours in a day, that is a good day.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

Dr Ellie Murray, ScD

@EpiEllie

3 years

Look, I’m no economist but aren’t questions like “how do we incentivize companies to produce enough rapid tests to meet demand?” the sort of thing y’all are supposed to be helping with?

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

It took me 30 seconds to fact-check this claim in the Chomsky op-ed.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

It has been 5 years since I left home, because of a political prosecution by the Singapore government. Friends often ask me if it's safe to return.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

In the past, I've had students call my problem sets "emotionally trying". (These are for 2nd-year PhD game theory.) This year I'm going to explain myself and set clearer expectations.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker…

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

Well, this went rapidly from “way outside economists’ expertise” to nuclear game theory plus macroeconomic forecasting. Stand back political scientists, this is officially our lane.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

4 years

“But I don’t see what auction theory has to do with my life!”, they tweet, over airwaves allocated by auction, while a swarm of advertising algorithms bid for their eyeballs. 🤔

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

Preparing to talk to students about research advice / hidden curriculum. Here are guesstimated base rates for converting ideas to papers.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

Giving good talks is a core skill for academics. It's learnable! Here's how I approach mine.

Theory_Presentation_Advice.pdf

drive.google.com

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

10 thinkers who changed how I see the world: 1. Newton (invented calculus). 10. Leibniz (invented binary).

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

As someone who did a bit of college debate, I always knew we were weird. But college students should be able to voice ordinary political disagreement without fearing social sanctions. And I’m surprised by academics who don’t regard this norm as worth defending.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

Phew. GPT4 still can't solve PhD-level mechanism design problem sets. As we all know, this is the ineffable quality that separates humans from machines.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

Thoughts on learning to "fail fast" in research. When you have a new idea, and the project is worthwhile only if P, then you need to check P first, not last. Examples: 1. You can only establish causality with a certain kind of data. 🧵

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

8 months

Ok here are my go-to papers for making small talk with smart non-econs. (Yes, I am exactly as uncool as maintaining this list would imply.)

Sam Power

@sp_monte_carlo

8 months

what paper (not your own, maybe not even in your own area) can you not stop telling people about?

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

Today a polymath public intellectual wandered into my domain of expertise (game theory), and I discovered they were just smoke and mirrors. Ah, well.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

4 years

There’s an econ paper by a Harvard law professor that uses game theory to deny that the Japanese military held sex slaves during WW2. Yes, it literally makes that claim. #EconTwitter

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

10 months

Why unrealistic theories? Most econ students go through a phase of thinking that more 'realistic' theories are automatically better. But here are some good reasons for unrealism.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 year

Having angered the humanities-econs, let me now anger their complement. I think that every PhD student should learn about the history of economic thought. Either by reading primary texts or by reading the work of relevant historians.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 year

Bold new theories of inflation, ignored by the academic mainstream: #1 . Inflation is caused by the Kierkegaardian sin of despair, the “sickness unto death” at the heart of the human condition.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

4 years

A lightboard-style setup without the lightboard. All you need is an ipad, a stylus, and OBS. Thanks @rithvikra0 for the idea! #EconTwitter

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

Reminder that research potential is extremely hard to measure at the PhD admissions stage, and many great researchers come from outside ‘top’ departments.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

10 months

Imagine how much more he would publish if he wasn’t named Acemoglu.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

Akerlof received the best rejection letters for the market for lemons.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

I've put together presentation advice for econ theory talks. It's coming that time of year when many young theorists rapidly learn to present papers, so I thought this might be useful.

Theory_Presentation_Advice.pdf

drive.google.com

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

I didn’t take real analysis as an undergrad. (Oxford PPE students can’t take math courses.) And the Harvard econ PhD rejected me twice. I took real analysis as a 2nd year grad student at Stanford. It worked out fine.

PhDio

@PhDio_fr

3 years

Normalize taking undergrad math classes in grad school when you didn't have the opportunity to take them in undergrad

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 year

Wait, so is Gino’s defense that she manages her RAs so poorly that multiple teams committed fraud without her noticing, and she doesn’t even remember their names?

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

6 months

Kahneman and Tversky proposed a theory of choice that was psychologically plausible and mathematically precise. They showed that a better kind of theory was possible. Rest in peace, Danny Kahneman.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

I think economists should read Smith, Marx, and Keynes… …and Mill and Kant and Aristotle and Chaucer and Dostoyevsky. And they should do this, not because they are economists, but because they are human beings. Hence, none appear on my syllabuses.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

I now reside in Cambridge, MA, and have a green card. It's gutting to be unable to return home, and to watch from afar as Singapore slides steadily further into authoritarianism. I'm grateful for the support and sympathy from my friends and my colleagues at @Harvard .

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 year

I don’t care if it’s real analysis in particular. But one has to be deeply incurious not to take a proof-based math course before starting an econ PhD.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 year

Suggest rebranding “all errors remain are own” with “all errors are the fault of an anonymous RA, to whom I give no credit and whose name I cannot recall”.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

4 years

An open offer for the fall semester: If you’re teaching a class for PhD students and one of my papers is on your syllabus, I would be happy to give a guest lecture. Get in touch!

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 year

What horrible luck, that a famous dishonesty researcher would have four separate RAs that falsified data. Really, what are the odds? 𝜖^4?

Ryan Briggs

@ryancbriggs

1 year

“The fraud isn’t my fault because my grad students, who weren’t coauthors, did literally all of the work” is quite a take.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

9 months

True Cambridge MA elitism is not about arguing whether Extension School is “really Harvard”. It’s about arguing about whether the Media Lab is really MIT.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

Econ perspective: People make choices to satisfy their preferences. Psych perspective: People adapt their preferences to justify their choices. Here's a theory that combines them. (A new working paper joint with Erik Eyster and Sarah Ridout.) 🧵

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

7 months

@jasndoc I thought it was very on-brand for American exceptionalism.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 year

I donated $1,000 to support @DataColada ’s defense against Gino’s ridiculous lawsuit. Believers in open science must stand together. Frankly, @HarvardHBS should step up and cover their costs. Leif, Joe, and Uri have done them an immeasurable service.

simine vazire

@siminevazire

1 year

Be a part of the change you wish to see in the world: Donate to help support the legal expenses of Data Colada. They're being sued by Prof Gino after posting careful, meticulous blog posts raising concerns about data integrity in 4 papers. Donate here:

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

6 months

As a behavioral economist, I'm especially irked by the "neoclassical econ has false assumptions" crowd. Even though I (obviously) think that the classical model has important limitations. I feel about them how a Roman reformer would have felt about the vandals.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

10 months

This JEP paper on game theory makes explicit a lot of what (I hope) econ grad students implicitly learn. I’m going to start assigning it as reading.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

If it’s hard for grad students to transition from coursework to idea generation, what can we do about it? One idea: faculty could hand students a starter project. That is, a well-formed open question that can likely be answered via standard methods.🧵

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

5 months

When so many ask, “How is this economics?”, it’s nice when the QJE answers, “yes this is economics.” Economics, like early hominids, thrives by aggressively expanding its territory.

QJE

@QJEHarvard

5 months

Recently accepted by #QJE , “The Ant and the Grasshopper: Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture,” by Andrea Matranga ( @andreamatranga ):

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

Nice one, @ZachWeiner . Actually, it's standard advice for PhD students that one should not worry about getting perfect grades, because it's better to spend time on research.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

Let me offer a defense of complex models for everyday economic situations. Of course workers aren't literally taking the integral. They're behaving based on a mixture of heuristics, common sense, and folk wisdom. 🧵

Khoa Vu

@KhoaVuUmn

3 years

Economist: Workers solve this complex dynamic programming problem with a Lebesgue integral to obtain the reservation wage. Also economist:

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

5 months

The NYPD thinks that the OUP Very Short Introductions are how-to books. In that spirit, here are some reading recommendations, in alphabetical order:

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

I wasn't expecting a webcomic that would cut this deep. Bravo, @ZachWeiner .

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

Economics cover letters, in comic form. @ZachWeiner

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

The list of Basic Presentation Habits That Make Me Judge You. Thanks @jmwooldridge and @KhoaVuUmn for getting the ball rolling! 🧵 1/219

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

4 years

How can you know anything about ornithology, given that you are not a bird?

Balaji

@balajis

4 years

One of the more fascinating phenomena is people who think they understand economics that have never built a two-sided marketplace, coded a financial instrument, issued a digital currency, started a company, managed a cap table, met a payroll, or created a single job.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

6 months

Hot take: The predoc system exists because of modern applied micro. Research via ‘labs’ has increased the amount of delegatable busywork. In the hard sciences this work is done by PhD students. But because econ PhDs are on a pure mentorship model, this leads to predocs.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 year

The odd hedonic thing about academia: When you get an R&R, you don't celebrate, because you don't want to jinx it. And when a paper is accepted, you don't celebrate, because most uncertainty resolved at the R&R stage. Don't do this! Celebrate every milestone. 🍾

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

6 months

No.

Oliver Scott Curry

@Oliver_S_Curry

6 months

Game theory provides a complete replacement for traditional moral philosophy because it a) provides a rigorous theory of what you ought to do, and b) cleanly distinguishes between moral (cooperative) and immoral (uncooperative) ways of behaving.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

7 months

@joshgans It turns out that the interview takes 30 seconds if you have the accent.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

My brilliant friend Mohammad @akbarpour_ just got voted tenure at Stanford GSB. On the job market, when interviewers asked about his research agenda, Mohammad would reply, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

10 months

Joe Biden

@JoeBiden

10 months

Let me be clear to any corporation that hasn’t brought their prices back down even as inflation has come down: It’s time to stop the price gouging. Give American consumers a break.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

Plot hole in War of the Worlds: What civilization develops space travel and terrifying sci-fi weapons, but neglects basic defences against respiratory coronaviruses?

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

Game theory has all these nice epistemic tripwires that catch charlatans. (Definition of a dominant strategy, of a zero-sum game, the folk theorem, etc etc)

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

4 years

Siri what’s an exogenous shock to trade flows?

Tracy Alloway

@tracyalloway

4 years

The Suez Canal, one of the busiest waterways in the world, has been blocked by a giant container ship that got stuck. You can see other ships piling up behind it. by @roberttuttle & @JavierBlas

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

Classical physics is a hell of a drug. It has no theory of particles, no account of cosmic inflation, and its models all presume the existence of “cosmic spheres” made of earth, air, fire, water, and an “æther” that perfectly resists all motion.

Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK

@doctorow

3 years

Neoclassical economics is a hell of a drug. It has no theory of prices, no account of inflation, and its models all presume the existence of a perfectly rational "homo economicus" who is a "utility maximizer" with perfect information. 1/

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

How to tell when a reporter doesn’t know anything about economics publications.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

For anyone who wonders today if anything they do matters, here’s a paragraph by CS Lewis that helps me. It’s part of a sermon at Oxford in 1939, titled “Learning in Wartime”.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

4 years

Conjecture: One reason for the willingness of public health officials to tell noble lies is a technocratic belief that laypeople are not able to deal with trade-offs and uncertainty.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

4 years

A lesson from auction theory: If you have the most extreme signal about the value of the prize, then everyone else knows something that you don’t. This suggests that you should adjust accordingly.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 year

It's about the system. Research fraud thrives when a field rewards single 'surprising' findings and there are low incentives for replication. The problem is not enough formal theory.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 year

New identification strategy just dropped. Just compute sample hazard rates, and then...

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

10 months

Congratulations to Stanford GSB, that just voted to make Mohammad @akbarpour_ a full professor! Attached is a photo of a class project we wrote a decade ago, and a stylized model of Mohammad that abstracts away from facial hair.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

🥳 Conditionally accepted at Econometrica: Algorithmic Mechanism Design with Investment. (w Mohammad Akbarpour, @skominers , Kevin Li, and Paul Milgrom.) VCG mechanisms aren't always feasible—many real-world allocation problems are NP-hard, so we can't compute optimal allocations.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

A great morning for proving something.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

6 months

Shadow prices.

Mike Simonsen 🐉

@mikesimonsen

6 months

This is incredible. From @Jamie_Lane where AirBnBs are fully booked next week.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

Caveat: Academic prizes don’t make for good research incentives. Nonetheless, I’m delighted to be in this year’s cohort of Sloan Fellows, with @instrumenthull @alexoimas @TobiasSalz (and others not on twitter).

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

Standardized tests do not measure understanding directly. They measure behavior that is a signal of understanding; and is costly/hard for humans to imitate without it. ChatGPT is changing the cost function.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

We did it. We found the other plane.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 year

Wow. This article is how you do journalism on scientific misconduct.

They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie?

Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino became famous for their research into why we bend the truth. Now they’ve both been accused of fabricating data.

www.newyorker.com

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

This. Please. Instead of predocs, let's have replication police.

Rayhan Momin

@momin_rayhan

2 years

Surprised journals don't hire teams of RAs to replicate papers before acceptance. It would honestly be remarkable training for grad school.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

The court case is technically over. However, I assess that there's a substantial risk that my uncle, the Prime Minister, would find an excuse to imprison me were I to return to Singapore. He likes to relitigate old disputes.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

10 months

My advice for coauthorships is to start your PhD the same year, do the RESTUD tour together, and get voted to full prof in same week.

Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

10 months

Congratulations to Stanford GSB, that just voted to make Mohammad @akbarpour_ a full professor! Attached is a photo of a class project we wrote a decade ago, and a stylized model of Mohammad that abstracts away from facial hair.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

4 years

In the face of unprecedented logistical challenges during WWII, mathematicians intervened to help the allied war effort. This was the birth of the field of operations research. I’m glad that George Dantzig, Freeman Dyson, and Ken Arrow did not stay in ‘their lanes’.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 year

Rest in peace Daniel Ellsberg. May we all have such moral courage when destiny comes knocking. Ellsberg’s story gave me hope in dark times. In 2017, I spoke truth to the authoritarian government in Singapore and lost a home.

Daniel Ellsberg, Who Leaked the Pentagon Papers, Is Dead at 92 (Published 2023)

Deeply disturbed by the accounting of American deceit in Vietnam, he approached The New York Times. The disclosures that followed rocked the nation.

www.nytimes.com

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

11 months

One of the beautiful things about doing theory is how much of the work can be done on a walk outside.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

Elizabeth Warren must be pleased to hear that oil companies have become less greedy.

Bloomberg Markets

@markets

3 years

Oil plunges below $70 a barrel as new Covid variant roils markets

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 month

Every grad student eventually learns what their advisor can (and can't) do. And also the particular tricks in 'managing up' for that person. I'm writing a user's guide, for students who want to ask me for advice. Has anyone else tried doing the same?

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

10 days

How to email your professor: 1. Find your prof’s email address and prior belief. 2. Compute your utility as a function of prof’s posterior belief. 3. Concavify. 4. Profit.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 months

It's a good thing that economists don't spend much time arguing about what past economists 'really' meant. Theories should be evaluated against evidence. They don't get special status by venerable ancestry.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

It’s the season to post job-market papers. 1. JMPs are working papers. As with all working papers, they should be open to public discussion and critique. 2. There’s every reason to be civil and generous when discussing JMPs, especially since the author is stressed and busy.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

When a hostile authoritarian government says they want to 'question' you, it is clear what that means. For the prime minister of Singapore, it's 'rule of law' for thee but not for me.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

It’s the season when the academic commentariat decides that true academic achievement is only marked by blood money from a Swedish arms dealer, rather than funds from the Swedish central bank.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

6 months

Calculus is one of humanity's most important discoveries. It's so good we invented it twice. Modern AIs run on a glorified algorithm for chain rule.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 year

Let me explain this claim, as if to an undergrad, an aspiring economist who has not yet taken a math course with real proofs. 🧵

Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

1 year

I don’t care if it’s real analysis in particular. But one has to be deeply incurious not to take a proof-based math course before starting an econ PhD.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

4 years

Defining notation for a theory paper is halfway between making up a language and choosing an opening in chess. Small early choices affect what moves are available later.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

7 months

Apparently, someone falsely put my name to an open letter from Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (HFSJP). This is the same group that recently circulated an antisemitic cartoon. 1. I have not signed that letter. 2. Today I learned that HFSJP exists.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

3 years

It seems unfair that philosophers tell economists that we’re paid too much. Do we go around telling philosophers that their grounds’ grounds are not grounded?

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

2 years

My uncle has a habit of suing his critics in Singapore courts. Fortunately, the SPEECH act of 2010 makes foreign libel judgments unenforceable in the USA, unless the foreign jurisdiction has at least as much free speech protection as that guaranteed by the 1st Amendment.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

7 months

A lot of this job is being at peace with uncertainty. It's about finding a process that works for you, and recognizing that insight arrives stochastically, in a way you can't fully control.

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Shengwu Li

@ShengwuLi

10 months

Dall-E draws an economist obsessed with eigenvalues. @ben_golub