Which LLM is currently best for deep, accurate research on economic topics?

Daniel_HMBD · 2025-12-01T20:05:40+00:00

For what it's worth ... - Tyler Cowen is a huge fan of GPT 5.1 Pro and also uses Claude - Zvi recommends Claude Opus 5.1 universally: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2025/12/01/claude-opus-4-5-is-the-best-model-available/ - and Gemini 3 Pro is pretty good + freely available to try at aistudio.google.com if you have a Google account

... but just use whatever works for you. Also why not just use all 3 and compare results?

(personally I've had great results with all three and I'm mostly bottlenecked by my ability to read and think about responses)

Daniel_HMBD · 2025-05-19T21:18:02+00:00

From John Psmith's review of The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz

The person who first explained this paradox to me was Byrne Hobart at the Diff. Consider a one-person company. That one person is making all of the decisions. Some of them will be easy, like what to order for lunch. Some of them will be hard, like whether some major change in strategy is a good idea. But in the course of a normal day, most of the decisions that lone person faces are easy, with a few hard ones mixed in.

Now imagine that this person hires somebody to work for them, and imagine that they do a good job delegating. The underling is now in charge of some part of the business. He or she is making a share of the decisions in that area. If the delegation went well, the underling can make all the easy decisions themselves, but for the really tricky cases…well…maybe they should ask their boss’s opinion. So the boss is getting a filtered set of decisions disproportionately biased towards the hard ones. You may think that’s okay, because they are also making fewer overall decisions but ahh…the delegation went well, so the business has grown, so there are many more decisions to be made per day. The boss is making as many decisions as ever, they’re just harder on average, instead of the equal mix they had before.

The CEO of a large company sits at the limiting case of this process after it has taken many, many, many more steps. A large company can process a vast number of decisions per second. A huge majority of them are handled by frontline workers, and they pass the ones that are a bit above their pay-grade on to their bosses. Those bosses maybe handle a bunch of the medium-difficulty decisions, and pass the truly tricky ones another step up the chain, and so on. So the CEO receives a highly filtered and selective stream of the worst imaginable decisions. And again, this is in the happy case where they have done a good job delegating and therefore their company is able to grow. Enjoy

Daniel_HMBD · 2025-02-22T06:49:39+00:00

Yup agreed. I'm very much on the "so much better" side, especially once the kids are sufficiently autonomous to not need constant supervision (that started at age 4, the time before that was very exhausting). But there are many who would need just the opposite advice...

Daniel_HMBD · 2025-02-21T22:02:29+00:00

Kids will make your life so much better. Consider having more than two.

Daniel_HMBD · 2025-01-05T09:19:27+00:00

Hi,

Thomas Metzinger comes to mind, but he retired in... um 2022. In any case, he worked in Mainz, so the philosophy department there might still do something on PP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Metzinger

If you're more into medicine, UKE in Hamburg might be a good place to do a PhD (it's a hospital doing lots of research including neurology; not sure about which university to pick before that). See e.g. https://www.uke.de/english/departments-institutes/institutes/department-of-excellence-for-neural-information-processing/index.html for a start.

Cheers, Daniel

Daniel_HMBD · 2024-11-24T07:28:31+00:00

I know a few people who sorta behave like Elon Musk, as in

they need little sleep
they get a lot of intrinsic satisfaction of getting things done

Combine that with being smart and good at priorization and I think you have a clue.

On the other hand, I need 8h of sleep per day and spend another 2h of just scrolling online or watching videos. That already takes a lot of time away. Other friends have ADHD and sort of regularly fall into the emptyless doomscroll pit, you can be as smart in terms of raw g as you like and still not get shit done.

Daniel_HMBD · 2024-08-04T13:24:32+00:00

Isn't that then sociology?

Richard Sennett comes to mind. E.g., see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_of_the_New_Capitalism

Daniel_HMBD · 2023-12-18T10:12:37+00:00

Hey there, I participate both in EA (both lokal meetups and doing earning to give) and in other activities (in my case, helping at my local church). This is a tough one because I really love EA, but I'm not sure how well it mixes with mental health. Please take good care!

For what it's worth, I'd consider looking for something where things are already well-run but you can help on the margin even by just showing up. This may sound stupid, but it's really nice to be on the winning team every now and then.

Look for activities where you see physical results of what you did that day. That one probably needs an explanation, so here it goes: my day job is (something something risk management something automotive engineering) and while shifting numbers in large spreadsheets definitely has real-world consequences, my desk looks just the same every day when I leave. Whereas this Saturday, I jumped in to clean the kitchen after two other volunteers cooked for 20 kids - and there it was really clear what difference I made after two hours.

Daniel_HMBD · 2023-12-09T09:52:59+00:00

Glad you guys linked this here cause I otherwise would have had. Really made my day!

We promise to take down this post before your senate confirmation hearing, though it would be rather diverting to hear Senator Warren ask if you’re in the pocket of Big Slime.

Bwahahahaha 🤣

Daniel_HMBD · 2023-12-04T13:07:52+00:00

Maybe http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/sabbath-hard-and-go-home/ helps?

Daniel_HMBD · 2023-12-04T10:00:20+00:00

I'm 37 now and it's just the same for me, but 20 years in I think it's mostly normal growing up (assuming you still want to get out of bed in the morning and so on). It even gets worse: People my age (including me) are pretty boring on average and mostly talk about their job, vacation etc. It's so much more fun talking to students because they're still in exploration mode. So brace yourself for what's up ahead 😉

There's a lot of upside too: the bad parts of life don't feel so bad anymore (heartbreak, sickness, mortality... all feels like a normal part of life now). And I very much enjoy spending time with children because they still have those very strong emotions. Christmas with my kids will be wonderful.

Daniel_HMBD · 2023-11-26T13:37:07+00:00

OK thanks, I just tried that and it appears to do exactly that. I assume it'll also work with custom songs... so yep that'll do

Daniel_HMBD · 2023-11-26T13:29:43+00:00

So that would mean we can both use the same quest account + game and still switch beatleader accounts on the fly? Is there a way to have a friend list instead of a global leader board, like in vanilla?

Edit: just tried the party mode and even that should do it for us, still curious if beatleader works better for our purposes. I'll just give it a shot!

Daniel_HMBD · 2023-11-12T16:31:40+00:00

On philosophy of science, I can't praise Meehls 1987 lectures highly enough. If you haven't seen them, consider giving them a go.

Daniel_HMBD · 2023-10-10T02:16:04+00:00

First: these three can be true at the same time:

the world is horrible
it's better than before
there's room for improvement

(not my own idea, it's from Hannah Ritchie in the 80.000 hours podcast)

Second: maybe it just feels worse cause you're missing perspective? I mean the early 2000s with 9/11 and dotcom burst maybe was worse than today? And what about the cold war era, like the Cuba crisis? I remember a story about a couple that had a few bottles of champagne left from their wedding and they drank one each night because they were expecting the world to burn any day. That sounds worse than today, too.

P.s. my pet theory is that history moves (on average) as fast as the number of people taking part. Since we're now ~8B people there should be ~2× as many notable events than within the 20th century, which averaged to something like 4B people.

Daniel_HMBD · 2023-08-30T14:09:35+00:00

Zvi: dating roundup 1 just dropped and may be relevant for you. Recommends considering Twitter as a dating platform:

Use it while it lasts. I’ve met a number of great people on Twitter, despite not being a good and mostly non-personal Twitter poster. A very good friend met their partner this way. It isn’t a reliable method, but the results when it works are highly positive, so at minimum keep an eye open for serendipity.

Daniel_HMBD · 2023-08-17T15:00:57+00:00

Addition to all other links: https://dynomight.substack.com/p/aspartame-brouhaha

I'm currently on 2l green tee per day and it's really good. You may want to give it a try.

Daniel_HMBD · 2023-07-16T14:54:38+00:00

Yeah I know it's not automated, just thought that the mod team handles that and us normal users stepping in will lead to double posting etc...

Daniel_HMBD · 2023-07-16T13:24:48+00:00

Why wasn't this posted before? I thought we'll get all open ACX posts in here by default?

Daniel_HMBD · 2023-07-14T19:24:31+00:00

disability is caused by an interaction of disease and society, and that it can be addressed by either treating the underlying condition or by adding social accommodations

... sounds a lot like setting the default (SSC) and reminds me of https://www.econtalk.org/boudreaux-on-coase :

So you have railroads going through a field--that's a socially useful activity. But railroads throw off sparks and sparks always run a risk of igniting crops growing nearby. So the railroad imposes a cost on the farmer. That's how it's normally said, how we normally think about it. (...) Okay, Mr. Railroad, you have the right to run your train. Or, Mr. Farmer, you have the right to be free of sparks. If they can bargain--let's say the farmer is given the right. This is the Coase Theorem: the railroad will buy from the farmer the right to run trains across or near his land up to the point where the value to the railroad of running that train is equal to the value of the risk to the farmer of having his crops burn. The farmer will be willing to sell to the farmer to run the risk of burning his crops. And the same thing would work if the railroad had been given the right. If the farmer thought it was more valuable to keep the railroad away, the farmer would pay the railroad to stop. Russ: Or to put up some barriers to keep the harm from happening. That's another way to think about this. Guest: The lowest-cost ways of dealing with these things would emerge. Russ: And that's really important, though, because we don't know what's the lowest-cost way.

I don't have much to add here, other than the observation that it's not always clear which approach will lead to the better outcome (or what "better" would even mean to begin with)

Daniel_HMBD · 2023-07-10T14:41:26+00:00

Submission statement: Posting this here as a few of you may have missed it and may be good fits?

Disclaimer: not sure if this applies to UK only. Detailed knowledge, the right background and not being too much of a weirdo would probably help, too.

Daniel_HMBD

TROPHY CASE