Best of #econtwitter - Week of December 29, 2024: interesting tweets
Welcome readers old and new to this week’s edition of the Best of Econtwitter newsletter. Please submit suggestions — very much including your own work! — over email or on Twitter @just_economics.
Journals
^a lot of discussion (also on bsky):
^💀
From a 2023 Tyler Cowen post:
In just about any scientific literature, there is an undercurrent of tacit knowledge which is not very directly expressed in any of the published pieces. That knowledge may cover the following issues, among many others:
1. How the rules of the conversation operate, and how a body of literature on a question coheres.
2. Why certain papers and methods are not taken seriously any more (you don’t generally find outright refutations of them).
3. Which results and papers are taken how seriously. Citations metrics help here, but not nearly as much as you might think.
4. What kinds of results and methods would be required to induce researchers to move to a new conclusion.
5. Why/when one paper pointing in a particular direction doesn’t prove much of anything, and why people don’t do things a certain way.
6. How, by asking around, you can figure out some (not all) of these issues, even if you do no work in that field. This includes knowledge of how to interpret the verbal feedback you receive from practitioners and how to integrate it into a broader knowledge of the body of research.
There is much more, as that is a very brief introduction to some key issues. I now have a few points:
a. I wish people would present this knowledge more directly! If only in oral form. Why not have some key people in a field talk through how their field actually works? Record that, issue transcripts, and yes feed it into LLMs.
the post continues
Misc
^more like this please :)
Charts
From the archives:
^for Americans, 10 day visa-free travel just announced, get flying…