Paul Stillman

@stillman.bsky.social

428 Followers 243 Following

Behavioral Scientist studying self-control and motivation. Assistant Professor at Boston University

Abstract: In six studies, we find evidence of efficiency neglect: when thinking about the effects of population growth, people intuitively focus on increased demand while neglecting the changes in production efficiency that occur alongside, and often in response to, increased demand. In other words, people tend to think of others solely as consumers, rather than as consumers as well as producers. Efficiency neglect leads to beliefs that the real costs of some consumer goods are rising when they are actually decreasing and may contribute to antiimmigration sentiments because of the fear that increasing local population creates competition for fixed resources. We demonstrate that economic pessimism and antiimmigration sentiments are reduced when people are prompted to consider their own beliefs about increased productivity over time, but are unchanged when they consider their beliefs about increases in demand. Together, these findings shed light on people’s lay economic theories and suggest promising interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)
Drake meme Top panel: Measured use of LLMs for modest efficiency gains Bottom panel: replace all humans with LLMs and severely degrade your product
Life does not have inherent meaning; to say that our lives are pointless and our achievements meaningless is to state the obvious. No matter how grand our achievements or how broad their scope, time turns all to dust and death destroys all memory. But that does not mean we cannot ascribe our own meaning to what we do. It is because nothing has meaning unto itself that we are free to create meaning, to make metaphor, and in doing so reflect on ourselves and our world. Leveling to 99 in the first reactor is pointless and meaningless. So why do I do it? I do it to express my hatred, and more importantly my disdain, for Dick Tree. I do it to express the camaraderie I feel for those of us who have followed this topic for years only to be disappointed by [Dick Tree]. I do it to prove to myself that I can persevere. The act is meaningless; I give it meaning.
A drawing of Big the cat
Still from 12 Monkeys with Carol Florence and David Morse
Claude with the prompt "Can I use separate_wider_delim (using _ as the separator) and specify that I want to drop the second column (it's always redundant)?" with the response: Yes! Use the cols_remove argument — wait, that's not it. The right argument is too_many — no. The correct answer is: separate_wider_delim has a cols argument to select which output columns to keep — no, it doesn't. Let me be honest: the way to drop specific output columns in separate_wider_delim is via the names argument, where you can pass NA for any column you want to discard: rdf |> separate_wider_delim(x, delim = "_", names = c("alpha", NA)) Passing NA as a name for a position tells separate_wider_delim to drop that piece entirely. This is the cleanest way to do it within the call itself.
Chat with claude, where the prompt is "I am using unnest_wider on a column-list that contains an unnamed numeric vector, and I want to specify column names. How do I do that within the unnest_wider call?" and the response from claude is: You can use the names_sep parameter combined with the names_repair approach, but the most direct way is the names_transform — actually, the right parameter is names_repair... let me be precise: The correct parameter is names_repair — no, actually the one you want is: Use the names_repair argument — no. The answer is ptype — no. Let me be direct: use the names_to argument — actually the correct answer is: ✅ Use unnest_wider() with a named list, or use the names_sep + names_repair combo For an unnamed numeric vector, the cleanest solution is the names_repair argument — but specifically, the dedicated way to supply names is: rdf |> unnest_wider(col, names_sep = "_")
Pic showing the top users on bluesky by engagement, with Mrs. Betty Bowers in the #3 spot
Storefront with sign that says “praxis city” (taken in Rotterdam).
comment of mercumeme saying 'Shoulda gotten the donkey tbh'
Ackman saying "The problem with big institutions is that they are massive bureaucracies which occassionally put aside the core principles on which they are founded because they are embarrassed, because they are busy, and/or it is easier to ignore the harm they may cause to the little guy in the interest of protecting their reputation and/or avoiding further distraction to leadership. They also often assume that the little guy will eventually give up and/or run out of resources to keep fighting," he wrote. "I am going to make sure that doesn't happen here."
On X, Ackman raised several critiques that Gino's lawyers have previously mounted. He argued that Gino is "A victim of some unintentional data errors made by some of the research associates that assisted her in her research" as well as "scammer(s)" who filled out surveys with corrupted data that showed up in some of her papers. He also argued that harvard failed to give gino adequate time and opportunity to defend herself. For example, he accused Alain Bonacossa, Harvard business school's research integrity officer, of telling gino that she could not hire her own forensic-research firm, and then denying in tryial that he had done so.
Movie poster for Road Trip (2000)
Depiction of every larger-later decision in our dataset (N = 46774) colored by their hierarchical clustering assignment using a two-cluster partition. Trials identified as impulse inhibition (N = 12,309, 26.3%) are colored red, and trials identified as dynamic competition (N = 34,465, 73.7%) are colored blue. Bold lines represent the two cluster centers. Shaded rectangles in the corners correspond to the two response options, and all trajectories are recoded to terminate at the right response option. Figure to scale
Depiction of both the temporal evolution of choice (top panels) and how these would manifest as mouse trajectories (bottom panels) for both stage-based impulse inhibition (left panels) and integrative dynamic competition (right panels). (A) Stage-based impulse inhibition predicts an evolution of choice such that automatic processes are dominant early and drive participants towards temptations (initial arrows highlighted in red), before controlled processes come online and inhibit these impulses, directing participants back towards the goal (second arrows highlighted in grey). Here, we depict three possible evolutions in which the impulse varies in magnitude and timing of correction. (B) Integrative dynamic-competition models predict a noisy accumulation of evidence, such that once evidence has accumulated beyond a certain threshold (dashed lines), a choice is made. Such models do not predict temporal precedence to either goals or temptations. Here, we depict three possible evolutions that vary in their drift rate. (C) How the impulse inhibition depicted in (A) might manifest in mouse trajectories: movement towards the temptation proportional to the strength of the impulse, followed by a discrete correction back to the goal once controlled systems come online. (D) How dynamic competition depicted in (B) might manifest in mouse trajectories: graded trajectories in which the directness is proportional to the drift rate
Three panels depicting a mouse-tracking experiment. The first panel shows a blank screen with a start button. After the participant clicks the start button, two options appear in the upper-left and upper right corners ($25 today and $40 in 180 days, respectively). The third panel depicts a participants' mouse trajectory, initially veering towards the smaller-sooner before deflecting back to choose the larger-later amount.
The bros from pacific rim in sync together