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Ben Golub Profile picture
@ben_golub
Aug 3, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
Just sent Knuth's advice on writing mathematical stuff to a student list and felt moved to retweet it more broadly.

Some favorite bits in the screenshots. 1/3

jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-pape… Image
the "grunting noise" is a great heuristic
2/3 Image
3/3 ImageImage
Since this has been such a big part of my everyday head for a while, I feel a bit sheepish highlighting it. But often when reading things, I remember some of the best advice is not universally followed.

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More from @ben_golub

Ben Golub Profile picture
Jan 18
If you do applied math (broadly - CS, stats, physics, . . .) - a request/freebie:

Refine is a tool that reads papers and finds technical issues, like a referee.

We want researchers in diverse areas to try it.

If you're willing to, read on.

1/ Image
We'll give you free reviews, useful to stress-test a paper before submission or circulation.
(Users say it's similar to at least 4h of expert reading.)

In exchange, all we ask is you write a brief, fully honest reaction on X, LinkedIn, or any similar platform.

2/
Then we'll give you more free reviews, which you can keep or give as a gift to others.

If you're interested, please DM me. We'll do about 10 researchers for this first trial.

Conditions: PhD student or later, not in economics/finance/game theory.

3/
Read 5 tweets
Ben Golub Profile picture
Nov 28, 2025
This NYT article on the "golden age" of air travel is an amazing example of an unthinking journalist failing to make contact with reality.

The narrative: air travel used to be much better, but less affordable.

1/ Image
The two big quality dimensions are comfort and safety. The article obsesses over comfort while ignoring safety entirely.

But it's wrong on both, so let's take them in turn.

2/
On comfort: the 1958 economy passenger paid ~$3,300 one-way to Paris in today's money.

Today, that price still gets you china and champagne.

But also a flat bed in a private suite with a big TV and wifi.

Transcontinental routes offer similar amenities.

3/
Read 9 tweets
Ben Golub Profile picture
Oct 23, 2025
I am super excited to share a new AI tool, Refine.

Refine thoroughly studies research papers like a referee and finds issues with correctness, clarity, and consistency.

In my own papers, it regularly catches problems that my coauthors and I missed.

1/ Image
We’ve been beta testing it with frontier research in areas from social science to applied mathematics to computational biology to philosophy.

Refine is already in use by editors and referees at top journals.

2/
Researchers find the comments thorough and helpful, exceeding the performance of top models like ChatGPT Pro.

3/
Read 8 tweets
Ben Golub Profile picture
Oct 12, 2025
This terribly misguided paper is making the rounds.

This thread is to make it common knowledge what is wrong with it.

The basic thing: all modern economic theory allows for a gap between individual maximization and efficiency, whatever you mean exactly by each of these.

1/
The first welfare theorem (individual optimization implies social efficiency) breaks down in the presence of frictions -

e.g., incomplete markets, asymmetric information, externalities, and market power.

Most economics today is about these frictions.

2/
Now, the paper has some halfhearted recognition of this, but says, effectively

"Well, you know, there is some meta-stage in which institutions are chosen, and economics assumes that this choice will be made to kill all frictions except the efficient ones."

3/
Read 7 tweets
Ben Golub Profile picture
Oct 4, 2025
this long post is an interesting document!

a few notes on it from an economist studying network theory

The striking thing about César's hit 2009 paper on economic complexity is that it doesn't mention eigen-anything and seems surprisingly disengaged from network theory.

1/
The economic complexity index that Hidalgo and Hausman propose in "The building blocks of economic complexity" is a very close variant of Kleinberg's very famous 1999 HITS algorithm.

It's not clear whether they're aware of this connection, but in any case

2/ Image
economists writing about networks in 2009, such as Jackson, Acemoglu, myself, and many others would have probably written the paper differently --

with a clearer consciousness to our big debt to the prior study of eigenthings as centrality measures!
Read 10 tweets
Ben Golub Profile picture
Sep 28, 2025
I was expecting to hate Tim Hartford's piece, which essentially says that the math in economics "feels wrong" for the subject.

But I liked it! He's right. Today's economics does invest a lot of its mathematical effort in the wrong stuff.

Thread 1/
To take an example from the graduate curriculum, we spend a lot of time dealing with fixed points in large models (dynamic, stochastic, etc.)

But most students taught our toolbox could say nothing useful about how to model whether agents can find these equilibria.

2/
Some famous work in computer science, e.g. by Daskalakis and Papadrimiou, has studied the complexity of finding equilibria in games and markets.

But economics has not absorbed much from the methods or concepts used in this work, and has mostly shrugged off the whole thing

3/
Read 8 tweets

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