Jules van Binsbergen

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478 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 13 Aug

Jules van Binsbergen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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All Else Equal: Making Better Decisions · Rerun: Ep73 “The Dangers of Group Think on Decision Making” with Adi Sunderam · 13 Aug 2026 podcast

Because once they're willing to commit to such a piece of information, it's much easier to have the debate after. matched

And of course, if the person says there exists no such piece of information that would ever make me change my mind, right, then we have something that in Bayesian statistics we call a dogmatic prior, which says there exists no matched

No data or no piece of evidence that would ever make people move from what their prior beliefs are. matched

The paper we will be discussing is called Sharing Models to Interpret Data, and Adi co authored it with Josh Schwartztein. matched

And I think, Jonathan, one of the key innovations of this paper is that the authors want to consider the possibility that certain decision makers just have what they call a set of models that they are unwilling to consider as potential explanations for the data that's being presented to them. matched

And another group of models that they're much more likely to relate any piece of information that they see to and see as a confirmation or matched

Or try to interpret to the best of their ability to fit that data into that set of models that they are trying to consider. matched

And so therefore Jonathan, I think that this paper matched

As much as it is a description of individual behavior, I really also'd like to interpret it in the context of sociological behavior. matched

In other words, is it possible that you grow up in or interact with a particular group of people where a set of explanations are just not allowed to be considered because if you bring them forward as hypotheses, you're ousted from the group or there are severe social matched

penalties to that. matched

And then once you're in that environment, I think as a group, you get this collective assignment of trying to be super creative in terms of together coming up with crazier and crazier explanations. matched

And I think that some of the echo chambers, regardless of which side of the political spectrum we're talking about, that we're currently seeing on social media, are actually engaged in that group activity. matched

And so I find that it's not just matched

Disturbing in its own right, but I also think it's a huge waste of intellectual resources. matched

Because I'm I'm not even sure that the people that are engaging in this behavior are necessarily people that aren't particularly smart. matched

I think really smart people are particularly good at coming up with crazier and crazier explanations just because other explanations are not allowed to be considered. matched

I think so. matched

So our guest today is Adi Sonderam, who is the Willard Prescott Smith Professor of Corporate Finance at Harvard Business School. matched

He's a research associate and the National Bureau of Economic Research and currently also one of the co editors of the Journal of Finance. matched

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