1 The Wages of Wins? (NBA Salary and Performance) | Read this on the Red Line to a rec league game and MISSED MY STOP. Basically confirms what every fan already screams at the TV, just with regressions. 10/10 nerd snipe. | The Wages of Wins? (NBA Salary and Performance) | Harvard University | Sports Economics |
|---|
2 Efficient Estimation of Word Representations (word2vec) | The paper that quietly rewired half my day job. Short, dense, and somehow readable at 11pm after a loss. Like a good IPA, small pour, big kick. | Efficient Estimation of Word Representations (word2vec) | Google (co-author trained at MIT) | Machine Learning |
|---|
3 A Mathematical Theory of Communication | The OG stats flex. Every data nerd cites it, way fewer have actually finished it (me included, three attempts and counting). | A Mathematical Theory of Communication | MIT (Claude Shannon's later home base) | Information Theory |
|---|
4 Basketball on Paper foundational win-shares framework | MIT Sloan hosts THE sports analytics conference every year, practically walking distance from my apartment, and I still watch it from my couch like a coward. | Basketball on Paper foundational win-shares framework | Independent researcher, presented at MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference | Sports Analytics |
|---|
5 Attention Is All You Need | The transformer paper. Changed the whole field, feels like the 1992 Dream Team of ML papers. I've read it four times and STILL forget how positional encoding works. | Attention Is All You Need | Google Brain / University of Toronto collab, widely taught at MIT | Machine Learning |
|---|
6 The Bias of an Estimator (foundational statistics) | Sounds boring, IS kind of boring, but explains why my fantasy projections are always a little off. Blame variance, not me. | The Bias of an Estimator (foundational statistics) | Harvard University Statistics Department | Statistics |
|---|
7 On the Origin of Species (foundational biology reprint studied at Harvard) | Not my usual lane but I got dragged into a Harvard Museum tour by a friend and came home with a PDF. Turns out natural selection and NBA draft busts have a lot in common. | On the Origin of Species (foundational biology reprint studied at Harvard) | Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology archives | Evolutionary Biology |
|---|
8 PageRank: The Google Citation Ranking | Not a Boston paper technically but every CS class in this city name-drops it. Like the 3-point line, it just became infrastructure. | PageRank: The Google Citation Ranking | Stanford University (studied heavily in MIT CS courses) | Computer Science |
|---|
9 Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk | Explains exactly why I keep betting the same guy will hit a corner three even though he's 2-for-19 this month. Kahneman knew me personally, apparently. | Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk | Studied extensively at Harvard Business School | Behavioral Economics |
|---|
10 Adaptive Market Hypothesis | MIT Sloan again (they're just built different over there). Reframes markets like a league adjusting its meta season to season. Basically the salary cap of finance papers. | Adaptive Market Hypothesis | MIT Sloan School of Management | Financial Economics |
|---|
TheLysts
