ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1d ago
What employees have you fired so far?
In Zvi's recent post, I noticed an interesting pairing of two things:
Sell your house. Stuart Thompson lets Gemini (because he had a free account there from work that saved him $8 a month?!) walk him through everything involved in the sale, including being his agent. The problem is, Stuart does not seem to realize he does not know the counterfactual?
Stuart A. Thompson: In the end, using A.I. netted me more than $90,000. That includes the premium over the asking price, plus the roughly $36,000 in fees I didn’t pay.
I mean, yes, the agents he talked to early on told him he’d lose money, and instead he turned a profit. But only after the sale did he talk to another agent for an expert opinion, and that expert expected a higher sale price than Stuart got, meaning he almost certainly listed too low. Stuart thinks that after the agent fee he still basically broke even, but I’m guessing he put in more work and stress this way, and took on more downside risk. I know that if I am ever selling or buying, I will be using AI extensively as part of the effort, but I am going to stick with Danielle Wiedemann. I am confident that her help, connections and advice were worth far more than the fee, and would be again.
and:
For those confused about the radiology example, yes, AI is better than radiologists at reading x-rays, and many other components of professional services, and does so at cost epsilon, and this is super useful. Even if no one is out of work quite yet, often there is a ton of value in ‘pretty good answer, vastly better than you could otherwise get without a professional, for cost ~$0’ when the professional costs $1,000 and up.
It was a bit stark, because getting a pretty good answer, vastly better than you could otherwise get without a real estate professional, would seem to cost ~$0, when the professional apparently costs something like $36,000 and up. So why not fire the real estate agent?
There could be a variety of reasons involving the nature of the work, regulatory barriers, etc., but one thing that comes to mind is that Zvi has paid for a real estate agent before and is consciously thinking about what that situation is like when thinking about whether he would hire again. Whereas, I doubt he's hired a radiologist before and is probably not in a situation where he's thinking super seriously about the considerations that would be involved if he had a need for such a service.
This leads me to ask, "Which employees have you fired?" In this case, "employees" can be read broadly, covering folks like real estate agents/radiologists, who you may procure services from on occasion, in addition to actual employment relations if you're a manager/business owner. But I want to particularly hone in on examples where you have paid a human for a particular service in the past and have subsequently encountered a nearly-identical need, but have chosen to not pay a human now for the service.
This question is in significant part simply selfish. I might be missing some aspect in my life where I can save a bunch of money. That would be cool, and I'd like to do that if I can.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
The burns example where your buddy is in horrible pain and bound to die soon is another one that works. You can play with it by having him be actively begging for death or just screaming wordlessly.
It doesn't meet the criteria stated above:
I see no circumstances under which the principle "Don't murder innocents" must be compromised in order to live. [emphasis added]
That may not be the only category in which some folks think something is acceptable, but it is the criteria stated that I'm comparing to for purposes of this sub-thread.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Almost none of your examples actually work. Most of them get intentionality the wrong way 'round. There is obviously a huge conceptual chasm between an affirmative requirement to take extreme measures to save a life and a far more minimal requirement that one not murder. Perhaps you're just confused about what 'murder' is? Or maybe about what "in order to live" means?
Your buddy falls while climbing and you have to cut the rope so you both don't die.
This is the only one that actually gets there. It's actually my favorite example. You can dial it up/down very well to push at people's intuitions. On one extreme is where you're actually going to die if you don't cut the rope. You can dial this down to just some risk of dying. You can dial it down further to just some risk of harm (maybe it's cutting off circulation to your foot, and you might lose your foot.... or maybe it's just threatening to give you rope burn; are you justified in cutting the rope then?). This is a good example that poses some tough questions, but yeah, almost none of your other examples work at all.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
With that in mind, what does it mean for the price to be "wrong"? What's supposed to happen if the "efficient market" doesn't get the price "right"?
That depends significantly on the reasoning why one thinks that may be the case. The unfortunate part is that it's about the same level of impossibility to know for sure that you've gotten that reasoning right as it is to know for sure what the underlying value of future cash flows is.
That said, if we are allowed to handwave a bit, it has been suggested by far greater financial minds than I (e.g., Matt Levine), that some stocks are sometimes priced above the current value of their future cash flows because of memes (e.g., Gamestop). If that's the case, then one would expect that the price would follow the dynamics of memes, which may or may not be at all similar to the dynamics that one would expect the price to follow if one thought that it was primarily being priced by more 'traditional' concerns. What is "supposed" to happen depends significantly on things like, for example, how long one thinks that it will primarily follow the dynamics of memes or whether that component will eventually disappear and such.
Obviously, there are many directions that any company may end up taking, and there could be many different underlying reasons why a (slightly-modified) "reasonably-efficient market" doesn't get the price "right". For example, a company may be engaging in fraud, and perhaps the vast majority of market participants are unaware of this fraud. What has sometimes happened in the past in such cases is that the company runs out of money, suddenly declaring bankruptcy and surprising everyone by telling them that their shares are a claim on $0 worth of shareholder equity. In other cases, an external party discovers the fraud, and as that information spreads through the market, many people want to sell, but no one wants to buy, and the price quickly collapses. Other dynamics can occur if there are other factors.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
IIRC, the shortest I've seen was, "We have Roko's Basilisk at home"
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Suppose I have legacy VBA macros in Excel. Are there any that let me just directly use them? Last I had looked at LibreOffice, I think, and I was going to have to do some significant rewriting.
What sort of engineer? What sort of regulation/code? I want to profit.
More options
Context Copy link