ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
3d ago
IIRC, the shortest I've seen was, "We have Roko's Basilisk at home"
ControlsFreak
3d 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.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Allow me to clarify. I'm aware of some of the weaknesses in the models that are used purely for the physical systems, but I actually don't think they're that bad. They're actually pretty decent, AFAICT, where "pretty decent" is a sort of term of art to describe situations where you have an okay sense for the scale of your error analysis and can sort of understand when it might be a problem or not a problem.
Sigh. I really don't know that I have a good way of explaining this intuition. Maybe a story. Long ago, I paid a lot more attention to fairly straightforward aircraft control topics at conferences. One question that came up surprisingly often was, "...would you fly on an airplane that is being controlled by your controller?" There is just a qualitative sense that you develop for how bad the badness is. How the error is likely to be structured, how likely genuinely destructive failure modes are, magnitudes of expected error under various noise distributions, etc.
With that, I guess I'll just say again that I don't think the climate models are "that bad". They're not garbage. There is error, we know some of the sources of error (you mention a couple), and we have an intuitive sense for about how big it may be.
Conversely, what I have significant theoretical disputes with is specifically trying to model economic systems coupled with climate systems. We basically can't even get off the ground, theoretically speaking. The timescales are the wrong way round. When you talk about the apparent fastness of climate dynamics, they are still figuratively glacial in comparison to the dynamics of economic systems (and I sometimes tack on political systems, because it's amazing how many people try to make completely whacko claims about these, too). You did great to realize that attempts like using a static damage function and then proceeding with a simple amortization are bonkers. My point is that the underlying theoretical reason why they're bonkers is because that's just not how one does anything with timescale-separated coupled dynamical systems.
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.
More options
Context Copy link