GoofyGoose
1d ago
- I still don’t understand your point of view on this. Why is there a difference between acquiring a real asset versus a financial asset (that is someone else’s liability? You mentioned wealth creation, but trading financial assets/securities creates wealth. Trading happens under mutual agreement which means both parties are better off.
- Using that segue, prediction markets create value in the same way that any trading creates value. What gives rise to two people wanting to trade with each other? Different situations in or different beliefs about the future. This is the simplest libertarian argument for freedom to trade with each other.
GoofyGoose
3d ago
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This makes no sense to me. What is the key difference that matters in your opinion? Is it the probability of payoff? Prediction shares are binary, so if one side has low probability, the other one has high probability. Start-up equity has low probability of success: are they in the same category? Is the issue that they hold your money until the event? We could imagine a type of prediction markets where we put shares of VOO instead of cash. Would that change your view on them? The shares are going to be held anyway, so there is no inefficiency there.
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You don’t need to assume that perfect information is good to think prediction markets are good. That’s a strawman if I ever saw one. You might be able to make a strong case for banning prediction markets based on negative effects of too much information, but it won’t be a strong case unless you explain why it wouldn’t be better to, say, have their players contracts prohibiting this and enforcing it.
GoofyGoose
1mo ago
You can also make exams open book or allow cheat sheets. It might be hard to believe but there are cases of open book exams where the questions were previously solved in class or recitation.
GoofyGoose
2mo ago
Why? You can have beliefs and they can be irrational. If the situation calls for symmetry, but your prior is asymmetric because “something tells you it can’t be otherwise” then irrational could be a good descriptor.
In your link, you had other, more seemingly valid, complaints which people addressed well. This one feels like BEC.
GoofyGoose
2mo ago
FATF delenda est
GoofyGoose
2mo ago
Science is naturalist, rather than materialist. To a naturalist, the existence of non-material entities or phenomena does not invalidate science. There might still be laws that govern those entities; independently of our ability to learn those laws.
Science appears materialistic because of a desire for parsimony and the extraordinary success of materialist theories. But the principles of science do not depend on a materialist world.
GoofyGoose
2mo ago
Would it? Or would they just blame them even more?
In any case, I don’t understand why they should help. Help me or I’ll envy you and make things difficult sounds like extortion.
GoofyGoose
3mo ago
I agree, although I understand how “Genetic Sexual Attraction” (wikipedia, SFW) might make it seem like a kink.
Probably politics first, with GSA helping implementation.
GoofyGoose
4mo ago
Maybe if we didn’t keep increasing the minimum wage and other benefits to workers, we could have nice things. That’s the price we pay for equality. Although people will still complain.
GoofyGoose
4mo ago
Why do bank accounts and payments need credit? A checking account (no overdraft) and pre-funded payment do not need credit at all.
If phone companies were required to give a phone line to anyone who is not provably a crook, then the main beneficiaries would be crooks with plausible deniability. Substitute for any other service. Does this sound reasonable at all?
GoofyGoose
4mo ago
Sure, crypto aims to eliminate the middlemen; but middlemen are sometimes useful.
Why not both? Why not have crypto act as a threat that keeps bankers from ripping off their customers?
Payment systems are rigged. You need to be a large bank to participate, and regulators will fight for large banks to keep competitors out. Sure, they might say this is for a good reason like financial stability or anti-money laundering (AML); but they don’t even have good arguments for why this is worthwhile (in the case of AML) or whether it is effective (in the case of financial stability.
You might be right that, in some ideal, free-market world, there wouldn’t be crypto. But, in this world, there should be even if it is only to push against the inefficiencies imposed by governments, bureaucrats, and regulators.
GoofyGoose
4mo ago
Treasuries are a liability of the government, not an asset.
What am I missing?
GoofyGoose
4mo ago
The pathologization of savings always struck me as economist cope.
It’s not even good economics. Any good economist knows that the “deflation bad” meme is wrong unless you add extra assumptions.
GoofyGoose
4mo ago
None of these are meaningful in the way you mean. I am not that good at math, but I am good at mathematical model building and interpretation.
These are not meaningful because we can easily write different examples with different results, so the key question for, say, society is whether society satisfies another given property that is not the ones you mentioned.
Economics has models where agents who are part of the model and know or learn the model. Yet, self-fulfilling prophecies are not guaranteed or fully ruled out.
Economics would also have models that imply tradeoffs. Yet, in general not every improvement leads to a tradeoff because there are always dumb actions. Stop being dumb and you get an improvement without losing anything.
We can also come up with processes that generate large numbers from small and make that process loop or collapse or anything we want. The question is not whether such processes exist, but whether we can identify which kind better represents society, if any of them do.
I do think that some math is useful to recognize whether a kind of argument is plausible or ruled out. But most math is not even useful for that.
GoofyGoose
5mo ago
So it is not as big a deal as one might think. Got it.
I agree that there is a lot of information in reports of subjective experience, I think most people would agree. Some people are mistakenly believed to disagree with this just because they believe that it is easy to be led astray by such information.
Can I ask for a recommendation on Freud and/or Jung here? I have never tried to read them, and my knowledge comes only from popular depictions (which seem to be unfair, tbh). I did read The Denial of Death, which made quite a bit of sense to me. What’s the best way to learn about the work of Freud or Jung for someone who is worried about it being just woo but willing to give it a chance?
GoofyGoose
5mo ago
I don’t think the Hansonian argument is about there being no subjective experience. Hanson’s arguments emphasize that there are some emotions and thoughts that we are not fully aware of because it is better not to know.
For example, you may brag to increase your status, but your brain avoids noticing that you are trying to do that because bragging is socially discouraged.
The same ideas can apply to your perception of your own personality or any part of your subjective experience.
GoofyGoose
5mo ago
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”
Your ability to think matters because it enables you to get the right answer. The only problem with students who don’t understand is that they won’t be able to get the right answer in more general situations. An athlete doesn’t need to understand the physics of his sport or the biology behind his movements.
GoofyGoose
5mo ago
Getting the bottom 10-20% over the bar (even if this takes extra effort) is by far more important.
At the risk of sounding unfair, this seems like a rationalization for equality or “fairness.” I don’t see the huge societal problems. I assume most people who can’t read are not very smart, so reading won’t help much.
OTOH, geniuses can use what they learn more effectively. Competition and markets lead to them generating consumer surplus they cannot fully appropriate. Therefore, we should focus on them first.
Except our education system is so bad, I am sure we could fail at that and ruin the geniuses.
GoofyGoose
5mo ago
Sure there are accounting identities involved. But the way I interpret the phrase is as saying that the action favored by Trump has a necessary consequence because of such an identity. For example, if your assets increase, either your liabilities or equities increase.
This is not the case for employment (what the comment I was replying to mentioned). There is no accounting identity in monetary economics (that I know of) which links interest rates and employment. There is the Phillips curve, but we can argue about the slope, causality, etc.
Lowering interest rates is not crazy, even if Trump suggests it. Even Milton Friedman recommended it.
GoofyGoose
5mo ago
Can someone explain what alienation means? I can’t seem to wrap my head around it. It might be one of those “universal human experiences” I am missing.
GoofyGoose
5mo ago
How is monetary policy an accounting identity?
GoofyGoose
5mo ago
- Poverty: capitalism works, redistribution doesn’t (or worse)
- Cost of living/services: Due to government subsidizing demand and restricting supply
- Welfare: Unfair redistribution
- Labor rights: Due to economic growth and competition, not unions
- The New Deal: Prolonged the Great Depression
- Rust Belt decline: Automation and unions, not free trade
- Europe: Low growth and health and pension crises
- Progressive governance: High spending and bad results
Did I miss anything? Which ones do you disagree with? I am not sure about 6: it could still be that a dollar that is too strong (expensive) harms exports. The problem there is still not the free market, rather underprovision of dollars in global markets.
GoofyGoose
5mo ago
Which bird is that?
GoofyGoose
6mo ago
Wait, you have never been struck by the thunderbolt?
We should have a poll. I thought it happened to everyone, although not too frequently.
I don’t understand the american obsession with entrapment. In other countries the definition is more lax and sting operations are used to greater effect.
Can you explain why the fence is there, beyond ‘a cop forced me to do it’?
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