KnotGodel
1yr ago
I don't object to the claim the evidence illustrates GVA is biased. I object to the claim that it provides convincing evidence the CDC is biased. In order to demonstrate that, I don't think what you showed is sufficient.
For instance, the fact the advocates were ignored by the CDC prior to getting support from the White House suggests that the CDC is not prioritizing leftwing advocates. Likewise, the fact this exchange took place over months suggests this isn't simple activism.
Moreover, the basic argument that this conversation caused the website to change doesn't indicate bias unless we take it as granted that the decision-making was bias. The more charitable explanation is that the advocates drew attention to a problem and the CDC eventually agreed in a neutral manner, at which point the only reasonable option was to change the website.
As I see it, the only way to demonstrate your preferred theory over the more charitable one is to demonstrate that the website change was, in fact, biased/unreasonable. IMO, you haven't done so.
to many people it seems like the desire to wipe the board and start again with new research coincides a) with the places with the greatest political disagreement, rather than disagreement with the merits, and b) where changes in political affiliation with likely researchers and with publications make it unlikely to see the same reads present, even if they were true.
What slate is being wiped clean? The CDC original reports are still publicly available. No research has been rescinded. I'd be shocked if future literature reviews just flat out ignored research from before year X.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
They were not way behind on production per person, which really ought to be the far more relevant metric to evaluating HBD.
But this is all moot, because, again, you are using a lack of correlation to infer a lack of causation, and you are using n=2. That is sloppy reasoning and can't let you draw any conclusions.
Sorry I'm muddying your rigorous analysis with silly things like logic.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Ok, but, again - if literally nothing bad happened to Yeltsin, why would anyone expect something bad to happen to the much more secure Putin? Heck, a literal economic depression occurred under Yeltsin, and (afaict) this didn't see him forced into retirement or killed.
Like, it seems like we have one comparable historical event and one far worse historical event - both under someone with a far weaker grip on power. An no "dissatisfied elements" did anything as far as we can tell...
I mean, I guess there's a chance Putin gets removed from power because of this, but it seems like a pretty remote one.
Let me make this very concrete for you
- Everyone complains about things holding them back that aren't there fault.
- It is common practice for this to be a social endeavor, and for people to avoid voicing disagreement, because that is considered anti-social, since people playing the game Poor Old Me generally don't want to play the game everyone here is addicted to: Debate Me
- If I complain I'm not X because I'm an A, and you reply that people who are not-A are also not-X, you haven't actually provided any evidence that the causal claim I was making is false.
- Even the most successful people can correctly point to things that held them back.
In other words, if we apply the standard of discourse used by the OP, we can validly whine about anyone's whining. That standard of discourse is, in a word, shit. It only appeals to people who have been mind-killed.
The specifics about Trump absolutely don't matter. I could point to any person or demographic, and there would be things they whine about holding them back. I could make a post exactly like the OPs regardless of whether those factors had any basis in reality.
I realize this forum is mostly a place to vibe/whine.
Sorry for killing the mood /s
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Inflation and the labour market which underpins it have not reacted at all to the current interest rate policy. Rates are going to need to rise much more than people think. Both here and the US.
...
When rates rise beyond some point there is going to be a panic cut in government spending at all levels. Either that or we give up and let inflation rip. Buckle up. We’re in economic accelerationism now.
I think this reasoning is wrong for the US for a couple reasons.
First, over the last 3 months, inflation has averaged 2% (annualized).
Second, the financial markets expect inflation to be brought back under control: the 5-year breakeven inflation rate has fallen from 3.6% in March to 2.6% today. Meanwhile the break-even inflation rate for the subsequent five years (2027-2032) fell from 2.67% to 2.35% over the same period of time. The most parsimonious explanation is that inflation will fall from 3-4% to 2.4% over the next couple years.
So, for the US at least, I don't think an inflation apocalypse is all that likely.
I don't know about Canadian financial markets, but inflation in Canada was basically zero over the last 3 months, despite pretty rapid inflation before that.
Your thesis:
The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
As with all such narratives, this says more about you than the world. You simply focus on all the ways Blues hurt Reds and ignore the millions of boring policy changes where nothing of the sort happens.
This lets your “model” be “correct” since you simply ignore all disagreeing events. For instance, I really don’t see how Biden turning immigrants away at the border is him hurting the Reds or how him sending arms to Ukraine is hurting the Reds or how a boring HOA meeting about lawn care is hurting the Reds.
Then you interpret your own bias as an objective fact of the world, which lets you make fun of people who don’t share that bias by effectively calling them stupid (which is the framing for your entire comment)
Not exactly a paradigm of clear and charitable thinking.
Well, except if you're with a group of people bonding by bullying someone, you perspective implies I should start bullying them too...
ETA: though, I do admit, definitionally that taking the selfish perspective does "better serve" you
KnotGodel
4mo ago
Statistical Structure of the Supreme Court
Inspired by earlier discussion on The Motte, I decided to statistically investigate the voting patterns of the Supreme Court.
The obvious place to start is by looking at how frequently each justice's opinions aligned with each other's. We can interpret the percent-of-times-disagreed as a measure of how "far apart" justices are. We can then use a variety of approaches to plot this onto a 2d graph (e.g. using sklearn.manifold.MDS)
I found data from back when Breyer was on the Court rather than Jackson. My preferred model results is this graph and fairly consistent with @Walterodim's characterization:
- Sotomayor as a left outlier
- Kegan (and Breyer) on the left
- Kavenaugh, Roberts, and Barrett towards the center
- Thomas and Alito on the right
Finally, he characterizes Gorsuch as a "Maverick", which is admittedly a little hard to formalize in a 2d projection of a high-dimensional space, and the model just spits him out between Barrett and Thomas.
KnotGodel
4mo ago
Based on this comment, SBF's blog, and his professional achievements it seems pretty clear that Sam is extremely smart. Specifically, he is very good at manipulating formal systems - math, software, games, etc. He is merely smart is once you leave the world of formal systems.
Unfortunately, in a move common common among STEM-nerd, I'm guessing he realized that all non-formal-systems contain subjectivity, which means you can use them to argue anything, which means they're "bullshit". Indeed, much of this forum is built upon a similar syllogism, but with a more explicitly political lens (e.g. the law is so vague that you can prosecute anyone with selective enforcement). None of this is completely wrong and it is often useful in some contexts, however...
I strongly believe that a large part of a STEM-nerd maturing into an healthy adult is learning
- that there are degrees of subjectivity and objectivity
- that whether a system (formal or informal) is useful for navigating the world is a pretty different question than whether it is objective/true
- how to use multiple systems, both formal and informal, simultaneously to navigate the world
Or, to use Robert Kegan’s model of development: to move from Stage 4 to Stage 5.
Like, take Socrates. Is Socrates the greatest philosopher in the history? That question doesn't have an answer. However, there is value in reading Socrates that puts him above a typical philosopher - namely that understanding Socrates makes it much easier for you to understand a myriad of other philosophers. If you're interested in digesting philosophy as a field, that is valuable. If, on the other hand, you're interested in how philosophy applies to doing the greatest good for the fewest dollars - not so much.
Or take Freud. I assume SBF would say Freud was pseudoscientific bullshit. To be fair, (1) I have yet to find value in some of his writing (particularly on sexuality) and (2) Freud was hardly a beacon of science qua science, and yet... Freud
- popularized the idea that much of our cognition is not conscious
- invented "defense mechanisms" as a concept and cataloged an enormous number of them (e.g. the use of intellectualisation to avoid negative emotions)
both of which are not really "provable", but are self-evidently true/useful.
Likewise, Freud popularized the framing of the Id, Ego, and Superego, which, when stripped of its mysticism essentially boils down to:
People's want to fulfill their desires (Id, Pleasure Principle), but these often conflict with moral/social values (Superego). This conflict, in addition to some desires/values being literally impossible (Reality Principle) introduce significant "tension" in that you can't achieve everything you want, so you have to trade off some of one for the other. Moreover, people use various cognitive tricks to help reduce this tension - e.g. rationalizing that they didn't want money anyway, when their desire (to have money) conflicts with reality (they're poor) or their morals (it's wrong to be greedy).
It is literally impossible to prove the above framework is "true". However, a great number of people find the framing useful.
Anyway, I've gotten off track... ¯_(ツ)_/¯
the heavy underemphasis on energy and housing I see as clear deliberate manipulation for instance
Let's look at the weights of the CPI-U as of 2022-Dec:
- 7.5% - Rent of primary residence
- 25.4% - Owners' equivalent rent of residences
- 3.6% - Household energy
- 3.3% - Motor fuel
I've ensured no overlap between the categories.
So, that's 32.9% of the CPI is housing and 6.9% is energy.
You believe these numbers are heavily underemphasized and are a "clear deliberate manipulation".
Please elaborate.
unemployment numbers... have been cooked to hell and back by essentially every government of every State.
Please elaborate.
KnotGodel
10mo ago
Whether the death happens to a victim or a perpetrator is not "less important". It's more important than just about everything else relevant to the situation.
You've made an assertion. Not an argument.
If I had two sons, and one son got drunk and punched someone at a bar while another got drunk and was punched by someone at a bar. I would not want to live in a world where the former was killed and the latter killed their assaulter. I'd much rather live in the alternative world where no one died. Which would you rather live in?
Also, using QALYs here at all produces bizarre results because it becomes much less bad to kill an older perpetrator than a younger one.
Again, I am not a blind utilitarian calculator. It is a model.
Tossing a punch at someone is an attempt to kill, or a reckless act that may kill, and should be treated as such
This is black-and-white thinking. There are gradations here that you are ignoring, because they are inconvenient to you. Those gradations are central to my argument, so I'm not sure how I'm supposed to respond here.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
It was simply because the government acted in contradictory ways and prevented people spending money
I'm not saying the restrictions were justified, but you are dramatically overstating their macroeconomic impact, especially post-vaccine rollout. In 2021-Jan, vaccines had just started rolling out and personal consumption had returned to its pre-covid peak. You think that's a bigger factor than the largest stimulus bill in history being passed during middling economic conditions? Not to mention monetary policy...
KnotGodel
1yr ago
EA reverses normal concentric loyalties
No, it equalizes them. You can argue that is bad, but it is not "reversed".
Effective charity requires accountability.
The EA movement still is heads-and-shoulders over the average non-EA charity in terms of accountability.
This is why the church was an effective charity - you get free stuff but you also have to behave and participate
This doesn't match my experience with churches at all. For instance, when I volunteered serving dinner and distributing food to the poor, there was literally no effort made to restrict it to good people/the congregation/etc.
Has EA yet to figure out that shipping pallets of rice to Africans only creates more Africans who need even more rice next year?
Has EA ever shipped rice to Africans? Or are you simply straw-manning?
Arizona's BASIS charter schools are regularly ranked among the best in the country (I count four of their Arizona campuses in the US News top 30). Basically, it looks like public education simply can't compete, and is desperately scrambling to protect its monopoly and union largess.
I am extremely unconvinced by this logic. Those rankings mostly reflect the pre-existing traits of the students and their families. No one has provided any evidence that these rankings reflect anything causal and, to the degree they do, that these causal effects aren't purely zero-sum peer-effects. There is some evidence that specific inputs to rankings like this (e.g. class size) might have causal effects, but even there, the evidence is typically quite mixed.
KnotGodel
3mo ago
If we had proof that intermarriage between class was as (in)frequent as intermarriage between race, how would you change your mind?
KnotGodel
4mo ago
I actually have pondered a more universalized application of this to utilitarians: I care as much about other people as they care about me.
For instance, if Nigeria and the US swapped economic places in a parallel universe, how much would they be doing for us? Realistically, this suggests being as selfish/altruistic as the average person, maybe correcting a bit for some bias. Likewise, most animals probably wouldn't mind much eating humans if they had the desire to.
IMO, this kind of mirrored-weight utilitarianism matches human intuition better than normal utilitarianism.
KnotGodel
6mo ago
Again and again, I see people here assuming that because the press and twitter academics are biased, it obviously implies that stats nerds in the BEA and BLS are biased. But, again, I've never seen evidence for this.
KnotGodel
6mo ago
To address the concrete point, real median pay is basically flat from its pre-pandemic value. The number you cited in your post was nominal.
Unemployment is also basically flat from pre-Covid (ditto for employment).
So, if people are subconsciously replacing the survey questions with "am I economically better off compared to pre-Covid?", then we should see about as many people answer "yes" as "no".
Ehh, Griggs vs. Duke Power is overrated by HBD/IQ folks. It's not like IQ tests were ubiquitous before Griggs, were they?
I think the more important problem for large companies is that the PR costs might be large and that PR costs are very salient/legible in a way that employee quality is not, at least no in the short-term (and people are hardly paragons of rationality in the long-term). Like, if you were a CEO and added IQ tests, you can be certain of a media backlash and you're also risking subsequent punishment by the board. Even if you're certain it would improve employee quality, that would (a) be hard to prove and (b) even if you could, it would take years...
Smaller firms,
- often just copy larger firms (they are often, in a sense, even more risk-averse than big firms, since all the financial risk is borned by the owner)
- often aren't super g-loaded anyway (e.g. mom-and-pop shop, contractor laying flooring, etc)
- have less principle-agent problems (arguably, IQ-esque tests are most valuable, because they partially displace hiring favoritism) - like, if I'm mostly hiring people I know and have worked with before, the additional value of an IQ test is ~0
KnotGodel
3mo ago
I think there’s an error here
Yeah, my bad. It should read
x = ((A-k) - (i-k)) / (2eB) = (A - i) / (2eB)
So, my conclusion remains: the wealth tax doesn't affect the allocation into stocks, while the capital gains tax does. This also explains your second point: the two conclusions are no longer the same.
I want to distort risk-taking, I think we would all tremendously benefit from a 90% reduction in financial risk aversion of the average citizen.
Do you believe venture capitalists and the startups they fund are net-bad for society? I think they're (a) net-positive and (b) the platonic ideal of high-risk-taking, so I don't think we want to discourage risk-taking in general. I do think you can argue that leverage should be discouraged more, but I don't think a capital-gains-versus-wealth tax is the appropriate tool to do that, even if you insist on using taxes rather than regulations. For instance, you can remove the interest tax deduction.
By the lights of MPT, shouldn’t we collectively expect a higher return on all our investments if risk aversion went down?
I don't see how MPT implies this. This sounds like you're "reasoning from a price change" - i.e. what matters isn't that risk is reduced - what matters is how it was reduced.
This is a useless extrapolation theory.
Hence my use of the term "ivory tower" :p
Welfare is not the opposite of a poll tax, it’s a progressive tax that goes into the negative
Just to make sure we're on the same page - you're saying welfare is a "progressive tax that goes into the negative". A poll tax is a fixed sum demanded regardless of income.
You can decompose any tax system as the union of
- some amount of welfare you give to a household that makes zero income
- some function that, given a dollar amount tells you the marginal tax rate
In this sense, welfare and poll taxes are opposites:
- Welfare is when the government gives money from people with no income.
- Poll taxes are when the government takes money from people with no income. (albeit with some implication that the marginal tax rate is always zero)
how is a poll tax distortionary?
Well, if you want math - suppose my utility function is
U = ln(wage * labor) - labor
dU/dLabor = 1/labor - 1
∴ labor = 1
With a poll tax
U = ln(wage * labor - poll_tax) - labor
dU/dLabor = wage/(wage * labor - poll_tax) - labor
∴ labor = 1 + poll_tax / wage
So, in this model, a poll tax would cause me to work more.
If you want a story: consider someone who barely makes enough to survive - a poll tax would force them to work more hours to continue surviving.
I'm well aware of those nuances (i.e. Paasche vs Laspeyres indices).
- I don't see what that has to do with your claim that housing and energy are "heavily underemphasized".
- CPI is mostly a Laspeyres index, which means it is generally biased upwards compared to other indices (i.e. GDP deflator).
Re unemployment, I'm not sure this matters much unless you can show that the definitions have been changed to benefit someone.
More generally, you're basically saying "there exist degrees of freedom in defining these metrics".
Sure.
But the distance between that and allegations of "clear deliberate manipulation" and "cooked to hell and back by essentially every government of every State" is HUGE. You haven't even begun to cross that line.
#MotteAndBailey
KnotGodel
1yr ago
I never said it had "no deleterious effect on the economy".
I am not sure I believe that
The data is easily found.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Agnosticism (i.e. confidence in belief) is on a separate axis from atheism (i.e. direction of belief). The vast majority of atheists will be agnostic. Most religious people will be gnostic. There are some gnostic atheists but they're mostly just strawmen.
I've never understood this way of discussing (a)theism. What's wrong with just using probabilities like we do with every other belief? What does the confidence-direction distinction add to the epistemology/discussion?
My central point wasn't that you didn't know what stimulus was. It was that you ascribed the large stock returns to covid-related measures rather than unprecedented stimulus, and I believe this is wrong and demonstrates that you beating the market was, in fact, luck and not skill.
I'm not against government stimulus. In fact, I'd even consider it plausible that the central bank and federal bank have never used too much stimulus prior to 2020. But it should be obvious that they used too much in response to the covid pandemic.
Biden signed a $1.9 trillion stimulus package on March 11, 2021 - inflation was 1.7% and unemployment was 6.1%. For context, the inflation target is 2% and the median unemployment rate historically is 5.5%. In other words, the economy was only ever so slightly below average in business-cycle terms. Meanwhile, the stimulus package was larger than all stimulus spending in response to the Great Recession. And that's just the federal government. The Fed continued its quantitative easing and purchased over a trillion dollars in assets after March 11th, above and beyond it's previous purchase, all the while keep nominal interest rates at 0% (and therefore real interest rates negative). It is really hard to overstate how unprecedented the degree of stimulus was. This is why stock prices surged: the degree of stimulus was enormously unexpected and had enormous direct and indirect effects on financial markets.
Stimulus can have three effects: employment, inflation, savings. I agree it was less effective at promoting employment and inflation, but this (again) goes back to my point: it mostly promoted savings - i.e. investment. But also it's not like stimulus was completely ineffective at boosting employment: unemployment dropped from 14.1% to 6.1% in 12 months, a feat literally never seen in US history.
They had lots of choice. The most effective way to achieve their goals would have been to send checks to the unemployed. Increasing unemployment benefits is bog standard during a recession anyway. Sending checks to everyone and engaging in generic stimulus was not a forced moved on the government's part. But this is all besides the point. We're talking about financial markets, not whether stimulus is good.
Ok, but the question is NOT whether this line of reasoning is correct. The question is whether hedge funds et al had already priced it in. You have given no evidence indicating they hadn't.
Yes, this is due to forced unwinding of leveraged positions, which often results in short-term liquidity spirals. I'm not sure what your point is though?
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