KnotGodel
1yr ago
Working in tech is considered to be relatively high status
I think it depends on how you define these things.
Almost all the status engineers have comes from their earnings, and if you take an engineer making $150k and a lawyer, artist, writer, etc making $150k, the latter will be viewed as higher status.
So, this all runs into a definitional question. Is tech high status? Or is being rich high status and tech is low status? idk - there's no "answer"
KnotGodel
1yr ago
and then demanded Kanye be cancelled
How does the linked tweet demand Kanye be cancelled?
KnotGodel
4mo ago
To clarify: are you arguing that subscribing to utilitarianism causes people to be more likely to cheat on their romantic partners?
Or are you merely exploring how utilitarians rationalize cheating - as opposed to how people of other ethical persuasions rationalize it?
KnotGodel
1yr ago
To add some data: Israel isn't an outlier in terms of patents per capita or citations per capita either, ranking #16 in patents and #37 in citations.
Israel faces some pretty bad headwinds:
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it's far from other developed countries
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it exists with a perpetual risk of conflict, which makes it unattractive for investment
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they spends 6% of their GDP on the military; mandatory military service taking ~6% of each person's career away
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it has virtually no natural resources
KnotGodel
1yr ago
IIRC, literally no Soviet or Russian leader has ever been killed in modern times (e.g. post WWII). This despite Russia being involved in quite a few wars. Even just looking post-collapse, we see exactly one leader who lost a war: Boris Yeltsin ordered a ceasefire just a couple months before an election - he won. He survived 7 years after leaving office, and (afaik) didn't suffer at all for having lead Russia to its first military defeat.
You might be right that losing a war is theoretically a potential cause of a coup. But, from what I've gathered, Putin has significantly more power than Yeltsin, so why should he be worried about literally being killed for simply not winning a war?
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
But it seems outrageously myopic and self absorbed to conclude that the people focused on "Twitter experts" (which include everyone from the media up to the Chief medical advisor to the President) care more about political consequences than the truth
Let me be clearer. I care far more about ensuring I believe the truth than I do about whether society believes the truth. I didn't mean to imply the "power" perspective was bad/wrong/useless.
What's more, you have developed a definition of expert which renders everything you say inscrutable (at best) to everyone else, which is generally only good for sticking your head in the sand, not for engaging in thoughtful conversations.
I care about having accurate beliefs about specific things (e.g. HBD, causal effect of college attendance on income, etc). Because of this perspective, I don't really care if Experts™ are biased. I do care if specific "experts" are biased or have poor epistemological hygiene - though, even there, I care more about whether particular papers are biased.
I don't think this is "sticking [my] head in the sand" - I think it's focusing my "thoughtful conversation" energy elsewhere.
Wrong in the sense that the official data turned out to be false? No. The one time someone gave me concrete anecdotal data - it closely matched the official data. So, I haven't been given any evidence the official data was wrong/falsified.
Wrong in the sense that high inflation ended up persisting higher than I (or the market/Fed) expected? Yes.
Wrong in the sense that I think my approach to the question was worse than the competition. Not really. I don't think "who got that one random prediction right" is a good way to check who will do the best at predicting in general. I will say, my view has become a little more nuanced, but it's fundamentally the same.
I will also note that few on this site (any?) actually gave a concrete predictions on which to judge them, so I'm not even sure any of them did do better. Predicting "inflation will be higher than expected" has a 50% chance of being right by default and even higher if you allow yourself degrees of freedom of what "expected" means.
You reasoning is largely faulty:
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"I beat the market once, so the market is inefficient" is pretty obviously faulty. You might as well say "I beat the world champion poker player in three hands, so I'm obviously better."
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Pointing to one investor who thought he saw the 2008 crisis coming is also not a knock-down argument. Even if you ignore luck in the sense of randomly getting an investment decision correct, it is still entirely possible that specific investors can see something coming while the market as a whole is efficient in the sense that it's not generally worth trying to beat it (even for the investor who beat it in this particular situation). [ As a toy example, suppose there are 1,000 factors to think about. Suppose if you thought of the correct 3, you could have seen the 2008 crisis coming. If you chose 10 random factors to think about. Your odds of seeing the crisis coming would be 1,384,725-to-1 and it is therefore not worth you spending the time to think about it.]
Broadly speaking, the EMH is largely correct within conventional liquid asset classes over short time horizons during stable economic conditions. It is frequently incorrect between illiquid asset classes over long time horizons in unstable economic conditions. There is a continuum between these two investment scenarios.
Concretely, if you're day-trading stocks during a boom, you're probably playing a losing game. If you're deciding between buying long-term stocks, bonds, or housing during a financial crisis, it is quite plausible that you can find significant relative alpha.
Pragmatically, the most valuable investment questions are typically related to avoiding taxes and choosing appropriate degrees of leverage given your age, life plans, risk tolerance, and interest rates. You can achieve several extra percentage points in risk-adjusted returns by carefully considering those questions.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
The people responding to you either don’t know or don’t care what “association” means.
But, I suspect that most attacks on gay people are by other lgbt people for the same reason most attacks on black people are by black people: that’s who they spend their time with.
So, it’s not obvious to me that P(anti-gay | attacked gays) is actually greater than P(anti-gay)
This might be a language barrier issue but that is not what you wrote. An equality is not an implication
In the above, I'm using equality in the way typical in programming, not mathematics. Setting B = A, then setting C = -A, then setting D = B+C. In this way, any change to B causes a change to D. This is one of the two most common ways to use the "=" symbol across countries and languages.
Indeed, it's probably worth pointing out that causation is not an implication - a distinction you seem unclear on.
acknowledging the presence of a 3rd unidentified factor that can overpower heritability you've effectively falsified the the bulk of the HBD-advocate's claims
Even ceding everything else, how can the mere existence of a factor that can occasionally have a larger effect than genes, "falsify" HBD? Like, an HBD-advocate might think a black man will statistically beat an asian man in a fight due to being geneticlly stronger. If you give an asian man a gun and they shoot a black man, how exactly have you disproven HBD?
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Re intelligence, the difference between the average SAT score from the poorest families and the richest families is about 2 z-scores - ditto for parental educational attainment. SAT scores correlate strongly with IQ, so the idea that the children of elites are idiots seems obviously false.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Re drugs - I did some googling:
tl;dr - among teens/young adults
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low SES predicts more smoking
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high SES predicts more alcohol and marijuana
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the evidence is unclear for harder drugs
A 2009 meta-analysis found
There was consistent evidence to support an association between lower childhood SES and later drug use, primarily cannabis use. However, few studies examined cannabis dependence, and studies of more problematic forms of drug use gave contradictory results
A 2010 study found
Higher parental education is associated with higher rates of binge drinking, marijuana and cocaine use in early adulthood. Higher parental income is associated with higher rates of binge drinking and marijuana use. No statistically significant results are found for crystal methamphetamine or other drug use. Results are not sensitive to the inclusion of college attendance by young adulthood as a sensitivity analysis.
A 2012 study found
Smoking in young adulthood was associated with lower childhood family SES, although the association was explained by demographic and social role covariates. Alcohol use and marijuana use in young adulthood were associated with higher childhood family SES, even after controlling for covariates.
Another 2012 study found
Except for alcohol abuse, substance use rates were systematically higher in individuals with low, rather than intermediate/high, socioeconomic position (age and sex-adjusted ORs from 1.75 for cannabis use to 2.11 for tobacco smoking and 2.44 for problematic cannabis use)
KnotGodel
4mo ago
I think there are two levels to an answer here. The first is to take your framing and dive into the difference between intelligence and perceived intelligence. I think there are two important things here: motivation and legibility.
Plenty of genius-level people just don't spend their time in smart-seeming disciplines. One of the smartest people I knew graduated from college at the age of 18, was an international chess master, and wend to work at a FAANG. Then he left to become a baker. This outlier aside, I suspect that when a man realizes he's good a math/writing/etc, he is disproportionately likely to reorient his life to spend oodles of time on the subject. This brings me to...
Legibility. The guy in class answering all the questions may or may not be the smartest - but he definitely appears the smartest. The guy who aces the test may or may not be the best in industry or in research, but a test score is much more legible than the latter two. Intelligence related to emotions, socialization, and even words are all much less legible than intelligence related to math and coding and engineering. But it is crucial (in life, really) to avoid conflating "harder to measure" with "less important". Also, having the confidence/narcissism to state and defend your beliefs is probably only loosely related to intelligence, but probably strongly related to perceived intelligence.
As an aside intelligence is academically defined as the principle component vector of academic test scores. Do you know what one of the strongest predictors is? Vocabulary size (r=0.83), followed by similarities (r=0.80). Both are much stronger predictors than arithmetic (r=0.68). Yet, a math-smart person is typically considered by people to be obviously smart, while intelligence in other disciplines is less obvious.
The second level is psychological. Why do you care about your partner's intelligence?
Examples:
- You worry about her ability to make money.
- You worry about other people's opinions of your intelligence.
- You worry that your difficulty seeing her as smart indicates a character flaw on your part.
If this were me thinking through this about myself, I would also ask myself why, on some level, I want to believe she is less intelligent. On an internet forum, such a presumptuous question is probably out of place. I will note though, that as someone widely considered a "math wiz" growing up
- It is psychologically comforting to believe that being math-smart is super special awesome
- If you spend thousands of hours doing math... you're going to end up believing that math is Important. The same is true of anything you spend time doing.
KnotGodel
4mo ago
I think the focus on censorship is misplaced. Censorship is one of the many ways a Culture War can play out, and it is neither necessary nor sufficient for showing a Culture War is occurring. Consider, for instance, a racial minority marching for civil rights. It doesn't matter whether there is censorship - that is quintessentially culture war. Conversely, consider censoring how to make nuclear weapons - that's not a meaningful component of any significant Culture War.
A culture war happens if at least one side decides that the other side is so wrong/dangerous that it needs to be converted
I agree with this. A Culture War is created by two groups of people attaching so much value to a dichotomy that converting the other seems important. So, necessary conditions for a Culture War are
- A dichotomy [ Edit: or two? I remain agnostic on the extent to which each group can have separate conceptualizations of the dichotomy ]
- Value placed on the dichotomy enough to prompt both ends to attempt convincing others
If the point is merely that you shouldn't blindly take numbers from models at face value, that point is well taken. But, for all his criticism of models, Stark doesn't really give any alternatives. Ultimately, we as people and civilizations have number-related decisions to make and those numbers/decisions have to come from somewhere.
Anyway, more generally, I have a hard time taking someone's abstract arguments seriously, when their concrete arguments are bad. For example, Stark refutes the idea of using expected value, saying
There is evidence that human preference orderings are not based on probability times consequences, i.e., on expected returns or expected losses. For instance, there is a preference for “sure things” over bets. Many people would prefer to receive $1 million for sure than to have a 10% chance of receiving $20 million, even though the expected return of the latter is double
This is correct, but is solved by using an increasing, concave function to convert wealth to utility - an idea that is is extremely old, and is almost always used in actual economic literature. See, for instance, virtually anything written on investment in the last 50 years.
He then says
In a repeated game, basing choices on expectations might make sense, but in a single play, other considerations may dominate
But, again, the traditional academic approach is to maximize log-wealth in iterated games, since this strategy (with probability approaching 100%) out-performs naive linear wealth optimization.
These aren't obscure ideas he's ignoring - they're ideas you'd expect most economics undergraduate to encounter, let alone a professor. Why isn't he mentioning them? Lack of knowledge? Dishonesty? Thinking the counter-arguments are obvious? I don't know, but I do know those paragraphs burn a lot of credibility in my eyes.
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.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Wrong.
Causation does not require correlation.
Consider the causal network
B = A
C = -A
D = B+C
There will be no correlation between B and D, even though B causes D.
An HBD advocate might say IQ causes greater output/capita but fewer people (via lower birth rates). This would cause an unknown correlation between IQ and total GDP.
Moreover, again, a correlation with n=2 is not even good evidence of correlation - especially when you are literally cherrypicking to prove your point.
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
The more obvious cause of the poor performance of DIS is increased competition (Netflix, Amazon, Apple, YouTube, etc) and Covid reducing box office sales.
Pre-covid, Disney repeatedly broke box office ticket sale records. Of their top 10 grossing movies of all time, 9 are from within the last 8 years (7, adjusted for inflation) - this on top of Covid eating into 1-2 of those years. This suggests that, contrary to your claims, their ability to produce watchable movies is not really a driver of their demise.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
The people running the place would likely end up dead
Why on Earth would Putin lose his life if he lost the war?
If you meant people besides Putin, whom do you mean? Who is this class of people who both have the power to perpetuate the war and not the power to keep themselves alive should it end poorly?
KnotGodel
4mo ago
Inflation helps debtors and hurts savers
Unexpected inflation helps debtors and hurts savers. That's a pretty big difference, and I see no reason to expect the market to be biased in its inflation forecasting with either a gold standard or fiat currency.
you’d kind of suspect a country that money isn’t sound to become less interested in investing long term
Sure, price/inflation volatility is bad. The obvious next question is whether a gold standard makes inflation volatility smaller or larger. My money is on "larger" for the US, but I admit it's a hard question to answer.
perhaps more likely to invest in more volatile assets
I don't think so?
Per the Markowitz Model, if you are allocating your money between a risk free asset that returns R and a risky asset that returns Norm(µ, V), you should put this proportion in the risky asset to maximize expected utility:
(µ - r) / (2 * e * (1-t) * V)
where e is a risk aversion parameter and t is the capital gains tax rate. Inflation should push both µ and r up the same, so it shouldn't affect how much is invested in risky assets. If you add extra variance, U, to both the risky and riskless investments, the formula doesn't change, either, so I'm skeptical price volatility changes asset allocation either.
Also, you’d suspect bankers to become worth more as the Cantillion effects run rampant encouraging the financialization of the economy.
Again, I'm pretty sure the Cantillion effects are only worse if you believe the gold standard reduces CPI volatility. That has yet to be argued here, let alone proven.
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
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
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:
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)_/¯
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