KnotGodel
1yr ago
So, ignoring a word tweak here/or there, they basically replaced
The report Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence indicates a range of 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year.
Given the wide variability in estimates, additional research is necessary to understand defensive gun use prevalence, frequency, circumstances, and outcomes.
I'm not sure how any of y'all are reading the new word as being notably more pro-gun-control. It seems like an accurate summary of a research area where estimates cover a 50x range.
KnotGodel
4mo ago
I'm saying psychologically health people don't see status as zero-sum.
I don't have to feel like I'm losing status if slaves are freed.
I don't have to feel like I'm losing status if I stop eating meat.
Any feeling that I'm losing status is a feature of my brain, not the world.
KnotGodel
4mo ago
You also don't have to feel like you are losing status if I fuck your wife in front of you, or force you to blow me, but I would suggest not doing so demonstrates a lack of self respect
IMO, the problem with both of those is not that I'm losing status.
KnotGodel
11mo ago
the problem is most easily solved by forcibly re-educating the peasants to say they love immigration
It's throw-away lines like this that make me avoid commenting here.
Then it's followed up by
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, while the face says "unlike those intolerant right-wingers, I'm open-minded enough to appreciate boot culture and cuisine!"
Ahh, such steel-manning, such charity - definitely no booing outgroup here!
Trying to understand why people don't take selected macro statistics as gospel truth about their own lives is, to use a common phrase, extremely out of touch.
It depends on the purpose of the discussion.
Is it to discuss policy? Is it to discuss aggregate public perception? Averages matter.
Is it to vent? They don't.
The question to ask: why are we on this forum?
why are the children of our elites so consistently idiots and drug addicts
Do have evidence that they're disproportionately idiots and drug addicts? I strongly expect the opposite.
If the HBD-Tards' and Woke-Cels' theories about race were accurate, this ought to have translated into quick and easy victory
The Allies had more than double the GDP of the Axis powers every year of the war. I don't think anyone has ever claimed that racial differences (if they exist) can trump a 2x advantage in production. It was even more lopsided regarding raw population counts. Even beyond that you're attempting to infer causation (or lack thereof) based on a correlation of n=2. That's absurd.
Is that a dodge, or are you actually saying that you wouldn't feel like you lost status if I banged your wife in front of you?
Could you maybe describe what "status" means to you?
I don't really walk around thinking "I should to X at work to gain status" or "I should make fun of Y to gain status" or "Person Z lowered my status in that meeting - I've got to be sure to get even with them." I don't think that, in order to have more/closer friends, it is important that I become more popular than someone else. I do occasionally feel embarrassed (e.g. I said something wrong in a meeting) or ashamed (e.g. I forgot about a friend's birthday).
I guess I just don't think any of these as "zero-sum".
Even in the "banged your wife" scenario - does that give you status? I don't think it would among my peer group... Would I become less popular? Would people at work think I was less competent? I don't think the effect would be very large...
Do people actually think like that? To me, it doesn't seem like a good way to approach life from either a personal-happiness perspective or a social-welfare perspective. I don't know, I find the amount of emphasis you're placing on its importance confusing. So, I see three options:
- There is some disconnect between what you and I mean by "status"
- I actually do care immensely about status - I'm just repressing it.
- Some people viscerally care a great deal about status. Others don't.
You can't expect absolute neutrality from people at all times
I don't. I expect people to follow the rules such as
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Be Kind
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Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
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Be charitable.
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Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is
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Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
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Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
The comment I was responding to violates these. The great grand parent violates these:
Noone needs to face anything, just increasingly automate weapon systems and let the peasants die. If they're not needed and can't use violence to effectively overthrow the system then why would anyone need to pay any attention to them whatsoever?
The forum is replete with obvious violations of the rules. The mods obviously won't mod comments like this, because then they'd be modding like 30% of all the comments here.
But that doesn't mean you should feel discouraged from commenting if you dissent from the consensus view.
Why not? I have better places to discuss topics like this where. I wish this place were better, because then I'd find much more value out of discussing things here, but c'est la vie. [edit: for instance, I found the /r/slatestarcodex threads much more pleasant and insightful]
KnotGodel
10mo ago
typically outnumber homicides with rifles 2-to-1
Per your same link, "total firearm" homicides outnumber "personal weapons" homicides 14-to-1. You also have to consider denominators. How many times more fistfights happen per year relative to gun fights? That is to say, all things considered, gun fights are probably 2-3 orders of magnitude more lethal than fist fights. Let's not minimize this obvious point.
When you say
Someone commits battery and risks committing murder, but because they haven't (yet?) escalated to a higher probability of death I should be upset that their victim does so first?
If your mode of moral reasoning can justify escalating from ~0.1% fatality risk to a 22% fatality risk under this situation, why not a also accept self-defense escalation to guns if the original fatality risk is 0.01%? 0.001%? If 2-3 orders of magnitude don't convince you, I'm not convinced 4-5 orders of magnitude would convince you, at which point I have to wonder if fatality risk escalation is really the model underlying your beliefs as opposed to, say, honor, fairness, etc.
but for discouraging murder via a more effective means of self-defense I'm fine with at least a couple orders of magnitude of "more effective"
But, this is an important sticking point. The only way allowing people to escalate from fists to guns reduces overall murder is if the 2-3 OOM increase in lethality is paired with a 2-3 OOM decrease in fist fights. This seems implausible. So, the only plausible conclusion is that a norm of escalating fist fights to gun fights causes a large increase in dead bodies. To me that is a steep price to pay for honor and fairness.
We are both just quibbling about numbers at this point, right?
I don't think when numbers are OOM that you can fairly describe it a "quibbling".
At what point does "if you don't want to face potentially-lethal force, don't start potentially-lethal force" become a more sensible rule than "just shake off the concussion and calculate probabilities", to you?
Definitely not when the expected loss of life is a decade (e.g. 50 years * 22% = 11) versus ~a week (2-3 OOM less). I don't think one man's honor and sense of fairness at a bar one night are worth an expected value loss of a decade of human life. Do you? Do you honestly think the deterrence effect is anything other than a rounding error next to a decade of human life lost in expectation?
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.
I just pointed out how important the distinction is between fist fights and unprovoked assaults.
Consider my previous comment as applying entirely to unprovoked assaults as well.
I just pointed out how important the distinction is between fist fights and unprovoked assaults. A world with fewer fist fights sounds nice to me, but to each their own.
Please don't imply I prefer a world with more fist fights, when I obviously don't.
A world with fewer unprovoked assaults, though, is one I'd really like to live in, even if that means I never get to blindside someone myself. Wouldn't you agree?
Sure? Though obviously the cost of achieving that world is important to consider.
Wouldn't "I can never safely give someone a black eye out of the blue" be a price so small that it's worth paying for even a slightly reduced risk of being punched and possibly even killed out of the blue?
Sure? Alas, that's not what we're considering.
Everything I'm reading about this case makes it sound like...
Good on you for being open minded. I personally don't really care about the specifics of a random particular case.
You're also ignoring the distinction between different dead bodies. Why?
Because when we're weighing pros and cons and you discussion partner ignores a 2-3 OOM factor, perseverating on a dramatically less important factor is not helpful.
If someone invents the "murder a little child" button, a magic device which can only be used once and has a fifty-fifty chance of working, would you kill them if that was the only way to stop them from pressing it?
To answer your question, I'm unsure if I would kill the button-pushing sociopath, but note that advocating killing him merely means accept a 2x decreased value of his life. Still far and away from the 2-3 OOM factor I've been harping on.
Moreover, in the minds of most people, there's an enormous difference between someone pushing a button with a specific probability of killing someone purely for the thrill of killing someone with a magic button and a drunkard throwing a punch at someone he views as disrespecting him. So even if you believe our button-pushing sociopath's life has 0 value, I don't know why you would infer the punch-throwing drunkard's life has no value. That's an enormous jump so, no, we have not "solved the problem" with your thought experiment - you've simply replaced the hard problem (is it acceptable to shoot drunks who punch people) with an easy problem (is it acceptable to shoot sociopaths who push magic buttons that kill people), all while refusing to actually grapple with the fact that you advocate cutting 10 years of life from someone in expectation because of one dumb drunk decision at a bar.
So, must we still treat attackers equally to victims?
No? You seem to think I am a blind utilitarian calculator. I'm not. But when utilitarianism says the costs outweigh the benefits by 10ish QALYs to ~0 QALYs and the benefit is a sense of fairness/justice in a brawl in a bar some random night... well, that seems like a pretty easy question for me to answer.
It seems silly to discount someone's life by 100x merely because the threw an unprovoked fist some night. It seems silly to think such a policy change would reduce fist fights by 2-3 OOM. It seems silly that fairness in a bar fight weighs more than 10 years of human life.
All else equal, all wealth should be taxed equally (say, flat 1%/y) , not income from wealth. Current tax laws encourage bubbles and poor investing. Just buy a garbage bond or shitcoin and uncle sam will barely touch it, but god helps you if you invest in a company actually making money. And don’t give me the hard-luck grandma story.
Hmm - I haven't heard this take before. Let me do some quick math, courtesy of the Markowitz model. Suppose you have two investment options:
- stocks that returns Norm(A, B)
- risk free interest rate: i
Let e be your risk aversion and let x be the the proportion of your portfolio you are investing in stocks
U = xA + (1-x)i - exxB
dU/dx = A - i - 2exB
x = (A - i) / (2eB)
Capital gains scales returns by k and variance by k^2 (where k = 1 - tax_rate):
x = (kA - ki) / (2ekkB) = (A - i) / (2ekB)
As taxes go up, k shrinks from 1 towards 0, which makes x increase. Therefore, capital gains taxes cause increased risk tolerance.
A wealth tax reduces returns by k:
x = ((A-k) - (i-k)) / (2ekkB) = (A - i) / (2ekB)
This is the same, so a wealth tax doesn't affect risk tolerance.
It’s like a poll tax on wealth, and like a poll tax, it’s very tax efficient.
I don't think this can be true. The chief academic argument against capital gains taxes is that they impose a 100% tax on consumption in the far future, which is maximally distortionary. The same is true of a wealth tax.
The problem with income tax is that it discourages economically beneficial behaviour, like working or good investing.... the state, counter-productively, eggs you on to be a bum and to stack your wealth under the mattress (ignoring inflation). Your lazy bum money should be taxed at least as much as superstar cancer-curing money.
I personally think that if society had no welfare, a flat income tax would be either not distortionary or push people to work more. Note: historically people worked much more and (e.g.) wages being 4x lower because your country is poor is equivalent to a 75% flat tax today.
I have an elegant mathematical model illustrating this result, but I think I've force-fed this forum with enough math already.
KnotGodel
1mo ago
Allow me to paraphrase your complaints from the other side of the aisle:
Trump will tell his supporters that, of course he lost in 2020 - The Establishment is manipulating things behind the scenes - everyone knows that. But Trump literally won in 2016! The media makes much ado about Biden's "dementia"! What idiots those Republicans all are! Isn't it shocking that everyone confirms/affirms this explanation!?
And what about White kid Who Was Rejected By Harvard, because of affirmative action. He literally got into U Chicago! What about all the black kids Harvard rejected!? It truly boggles the minds.
If even Trump explains the world to himself this way, what is a normal Republican supposed to think? A poor white trash family in a trailer park? How can self-exculpatory models of the world be eradicated in people with somewhat credible claims to oppression when they are so popular even among the most privileged members of society?
KnotGodel
3mo ago
- There's virtually no actual cost in having money depreciate slowly over time.
- This is a fully general argument in favor of greater economic volatility. If you believe that, you shouldn't just be arguing for a gold standard - you should be arguing for the government to artificially create recessions.
- If this is tyranny, sign me up for another!
- Plenty of governments had no issue borrowing enormous amounts during WWII, so I have a hard time viewing a gold standard as much of an impediment to that.
Where is “p”?
Sorry. I ended up using "x" in the actual math. I've edited the post to be correct
I’m gonna need a template for these equations
You might find the Modern portfolio theory article more useful or even his original paper (scihub). If you want a quick explanation
- We can approximate any reasonable utility function using a second-order Taylor series
- We can approximate investments as normal distributions
- The expected value of a 2nd order polynomial normal random variable, X, equals (up to linear transformation) E[X] - e * Var[X], where e is a parameter determined by the 2nd order polynomial and the normal distribution
- Therefore, we can approximate the problem of "choose an optimal portfolio" as "choose the portfolio that optimize E[X] - e*Var[X]
- Once we've made that leap, we can use the properties of expected value and variance to convert (a) a vector of expected values and (b) a covariance matrix of returns into an optimal portfolio
Obviously, the usual caveat applies: all models are wrong, some are useful.
[ Edit: in case it wasn't clear, I'm saying a wealth tax is better than a capital gains tax in that it doesn't distort risk-taking while a capital gains tax does]
So a 99 % capital gains tax results in everyone investing in stocks?
Yeah. Note: people would probably save less, but what the people are saving would be invested in stocks rather than bonds in this model.
I call bullshit on that. A 100% tax on everything right now is more distortionary.
Sure. I mean that according to ivory-tower theory, even a 1% capital gains tax now is equivalent to a 100% tax on far-future consumption. A 1% tax on labor income or current-consumption doesn't have that pathology.
But we have welfare, and the income tax isn’t flat. You’re very theoretical today.
Right, my main point is that, contrary to textbooks, I don't think poll taxes are actually non-distortionary. I think a poll tax (and its opposite: welfare) is distortionary.
Ignoring the motivating effect of hunger, of course.
What do you mean?
KnotGodel
11mo ago
To be completely honest, I'm not even really convinced you understand why you got your covid bet "correct".
The single most important factor in asset price movement wasn't the degree of government crackdown. It was the enormous and unprecedented degree of stimulus unleashed by the Federal Reserve and federal government. In particular
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The Federal Reserve dropped nominal interest rates. Government stimulus drove inflation. Together, these drove real interest rates literally negative. Low interest rates encourages leveraging, which drives up asset prices.
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The Federal Reserve implemented enormous quantitative easing, driving an artificial demand for assets, driving up their prices.
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Government stimulus drove profits up ~25% in real terms, driving up stock prices.
Altogether, this explains why an initial 30% drop ended up becoming a 45% surge peaking near the end of 2021. Then, as soon as the Federal Reserve started hiking interest rates and reversing quantitative easing, we saw stocks start to fall.
Why did the market take so long to price this in? Because the actions of the Federal Reserve and federal government were unprecedented and really didn't make much sense. Why were rates kept near zero when inflation hit 7%? Why did stimulus checks go out when unemployment was below 4%? None of it made any sense and all of it was completely out of line with historical precedent.
The effect of biased predictions re covid lockdowns was dwarfed by the unanticipated actions of fiscal and monetary stimulus. If I'm right, then you really made the right bet for the completely wrong reasons.
Though, to be honest, even if I thought lack of covid lockdowns caused stock prices to increase and even if you predicted this ahead of time, I wouldn't consider that a serious mark against the EMH. Consider another toy example:
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Investment return = sum of 5 dice: [3, 6, 2, 5, 4] = 20
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You have access to 3 dice: [4, 5, 6]. You therefore extrapolate that the investment return will be 20 = (4+5+6)/3*5
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The market has access to 4 dice: [4, 5, 6, 2]. They therefore extrapolate that the investment return will be 21.25 = (4+5+6+2)/4*5
You made a perfectly rational prediction. You did better than the market. And this is all perfectly consistent with the market being a better investor than you (notice they have a superset of the dice available to you).
This example is a toy. The numbers stand in for factors / arguments / evidence. You can get an answer right by virtue of having less evidence if you get lucky. From the inside, this feels rational. But, with repeated testing/betting, it is eventually revealed as luck.
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
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?
My point is that this method of reasoning is garbage that only seems useful when you are mind killed.
The specifics hardly matter.
there will always people who want to be free, and there will always be people who want to censor and control them.
That is the libertarian dichotomy.
An Effective Altruist would say
there will always be people who want to help others, and there will always people who want to ignore them or merely feel good about themselves
The Christian wold say
there will always be people who believe in Jesus, and there will always be people who reject him for a life of sin and pleasure
The Scientist would say
there will always be people who pursue truth, and there will always be people who cling to dogma
The SJW would say
there will always be people who stand up for the weak, and there will always be people trying to oppress them
etc. etc.
The Culture War is not simply the dichotomy of the free versus the controlling. That is simply the dichotomy people on this forum tend to favor.
KnotGodel
5mo ago
The one time someone tried to prove to me that the official data was too low by citing their own personal receipts, the receipts ended up matching the official data.
It would be great if one of the numerous people here making these claims had evidence that the CPI stats are being gamed instead of having to resorting to "academia and the media is biased => the BEA and BLS stats nerds are biased"
I wonder if your wondering is done in good faith 🤔
I think extremely few people (maybe even no one) pursue making LLMs liberally biased for EA reasons.
Since when has a group representing 3% of the population (vegans) taken enough power to implement "hardcore authoritarian policies and restrictions"?
Only for unhealthy minds, I think? Whether freeing slaves "reduced" the position of non-slaves is a question without an objective answer - only psychological interpretations. For instance, many Indians never eat meat and would tell you they don't feel "reduced" by this.
That post is just describing regression to the mean, which every informal group encounters. Nothing unique to EA here.
The same could be asked about any group with any large goal: companies, nonprofits, religious organizations. Nothing unique to EA here.
How do we know it is dishonorable?
won't be the last?
Do you have evidence EAs suffer from "extreme self confidence"?
Again, this isn't unique to EA. Any group with money/power attracts the power hungry. What's your point?
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