TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
No bio...
User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
There's definitely some nonsense in TA, but bundling only the bits you don't like and discarding it as "technical analysis" while leaving in the other stuff as "quantitative analysis" seems like cherrypicking. In any case, no matter what you call their strategy, some firms and individuals have long-run success in intraday trading which is a pretty clear indication that even the weak version of EMH doesn't always hold.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
I'm almost certain that funds like DE Shaw use stuff like SMA, EMA, Bollinger Bands, and other TA indicators in their purchasing decisions.
more about anticipating various flows and the state of the order book
Unless they're front-running, I don't see how they'd do stuff like this without using the order book's recent history... and the order book is just a more in-depth explanation of price, so most people would call it a form of technical analysis. Really, any form of extremely short-term trading is almost certainly going to be using TA a lot. What else would they use? FA stuff doesn't work well for intraday trading.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
I don't think we're really disagreeing, as I never disputed that society (exemplified by a magazine in this case) sees video games as inherently "lesser" than literature. I'd disagree with the truth of their assertion, but I wouldn't disagree that they'd make such an assertion at all.
It wouldn't be particularly hard to make a list like that if one put in the effort, though. A game exemplifying the scientific/engineering mindset of the West could be something like Minecraft, or Factorio for something more niche that takes it to the extreme. For a game exemplifying Western individualism and aspiration, Skyrim (or something along those lines) would do the trick.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Quant funds like DE Shaw fit the bill. Quant isn't a perfect analog, but their algorithmic trading definitely isn't fundamental analysis from what I can gather.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
The strong version of EMH says that nothing, even insider trading, could generate excess returns. That's obviously, trivially false.
The weak version of EMH just says that technical analysis can't generate excess returns. The existence of successful TA-based hedge funds goes against this pretty overwhelmingly.
However, the existence of a debate at all can imply a sort of weak-weak EMH, which means that markets are fairly efficient, and that beating them is no small feat. It'll require a lot of investigative legwork, above-average intelligence, or both.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Well, we have high literature, no high video games
Have you played a broad swathe of video games that you're confident in dismissing the entire genre as having no equivalents to "high literature"?
You sound like Roger Ebert, except replacing films with literature. He eventually backtracked what he said.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Neither of them directly impart any skills, and both should be seen as primarily leisure activities. As a side effect though, reading can improve vocabulary and spelling, while video games can improve certain types of problem solving. The effects aren't massive in either direction and a lot depends on what type of content is being enjoyed. For whatever reason, society has deemed that reading is a fantastic use of time that's worthy for its own sake, whereas video games are seen as a vice like gambling or cigarettes, though not quite as destructive.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
There are definitely some bookworms out there who are addicted, but overall you're correct.
Teenage girls get addicted to social media instead.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
For whatever reason, women seem more interested in fiction novels and men seem more interested in video games. There's some amount of crossover of course, but they're exceptions that prove the general rule. It only makes sense that women would dominate the field considering they're far more interested in it.
Of course there's the societal issues when reading of any sort, including vapid fiction novels, is held on a ridiculous pedestal whereas video games are seen as a vice and a waste of time. In reality, there's little difference between the usefulness of a teenage girl reading the latest YA novel and a teenage boy playing Call of Duty.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
This comment reminds me of this internet comic. Of course there's still a long way to go, but polls early in the primary are still fairly predictive of the ultimate outcome. For all intents and purposes Desantis is already running with the Florida legislative session just being an extended PR stunt of "what I would do if I got into federal office!". The fact that Desantis is losing support even this far out still isn't a good thing. Desantis will need to pull off an Obama vs Clinton in '08 feat to surpass Trump. The weaker he looks, the more likely other candidates are to jump in and bite into his chunk of the pie. His pseudo campaign so far has been pathetic, as it's clear he's terrified of directly attacking Trump when the reverse isn't true in the slightest.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Trump's tax cuts for the rich weren't especially great for rank-and-file Republicans. His SCOTUS appointments could have been accomplished by any R president with a heartbeat. The fact that they're more reliably conservative is more thanks to McConnell and negative partisanship leading to fewer compromise candidates. Trump actually seethed about how "disloyal" his SCOTUS appointments were, as he would have preferred lapdogs rather than principled legal scholars, but thankfully McConnell outmaneuvered him.
I definitely agree that Trump made other Republicans better though, as their MO before him was essentially "chain-surrender on cultural and social issues in order to fellate transnational corporations as much as possible". Trump wasn't as much of a break with that as some people imply, but he at least moved in the right direction.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
So you think the comment is AI-generated? That certainly seems plausible.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
This post has a lot of red flags. It's coming from a new account with 0 other posts, so there's a nontrivial chance it's a ban-evading troll trying to e.g. harvest responses for sneerclub, which this community has had issues with in the past. The syntax of the post is a bit stilted as well, indicating it's not OC but rather came from something like a news article or opinion piece, although I've put in a few sentences to search engines and can't find anything. Perhaps it's translated? Finally, it's coming from a culture war angle that people on this forum usually argue against. Stuff like "He knew the definition of the term feminism" is a big red flag. Is this asking about a boring dictionary definition of "feminism"? If so, I doubt most people would have difficulty coming up with something vaguely correct. As such, it figures that this is arguing for the sloganeering, meme definition where "feminism" means "the belief that women are people", which is a motte-and-bailey where the bailey is "if you don't agree with all third-wave feminist dogma, then you're equivalent to someone who believes women are akin to dogs or chattel-slaves".
I'll bite anyways since I think it makes for interesting discussion.
This post sounds like the Hollywood Romcom-esque advice that women often give to impressionable men that "if you want to succeed in dating, the most important factor is being Nice Guy". This is flatly nonsense. Women automatically filter out any men that don't meet a certain attractiveness threshold. The most important dating advice for men, bar none is "be attractive, and don't be unattractive". For men, this mostly involves being physically fit, having at least an OK fashion sense, being tall, and other stuff that gets stereotyped as "Alpha male". Once this basic threshold of attractiveness is reached, then other factors like personality can matter at the margins although it tends to manifest in ways that go counter to Hollywood and feminist claims, e.g. being confident and arrogant is almost certainly better than being kind but unconfident.
On section of your post illustrates this quite well:
Women look more often for personality, because they are looking for a connection with someone, while many men only look at looks, because they are mainly interested in body and sex.
The alpha male is an ideal for men, not the dream man for women. On the contrary, I've heard many nightmare stories from bad dates with these types. They sit there and flaunt themselves, and are so full of themselves that they are completely uninterested in the person they are on a date with. It's like the old joke:
No, I've talked a lot about myself. Let's talk about you. What do you think of me?
Dating the alpha male are the stories we laugh about most on girls' nights out.
Yes, women joke about arrogant assholes. But notice that the woman went out on a date with such a man in the first place. An unconfident, unattractive nerd doesn't even get a chance.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
I wish the people hyperbolically exclaiming that AI-induced human extinction is right around the corner would publicly commit to bets about when it will happen. Between this petition and Yudkowsky's "Death with Dignity" we have a lot of rationalist-adjacent people that seem to think we'll all be gone in <5 years. If that's what they truly believe then they should commit to that prediction so we can all laugh at them in 2028 when it almost certainly doesn't come true.
There's a ton of uncertainty involving AI's scalability and whether current progress will follow something like Moore's Law or if we've just been picking all the low-hanging fruits. AI alignment people are filling that uncertainty with maximally negative projections that an anti-human singularity is right around the corner. The biggest human inventions in terms of scale and impact were all the advances in mechanization of the industrial revolution, which took more than a century to unfold. The biggest invention in terms of impact relative to time was the Manhattan Project. Alignment people are saying (or at least strongly implying) that AI will have a much larger impact than the Industrial Revolution on a time-scale shorter than the development of nukes, while also being basically uncontrollable. People like Yudkowsky are smart, but they're predicting things an order of magnitude beyond the bounds of previous human history. Such predictions aren't rare, but they're usually made by snake-oil salesmen saying "This new invention will totally revolutionize everything! Trust me!"
Am I off-base here? I've been paying attention to AI developments but not to the degree that some people have, so there's a chance that there's a compelling case for AI being a combination of 1) inevitable, 2) right around the corner (<5 years away), and 3) uncontrollable.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Got a link to that post?
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Those other defenses you listed are well and good, but they don't specifically address the concern of "Why are you so sure that God doesn't exist" (bolding added this time). Those other defenses cast doubt on the likelihood of God, but none are 100% knockout blows. There's always still some chance, however small, that God (or even just some god) does exist. That's why debates on the confidence of belief are important, because a theist interpreting an atheists claims as being gnostic are almost always strawmen.
Theist: So why is your prior so low that you don't go to church, tithe, read the bible, and get into internet debates with theists?
This is a different question. Again, it's a question of "likelihood that God exists" as opposed to "when does evidence become so unconvincing that that you discount something"?
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
The concept of agnostic vs gnostic arose as a necessary defense against theists who'd retort "how are you so sure that God doesn't exist???" and try to pin the burden of evidence on the other side. Sarcastic atheists would respond with something like "how are you so sure that we weren't created by a magical Flying Spaghetti Monster?". More charitable atheists would explain the agnostic vs gnostic split.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Atheism says nothing intrinsically about moral systems. It clashes with Christianity on account of superstitions.
The argument you're making sounds to me like this:
Atheism attacks religion on grounds of superstition --> Declining religion means religious morality also declines through collateral damage --> People go looking for a new form of morality, and some decide on cultural relativism --> cultural relativism (sort of) gives birth to Critical Theory (proto wokism) --> proto wokism evolves into the modern monstrosity that wokism is today.
That's a long and strained chain of causality. Why not attack any of the links before getting to atheism? It seems like you have an axe to grind specifically against atheism, but since it's difficult to attack atheism directly you instead equate it to relativism and wokism, which it emphatically is not.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
I'm a HUGE fan of SupCom. I'm not really big on the pvp aspect, but good old fashioned comp-stomps against the Sorian AI are great.
I really wish RTS games would have tilted more towards the path of SupCom rather than Starcraft 2 and AoE2 sucking all of the oxygen out of the genre.
Great article!
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
I've explained it in a few comments downthread. Man, if anything came out of this post, it's that this forum needs more Girard. And basic metaphysics/philosophy of science.
Fair enough, though I'd say you should really provide a better explanation in the first post next time. For whatever reason, the philosophy nerds and especially the metaphysics people seem to think everyone has a very high baseline knowledge of philosophers on this forum. Some might, but I've always found metaphysics to be both highly esoteric and quite useless in the few brief forays I did on the subject.
That would more accurately be described as a type of agnosticism. A particular type, in fact.
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 don't think we're necessarily disagreeing here. To reiterate, I'm saying that everyone should default to being (agnostic) atheists until they've been given sufficiently compelling evidence to believe otherwise.
The claim is that wokeism was only able to rise so quickly and so broadly was due to the effects of atheism on the masses
This sounds like a "wokeism is just the lack of religion" argument that I mentioned up above. Your only articulation on this point in the top post was "Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses". I don't really follow. I'm assuming you're talking about cultural relativism here? Modern wokeism really isn't relativistic; it's morally absolutist about its causes so I really don't know what you're getting at.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
But consider the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory, or further implying that shoes are atheists.
What in the heck are you even saying here?
To the rest of your post, atheism is correct in the sense that if there's not sufficient compelling evidence then people should default to a position of not knowing instead of just blindly believing things on faith. This jives pretty well with the rationalist movement that this forum is a descendent of.
Atheism used to be pretty blue-coded back in the Bush days when proto-Wokeists teamed up with principled atheists to lambast the evangelical hegemony of the early 2000s USA. The movement splintered when the principled atheists like Dawkins essentially said "actually our critiques apply to ALL religions, like Islam too", which caused consternation with the proto-Wokeists since Muslims are blue-coded. This caused the Atheism+ to be born to try to explicitly pivot the movement towards social justice and woke causes, but the inconsistencies were big enough that the movement collapsed almost immediately. Atheism as a political movement has effectively no power today, even though the rates of irreligiosity continue to increase.
Implying atheism gave rise to wokeism is nonsense. The two were aligned a few decades ago, but they have very separate origins, goals, motivations, etc. which is why they split.
If any group is given the kid glove treatment on this forum, it's religious people themselves. I've seen a lot of people here argue junk like "wokeism is just the lack of religion" (it's not) or try to promote a revival of religiosity by cherrypicking parts of religion that present it as an almost godless political philosophy for conservatism while ignoring the superstitious parts like, say, the whole origin story, the concept of eternal salvation, etc.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
I certainly don't mean that whoever responds has to do/fund the survey themselves, just that they should cite some form of data done by someone else.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Aella has a response to these types of questions here. I don't know how you'd ever get population-level statistics on these types of questions without going through the task of asking every single person.
The proper response to data quality questions is to respond with better data, not throw away all conclusions totally because they're politically inconvenient (which is what a lot of political partisans like to do). The problem is that research is very thin on these types of questions, so oftentimes there's not a lot of counterdata to respond with. In such a case, some data > no data, just keep in mind the error bars are higher than they would be if this was an established survey house polling on a traditional question like "who do you want for president".
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Monogamous men in long-term relationships aren't doin too hot
A recent post by Aella goes over some statistics on marriage and relationships with a focus on the male perspective. The results are... pretty awful. It's a well-known fact that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, 70% of which are initiated by women, and that family courts are heavily biased against men. This makes marriage an inherently risky proposition, as people are putting a substantial chunk of their life on the line on what amounts to coinflip odds.
So what about the men who pass that check and remain married? Is it all sunshine and rainbows for all of them? Well, obviously not, as there are common tropes of bitter old couples who argue with each other over tons of small things, and of couples where the passion has long since dissipated but they remain together out of convenience. What proportion of marriages are unfulfilling like this? There hasn't been much research or data on this but Aella reveals that the answer is, unfortunately, most of them.
On the question of "Are you satisfied with your sex life?", men are indeed quite satisfied if they're in relationships that are less than a year old, but the rate of agreement drops precipitously as the relationship progresses. By the time the relationship is 6-8 years old, men flip to being net-unsatisfied with their sex life. It continues getting worse and worse over time, although at a slower rate. For relationships that are 12+ years old, ~53% of men report being unsatisfied with their sex life compared to 41% who are satisfied. More than twice as many men report being severely unsatisfied (13.7%) compared to the number who are strongly satisfied (6%). An unsatisfying sex life has a strong negative correlation with overall relationship satisfaction, and a strong positive correlation to agreeing with statements like ”My partner doesn't excite me” (r=0.47), ”My relationship causes me grief or sorrow” (r=0.44), ”In hindsight, getting into this relationship was a bad idea” (r=0.42), and ”My partner judges me” (r=0.31). It also often leads to cheating. By the time relationships are 22 years old, over 40% of men self-report cheating at least once, while over 20% of women report the same.
So for men, opting for marriage seems like an exceedingly bad option because they not only have to pass the 50/50 on whether the marriage collapses into a divorce, but then they also need to hope their relationship remains net-satisfying in the long run when only around 40% do. Modern relationships age like milk and doing the math on the two probabilities (0.5 * 0.4 = 0.2) means marriage only has about a 20% chance of being satisfying in the long-term. To be fair, relationships in history also had to deal with one or both sides becoming unsatisfied, but the lust-focus of modern marriages make them particularly susceptible to problems compared to the more contractual marriages of history.
This has the garden gnomes problem of "ok, so what ARE they using?"
Let's arbitrarily assume that TA indicators are either not used in their trading strategies at all, or are simply used to confirm preconceptions of better indicators. I doubt this is really the case, but I'll entertain the notion for the sake of the argument.
In that case, what are the better indicators they're using? To use your example, what's the "science" here? They have to be using some other indicators that enables long-run success of short-term intraday traders. Whatever those indicators are, they're still going to prove the weak version of EMH incorrect.
More options
Context Copy link