sword-of-empire
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User ID: 2136
Some important content here is that “notoriously” = one sketchy study from the sixties that’s not really feasible to replicate today. I think this is one of those claims that’s exactly the right combination of surprising enough to be interesting and intuitive enough that people just kind of go with it instead of checking. Genuinely not sure if it’s true myself; I’d be interested to hear anecdotal accounts from people who happen to have babies.
Ah okay. I agree that those firms make money but I don’t think I would call what they do technical analysis. In my mind, technical analysis is stuff like drawing lines on charts and squinting until you see patterns that aren’t there. Trading firms run a lot of different strategies but my understanding is that it’s more about anticipating various flows and the state of the order book than purely looking at price charts.
The weak form of the EMH specifically says that you can’t predict future prices based on past price data. I don’t think the existence of DE Shaw contradicts this.
sword-of-empire
11mo ago
Yeah I’m saying that you shouldn’t do this because it’s terrible risk management and probably bad in expectation. Are there worlds where the bet pays off handsomely? Sure, but you probably won’t end up in one of those worlds.
sword-of-empire
11mo ago
What are some successful TA-based hedge funds? I was under the impression that successful trading generally requires features other than price, so this would be a significant update for me.
sword-of-empire
11mo ago
I recently heard an interesting explanation for why East Asians are more likely to wear masks than other ethnic groups that doesn't rely on broad claims about culture or personality (or maybe is just upstream of those factors): smaller noses. The claim is that because East Asian noses are typically not as large as those of other races and a lot of the discomfort of wearing a mask comes from pinching or restrictions around the nose, East Asians physically feel less discomfort when wearing masks and therefore are less likely to object to doing so. I'm not sure how much explanatory power this holds vs being a cute story, but it does strike me as being a bit more parsimonious than alternative explanations like "Mongoloids are naturally subservient because <insert evopsych narrative>" and it is something most people wouldn't think of immediately because they only have first-hand knowledge of one nose size (rhinoplasties notwithstanding) and implicitly assume that everyone else has roughly the same facial-topographical experience.
sword-of-empire
11mo ago
I imagine it's pretty hard for a society to be all three of high trust, wealthy/developed, and open to immigration/naturalization. If you're high trust and wealthy (e.g. Japan, Singapore), you need to have a somewhat strict stance toward immigration, or at least naturalization, to prevent economic migrants from breaking that high-trust equilibrium. Conversely, if you're wealthy and liberal about immigration (e.g. US, Canada), it's unlikely you'll manage to build a high-trust society. And finally, If you're open to immigration and manage to remain high trust, that's probably a sign that nobody wants to immigrate (I can't think of any obvious examples here but plausibly some poor but peaceful country could fit the bill).
I think your best bets would be one of (1) compromising on citizenship for yourself by picking one of the high-trust + developed but xenophobic countries and securing citizenship for your kids via jus sanguinis if you don't have a partner yet, or (2) finding a smaller-scale, high-trust community within one of the wealthy + immigratorily liberal countries.
sword-of-empire
11mo ago
It is! Thank you for digging this up!
I haven't heard the tune physically in a long time, so it's pretty interesting to note all the subtle ways in which the version in my head has drifted from the original. I was vaguely aware that Yandex had better results than US engines for e.g. piracy and culture-warrish topics, but it never occurred to me to use it to search for this song.
Don’t forget that there’s a whole industry of firms like Rentech that trade with their own money and get consistently good results, albeit usually not as good as medallion. Sometimes people even start new ones :)
My impression from having worked at one of these firms long ago is that the famous, highly liquid markets (e.g. US equities) are indeed very competitive and efficient. If the price moves out of line you will need some serious advantages in modeling or microstructure to be the one to profit off of it. Probably the right thing to say is that the EMH is “almost true.”
What I mean by this:
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Markets aren’t magically efficient; they’re the sum of lots of people thinking really hard about the world and making bets. These people aren’t omniscient, but they don’t have to be to make money (the traders I worked with got stuff analogous to OP's COVID examples wrong sometimes but their trading was still profitable on the whole).
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If you are some combination of smart and well resourced, you can be one of these people (in a +EV way).
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(2) is pretty hard but not impossibly so, as demonstrated by the fact that lots of people manage to do it
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There are some markets where this is easier than others for various reasons like less competition
Should you yolo your life savings in the next time there’s an event like COVID where you think the market is wrong? Probably not, unless you’re extremely confident and also think you’re very well calibrated on that confidence. But on the other hand, I think it is not always right for all people to say “oh well, EMH” and use that as an excuse to never bet on anything. Maybe (not investment advice) think about how confident you are and then bet some fraction of Kelly.
Then again, if your goal is to get rich probably a better thing to do than trying to beat very competitive markets is to take advantage of (4) and build a business that takes advantage of some market that is not so efficient (generalizing this to include stuff that doesn’t look like a stock market at all).
sword-of-empire
11mo ago
Probably a long shot, but has anyone here got a copy of the hpmor-affiliated song “Hermione’s Theme: Innocence”? It’s an instrumental piece uploaded to SoundCloud by a user called PurelySadistic. I recall listening to and enjoying it around 2015 or so. I think it might have been featured in the audiobook version of hpmor at some point, but it looks like song itself has completely disappeared from the internet. If anyone happened to download a copy of it and is willing to share I’d much appreciate it :)
sword-of-empire
1yr ago
Not an explicit answer to your question, but adding in case it wasn’t on your radar: I also only recently started watching Star Trek content and found Lower Decks to be quite (American “quite”) good.
I think sweet fungus soup is something where the translation makes it sound worse than it actually is. People probably imagine a portobello mushroom in sugar syrup or something, but in reality the fungus is a crunchy/chewy, translucent thing that pairs reasonably well with a (mildly, by US standards) sweet soup that also usually contains stuff like lotus seeds. I wouldn’t really describe it as a mushroom at all. I’m not saying it’s amazing, but it can be a positive addition to a meal.
sword-of-empire
1yr ago
I've been thinking about this question a bit as well. My intuition (backed by no physical evidence) is that it comes down to something like:
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cartoons characters are more aesthetically pleasing than even attractive humans on a visceral level
I don't mean to rehash the 2D vs 3D girl meme or say something like "people are generally sexually attracted to cartoons." I mean that characters depicted in cartoons are a kind of superstimulus in the same way that no real life Big Mac has ever compared to the Big Mac you see in McDonalds commercials. Some cartoons are drawn with "ugly" art styles and some characters are intentionally made to appear ugly in-universe, but for the most part characters in cartoons have qualities like flawless skin, big eyes (more exaggerated in East Asia but still present in the West), and perfect facial symmetry--the kinds of health markers people are intrinsically drawn to, especially at an early age. They're also a lot simpler information-wise than pictures of real humans, which is probably significant (maybe it makes them easier to process or something?).
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the constraints of live action television tend to make it slower and less exciting
The most noticeable aspect of this is the cost of showing vs telling. In live action shows, this cost is very asymmetric--it's much cheaper to film a couple of guys talking for 10 minutes than to choreograph, record, and edit even a short scene where stuff actually happens. There are ways to make dialogue exciting or show instead of tell without breaking the bank in live action, but this kind of thing takes skill and creativity so a lot of live action shows end up being full of boring talking. It's also more expensive to do action than dialogue in cartoons, but my understanding is that the difference is a lot smaller, which biases cartoons toward action/showing and live action toward dialogue/telling. I'm past my prime cartoon-watching years, but I notice that my prior on "will this show be at least good enough to keep me engaged for 30 minutes" is still a lot higher for a randomly chosen cartoon than a randomly chosen live action series targeted at the same demographic.
This is my impression as well. I attended a well-funded public high school in the US where teachers made roughly what OP is quoting (100k-180k depending on seniority IIRC). A minority (maybe 20%?) of the teachers I encountered stood out noticeably from the kind of teaching quality I'd encountered before that point, i.e. "you would probably have trouble attracting this level of human capital with e.g. a 60k salary, all else being equal," and at least some of them were clearly not in it for the money. A lot of the others were phoning it in or actively bad in ways you would expect to encounter at schools with more normal salaries. I think most of them were coasting on the median quality of the students, which was pretty high. It's really hard for me to confidently say that attending that school (vs one closer to the median) had a significant positive impact on my education or the direction of my life. I definitely wouldn't use my experience to justify the claim "paying teachers 120k instead of 60k is usually worth it on the margin."
sword-of-empire
1yr ago
You might be interested in the approach described in this blog post. TL;DR take a first pass with OCR and then pass it through GPT-3 with a prompt like "The following text contains typos; please fix them." The author claims it's very accurate (enough so to support a paid product), and I thought it was a pretty clever trick when I read about it.
I think it's almost never worth it to learn a language as an adult just for fun or in order to consume media. That said, I have met several people who learned a foreign language as adults to a native-like proficiency (by my own judgement as a native speaker of that language). All of them use that language extensively in the course of their work; two of them are professors teaching either the language or a subject that requires reading difficult primary sources in the language at well-known universities. This is a non-indo-european language that's supposed to be hard for English speakers to learn, so I imagine it's even easier to find examples of people who have achieved this level of skill in the examples you named (French/German/Spanish).
My prior is that it's not really possible to learn a language well in the one-hour/day format in which foreign languages are taught in most secondary schools and language-specific supplementary schooling programs, no matter how many years you spend on it.
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