Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
You are Sleeping Beauty, I am the Magician. The experimental setup is exactly the same as outlined in my previous comment, except that you deposit $20,000 with me before the experiment starts. I explain that each time I wake you up, I will hand you $10,000 of your own money and give you the option to bet at 3:2 odds that the coin came up heads. At the end of the experiment, any unbet deposits will be returned to you.
When you wake up, if you think that there is a 50% chance that the coin came up heads, then you should bet the $10,000 (because 3:2 is a better payout than 1:1). You have no way of determining which situation you woke up into, so you should take the bet every time if this is your true belief.
I am thrilled to offer you this bet. From my perspective, there is a 50% chance that the coin comes up heads, in which case you win $15,000 from me. However, the other 50% chance is that the coin came up tails, in which case you woke up and bet $10,000 on heads twice, so I won $20,000 from you. The net outcome is:
- Heads: I pay you $15,000
- Tails: You pay me $20,000
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Great Patio11 tweet:
Part of the reason for licensing regimes, btw, isn’t that the licensing teaches you anything or that it makes you more effective or that it makes you more ethical or that it successfully identifies protocriminals before they get the magic piece of paper. It’s that you have to put a $X00k piece of paper at risk as the price of admission to the chance of doing the crime. This deters entry and raises the costs of criminal enterprises hiring licensed professionals versus capable, ambitious, intelligent non-licensed criminals.
A lot of regulatory schemes are more complex than, "create a government entity that finds violations and punishes them." I have no idea whether or not the North Carolina State Board of Examiners of Plumbing, Heating and Fire Sprinkler Contractors is a wretched hive of regulatory capture and villainy, but punishing unliscensed practitioners is a key aspect of any regulatory regime involving licensing.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
I think it is very relevant even today that threats to withdraw US military forces abroad are met with bribery from foreign agents.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
I think there's a sort of Monty Hall-style switcharoo going on with regards to what Alice puts into the computer. Only what she puts in the computer on Monday matters, so she should put the probability conditional on it being Monday into the computer, but bet her true probability (since she doesn't know whether or not it is Monday) herself.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
It's a reference. My list was of course not all-inclusive. I assure you however that there exist people who are okay with white immigrants and not okay with any other immigrants.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Sorry, my comment was ambiguously phrased. I was referring to the cannonical form of the Sleeping Beauty question from Wikipedia:
Sleeping Beauty volunteers to undergo the following experiment and is told all of the following details: On Sunday she will be put to sleep. Once or twice, during the experiment, Sleeping Beauty will be awakened, interviewed, and put back to sleep with an amnesia-inducing drug that makes her forget that awakening. A fair coin will be tossed to determine which experimental procedure to undertake:
- If the coin comes up heads, Sleeping Beauty will be awakened and interviewed on Monday only.
- If the coin comes up tails, she will be awakened and interviewed on Monday and Tuesday.
- In either case, she will be awakened on Wednesday without interview and the experiment ends.
Any time Sleeping Beauty is awakened and interviewed she will not be able to tell which day it is or whether she has been awakened before. During the interview Sleeping Beauty is asked: "What is your credence now for the proposition that the coin landed heads?"
This question is not ambiguous. The correct answer is 1/3. If you ran this experiment on people who think the answer is 1/2 you could take their money.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
I phrased it a bit flippantly, but I do think that the original question is not ambiguously phrased. We do not say that people who think that there is no advantage to switching doors in the Monty Hall problem are answering a different question than the people who say that there is an advantage to switching. We say they are wrong.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
The culture war angle is that the correct answer is 1/3 and that the people who think it is 1/2 cannot comprehend a word problem and need to be put into UCSD's remedial mathematics course.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
”Is this inevitable”
Probably. Intra-coalition jockeying always peaks around this point in the election cycle. Remember all the Kyrsten Sinema hate back in the winter of 2021-2022?
Regarding this cycle specifically, the Republican coalition that won the election was pretty united that mass immigration is bad, but they weren’t in agreement on why it is bad. Some people think it’s bad because “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Some people think it’s bad because it drives down wages. Some people think it’s bad because immigrants are poor and stupid. Some people just think it’s unfair that illegals get to jump the line literally and figuratively. All of these groups will be more or less sympathetic to different particular types of immigrants.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
”Are there as many boring tomes as I would expect working over evidence for minor policy changes?”
When you actually read the Federal Register entries announcing proposed or promulgated changes, it is hard not to be awed by the sheer scope of what some guy at a desk in Washington has been up to for the last 6 months.
I looked-up a semi-random regulatory docket just for fun. Here are 60 pages from NOAA outlining the legal and factual basis for their plan to upgrade the Port of Alaska while complying with the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
For bonus hilarity, click over to the public comments tab. I assure you, this is a quite representative sample of who actually comments on these things and what they say.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
In my completely unqualified and uninformed opinion, it sounds like you should move in with her. You don't mention this as an option, and it might be good to clarify (if only to yourself) whether or not it is an option.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
It’s not just the urban poor who are on SNAP. The Democrats had a chance to make gibs into a real bread-and-butter issue, not just a culture-war distraction.
This was also a great opportunity to bait the Republicans into abolishing the filibuster, which would have helped Democrats in the long run. Zero Machiavellian instincts from these people. No wonder the base is angry.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
Batman
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
Speaking of not educating women, how is Afghanistan doing these days under the Taliban? This is not a rhetorical question. I want to know what things are actually like on the ground over there.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
why should I, as a native-born American who would qualify for Israeli citizenship, be bound by Israeli law?
I don’t think this the point. I highly doubt that Zohran Mamdani is bound by Ugandan law. Is Matt Walsh simply confused about the state capacity of Uganda and Somalia?
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
I’m not the one who wants to forbid dual citizens from holding office, Matt Walsh is (if @anti_dan is to be believed). My point is that in terms of the actual legal rights possessed by a person, being a Jewish American is functionally equivalent to being an Israeli-American dual citizen living in the USA.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
It’s hard to find a good-faith summary of Fuentes’s policy positions, so I’m going off the top of my head here:
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This clip has been going around as evidence that Fuentes wants to kill all the Jews, but the real thing he is advocating for here is executing witches. He sounds pretty serious here. I don’t think this is one of his joking-around clips. I think this would be bad policy and I disagree with it.
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In a recent episode Nick went on a big monologue about how surrogacy is evil because it rips babies away from their mothers. I disagree with this and think a ban on surrogacy would be bad policy.
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Nick doesn’t think Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, and Josh Hammer are Americans. He is typically vague on the policy details, but he rants about these three specific people almost every night. I don’t think there is any way to interpret Fuentes as not supporting revocation of their citizenship. I don’t think there is a valid basis for doing this and I disagree with it.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
You are correct that Matt Walsh’s positions are standard conservative ideals taken to their logical conclusion, my point is that Nick Fuentes’s positions are also conservative ideals taken to their logical conclusion. The only difference is that Fuentes would count Jewish identity as foreign citizenship, which it essentially is under Israeli law.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
The political realignment means that the Republican coalition is dominated by low-propensity voters. A lot of these guys show up for presidential elections every four years and nothing else.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
I agree that they come off with very different demeanors, but that's obviously not why Shapiro put out a 45-minute special episode with no ad reads. What is the actual policy opinion being expressed by Nick's, "your body, my choice," that isn't also supported by Walsh? Walsh doesn't even support rape exceptions for abortion.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
It’s hard to do the, “we are principled civic nationalists who believe in the inherent dignity of every human being,” routine when your organization employs Matt Walsh. Walsh believes basically the same things as Fuentes does. The only difference is that Walsh believes that Jews are part of based White Western Civilization, and Fuentes doesn’t. It’s incredibly transparent why Ben Shapiro is taking such a firm stance on this issue in particular. This is why Fuentes is going mainstream.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
I submit to you that the United Arab Republic would have been a lot more stable if it were contiguous. Things may have been different if Nasser had the ability to drive a tank column into Damascus. If you need to look at a map to know what country is between Egypt and Syria, go ahead.
nothing is stopping Egypt and Saudi Arabia from uniting across the Red Sea, but that's clearly not going to happen
The main thing stopping this is US foreign policy. The US funds a quarter of Egypt's military expenses (which is extremely relevant because the Egypt is controlled by the army), and defends Saudi Arabia whenever they are threatened militarily.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
$7000 is the maximum than an individual can give directly to the campaign of a political candidate per election cycle. I've been seeing it used as a meme on twitter to reference Israel-lobby influence ever since Scott wrote his political finance post a few weeks ago.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
There is a legitimate geopolitical reason for propping-up Israel, but it sounds Machiavellian when stated explicitly. Israel cuts the Arab world in half, preventing them from coalescing into a caliphate which would be a global power. Israel is the cornerstone of America's divide-and-conquor strategy in the Middle East.
You are fighting the hypothetical. This sentence is key:
In order to maintain the logic of the thought experiment, I have to offer you the bet each time you wake up. If I only offered it on the first day, that would give away that it is the first day.
You cannot decide to only take the bet on the first day, because you have no way of knowing when you wake up whether or not it is the first day. Any decision algorithm you implement that would accept the bet on the first day would also accept the bet on the second day, because there is no way within the experimental setup for you to distinguish them.
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