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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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"Confidence - 100% - I don't get these things wrong"

Do you know that saying something like that makes me lose confidence in you? No one should be 100% confident about vague future things, and not realizing that is a pretty big strike against you.

(FWIW, I agree that any housing drop won't be that big -- I think also because there's a global move to finding 'safe assets' (still) and real estate is a pretty good one, at least in bigger cities. I'm only about 60% confident though, because I really don't do much in that economic space.)

Confidence - 100% - I don’t get these things wrong

Do you know that saying something like that makes me lose confidence in you? No one should be 100% confident about vague future things, and not realizing that is a pretty big strike against you.

It reminds me of a story Russ Roberts at EconTalk tells about about the Stanford professor Ron Howard. Ron used to require students to assign a confidence to each of their answers on an exam. He would adjust the points they got based on their certainty - the higher the probability the student assigned to his or her answer, the more points they got if it was right. And he implored students to never ever assign 100% probability to an answer, because if you assign 100% probability to an answer and it's wrong, you get negative infinity points and you fail the exam. Alas, some students still put 100% probability.

It seems unlikely that this professor had come up with a scheme where the optimum thing to do is to state your actual confidence in your answer, so exams would be passed mostly by finding the optimum ffunction of fake confidence to real confidence to put down. Having exams that get passed mainly on whether you can hack the scoring system rather than on whether you get the right answer is a bad idea.

Having exams that get passed mainly on whether you can hack the scoring system rather than on whether you get the right answer is a bad idea.

Agree because the world should be fair, but disagree because it isn't. Learning to "hack the exam" works very well in any organization, not just the academy. He's unwittingly preparing his students to play the stupid games they will play in real life.

That was heavy sarcasm at the original poster with no experience giving 90% confidence.

Especially since he entirely missed anything related to real estate finance on existing real estate.

Well, I'll just say I missed that entirely. I'm not sure if that's Poe's law, or something else (my own shortcoming? forsooth!)