Very vague question: How we can estimate my real-world impact when betting on a prediction market?
Let's say I raise a fund of 100 mln$, and then go all-in for "No" on "Will Putin resign by 1 April 2022?"
Should I expect some of his friends say to him: "You gonna resign anyway, let's at least make some money on the way out". They bet a few grand on a "Yes", announce resignation – PROFIT.
I lose my 100 mln$ (mostly), but this way I "buy" my future. (Literally buying "futures").
Sounds too naive, I know. Are there examples where this worked, in a brief history of low-liqudity prediction markets?
P.S. Idea stolen from "Assassination Politics", but I wanted to take a wholesome spin on that.
Given how high (>1%) the estimates are for a gigadeath famine, and how cheaply alternative food sources could be researched and developed, I suspect the most cost-effective way to save lives at the moment is to support AllFED (https://twitter.com/ALLFEDALLIANCE).
That goes back a long way. Back to the Carter administration, when federal money for alternative energy was plentiful. There were a number of proposals for harnessing tides, waves, and ocean thermal gradients to generate electrical energy. I think the basic problem with all of these was low energy density, combined with the very harsh ocean environment.
TL;DR: Putin and his oligarch buddies are a successful branch of the Mexican avocado mafia. This assertion explains nothing less than the hierarchy of Russian oligarchs, the structure of the Russian economy, and why Putin launched the Ukraine war (and all the others) despite the predictable sanctions.
Summary: The standing of a Russian oligarch is inversely proportional to their ability to manage complex businesses. Mafia are not the best and brightest, so they only (barely) manage to manage relatively simple businesses like oil and gas. On the other end, hightech like complex machinery is left to stupid engineer nerds who got nothing to say among the real men. Russia doesn't export their own high-tech products, because it's too complicated for simpleton Mafia and would thus enrich and eventually empower the wrong people - the stupid nerds. So the nerd businesses must be sabotaged wherever possible, even if it means that Russia becomes entirely dependent on imports for such goods.
The war in Ukraine is a show of force to bully their neighbors, which is the only thing the Mafia is actually good at, and which is a perfectly rational decision for the Mafia. It is the basis of their business, their means of production - if you want to bully your neighbors into submission, you got to look and act the part. The entirely predictable Western sanctions are also a feature, not a bug: Inflation and seizing of assets abroad hurts the stupid nerds and helps the Mafia's export-oriented businesses. And if the sanctions are ramped up and targeted to a point where they threaten the very existence of Putin's avocado Mafia, then it was a miscalculation on Putin's part because he was surrounded by Yes Men who would tell him anything to stay on his good side.
We are https://hookelabs.com, a family-owned company (15 years old, ~50 people but growing fast) based in Lawrence MA USA (30 min north of Boston/Cambridge). Our focus is research on autoimmune diseases (multiple sclerosis, colitis, arthritis, etc.), but we’re also branching out into development of scientific equipment.
You’d be the third regular SSC/ACX reader here (that I know about).
About 80% of the work we have now is in Python/NumPy, with another 15% in C (or Rust if you prefer), and 5% “other” including Google Apps Script. You don’t need to be able to do *all* of that.
The Python/NumPy work is on PCs and Raspberry Pi. The C/Rust work is on microcontrollers.
We have a lot of different projects, large and small. These include:
• Image analysis in Python/NumPy
• Embedded systems work on Raspberry Pi and microcontrollers
• Web-based UI development for scientific analytical equipment (mostly image related)
• Act as mentor to other sw developers
We could also use some help with IT stuff – we have a full-time IT person but he’s pretty overloaded. (We run Windows networks.)
This is a good position for a person who gets bored easily - you'll get to juggle projects, to some degree, to your taste, so long as they all move forward at some reasonable rate.
I don’t really expect one person to be able to do all this stuff, but the more you can do the better.
I’d prefer a full-time, on-site person, but we’ll also consider part-timers and people working from home (part of the time). Hours and most other things are very flexible. We offer all the usual benefits. We pay well and expect high performance.
To apply send a CV to <jobs (at) hookelabs.com>; put “Software Engineer” in the subject line.
How is zlibrary giving me much better book recommendations than amazon?
Amazon has a virtually infinite dataset and infinite money to hire programmers. Zlibrary is probably one or two anonymous guys hiding in some former soviet country that doesn't extradite to the US.
It could be that the average zlibrary user is more similar to me than the average amazon user. But if Amazon had good algorithms that shouldn't be a problem -- there are probably way more people like me on amazon than people like me on zlibrary, and ways of finding them algorithmically.
I'd assume that Amazon is putting their fingers on the scale to make sure you see the books that make them the most profit, not the ones you most want to see.
This study says that, as a nation, we've lost 824,097,690 million IQ points due to lead exposure. I have yet to read the article, but I find it an interesting way to frame a serious issue. But as Kevin Drum pointed out, it's a stunning misuse of significant digits... ;-)
A single IQ point increases adult income by ~1k/year in current dollars (based on eyeballing this graph and adjusting for inflation https://pumpkinperson.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/dollarbar.png), and income scales a bit faster than inflation, and adults earn for about 50 years, so the cost of losing 8e8 IQ points among youth now would be at least 8e8*1e3*50 = 4e13 dollars of lost individual income (even before considering Hive Mind style network effects which are probably even bigger than the individual effects). That's 1.3x the entire US national debt.
Some of those dollars are surely zero-sum, i.e. if you raise everyone's IQ, the total amount of useful resources doesn't necessarily increase, so total real income doesn't necessarily increase.
On the other hand, raise intelligence and the general amount of innovation could increase, which could then increase the amount of useful resources. It seems like raising *everyone's* IQ is unnecessary for that beneficial outcome, but there are probably some other benefits of higher IQ among the general public too.
If natural resources were a bottleneck, we wouldn't have had all that income growth worldwide over the last hundred years. >99% of earth's surface is still uninhabited by humans. I don't worry about running out of any natural resources in the future either. One of the unsuccessful book contest entries last year was for a pamphlet by Tim Worstall on that: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M1m8o1HInGYJR3cEMYZ6TQgNmeBOWo98YC6djNnFWf0/edit#heading=h.6wuv83sms3jq
Yes, but I don't think it's significant. Higher IQ increases productivity within the same job, plus opens up whole new types of jobs in the O-ring sector. I'm also ignoring positive network effects which are probably bigger than total individual effects. And total individual effects are probably an OOM bigger than the zero-sum individual effects.
One issue I don't see much discussed in the context of climate change is the effect of warming on the amount of habitable land. As temperature contours are pushed north in the northern hemisphere land that was too cold to be habitable becomes barely habitable, land that was barely habitable becomes somewhat better, and so on down the line. The net effect is to increase the amount of land suited to human habitation. At the same time, some land that is now almost too warm for habitation gets a little warmer, which decreases the amount of land suitable for habitation.
I have done back of the envelope calculations suggesting that, with 3°C of warming, the gain in land from the first effect comes to the equivalent of about three-quarters the area of the U.S., the loss of land from the second to about half as much. If so these are large effects that ought to be taken into account. Does anyone here know of published estimates, ideally better than I can produce? Along similar lines, are there published estimates of the total loss of usable land due to sea level rise? My guess is that it is much smaller, but I could be wrong.
There's a paper that goes into that subject in depth, I'll see if I can find it sometime. I recall most of the increase in available land is permafrost in Russia, which isn't very arable.
Have you read Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters by Steven E Koonin? It doesn't discuss agriculture at length, but it discusses climate change in general in the same honest and unideological way that you propose.
I'd be much more interested in the effect on agriculture. How many people can live in the world mostly comes down to how much food the world can produce, not how much space there is for homes.
Emm. Food production capacity, in the absolute sense, hasn't been an issue since the Green Revolution. There are issues with input & processing considerations, which can vary from place to place (water in CA, roads & docks in less developed places) but we-humans command a staggering variety of crops and livestock breeds, and the ability to modify fertility of soil to very large degrees. Climate change will necessitate changes in production methods on the margins, not in the whole.
I believe that was what he was calculating, not housing space. In the northern hemisphere there is a lot of land that is currently too cold (Canada and Russia mainly) for much agriculture, that could become better suited if a little bit warmer. There is more ocean water in the areas that may become too warm for agriculture, so there would be less loss of arable land than the gain. That is, if I'm understanding David correctly.
Housing space isn't a serious constraint in most of the world. I was thinking mostly of agriculture, more generally of land warm enough for people to do things on it. I don't have data on how far north crops are grown, did find a map on population density. If someone knows of good information on where crops grow, that would be useful.
It occurs to me that I do have a map showing climate zones in North America, so could try working from that.
Filmed back in the day, when, if you needed hundreds of horsemen, you didn't fake something up with CGI, you went down to Argentina and hired their army. The thing they're yelling is, more or less, the Cossack equivalent of "U! S! A!". The story itself is a bit of pan-Slavic romanticism from the days of the Russian Empire, but it's still Ukrainians kicking butt. And Yul Brynner still rocks, as does the score.
Yes I have, and yes it is. It seems to happen most when I have collapsed a thread. It may be that it is forgetting to take the no-longer-displayed text lines into account.
> that Anatoly Karlin was wrong before he was right.
He seems to be mostly right when reading Putin, but I worry about his understanding of the situation in Ukraine. On his substack, he correctly predicted on the eve of the invasion that Russia would attack in the next 48 hours (at 70%), but also claimed that fighting would last less than a week (90%, and with lots of weight on victory in the first two days): https://akarlin.substack.com/p/happening-the-ukraine-war-2022?s=r
Since then he seems to have swallowed the Russian propaganda whole. He seems to think that economic gifts can make people forget the killing of civilians (e.g. https://twitter.com/akarlin0/status/1500299500342157317?cxt=HHwWioC56cqckdIpAAAA) and that the sanctions will mostly be bad for the "eurocels" (rich Russians that live in London, Milan, etc). Both seem to me to be a pretty dramatic misreading of the situation. Past injustices live on long in the memory of people: Hitler came to power by bashing the contract of Versailles, Isis recruited from people burned by the American invasion 15 years prior. It is difficult to imagine Ukrainians simply accepting to be part of Russia. And with Russia's economy estimated to shrink 7-11% this year (even without an export ban on oil, which might still be implemented) and many European shops gone, Moscow might be much less fun soon.
(also, note how he wrote "(Z, Z)" behind his name. "Z" has become a symbol for supporting the war since it is written on many Russian military vehicles. I would assume that he writes it this way to further make fun of people who add their pronouns behind their names. Is that the kind of guy Scott should signal-boost?)
I would like to calculate that X amount of alcohol caused the same number of germ line mutations as Y years of parental age, but I can’t find any good sources quantifying alcohol’s effect on the germ line mutation rate. Any carcinogen would increase it, and alcohol is strongly carcinogenic. NORML used to publish calculations of how alcohol is a zillion times worse than weed even before considering the negative utility of these germ line mutations. (My aunt was a heavy drinker for years and her son is anomalously dumb relative to everyone else in the extended family, to the point that he can barely hold down a job, which sucks a lot. I don’t know if the alcohol is to blame but it probably worsened the odds. https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2018/jan/03/alcohol-can-cause-irreversible-genetic-damage-to-stem-cells-says-study Seems like it could also apply to ova.) De-alcoholizing society seems like a worthy EA goal. Not prohibition 2.0 but changing education to treat alcohol the same as tobacco. Standard advice should be to totally avoid it. There’s been a massive success in tobacco harm reduction over the last few decades and I see no reason that can’t be replicated with alcohol.
Hm. Assuming there's no more direct method, you could try pedigree approaches. Something like: if alcohol really is causing nontrivial amounts of trait-lowering de novo mutations (which BTW I really doubt), then correlations with alcoholic parents should be more than twice that aunts/uncles etc, because the more distant relatives do not have the parents' new mutations. Combine that with total units of alcohol consumed over a lifetime before conception of the child, then you should be able to back out that 'X IUs of alcohol cause -Y SDs on IQ [or whatever]'. You could also try to count de novo counts directly in children of alcoholics and then use other estimates of pathogenicity fraction + average effect size of a harmful de novo. I suppose you could also try to do time-series or look for discontinuities by age: do kids of people just past the legal drinking age suddenly become dumber?
Yes. Sugar is probably responsible for at least as many health problems as alcohol. People could be educated to avoid it and the distribution/advertising of it could be subject to some restrictions like tobacco.
I've come to distrust in vitro studies as predictor of in vivo outcomes. Eremolalos is correct. You've already got abundant evidence for the negative health and social impacts of alcohol. And by referencing studies whose conclusions may or may not have any detectable effect on living populations will likely weaken your arguments (by allowing others to quote studies with different conclusions). Once it comes down to dueling studies reported in Science section of the New York Times, you've probably lost the public's interest. ;-)
But if you find powerful evidence of germ line mutations from alcohol, do you think that finding would greatly strengthen the case against alcohol, and strengthen it in a way that would powerfully de-incentivize drinking it? There is abundant evidence now of the harmed caused by alcohol, and it's harm of a kind that's really easy for people to recognize (auto accidents, etc.)
Similarly, modern articles on the history progressivism mention nothing of the Georgist Progressives at the turn of the 20th century. The wikipedia article similarly labels the early 20th century progressives as a mix of eugenicists and teetotalers.
Bearing in mind George was only outsold by the bible in his time, it does feel like some sort of weird cultural amnesia - and I'm sure a true schizo could run with it.
Why should it mention Henry George? Do articles about Value Added Tax feel the need to discuss Wilhelm von Siemens? Do articles about income tax feel the need to make reference to Emperor Wang Mang?
Constant reference to some 19th century dude is what makes Land Value Tax advocates look like weird cranks rather than just advocates for vaguely sensible tax reform. Sensible LVT advocates would, I think, do well to distance themselves from Henry George.
I think they made the wise choice not to go by Siemenism and Wangism, and not just because of the obvious juvenile humor. Tying your movement/ideas to a particular place and time (or person in this case) allows people to categorize your idea in a mental box. Once they have done that, they only have to dismiss your box of ideas once, and then forever conclude "I am against _______." This is especially easy when the box is clearly labeled "19th century, and not adopted" and can add the cultural weight of the previous rejection. If it wasn't implemented at the height of its popularity, then obviously it's a failed idea.
Better in this case to repackage the idea for modern audiences and give it a different polish.
Because "of the impact of increasing material and logistics costs, as well as severe supply constraints, on the solar business" i.e., they don't make enough money with them.
Optimistic take: as solar cell production becomes more and more commoditised and the equipment gets more widespread, it's no longer worthwhile for high tech companies like LG to make them. In the future, solar cells will be manufactured like bricks -- cheaply, and close to the point where they're needed.
Isn't that exactly backwards? LG isn't halting production due to a decrease in production costs of solar panels - their statement says the exact opposite. They're halting production because everything that goes into making solar panels (the "factors of production"), as well as the costs to transport those factors, has drastically increased.
Ironically, this is probably driven in significant part by the rising price of fossil fuels. I've said it before and I'll say it again - if you want to go green, first you have to go brown; you can't revolutionize your energy and your economy without a stable industrial base.
It's a step in the process to what Melvin is saying. The real reason LG is leaving the business has more to do with Chinese firms making them in bulk, and cheaper. There's no longer a significant margin to make them more advanced, so the incremental cost increases eats away at the profit or makes them unprofitable entirely. LG and other "tech" firms survive by making something that's expensive, but has a good margin due to being new. Once the technology can be reproduced by the "cheap" manufacturers, there's nothing left for a firm like LG to make money on, unless they can revolutionize the solar panels with a new design. It seems like new design space in solar panels is drying up.
I suppose I agree in the long term. But what I'm adding to that is, in the short and medium term, we're hurting both our economy *and* that transition by sanctioning, prohibiting, and over-regulating fossil fuel production and use.
Also, we're not running out anytime soon. "Peak oil" is like nuclear fusion; it's been 15 years away for my entire life, and always based on the same kinds of faulty calculations. Only look at the oil fields we're currently tapping; only look at what's close to the surface; ignore sour crude, ignore offshoring, ignore tar sands... it's like basing your estimate of how much money has been minted based only on how many pennies are lying on the ground. We're not running out anytime soon, and we're shooting a potential green transition in the foot by damaging our existing energy base.
I'd say, if you want to go green, you have to go nuclear.
If someone tells you to panic over climate change, ask them if they expect the consequences of climate change to be worse than the consequences of nuclear power. Then watch their brain freeze up.
I think it is worth being at least seriously concerned about climate change (only not saying panic because panicking isn't doing any good) and think that the consequences of climate change are WAY worse than the consequences of nuclear power and agree that we should invest into more nuclear power
He predicted: (1) Russia was actually going to invade Ukraine and (2) the cost for Russia to occupy Ukraine would be too high.
His conclusion is that the goal of Russia's invasion would not be to occupy territory. Instead, they would try to destroy as much of Ukraine's military as quickly as possible, while avoiding going into most cities. The only city that might be worth entering is Kiev, to seize the seat of the government and replace Zelenskyy as the president of Ukraine. This is a war that Russia should be able to win quickly.
Instead, Russia did not destroy Ukraine's military capacity as quickly as expected and instead rushed in cities like Kharkiv, Kherson, and Mariupol in addition to Kiev. He was surprised by both parts. This suggests a massive intelligence failure by Russia on figuring out the mood on the street and on basic questions like "Where does Ukraine store its drones?", along with the more well known logistical and morale problems that Russia is facing.
Rob Lee seems to have gotten the facts on the ground right, but then concluded from them the wrong objective of the war.
Yes, I've been following him. But it's pretty clear now that Russia was depending on Zelenskyy to flee and Ukainian armed forces to collapse (as they did in the early stages of Donbass rebellion). For instance, If this were a "normal" blitzkrieg, Russian forces would be backfilling their forward units as they advanced, to secure the captured infrastructure behind the front line, and to protect it against raids from special forces and partisans. But the Russians expected Ukraine to collapse quickly, and they never really planned their incursion this way.
Several military commentator/experts are now suggesting that Russian military didn't have the resources to this (and they may not have the resources to correct their mistakes). But we see maps like this one from the UK MoD showing huge red zones, supposedly under Russian control...
But a truer map of the conflict would show that the Russians are occupying a bunch of roads, and the Ukrainians are picking off their heavy armor and their supply vehicles that are sitting ducks for Ukraine hit and run attacks.
The big question now is where is Russian air superiority? Their air force has hundreds and hundreds of aircraft, and why haven't they taken control over the Ukrainian airspace?Experts are beginning to suggest that Russia's air force has their own serious problems: for instance, planes shot down are using commercial GPS equipment, and they've been carrying dumb bombs (so they have to fly low and are easily shot down).
> ...planes shot down are using commercial GPS equipment, and they've been carrying dumb bombs...
These two ideas are tightly linked. If they can't afford better GPS for aircraft that they presumably intend to use more than once, then they sure as hell can't afford them for single-use applications like a JDAM equivalent.
It seems to me that if Russia felt threatened by NATO nations he would simply bring more attention to the multitude of issues with pandemic politics that have large groups of peoples converging on their capitals in NATO nations . I question why Russia does not do this and the timing of these provocations to be when protests are crossing a threshold
I'm not sure the marginal propaganda dollar would have made that much difference, beyond what the news already reports on these events. And while the Canada convoy was pretty big and annoying, the corresponding one in the US barely made the news. (Something like five trucks showed up, last I read?)
But also, I'm not really sure what goal this would accomplish? I don't think Russia is feeling threatened by NATO in a "our people might think democracy is better than autocracy" sort of way, which could plausibly be handled by propaganda. It's more of a military concern - "we need to throw our weight around with our neighbors or we'll look weak and NATO will start bullying us." I don't know if Russia could accomplish that without actually using their military.
Because the idea that Russia feels threatened by NATO nations is complete BS. It is a fiction Putin has created as propaganda. What is he worried about? NATO invading Russia? Why would NATO do that. NATO nations may want economic, social, and political changes to happen in Russia but the only groups threatened by that are Putin and his cronies.
But when was Russia threatened and what were they threatened with? I know what Putin/Rus gov claims the threat is or what they believe the threat is, but these all seem to be closer to paranoid delusions than reality.
I'm saying it is hard to make the case that NATO might attack you, since in this instance they have a clear reason to, and widespread support, and are still doing their best not to be at war with you.
He's probably worried about NATO having nuclear missiles that can reach Moscow in under 2 minutes. Although they would only arrive seconds earlier than missiles from Latvia.
The Russian leadership is not as secure in their power as the Western democracies. And the leadership doesn't see itself as semi-expendable in the way the Western democracies do. In the West, if the President or Prime Minister dies, meh, we've got a backup and a backup for the backup, and if it matters they've got the spare keys for the nukes, things will continue more or less as they would have if the President hadn't died. And the President understands that this is part of the deal.
Not so in Russia. "If Putin dies, there's a guy deep under the Urals with a spare key to the nukes" is a very worrisome scenario because of what that guy might do in peacetime, which makes it an even more worrisome scenario in a crisis because you maybe lied about which sofa cushion the spare key to the nukes was hidden under and were counting on at least being able to give him a phone call if it mattered.
If Putin can only absolutely trust the people he can keep under his watchful ex-FSB eye in the Kremlin, then he has to worry about the Kremlin being nuked before anyone in the Kremlin even has time to send a text saying "hey please nuke the Americans to avenge me PS keys to the nukes are really in the oregano jar". Which means he also has to worry about what the Americans might get up to when they figure that out.
The ideal solution is to not run such a paranoid, corrupt government, but if you're not up to that, you do want to not have to worry about your entire trusted inner circle being killed before any of them can do anything about it.
Also, NATO isn't putting nuclear ballistic missiles in the Baltic states or Poland or whatever, but if you're too paranoid to entirely trust what your own people might do with your own nuclear weapons, you're certainly not going to take NATO's word for that.
In fairness to the differences, at the time there were fewer (maybe none? I'd have to research to be sure) options to hit targets from long range. Not too long after that, it was easy for both sides to launch ICBMs to pretty much anywhere in the world, but at the time it was a degree of safety if the enemy missiles were not within a certain proximity.
Response time is the issue now. If missiles in Ukraine were launched at Moscow, by the time the Russians detected them, they'd have about one minute to decide whether it was a false alarm, call the President, get him into a bunker, have him decide what to do, and issue orders. Probably not possible.
On the flip side--if NATO detected that Russia was launching missiles, missiles stationed in Ukraine could be close enough to take some Russian launch sites out before they launched their missiles. Russia would have to move its own missiles further into its heartland to keep them safe, reducing its ability to make a successful unretaliated first strike.
Submarines are probably a bigger worry for everyone, though. A Russian Typhoon submarine carries 20 MIRV missiles, with 6 warheads per missile, and so can hit 120 cities. It could take its time, travelling along the coast for weeks, launching missiles, submerging, and moving on. It's very hard to find one submarine submerged in the ocean other than by catching it moving between the Pacific and the Atlantic. So a single Russian submarine might be able to kill half the people in America on its own, supposing that its targeting system still worked.
Westerners were noting that Russia felt threatened by NATO long before Putin was in charge, and that any Russian leader (even if Putin was out) would take that stance. Not that this justifies the invasion.
Because that wouldn’t work. Putting aside the object level concerns about whether Putin is motaviated in this way, having Russian propaganda say “oh, look at how bad NATO is failing lol” wouldn’t actually acomplish anything in the near term.
I noticed Adam Something on Youtube (he was recommended to me by the Algorithm). He has quite a few interesting videos, but unfortunately, he is very partisan and picks easy targets.
He spent 15 minutes in a video ranting about an alt-right American who moved to Hungary to enjoy "the good old world where men are still men and women are women". Now, the guy he was criticizing was an imbecile but I don't like the "and therefore all right-wingers are idiots" vibe his video had. In another video he pretty much literally said that "It is fine and natural that universities are so heavily leaning to the left since nobody who is intelligent can be a conservative because curiosity and intelligence are antitheses to conservatism".
He has a tendency for straw-manning and equally to glorify his political views. I found him an interesting and engaging left-winger at first but I soon lost interest.
Also, I noticed factual errors in his videos where I know a little bit (not that much, mind you, but enough to spot the errors) about the subject (communist city planning, original colours on statues from the antiquity) which makes him less trustworthy for me on matters where I don't have much of a clue (city planning more broadly and logistics/transportation projects he talks about a lot).
Of course, that does not mean he does not deserve credit for correctly predicting the war in Ukraine.
The Alexander Cube model of prediction markets assumes that it is desirable for anyone to be able to easily create markets, but this is not obvious to me. Consider Metaculus: they currently have a couple dozen Russia/Ukraine-related markets, if they made it easy for anyone to create one they have a thousand such markets and every single one would be undertraded. Real money over fake points does some work to fix this, but even then it's not ideal: assume the world contains a bunch of perfectly rational traders with some large but finite amount of money to sink into your service: would it be more informative to spread that money over twenty different questions, or a thousand variations on forty different questions?
I share this concern regarding the idea of micro-markets for very local things. Scott has used examples like "will [person I know] get pregnant this year?" and similarly hyper local, hyper minor, markets. Unless people are putting insanely large amounts of money into prediction markets (which I'm sure Scott would like to see but I'm even more sure it will never happen), there doesn't seem to be enough money to actually arbitrage the different questions. There doesn't seem to be enough money, fake or not, to even align the current markets properly, as people leave small amounts of money on the table regularly.
I think a market that can repeat the same (or worse, very slightly different) questions will naturally deplete their users and leave a lot of potential money on the table. Doing so will make the actual predictions worth far less. Consider this scenario - a major question, such as "Will Russia invade the Ukraine?" that is open to any number of user-created markets. If the answer is a clear "yes" and the market starts to show that, then the incentive to bet on "yes" decreases as more and more people do so. By the time it gets above 90%, it may not be worth adding more money to "yes" after considering fees, holding up your money, etc. But it does make sense to create a new market with a slightly different question but really the same answer. You create a market that's getting closer to 50% and that's worth far more for an investor. The net result is that even really clear answers that should be obviously "yes" or "no" start to cap out lower, and new markets with much smaller market caps and less reliable percent chances spring up instead of the main market reflecting accurate predictions. Maybe the main market says 85% chance of something that should be an obvious yes, and then a bunch of smaller markets showing something like 70%.
Depending on how closely aligned the resolution criteria are, there should be arbitrage opportunities between these markets if they're not priced equally, so they should all still end up at the same point.
Consider one market on "Will Russia invade Ukraine by Feb 28" vs many markets for "Will Russia invade Ukraine by Feb 20/21/22/23/etc". The latter is arguably more informative overall because it gets us a better view of the distribution of outcomes, but $X distributed over the entire month of February seems like it will necessarily provide a less precise answer to the specific question of whether Russia will invade by the 28th. Easy market creation seems like it will inevitably lead to questions covering the spread like this, and until prediction markets reach stock market levels of "assume infinite arbitrage" there will be cases where people want to concentrate the market's attention more narrowly.
On the Ukraine post, Scott said "If you look at the 2016 election in isolation, Scott Adams is the smartest guy in the world". I pointed it out there and am doing so again here: This is a major mistake worthy of correction, Scott Adams predicted a landslide Trump victory, he was wrong! Wronger than the generic pundit predicting a 55-45 Clinton victory! Stop giving Scott Adams credit he doesn't deserve!
Scott Adams also predicted that after winning the 2016 election Trump would use his persuasive powers to unify the country and be popular with everyone
Scott Adams is the "smartest guy in the world that is famous". Literally millions people thought Trump would win, some farther out than Adams and without the wrong "landslide" part.
It's not just the claim he made, it's how far out he made it; the generic pundit was aiming at a target 1m out, so them not being very wrong isn't very interesting, there wasn't much for them to be right or wrong about. Scott Adams might have hit barely hit the edge of the target, but he did so at 10,000m, when the Republican field was still full of candidates, and nobody took Trump seriously.
I think that what Scott (Alexander) said in the last post is my basic view ... Adams likes to make out-there predictions, always with sky-high confidence, and conveniently forgets about the ones that are wrong (or retcons them). IIRC he also predicted a 100% chance of trump winning in 2020, and even after the networks called it for Biden, he said there was a 65% chance of trump winning, and if the election wasn't stolen then his entire worldview is wrong. And also counted Kamala Harris being the VP nominee as vindicating his prediction that Harris would the Presidential nominee. (this is from the one thing he has put out that I remember looking at in the last several years).
So saying "98% chance that trump will win 65% of the popular vote" and then claiming vindication when trump wins with 46% of the popular vote is in line with that tendency.
Yeah my impression of Scott Adams is that he is at least a useful foil for recieved wisdom where you can get his take and be able to consider possibilities that no one else will contemplate
As someone who lives in deep Trump country, I watched in real-time as many Republicans of my acquaintance went from dismissing Trump as a grifter in 2015 to supporting Trump harder than they had supported any Republican POTUS candidate of my living memory by November 2016.
The hypnosis claim, taken strictly, is weird and false, but Adams' style is always to overhype things, so even if he's right, it's going to be in a way that involves overhype. If we soften it to a claim that Trump had/has an unusual persuasive ability, the claim does seem to hold up. The problem is that ability is only highly effective on about 20-30% of the population, and a much smaller percentage of the chattering classes (many of whom are outright antagonized by that ability), which made this fact hard for the chattering classes to observe.
I also live deep in Trump country, yet most Trump-voters I know recognize that Trump is an asshole. But they hate and fear the Squad, Bernie Sanders, and the Clintons far more.
If someone constantly talks in hyperbole about everything in a way that's excessive even for Americans, and defends such wild claims unto the last trench, that goes beyond "clever rhetorical trick".
I'm not trying to say Adams' style is a clever trick, I think it's just plain annoying.
I think he adopted a certain approach because he thinks it will sell more of his books or whatever venture he's currently cooking up, the same reason "buy our carbonated sugar water, some people think it tastes marginally better than other carbonated sugar water" never caught on as an advertising approach. And at some point he decided it's better to be "always on" and also to never back down or apologize.
Which maybe does help him sell more books, but it's just plain weird and annoying in spheres where people sit down and try to reason things out. But again, that doesn't mean he's always wrong, and I do think that just being weird, he sometimes has a unique insight.
What are folks' thoughts on refugee resettlement from conflict zones as a philanthropic cause in relation to other popular EA causes (tb research, etc)? It has felt to me in the past like one of the highest value philanthropies, both in terms of the qualitative effect on individual lives and the spillover effects of whatever that person creates throughout the rest of their lifetime. It's also critical since, refugee populations that receive poor welcomes or are ineffectively resettled can become sources of significant civil strife decades down the road.
I can think of a few arguments against it - mostly just that resettlement efforts are expensive and have perhaps weaker effects on outcomes for migrants. Also that it could detract resources from other efforts (like stopping infectious diseases or building effective policy structures in failed states) that have the potential to actually stop the destabilizing event that's generating refugees.
>>>refugee populations that receive poor welcomes or are ineffectively resettled
In the context of the Boston Marathon bombing, I am not sure what you mean.
'Effectively resettled' probably includes 'convince the refugees that returning to their homeland is out of the question and they should focus on integration where they are' which can be a hard sell for both refugees and citizens of the refuge.
One general argument is that if you tell the world, "Hey, people, you can come to the US if your country is threatened by an evil dictator", this motivates soldiers fighting evil dictators to throw down their weapons and flee to the US. It might even motivate people in hopeless countries to support potential evil dictators, in the hopes of getting to flee from them to the US.
In my opinion to do it right and actually lead to good outcomes requires a degree of encouraged cultural that to some people would be impractical. You don't want to do what Merkel did, and to go reasonably away from her approach would raise concerns of destroying foreign cultures and similar.
Lets say there are rationalists in two countries that are at war with each other. The rationalists are patriots for their respective country - but they know that a lot of the news they receive is propaganda and they would like to know the truth. They also want to convince the rationalists on the other side about the facts that they learn. Not all communication channels between the two countries are closed - but to be realistic they are quite limited.
What they can do? What can we establish before we get into a situation like this?
I think two big questions should be asked by each:
1. Is my country's access to information open and competitive? Can media outlets in your nation take any position on the war or provide any information without fear of government reprisal? It doesn't mean that the mainstream media outlets will have the correct story, but it's an important baseline. If you find that news sources in your own nation are being censured for taking positions opposed to the government, your best bet is probably to suspend judgement on all counts and refuse to participate in any war that is not an immediate defense of your home region.
2. What type of war is being called for? This should affect your information threshold for support. There are other positions like pacifism and ethnic nationalism, but most "normie" war ethics are pretty straightforward: attacking country = bad, defending country = good. If the war is being fought on your own nation's soil and your neighbors are largely unhappy about it, you can relax most skepticism of your nation's war efforts.
But if your nation's troops are fighting on another country's soil, you should raise your thresholds for support significantly. The next level up from defending your own soil would probably be defending an ally with whom your nation has a mutual defense treaty. Then you would need to know that there was in fact an invasion of that country. The next level up from that would be intervention in a civil conflict or genocide, in which case you would need to be absolutely sure that your country had free access to information - and you should probably have the support of nearly the entirety of the United Nations or another legitimate international body.
Much grayer - and probably requiring you to develop a more detailed philosophical position - are ideological wars. E.g. attempting to remove a regime of one kind and replace it with another regime. Americans have been talked into getting embroiled in these (IMHO unjustified) gray wars for years and I think it's badly warped our discourse around war.
Remember in early January 2020, when some of us were enjoying ignorance and others were pontificating on what China should do about that pesky pandemic? If only we had focused on the global contagion and the perfect day to get short the market, we could be running our own, self-funded, fast-grant programs right now.
It kinda feels like we're in the same situation today. A local crisis has turned global, but all the focus is still on Ukraine, first, and Russia, second. Instead, let's talk about what this crisis is going to do to me, and what I should do about it. (By me, I mean us. By us, I mean western financial markets.)
So we've seen the Russian markets tank. We've seen a few companies that operate in Russia tank. We've seen the energy markets react. What's next? What are the second and third order effects?
Let's break it down by sources of contagion (feel free to add to this list):
1. Energy prices > Commodity prices > Inflation
2. Russian banks > European banks > American Banks
Would anybody be interested in a working session Zoom + White board to figure out: when and what to short? As a bonus, we could all share our plans for surviving a nuclear war.
My background: I've been a professional stock trader for over 2 decades (with some detours). I also founded a quant fund that operated from 2006-2009. I also never found finance very interesting and know very little about the underlying structure of capital markets.
If you have ideas on the categories/scenarios, please comment. If you're interested in joining the work-session, please email me at: protopiacone at gmail dot com.
Very vague question: How we can estimate my real-world impact when betting on a prediction market?
Let's say I raise a fund of 100 mln$, and then go all-in for "No" on "Will Putin resign by 1 April 2022?"
Should I expect some of his friends say to him: "You gonna resign anyway, let's at least make some money on the way out". They bet a few grand on a "Yes", announce resignation – PROFIT.
I lose my 100 mln$ (mostly), but this way I "buy" my future. (Literally buying "futures").
Sounds too naive, I know. Are there examples where this worked, in a brief history of low-liqudity prediction markets?
P.S. Idea stolen from "Assassination Politics", but I wanted to take a wholesome spin on that.
Given how high (>1%) the estimates are for a gigadeath famine, and how cheaply alternative food sources could be researched and developed, I suspect the most cost-effective way to save lives at the moment is to support AllFED (https://twitter.com/ALLFEDALLIANCE).
Whatever happened to the DAM-ATOLL energy generator?
That goes back a long way. Back to the Carter administration, when federal money for alternative energy was plentiful. There were a number of proposals for harnessing tides, waves, and ocean thermal gradients to generate electrical energy. I think the basic problem with all of these was low energy density, combined with the very harsh ocean environment.
A seductive (at least for smooth brains like myself) theory laid out by Kamil Galeev:
https://nitter.net/kamilkazani/status/1501360272442896388#m
TL;DR: Putin and his oligarch buddies are a successful branch of the Mexican avocado mafia. This assertion explains nothing less than the hierarchy of Russian oligarchs, the structure of the Russian economy, and why Putin launched the Ukraine war (and all the others) despite the predictable sanctions.
Summary: The standing of a Russian oligarch is inversely proportional to their ability to manage complex businesses. Mafia are not the best and brightest, so they only (barely) manage to manage relatively simple businesses like oil and gas. On the other end, hightech like complex machinery is left to stupid engineer nerds who got nothing to say among the real men. Russia doesn't export their own high-tech products, because it's too complicated for simpleton Mafia and would thus enrich and eventually empower the wrong people - the stupid nerds. So the nerd businesses must be sabotaged wherever possible, even if it means that Russia becomes entirely dependent on imports for such goods.
The war in Ukraine is a show of force to bully their neighbors, which is the only thing the Mafia is actually good at, and which is a perfectly rational decision for the Mafia. It is the basis of their business, their means of production - if you want to bully your neighbors into submission, you got to look and act the part. The entirely predictable Western sanctions are also a feature, not a bug: Inflation and seizing of assets abroad hurts the stupid nerds and helps the Mafia's export-oriented businesses. And if the sanctions are ramped up and targeted to a point where they threaten the very existence of Putin's avocado Mafia, then it was a miscalculation on Putin's part because he was surrounded by Yes Men who would tell him anything to stay on his good side.
Counterpoint: he is reacting to an anti-Russian alliance that seeks to topple him (Putin's perspective).
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/03/11/john-mearsheimer-on-why-the-west-is-principally-responsible-for-the-ukrainian-crisis
What is the most advanced analog computer?
(Animal brains don't count.)
Maybe those analog chips in Veritassium's new video? If you put a bunch of them in one box anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVsUOuSjvcg [edit: link fixed[
SOFTWARE ENGINEER WANTED
We are https://hookelabs.com, a family-owned company (15 years old, ~50 people but growing fast) based in Lawrence MA USA (30 min north of Boston/Cambridge). Our focus is research on autoimmune diseases (multiple sclerosis, colitis, arthritis, etc.), but we’re also branching out into development of scientific equipment.
You’d be the third regular SSC/ACX reader here (that I know about).
About 80% of the work we have now is in Python/NumPy, with another 15% in C (or Rust if you prefer), and 5% “other” including Google Apps Script. You don’t need to be able to do *all* of that.
The Python/NumPy work is on PCs and Raspberry Pi. The C/Rust work is on microcontrollers.
We have a lot of different projects, large and small. These include:
• Image analysis in Python/NumPy
• Embedded systems work on Raspberry Pi and microcontrollers
• Web-based UI development for scientific analytical equipment (mostly image related)
• Act as mentor to other sw developers
We could also use some help with IT stuff – we have a full-time IT person but he’s pretty overloaded. (We run Windows networks.)
This is a good position for a person who gets bored easily - you'll get to juggle projects, to some degree, to your taste, so long as they all move forward at some reasonable rate.
I don’t really expect one person to be able to do all this stuff, but the more you can do the better.
I’d prefer a full-time, on-site person, but we’ll also consider part-timers and people working from home (part of the time). Hours and most other things are very flexible. We offer all the usual benefits. We pay well and expect high performance.
To apply send a CV to <jobs (at) hookelabs.com>; put “Software Engineer” in the subject line.
How is zlibrary giving me much better book recommendations than amazon?
Amazon has a virtually infinite dataset and infinite money to hire programmers. Zlibrary is probably one or two anonymous guys hiding in some former soviet country that doesn't extradite to the US.
It could be that the average zlibrary user is more similar to me than the average amazon user. But if Amazon had good algorithms that shouldn't be a problem -- there are probably way more people like me on amazon than people like me on zlibrary, and ways of finding them algorithmically.
I'd assume that Amazon is putting their fingers on the scale to make sure you see the books that make them the most profit, not the ones you most want to see.
This study says that, as a nation, we've lost 824,097,690 million IQ points due to lead exposure. I have yet to read the article, but I find it an interesting way to frame a serious issue. But as Kevin Drum pointed out, it's a stunning misuse of significant digits... ;-)
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2118631119
A single IQ point increases adult income by ~1k/year in current dollars (based on eyeballing this graph and adjusting for inflation https://pumpkinperson.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/dollarbar.png), and income scales a bit faster than inflation, and adults earn for about 50 years, so the cost of losing 8e8 IQ points among youth now would be at least 8e8*1e3*50 = 4e13 dollars of lost individual income (even before considering Hive Mind style network effects which are probably even bigger than the individual effects). That's 1.3x the entire US national debt.
Some of those dollars are surely zero-sum, i.e. if you raise everyone's IQ, the total amount of useful resources doesn't necessarily increase, so total real income doesn't necessarily increase.
On the other hand, raise intelligence and the general amount of innovation could increase, which could then increase the amount of useful resources. It seems like raising *everyone's* IQ is unnecessary for that beneficial outcome, but there are probably some other benefits of higher IQ among the general public too.
If natural resources were a bottleneck, we wouldn't have had all that income growth worldwide over the last hundred years. >99% of earth's surface is still uninhabited by humans. I don't worry about running out of any natural resources in the future either. One of the unsuccessful book contest entries last year was for a pamphlet by Tim Worstall on that: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M1m8o1HInGYJR3cEMYZ6TQgNmeBOWo98YC6djNnFWf0/edit#heading=h.6wuv83sms3jq
"natural resources" is your phrase, not mine.
If you mean to include machines and finished products phrase "useful resources", those are downstream of intelligence and very much influenced by it.
I could easily believe that. But where did they get IQ vs income level data?
its not necessarily all lost though, right? some (but not all) of personal income must be zero sum with everyone else
Yes, but I don't think it's significant. Higher IQ increases productivity within the same job, plus opens up whole new types of jobs in the O-ring sector. I'm also ignoring positive network effects which are probably bigger than total individual effects. And total individual effects are probably an OOM bigger than the zero-sum individual effects.
to understand what I mean by the O-ring sector see this paper:
http://mason.gmu.edu/~gjonesb/O%20Ring%20Foolproof.pdf
and this blog:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/stupid-people/
thank you, look like good references. will take me some time to get through though.
mostly NLSY, via Charles Murray, via blogger Pumpkin Person converting it and combining it with some other data. The text from Charles Murray is republished here (see table 2-1): https://analyseeconomique.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/income-inequality-and-iq-by-charles-murray/
8.24097690 x 10 to the 8th power million
Yeah, well beyond slide rule interpolation
One issue I don't see much discussed in the context of climate change is the effect of warming on the amount of habitable land. As temperature contours are pushed north in the northern hemisphere land that was too cold to be habitable becomes barely habitable, land that was barely habitable becomes somewhat better, and so on down the line. The net effect is to increase the amount of land suited to human habitation. At the same time, some land that is now almost too warm for habitation gets a little warmer, which decreases the amount of land suitable for habitation.
I have done back of the envelope calculations suggesting that, with 3°C of warming, the gain in land from the first effect comes to the equivalent of about three-quarters the area of the U.S., the loss of land from the second to about half as much. If so these are large effects that ought to be taken into account. Does anyone here know of published estimates, ideally better than I can produce? Along similar lines, are there published estimates of the total loss of usable land due to sea level rise? My guess is that it is much smaller, but I could be wrong.
Billions of people already live in the tropics.
Go live in the Philippines for over two years, as I did, before you tell me they won't mind if the temperature goes up another 2°C.
Note that global warming affects land more than sea; 3°C global warming is likely to correspond to almost 4.5°C of land warming.
There's a paper that goes into that subject in depth, I'll see if I can find it sometime. I recall most of the increase in available land is permafrost in Russia, which isn't very arable.
Not yet. But over time the land will become more valuable through ecological succession. Perhaps humans can accelerate this?
Do you think that could happen fast enough to take all the refugees from places that become uninhabitable?
No, or maybe. Not for arable crops for quite a while. But other plants may do well enough. And if it can produce plenty of grass, dairy is an option.
Have you read Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters by Steven E Koonin? It doesn't discuss agriculture at length, but it discusses climate change in general in the same honest and unideological way that you propose.
I'd be much more interested in the effect on agriculture. How many people can live in the world mostly comes down to how much food the world can produce, not how much space there is for homes.
Emm. Food production capacity, in the absolute sense, hasn't been an issue since the Green Revolution. There are issues with input & processing considerations, which can vary from place to place (water in CA, roads & docks in less developed places) but we-humans command a staggering variety of crops and livestock breeds, and the ability to modify fertility of soil to very large degrees. Climate change will necessitate changes in production methods on the margins, not in the whole.
I agree with this - the fact we eat meat is a testament to how low food prices are
I believe that was what he was calculating, not housing space. In the northern hemisphere there is a lot of land that is currently too cold (Canada and Russia mainly) for much agriculture, that could become better suited if a little bit warmer. There is more ocean water in the areas that may become too warm for agriculture, so there would be less loss of arable land than the gain. That is, if I'm understanding David correctly.
Housing space isn't a serious constraint in most of the world. I was thinking mostly of agriculture, more generally of land warm enough for people to do things on it. I don't have data on how far north crops are grown, did find a map on population density. If someone knows of good information on where crops grow, that would be useful.
It occurs to me that I do have a map showing climate zones in North America, so could try working from that.
I thought I'd share this link to a lovely bit from the 1962 movie "Taras Bulba".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8G6S6fQQ4I
Filmed back in the day, when, if you needed hundreds of horsemen, you didn't fake something up with CGI, you went down to Argentina and hired their army. The thing they're yelling is, more or less, the Cossack equivalent of "U! S! A!". The story itself is a bit of pan-Slavic romanticism from the days of the Russian Empire, but it's still Ukrainians kicking butt. And Yul Brynner still rocks, as does the score.
https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/10222121121199494
https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/10220156256039093
Discussion of whether you can manage what you can't measure. What counts as measurement, anyway?
What Management by Walking around really means, and perversions of the idea.
How McDonnell really managed by walking around, and how his grandson got it wrong.
What's the best way to share a public Facebook post to people who don't want to have a Facebook account?
Has anyone else noticed that substack is fucking with the page up and page down buttons?
It is quite disheartening how much they seem to struggle with not breaking extremely basic functionality
Yes I have, and yes it is. It seems to happen most when I have collapsed a thread. It may be that it is forgetting to take the no-longer-displayed text lines into account.
> that Anatoly Karlin was wrong before he was right.
He seems to be mostly right when reading Putin, but I worry about his understanding of the situation in Ukraine. On his substack, he correctly predicted on the eve of the invasion that Russia would attack in the next 48 hours (at 70%), but also claimed that fighting would last less than a week (90%, and with lots of weight on victory in the first two days): https://akarlin.substack.com/p/happening-the-ukraine-war-2022?s=r
Since then he seems to have swallowed the Russian propaganda whole. He seems to think that economic gifts can make people forget the killing of civilians (e.g. https://twitter.com/akarlin0/status/1500299500342157317?cxt=HHwWioC56cqckdIpAAAA) and that the sanctions will mostly be bad for the "eurocels" (rich Russians that live in London, Milan, etc). Both seem to me to be a pretty dramatic misreading of the situation. Past injustices live on long in the memory of people: Hitler came to power by bashing the contract of Versailles, Isis recruited from people burned by the American invasion 15 years prior. It is difficult to imagine Ukrainians simply accepting to be part of Russia. And with Russia's economy estimated to shrink 7-11% this year (even without an export ban on oil, which might still be implemented) and many European shops gone, Moscow might be much less fun soon.
(also, note how he wrote "(Z, Z)" behind his name. "Z" has become a symbol for supporting the war since it is written on many Russian military vehicles. I would assume that he writes it this way to further make fun of people who add their pronouns behind their names. Is that the kind of guy Scott should signal-boost?)
Agreed. He is delusional and clearly high on propaganda. Bad decision by Scott to legitimize him.
I would like to calculate that X amount of alcohol caused the same number of germ line mutations as Y years of parental age, but I can’t find any good sources quantifying alcohol’s effect on the germ line mutation rate. Any carcinogen would increase it, and alcohol is strongly carcinogenic. NORML used to publish calculations of how alcohol is a zillion times worse than weed even before considering the negative utility of these germ line mutations. (My aunt was a heavy drinker for years and her son is anomalously dumb relative to everyone else in the extended family, to the point that he can barely hold down a job, which sucks a lot. I don’t know if the alcohol is to blame but it probably worsened the odds. https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2018/jan/03/alcohol-can-cause-irreversible-genetic-damage-to-stem-cells-says-study Seems like it could also apply to ova.) De-alcoholizing society seems like a worthy EA goal. Not prohibition 2.0 but changing education to treat alcohol the same as tobacco. Standard advice should be to totally avoid it. There’s been a massive success in tobacco harm reduction over the last few decades and I see no reason that can’t be replicated with alcohol.
Hm. Assuming there's no more direct method, you could try pedigree approaches. Something like: if alcohol really is causing nontrivial amounts of trait-lowering de novo mutations (which BTW I really doubt), then correlations with alcoholic parents should be more than twice that aunts/uncles etc, because the more distant relatives do not have the parents' new mutations. Combine that with total units of alcohol consumed over a lifetime before conception of the child, then you should be able to back out that 'X IUs of alcohol cause -Y SDs on IQ [or whatever]'. You could also try to count de novo counts directly in children of alcoholics and then use other estimates of pathogenicity fraction + average effect size of a harmful de novo. I suppose you could also try to do time-series or look for discontinuities by age: do kids of people just past the legal drinking age suddenly become dumber?
should we do the same with sugar?
Yes. Sugar is probably responsible for at least as many health problems as alcohol. People could be educated to avoid it and the distribution/advertising of it could be subject to some restrictions like tobacco.
I've come to distrust in vitro studies as predictor of in vivo outcomes. Eremolalos is correct. You've already got abundant evidence for the negative health and social impacts of alcohol. And by referencing studies whose conclusions may or may not have any detectable effect on living populations will likely weaken your arguments (by allowing others to quote studies with different conclusions). Once it comes down to dueling studies reported in Science section of the New York Times, you've probably lost the public's interest. ;-)
But if you find powerful evidence of germ line mutations from alcohol, do you think that finding would greatly strengthen the case against alcohol, and strengthen it in a way that would powerfully de-incentivize drinking it? There is abundant evidence now of the harmed caused by alcohol, and it's harm of a kind that's really easy for people to recognize (auto accidents, etc.)
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22951092/land-tax-housing-crisis
An article on Land Value Tax that somehow never mentions Henry George or Georgism. I can't imagine this is an accident, so what's the deal here?
Similarly, modern articles on the history progressivism mention nothing of the Georgist Progressives at the turn of the 20th century. The wikipedia article similarly labels the early 20th century progressives as a mix of eugenicists and teetotalers.
Bearing in mind George was only outsold by the bible in his time, it does feel like some sort of weird cultural amnesia - and I'm sure a true schizo could run with it.
Why should it mention Henry George? Do articles about Value Added Tax feel the need to discuss Wilhelm von Siemens? Do articles about income tax feel the need to make reference to Emperor Wang Mang?
Constant reference to some 19th century dude is what makes Land Value Tax advocates look like weird cranks rather than just advocates for vaguely sensible tax reform. Sensible LVT advocates would, I think, do well to distance themselves from Henry George.
The difference is that there's no such thing as Siemensism or Wangism. Unlike the other two, George's name is synonymous with his proposed tax reform.
I think they made the wise choice not to go by Siemenism and Wangism, and not just because of the obvious juvenile humor. Tying your movement/ideas to a particular place and time (or person in this case) allows people to categorize your idea in a mental box. Once they have done that, they only have to dismiss your box of ideas once, and then forever conclude "I am against _______." This is especially easy when the box is clearly labeled "19th century, and not adopted" and can add the cultural weight of the previous rejection. If it wasn't implemented at the height of its popularity, then obviously it's a failed idea.
Better in this case to repackage the idea for modern audiences and give it a different polish.
Which may contribute to many people not taking it seriously.
I don't want to post this as a reply to dozen different comments, so I am just posting it here separately. Maybe someone will notice.
Yes, Putin wanted to conquer the whole Ukraine, he described his long-term goals clearly in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians
Yes, Putin expected to conquer Ukraine fast, Russian media already had in advance written articles celebrating the fast victory, and some of them accidentally published them e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20220226/rossiya-1775162336.html
Somehow, in the midst of a climate change crisis, the company "LG" has decided that it is leaving the business of manufacturing solar panels. But why?
https://www.lg.com/us/press-release/lg-to-exit-global-solar-panel-business
Because "of the impact of increasing material and logistics costs, as well as severe supply constraints, on the solar business" i.e., they don't make enough money with them.
Optimistic take: as solar cell production becomes more and more commoditised and the equipment gets more widespread, it's no longer worthwhile for high tech companies like LG to make them. In the future, solar cells will be manufactured like bricks -- cheaply, and close to the point where they're needed.
Isn't that exactly backwards? LG isn't halting production due to a decrease in production costs of solar panels - their statement says the exact opposite. They're halting production because everything that goes into making solar panels (the "factors of production"), as well as the costs to transport those factors, has drastically increased.
Ironically, this is probably driven in significant part by the rising price of fossil fuels. I've said it before and I'll say it again - if you want to go green, first you have to go brown; you can't revolutionize your energy and your economy without a stable industrial base.
It's a step in the process to what Melvin is saying. The real reason LG is leaving the business has more to do with Chinese firms making them in bulk, and cheaper. There's no longer a significant margin to make them more advanced, so the incremental cost increases eats away at the profit or makes them unprofitable entirely. LG and other "tech" firms survive by making something that's expensive, but has a good margin due to being new. Once the technology can be reproduced by the "cheap" manufacturers, there's nothing left for a firm like LG to make money on, unless they can revolutionize the solar panels with a new design. It seems like new design space in solar panels is drying up.
Or, as I like to put it, you need to develop sustainable energy before you've run out of the other kind.
I suppose I agree in the long term. But what I'm adding to that is, in the short and medium term, we're hurting both our economy *and* that transition by sanctioning, prohibiting, and over-regulating fossil fuel production and use.
Also, we're not running out anytime soon. "Peak oil" is like nuclear fusion; it's been 15 years away for my entire life, and always based on the same kinds of faulty calculations. Only look at the oil fields we're currently tapping; only look at what's close to the surface; ignore sour crude, ignore offshoring, ignore tar sands... it's like basing your estimate of how much money has been minted based only on how many pennies are lying on the ground. We're not running out anytime soon, and we're shooting a potential green transition in the foot by damaging our existing energy base.
I'd say, if you want to go green, you have to go nuclear.
If someone tells you to panic over climate change, ask them if they expect the consequences of climate change to be worse than the consequences of nuclear power. Then watch their brain freeze up.
I think it is worth being at least seriously concerned about climate change (only not saying panic because panicking isn't doing any good) and think that the consequences of climate change are WAY worse than the consequences of nuclear power and agree that we should invest into more nuclear power
Good! I was, of course, overgeneralizing.
Why are you writing an open letter to "Andrew Hill" (whoever that is) here, of all places?
I would give Rob Lee an A- for his Ukraine predictions. I heard about him from Noah Smith's interview with him: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/video-interview-rob-lee-russian-defense?s=r , and the main article for his predictions is https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/01/moscows-compellence-strategy/ .
He predicted: (1) Russia was actually going to invade Ukraine and (2) the cost for Russia to occupy Ukraine would be too high.
His conclusion is that the goal of Russia's invasion would not be to occupy territory. Instead, they would try to destroy as much of Ukraine's military as quickly as possible, while avoiding going into most cities. The only city that might be worth entering is Kiev, to seize the seat of the government and replace Zelenskyy as the president of Ukraine. This is a war that Russia should be able to win quickly.
Instead, Russia did not destroy Ukraine's military capacity as quickly as expected and instead rushed in cities like Kharkiv, Kherson, and Mariupol in addition to Kiev. He was surprised by both parts. This suggests a massive intelligence failure by Russia on figuring out the mood on the street and on basic questions like "Where does Ukraine store its drones?", along with the more well known logistical and morale problems that Russia is facing.
Rob Lee seems to have gotten the facts on the ground right, but then concluded from them the wrong objective of the war.
Yes, I've been following him. But it's pretty clear now that Russia was depending on Zelenskyy to flee and Ukainian armed forces to collapse (as they did in the early stages of Donbass rebellion). For instance, If this were a "normal" blitzkrieg, Russian forces would be backfilling their forward units as they advanced, to secure the captured infrastructure behind the front line, and to protect it against raids from special forces and partisans. But the Russians expected Ukraine to collapse quickly, and they never really planned their incursion this way.
Several military commentator/experts are now suggesting that Russian military didn't have the resources to this (and they may not have the resources to correct their mistakes). But we see maps like this one from the UK MoD showing huge red zones, supposedly under Russian control...
https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1499005871770288132/photo/1
But a truer map of the conflict would show that the Russians are occupying a bunch of roads, and the Ukrainians are picking off their heavy armor and their supply vehicles that are sitting ducks for Ukraine hit and run attacks.
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1500645154939625473
The big question now is where is Russian air superiority? Their air force has hundreds and hundreds of aircraft, and why haven't they taken control over the Ukrainian airspace?Experts are beginning to suggest that Russia's air force has their own serious problems: for instance, planes shot down are using commercial GPS equipment, and they've been carrying dumb bombs (so they have to fly low and are easily shot down).
One explanation is that they're only trained in flying small numbers of planes at a time rather than large complex formations. https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-defence-systems/russian-air-force-actually-incapable-complex-air-operations
> ...planes shot down are using commercial GPS equipment, and they've been carrying dumb bombs...
These two ideas are tightly linked. If they can't afford better GPS for aircraft that they presumably intend to use more than once, then they sure as hell can't afford them for single-use applications like a JDAM equivalent.
His Twitter is also a great source of OSINT / materiel loss documentation
It seems to me that if Russia felt threatened by NATO nations he would simply bring more attention to the multitude of issues with pandemic politics that have large groups of peoples converging on their capitals in NATO nations . I question why Russia does not do this and the timing of these provocations to be when protests are crossing a threshold
I think that was always a bullsh*t excuse for him to do what he wanted to do anyway, and regather the Russian peoples.
I don't think Putin really cares much about people whining about covid restrictions that are mostly being lifted anyway.
I'm not sure the marginal propaganda dollar would have made that much difference, beyond what the news already reports on these events. And while the Canada convoy was pretty big and annoying, the corresponding one in the US barely made the news. (Something like five trucks showed up, last I read?)
But also, I'm not really sure what goal this would accomplish? I don't think Russia is feeling threatened by NATO in a "our people might think democracy is better than autocracy" sort of way, which could plausibly be handled by propaganda. It's more of a military concern - "we need to throw our weight around with our neighbors or we'll look weak and NATO will start bullying us." I don't know if Russia could accomplish that without actually using their military.
Because the idea that Russia feels threatened by NATO nations is complete BS. It is a fiction Putin has created as propaganda. What is he worried about? NATO invading Russia? Why would NATO do that. NATO nations may want economic, social, and political changes to happen in Russia but the only groups threatened by that are Putin and his cronies.
This invasion seems like proof Russia should not be threatend. NATO is doing everything they can not to be involved in this war.
But when was Russia threatened and what were they threatened with? I know what Putin/Rus gov claims the threat is or what they believe the threat is, but these all seem to be closer to paranoid delusions than reality.
I'm saying it is hard to make the case that NATO might attack you, since in this instance they have a clear reason to, and widespread support, and are still doing their best not to be at war with you.
He's probably worried about NATO having nuclear missiles that can reach Moscow in under 2 minutes. Although they would only arrive seconds earlier than missiles from Latvia.
But why would NATO do that? What is to be gained?
The Russian leadership is not as secure in their power as the Western democracies. And the leadership doesn't see itself as semi-expendable in the way the Western democracies do. In the West, if the President or Prime Minister dies, meh, we've got a backup and a backup for the backup, and if it matters they've got the spare keys for the nukes, things will continue more or less as they would have if the President hadn't died. And the President understands that this is part of the deal.
Not so in Russia. "If Putin dies, there's a guy deep under the Urals with a spare key to the nukes" is a very worrisome scenario because of what that guy might do in peacetime, which makes it an even more worrisome scenario in a crisis because you maybe lied about which sofa cushion the spare key to the nukes was hidden under and were counting on at least being able to give him a phone call if it mattered.
If Putin can only absolutely trust the people he can keep under his watchful ex-FSB eye in the Kremlin, then he has to worry about the Kremlin being nuked before anyone in the Kremlin even has time to send a text saying "hey please nuke the Americans to avenge me PS keys to the nukes are really in the oregano jar". Which means he also has to worry about what the Americans might get up to when they figure that out.
The ideal solution is to not run such a paranoid, corrupt government, but if you're not up to that, you do want to not have to worry about your entire trusted inner circle being killed before any of them can do anything about it.
Also, NATO isn't putting nuclear ballistic missiles in the Baltic states or Poland or whatever, but if you're too paranoid to entirely trust what your own people might do with your own nuclear weapons, you're certainly not going to take NATO's word for that.
In 1961, the Soviets put nuclear missiles in Cuba, and the US put nuclear missiles in Turkey. They were all removed by the end of 1963.
In fairness to the differences, at the time there were fewer (maybe none? I'd have to research to be sure) options to hit targets from long range. Not too long after that, it was easy for both sides to launch ICBMs to pretty much anywhere in the world, but at the time it was a degree of safety if the enemy missiles were not within a certain proximity.
Response time is the issue now. If missiles in Ukraine were launched at Moscow, by the time the Russians detected them, they'd have about one minute to decide whether it was a false alarm, call the President, get him into a bunker, have him decide what to do, and issue orders. Probably not possible.
On the flip side--if NATO detected that Russia was launching missiles, missiles stationed in Ukraine could be close enough to take some Russian launch sites out before they launched their missiles. Russia would have to move its own missiles further into its heartland to keep them safe, reducing its ability to make a successful unretaliated first strike.
Submarines are probably a bigger worry for everyone, though. A Russian Typhoon submarine carries 20 MIRV missiles, with 6 warheads per missile, and so can hit 120 cities. It could take its time, travelling along the coast for weeks, launching missiles, submerging, and moving on. It's very hard to find one submarine submerged in the ocean other than by catching it moving between the Pacific and the Atlantic. So a single Russian submarine might be able to kill half the people in America on its own, supposing that its targeting system still worked.
Westerners were noting that Russia felt threatened by NATO long before Putin was in charge, and that any Russian leader (even if Putin was out) would take that stance. Not that this justifies the invasion.
Because that wouldn’t work. Putting aside the object level concerns about whether Putin is motaviated in this way, having Russian propaganda say “oh, look at how bad NATO is failing lol” wouldn’t actually acomplish anything in the near term.
I noticed Adam Something on Youtube (he was recommended to me by the Algorithm). He has quite a few interesting videos, but unfortunately, he is very partisan and picks easy targets.
He spent 15 minutes in a video ranting about an alt-right American who moved to Hungary to enjoy "the good old world where men are still men and women are women". Now, the guy he was criticizing was an imbecile but I don't like the "and therefore all right-wingers are idiots" vibe his video had. In another video he pretty much literally said that "It is fine and natural that universities are so heavily leaning to the left since nobody who is intelligent can be a conservative because curiosity and intelligence are antitheses to conservatism".
He has a tendency for straw-manning and equally to glorify his political views. I found him an interesting and engaging left-winger at first but I soon lost interest.
Also, I noticed factual errors in his videos where I know a little bit (not that much, mind you, but enough to spot the errors) about the subject (communist city planning, original colours on statues from the antiquity) which makes him less trustworthy for me on matters where I don't have much of a clue (city planning more broadly and logistics/transportation projects he talks about a lot).
Of course, that does not mean he does not deserve credit for correctly predicting the war in Ukraine.
I have no information about this particular case. But I will note that it is possible to come to the right conclusions from the wrong premises.
The Alexander Cube model of prediction markets assumes that it is desirable for anyone to be able to easily create markets, but this is not obvious to me. Consider Metaculus: they currently have a couple dozen Russia/Ukraine-related markets, if they made it easy for anyone to create one they have a thousand such markets and every single one would be undertraded. Real money over fake points does some work to fix this, but even then it's not ideal: assume the world contains a bunch of perfectly rational traders with some large but finite amount of money to sink into your service: would it be more informative to spread that money over twenty different questions, or a thousand variations on forty different questions?
I share this concern regarding the idea of micro-markets for very local things. Scott has used examples like "will [person I know] get pregnant this year?" and similarly hyper local, hyper minor, markets. Unless people are putting insanely large amounts of money into prediction markets (which I'm sure Scott would like to see but I'm even more sure it will never happen), there doesn't seem to be enough money to actually arbitrage the different questions. There doesn't seem to be enough money, fake or not, to even align the current markets properly, as people leave small amounts of money on the table regularly.
I think a market that can repeat the same (or worse, very slightly different) questions will naturally deplete their users and leave a lot of potential money on the table. Doing so will make the actual predictions worth far less. Consider this scenario - a major question, such as "Will Russia invade the Ukraine?" that is open to any number of user-created markets. If the answer is a clear "yes" and the market starts to show that, then the incentive to bet on "yes" decreases as more and more people do so. By the time it gets above 90%, it may not be worth adding more money to "yes" after considering fees, holding up your money, etc. But it does make sense to create a new market with a slightly different question but really the same answer. You create a market that's getting closer to 50% and that's worth far more for an investor. The net result is that even really clear answers that should be obviously "yes" or "no" start to cap out lower, and new markets with much smaller market caps and less reliable percent chances spring up instead of the main market reflecting accurate predictions. Maybe the main market says 85% chance of something that should be an obvious yes, and then a bunch of smaller markets showing something like 70%.
Depending on how closely aligned the resolution criteria are, there should be arbitrage opportunities between these markets if they're not priced equally, so they should all still end up at the same point.
Consider one market on "Will Russia invade Ukraine by Feb 28" vs many markets for "Will Russia invade Ukraine by Feb 20/21/22/23/etc". The latter is arguably more informative overall because it gets us a better view of the distribution of outcomes, but $X distributed over the entire month of February seems like it will necessarily provide a less precise answer to the specific question of whether Russia will invade by the 28th. Easy market creation seems like it will inevitably lead to questions covering the spread like this, and until prediction markets reach stock market levels of "assume infinite arbitrage" there will be cases where people want to concentrate the market's attention more narrowly.
On the Ukraine post, Scott said "If you look at the 2016 election in isolation, Scott Adams is the smartest guy in the world". I pointed it out there and am doing so again here: This is a major mistake worthy of correction, Scott Adams predicted a landslide Trump victory, he was wrong! Wronger than the generic pundit predicting a 55-45 Clinton victory! Stop giving Scott Adams credit he doesn't deserve!
Scott Adams also predicted that after winning the 2016 election Trump would use his persuasive powers to unify the country and be popular with everyone
Scott Adams is the "smartest guy in the world that is famous". Literally millions people thought Trump would win, some farther out than Adams and without the wrong "landslide" part.
It's not just the claim he made, it's how far out he made it; the generic pundit was aiming at a target 1m out, so them not being very wrong isn't very interesting, there wasn't much for them to be right or wrong about. Scott Adams might have hit barely hit the edge of the target, but he did so at 10,000m, when the Republican field was still full of candidates, and nobody took Trump seriously.
I think that what Scott (Alexander) said in the last post is my basic view ... Adams likes to make out-there predictions, always with sky-high confidence, and conveniently forgets about the ones that are wrong (or retcons them). IIRC he also predicted a 100% chance of trump winning in 2020, and even after the networks called it for Biden, he said there was a 65% chance of trump winning, and if the election wasn't stolen then his entire worldview is wrong. And also counted Kamala Harris being the VP nominee as vindicating his prediction that Harris would the Presidential nominee. (this is from the one thing he has put out that I remember looking at in the last several years).
So saying "98% chance that trump will win 65% of the popular vote" and then claiming vindication when trump wins with 46% of the popular vote is in line with that tendency.
Sure.
Ultimately the question comes down to this: If you bet $1 on each of Scott Adam's 1000-1 claims, would you come out ahead?
Yeah my impression of Scott Adams is that he is at least a useful foil for recieved wisdom where you can get his take and be able to consider possibilities that no one else will contemplate
The possibility he contemplated was that Trump was literally hypnotizing people. I assert that it is not useful to consider this wisdom.
As someone who lives in deep Trump country, I watched in real-time as many Republicans of my acquaintance went from dismissing Trump as a grifter in 2015 to supporting Trump harder than they had supported any Republican POTUS candidate of my living memory by November 2016.
The hypnosis claim, taken strictly, is weird and false, but Adams' style is always to overhype things, so even if he's right, it's going to be in a way that involves overhype. If we soften it to a claim that Trump had/has an unusual persuasive ability, the claim does seem to hold up. The problem is that ability is only highly effective on about 20-30% of the population, and a much smaller percentage of the chattering classes (many of whom are outright antagonized by that ability), which made this fact hard for the chattering classes to observe.
I also live deep in Trump country, yet most Trump-voters I know recognize that Trump is an asshole. But they hate and fear the Squad, Bernie Sanders, and the Clintons far more.
If someone constantly talks in hyperbole about everything in a way that's excessive even for Americans, and defends such wild claims unto the last trench, that goes beyond "clever rhetorical trick".
I'm not trying to say Adams' style is a clever trick, I think it's just plain annoying.
I think he adopted a certain approach because he thinks it will sell more of his books or whatever venture he's currently cooking up, the same reason "buy our carbonated sugar water, some people think it tastes marginally better than other carbonated sugar water" never caught on as an advertising approach. And at some point he decided it's better to be "always on" and also to never back down or apologize.
Which maybe does help him sell more books, but it's just plain weird and annoying in spheres where people sit down and try to reason things out. But again, that doesn't mean he's always wrong, and I do think that just being weird, he sometimes has a unique insight.
What are folks' thoughts on refugee resettlement from conflict zones as a philanthropic cause in relation to other popular EA causes (tb research, etc)? It has felt to me in the past like one of the highest value philanthropies, both in terms of the qualitative effect on individual lives and the spillover effects of whatever that person creates throughout the rest of their lifetime. It's also critical since, refugee populations that receive poor welcomes or are ineffectively resettled can become sources of significant civil strife decades down the road.
I can think of a few arguments against it - mostly just that resettlement efforts are expensive and have perhaps weaker effects on outcomes for migrants. Also that it could detract resources from other efforts (like stopping infectious diseases or building effective policy structures in failed states) that have the potential to actually stop the destabilizing event that's generating refugees.
>>>refugee populations that receive poor welcomes or are ineffectively resettled
In the context of the Boston Marathon bombing, I am not sure what you mean.
'Effectively resettled' probably includes 'convince the refugees that returning to their homeland is out of the question and they should focus on integration where they are' which can be a hard sell for both refugees and citizens of the refuge.
One general argument is that if you tell the world, "Hey, people, you can come to the US if your country is threatened by an evil dictator", this motivates soldiers fighting evil dictators to throw down their weapons and flee to the US. It might even motivate people in hopeless countries to support potential evil dictators, in the hopes of getting to flee from them to the US.
In my opinion to do it right and actually lead to good outcomes requires a degree of encouraged cultural that to some people would be impractical. You don't want to do what Merkel did, and to go reasonably away from her approach would raise concerns of destroying foreign cultures and similar.
Lets say there are rationalists in two countries that are at war with each other. The rationalists are patriots for their respective country - but they know that a lot of the news they receive is propaganda and they would like to know the truth. They also want to convince the rationalists on the other side about the facts that they learn. Not all communication channels between the two countries are closed - but to be realistic they are quite limited.
What they can do? What can we establish before we get into a situation like this?
I think two big questions should be asked by each:
1. Is my country's access to information open and competitive? Can media outlets in your nation take any position on the war or provide any information without fear of government reprisal? It doesn't mean that the mainstream media outlets will have the correct story, but it's an important baseline. If you find that news sources in your own nation are being censured for taking positions opposed to the government, your best bet is probably to suspend judgement on all counts and refuse to participate in any war that is not an immediate defense of your home region.
2. What type of war is being called for? This should affect your information threshold for support. There are other positions like pacifism and ethnic nationalism, but most "normie" war ethics are pretty straightforward: attacking country = bad, defending country = good. If the war is being fought on your own nation's soil and your neighbors are largely unhappy about it, you can relax most skepticism of your nation's war efforts.
But if your nation's troops are fighting on another country's soil, you should raise your thresholds for support significantly. The next level up from defending your own soil would probably be defending an ally with whom your nation has a mutual defense treaty. Then you would need to know that there was in fact an invasion of that country. The next level up from that would be intervention in a civil conflict or genocide, in which case you would need to be absolutely sure that your country had free access to information - and you should probably have the support of nearly the entirety of the United Nations or another legitimate international body.
Much grayer - and probably requiring you to develop a more detailed philosophical position - are ideological wars. E.g. attempting to remove a regime of one kind and replace it with another regime. Americans have been talked into getting embroiled in these (IMHO unjustified) gray wars for years and I think it's badly warped our discourse around war.
Remember in early January 2020, when some of us were enjoying ignorance and others were pontificating on what China should do about that pesky pandemic? If only we had focused on the global contagion and the perfect day to get short the market, we could be running our own, self-funded, fast-grant programs right now.
It kinda feels like we're in the same situation today. A local crisis has turned global, but all the focus is still on Ukraine, first, and Russia, second. Instead, let's talk about what this crisis is going to do to me, and what I should do about it. (By me, I mean us. By us, I mean western financial markets.)
So we've seen the Russian markets tank. We've seen a few companies that operate in Russia tank. We've seen the energy markets react. What's next? What are the second and third order effects?
Let's break it down by sources of contagion (feel free to add to this list):
1. Energy prices > Commodity prices > Inflation
2. Russian banks > European banks > American Banks
3. Disrupted supply chains > Additional disruptions > shipping? retail?
4. Military tension > military escalation > nervous boomers getting out of the market (lack of liquidity?)
5. Interim market shock > stimulus/mmt (fast enough?)
6. Financial market stress > liquidity crunch > (who's over-leveraged?)
Would anybody be interested in a working session Zoom + White board to figure out: when and what to short? As a bonus, we could all share our plans for surviving a nuclear war.
My background: I've been a professional stock trader for over 2 decades (with some detours). I also founded a quant fund that operated from 2006-2009. I also never found finance very interesting and know very little about the underlying structure of capital markets.
If you have ideas on the categories/scenarios, please comment. If you're interested in joining the work-session, please email me at: protopiacone at gmail dot com.