Yeah, I see what you’re seeing. Someone without anxiety to flinch away from would be behaving very differently, and the tells are unambiguous. To start with, they either wouldn’t post about it at all, or they’d make a post that couldn’t be accurately mocked as “Oh, you’re afraid of impending doom? Which stocks have you shorted?”.
If you aren’t flinching from anxiety, you can see a turn or two ahead and address the glaring weaknesses before they’re used against you. If you’re as willing to put your money where your mouth is as you think the other side isn’t, then you can bet on that. Not “How do you explain banana? Checkmate atheists!” before atheists get a chance to explain banana, stick your neck out and predict crickets.
Show me how to collect on my shorts when the world ends. Better yet, show me how to collect on my shorts when the world doesn’t end because I took the dangerous trajectory seriously, and helped to avert disaster. Or at least don’t open with “doom” in the first five words and close on “what are you shorting” so any real point doesn’t get buried in nonsense.
If he were to make it obvious how to actually profit, so that the doomers can actually recognize “Huh, that would work”, then it gets interesting if doomers don’t place the bets. At which point his implicit accusation actually lands, because he would have tested it. And if bets get made, he gets a chance to learn.
Yet he chose not to do the thing that would give either “makes his point land” or “learn he’s wrong”, and chose to do the thing that changes no minds, gets him mocked in the comments, and allows him to not engage any more deeply.
Revealed preferences.
Stronger, he could actually be correct that most attempts to analyse such risks via rationalist style arguments will be distorted by fear.
This is absolutely to be expected. It’s not exactly easy to avoid, given how much is at stake here. “Lol, you scared bro?”. Yes.
The unfortunate thing is that these flinches are so ubiquitous that noticing them is like a fish noticing water. Where have we seen someone not flinch? Seen someone smiling in the face of likely doom without inaction? It’s rare, especially where things are scariest.
It’s actually plausible that maintaining such a strong epistemic bar for such fears makes sense for Tyler personally[..]However, neither of these means that his decision to run from anxiety is necessarily correct. And insofar as this is choice is unconscious, he won’t know what trade-off he’s making. This is rarely a good place to find yourself.
I think it’s easy for people to take this as lip service, but it’s seriously important.
The temptation here is to think “Ah, Cowen is irrational, it’s important to be rational, I should face reality”, but that is itself a flinch from reality any time you don’t know you’re prepared to handle reality. Which turns out to be every time you’re saying “I should face reality” because if it were unambiguously clear[1] to you that facing reality would be a winning move for you, you’d have done it already.
And that’s why despite mocking Cowen a bit above, I actually sympathize quite a lot. I don’t think “pretending not to be avoiding” is a winning move for him there (lol), but the avoiding itself is most likely completely reasonable, and I mean that sincerely.
I definitely choose not to engage with scary things, at times. If I try to force myself to engage too far I can feel the distortionary pressures, and my own inability to handle them all indefinitely without loss. Since it’s gonna happen either way, I’d rather it be on my terms, in my accounting book, while I work on the capacity to handle more.
Yeah, I see what you’re seeing. Someone without anxiety to flinch away from would be behaving very differently, and the tells are unambiguous. To start with, they either wouldn’t post about it at all, or they’d make a post that couldn’t be accurately mocked as “Oh, you’re afraid of impending doom? Which stocks have you shorted?”.
If you aren’t flinching from anxiety, you can see a turn or two ahead and address the glaring weaknesses before they’re used against you. If you’re as willing to put your money where your mouth is as you think the other side isn’t, then you can bet on that. Not “How do you explain banana? Checkmate atheists!” before atheists get a chance to explain banana, stick your neck out and predict crickets.
Show me how to collect on my shorts when the world ends. Better yet, show me how to collect on my shorts when the world doesn’t end because I took the dangerous trajectory seriously, and helped to avert disaster. Or at least don’t open with “doom” in the first five words and close on “what are you shorting” so any real point doesn’t get buried in nonsense.
If he were to make it obvious how to actually profit, so that the doomers can actually recognize “Huh, that would work”, then it gets interesting if doomers don’t place the bets. At which point his implicit accusation actually lands, because he would have tested it. And if bets get made, he gets a chance to learn.
Yet he chose not to do the thing that would give either “makes his point land” or “learn he’s wrong”, and chose to do the thing that changes no minds, gets him mocked in the comments, and allows him to not engage any more deeply.
Revealed preferences.
This is absolutely to be expected. It’s not exactly easy to avoid, given how much is at stake here. “Lol, you scared bro?”. Yes.
The unfortunate thing is that these flinches are so ubiquitous that noticing them is like a fish noticing water. Where have we seen someone not flinch? Seen someone smiling in the face of likely doom without inaction? It’s rare, especially where things are scariest.
I think it’s easy for people to take this as lip service, but it’s seriously important.
The temptation here is to think “Ah, Cowen is irrational, it’s important to be rational, I should face reality”, but that is itself a flinch from reality any time you don’t know you’re prepared to handle reality. Which turns out to be every time you’re saying “I should face reality” because if it were unambiguously clear[1] to you that facing reality would be a winning move for you, you’d have done it already.
And that’s why despite mocking Cowen a bit above, I actually sympathize quite a lot. I don’t think “pretending not to be avoiding” is a winning move for him there (lol), but the avoiding itself is most likely completely reasonable, and I mean that sincerely.
I definitely choose not to engage with scary things, at times. If I try to force myself to engage too far I can feel the distortionary pressures, and my own inability to handle them all indefinitely without loss. Since it’s gonna happen either way, I’d rather it be on my terms, in my accounting book, while I work on the capacity to handle more.
I don’t think there’s any other option, really.
Meaning no part of you, which you take seriously enough to act on, is still predicting you’d lose by facing it
Revealed preferences indeed.
By being provocative, he gets to tell himself that almost no-one is addressing his core point.