AllAmericanBreakfast

• AllAmericanBreakfast 30 May 2020 16:37 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Donald Hobson’s comment on: Trust-Build­ing: The New Ra­tion­al­ity Project

  “I don’t trust your ev­i­dence.”

  I sus­pect that the fac­tions which can be rec­on­ciled are those that are op­er­at­ing in a shared epistemic paradigm. For ex­am­ple, two op­pos­ing sci­en­tific fac­tions that agree on the ba­sic prin­ci­ples of logic and ev­i­dence, but do not trust the re­search that the other side is pro­duc­ing—per­haps be­cause they be­lieve it’s slop­pily done or even fraud­u­lent. To be con­crete, the de­bate on whether the min­i­mum wage does or does not harm eco­nomic growth has volu­mi­nous ev­i­dence on each side, pro­duced by se­ri­ous re­searchers, but it ap­par­ently hasn’t caused ei­ther side to budge.

  A sec­ond ex­am­ple is be­tween re­li­gious be­liev­ers. Two camps might ac­cuse each other of a be­lief in God that isn’t based on gen­uine rev­e­la­tion. For ex­am­ple, Chris­ti­ans dis­count the Qu­ran, while Mus­lims dis­count the claim that Je­sus was the son of God. But nei­ther side ques­tions that the other is gen­uinely mo­ti­vated by faith.

  “You’re just pre­tend­ing to care about our epistemic norms”

  Less tractable is re­solv­ing a dis­pute be­tween fac­tions that agree on an epistemic paradigm in the­ory, but sus­pect that in prac­tice, the other side is not ac­tu­ally us­ing it. An ex­am­ple here is the dis­agree­ment be­tween Western medicine and natur­opa­thy. Natur­opaths ac­cuse Western doc­tors of pre­tend­ing like their prac­tice is more based on ev­i­dence than it re­ally is (which is of­ten a fair ac­cu­sa­tion). There are some natur­opaths who claim that prac­tices like home­opa­thy and acupunc­ture have an ev­i­dence base, and Western doc­tors ac­cuse them not only of sloppy re­search, but of only us­ing re­search as cover for a fun­da­men­tally non-ev­i­dence-based ap­proach to medicine.

  A re­li­gious ex­am­ple is be­tween fol­low­ers of the same re­li­gion who might ac­cuse each other of fak­ing faith to serve some wor­ldly goal. This ac­cu­sa­tion gets lev­eled at pros­per­ity gospel, fun­da­men­tal­ists, cults, and main­line re­li­gions.

  “Our epistemic norms are in­com­pat­i­ble.”

  More in­tractable still is a dis­pute be­tween fac­tions that openly dis­agree on epistemic norms. Your ex­am­ple is be­tween be­liev­ers in di­v­ine rev­e­la­tion and ad­her­ents of Oc­cam’s ra­zor/​logic/​ev­i­dence.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 29 May 2020 19:57 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: G Gordon Worley III’s comment on: Trust-Build­ing: The New Ra­tion­al­ity Project

  Yes, that seems very much along the lines I’m set­ting out!

  I think part of where my take goes a level deeper is point­ing out that you’re prob­a­bly se­lec­tive in which per­spec­tives you seek out. There are prob­a­bly some you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. Others that you would, but in se­cret, be­cause your pri­mary trust-net­works would find them dan­ger­ous. And some that are in that sweet spot of be­ing for­eign enough to be novel for your trust-net­work, but also friendly enough to be ac­cepted. It’s this lat­ter cat­e­gory that I’m sug­gest­ing is most valuable to find, in the spirit of rec­on­cil­ing fac­tion­al­ism to move to­ward truth.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 29 May 2020 19:53 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Trust-Build­ing: The New Ra­tion­al­ity Project

  It sounds like you’re sug­gest­ing that there’s a ten­sion be­tween trust and trust­wor­thi­ness. A trust­ing com­mu­nity will have an eas­ier time co­or­di­nat­ing ac­tion, but may make bad de­ci­sions due to a lack of crit­i­cal think­ing. By con­trast, a crit­i­cal com­mu­nity will have a hard time co­or­di­nat­ing, but when it does suc­ceed, its pro­jects will tend to be more trust­wor­thy.

  If this is an ac­cu­rate in­ter­pre­ta­tion, I agree.

  I also think that the prob­lem of fac­tions that I’m de­scribing fits with this. Mistrust in other peo­ple’s ba­sic in­tu­itions causes the rise of in­tel­lec­tual fac­tions, each of which has high in-ground trust and con­se­quently low trust­wor­thi­ness:

  Differ­ent in­tu­itions → mis­trust → as­sum­ing con­trary ev­i­dence is based on a flawed pro­cess → fac­tions → un­crit­i­cal in-group trust.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 29 May 2020 19:41 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Donald Hobson’s comment on: Trust-Build­ing: The New Ra­tion­al­ity Project

  Once one per­son any­where in the world gets all the pieces just right, then it will be ob­vi­ously good and quickly spread.

  My post is in­spired by Zack M Davis’s com­ment that’s linked at the top. The point there was that when be­liefs di­verge so much that we start dis­count­ing valid ev­i­dence be­cause we mis­trust the source, then the truth will not be ob­vi­ous and will not spread.

  Smart­phones are a great case in point. Although it’s ob­vi­ous that they func­tion me­chan­i­cally as promised, it’s not at all clear that they’re a good thing for hu­man­ity. There’s plenty of re­search about whether they’re driv­ing men­tal health is­sues, de­grad­ing our re­la­tion­ships, suck­ing up our time, and drain­ing our in­come.

  There is a truth of the mat­ter, but some peo­ple find it hard to trust ev­i­dence one way or the other. They get sus­pi­cious of the ev­i­dence of the fac­tions claiming that smart­phones are or aren’t do­ing these things; sus­pi­cious of their in­cen­tives and in­tu­itions that we be­lieve drive their er­ro­neous con­clu­sions; and aren’t ready to be­lieve even when the ev­i­dence is sys­tem­at­i­cally weighted (GIGO).

  The kind of unity I’m refer­ring to here is wide­spread agree­ment on how to in­ter­pret the state of the ev­i­dence on any given propo­si­tion. It’s what Kuhn would call “nor­mal sci­ence.” I think this is un­con­tro­ver­sially de­sir­able. Unity on physics, chem­istry, com­puter sci­ence, and so on is what pro­duced the Smart­phone.

  But not only is the ev­i­dence in many other fields (and even within these fields, in some ar­eas) in­com­plete, the ex­perts are di­vided into long-stand­ing, in­tractable fac­tions that dis­agree about how to in­ter­pret it, won’t change their minds, and aren’t in­ter­ested in try­ing.

  The old cog­ni­tive bias frame sug­gests that we need to in­di­vi­d­u­ally over­come our ir­ra­tional bi­ases in or­der to cor­rect this prob­lem.

  The new trust-build­ing frame sug­gests that in­stead, peo­ple are ba­si­cally ra­tio­nal, but are failing to build suffi­cient trust be­tween mem­bers of op­pos­ing fac­tions to rec­on­cile the ev­i­dence and pro­duce a mo­tion to­ward truth.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 29 May 2020 19:27 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Trust-Build­ing: The New Ra­tion­al­ity Project

  It’s that ex­plo­ra­tion should always be a com­po­nent of your la­bor, even when you are more heav­ily weight­ing ex­ploita­tion and rou­tine. Even if you like your job, spend some time ev­ery year pon­der­ing al­ter­na­tives.

  Ex­plo­ra­tion and ex­ploita­tion can also be nested. For ex­am­ple, the build­ing of the hy­dro­gen bomb was a re­search pro­gram (ex­plo­ra­tory) but was a large-scale com­mit­ment to a for­mal pro­ject (ex­ploita­tion) in which one sci­en­tist took the time to think about whether the bomb might like the air on fire (ex­plo­ra­tion). It’s prob­a­bly not a good idea for a pro­ject to fo­cus all its en­er­gies on ex­e­cu­tion and ex­ploita­tion, with­out set­ting aside some re­sources to con­sid­er­ing al­ter­na­tives and is­sues.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 29 May 2020 15:14 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Trust-Build­ing: The New Ra­tion­al­ity Project

  I think it’s ad­vo­cat­ing against cultism, but if that’s your take­away, my bad for not mak­ing that clearer!

Trust-Build­ing: The New Ra­tion­al­ity Project

• AllAmericanBreakfast 28 May 2020 21:21 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: G Gordon Worley III’s comment on: Bak­ing is Not a Ritual

  I’m in the midst of a ca­reer tran­si­tion into com­pu­ta­tional biol­ogy. I taught my­self cod­ing at a young age and find it in­tu­itive, but I’ve never worked in a tech job be­fore. This re­as­sured me that if peo­ple who don’t know that an iter­a­tor vari­able doesn’t need to be named “i” to work, that I can get a job in tech too, since I’m at least be­yond that. Thanks :)

• AllAmericanBreakfast 28 May 2020 21:20 UTC

  1 point

  on: Bak­ing is Not a Ritual

  It would be neat to have a bread bak­ing recipe book (or web­site) in which each recipe was ac­com­panied by nicely-de­signed and or­ga­nized de­scrip­tions of the sci­ence be­hind each in­gre­di­ent and step. Al­most always, the filler in recipe books is au­to­bi­o­graph­i­cal, or de­scribes the dish it­self; sci­en­tific de­scrip­tions are rare.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 26 May 2020 2:14 UTC

  11 points

  on: Should I self-var­i­o­late to COVID-19

  At 26, you can ex­pect to life around 55 more years. Let’s trade off against wait­ing for a vac­cine, as­sum­ing the vac­cine is 100% safe and effec­tive, and also as­sume your quaran­tin­ing strat­egy is 100% effec­tive.

  By giv­ing your­self COVID-19, you’re los­ing about 55 years * 52 weeks per year * .002 chance of death = 6 weeks of life in ex­pec­ta­tion. That’s not count­ing the risk of chronic fa­tigue, or the time you might spend be­ing sick.

  Your mo­ti­va­tions seem ba­si­cally self­ish, mod­er­ated by a de­sire to be so­cially re­spon­si­ble. If so, then con­sider that we’ll also prob­a­bly have faster and more wide­spread test­ing in the com­ing months. More effi­ca­cious treat­ments may emerge. Th­ese may per­mit so­cially re­spon­si­ble travel prior to the ar­rival of a vac­cine. Then con­sider that some peo­ple may not want you around even if you tell them you’re im­mune. And of course, the world’s go­ing to con­tinue be­ing shut down even if you have an­ti­bod­ies in your sys­tem.

  Does so­cial dis­tanc­ing suck so bad for you that this trade off feels like it makes sense? What is the con­crete ac­tivity you’d like to be able to do, that you can’t do with­out an­ti­bod­ies in your sys­tem?

• AllAmericanBreakfast 18 May 2020 0:25 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: clearthis’s comment on: The EMH Aten’t Dead

  The steel­man that VIX re­sponded to COVID-19 in Jan­uary is that it went up 40% from Jan 23-27. For what­ever rea­son, this chart makes it eas­ier to see the bump I’m talk­ing about. It’s not dra­matic com­pared with the ex­plo­sion in mid-Feb, but that ac­cords with the idea that the mar­ket was un­sure about whether COVID-19 was go­ing to be a re­play of SARS or some­thing much worse, and didn’t de­cide un­til the hard ev­i­dence came in of in­ter­na­tional com­mu­nity spread on Feb. 21.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 18 May 2020 0:18 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: clearthis’s comment on: The EMH Aten’t Dead

  Hmm, maybe you are right. I had a dis­cus­sion about this in re­gards to an­other one of my posts about COVID-19 and the stock mar­ket, but now that I’m look­ing again I don’t re­ally see any­thing like what I was de­scribing.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 16 May 2020 22:34 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: clearthis’s comment on: The EMH Aten’t Dead

  Mar­kets did re­act just about as soon as COVID started mak­ing the Amer­i­can news. If you look at VIX, which is an in­dex of S&P500 fu­tures volatility (aka the “fear in­dex”), it jumped to a new, higher plateau right as COVID-19 started mak­ing the news in mid-Jan­uary.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 16 May 2020 22:14 UTC

  1 point

  on: The EMH Aten’t Dead

  Your sec­ond quote that you at­tributed to me was ac­tu­ally from keaswaran, who I agree with.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 11 May 2020 23:35 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: clone of saturn’s comment on: Zoom Tech­nolo­gies, Inc. vs. the Effi­cient Mar­kets Hypothesis

  That doesn’t seem to sup­port the grandiose con­clu­sions that are usu­ally made on the ba­sis of the EMH. The same would be true of a poker game, for in­stance, or sim­ply a bet be­tween 3 peo­ple where only one of them can be right.

  Yes, pre­cisely. And that is a mean­ingful pre­dic­tion.

  The EMH is not a grandiose claim. It is a bor­ing re­but­tal to grandios­ity. Say­ing “you prob­a­bly will make an av­er­age amount of money for your in­tel­li­gence and ed­u­ca­tion level trad­ing stocks as you would in any other pro­fes­sion” is de­cid­edly dull. Say­ing “peo­ple with mil­lions or billions of dol­lars in­vested in X keep a pretty tight bead on new in­for­ma­tion re­lated to X and make trades based on it” is also a sen­si­ble claim. Say­ing “boy, this is com­pli­cated stuff—are you sure that’s alpha you’ve found there?” is rea­son­able.

  In the end, money talks. So if any­body is dead con­vinced that the EMH is wrong, there are hun­dred dol­lar bills ly­ing around in the stock mar­ket, and they’ve found a way to pick them up, the ul­ti­mate test is just to say “go make a lot of money, then, and let me know how it all went once you’ve ex­ited the stock mar­ket!”

• AllAmericanBreakfast 11 May 2020 22:46 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: gilch’s comment on: Zoom Tech­nolo­gies, Inc. vs. the Effi­cient Mar­kets Hypothesis

  I mean, that’s the ideal case. I’m skep­ti­cal that my own efforts, or those of most peo­ple, would lead them to profit sub­stan­tially more than they could have by ap­ply­ing their en­er­gies to any other line of work.

  This is partly based on my own ex­pe­rience do­ing a mini his­tory of COVID 19 and the stock mar­ket, when I was re­ally con­vinced that the mar­ket had be­haved ir­ra­tionally. It was re­mark­able to see how long it took me to find dis­con­firm­ing ev­i­dence that made me see that the mar­ket was just think­ing differ­ently. Based on that ex­pe­rience, I’d want to see a whole lot of work sunk into any at­tempt to find alpha be­fore I was pre­pared to be­lieve it was real.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 11 May 2020 15:32 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: Really Fresh Baking

  In my imag­i­na­tion, we’d have fresh-baked bread vend­ing ma­chines ev­ery city block in­stead of lit­tle free libraries. Bread takes around 1-1.5 hours to cool enough to serve. The vend­ing ma­chine pro­duced bread only at high-de­mand times and could slice bread in­ter­nally so that users could take away just the bits they wanted. Meet­ing the neigh­bors at the vend­ing ma­chine in the mid­dle of the block to get your bread could be a pleas­ant so­cial bond­ing ex­pe­rience.

  You could com­bine this with a hy­dro­ponic GroShed. If it works as well as in­tended, you’d prob­a­bly need to spend around $15,000 to for a GroShed big enough to make pro­duce for a fam­ily of four. Imag­ine that it lasts 10 years and costs $100/​month to run, and you’re look­ing at a roughly $2,600 per year for year-round, gar­den-fresh veg­gies. Un­for­tu­nately, you’ll still have to buy your fruit, and pos­si­bly your tu­bers, at the store.

  If Whole Foods veg­gies cost an av­er­age of $3 per pound and your fam­ily eats its FDA-ap­proved 5 serv­ings per day of pro­duce (roughly 1 pound per per­son), that might cost $4,400 per year. So you’d po­ten­tially be achiev­ing some sig­nifi­cant cost sav­ings.

  I’m be­ing nice to the GroShed here, and not con­sid­er­ing the op­por­tu­nity cost of the square footage.

  Your risk is that the GroShed doesn’t work out for some rea­son:

  • It might be tire­some to set up or operate

  • Hy­dro­ponic pro­duce might not taste very good

  • Per­haps it’s limited in the va­ri­ety or re­li­a­bil­ity of its output

  • It might break or be ex­pen­sive to maintain

  • You might not ac­tu­ally fol­low through on eat­ing 5 serv­ings of gar­den-fresh veg­gies per day

  This seems like an­other ini­ti­a­tive that might be best ex­e­cuted on the scale of a city block.

  Imag­ine if we al­tered the zon­ing of res­i­den­tial neigh­bor­hoods slightly so that it was nor­mal for one chunk of ev­ery block to con­tain an au­to­mated gar­den + bak­ery. That sounds like fully-au­to­mated lux­ury gay space com­mu­nism to me...

• AllAmericanBreakfast 11 May 2020 14:59 UTC

  1 point

  on: Really Fresh Baking

  You could use a small bread­mak­ing ma­chine. Make a large tub of flour mix­ture and a vat of wet in­gre­di­ents with a ded­i­cated scoop for each. Or scratch a mark on the bot­tom of the bread ma­chine it­self for the level the wet in­gre­di­ents should be at, so you don’t have to deal with wash­ing an oily mea­sur­ing scoop. Then just pour them in and turn the ma­chine on three times a day. Many mod­els have a de­lay start timer so that you can wake up to fresh bread.

  Based on this, it sounds like you could have a hot fresh loaf ev­ery meal in ex­change for a few min­utes of pour­ing in­gre­di­ents, mix­ing, and clean­ing.

  Here’s the catch.

  The small ma­chines make 1-lb loaves. A gro­cery store loaf is 1.7 lbs. In­dus­try stan­dard is 18 slices per loaf, so a 1-lb should give you about 10 slices. If you like 2 slices of bread per serv­ing, each “small” loaf is enough for 5 peo­ple who want bread ev­ery sin­gle meal. Sounds work­able for a fam­ily of 4-5 or a cafe­te­ria set­ting.

  If you were cook­ing for just your­self, you’d be throw­ing away about 2.5 pounds of cold bread ev­ery day. If you were cook­ing for your­self and a part­ner, it’s more like 1.2 pounds, but try con­vinc­ing most peo­ple to not feel bad about that kind of food waste. Can’t just give away the ex­tras, be­cause it would all be partly-eaten loaves, not nice pretty whole loaves.

  My guess is that the end re­sult for 1-2 eaters would be you’d make one loaf per day and eat cold bread the rest of the time. That might still be an im­prove­ment. But then there’s that pesky he­do­nis­tic tread­mill to worry about…

• AllAmericanBreakfast 11 May 2020 7:55 UTC

  25 points

  on: Zoom Tech­nolo­gies, Inc. vs. the Effi­cient Mar­kets Hypothesis

  I think it’s worth steel­man­ning the EMH in this case.

  Let’s com­pare ZTNO (the False Zoom) and ZM (the True Zoom) for the last 6 months:

  False zoom prices

  True zoom prices

  True zoom be­gan climb­ing on around Feb. 1st and seems to have con­tinued climb­ing.

  False zoom had a cou­ple lit­tle bumps in Fe­bru­ary, but it only started ris­ing con­sis­tently around Feb. 24th, and the spike you’re notic­ing mostly took place from March 12-20th, over about a week’s time. Then it plum­meted, got a hold put on it, and de­clined once the hold was re­leased to an un­prece­dented low of $0.70/​share.

  How big of an er­ror is this?

  Mar­ket cap is the price of stock mul­ti­plied by the num­ber of out­stand­ing shares of stock. Its cur­rent mar­ket cap is $300.9 mil­lion, so at a share price of $.70 cents, it should have about 430 mil­lion out­stand­ing shares.

  Let’s as­sume the worst-case sce­nario: to­day’s low­est-ever price was the cor­rect price for ZTNO from Feb. 24th on.

  In that case, for in­vestors who owned ZTNO at its peak price and held it through to to­day, they suffered a col­lec­tive loss of around $9 billion.

  The world’s mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion is around $78 trillion, so that’s around 0.012% of the world’s mar­ket cap.

  What’s the strongest defense of the EMH I can offer here?

  • Even a very strong EMH might al­low for oc­ca­sional fuck­ups, when we’re talk­ing a tiny frac­tion of a per­cent of the world’s pub­li­cly traded com­pa­nies, for about a week’s time, in very weird cir­cum­stances. If you go around cherry-pick­ing for missed op­por­tu­ni­ties in hind­sight, you’re sure to find them.

  • It’s called the Effi­cient Mar­ket Hy­poth­e­sis, not the Ideal Mar­ket Hy­poth­e­sis. Say­ing “As­set prices re­flect all available in­for­ma­tion” is not the same as say­ing “As­set prices re­flect all in­for­ma­tion.” Ground-level eco­nomic in­for­ma­tion, such as the bankruptcy of a small-cap com­pany in a for­eign coun­try, might spread at a speed that is pro­por­tional to its ex­pected value. Per­haps most or all in­vestors in ZTNO prior to Jan­uary had such small seg­ments of their port­fo­lio al­lo­cated to ZTNO that it didn’t make sense to check whether or not it ex­isted, since pre­sum­ably the vast ma­jor­ity of listed com­pa­nies do ex­ist and it prob­a­bly takes quite a bit of work to check.

  • Did ZTNO re­ally look like a bad buy at the time to some­one who knew it wasn’t the True Zoom? Maybe you no­ticed early that peo­ple were buy­ing be­cause of name con­fu­sion, and you bought for that rea­son, hop­ing to time the mar­ket and sell be­fore the bub­ble burst. That’s not illog­i­cal. Then again, ZTNO is a Chi­nese video­con­ferenc­ing com­pany. Maybe you rea­son­ably ex­pected that they, like ZM, would profit from in­creased de­mand due to COVID-19. I ad­mit that the com­pany sounds du­bi­ous, but that’s not a sure thing.

  My small ex­pe­rience with stocks is that the more I look into ap­par­ently bonkers vi­o­la­tions of the EMH, the more I dis­cover that I just didn’t un­der­stand the full con­text. Search a lit­tle harder un­der the as­sum­tion the EMH is true and you’re just miss­ing some­thing, and there’s a good bet you’ll find an ex­pla­na­tion that makes the prices make sense.

• AllAmericanBreakfast 1 May 2020 21:01 UTC

  5 points

  on: Fore­cast­ing an 80% chance of an effec­tive anti COVID-19 drug (prob­a­bly Remde­sivir)

  +1 point for my pub­lic pre­dic­tion track record.