You’re leaving out geometric growth of successive bets. Kelly maximizes expected geometric growth rate. Therefore over enough bets Kelly maximizes expected, i.e. mean, wealth, not merely median wealth.
bluefalcon
A bettor who can make an infinite number of expected profitable bets is going to outperform one who can only make a finite number of bets.
(any number between 1 and 0 exclusive)^infinity=0, i.e. for an infinite series of bets, the probability of ruin with naive EV maximization is 1. So, expected value is actually −1x your bet size.
IIRC studies have found IQ is more strongly correlated with job performance than most other things people use. BUT there is one exception—tests that mirror the actual work. Which of course is more legally defensible, in addition to being a genuinely better measure. If I were hiring people, I would probably do interviews just to not seem weird to applicants, but all the real selection would be based on performance testing.
I predicted 80% on this particular set of reforms being good but I would have put 60 on the opposite if he had disguised the identity of the revolutionaries. Democracy and freedom are good and the French revolution/Napoleon were generally better at those than the pre-existing institutions. But most revolutions (and wars, and natural disasters) don’t budge it either way. The average is a short burst of bloodshed followed by more of what came before.
I highly doubt that wars or disasters are net good on average. Being defeated in WWII was probably good for the axis powers’ economies because they replaced totalitarian states with democracies. But I doubt that’s the default outcome. Losing a war with Spain, for example, seems to have been very bad for most countries’ long-term prospects.
Industrialization clearly doesn’t change everything here. British political reform cleanly precedes the industrial revolution; US and French revolutions are post-British IR and may have been affected by it some, but before those countries really industrialized.
Does this study prove it? Maybe not. But if there are confounding effects, industrialization ain’t it.
uuhhhh most of the middle class health care professionals I know are stoners
EMH requires liquid markets where you can’t cheat. Buying non-US stocks may be putting you on the wrong side of an inefficient market.
I think most or all of these rituals are still functional even if participants can’t see it. If you want to see that up close, look at how you get the rules waived. If a dispute over a document goes to court, a judge can waive almost any formal defect. But they won’t always do it, and someone else, like the clerk, can’t. The formalities take the place of human judgment because only a few people are trusted to exercise the appropriate level of judgment and getting it in front of such a person is expensive and time-consuming.
Given the difference between mortgage rates and average market returns, you probably should mortgage your house to invest in the stock market even today.
Easily worth it for me. Margin is probably a better deal and should be taken advantage of first. But the idea of being so attached to a particular house that you’d give up a chance to be significantly wealthier just to avoid the risk of foreclosure sounds nuts to me.
The market may go down for 10 years but you’re not gonna stay unemployed for 10 years. If you lose your job in a developed country for reasons that are correlated with the market (i.e. not quitting or misconduct) you get unemployment, which is more than enough to live on.
[Question] Best empirical evidence on better than SP500 investment returns?
I am far away from retirement so not at 30x yet. But assuming 7% real returns, my projected nest egg is about 108x my current living expenses around the age I want to retire. If something goes wrong before then I can always put more in. Compounding is fucking magic if you start it in your early 20s.
Haha. I didn’t really know what was a reasonable amount to save when I started because I had just gotten my first real job and really had no idea how expensive a lifestyle I might want in the future. But I knew I didn’t want to be poor ever again. So I set a fairly arbitrary goal, spent a few more years living on the poverty-level income I had had before getting a good job so that I could save while it still had lots and lots of time to grow, and now it’s done.
And from a stress/flexibility standpoint I think it was the right decision. I probably don’t have to think about saving ever again, except for fun, so if I want to take a job that is funner but pays less, I have absolute freedom to do that.
And it turns out even having money I can live pretty cheap. There were only a few material things I hated about being poor. The constant stress over money was the real problem most of the time. I don’t enjoy cooking and the food was boring when I couldn’t afford restaurants, so I eat more takeout. And walking 5 miles bc the bus doesn’t go where you want kinda sucks, so I take more cabs/ubers/lyfts.
Szilard got his key insight precisely by being pissed at Rutherford’s hubris. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/leo-szilard-a-traffic-light-and-a-slice-of-nuclear-history/
The interesting measure would be absolute returns, not risk-adjusted.
5% of world pop or GDP means China, India, and the US are the only countries used for the calculation in 12. Which seems questionable.
Also, 11-13 and maybe even 6 and 14 are lagging indicators that seem quite unhelpful in making before-the-fact predictions
This post is stolen valor. We just ended a 20-year war against some of the most horrible people in the world in 2021. Anyone over age 20 who claims to long for righteous combat who didn’t enlist during the Global War on Terrorism (or make a serious attempt and have it denied for reasons fully beyond their control) is a liar. As is almost anyone who makes this claim now and hasn’t signed up to be a mercenary in Ukraine (special exception for someone who needs a valid US security clearance and would put it at risk by joining a foreign army). Policy should not cater to their fake preferences.
It’s clearly bad because Altman is launching a coup attempt against the board, making clear that we cannot control dangerous AI even with a nonprofit structure as long as someone has career/profit incentives to build it. Altman should be put down like a rabid dog.
I dunno about you but I am basically just a pants-wearing monke. I have an intuitive aversion to the experience machine but I think that is tied to my own experience of life and that my monke brain just does not fully understand the hypothetical being put forward and how radically different it is. In life thus far, and in any version of the scenario that seems plausible to me, there are real hedonic costs, or at least risks of costs, to being deceived. Maybe the machine company steals my organs or forgets to feed me or something while I am deluded and unable to care for myself in the real world. And then either I die, or experience much more pain than I would have. I think if I had perfect certainty that the machine would work as advertised I would take it, but my monke brain thinks it’s foolish to have such certainty, and in any real-world situation it is probably right.
I used to think I held truth as a terminal value but now I think that is not even a meaningful thing to state. To quote a famous movie guy, “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!” Or more fundamwntally, you can’t even KNOW the truth. You can know a few limited truths, but without a brain enhancement so serious that it’s questionable whether the resulting being is even you anymore, that knowledge is quite limited. We make fun of pigeons and goldfish for being dumb but we can’t even see all the colors they see. Even your vision of the milk right in front of you is a simulation, and a pale one that leaves out details so basic they can be understood by a pigeon. Even limiting it to knowledge humans can actually know, the body of knowledge is too large for one individual to know it all, so you are limited to knowing just a few things that interest you. While in a simulation, there really is some combination of particles forming the thing you see, so it is “real” in the sense that it is a thing that exists in the universe, even if not the thing your mind thinks it is. There is a sense in which the world outside the machine is more real, but one human’s understanding of that world is so limited anyway that I am not sure the warping done by the machine matters, except insofar as it has external consequences.