As you said, it doesn’t really change the point, but I’m here to say it’s not an alternative bond structure, just that the bond happens to be trading at a discount already at the initial conditions. It will trade at a steeper discount as interest rates rise. It would be even less intuitive, but you could also do this analysis with bonds that are trading at a premium (trading at a smaller premium, or even hitting par or switching to a discount, as interest rates rise).
Daniel V
Karma: 490
Matt Levine at Bloomberg also has good comments on this—basically it was a boring bank run/collapse. With it being primarily a duration issue (rather than an impaired assets issue) and a large amount of deposits, I also suspect we’ll see an acquisition.
Check the date on this too.
Further illustrating Eliezer’s misplaced confidence, Sumner’s view is about NGDP targeting, so the success of the BOJ’s policy should be based on delivering NGDP growth, not real economic variables like RGDP growth or employment rate as Eliezer implies. They were in fact successful at this (RGDP growth + Inflation = NGDP growth; with RGDP growth continuing on trend and Inflation bucking the downtrend, that’s a new NGDP trajectory, baby!). Here, with 100=March 2013 as Kuroda ascended, you can see the shift in CPI trend even before the VAT impact in April 2014. Sumner was bullish on the new BOJ policy by September 2013.
So, Eliezer, you think you have identified which econbloggers, like Scott Sumner, know better than the Bank of Japan, do you? Eliezer did identify Sumner successfully, but he got lucky. His belief in Sumner was based on a misread of Sumner’s position, one that led him to wrongly believe real economic variables would supply evidence for the veracity of the theory. Further compounding the issue, while employment rate might have been readable as supportive, as Matthew Barnett points out, RGDP was not. He is overconfident and should be more humble about his approach.
Ironically, Eliezer’s mistake actually more strongly makes his key point. The demand for humility Eliezer was writing about stemmed from the belief that even a very good reasoner oughtn’t be able to outperform “the experts.” And yet, here we have a mistaken reasoner outperforming “the experts” (at least, outperforming the hawkish experts, before they were replaced by the dovish experts who implemented the new monetary policy at the BOJ). Perhaps the case for humility is not so strong after all: “it is perfectly plausible for an econblogger to write up a good analysis of what the Bank of Japan is doing wrong, and for a sophisticated reader to reasonably agree that the analysis seems decisive, without a deep agonizing episode of Dunning-Kruger-inspired self-doubt playing any important role in the analysis.” I suppose one might need to decide how interchangeable “humility” and “agonizing self-doubt” are...
Eliezer is driving an intellectual racecar when many are driving intellectual horse-and-buggies. Still needs to be vacuumed out from time to time though.
Chapin is describing a range of gains—“Until I’d gained some muscle, I didn’t know that getting out of bed shouldn’t actually feel like much, physically, or that walking up a bunch of stairs shouldn’t tire you out, or that carrying groceries around shouldn’t be onerous. I felt cursed.” If you can remove a general feeling of being cursed and get a license to live in the material world, wow! If you can solve chronic pain with strength training, great! If you can climb stairs without getting tired, a lot of people already can, but good! If you can carry groceries, like most people can, okay!
Since most normal people’s gains will fall in the last two types (for real, what percent of the people feel they “need some special justification for existing” because they’re physically not-that-bad-kinda-on-the-weak-side?), you have a point that for a lot of people who already can do things without bother, this won’t move the needle. Yet, for many who can do these things, doing them without bother may be nice (and prospectively under-appreciated) - feeling less exhaustion in your life generally and having more energy to do things you really want to do are quite good benefits.
But even if the benefits are more trivial than Chapin characterizes, I think your characterizing the costs as “feel[ing] miserable” is a bit much (though obviously everything is subjective here). Again, for some, sure, it’s misery. For most, it’s challenging and uplifting and potentially even energizing (especially after the first couple workouts).
So, we have Chapin claiming , and I suggest it’s probably more like or at worst , either of which should be more motivating than your . But I agree the benefits seem trumped up by Chapin.
You (correctly, I believe) distinguish between controlling the reward function and controlling the rewards. This is very important as reflected in your noting the disanalogy to AGI. So I’m a little puzzled by your association of the second bullet point (controlling the reward function, which parents have quite low but non-zero control over) with behaviorism (controlling the rewards, which parents have a lot of control over).
(I’m going to nix the cost of the ticket as it’s just a constant)
Depends. Do you want to sum the probability weighted payoffs? EV is fine for that. The probability weighting deals with the striking “really, really low” odds (unless you want to further reweight the probabilities themselves by running them through a subjective probability function), and the payoffs are just the payoffs (unless you want to further reweight the payoffs themselves by running them through a subjective utility function). Either or both of these changes may be appropriate to deal with your own subjective views of objective reality, but that’s what they are—personal transformations. However, enough people subscribe to such transformations that EU (expected utility, or see cumulative prospect theory) makes sense more widely than just for you. We indeed perceive probabilities differently from their objective meanings and we indeed value payoffs differently from their mere dollar value.
Now, if you just want a number that best represents the payoff structure, we have candidate central tendencies—mean is a good one (that’s just EV). But since the payoff distribution is highly skewed, maybe you’d prefer the median. Or the mode. It’s a classic problem, but it’s finding what represents the objective distribution rather than what summarizes your possible subjective returns.
Thanks for the analysis, and I mostly agree with your interpretation (having done no further research into this myself), but I’m confused how dividing by 1000 is the problem here. The levels are “basically fine” because 9*-they are well below the FDA/EPA limits, but the CA levels are only about 1 order of magnitude lower, not 3. If they had divided by 100, would we be interrogating their divisor choice? (The current implication is that that arbitrary approach would have been fine since it would correspond to FDA/EPA levels). It makes me think that maybe the impetus to question the arbitrary approach mainly stems from the conclusions not fitting our palate.
Karma downvote for lack of introspection into failures of rationality in a rationality forum.
Agreement upvote for “don’t do this” because “that is telling of your own biases” without naming any is just not engaging. It was sadly a throwaway starting line to an otherwise excellent comment.
1. My comment was contra “the case that the categorical imperative tries to pull a fast one.” Evaluating this (the point of the OP) very much requires an understanding of intent.
2. Well sure, if you don’t care about the point of the OP, you can care about other things. Whether it is a useful framework for you to judge and cajole others in their actions is a very important question! You might still care about intent though. Is a handsaw the right tool for hammering a nail? I would recommend you look at a handsaw’s intended use case and rule it out. If you really want to see how it would do, okay then, I can’t really stop you. You can conclude a handsaw it bad at hammering nails, but don’t go to the hardware store and complain. Likewise, is the categorical imperative a good way to aggregate preferences? I say it’s not for that, so you don’t really have to try it. If you really want to see how it would do and find out that it’s bad for the job though, great. But don’t say you were duped!
Ah, makes more sense now. I’m generally not a fan of that approach though, and here’s why.
My comment was that your conclusion about the categorical imperative vis-a-vis its aims was off because the characterization of its aims wasn’t quite right. But you’re saying it’s okay, we’re still learning something here because you meant to do the not-quite-right characterization because most people will do that, and this is the conclusion they will reach from that. But you never tell me up front that’s what you’re doing, nor do you caution that the characterization is not-quite-right (you said your purpose was to “make the case that the categorical imperative tries to pull a fast one” not that “laypeople will end up making the case...”). So I’m left thinking you genuinely believe the case you laid out, and my efforts go into addressing the flaws in that. Little did I know you were trying to describe a manner of not-quite-right thinking people will do, a description which we should be interested in not because of its truth value but because of its inaccuracy (which you never pointed out).
I’ve seen this before in another domain: someone wanted to argue that doing X in modeling would be a bad call. So they did Y, then did X, got bad results and said voila, X is bad. But they did Y too (which in this particular case was a priori known to be not the right thing to do and did most of the damage—if they did Y and not X, they’d get good results, and if they had just not done Y, they’d get good results without X and adequate results with X)! When I pointed out that X really wasn’t that bad by itself, they said, well, Y is pretty standard practice so we’d expect people to probably improperly do that in this particular case anyway. You gotta tell me that beforehand! Otherwise it looks like a flaw in your commenting on the true state of the world as opposed to a feature of your analysis of the typical approach. But it also changes the message: the problem isn’t with X but Y, the problem isn’t with the categorical imperative but analyzing it superficially. Of course, that message is also the main point of my comment.
The categorical imperative aims to solve the problem of what norms to pick, but goes on to try to claim universality.
...
The trouble is that the categorical imperative tries to smuggle in every moral agents’ values without actually doing the hard work of aggregating and deciding between them.That would be a problem, if that is what it were doing. The categorical imperative aims to define the obligation an individual has in conducting themselves consistent with the autonomy of the will. Each individual may have a distinct moral code consistent with that obligation, and that is indeed a problem for ethics, but the categorical imperative does not attempt to help people pick specific norms to apply across multiple agents.
Kant lays out a ton of definitions and then leans on them heavily; it’s classic old philosophy. Understanding what Kant said means you need to read Kant, not just his conclusions. That’s a big strike against the clarity of his writing (it is a real slog to get through), but whether he achieves his intent should be judged vs. his self-professed intent, not against a misunderstanding of his intent.
With a goal to “alleviate immediate and preventable suffering,” QALY seems to be a pretty terrible metric. You need to measure immediacy, preventability, and suffering, or at least the suffering due to just the immediate and preventable causes. I would suggest suffering needs construct definition before you consider an operationalization.
It would be smart to measure pre- and post-intervention. The good news is that if suffering is a subjective psychological state, you could do post-only and measure perceived change. If you’re worried about self-report, you could do observer-report (case worker), but since they’ll be doling out the funds that could be biased as well (and presumably they’ll be basing these decisions in part on self-reports of what is a “fire”).
The type of counterfactual analysis tailcalled suggests is likely what the family or case worker would be mentally approximating when responding to how big of a difference paying off the utility bill or a pizza night made to their suffering. Plus, n=1, so a qualitative assessment may be all you can really do—if they rate something a 7⁄7 on reducing their suffering and everything else came in at 1-2, sure, that hits you between the eyes, though you’d probably get that anyway from them saying “the most important thing, by a mile, was X, and this is why...”
If you take the business part of the business and separate it from the Ponzi part of the business, it’s not a Ponzi scheme. But apparently it was a package deal—at least until Alameda were to weather the crypto crash? Like, we just need to siphon FTX customer funds over to Alameda until they recoup $8-10 billion over time in profits, which have not been forthcoming lately. But oops, we “forgot” that when we transferred that money over, it affected our financials—there it is, fake books. And that’s not even getting into the laughable valuations of their other “shitcoin” assets, or even of FTT itself, just the flow of funds!
This also speaks to further impairment of FTX’s value by management—if you separate the business part of the business from the management part of the business...and you can to some extent, but the damage has been done. Who is going to trust FTX as an exchange going forward even with a new structure and management team?
Finally, it’s not like Madoff vaporized the money and SBF/FTX/Alameda didn’t. If anything, it’s the opposite; Madoff was a far better steward, making the assets recoverable. SBF/FTX/Alameda simply gambled them away. Put differently, the non-Ponzi part of the business was a bigger share of Madoff’s fund than of SBF’s bundle. Obviously the valuation in either case was fake, based on a multiple of both real assets and Ponzi accounting over time, but Madoff skimmed customer funds while SBF/FTX straight-up embezzled them to prop up the husk of Alameda. In its death throes, FTX was in straight-up Ponzi mode, making withdrawing customers whole to maintain the facade at the expense of those last in line.
I think the comparison is quite apt, and the points of contrast are more interesting than absolving. I was initially hesitant to say there was some fraud/Ponzi beyond just accidentally falling into borderline insolvency, but by this point, especially with how enormous the hole, it looks much more intentional, and Matt Levine has even dropped the P-word because of it.
Disagree that “[a]t best, these theories just do not bring much new to the table” but agree that the over-emphasis on these theories is “extremely unhelpful.” That is, they provide good insights and explanatory power, and even substantial explanatory power on the margin sometimes, but having non-zero is not the same as being the explanation with the highest . Assuming the latter is often not accurate. Ironically, I find myself mostly agreeing with a post that Razied disagrees with while also mostly agreeing with Razied—the human value function is not solely, or even primarily, status seeking.
Likewise, I also disagree with “[on social media], it is well known people are playing their meaningful status games and doing false signalling on a high simulacrum level’ because Ape in the coat is doing exactly what they are complaining about. Certainly this happens, and in some cases dominates any other reasons for people’s behavior on social media, but again, most of why people engage on social media is likely not to be about obtaining status, unless status is to be so broadly defined as to include things like “personal satisfaction.”
Getting meta, here I find myself engaging in a social medium that even has a very clear social approval mechanism. Yes, I want lots of yummy upvotes (is it because they accord me status somehow, or because the social approval provides peer review for the validity of my hopefully-rational take?), but mainly I’m posting because I think my opinion is right, worthwhile to share, and hopefully conveyed in a way that can, if not persuade, update.
Nicely done!
The question is what should be the denominator of the risk?
For societal aggregate worries: Day? Sure.
For personal risk: Day? Nope. Person-day? Yes!
He guessed I had an allergic reaction and threw 5 different antihistamines
Not so much dumb luck after all! Allergic reactions often cause inflammation, and it’s the inflammation that is uncomfortable. Sure, it’s not very controlled (could have suggested one, then another, then another, until you got to Boswellia, preferably in order of prior belief for each more-specific hypothesis), and other things could cause inflammation, but it’s not completely luck either. (Though this did not detract from my enjoyment of the post!)
Some quick Googling says,
Helpfully, this study compared AKBA vs. NDGA, so maybe that could be a useful way to test the mechanism of action (they also differ in their specifics within that too, so that’s yet another question mark). Obviously not medical advice and just a curious wondering.
To the contrary, johnswentworth’s point is not that the experiments have low external validity but that they have low internal validity. It’s that there are confounds.
Ironically, one of my quibbles with the post is that the verbiage implies measurement error is the problem. Not measuring what you think you’re measuring is about content validity, but the post is actually about how omitted variables (i.e., confounders) are a problem for inferences. “You are not Complaining About What You Think You Are Complaining About.”
Adam’s whole position here, to me, is rather silly, even if we limit ourselves to use cases where the Twitter poll is being used only to try and extrapolate towards national sentiment.
I agree except with the last part (it’s not silly when thinking about extrapolating to national sentiment). The key is to what extent is it evidence of [insert thing], and of course if you’re interested in learning more, what are the factors that affect the extent to which it is evidence of [insert thing]? In other words, what are you trying to generalize to, and what interesting things are limiting your ability to generalize to [insert other thing]?
Often we are comfy with generalizing from sample to appropriately-defined population (sample of Zvi Twitter noticers to Zvi Twitter noticers), but when we don’t define the scope of our generalization properly, we get uncomfy again (sample of Zvi Twitter followers to US general population). Often we are interested in the limits of generalizability (e.g., this treatment works for men but not women, isn’t that interesting and useful!), unless the those boundaries are trivial (e.g., vasectomies work for men but not women, gosh!) or we already don’t see them as boundaries (e.g., “what if you had changed the wording from ‘YOU in particular’ to ‘YOU specifically’?).
Interestingness is in the eye of the beholder. Concede to Adam for the moment that the boundaries are not interesting because they are well-known limits to generalizability (selection, wording). Then, is it “bad evidence?” Depends on what you’re trying to generalize to (what it is purported to be evidence of)! Adam waves between Twitter polls being “meaningless” and “does not generalize at all” as in worthless for anything at all, which is obviously mostly false (it should at least generalize to Zvi Twitter noticers, though even then it could suffer from self-selection bias like many other polls), vs. “not representative of general views,” which is not silly and is far more debatable (it’s likely “weak” evidence in that Twitter polls can yield biased estimates on some questions [this is the most charitable interpretation of the position]; it’s possibly “bad” evidence if the bias is so severe that the qualitative conclusions will differ egregiously [this is the most accurate interpretation of the position seeing as he literally wanted to differentiate it from weak evidence] - e.g., if I polled lesbian women on how sexually attractive the opposite sex was to infer how sexually attractive the opposite sex is to people generally). So overall, the position is rather silly (low generalizability is not NO generalizability, and selection and wording ARE interesting factors relevant for understanding people), except on the very specific last part, where it’s not silly (possibly bad evidence) but it is also still probably not correct (probably not bad evidence).
Comparative advantage—and even worse, EY didn’t even fully reinvent it. He just lined up a bundle of things that fall under the umbrella and called it a job well done. This particular instance also checks the boxes for arrogance and lack of rigor. That post was a fun read, but the embedded disdain for economics textbooks was particularly galling since economics textbooks handle the concept just fine.