Most of the time people say “Schelling point” they mean this. Maybe it would be better to call it a Schelling fence, but even that post claims that it is a Schelling point. I suspect that you can reframe it to make it true Schelling point, such as the participants coordinating to approximate the real game by a smaller tractable game, but I’m not sure.
Douglas_Knight
Karma: 7,814
I wanted to take measure theory in college, but my advisor talked me out of it, saying that it is an old, ossified field where writers play games of streamlining their proofs. They seek too much generality and defer applications to later courses. That complaint could apply more generally, that introductory graduate classes are bad because they have captive audiences, but it seems to me much worse in analysis than other fields of mathematics. What is the point of measure theory? Archimedes gave a rigorous delta-epsilon proof that if there is a coherent notion of measure, then the area of a circle is πr². But how do you know that you don’t encounter inconsistencies?
Applications are related to constructibility. If you know what your goal is, you can see if you can skip the axiom of choice. Indeed, as I phrased it above, the goal is to show that measure is defined on some sigma algebra, not just the maximal one. And it is also related to constructibility. Why do we want measureable functions? What is a function? If a function is something you can apply at a point, then from a constructive viewpoint it must be continuous. But you can constructively describe things like infinite Fourier series. You can’t evaluate them at points, but only do other things, like compute an average over a small interval. You want a theorem that the Hilbert space of square integrable functions on the circle is isometric to the Hilbert space of square summable sequences L²(S¹)=ℓ². Usually you define L² as measurable functions up to the equivalence relation of equality away from a measure zero set. But you could instead define it as the metric completion of infinitely differentiable functions under the appropriate norm. This is a much better definition for many reasons, including constructibility, but it requires you to open up your definition of function.
Here are two alternate books. Measure and Probability by Adams and Guillemin is a book about measure theory that tries to justify it by the context of things like 0-1 laws of probability. I’m not sure it succeeds in the justification, but it gives something more serious to think about if you want to drop the axiom of choice or the law of the excluded middle. Also, see this MO question.
The second book is more advanced, outside of the scope of this post. After measure theory, one has functional analysis, the study of infinite dimensional topological vector spaces of functions. I once heard it described as “degenerate topology.” For this, I recommend Essential Results of Functional Analysis by Robert Zimmer. It gives a bunch of applications to differential equations with a geometric flavor. It minimizes the amount of theory to get to the applications, in particular, by only using Hilbert spaces, not general Banach spaces.
Could you say more about taste? How fast can you evaluate the taste of a book? If it’s fast, could you check whether there was a trajectory over the 12 editions?
showcasing the fearsome technicality of the topic in excruciatingly detailed estimates (proofs involving chains of inequalities, typically ending on “< ε”).
That sounds bad. The ultimate proof is a chain of inequalities, but just presenting it is bad compared to deriving it.
“I wish we had the education system they have in Doorways in the Sand,” I said… “Did you know, there’s a new Heinlein? The Number of the Beast. And he’s borrowed the idea of that education system, where you study all those different things and sign up and graduate when you have enough credits in everything, and you can keep taking courses forever if you want, but he doesn’t acknowledge Zelazny anywhere.”
Wim laughed. “That’s what they really do in America,” he said.
— Jo Walton, Among Others
I found this Terry Tao blog post helpful. In particular, this paragraph,
It is difficult to prove that no conspiracy between the primes exist. However, it is not entirely impossible, because we have been able to exploit two important phenomena. The first is that there is often a “all or nothing dichotomy” (somewhat resembling the zero-one laws in probability) regarding conspiracies: in the asymptotic limit, the primes can either conspire totally (or more precisely, anti-conspire totally) with a multiplicative function, or fail to conspire at all, but there is no middle ground. (In the language of Dirichlet series, this is reflected in the fact that zeroes of a meromorphic function can have order 1, or order 0 (i.e. are not zeroes after all), but cannot have an intermediate order between 0 and 1.) As a corollary of this fact, the prime numbers cannot conspire with two distinct multiplicative functions at once (by having a partial correlation with one and another partial correlation with another); thus one can use the existence of one conspiracy to exclude all the others. In other words, there is at most one conspiracy that can significantly distort the distribution of the primes. Unfortunately, this argument is ineffective, because it doesn’t give any control at all on what that conspiracy is, or even if it exists in the first place!
But I’m not sure how much this is just restating the problem.
Yes, if we accept your ifs, we conclude that the new business is net negative. This really happens and some new businesses really are net negative (although I think negligible compared to negative externalities). But why think your assumptions are normal? Why think that the fixed cost of the business is larger than the time savings of the closer customers? Why expect no price competition, no price sensitivity?
There is a standard analysis of competition. If you reject it, it would be good to address it, rather than ignoring it. The standard analysis is that competition reduces prices. The first order effect of reducing prices is a transfer from producer surplus to consumer surplus, taken as morally neutral. But the lower price induces more sales, creating increased surplus. The expectation is that the first order neutral effect swamps the second order positive effect, which swamps the fixed costs.
The producer surplus is a rent. It induces rent-seeking. The second company to enter the market is mainly driven by rent-seeking. But by lowering the price they probably produce much more aggregate surplus than they capture. The more competitive the market, the lower the rents and the less new entrants are driven by rent-seeking. Late entrants are driven by the belief that they are more efficient.
The producer surplus is a rent. It induces rent-seeking. One form of that rent-seeking is new entrants, but another form is parasites within the organization, which seem much worse to me. Competition applies discipline which discourages these parasites. If the producers are innovative, you might think that they will make better use of the surplus than the consumers. If you do not expect parasites, maybe it would be better for innovators to capture more wealth. Maybe this was true a century ago, but it seems to me very far from true today. So I think the dispersal of wealth by transferring from producer surplus to consumer wealth is morally good by discouraging parasites within larger firms.
Putting lamps in ducts is not very different from putting filters in ducts; but with the downside that I’m a lot more worried about fraudulent lamps than filters. I guess it’s easy to retrofit a lamp into a duct, whereas a filter slows the air; but you probably already have a system designed with a filter.
The point of lamps is to use them in an open room where they cover the whole volume continuously.
This is standard today, but how recent is it? It looks like the industrial age to me.
How much of institutions is about solving akrasia and how much is about breaking the ability to act autonomously?
We get the word akrasia from Plato, but was he really talking about the same thing?
There is always the question of whether to study things bottom-up or top-down. These are bottom-up studies of what to do if you have a single infected patient. If you had an individual infected with a novel cold, that would be important, but we are generally interested in epidemics. In particular, why do colds go epidemic in the winter? We know there must be some environmental change. Maybe it’s a small change, since it only takes a small change in reproduction number to cause an epidemic. Then these controlled experiments might identify the main method of transmission. But maybe the change from summer to winter is a big change that swamps the effects we can measure in these bottom-up experiments.
I think Benquo’s claim is that most institutions do want financial fraud. Most people don’t, but a big constituency arranges to profit from it and to corrupt institutions. So his advice is aimed at the individual, not to blindly trust institutions.
Thanks!
I have a lot of quibbles about this, but going back to the main point, yes, this was a separate source of funding from stealing from customers and unlike Enron, not a rounding error compared to the first step.
via indirect channels like Alameda
What channels other than Alameda? If this was entirely about Alameda, how is FTT adding anything to the story above saying that they stole to give to Alameda? Who are they fooling other than their own internal accounts? The Coindesk article is very late in the story because no one saw the accounts before they tried to get a bailout from Binance, who wasn’t fooled.
If a customer puts up FTT as collateral to short bitcoin, then FTX is confused about how much collateral it has. But this is the customer exploiting FTX, not vice versa! This is FTX exploiting all the other customers by falsely claiming that it has hedged risk. But this isn’t what took it down. It did manage to largely liquidate shorts before they ran out of collateral.
Later you say that this is just one ingredient, but in the beginning you describe a rigid structure of compounding and shoehorn examples into bullet points. I think that structure is too rigid and I object to the examples. I think Theranos and academic Tessier-Levine fit it well. Indeed, for research, pretty much all people have is their reputation.
You describe Enron as a simple Ponzi scheme. I think this is just wrong. My understanding is that the main thing with Enron was a one-time shift from brokering energy today and owning the physical capital to deliver that energy, to brokering long-term deals that were purely virtual. By having unmoored forecasts, they could make arbitrary forecasts about the state of the company. It is not clear how much the senior executives knew they were doing this; perhaps they just accidentally designed poor incentives by allowing the salesmen to price their own deals and get an immediate bonus with no real-world feedback of how the deal turned out years later. You can certainly say that this is an example of extending credit from Enron’s old business to its new business, but I think it was a one-time change and not repeated compounding of credit. It is true that the new business having no physical capital was able to scale very far on financial credit. (Enron is my hobby horse. “Everybody knows” that you’re supposed to hold it up as an example, but it did 3 bad things and no one notices that other people are talking about different things. The main problem was that there whole business was mispriced. When the senior executives discovered this they something more like a Ponzi scheme, but that was just a couple billion, a rounding error. And the third was manipulating California energy prices.)
Similarly, FTX made a one time pivot from trader to bank. As I understand, it stole mainly to cover the trading losses and not to pay for advertising. If it had accepted the trading losses and wound down the trading, it wouldn’t have looked very different from the outside. Trying to convert its credit for trading to being trusted as a steward might be an example of the credit conversion you’re talking about, but not a compounded phenomenon. If that was central to its strategy, then maybe would make it hard to accept the loss and wind down that business.
What scale is “quickly ramping up their PR spending”? Theranos lasted 10 years. Enron lasted 15 years from the merger of much older companies. I don’t think a heuristic about speed would identify either of them. It sounds like you’re only talking about FTX.
The denominator isn’t fixed.
If you have a tool which does a good job at automatically generating a certain type of code, you should probably generate more of that type than you used to. This could easily balloon to 90% of your new code, but only replace a small amount of human coding. You seem to allude to this scenario when you talk about one-off scripts. Another example is automated tests.
During the last pandemic people were sometimes not allowed to wear reusable respirators, but required to drop down to N95. This is pretty strong evidence that people think they are weird.
Without disagreeing with the conclusion, I think this is a poor discussion of the pros and cons. The big con is weirdness points. That’s basically why people don’t do it. Probably if you articulate that it’s easy to see that it’s a win, but if you don’t articulate it...
Yes, they’re supposed to be more effective. I think this is emotionally difficult because it sounds like a Pascal’s Wager. Yes, you should invest at the prepper margin, but how far? How many other points are comparably far down the list? What should I do before this? Here’s a concrete point: if I have a beard and an N95, I will achieve more by shaving than by switching to a reusable mask. Shaving is pretty low cost (especially, conditionally shaving in the event of crisis), not a tradeoff with changing masks, but knowing to shave is important and competes with mental resources.
Here are two other advantages over paper masks: you say elsewhere that it is more cost effective than paper masks. If you are already committed to having a stock of masks, this makes it much less like a Pascal’s Wager and more of free lunch. And I suspect that they are more comfortable, which is important for actually using them.
I don’t think MZB or Breen ever lived in Oregon. They moved to Berkeley for grad school in the mid 60s and except for some time on the east coast, lived in the Bay Area for the rest of their lives.
The points about IQ seem parochially American, not applicable to the rest of the West. But aren’t you British, not American? Does this really seem so central in Britain?
Let Nitter scrape for you. 1 2 3