jmh

Karma: 1,638

jmh 27 Aug 2026 7:01 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: GeneSmith’s comment on: GeneSmith’s Shortform
I would see a few things to consider before selling everything now. First, when are is the debt due? If there is no concerns about default and the time is still within the person’s planned holding period I could see an argument for scaling back some but not just exiting.
Second, what are the income needs. If the current rate is still generating the level of income desired then again, I don’t see the strong case for closing out the holdings now.
Third, if the holders are shifting their focus to maximizing returns rather than stabilized income and capital preservation then the dumping everything and investing later to get that 20% or more rate makes some sense but recognize it for what it is, a change in investment approach and a shift in the risk exposure.
Last, somewhat related to the holding period, most of these investors probably have some type of targeted duration and ladder structure in their debt holding. Might make sense to adjust the portfolio duration but they will likely enjoy most of the gains and avoid most of the real losses you see as holding mature and get rolled over into new debt.

jmh 27 Aug 2026 6:43 UTC
3 points
0
on: “So You Don’t Trust Me?”
I wonder if there isn’t an aspect of the how to, of if one should, answer leading compound questions. The old “Have you stopped beating your wife?” type questions. It’s not that one cannot answer but in answering there is the risk of indicating the unasked question/unstated assumption is in fact true (The person has beaten his wife in the past.)
I’m not sure just how the situation might fit into the separating-pooling equilibria framing but seems to have some similarities. For someone to say they cannot trust me I think two extremes might be, making the assumption I am honest and trustworthy, they know nothing about me or they think something false about me. In the first case being offended by someone saying they cannot trust me. Caution is reasonable here.
In the other case, arguing that I am trustworthy is not the right approach and before ever making such a claim identifying why the person thinks there are reasons not to trust should be identified and cleared up—at which point might feel slighted if all the reasons they were not viewed as trustworthy were should to be false and they may well be justified in protesting further statements of untrustworthiness.

jmh 19 Aug 2026 0:53 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: the gears to ascenscion’s Shortform
I think there are a number or steps/factors that you need to put in between [IPO] ⇒ [Degradation].
What I would factor into your thinking is income generating capacity. As long as Anthropic (or any companying going public) is able to generate the requires that are needed to support most investors you don’t see a lot of investor activism pushing for changes.
So is there a connection between staying private and pursuing one’s vision and holding to one’s values pre IPO and then post IPO shifting to some greed maximizing mindset? In some cases I suppose so but it think that is a bit complex and probably highly variable so not sure about your 80% guestimate.

jmh 12 Aug 2026 16:51 UTC
1 point
−2
on: Don’t Build Mindreading
Seems more fear than fact here. Is the compaly saying they actually have a roadmap to some actually accurate lie detector that can be applied to the vast majority, 99% or more, human minds?
If not then can someone map out the necessay realities of the structure of human thoughts and specific technogies and capibilities that gave to be true to get us there?

jmh 7 Aug 2026 15:31 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: JennaS’s comment on: zroe1′s Shortform
I would also like to see people’s ideas on these. I would take a different approach than looking at the most outlandish or radical possibilities but rather try to assess the most likely and then add some about some interesting tail risk cases.
Not sure if these fit either of my criteria but one though I had regarding the banking/financial area. Do the older generation who was more used to in person activities and keeping paper trails survive better than the younger generation that grew up with only line banking and has done everything digitally?
It is true people in general don’t do much about risks they know exists but perhaps systemic solutions are beyond their control. Everyone has a probability of dying in a car crash and we’ve had the technology to mitigate the events for a pretty long time but it’s only now really present in our cars. Before it was an individual action for self-protection. What types of mitigation might emerge and how long would they take to be implemented.

jmh 7 Aug 2026 15:09 UTC
2 points
−3
in reply to: PoignardAzur’s comment on: Surprising facts about the slave trade
But making the claim they are not serious because they don’t follow the consensus view is the rhetorical trick to dismiss a position rather then engage it. This seems doubly true if one takes the view that consensus is not definitionally truth. I don’t get why you are taking such exception to that.
Similarly, rejecting Wilson’s comment out of hand because he was racist seems like killing messengers rather than messages (and a bit of an ad hominem attack more than anything else). Lincoln and a lot of the North was racists. Lincoln specifically said he was not going to war over slavery, why make that claim if the Civil War was all about slavery?
Yes, slavery is hard to separate from the whole history but if slavery was really what the North-South conflict was “all about” then you should be able to directly tie the Tariffs of Abomination in the 1830s to the issue of slavery. Can you?
It’s fair to say that slavery was an issue that was related to and impossible/very difficult to separate from the other sources of North-South conflict but I don’t think one gets to “it was all about slavery”. If that is the case then I think one should be able to model a world where slavery didn’t exists but all the other sources of conflict and disagreement in the political structure equilibrium and the political economic equilibrium and the social/cultural equilibrium would not have still resulted in a Civil War occurring. I am not sure that case can be made.
If such a case cannot be made then “all about slavery” is a rather questionable claim.

jmh 25 Jul 2026 16:04 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: ryan_greenblatt’s Shortform
You might look at Hal Varian’s takes. They do seem similar to what the exchange between Patel and Cowen were touching on. There was also some discussion here, or at least linked here, that I don’t have a ready reference for (sorry) about rate of adoption of the existing (as of maybe 9 months to a year back) models in corporations. The bottle necks were not really model ability or powers but fitting them into the existing production and supply chains.
If we see some rouge model that goes out and takes over the production at some of the big, highly automated factories, and probably down stream for the needed inputs (much less likely I suspect as a lot of those are relatively small, non-automated production processes but human dependent) that starts making everything faster and cheaper (or making things it wants and causes some type or retooling and different output) I don’t think the rapid transformation by AI will occur. When does that happen? I’m sure others are better suited to estimate but my guess is more like 30 years than 5 years.

jmh 17 Jul 2026 16:05 UTC
0 points
−6
in reply to: Stuart_Armstrong’s comment on: Surprising facts about the slave trade
Yes, for some of the states the immediate cause was Lincoln but for others they did not succeed until Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to subpress the rebellion—and did so it seems to avoid having to provide troops.
My point about all about or little/not about slavery has to do with the separating that out of all the other inter-State politics and political economy going on. Some what to make it the central source which doesn’t seem fully supported.
I wish I could recall the source for the claim that many (most? could have been wrong on that) would not have fought a war just for keeping Slavery but alas cannot. I think the “serios historians” seem to be a kind of shady trick to disqualify historians that might cast things is a different light. Here’s a link to one that suggests it wasn’t all about slavery, or even primarily about slavery. I think the quote from Woodrow Wilson might be worth considering.

jmh 14 Jul 2026 14:54 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: TsviBT’s Shortform
You might try reaching out to Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolutions. Econ professor that writes (or at least blogs) a fair amount about healthcare and healthcare policies and regulatory actions.

jmh 28 Jun 2026 0:54 UTC
2 points
−1
on: Surprising facts about the slave trade
The political parallel in the USA to what you are describing may be of some interested to you if you’re not already looking or aware. Depending on who one speaks to or reads the US Civil War was either all about slavery or not really about it at all. I suspect those are the political endpoints and it’s hard to claim that the war and the issue of slavery were somehow completely unrelated and completely independent of one another. But, I think it was from of the Confederate political discourse where a number of the Southern States held the position that if the secession had been about slavery they would have preferred giving up their slaves rather than go to war. Only 4 of the Southern States were large plantation states that depended on slaves for their agricultural production work—and I think that was even more concentrated into a small number or plantation owners rather than a large portion of the State’s population. Most of the other States, and slave owners, only had a few slaves that were largely more like household servants (and to some extent tenant farmers).
So the issue of slavery and abolition was similar in that it was about a small special interest group that was driving the the politics about preserving slavery rather than a large wide spread social institution (that probably is too strong as it was wide spread but the dependency on slavery was not).
I’m interested in another aspect of your research here. What was the position of the abolitions in the UK regarding indentured service? I don’t know that history so don’t even know if that had been abolished already but in the USA for a lot of the smaller slave owners their slaves were much more like indentured servants, could and did earn some money on the side (when the owner was not being a complete jerk about things) and some even bought their freedom that way. Now, some of the owners took actions to make that effectively impossible for the slave even to the extent of violating the laws governing slavery. But I’ve also heard some horror history that similar treatment occurred for some of the indentured servants in the UK where the family they were indentured to did similar things. So wondering if the abolitionist movement was fighting a similar battle there and if that the industry of indenture didn’t have some similar political economic characteristics of concentrated special interests competing for political support?

jmh 28 Jun 2026 0:31 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Bistrofan’s comment on: Surprising facts about the slave trade
It’s beneficial for A and B to engage in mutual trade of goods and services. If A and B would not have traded unless C was involved, and C takes a 20% cut yet A and B still want to trade despite that, then C is probably an economic good. Introducing buyers to sellers (and vice versa) is a whole job in modern economies after all.
I find the phrasing of C as an economic good a bit odd. I suspect economists would refer to C as and entrepreneur acting to move the allocation of resources towards equilibrium of some unmentioned economic good or resource. I think C would be better viewed as acting in some type of economic role rather than as some economic good. Is there something in your thinking I am missing that makes it better to describe C as an economic good that is somehow taking a 20% cut of the value of the exchange between A and B?

jmh 25 Jun 2026 2:20 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Baram Sosis’s comment on: AI pause: the case for ASAP
Curious as to why China will take longer than the USA. Is the thinking there that China is already behind so could gain a bit of ground before they need to take action (basically a scenario Katja is arguing against) or something else?

jmh 20 Jun 2026 1:17 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Shallow Bench
I’ve enjoyed the post and think the closing advise is really good. As I read I was reminded of a neighbor of mine 10+ years ago who said pretty much the same thing about his job as you have. Also some old sayings like “The expert is the person that can answer one more question than anyone else in the room.” and “right time, right place”.
We don’t live in an optimized world, its messy, flexible, dynamic and because of those pretty robust. I don’t think I would like living in a truly optimized world.
BTW, having read PHM I didn’t find the “spoiler” all that spoiling in the sense that if I read the book after reading this I would have felt cheated about something about the story.

jmh 19 Jun 2026 3:01 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Leveraged on being right
Quite true, but doesn’t that suggest one question even using the word naive(ly)? In what sense is it adding value to the exchange? If the point is why someone is missing/ignoring X and Y then perhaps it’s important. But if the exchange is about why and how X and Y matter using that terms seems like it runs a risk of derailing the constructive input.

jmh 19 Jun 2026 2:51 UTC
12 points
0
on: Contra Pace on When to Apologize
[For clarity, this is best seen as directed and the exchange rather than just Zack’s post.]
I wonder if the starting point of apologies are an acknowledgement of harm is correct. I suspect a more accurate statement is that apologies are sometimes such an acknowledgement but other times are doing something quite different. Similarly, I wonder why it seems the idea of accepting some apology implies or requires forgiveness/absolution.
I’m also curious what the authors’ views might be if we flip the situation. Forget “I’m sorry.” and replace that with “Thank you.”. Is there some symmetry? Should there be? The argument, as I understood them, suggest symmetry might be implied and if so do all the arguments still make sense?

jmh 14 Jun 2026 0:43 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: RogerDearnaley’s comment on: Sympathy for both sides of the egregious misalignment debate
I think human intelligence and history might suggest that is incorrect, turning up the compassion and turning down selfish. I agree it is a really complicated area. I’d point to things from economics (Mandeville, Smith and others) and recognition of things like the saying about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
Perhaps we’ve not tried but we don’t seem to channel at a social level our compassions as well as we do out selfish interests. It’s not the driver of the incentives it seems to me but the environment and institutional structures that are mediating the interactions. But even if our social institutions that mediate our interactions in beneficial ways worked well for our compassionate impulses I’m not sure they work well for AI as that seems to be more of a monolithic entity that a real composite of individuals as human society is.

jmh 8 Jun 2026 13:19 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
I know this is a quick take but I think perhaps too quick. I suggest first clarifying just what you aim at with the term religion. Are we talking about the organized religions and all their canon or a general belief and faith in some supernatural entity?
first that its claims are completely and utterly false; obviously the christian god doesn’t literally exist, jesus never came back from the dead, etc.
seems a very strong claim. There are modern cases of dead but return to life. The point here is about what technology is available to establish death and recovery. Not so say there is a case to be made that dead three days and then alive is not an extreme claim and deserving of skepticism. But is that an issue for those with faith or orthodox religion or a case of historical inaccuracy?
I also find the concept of truth rather complicate in this area. Can er really know the truth about something that is suppose to exist outside our universe and its laws?
I see you posted in a reaction to some readings. Just curious, have you ever seen “The Hogfather”? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett%27s_Hogfather). It’s a pretty quirky movie but one of the lines has always stuck with me and it seems very related to your post. It is actually a something of a retelling of some type of Christmas story, the Hogfather is basically Santa Claus. At the end Death (the character) says “If they cannot believe the little lies, how can they ever believe the bit lies?” The point being that perhaps a lot of what we see as moral and right is just BS but very valuable both socially and individually.

jmh 25 May 2026 3:09 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Rattengift’s comment on: Taxing Small Cars To Improve MPG
Doesn’t the same general way work—at least for charging at a station. I suppose a similar approach could be used for home charging by requiring the hook-up to have some meter applied and then report consumption by the meter—or add the tax to the electric bill for collection.
But yes, it is a bit of a different setting for collecting tax revenues for electric vehicles. But might also just be one of the add-on fees public utilities already add to my bill to cover the infrastructure build and maintenance costs.

jmh 24 May 2026 12:46 UTC
−3 points
0
in reply to: Radford Neal’s comment on: Probabilities are not the right concept
I was thinking in terms of what we’re thinking the numbers mean I suppose. Probabilities seem to imply some underlying fact of the population or process that we can (or are assumed to) know. The likelihood is more about putting numbers or weights on things in a way it’s consistent with what we observer. As you say, there is some proportionality between them.
Of course they are difference and it would not make much sense to just replace the label while leaving the underlying “thing” the same. But given the concerns about probability I wondered if a shift in thinking from p(x) (or p(x|B) ) to L(x) might help with some of the difficulties the OP sees.

jmh 24 May 2026 12:08 UTC
−5 points
0
on: Probabilities are not the right concept
I wonder if changing the terminology from probability to likelihood would help a bit?