My partner says that as a kid, their school did something similar as part of “don’t talk to strangers” teaching. The “stranger” in question was someone the class been working with all day, introduced by their teacher.
philh
Karma: 3,990
I’d like to offer some combination of consoling hugs and ಠ_ಠ.
(edit: but to be clear I’m not super-confident I wouldn’t have fallen for it myself. Especially if I saw that message 25 minutes after it was sent.)
If Chris could be confident it came from the admins I’d agree, but with my current knowledge (and assuming the admins would have been honest had Chris messaged them on their normal accounts) it feels more like pentesting.
Broadly agree, but:
“I think [term X] in your post is going to cause misunderstandings, I’d suggest phrasing it differently.”
“Oh, haters are gonna hate, there’s no amount of rephrasing that’s going to prevent this from being misinterpreted if people want to.”
I think I feel differently about this depending on whether the first person has a specific suggestion. Without it, I think that sometimes the second person isn’t “not bothering to put in the effort” so much as “doesn’t think the effort will pay off”, or even “has already put in the effort and this was the result”. It may be much easier to notice that something will be misunderstood than to phrase it differently such that it won’t be.
Can you be more specific? There are many things you could mean by “difference of degree”. Some of them seem quite bad if true, and some seem perfectly benign.
Like sure, both are nonzero on some scale of contrarianism. But I predict that, for example, separating the world into “zero on that scale” and “nonzero on that scale” is mostly a silly categorization. (Even if the optimal amount on that scale is zero, which I doubt.) If all you mean by “difference of degree” is that they’re both nonzero on that scale, then I think it says very little.
Whereas if you mean, for example, something like… “if you asked mainstream physics PhDs for their thoughts, they’d say “this is a dumb opinion to hold” only slightly more often for the mensa opinions than for the LW opinion”… if you mean something like that, then calling it “only a difference of degree” seems like a significant claim that would reflect badly on LW if it were true. But I don’t think it’s true.
I predict, and would be willing to bet if we can operationalize it, that: if we compare [the opinion you refer to expressed by some people in the rationalist community] to [the “this disproves relativity” opinions Villiam is refering to], the rationalist community opinion is more mainstream among physicists than the Mensa opinions.
Whereas the BetFair rules say ‘next president.’
Note that betfair has both an exchange and a sportsbook, and you linked the sportsbook. Their exchange market for this question is also called “next president”, but does have more detailed rules. In particular:
This market will be settled according to the candidate that has the most projected Electoral College votes won at the 2020 presidential election. Any subsequent events such as a ‘faithless elector’ will have no effect on the settlement of this market. In the event that no Presidential candidate receives a majority of the projected Electoral College votes, this market will be settled on the person chosen as President in accordance with the procedures set out by the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
I’m surprised there’s nothing like that (that I can see) on the sportsbook.
I simply disagree that that’s what boots theory is saying. It seems like a reasonable thing to say, but not using the words that were used.
I always interpreted “The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.” as saying that this is one way that the rich become richer.
Sure, and lots of people seem to do similar to you, and this is one of the things I’m complaining about. I think this is a weird interpretation of a straightforward sentence.
But also, what do you mean by “this”? If it’s “spending less money” then part of my point is that I think you’re just wrong; I think rich people spend more money. If it’s something broader, then part of my point is that it’s not clear what you do mean.
The “ghetto tax” is one place, but then there’s everything else—less stress, for instance, or being able to pay for education.
“Stress” seems like a reasonable thing to consider part of a ghetto tax, to me. “Rich people can pay for education” seems like it fits neither as part of the ghetto tax, or boots theory as originally written. Similarly, it seems like you want to count “earning interest on your bank balance” as part of boots theory, but I think that’s a massive extension from the original text.
Against boots theory
Thanks for the datapoint!
To answer your questions,
a → bdenotes functions from type a to type b; so the function “round”, taking a float and returning an int, has typeFloat → Int. It’s required to exist just because the rules of type inference specifically refer to it. You could implement HM without aListtype or anInttype, it might be silly, but it would be meaningful. But if you tried to implement it without->, it’s not clear to me what you’d actually be implementing.And
∀is read “for all”—it’s pretty standard in math, but if you don’t know it or how standard it is, yeah, it would be opaque. Someone commented when I first wrote this that I ought to make a note of that, and I agreed it was a good idea and forgot to do it. I’ll try again to remember to update it in the near future, along with a note about the arrow.Thanks again!
Hm. “Value” might not have been quite what I meant there. The thing I was pointing at was that if you start with $100k worth of google stock in your account, you’d (if I’m understanding this correctly) still have $100k worth of google stock, even if the brokerage also marks you as having a $10-50k liability. You might have to liquidate some of it in future if there’s a margin call, but your goal is presumably to avoid that.
In light of this, to clarify the first point—“When you do, the value of your account will be $100k lower than it was before”—I meant $100k lower than it was before withdrawing, because previously your account had $100k cash and now it has $0k cash. I was thinking it would be the same value as it was before you sold the box spreads. But if selling the box spreads doesn’t change the account value much—if the brokerage marks you as having $100k cash but also a ~$100k liability—then after withdrawing, the value is lower than before you sold the spreads.
Thanks, I didn’t know these.
the broker allows you to withdraw all but 10-50% of the value of your investments in a margin loan even without a box spread; they just charge exorbitant interest rates since they’re financing the loan themselves.
To clarify, the difference between this and the box spread loan is:
With the box spread, your brokerage account gets deposited say $100k cash that someone else has lent you. The brokerage knows you’ll need lots of cash in future, so they need collatoral to let you withdraw it. When you do, the value of your account will be $100k lower than it was before.
With this, your brokerage account has say $100k invested, but it’s not currently in the form of cash. Your brokerage is willing to lend you $10-50k cash, and let you withdraw it; but they need both collatoral and interest for that. When you withdraw it, your account will still be worth $100k.
?
To explain/sanity check why I think it doesn’t make sense for me personally to do this:
A thing the UK has is ISAs, which are accounts that you can put a certain amount into per year and not pay tax on your gains (or interest, for fixed-interest ISAs). The limit is something like £15k. One of my ISAs lets me invest in various stock indices, but not individual stocks, and I’d be surprised if there was one that let you pull off a trick like this.
Separately, any money I put into my pension lets me reclaim the income tax I already paid on it. Then I think I need to pay tax when withdrawing it, but some of it is tax free and the rest will be at a lower rate unless I withdraw a lot or have other income. (Or I guess if the rules change, which is maybe a possibility I should take more seriously.) My pension also lets me invest in stock indices.
So as I understand it, the bulk of what I invest should (and currently does) go to an ISA or pension. It’s probably not harmful to put moderate amounts in the kind of broker that would let me do this trick, because I only pay capital gains tax if my gains are above some threshold. But I suspect the intersection of “enough money it’s worth doing this trick with” and “not so much that I should just have it in an ISA” is either empty, or narrow enough to be only barely worthwhile.
(I’d also need to figure out where to put the money I’ve borrowed. We have current accounts that pay a few % on up to a few £k, but for large amounts the best safe investment I can think of is maybe premium bonds. That’s a lottery that pays 1.4% interest on average, tax free. You can invest up to £50k in them. But then doing it with a smaller amount is riskier, because there’s more chance that I don’t earn enough.)
To check I understand the mechanics of this, let me try to restate parts of it:
A box spread is a combination of options engineered to be worth a fixed amount at a specified future time. Thus, buying a box spread works out like lending money, and selling a box spread works out like borrowing it.
I think the specific choice of SPX (the S&P 500) here doesn’t matter too much, but presumably it’ll be good because it’s something that gets traded on a lot.
If you borrow money like this, you can’t in general withdraw it, because your broker doesn’t know you’ll be able to pay it back. But if you already have a lot of money invested with your broker, they might let you do so, using those investments as collatoral. The caveat will be that if your current investments drop below a certain value, your broker will ask you to pony up some more collatoral in the form of cash, possibly selling some of your investments.
Using this trick, you sell a box spread to borrow money at a lower interest rate than you can normally. Then you withdraw it and invest in a different account, which has a fixed interest rate higher than the rate you’re paying to borrow the money.
Does that sound about right? The third point is the one I’m least sure about.
(I’m unlikely to make use of this myself, not living in the US and not having that kind of money to invest. I just want to understand this stuff better than I currently do.)
Yeah. I’m in index funds because someone told the London group “here’s what it means to get into index funds, here’s why it’s a good idea, here’s how you do it, here’s a list of places you can sign up with to get one”. I kind of want to dabble a little in stocks and other investments, but I don’t know who offers that ability and I haven’t looked closely yet.
(My impression is if I was in the US a decent answer would be “Robinhood”. And authors here might not know anything UK specific, which is fair enough. But that’s the sort of thing I’d find helpful.)
When there is no transparency about why people exit discussions, it allows for them to leave due to bias, dodging, bad reasons, etc., and it’s not very provable.
Right, so my very first comment in this thread pointed out a way you could collect evidence on this question. You can look for patterns. If a particular user has a habit of dropping out of threads when they seem to be “losing”, then that’s evidence that they’re doing so to evade arguments and dodge questions. If LW users as a group have a habit of doing that, it’s also evidence that that’s a common reason people do it.
But as far as I can tell you haven’t looked for evidence like that, either for individual users or for LW as a whole. When I asked if we have this problem, you didn’t point to patterns. You just pointed to individual instances of people stopping replying for unclear reasons. But there are plenty of reasons someone might stop replying.
And so I still have to wonder: do we in practice have this problem on LW? Is it in fact common here for people to leave discussions to evade arguments and dodge questions? You’ve given me no reason to think it is.
(Of course it would be super duper surprising if no one had ever done that. So perhaps we should be asking questions like “how often does it happen here, how bad is it when it happens, what does it trade off against, how much would it be worth to make a marginal improvement”. Maybe your full post is more nuanced about things like that, but your description of the problem so far has seemed fairly… black-and-white? When remizidae pointed out that there were tradeoffs, you asked them if they could propose solutions. Whether they can propose solutions or not doesn’t change the fact that there are tradeoffs. So far in this thread I haven’t seen you acknowledge the tradeoffs.)
Something I notice is that… so far, this subthread seems to have been entirely useless, and it’s taking a lot more energy than most of the comments I write on LW. I’ll still give one more response, but...
This feels mean, and I don’t like that, but it also feels like an important part of what’s going on for me right now and relevant to the conversation and I don’t want to dance around it, so, uh, here goes I guess: to be frank, I don’t blame people for stopping replying to you.
The problem in question was
people being biased then leaving discussions at crucial moments to evade arguments and dodge questions, and there being no transparency about what’s going on and no way for the error to get corrected?
This is a problem you plausibly have a solution for. I mean, I still haven’t read this article and I probably won’t, but I could believe that there are social engineering ways to avoid this problem, and I could believe you’ve identified one. “Tapping out in two” plausibly also suggests a way.
But I’m not convinced we actually have this problem. No one in this thread has obviously done the problematic behaviour. We don’t know why people stopped replying when they did, but there are surely explanations other than “trying to evade arguments and dodge questions”.
(To be precise, Gordon and remizidae haven’t replied yet. I can’t rule out that they intend to later, but it doesn’t really matter.)
It seems to me that you’re answering as if I’d asked about a different problem, the problem of “most discussions end without making any progress”.
I agree LW has that problem. (Less than most comparable places.) But I don’t think you or I or anyone else has a plausible solution to it, though I do think there are marginal improvements to be made. I don’t think simply taking these discussions further is particularly likely to help, at least not enough to justify the cost.
I note that in Dagon’s thread, he currently has the last word—he announced that he intended to stop, but he also said other things in that comment, and you didn’t reply to them. And I note that in this thread, remizidae asked “why is being busy not an adequate excuse?” and you haven’t replied to that, either. (Or you replied with a question whichMy sense is that you’re trying to hold people to standards you fall short of.
Limiting myself to two more replies in this thread.
Noticing patterns. If someone seems to be doing that a lot, we can point it out.
This relies on the population being able to sustain reputations, but that feels like a prerequisite for intellectual discussion anyway, I think.
Do you think this is a problem in practice on LW, and/or other places you visit?
To the main article: I only skimmed, but my previous tapping out in two is relevant. I wouldn’t want to impose it as a requirement on people though.
That’s… a bit surprising. If I were behind this, I wouldn’t have sent a message to you because you’re likely to know the plan. Anyone who receives the message but doesn’t fall for it is an extra chance for the scheme to fail, because if nothing else they can post in this thread where someone is most likely to see it before entering codes. (Chris, I’m curious if you did look in this thread before you put them in?) In your case you could react with admin powers too, though I dunno if you would have considered that fair game.
I feel like this gives us a small amount of evidence about the identity of the adversary, but not enough to do any real speculation with.