speck1447

Karma: 264

speck1447 11 Feb 2026 0:51 UTC
9 points
5
on: Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good
For example the “Poor and Proud” and “March 4 Hundredaires” signs are sentiments that literally every Pro-Billionaire protestor would gladly endorse
See https://x.com/twocents/status/2020596821228388704

In particular, note the following exchange

> Interviewer: “Is there any ways you would restructure current incentives to make, to allow for, the protestors and the antiprotestors to like see eye-to-eye?”

> Pro-Billionaire Protestor: “I don’t want to see eye to eye with them! I want to destroy them. [cut, apparently to later in the same answer] All manner of socialists and communists that are motivated by jealousy, I want to wipe them off (pause) of the political spectrum. I want to make it (pause) not allowed for you to support this.”

There’s a cut here, perhaps there’s some intervening context that changes the conclusion I should draw from this exchange, but I really very strongly doubt it.

speck1447 10 Feb 2026 1:00 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good

Not at all. There is no such set of characteristics. Wrong conclusions are inevitable and commonplace. Godel’s Theorems apply to all formalisms.

They do not apply to all formalisms, morality is not a formal system, and even if it were this is not what either of Godel’s theorems would say about it. I don’t know why this particular bit of math misunderstanding is so popular online, I suspect it’s because it enables moves like the one you’re making here (i.e. of the form “it’s impossible to justify any statement so I can’t be expected to justify my statements”).

In the current world, the harm of unsanctioned killing being commonly accepted (and cheered) is generally a LOT higher than the harm of statistically-evil people continuing to live. So, yes, a heuristic argument: this is a loss of civilization and order, even if it might have been justifiable on some dimensions.

Ah, I wouldn’t call this a heuristic argument—by “heuristic argument” I mean something like “I can’t come up with any utilitarian calculation that says the bad outweighs the good here, but I know that human brains are prone to underestimating this sort of bad, so I assume there is a calculation saying it was overall bad even if I don’t know what it is.” (Incidentally this is how I understand this situation.) If you have an argument to this effect, I’d love to see it! But to satisfy me it will need to be the sort of argument that permits killing Stalin or Hitler or Idi Amin with a pretty wide margin for error, and if it’s not I’ll make the same critique I did before.

speck1447 9 Feb 2026 23:27 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good

“is it ok to kill people (or call for the killing or support the killing) who have not been convicted by any court and the killing does not stop any immediate physical threat to you?”

When you phrase the question like this, do you think that you’ve identified a set of characteristics that, throughout history, will never lead to the wrong conclusion? Or are you making a heuristic argument?

I think that throughout history, there have probably been many “ok” killings against people who did not present an immediate threat to the killer and had not been convicted by any court. I think that even today there are probably such killings. Do you have an argument against that position or do you think that, by phrasing things in the way you have, you’ve implicitly made a sufficient argument already?

(This is not to say that the UHC CEO killing in particular was justified, of course.)

speck1447 5 Feb 2026 21:43 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: p-values are good actually
I mostly agree with this, principled and robust estimations of effect size are hard and also important. Maybe someday I’ll write a primer on Judea Pearl covering Bayesian networks and causal graphs, which in my mind is the framework that unifies these approaches, but that would take me a while and would require some more research, so I didn’t get into it here.

speck1447 5 Feb 2026 21:38 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: p-values are good actually

By calling something the “p-value” you are elevating the null hypothesis to a special status

Of course when you call something a p-value you should in your mind add “(for a particular choice of null hypothesis)”, calling something “the” p-value doesn’t really make sense. But I don’t think it’s correct to say that this elevates the null hypothesis to a special status; in many (perhaps even most) cases, there’s a hypothesis which already has special status, and addressing that hypothesis in particular is productive in a way that cataloguing and grouping several alternate hypotheses is not.

(and usually leaving various things about it underspecified)

This is precisely the opposite of the truth. As I tried to explain in the original post, roughly the entire benefit of reporting p-values instead of full bayesian updates is that if we try to do a full update, we will necessarily underspecify many hypothesis classes, but by focusing on one hypothesis (in the cases where there’s a hypothesis that it makes sense to focus on), especially if that hypothesis is deliberately “simple” (something like, this intervention does not have an effect on this observable), we can fully specify it. This is exactly the problem that p-values solve.

Like, it seems like your post is trying to say something like “ah, no, don’t do bayesian statistics, p-values are better sometimes actually”. But no, bayesian statistics in this sense is just better and more straightforward, as far as I can tell, and you get the things you would get from a p-value by default if you did any bayesian statistics.

I don’t think this is what my post says or that this is a plausible reading of it. A p-value is a conditional probability and since a principled bayesian update involves considering all of the relevant conditional probabilities, of course it contains all of the information that a p-value gives, and indeed the only way to interpret a p-value is in this light. But we can hardly do principled bayesian updates for ourselves and we can’t effectively communicate them, and moreover, if there are competing explanations for the data, we often can’t tell which explanation is best or if a correct explanation is among the hypotheses we’re really considering. In these cases, the correct amount of our internal update to report is often just a p-value.

The concrete examples I have in mind are the discoveries of CMBR and of the muon—Penzias and Wilson were not aware of the prediction of relic radiation, and nobody had even hypothesized the muon. It turned out that some Big Bang theorists at the time had started thinking about the possibility of microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang, and so Penzias and Wilson were eventually made aware of this work and realized what they had discovered, but when they conducted their experiment, what was relevant was not the full bayesian update but one conditional: their observations simply were not consistent with a steady state universe. They did not need to know about the alternative hypotheses to know that this was important. In the other example, Yukawa had predicted the existence of mesons before the muon was discovered, in particular he had predicted what we now call the pi meson, and since the mass of the muon matched the predicted mass of the pi meson, many people at the time guessed that Anderson and Neddermeyer had observed the pi meson. But they had not! Of course it wasn’t necessarily a mistake to update toward the best available hypothesis, but nonetheless, it was incorrect. The relevant discovery here was not that Yukawa’s prediction fit the newly-observed particle better than any other available explanation, it was simply that the newly-observed particle could not be any previously-observed particle, and so something new had been discovered.

speck1447 5 Feb 2026 7:01 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: p-values are good actually
Bayesian reasoning does work fine here, but if you were trying to communicate how you changed your mind about the original hypothesis, you wouldn’t report all your updates, because you wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) go through the process of enumerating all of the alternatives you considered and the likelihoods under those alternatives and your priors and justifying an estimate of the likelihood under alternatives like “or something I haven’t thought of”. If you’re interested in a distinguished hypothesis, which you almost always are (hypotheses like “this intervention has no effect” or “the normal explanation of how this process works is correct” are basically always available), then the most important thing you should report is the probability of the evidence under that distinguished hypothesis, since the updates on that hypothesis should agree even if the auxiliary updates do not and that’s the hypothesis your peers will tend to care about the most.

speck1447 5 Feb 2026 6:54 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: p-values are good actually

You can communicate the same thing in a bayesian fashion, you just need to specify the class of hypothesis you are declaring the “null hypothesis”.

Yes this is what a p-value is? Perhaps I am confused, are you saying something here that I’m not saying? (Although note that we cannot perform an update this way, we need conditional probabilities for the evidence under both the hypothesis under consideration and its complement.)

Yes, of course any bayesian analysis will need to require creating classes of hypotheses and assigning odds-ratios to them. So does doing any kind of analysis with p-values, it’s just that with p-values you are elevating one such class of hypotheses to a special status of “null hypothesis” and claim objectivity when none such exists.

Only in the sense that one hypothesis can form a class! It’s extremely reasonable to say something of the form “the normal understanding of this phenomenon implies this outcome distribution, the true outcome was very unlikely under that distribution, thus we should think harder about the part of the normal understanding that addresses this situation”, and we do not need to really come up with an alternate hypothesis to do this. I agree that you shouldn’t compute p-values for hypotheses that you don’t have reason to believe in advance will be prominent in the minds of people you want to communicate your results to, if that doesn’t address what you’re saying about objectivity (actually even if it does) then I’m pretty confused by the last clause here.

p-values are good actually

speck14474 Feb 2026 22:04 UTC

10 points

8 comments3 min readLW link

speck1447 31 Jan 2026 19:55 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
I think our mental models here might be different enough that it’s hard for me to understand what you’re saying here. By nonlinearity here I mean that, in addition to nonlinear interactions between drugs, there are interacting systems, equilibration mechanisms, etc., to the point that I think intuitions about ML systems basically shouldn’t transfer at all. But then I know your intuitions about ML are better than mine, so it’s hard to be sure of that.

Re: interactions specifically, this definitely isn’t true in polypharmacy situations. We know most of the bad drug pairs in the normal population, and because doctors are wary of prescribing many different medications, this means we rarely encounter new bad interactions in the normal population. But there are drug combinations that only become dangerous in triples (search terms: the Triple Whammy, a combination of 3 drug classes, any 2 of which are generally safe but which cause kidney failure in combination, this interaction was discovered in 2000 but the drugs became available in like 1980), there are interactions which are only dangerous in the context of certain mutations (for example there are ultrametabolizers who simply can’t use prodrugs like codeine).

Interactions like this are rare right now largely because doctors are wary of prescribing too many drugs at once, but polypharmacy is becoming more common and more bad interactions are emerging as a result, basically just for combinatorial reasons. It’s definitely possible for combinations of drugs to be prescribed safely and for them to just not interact, but if we push this further, I suspect there are very few combinations of, say, 10 drugs that are simultaneously safe for most people (even if we ignore cholinergic response).

speck1447 30 Jan 2026 1:15 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
A huge percentage of the job of a pharmacist is to keep track of potential negative interactions between different drugs, of which there are an incomprehensible number. I don’t think linearity is a reasonable assumption here, the interaction terms between multiple interventions should be though of as, on average, big. Augmentation and synergistic effects exist, but are in general risky and quite hard to find. Even the effects of one drug are not linear, there are significant nonlinearities in dosage effects for most drugs.

speck1447 27 Jan 2026 1:03 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: What’s a good methodology for “is Trump unusual about executive overreach / institution erosion?”

Partisanship in the US could be something other than anti-Trump sentiment. There’s no logical necessity for it to be that, after all. It just isn’t actually separate from anti-Trump sentiment. (Outside the lizardman constant.)

Anti-Obama sentiment was not partisan? Anti-Biden sentiment is not? Anti-Zohran sentiment is not? Anti-ICE sentiment is not? Anti-DEI sentiment is not? Anti-Somali sentiment is not? Antisemitism is not? Do you actually believe this?

I have no idea which argument you’re referring to.

The paragraph beginning “of course it’s increased partisanship” was my main target here.

First of all, you are demanding that you can attack all you want, but nobody gets to defend. No. This is like the difference between initiation of force and self-defense. If you’re going to argue that Trump is uniquely bad to the point where norms can be violated to tell everyone how bad he is, then everyone else gets to say that you are overreacting. You started it.

Of course, I did not start it. (Indeed you’ll notice that I’ve been extraordinarily careful not to make any claims like this in our discussion, even though I think they can be justified, because I respect your desire to keep those discussions off of LW. EDIT: To clarify I’ve stated my position, what I mean is that I haven’t argued for it or tried to provide any reason to believe that I’m correct.) I challenged you on what you claim is your point, you decided proactively to jump down from the meta to the object level at that point. But someone somewhere did this, so you’re allowed in “self-defense” to make this pivot when talking to me. I wonder if you’ve thought about the bad incentives this behavior produces? Or is that the sort of thing only your ideological opponents are supposed to concern themselves with?

Second, my point is “you shouldn’t post about it here regardless of whether you’re overreacting.” It doesn’t matter how genuinely bad Trump is; you (and the OPs) shouldn’t be posting about him either way.

I have been trying to get you to argue for this, but you’ve refused three times now! Do you actually believe it to be true that, entirely regardless of how bad they actually are, nobody should ever talk about political figures on LW? Like, if Satan himself were president of the United States and was killing a million people per day, eliciting celebration from his supporters, would you still think discussion was not justified on the grounds that it’s political? If so I’d like you to defend that belief rather than just stating it, as I am now asking you to do for the fourth time. If not, I’d like you to explain what criteria you’re using to decide whether discussion of political figures is acceptable (of course you don’t have to draw hard-and-fast lines, but at least tell me what the relevant methods of evaluation are), and admit that deciding whether norm-breaking is justified will require at least a bit of discussion of object-level truths.

speck1447 26 Jan 2026 16:32 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: What’s a good methodology for “is Trump unusual about executive overreach / institution erosion?”
All right. So, if I’m reading this correctly, by partisanship you don’t mean partisanship (something everybody agrees has increased in the US), but instead some bizarre phenomenon which shares some characteristics with partisanship but is only capable of being realized as broad anti-Trump sentiment? And we (by “we” I mean LW in public, of course individuals can draw their own conclusions, sorry if I wasn’t clearer about this before) should refuse to speak clearly about certain issues, because if norms are more fluid that has some bad incentives (and what about the incentives of being unable to discuss certain topics? Well, it would be norm-violating to acknowledge those!) But also, it’s “of course” your preferred explanation—conveniently, it doesn’t matter whether you’re right or wrong, but you’re obviously right. And why is it obvious? Well, you can think of one plausible mechanism by which you could be correct, modulo the fact that your definition of partisanship is for some reason impossible to apply to Biden or Zohran, whom plenty of people think are the worst thing ever, even on here. And, well, sure there are other explanations, but considering those other explanations would be norm-violating, so, no more thinking needed. Is this really what you mean when you say “of course it’s partisanship”? Because I can’t think think of another way to form what you’ve said into an argument for your position.

It seems like your pattern of argumentation is: take a position, think up one single way that position could be true, then assert that any alternate explanations are damaging to the community to discuss. Surely you understand the difference between an argument being difficult to challenge for social reasons and that argument being convincing, right? You can’t Emperor’s New Clothes your way into political consensus. I don’t think you’re doing this on purpose, but I strongly recommend trying to stop doing it on purpose.

Of course, you could stop trying to make political arguments entirely and only make meta-arguments, that would be more respectable. If you really think there are no circumstances whatsoever under which LW should talk about politics, you can say that, you’ll just have to explain why you think the bad incentives that produces are more bearable than those it eliminates. But that would also mean giving up on the other arguments you’re making here—if people shouldn’t be allowed to argue that Trump is genuinely exceptionally bad regardless of its truth value, then you’re also not allowed to argue that those people are overreacting regardless of it’s truth value. You don’t get to have it both ways.

speck1447 26 Jan 2026 4:35 UTC
10 points
0
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: What’s a good methodology for “is Trump unusual about executive overreach / institution erosion?”
Votes also come in integers, but are not so small, so I don’t think you’re really providing any support for your hypothesis here. We’ve seen broadly anti-Trump and anti-Republican posts, they’ve usually been met with pretty strong disagreement (even just as a matter of form, often from people who agree with the overall sentiment) and a desire to avoid drawing too many conclusions, but this has changed recently. We can tell that it’s changed by noticing patterns in discourse and voting. That five months ago detailed anti-Trump posts were being made, downvoted, and mere expressions of disagreement in the comments were pretty roundly applauded, but now people (basically correctly) take for granted that the median LWer is so strongly anti-Trump that the position doesn’t need justification, is exactly what I’m pointing out.

There are multiple possible explanations, sure, but merely that this is a partisan issue isn’t one of them. That it’s a partisan issue and that partisan hostility is worse and more common now is, but as I mentioned, it requires argument. Have you noticed this pattern on other issues here? Is there a breakthrough effect, such that it happens first on one issue without seeming to change other discussions? If so, why? What other patterns of behavior on LW does this fit, and what does it predict?

The relevant counter-hypothesis is that Trump really is that bad, such that suspending judgment on whether he’s bad impedes discussion even if it elides some nuance. Elsewhere you’ve claimed that this isn’t a hypothesis we should allow ourselves to even consider no matter how true it is, here it seems like you’re arguing that it’s basically wrong in the sense that increased partisanship in general rather than exceptional circumstances are responsible. I think it’s pretty likely that lots of people are overestimating how bad Trump is somewhat, but not to an extent that is easy or productive to correct—I think I’d basically have to lie to someone to convince them that Trump is actually completely fine and totally in line with what they should expect, to the extent that breaking communication norms to mention his mistakes is escalatory. Do you think I’m wrong, or just that I shouldn’t talk about it on LW? It’s really unclear to me what you’re trying to argue for, and hence, what (if anything) I can expect to get from discussing this with you. (I notice this sounds snarky, what I mean to say is that since disagreements can get pretty wide hear and require a ton of tension to sort out, I can imagine either talking further or agreeing to disagree being reasonable actions for both of us, depending on what your answer here is.)

speck1447 25 Jan 2026 22:36 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: What’s a good methodology for “is Trump unusual about executive overreach / institution erosion?”

There’s an abrupt series of partisan posts because partisans like to think their enemies are the worst people ever—so bad that they can violate all the norms they want in order to get their enemies, including norms about avoiding politics.

Probably worth noting that this can’t be the reason, because partisanship predates these posts. Partisans have always disliked their enemies! An answer to questions of the form “why” has to extend to an answer of the question “why now”, and this does not and can not. Perhaps you could argue that we’ve very recently reached critical mass on the amount of partisanship that’s allowed to exist in this community, but that’s a much more specific argument than the one you’re making.

speck1447 20 Jan 2026 18:49 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Gabriel Alfour’s comment on: How to think about enemies: the example of Greenpeace
I don’t currently have a write-up of that length or with the right lens, I have a draft that I’ve been working on for a while. Next time I’m working on it, I’ll see if I can consolidate this claim from it and ping you? Incidentally, I appreciate your willingness to engage and retract my previous worries about this conversation being too charged to be productive.

speck1447 19 Jan 2026 23:22 UTC
−1 points
0
in reply to: Gabriel Alfour’s comment on: How to think about enemies: the example of Greenpeace
I think I was pretty clear in saying that this characterization may be invalid, was I not? You read the characterization as an accusation, for which I apologize, but I worry that this might speak to your state of mind in this discussion, which makes me worry that further discussion may be unproductive.

I notice that when you’re concerned about your views being characterized correctly, you address arguments and not just positions. Perhaps when you’re writing about the importance of choosing one’s enemies in politics, in the part where you explicitly choose an enemy and explain how your views differ from theirs, you could do that without needing to be provoked.

To be clear, I suspect we agree about enough issues of policy that in a reasonable political landscape, we should be allies. I’m certainly not a libertarian, I’m not projecting here, I’m trying to explain how I expect your political project to be categorized and defeated if you continue to approach politics the way you do in this essay. I’m frustrated with you because I would like my potential political allies to not make easily-avoidable mistakes and you are making one. Greenpeace is a bloated, inefficient, anti-progress organization, and yet it persists and amasses power because its political situation is convenient. Greenpeace has picked the right enemies, has (often correctly) accused them of acting in myopic and self-serving ways, and so has endured. If you make Greenpeace your enemy, you should try to understand what their favored enemy looks like and try to be visibly something other than that, not just in the abstract across your body of work, but specifically when you talk about Greenpeace. As I said earlier, and as I’m willing to explain if needed, this is the canonical losing move in politics.

speck1447 19 Jan 2026 18:38 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Gabriel Alfour’s comment on: How to think about enemies: the example of Greenpeace
Having read the full article, I had basically the same objection and think your response is more or less nonsense. The point is that choosing enemies without understanding them as actors is bound to fail. A new political movement needs both friends and enemies if it is to succeed. It will need to offer its friends a new perspective in accordance with their values in order to endear itself to them. It will need to offer its enemies a coherent response to their disagreements to avoid being consumed by them. Identifying enemies based on policies and actions but not arguments is the canonical losing move in politics.

More directly: it is useful for political movements to have convenient enemies, but you should always wonder whether you or your enemy is the convenient one. A bunch of wealthy libertarian-leaning Silicon Valley nerds who routinely dismiss the concern that wealthy countries could exploit poor countries, to the point that they’re offended when they’re asked to even address that concern in their manifestos against Greenpeace, are more or less Greenpeace’s ideal enemy. Maybe you aren’t such an enemy! But you sure are doing an excellent job blending in with them.

speck1447 14 Jan 2026 17:12 UTC
6 points
−1
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Jimrandomh’s Shortform Posts
Again, this is just incorrect on the merits. On the meta level I think I already agreed that these concerns can be plausible for some wealth taxes, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to set our standard of belief about tax law (or indeed any law) at certainty that some malicious actor out to victimize us personally could have hidden something in legalese. This isn’t the standard of belief we apply to anything else and is not a worthwhile way to understand the tax system! I should also mention that many people are more afraid of legal jargon than is reasonable—legal jargon exists and the distinction between legal and everyday definitions of words is important, but it’s (1) not that hard to recognize when legal jargon is present, and (2), in most cases, not hard to figure out what it means either. I think the rest of this comment will demonstrate why I believe that a smart but legally-uninformed person can usually work out what a law says pretty explicitly.

In order:

Not being able to sell is not a usable defense, in the way you describe it to be, because “unable to sell” and “unwilling to sell” are not legally distinguishable until much further into litigation than anyone wants to get.

It is a usable defense! In some sense it’s the only usable defense. “The government might send you a bill for more money than you can possibly scrounge up and destroy you forever” and “the government might make you prove that you have less money than you do, which is a long process” are not the same claim. In the typical case these are pretty hard to distinguish, because the typical person who can by any metric claim to have a billion dollars in assets is not ever at risk of being unable to find 50 million dollars in cash, and the government is usually strict about things that look like tax evasion. But if you got a bill and realized you can’t afford all of it (which is the atypical case), you could anticipate this and hire a reputable third party to try to find a sale in as reasonable a timeframe as you can manage, which would be the gold standard as far as this sort of defense is concerned, and if you anticipated it, you would not have to get deep into litigation before the case was dropped. (The government doesn’t want to continue prosecuting cases that it knows it will lose! Indeed, the government is in many cases incapable of investigating suspected cases of tax abuse by ultra-wealthy people because even if it’s right, the litigation won’t be worth the payoff.)

The ODA mechanism specifies that in order to use it, you have to give up several of the causes of action that you would want to use to dispute the tax. It also says that the Franchise Tax Board will create a contract, leaving some freedom in what that contract will contain, which likely means giving up additional causes of action.

This is correct but I don’t see how it’s relevant. The government doesn’t want to give people two chances at disputing the correctness of a tax—if the tax is being assessed incorrectly you should do it now, not wait around for a more favorable political climate and for the trail to run cold on which assets were where.

The ODA mechanism specifies that “A taxpayer may only attach assets or groups of assets to an ODA to the extent that the amount of additional tax that would be owed as a result of Section 50301 (without the use of an ODA) would exceed the sum of the combined value of all of the taxpayers’ assets subject to the valuation rules of paragraph (1) of subdivision (c) of Section 50303.” My my read of paragraph (1) of subdivision (c) of Section 50303, this includes all cash, cash equivalents, and easily tradeable commodities. … The definition of “Publicly traded asset” in 50308(j) is “an asset that is traded on an exchange; traded on a secondary market in which sales prices for such asset are frequently updated; available on an online or electronic platform that regularly matches buyers and sellers; or any other asset that the Board determines has a value that is readily ascertainable through similar means.” A literal reading of this definition would seem to include cars used as primary transportation. (Emphasis mine)

This is where the legal jargon avoidance becomes an issue. Many laws govern publicly-traded assets and so this is an established legal definition. In general, if you want to understand what a law says and you see a phrase that you expect appears in lots of other laws, you shouldn’t go with your best guess at the most natural reading in context, you should look up other laws and rulings to figure out the prevailing definition (or more precisely the prevailing interpretation of that definition). Cars are not publicly-traded assets! They simply are not. (See also 50303.9 which allows the exclusion of up to 5 million dollars worth of assets which are not publicly traded and explicitly lists vehicles as an example of such an asset.)

(The legal justification here, for those curious, is usually that the sales price for a type of car might be easy to determine on average, but the sale price for a specific car depends on the specifics of that car.)

50302(e) says that “No debt or liability, including recourse debts described in subdivision (a), shall reduce net worth if the debt or liability is owed to a related person or persons; or if the existence or amount of the liability is contingent on future events that are substantially uncertain to occur or that are substantially uncertain to occur within the subsequent five years; or if the debt or liability was not negotiated for at arm’s length.” This would exclude convertible notes, which are a common financial instrument used by startup investors.

I think in most cases this would not exclude convertible notes. The type of liability is contingent on future events, but the existence and amount typically isn’t. There are definitely ways you could structure convertible notes to be subject to this clause, but they’re mostly tax evasion—you don’t get to evaluate your company one way when trying to get financing and another way when paying taxes. If you’re consistent about both, you’re basically never subject to clauses like this.

And maybe another meta-level point: the framing of laws in terms of “gotchas” is anti-productive here. If you believe that laws exist basically to victimize you personally (or some hypothetical version of you who’s subject to them), you will often be able to find things that look like traps. Of course, as I mentioned, there are usually mitigating factors, and any competent lawyer would be able to get you out of these apparent traps. But this fact isn’t available to you in the mindset I think you have—sure, the law makes assurances in obviously-unreasonable cases, and sure the judge and prosecution would see that coming a mile away, but if they’re out to get you, you’re not going to get a reasonable judge and the prosecution will keep litigating even when they know they’re going to get nothing!

I think most of your errors here come from your dismissal of the idea that inability to sell an asset at a price would nakedly prove that it can’t be evaluated at that price, which is ~the reason that the scenario you originally described cannot possibly happen. You’re correct that there’s some subjective evaluation here and argument could go back and forth, and ultimately this means that a sufficiently-motivated government could bill you for more than you’re worth and then make it impractical for you to prove that the bill was wrong. But the government is not sufficiently-motivated! It’s not out to get you, it’s not even out to get Elon Musk or Peter Thiel most of the time. This is not what happens in practice, in practice this is paranoia.

To be clear: bad incentives can still exist, and overvaluation is possible! I’m not disputing that. In rare circumstances, and considering legal fees incurred as part of the tax, I think it’s possible that an exceptionally unlucky person could end up paying closer to 15% (or maybe even 20% if their tax lawyer is really bad) of their net worth, not the 5% the bill claims to charge. But this person would still end up with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets and would not be in any danger of destitution whatsoever. I agree that we have a world model difference about this (though I wouldn’t consider myself a proponent of this initiative), but I don’t think your world model here is at all defensible, and it seems to be supported mostly by misunderstandings of legal terms and a mistaken belief that every part of the law exists to be maximally punitive.

speck1447 14 Jan 2026 15:50 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: Lee Bousfield’s comment on: Jimrandomh’s Shortform Posts
Yes, this is where you’d be encouraged to use the ODA.

speck1447 14 Jan 2026 3:08 UTC
23 points
−4
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Jimrandomh’s Shortform Posts
This is a deep misunderstanding of the proposal as written. Assets are taxed at their fair market value (EDIT: by definition, the average price that would be negotiated for them in the prevailing market if neither the buyer nor the seller were under particular pressure to act). Companies are usually valued at their book value plus 7.5 times their annual profits. If the company’s valuation is higher than this, then under usual circumstances the floor of the fair market value is set at their valuation, but you can dispute this by presenting clear and convincing evidence that the valuation doesn’t reflect the fair market value, and there is no clearer or more convincing evidence than being unable to sell assets to cover even 5% of the wealth you supposedly have.

And if you’re still worried about this, the bill has a provision that explicitly fixes it! If your bill is worth more than your publicly-traded assets, then for illiquid assets, you can just take a 5% lien on future liquidity events, so if the liquidity is much lower than expected, you’re not ever on the hook for more than 5% of what you actually get.

It’s definitely possible for noisy valuations to induce overpayment, and it can be tricky to handle the deferral provision since the obligation isn’t time-bound—there are definitely concerns here. (And, to be clear, you can also just think a wealth tax is bad! There are good arguments that wealth taxes are at least inefficient relative to other forms of taxation.) That said, the tax could not make anybody bankrupt unless their tax lawyer was illiterate and also probably deceased.

speck1447

p-val­ues are good actually

p-values are good actually