What possible relevance does this have to anything?
Are you an econ-blogger? Is this your entry into econ-blogging? (Probably not, right?) If not, then what is the point of this? Can’t you just link to some econ-bloggers? There’s plenty of them out there, right? (I seem to recall you even mentioning one, in your previous post…)
I don’t understand any of this. It (seems like it?) requires a ton of economics knowledge just to have even the slightest clue of what you’re even saying, much less to have any inkling of whether what you’re saying makes any sense or whether it’s actually total crankery. Am I (or is your average reader) expected to understand it, and to be able to make any hint of a judgment of it?
Seriously, though: why?
Edit: Oh, this is just a repost of a Facebook post. Well, never mind, then. Quality standards for Facebook posts are certainly lower.
Can I ask, though, that such Facebook reposts be clearly marked as such? It would save me quite a bit of attention, I think.
Eliezer, why on earth are you writing about this? [...] Can’t you just link to some econ-bloggers? There’s plenty of them out there, right? (I seem to recall you even mentioning one, in your previous post…)
It is worth noting that Scott Sumner called this post “probably the best single introduction to the market monetarist way of thinking in the entire blogosphere.”
I think it’s good when Eliezer writes when he’s passionate about writing something. Some articles will get more readership and other less but that’s no problem.
I don’t know why Eliezer originally wrote this; probably mostly just for fun. The cross-post helps give his answer to the first two Qs in the Inadequacy and Modesty comments:
So why didn’t the Bank of Japan print more money? If they didn’t have an incentive one way or another I would expect them to cave to the political pressure, so what was the counter-incentive? Did they genuinely disagree and think that printing money was a bad idea? Were they reluctant to change policies because then they would look stupid?
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Even if we believed that central bankers are purely selfish, and don’t care at all about the mandate they have nominally taken on, they still have some incentive to produce higher employment (inflation being equal). Politicians encourage them to do so, and they get prestige among macroeconomists (e.g. “wow FED chairperson X presided over the longest period of peacetime growth since 1900.”). To paraphrase evolution-is-just-a-theorem: what incentive do central bankers have not to puruse adequately loose monteray policy?
This isn’t an important point for most readers, and indeed part of the point of the Bank of Japan example in that chapter was that Eliezer doesn’t think it’s important or necessary to understand the BoJ’s reasoning, or model a specific bias they might have, in order to be confident that they’re wrong on object-level grounds. Hence the psychologizing above gets cleanly left out.
This was originally a post on Facebook from a few months ago, and it’s related to the first post of Inadequate Equilibria that he posted yesterday.
This was originally just posted to his personal page, where people can really post whatever they want, and I actually want to highly encourage people to post about more technical and specialized content there. I personally thought it was good enough to promote the frontpage, but you might disagree, and I am happy to discuss that.
It seems reasonable to critique the decision to promote it. I was fairly on the fence about it, but actually liked it quite a bit, which caused me to recommend Ben to promote it. Though me liking it might indeed be related to me recently taking a class on international monetary economics (as I wrote in a comment above). I had actually also hoped that promoting it to the frontpage would cause a few more people to explain and provide resources for some parts of the post.
If this does seem out of place on the frontpage for too many people, then me and the other sunshines will update on what posts to promote (which does not mean we will commit to always acting in line with the public opinion, but in this case it seems reasonable to remove it if people feel like it’s out of place).
FWIW, I approve of people posting more random inside-baseball discussions of stuff to LW, and posting especially interesting and not-too-inaccessible inside-baseball stuff to the frontpage. Indeed, I think there should be way more of that stuff here. I think this particular post would plausibly be frontpage-worthy if it weren’t written by Eliezer, but given that it’s an Eliezer post and a lot of people will probably see it anyway (and there may be a false presumption, since it’s by Eliezer and on the LW frontpage, that it’s “essential reading” of some kind), frontpaging it seems a bit overkill-ish.
(I might feel differently if LW didn’t have a ‘subscribe to author’ feature that makes it easy for people who just want to read everything by someone to not miss it.)
given that it’s an Eliezer post and a lot of people will probably see it anyway
I don’t think I’d ever have seen this if it weren’t posted here on the front page. (To be clear, I am not saying that’s a bad thing.)
(I might feel differently if LW didn’t have a ‘subscribe to author’ feature that makes it easy for people who just want to read everything by someone to not miss it.)
I wager that many people don’t know about this. I certainly didn’t, until now!
(Question to the dev team: what the heck does “subscribing to author” do? I went to Eliezer’s profile page, clicked “Subscribe”, got a message that I’m subscribed. Uh… ok. What does that mean? What happens now? Suggestion: under the “subscribe” link, have descriptive text specifying what on earth it means to subscribe; possibly repeat this information in the “you are now subscribed” popup.)
Yeah, we really need to improve and overhaul the subscription and notification experience. Clicking subscribe makes it so that it shows up in your notifications, aka. the bell icon in the top right corner. The system is still a bit spotty, which is why we haven’t made it so that the bell icon shows you the number of unseen notifications, since I wasn’t confident that number would actually be accurate, and it seemed better to have a subdued and slightly buggy notification system, than a loud and annoying buggy notification system (and very slightly better to have the first one than none at all).
This was originally just posted to his personal page, where people can really post whatever they want, and I actually want to highly encourage people to post about more technical and specialized content there. I personally thought it was good enough to promote the frontpage, but you might disagree, and I am happy to discuss that.
I have no opinion on this. My actual complaint is that when I see a post on the front page, I really have no idea what the heck to think. Was the post:
Written here, just now, for the front page?
Written here, just now, for a personal page?
Written somewhere else, at some other time, and reposted here, for the front page?
Written somewhere else, at some other time, and reposted here, for a personal page?
Written somewhere else, just now, and cross-posted here?
Basically, I have no idea what the context (temporal, conversational, social, etc.) is, or what the author intended the context to be, or whether the decision for this post to appear on the front page was the author’s, or yours, or what.
That makes it really hard to know how to react to a post, and hard to evaluate whether I should even bother reading it, etc.
Basically what I am saying is: it really matters less what you put where, than making it really super clear and apprehendable at a glance what is what and where it comes from.
Why do you see it’s your role to promote posts to the frontpage? I think it’s better when the decision is made by the author. You have the category of featured posts to promote posts that you find valuable promoting.
When it comes to EY writing I think it’s valuable when he has a place where he can put writing that he wants to have held to a lower standard and a place where he wants to be held to a higher standard.
Taking that choice away from him might lead to him not posting content that might face more criticism like this post.
I agree with the thrust of your comment, and I want to give writers a button which prevents moderators from promoting things to the frontpage, should they wish for this to be the case. The reason I (and eventually the full moderator team) will promote things from personal blogs is because I asked many of the writers in this community what they wanted, and they said that they didn’t want to have to make the decision to post to the LW frontpage—for many that came with assocciated costs of having to write to a certain standard, and they’d probably end up just not writing at all (as happened on LW 1.0).
So far it’s had some successes, where writers have told me either publicly or privately that they’d never have posted to the frontpage, but are happy that it’s ended all the way up in Featured (exampleexample).
Yeah, I don’t think that it was really written for the front-page given its tone. I mean, we want people to have more freedom in how they write on their own pages, but on the front-page, we want people to write in such a way as to encourage good epistemics.
Eliezer, why on earth are you writing about this?
What possible relevance does this have to anything?
Are you an econ-blogger? Is this your entry into econ-blogging? (Probably not, right?) If not, then what is the point of this? Can’t you just link to some econ-bloggers? There’s plenty of them out there, right? (I seem to recall you even mentioning one, in your previous post…)
I don’t understand any of this. It (seems like it?) requires a ton of economics knowledge just to have even the slightest clue of what you’re even saying, much less to have any inkling of whether what you’re saying makes any sense or whether it’s actually total crankery. Am I (or is your average reader) expected to understand it, and to be able to make any hint of a judgment of it?
Seriously, though: why?
Edit: Oh, this is just a repost of a Facebook post. Well, never mind, then. Quality standards for Facebook posts are certainly lower.
Can I ask, though, that such Facebook reposts be clearly marked as such? It would save me quite a bit of attention, I think.
It is worth noting that Scott Sumner called this post “probably the best single introduction to the market monetarist way of thinking in the entire blogosphere.”
I think it’s good when Eliezer writes when he’s passionate about writing something. Some articles will get more readership and other less but that’s no problem.
I don’t know why Eliezer originally wrote this; probably mostly just for fun. The cross-post helps give his answer to the first two Qs in the Inadequacy and Modesty comments:
-
This isn’t an important point for most readers, and indeed part of the point of the Bank of Japan example in that chapter was that Eliezer doesn’t think it’s important or necessary to understand the BoJ’s reasoning, or model a specific bias they might have, in order to be confident that they’re wrong on object-level grounds. Hence the psychologizing above gets cleanly left out.
This was originally a post on Facebook from a few months ago, and it’s related to the first post of Inadequate Equilibria that he posted yesterday.
This was originally just posted to his personal page, where people can really post whatever they want, and I actually want to highly encourage people to post about more technical and specialized content there. I personally thought it was good enough to promote the frontpage, but you might disagree, and I am happy to discuss that.
It seems reasonable to critique the decision to promote it. I was fairly on the fence about it, but actually liked it quite a bit, which caused me to recommend Ben to promote it. Though me liking it might indeed be related to me recently taking a class on international monetary economics (as I wrote in a comment above). I had actually also hoped that promoting it to the frontpage would cause a few more people to explain and provide resources for some parts of the post.
If this does seem out of place on the frontpage for too many people, then me and the other sunshines will update on what posts to promote (which does not mean we will commit to always acting in line with the public opinion, but in this case it seems reasonable to remove it if people feel like it’s out of place).
FWIW, I approve of people posting more random inside-baseball discussions of stuff to LW, and posting especially interesting and not-too-inaccessible inside-baseball stuff to the frontpage. Indeed, I think there should be way more of that stuff here. I think this particular post would plausibly be frontpage-worthy if it weren’t written by Eliezer, but given that it’s an Eliezer post and a lot of people will probably see it anyway (and there may be a false presumption, since it’s by Eliezer and on the LW frontpage, that it’s “essential reading” of some kind), frontpaging it seems a bit overkill-ish.
(I might feel differently if LW didn’t have a ‘subscribe to author’ feature that makes it easy for people who just want to read everything by someone to not miss it.)
I don’t think I’d ever have seen this if it weren’t posted here on the front page. (To be clear, I am not saying that’s a bad thing.)
I wager that many people don’t know about this. I certainly didn’t, until now!
(Question to the dev team: what the heck does “subscribing to author” do? I went to Eliezer’s profile page, clicked “Subscribe”, got a message that I’m subscribed. Uh… ok. What does that mean? What happens now? Suggestion: under the “subscribe” link, have descriptive text specifying what on earth it means to subscribe; possibly repeat this information in the “you are now subscribed” popup.)
Yeah, we really need to improve and overhaul the subscription and notification experience. Clicking subscribe makes it so that it shows up in your notifications, aka. the bell icon in the top right corner. The system is still a bit spotty, which is why we haven’t made it so that the bell icon shows you the number of unseen notifications, since I wasn’t confident that number would actually be accurate, and it seemed better to have a subdued and slightly buggy notification system, than a loud and annoying buggy notification system (and very slightly better to have the first one than none at all).
I have no opinion on this. My actual complaint is that when I see a post on the front page, I really have no idea what the heck to think. Was the post:
Written here, just now, for the front page?
Written here, just now, for a personal page?
Written somewhere else, at some other time, and reposted here, for the front page?
Written somewhere else, at some other time, and reposted here, for a personal page?
Written somewhere else, just now, and cross-posted here?
Basically, I have no idea what the context (temporal, conversational, social, etc.) is, or what the author intended the context to be, or whether the decision for this post to appear on the front page was the author’s, or yours, or what.
That makes it really hard to know how to react to a post, and hard to evaluate whether I should even bother reading it, etc.
Basically what I am saying is: it really matters less what you put where, than making it really super clear and apprehendable at a glance what is what and where it comes from.
I really liked the post and was glad it was here. Also, I don’t have much of an econ background but felt it was pretty easy to understand.
Why do you see it’s your role to promote posts to the frontpage? I think it’s better when the decision is made by the author. You have the category of featured posts to promote posts that you find valuable promoting.
When it comes to EY writing I think it’s valuable when he has a place where he can put writing that he wants to have held to a lower standard and a place where he wants to be held to a higher standard.
Taking that choice away from him might lead to him not posting content that might face more criticism like this post.
I agree with the thrust of your comment, and I want to give writers a button which prevents moderators from promoting things to the frontpage, should they wish for this to be the case. The reason I (and eventually the full moderator team) will promote things from personal blogs is because I asked many of the writers in this community what they wanted, and they said that they didn’t want to have to make the decision to post to the LW frontpage—for many that came with assocciated costs of having to write to a certain standard, and they’d probably end up just not writing at all (as happened on LW 1.0).
So far it’s had some successes, where writers have told me either publicly or privately that they’d never have posted to the frontpage, but are happy that it’s ended all the way up in Featured (example example).
Yeah, I don’t think that it was really written for the front-page given its tone. I mean, we want people to have more freedom in how they write on their own pages, but on the front-page, we want people to write in such a way as to encourage good epistemics.
I agree that marking posts as FB reposts would indeed be valuable.