Is accounting underrated in most nerd circles? What would a transhumanist or rationalist take on accounting look like? Are there any good blog posts introducing accounting to make it look like an awesome and exciting topic?
The reason I ask is that as I’ve gotten some actual experience working at a software business, I notice a lot of time and effort seems to go into making sure the numbers add up. At first I thought this was largely wasted, but lately I’ve been thinking it helps combat many of the kinds of things we talk about here such as scale blindness… It’s sort of like an intelligence augmentation that lets us tackle resource allocation issues we did not evolve natural intuitions to solve.
I don’t know if accounting is underrated, and I don’t know if anyone has made accounting look awesome and exciting on its own. But conditional on finding scam-busting interesting, which I guess a lot of skeptics do, there are several books on auditing, how companies cook the books, how to detect unethical accounting practices through various statistical techniques, etc. In fact most of the techniques are subtle because they tend to bend the rules just a little bit more than auditing professionals prefer. The rules can already be legally bent significantly because of how many different ways there are to operate a business.
I suspect that accounting is sufficiently well-optimized that a rationalist take on it would be a waste of time. Most of the questionable decisions made in the field are due to overlaps with the madness-inducing world of tax law or the simple fact that the future is uncertain and assessing an object’s value other than through a cash sale is expensive. But double-entry bookkeeping and assets-liabilities=equity aren’t ever going to change.
Is accounting underrated in most nerd circles? What would a transhumanist or rationalist take on accounting look like? Are there any good blog posts introducing accounting to make it look like an awesome and exciting topic?
The reason I ask is that as I’ve gotten some actual experience working at a software business, I notice a lot of time and effort seems to go into making sure the numbers add up. At first I thought this was largely wasted, but lately I’ve been thinking it helps combat many of the kinds of things we talk about here such as scale blindness… It’s sort of like an intelligence augmentation that lets us tackle resource allocation issues we did not evolve natural intuitions to solve.
I don’t know if accounting is underrated, and I don’t know if anyone has made accounting look awesome and exciting on its own. But conditional on finding scam-busting interesting, which I guess a lot of skeptics do, there are several books on auditing, how companies cook the books, how to detect unethical accounting practices through various statistical techniques, etc. In fact most of the techniques are subtle because they tend to bend the rules just a little bit more than auditing professionals prefer. The rules can already be legally bent significantly because of how many different ways there are to operate a business.
I suspect that accounting is sufficiently well-optimized that a rationalist take on it would be a waste of time. Most of the questionable decisions made in the field are due to overlaps with the madness-inducing world of tax law or the simple fact that the future is uncertain and assessing an object’s value other than through a cash sale is expensive. But double-entry bookkeeping and assets-liabilities=equity aren’t ever going to change.