Salemicus

Karma: 2,609

Salemicus 19 Jan 2017 12:08 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Jade’s comment on: Crisis of Faith
No, I didn’t leave that part out.

the closer the real Paul Bunyan hews to the Bunyan of the stories, the smaller the mystery

Of course magic makes everything else more mysterious i.e. P(magical Jesus) is infinitesimal. But P(non magical Jesus) is not low. We do ask JK Rowling what non magical boy inspired Harry Potter.

Salemicus 12 Jan 2017 11:36 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Jade’s comment on: Crisis of Faith

Would you say the origins of other religions become more mysterious if there never were whatever magical beings those religions posit?

Yes, of course.

The least mysterious explanation of Paul Bunyan stories is that there really was a Paul Bunyan. And the closer the real Paul Bunyan hews to the Bunyan of the stories, the smaller the mystery. P(stories about Bunyan | Bunyan) > P(stories about Bunyan | !Bunyan).

But just because a story is simple, doesn’t necessarily make it likely. We can’t conclude from the above that P(Bunyan | stories about Bunyan) > P(!Bunyan | stories about Bunyan).

Salemicus 7 Jan 2017 12:15 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Jade’s comment on: Crisis of Faith
Neither sufficient nor necessary:
- The origins of Christianity become more mysterious, not less, if there never was a Jesus.
- We don’t need to tie ourselves to a fringe hypothesis to posit non-supernatural origins for the Gospels.

Salemicus 3 Nov 2015 15:58 UTC
5 points
in reply to: passive_fist’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 02 - Nov. 08, 2015
One possible answer is to look at how the then-state-of-the-art models in (say) 1990, 1995, 2000, etc, predicted temperature changes going forwards.

The answer, in point-of-fact, is that they consistently predicted a considerably greater temperature rise than actually took place, although the actual temperature rise is just about within the error bars of most models.

Now, there are two plausible conclusions to this:
- Those past mistakes have been appropriately corrected into today’s models, so we don’t need to worry too much about past failures.
- This is like Paul Samuelson’s economics textbook, which consistently (in editions published in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s) predicted that the Soviet Union would overtake the US economy in 25 years.

Salemicus 4 Sep 2015 11:14 UTC
0 points
on: Actually existing prediction markets?
Stock markets. I am using them continuously (if passively).

Salemicus 28 Aug 2015 13:54 UTC
6 points
on: Why people want to die
As usual, Nietzsche got there first:

The heaviest burden: What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!’ If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

Salemicus 20 Aug 2015 13:07 UTC
6 points
on: Vegetarian/Omnivore Ideological Turing Test Judging Round!
I am a big fan of the Ideological Turing Test, and applying it to different domains, and I was happy to participate in this one. However, I wonder whether this is an appropriate domain.

I think the ITT works best when there are coherent and well-defined opposing positions, of roughly equal size and intensity. The abortion debate is a good example—while there are differences in emphasis and gradations of support, it is clear what the two sides are. Other good examples are the minimum wage debate, the global warming debate, and the debate. The ITT works worst when the positions are incoherent and ill-defined, or of grossly unequal size and intensity. “Was Tony Blair a good Prime Minister?” is a good example—it’s not clear what it means to be a good Prime Minister, there are people who (dis)approve of him for diametrically opposite reasons, and his detractors are much more invested in the question than are his defenders.

Sadly, vegetarianism is much more like the latter than the former. Some people are vegetarians for health reasons, others for animal welfare reasons. Vegetarians typically feel strongly about the issue; non-vegetarians simply don’t care about it, and have typically not considered the issue nearly as strongly. There is no “opposing side” to vegetarianism that would drive the ITT; all that links non-vegetarians is that they don’t find vegetarian arguments compelling.

Salemicus 13 Aug 2015 10:47 UTC
3 points
in reply to: pianoforte611’s comment on: Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015
US prohibition was very successful at its goal of reducing alchohol consumption, and you are right that this is insufficiently appreciated. But it also resulted in massive organised crime. Your linked article is extremely unpersuasive on this point.

Although organized crime flourished under its sway, Prohibition was not responsible for its appearance, as organized crime’s post-Repeal persistence has demonstrated.

Ha! And lest anyone thinks I’m being unfair, that is literally its only discussion of the massive increase in organized crime caused by Prohibition. In an article that repeatedly discusses the possibility of people being socialised into different modes of behaviour, too!

Now, “don’t cause a massive increase in organised crime” wasn’t exactly a goal of the WCTU et al when they were campaigning for Prohibition. It was simply not on their radar, so you’re kinda right that Prohibition succeeded in its goals. But looking at the implicit goals more broadly, Prohibition was a disaster, despite its success at its ostensible primary goal, in exactly the way that Lumifer’s “blinking ad” example demonstrates.

Salemicus 12 Aug 2015 10:45 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: MrMind’s comment on: Open thread, Aug. 10 - Aug. 16, 2015
Pre-commitment needs to be credible, verifiable and enforceable. If you’re playing chicken, pre-commitment means throwing the steering-wheel out of the window, not just saying “I will never ever swerve, pinky-swear.”

What is the relevant pre-commitment mechanism here, and how does it operate?

If anything, I would say large dealers are more vulnerable.

Salemicus 11 Aug 2015 22:29 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Sabiola’s comment on: Vegetarianism Ideological Turing Test!
With my omnivore hat on:

I don’t know what you mean by “suffering.” Google defines it as “the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship.” But just because you’re going through pain and hardship, doesn’t mean you’d rather be dead. You can be suffering in some ways, and still have a net-positive life—indeed, this is the normal meaning of suffering. Do you deny that the inhabitants of the Syrian refugee camps are suffering? Do you think they’d be better off not to have been born?

Do factory farmed animals sometimes suffer? Surely. Is their life such a constant torment that non-existence would be preferable? Surely not.

Salemicus 11 Aug 2015 21:03 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open thread, Aug. 10 - Aug. 16, 2015

Oh, I thought we were talking about reality. EMH claims to describe reality, doesn’t it?

Yeah, but you wanted “a scenario where everything is happening pre-tax, there are no transaction costs, we’re operating in risk-adjusted terms and, to make things simple, the risk-free rate is zero. Moreover, the markets are orderly and liquid.” That doesn’t describe reality, so describing events in your scenario necessitates a toy model.

In the real world, it is trivial to show how you can lose money even if the EMH is true: you have to pay tax, transaction costs are non-zero, the ex post risk is not known, etc.

deep OOM options are diversifiable—there is a great deal of different markets in the world.

There’s still a lot of correlation. Selling deep OOM options and then running into unexpected correlation is exactly how LTCM went bust. It’s called “picking up pennies in front of a steamroller” for a reason.

Salemicus 11 Aug 2015 20:47 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open thread, Aug. 10 - Aug. 16, 2015
1. Who says this risk is diversifiable? Nothing in the toy model I gave you said the risk was diversifiable. Maybe all the X-like instruments are correlated.
2. No, I’m not saying that selling deep OOM options is a free lunch, because of the risk profile. And these are definitely not diversifiable.
3. I am not arguing that EMH is wrong. I have given you a toy model, where a suitably defined investor cannot make money but can lose money. The model is entirely consistent with the EMH, because all prices reflect and incorporate all relevant information.

Salemicus 11 Aug 2015 20:37 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Open thread, Aug. 10 - Aug. 16, 2015
The annotated RichardKennaway:

This is a quote from Henry IV part I, when Glendower is showing off to the other rebels, claiming to be a sorceror, and Hotspur is having none of it.

Glendower:

I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur:

Why, so can I, or so can any man

But will they come when you do call for them?

Salemicus 11 Aug 2015 19:58 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open thread, Aug. 10 - Aug. 16, 2015
Second, when you say they are “a poor investment in terms of expected return”, do you actually mean expected return? … A lottery can perfectly well have a positive expected return even if your chance of getting a positive return is very small.

Yes, I mean expected return. If you hold penny stocks, you can expect to lose money, because the occasional big wins will not make up for the small losses. You are right that we can imagine lotteries with positive expected return, but in the real world lotteries have negative expected return, because the risk-loving are happy to pay for the chance of big winnings.

[If] penny stocks provide negative expected return … then EMH breaks

Why?

Suppose we have two classes of investors, call them gamblers and normals. Gamblers like risk, and are prepared to pay to take it. In particular, they like asymmetric upside risk (“lottery tickets”). Normals dislike risk, and are prepared to pay to avoid it (insurance, hedging, etc). In particular, they dislike asymmetric downside risk (“catastrophes”).

There is an equity instrument, X, which has the following payoff structure:

99% chance: payoff of 0 1% chance: payoff of 1000

Clearly, E(X) is 10. However, gamblers like this form of bet, and are prepared to pay for it. Consequently, they are willing to bid up the price of X to (say) 11.

Y is the instrument formed by shorting X. When X is priced at 11, this has the following payoff structure:

99% chance: payoff of 11 1% chance: payoff of −989

Clearly, E(Y) is 1. In other words, you can make money, in expectation, by shorting X. However, there is a lot of downside risk here, and normals do not want to take it on. They would require E(Y) to be 2 (say) in order to take on a bet of that structure.

So, assuming you have a “normal” attitude to risk, you can lose money here (by buying X), but you can’t win it in risk-adjusted terms. This is caused by the market segmentation caused by the different risk profiles. Nothing here is contrary to the EMH, although it is contrary to the CAPM.

Thoughts:
1. Penny stocks (and high-beta instruments generally, such as deep out-of-the-money options) display this behaviour in real life.
2. A more realistic model might include some deep-pocketed funds with a neutral attitude to risk who could afford to short X. But in real life, there is market segmentation and a lack of liquidity. Penny stocks are illiquid and hard to short, and so are many other high-beta instruments.
3. The logical corollary of this model is that safe, boring equities will outperform stocks with lottery-ticket-like qualities. And it therefore follows that safe, boring equities will outperform the market as a whole. And that also seems true in real life.
4. There are plausible microfoundations for why there might be a “gambler” class of investor. For example, fund managers are risking their clients’ capital, not their own, and are typically paid in a ranking relative to their peers. Their incentives may well lead them to buy lottery tickets.

Salemicus 11 Aug 2015 11:02 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open thread, Aug. 10 - Aug. 16, 2015
Consider penny stocks. They are a poor investment in terms of expected return (unless you have secret alpha). But they provide a small chance of very high returns, meaning they operate like lottery tickets. This isn’t a mispricing—some people like lottery tickets, and so bid up the price until they become a poor investment in terms of expected return (problem for the CAPM, not for the EMH). So you can systematically lose money by taking the “wrong” side, and buying penny stocks.

Does that count as an example, or does that violate your “risk-adjusted terms” assumption? I think we have to be careful about what frictions we throw out. If we are too aggressive in throwing out notions like an “equity premium,” or hedging, or options, or market segmentation, or irreducible risk, or different tolerances to risk, we will throw out the stuff that causes financial markets to exist. An infinite frictionless plane is a useful thought experiment, but you can’t then complain that a car can’t drive on such a plane.

Salemicus 10 Aug 2015 18:25 UTC
5 points
on: Vegetarianism Ideological Turing Test!
For Omnivores:
- Do you think the level of meat consumption in America is healthy for individuals? Do you think it’s healthy for the planet?
America has an obesity crisis, but I don’t see any reason to think that meat specifically is a major part of it. I’m far more worried about the sugar consumption. If, as part of a general reduction in calorific intake, the meat consumption fell, that would be a good thing, but I worry more about people too poor to afford steak.

Regarding planetary “health”—the damage seems to me to be caused by a lack of property rights and tragedy-of-the-commons situations (see e.g. global warming, fish stock depletion, etc) than meat consumption per se. If reliable property rights could be established, we could all happily consume far more meat than we currently do—and without those reliable property rights, everyone going vegan will make little difference.
- How do you feel about factory farming? Would you pay twice as much money for meat raised in a less efficient (but “more natural”) way?
I would (and do) pay a little more for humanely raised meat, but not twice as much. Regarding factory farming—what alternative am I comparing it to? It’s worse than happy animals frolicking in the fields, it’s better than those animals not existing. As in my judgement, the realistic alternative is much closer to the latter, I am an enthusiast for factory farming, but not in an absolute sense.
- Are there any animals you would (without significantly changing your mind) never say it was okay to hunt/farm and eat? If so, what distinguishes these animals from the animals which are currently being hunted/farmed?
It’s context-dependent. If I’m starving on a lifeboat, in extremis I’d eat anything that came to hand—even human! - but I wouldn’t resort to cannibalism just out of idle curiosity. There are no animals I’d never eat.
- If all your friends were vegetarians, and you had to go out of your way to find meat in a similar way to how vegans must go out of their way right now, do you think you’d still be an omnivore?
Yes. Meat is delicious and I would seek it out.

For Vegetarians:
- If there was a way to grow meat in a lab that was indistinguishable from normal meat, and the lab-meat had never been connected to a brain, do you expect you would eat it? Why/why not?
I’d need to know more about the way the meat was grown, and why, but no, I don’t expect I would eat it. Partly because the fact that this product is classified as “meat” tells me a great deal about the people it’s aimed at, and the sensibilities of the corporation behind it. Partly because this kind of artificial creation is highly suspect. But mostly because it’s so unnecessary—when you can live a happy and healthy lifestyle without having any truck with meat, why would you want to go down that route?
- Indigenous hunter gatherers across the world get around 30 percent of their annual calories from meat. Chimpanzees, our closest non-human relatives, eat meat. There are arguments that humans evolved to eat meat and that it’s natural to do so. Would you disagree? Elaborate.
Humans didn’t evolve “to” do anything. That’s the naturalistic fallacy. We just evolved. And sure, we have certain adaptations that make it easier for us to eat meat, but we have other adaptations (the shrivelled appendix, for example) that make it harder for us to do so. Unlike most other omnivores, humans can’t safely eat raw meat—presumably because we have adapted to early technology such as fire. That makes it very misleading to talk about what’s “natural” for humans, because there is no natural human state apart from our technology. But sure, there is a sense in which it’s “natural” for humans to eat meat—the same sense in which it’s natural for humans to murder our stepchildren, which chimpanzees and most other mammals do. The word I prefer is “barbaric.”
- Do you think it’s any of your business what other people eat? Have you ever tried (more than just suggesting it or leading by example) to get someone to become a vegetarian or vegan?
As long as governments are pumping billions into agricultural subsidies, as long as corporations are distorting the democratic process and subverting the First Amendment with ag-gag laws, as long as chemicals and pollutants are flooding our rivers, as long as innocent animals are being tortured so you can eat a roast, then of course it’s everyone’s business. What you put into your mouth may seem like a private decision, but your ability to eat meat rests on a massive industry and supply chain that affects all of us, whether we like it or not. Externalities matter.

Yes, I have encouraged vegetarianism. I have volunteered for Viva in the past. However, there is a time and a place for such conversations. It’s better to build trust first, rather than hectoring strangers.
- What do you think is the primary health risk of eating meat (if any)?
The biggest risk is heart disease and related cardiovascular problems. However, the increased cancer risk is almost as bad.

Salemicus 14 Jul 2015 15:49 UTC
2 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, Jul. 13 - Jul. 19, 2015
Birds have a ZZ/ZW system where the male is the homogametic sex.

Yes, birds have testosterone. Mind you, women have testosterone. It’s the elevated quantity of testosterone that leads to masculinity.

Salemicus 13 Jul 2015 14:57 UTC
6 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, Jul. 13 - Jul. 19, 2015
Woman is the biological default. That’s why women have redundancy on the 23rd chromosomal pair, whereas men have a special “Y” chromosome—leading to much higher rates of genetic disorders in men. That’s why in infant male humans, the testicles have to descend. And so on. Both from an encoding and from a developmental point of view, a man is a woman altered to be masculine. And testosterone is what does that altering.

Yes, it could have been different. We can imagine a species with a neutral default, which then gets altered to be either masculine or feminine by different sex-encoding hormones. But that’s not how humans came about.

Salemicus 1 Jul 2015 10:16 UTC
3 points
on: Selecting vs. grooming

A capitalist employer selects an accountant from a pool of 100 applicants. A feudal lord would groom a serf boy who has a knack for horses into the job of the adult stable man.

A capitalist employer grooms a management trainee for a future role, while a feudal lord selects a mercenary from those applying for the job.

My vote is for “false dichotomy.” There has been a rise in selection (because the world is freer and more connected) but there is still plenty of grooming too. Note that even in your stable boy example, there was selection.

Salemicus 24 Jun 2015 22:29 UTC
5 points
on: The great quote of rationality a la Socrates (or Plato, or Aristotle)
Cicero wasn’t Greek and is most known as a jurist and politician, not as a philosopher.