I love the word “aspiring.” It feels...aspirational. Humble.
I don’t like “Less Wronger” or other names that are about the affiliation rather than the thing itself.
talisman
Karma: 238
A week ago I would have thought this was a silly discussion. As I’ve thought more about LW’s group nature, I’ve realized that this kind of cultural thing does matter.
It feels group-narcissistic to waste time on this, but the small difference this makes will be magnified over years and hundreds of thousands of repetitions. E.g.: at some point a major news outlet will do an article on OB/LW, and it will repeatedly use whatever the self-moniker is, and impressions of OB/LW will be slightly altered. (Parallel: I can’t stop being marginally more negative on Google because their employees call themselves “googlers.”)
The name will also subtly affect internal psychology and self-perception, and act as a slight magnet or a slight repellent over time.
It’s worth taking the time to think about this and work on it, even if it takes a couple of weeks. Don’t give up if the right answer doesn’t show up in the next twelve hours.
There are three specific examples linked to; I agree that I could/should have done more.
Rational Groups Kick Ass
Judgement Day by Nathaniel Branden. (I think this is the same book as My Years With Ayn Rand.)
Hero becomes Ayn Rand’s closest confidant, co-builder of Objectivism, lover; gets drummed out.
Message: every cause wants to be a cult; the enormous power of personal charisma; an excellent antidote for the recalcitrant Objectivist in your life.
I disagree strongly that “the danger of leverage” is the key message of LTCM. The key message for rationalists has to do with the subtle nature of correlation; the key message for risk managers has to do with the importance of liquidity.
“The danger of leverage” also isn’t much of a message. That’s like saying the message of the Iraq War is “the danger of foreign policy.”
Does “popular belief” hold that LTCM wasn’t hedged? Anyone who believes that is very far from learning anything from the LTCM story.
Not to focus exclusively on markets, and it’s not a book, but this page of a Michael Lewis piece from Portfolio.com is a crucial read (and short!):
I was shocked to learn that when the big Wall Street firms all became public companies, which is arguably the most important precursor event to the current unpleasantness, many people knew this was a terrible idea!
There are at least two parts to the failure message: think carefully about the public company structure and how it changes your institutions’ incentives; and listen to the wise.
The rest of the piece is entertaining but not on point to the current discussion and not a must-read.
What are the best books about the fall of the Roman Empire?
This seems like one of the most important failures in history, and most important to understand.
I just started Peter Heather’s book, but haven’t read enough to say anything except that the writing is a bit clunky.
A Demon Of Our Own Design by Richard Bookstaber
This book came out two years ago but reads like it was just written.
The lesson is similar to e.g. When Genius Failed but it gets into the grit a bit more and is more detailedly insightful about markets. Bookstaber has worked in markets rather than just writing about them, and it shows.
Dull in spots, but that’s fairly standard in books like this, since you can’t sell a 130-page book.
I don’t buy this account of Enron, which has become the standard fable. There was a lot there that was more like straight-up fraud than smart people overcomplicating things and missing the down-home common sense.
Edit: I agree with the “hiding from reality = downward spiral” part strongly.
Thanks; I had forgotten about that post.
I’d like to understand the precise arguments so that I can understand the limits, so that I can think about Robin and Eliezer’s disagreement, so I can get intuition for the Hanson/Cowen statement that “A more detailed analysis says not only that people must ultimately agree, but also that the discussion path of their alternating expressed opinions must follow a random walk.” I’m guessing that past the terminology it’s not actually that complicated, but I haven’t been able to find the four hours to understand all the terminology and structure.
Two Blegs
This post feels out of accord with the Virtues. It feels like a debate brief against religion rather than a curious, light, humble, empirical exploration. “On the wrong side of every moral issue in American history”? “Denying the government billions in tax revenue”? This doesn’t strike me as the talk of a truthseeker; rather, a polemicist.
Religion is true (vague, but you know what I mean I hope) with a very low odds ratio, perhaps 1-to-100k against? In any case way down in the hazy low probability region where the intuition has a hard time. Call it evidence of −70 to −40 decibels.
Religion net helps the total utility of humans in the present day with a still adverse but much higher odds ratio. I would be reluctant to go as far as −15 decibels.
It seems to me that you are conflating the two numbers.
Your first point about the claim of privacy is good, though.
Hm. I’m far from an expert, and it could well be that there are ten times as many anonymous attacks, but off the top of my head I think of WTC ’93, the Millenium plot, 9/11, London trains, Madrid trains, Israel suicide bombings, Munich massacre, Iraq beheadings, USS Cole, bombings of US embassies.
Not off the top of my head: Golden Mosque bombing, Tamil Tigers numerous bombings, IRA-related terrorism, etc. Scanning through this I find many more terrorist attacks that were done with a clear political or propaganda purpose.
The fear and hatred of gambling. Contra Tyler Cowen, betting your beliefs is one of the best paths to both individual and group rationality. You should be doing it twice a day, like brushing your teeth. The beliefs that don’t get bet get cavities and rot; the beliefs that are unbettable create unbreakable deadlocks that later require ophtalmological intervention. Bet!
Modeling terrorists as trying to kill as many people as possible strikes me as insufficient. In Terror and Consent, Philip Bobbitt models their aims as propagandistic, which feels more like the right angle—hence the focus on inefficient but spectacular killing.
That assumes beginners know what they know, which strikes me as a poor assumption.
I wanted to avoid the anecdotes-ain’t-data writeoff and to avoid making the post too much about me specifically. Is that a mistake?