I’m not sure I agree with 9. There is a lot of SF out there, and some of it (Roadside Picnic, Stanislaw Lem’s works) presents the idea that the universe is inherently uncaring in a very real way. Anthropomorphization is not an inherent feature of the genre, and fiction might enable directly understanding these ideas in a way that argument doesn’t make real for some people.
wubbles
Karma: 114
Politics: an undervalued opportunity to change the world?
Donald Rumsfeld, from http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2636 “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Ah, I missed that part of the OP. So then I think your argument is correct.
This doesn’t seem right. Let’s assume that the stock gives double or nothing, with 51% probability of double. The Kelly Criterion suggests giving 1% of the total payroll in stock. Yes, this neglects the balancing fee. Your argument seems to suggest that we should be all in cash. But the Kelly bet outperforms this.
The few examples of UN lead responses to invasions that worked typically involved great powers backstopping the response. UN members are reluctant to expend blood and treasure without getting something in return. I think the only time it worked as intended was the Korean war, and that’s because Stalin was sitting out for a bit.
Trotskyism is represented in the US by the Spartacist League. The members do not seem well adjusted socially.
The Prime Number Theorem
A group of four people can stand two by two, but a group of five people can only stand five in a line. The number of numbers like five, and not like four, between two numbers, is the number of times you take two times what you had, starting at one, to get between the two numbers if the two numbers are close.
By “Wall Street” I’m including the Buy Side as well as the Sell Side. The big buyside firms like Fidelity and Charles Schwab sell products that most people shouldn’t buy. Insurance probably has a better case to buy some actively managed products, or some exotic derivatives, but I don’t know why it can’t do it itself.
To the extent that finance reallocates risk it can provide a positive utility benefit. However, the very productive businesses have questionable utility. Promoting active trading, picking hot funds etc, all eat into the returns clients can expect. Justify the existence of Charles Schwab’s S&P 500 index fund, with expense ratio twice that of Vanguards. The most profitable divisions of investment banks tend to be the ones with the least competition, and hence most questionable social benefit.
I’m aware Dodge and Cox is in SF, and Vanguard in Valley Forge, Blackrock in Princeton, etc. However, they are all on “the Street”.
The IRS doesn’t pay well: for government pay one might as well work for NASA and accomplish something fun.
I think the problem with elite common sense is that it can be hard to determine whose views count. Take for instance the observed behavior of the investing public determined by where they put their assets in contrast with the views of most economists. If you define the elite as the economists, you get a different answer from the elite as people with money. (The biggest mutual funds are not the lowest cost ones, though this gap has narrowed over time, and economists generally prefer lower cost funds very strongly)
How do we draw the line? Tit-for-Tat is very simple, yet does very well. Arguably before knowing how it performs it could be considered a troll.
I would have expected a few more metaevaluator bots which clean up the environment to prevent detection. Of course this can be an expensive strategy, and certainly is in programmer time. A metaevaluator bot would have probably broken several recursion detection strategies, or even defining set! out of the language.
Hermione didn’t erase her own existence, but implanted false memories to get her parents to go to Australia. Distance did what magic couldn’t.
I would like to declare the following: I have submitted a program that cooperates only if you would cooperate against CooperateBot. You can of course create a selective defector against it, but that would be a bit tricky, as I am not revealing the source code. Evaluate your submissions accordingly.
Yes: all tail-calls are guarantied not to exhaust resources. The precise definition of what is tail is in the spec.
Small business are illiquid. They also have capital requirements that might not fit your investment needs. If you have enough money that these two problems aren’t an issue, as well as the skill in finding small business that won’t fail and that are on the market, and have the time to supervise them/manage them, then they could be a good investment. But that isn’t a lot of people.
Some banks offer money market accounts, or even a savings account might be a good idea.
Things were a lot worse then everyone knew: Russia almost invaded Yugoslavia, which would have triggered a war according to newly declassified NSA journals, in the 1950′s. The Cuban Missile Crisis could easily have gone hot, and several times early warning systems were triggered by accident. Of course, estimating what could have happened is quite hard.
Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antionus Pius, Marcus Aurelius we all able and capable administrators, and their reign was largely peaceful. But then they were followed by Commodus. Benevolent dictatorship with succession by training and adoption was tried, and so long as it worked it worked. But the one failure was a pretty dramatic one, considered by some to be the start of the fall of the Roman Empire.
However, they seem not to have examined the impact of starting a new political movement or political philosophy in the same way. Even higher variance, potentially even bigger rewards. Institutional change in particular can be extremely difficult to do without a clear mandate, which alliances in existing parties might not give.