Viewing profile — jacobion

> if the placebo effect is something that you can scientifically demonstrate, how would you arrange a control group? Easy, just don't give the control group any medicine. Give the …

Wasn't the someone who dismissed Dropbox when they first launched Steve Jobs ?

Arguably one reason those two businesses were successful in areas with entrenched players and business practices was because they handle the money. If AirBnB was asking either trav…

The Law of Large Numbers is an actual math theorem. The Law of Averages is a non-technical name for various informal reasoning strategies, some fallacious (like the gamblers fallac…

Yes, this is a problem that a heavily regulated free market actually solved pretty well. I go to my local grocery store and look at the painkillers they have. There are generic asp…

Also, people feel differently about different treatments, for particular reasons. If your mom always took one brand of Tylenol when she had a cold, taking it might reassure you mor…

Then for you, a meta-analysis would be even more useless, as your own experience is much more valuable.

Isn't there a social benefit in letting the 10% (or whatever) of people that believe in them get a safe and effective placebo, for many conditions where that's all that's needed?

Yes, for headaches no one wants to read a meta-analysis, they just want to buy something quickly and feel slightly better. On the other hand, for depression medication, they don't …

But doesn't a large majority of 'social services' spending go to retirement incomes? Obviously that is important, but discretionary spending on, for example, taking care of childre…

So maybe the problem is a broken political system which serves the interests of only one group of people, rather than high or low interest rates?

Why do low interest rates cause high rents? High house prices sure, but why does it affect rents? You prefer to live in Copenhagen than the part of Europe you come from, for the hi…

'artificially low' What do you think the natural rate of interest should be? Why?

I think there might be two things going on here: one is a rise in various forms of social inequality, between generations, between people living in tier one cities and smaller citi…

I brought up the past model to show that apprenticeships in the past worked for a specific reason. Various models of apprenticeship/training/education fail today, because we have r…

Do you think that apprenticeships in the UK have been successful in motivating training for shortage jobs with highly technical skills? I don't think they have. I've seen reports w…

Most people will not use the ethical projects that you mention, at least until perception of crypto changes, because they will associate crypto/defi either with full-on exit/Ponzi …

Yes, and despite this there is commonly resentment by academics of the time they spend mentoring graduate students who then leave for higher paid posts outside academia.

It might be easier to compare them, I'm not persuaded it is any easier to evaluate them.

> a project's economic viability doesn't depend on the relative merits of other projects. I'm not sure this is true - certainly the opposite of this statement is the central thesis…

The way apprenticeships traditionally worked is that the apprentice was bound to the master for a certain number of years, and his parents also often had to pay to have him taken o…

Arguably it's actually in their interest to filter out less determined people, by providing an environment which is confusing or demoralising.

How does the internet 'alleviate issues of information asymmetry'?? I thought it was well understood that this has not generally happened, except in open markets for very transpare…

But it doesn't make economic sense to work rather than steal, unless there are enforced rules and sanctions against stealing. Most people who choose to work do so either because of…

The thing about efficient markets is that lucrative activities which don't produce much value—borderline scams—can block activity which would be highly wealth creating. For example…