"excessive pessimism" stopped reading right there. All credibility lost.
I’m Just Now Realizing How Stupid We Are
71–80 of 111 posts
Re: I’m Just Now Realizing How Stupid We Are
#72Re: I’m Just Now Realizing How Stupid We Are
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without commenting on the success rate of bitcoin itself, the money being put in bitcoin is still an order of magnitude smaller than the bubbles mentioned in GP. The USP guy, more likely than not still doesn't know about bitcoin.
> an order of magnitude smaller than the bubbles mentioned The thing about money and markets is it all relative (%). Whenever talking on these topics people revert to absolute($) comparisons, this is where most analysis breaks. I am not arguing or commenting on bitcoin success, just that your mention of "order of magnitude" sounds like an absolute value.
I agree with your remark about the relative and absolute comparisons.
However, in this case, the discussion were about the "popularity", or the "reach" of bitcoin. The underlying assumption (by me) is that absolute value would strongly correlate with the number of people knowing about bitcoin, hence the absolute number remark.
Re: I’m Just Now Realizing How Stupid We Are
#74> I've learned that there's a strong correlation between knowledge and humility. People who spend 10 minutes on Google studying monetary policy think they have it all figured out, while people with Ph.D.s and decades of experience throw up their hands in frustration. The more you study economics, the more you realize how little we know about it. This is the problem with Congress making decisions about science, the in…
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." Bertrand Russell
It really calls into question the input of the various "experts" who plague our public discourse.
Re: I’m Just Now Realizing How Stupid We Are
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of legislation cannot be approach scientifically, e.g. the right taxes rates, etc. Other legislation can be very scientific, e.g. is marijuana dangerous?
We may not be able to decide the right tax rate scientifically. But what we can do is determine very accurately the consequences of the choice. If we increase the tax rate x%, innovation will suffer y% but n less people will have to starve in the streets.
Even this is grossly overestimating the powers of current economic analysis. Many economists will give you this sort of ridiculous precision in advance, but in retrospect all they'll say is "we can't run a controlled experiment so you have to believe me that if we had done more of what I recommended, the results I promised would have occurred."
Re: I’m Just Now Realizing How Stupid We Are
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
what decisions about science would you be referring to?
A lot of legislation cannot be approach scientifically, e.g. the right taxes rates, etc. Other legislation can be very scientific, e.g. is marijuana dangerous?
Other legislation can be very scientific, e.g. is marijuana dangerous?
Yet somehow, for this question, the science upon which legislators have relied has been completely wrong for many decades.
Re: I’m Just Now Realizing How Stupid We Are
#77Mostly insightful, but this bit: Those who criticize the behavior of "greedy Wall Street bankers" underestimate their tendency to do the same thing if offered an eight-figure salary. You have to be greedy to go into Wall Street banking in the first place. Most of us deliberately didn't become bankers because we aren't motivated by greed. This makes bankers fair game for criticism.
"You have to be greedy to go into Wall Street banking in the first place."
Not necessarily. Our society places tremendous pressure on us to be materially successful. A lot of highly ambitious people in high school, and later in college, hear that Wall Street is the best way to become materially successful. So they go to Wall Street. Once they're hooked into the Wall Street lifestyle, mainlining money, they have a hard time giving up the habit. And they're start to justify an increasingly slippery array of behaviors to maintain their fix.
No doubt there's a proportion of all incoming, freshman analysts who are there because they're greedy. It's all about money for them. Gordon Gekko is a hero, not an antagonist. Wolf of Wall Street looks like a celebration, not a cautionary tale. Etc. But I'd bet that, for every Junior Gekko, there are two or three smart, ambitious, by-the-book kids who are following the recipe their parents, their educators, and their mentors have told them to follow.
Now, let's say you're one of those kids. You land a prestigious job at a bulge-bracket firm. You're making gobs of money. That's hard to give up. Especially because you've worked so hard, for so long, to get to where you are. So you keep climbing the ladder. As you climb, you make more money. You don't want to give that up, either. Maybe you experience a few shady or ethically questionable things along the way, but hell, you're making a shitload of cash. And deep down, you suspect that there's no functional, ethical difference between you and some middle manager at a Main Street company; the only difference is that you're doing more "sophisticated" work, and you're getting paid a lot more. The lifestyle sucks, but you've been conditioned to expect that having a life is a sucker's bet. You've traded all of that for the definition of success you've come to internalize.
The failure here isn't wholly the individual's. It's also the system's. Our society, our culture, our system teach many of our best and brightest to treat money and prestige as life's scorecards.
I don't excuse shady behavior from banks or from bankers. But I don't think most bankers are morally defective human beings. I think they're Type-A kids who do what they're told. Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil; I think one could write just as convincingly about the banality of greed. Or the institutionalization of greed. No doubt there are some genuine sociopaths on Wall Street, and perhaps in greater proportion than you'd find in other industries. But for every sociopath, you have some folks just chasing what society conditions them to chase.
Re: I’m Just Now Realizing How Stupid We Are
#78>I've learned that strong political beliefs in either direction limit your ability to make rational decisions more than almost anything else.
Strong political beliefs in any direction, not either direction. This complaint also relies on the fictional 'rational decision about a political issue' vs. 'political decision' distinction, where your opponent is always "playing politics", but you're always simply being empirical and pragmatic.
>I've learned that people's expectations grow faster than their wealth. The country is richer than it's ever been. I don't think it's as happy as it's ever been.
Not in the median it isn't. The fact that the nation's total wealth has increased while median individual wealth has decreased is a lesson about something, but not about the bulk of people's expectations rapidly growing. What a lot of people want is what most people in the US actually had before the 80s.
Re: I’m Just Now Realizing How Stupid We Are
#79Mostly insightful, but this bit: Those who criticize the behavior of "greedy Wall Street bankers" underestimate their tendency to do the same thing if offered an eight-figure salary. You have to be greedy to go into Wall Street banking in the first place. Most of us deliberately didn't become bankers because we aren't motivated by greed. This makes bankers fair game for criticism.
"Most of us ... because we aren't motivated by greed" History would indicate otherwise. Maybe most of us aren't dominated by our greed to the exclusion of all else / to sociopathic levels. But, most of us certainly are greedy. I suspect it's in our genes. Greed/hoarding (to a degree) being evolutionary strengths.
Some rudimentary consideration of what life is like in a tribe would suggest that greediness and hoarding are evolutionary weaknesses. If you take too much for yourself, others in the tribe get pissed off and get rid of you. If you have a tendency to hoard things, you're going to have a hard time managing a nomadic lifestyle that necessitates light enough loads to carry. Not to mention -- things rot, things break, things get lost, and if you've just used up all the natural resources around you, you're screwing yourself quite hard.
Re: I’m Just Now Realizing How Stupid We Are
#80Every one of those observations sounds extremely true to me. Regarding the first one: "changing your mind is one of the most difficult things we do" -- changing our mind is almost impossible; changing other people's is down right impossible. BUT - It's possible to influence people before they have made up their mind. - It's also possible to reframe / rename / re-position a subject, so that it becomes a new category a…
Regarding the first one: "changing your mind is one of the most difficult things we do" -- changing our mind is almost impossible; changing other people's is down right impossible.
Eh, I did a lot of therapy. We can change our own minds. It takes work and it is hard but it is not "almost impossible."
Perhaps the second is true. If so, that would explain a lot of my frustrations. I would like to think it is not true and that changing the minds of other people is hard but not impossible.