Earlier quoted context omitted.
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So far it looks more like Russia is self-destructing in Ukraine, so why would Ukrainians yield?
Yeah. Maybe, you know, Russia should yield.
Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave
41–50 of 105 posts
Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wedge issues have really split us irrationally. Group A tells scary bedtime stories to their children using caricatures of an average Group B position as a way to maintain in-group discipline. What seems to be new now, is that Group B has taken to espousing Group A's caricature as a way of proving their group identity. "Group A says we eat babies. I eat more babies than anyone else, proving my Group B bonafides!" If…
First time I've heard this, great point. (The baby eating thing, not ranked choice voting) I think extremism is a sign things are bad, but haven't gotten worse. Like, normal communication has broken down, but nothing has escalated to the really scary place where everyone shuts up.
Falling off a cliff isn't so bad, it's the impact with the ground that we should worry about.
Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The window is bifurcating. The political left and right have moved so far apart that "middle ground" ideas appeal to very few and the extremes have more viability.
Wedge issues have really split us irrationally. Group A tells scary bedtime stories to their children using caricatures of an average Group B position as a way to maintain in-group discipline. What seems to be new now, is that Group B has taken to espousing Group A's caricature as a way of proving their group identity. "Group A says we eat babies. I eat more babies than anyone else, proving my Group B bonafides!" If…
Although FPTP is bad, it's not at all clear that IRV (the election method that most mean when they say the ballot-marking method of RCV) actually leads to less extremism. It's a chaos monkey in any race that approaches competitive, and changes that one might expect to help A (such as more A > B > C votes) can actually hurt A. That is, its bad results show up precisely when it might produce a different outcome than FPTP. See the recent Alaska house election for an actual case.
If you're tied to a full ranking, there are much better choices than IRV; any of the Condorcet methods, for instance. However, rating systems are far more likely to produce compromise candidates. I like Approval, perhaps with a runoff between the top 2.
EDITTED-TO-ADD: In practice IRV and FPTP both suffer from the "center-squeeze effect": https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effec...
Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave
#44The way that the author is describing the Overton window as it relates to investing and finding alpha is very similar to a theme that has been talked about for a couple decades now by Jeremy Grantham, which he dubs "career risk".
That is, if you are an exec or money manager, being wrong when the rest of the crowd is wrong isn't that bad career-wise. But being even temporarily wrong when the rest of the crowd is making money is a guaranteed way to get canned.
Good example: in the mid 00s housing bubble, there were plenty of people who knew that mortgage lending standards were insanely low. But if you were head of a mortgage lender and said "This practice of giving a loan to anyone who can fog a mirror is crazy, we're raising our lending standards" then you would have vastly underperformed your peers for literally years before being proven right, and, most importantly, you probably would have been canned by your board long before the world got to see that your foresight was correct.
More recently, I think this is why you saw so much overinvestment during the pandemic and why now you are seeing all these tech layoffs. It always seemed like a huge stretch that pandemic conditions would continue for a long time - my favorite example is Peloton, where if you did the math of "OK, half the country owns a Peloton", it still didn't work out to their valuation or level of investment. But a greater fear for many execs was "missing the boat" if there was a more permanent shift in people's behaviors, and that if you had underinvested that your competitors would take business from you.
IMO career risk is the concept that has been the most helpful to my understanding of the "madness of crowds".
Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to have completely missed the main point. Your ideological bias is showing here: "He's saying virtue signaling is bad. I can stop reading now." > Instead, I’d like to argue that the market, at least important parts of it, may have become notably less efficient due to changes to the information landscape. That's the point. The narrower the window of acceptable discourse, the more opportunity there is in looki…
Oh no, I got the point - the idea that groupthink leads to inefficient markets is not exactly new, so it is easy even for someone at my speed to grasp. (And to the author's credit, he avoids mentioning virtue signaling.) The problem is that the article does nothing except state that things feel homogeneous to author, with no demonstration of the opportunities presented. So, it's a restatement of a very common pose: I…
> So, it's a restatement of a very common pose: I see further than the masses.
It's more of the many stages of grief of finance types.
Like he just wants the bad times to end and for the good times to resume again.
He wouldn't care if markets were irrational and inefficient but also making him money.
People who chose to be defined by how much money they make, and nothing else, are in for a shit time right now.
These think pieces are pretty funny gasps at this. I'm sure someone's going to accuse you of feeling schadenfreude or something - Hacker News is full of people who have been obliterated by the markets.
Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but it was in 1993, when my grad school professor Ilya Prizel pushed back against all the End of History BS and said Russia would eventually assert itself in the middle of Europe, if desperately. He was dead right. I don’t know, it seems like great powers are prolonging the war in Ukraine’s favor right now. > less institutional capacity IR always bankrupts itself on trying to find gold in shithole countries.
"prolonging the war in Ukraine’s favor" is a phrase that sounds _very_ loaded, politically. Would love to hear you explain a bit more what you mean by that.
Account is 2 hours old, 0 karma. What do you think it means?
Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave
#47The way that the author is describing the Overton window as it relates to investing and finding alpha is very similar to a theme that has been talked about for a couple decades now by Jeremy Grantham, which he dubs "career risk". That is, if you are an exec or money manager, being wrong when the rest of the crowd is wrong isn't that bad career-wise. But being even temporarily wrong when the rest of the crowd is makin…
It sounds like a financial systemic version of “fear of missing out” if I read you right.
Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave
#48It never ceases to amaze me how experts at something can't resist trying to be experts at everything. His examples from political science are just so off, but I have to concentrate on his example of Mearsheimer. Far from being one step or two ahead of the crowd, Mearsheimer's problem has been that he's still standing back in the 1980s. His realpolitik approach was refreshing and appealing for the time whensomewhat ph…
It s not just M. Russia's war for the past has brought forward an army of former soviet "experts" who have been dusted off to tell us that we are heading straight back to 1970s because that s all they know. alas history does not repeat
Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wedge issues have really split us irrationally. Group A tells scary bedtime stories to their children using caricatures of an average Group B position as a way to maintain in-group discipline. What seems to be new now, is that Group B has taken to espousing Group A's caricature as a way of proving their group identity. "Group A says we eat babies. I eat more babies than anyone else, proving my Group B bonafides!" If…
Although FPTP is bad, it's not at all clear that IRV (the election method that most mean when they say the ballot-marking method of RCV) actually leads to less extremism. It's a chaos monkey in any race that approaches competitive, and changes that one might expect to help A (such as more A > B > C votes) can actually hurt A. That is, its bad results show up precisely when it might produce a different outcome than FP…
Would you mind explaining more about what you mean regarding the recent Alaska election? The information I have found about it made it seem fairly reasonable and straightforward to me, but perhaps I am missing something.
Re: Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave
#50It never ceases to amaze me how experts at something can't resist trying to be experts at everything. His examples from political science are just so off, but I have to concentrate on his example of Mearsheimer. Far from being one step or two ahead of the crowd, Mearsheimer's problem has been that he's still standing back in the 1980s. His realpolitik approach was refreshing and appealing for the time whensomewhat ph…
I don't think it was inevitable for Russia to end up so firmly in the anti-West camp. Back in 1993 - and, really, all the way until the end of 90s - it was very much at the crossroads. The mistake is claiming that the path it ended up choosing, it chose because of something the West did or didn't do. It was all about choices that people made - and back then, elections in Russia still meant something - in response to…
Nothing in history is truly inevitable, but it’s hard for me to see Russia — and particularly Muscovites — to abandon empire and corrupt oligarchy. Yeltsin let oligarchs emerge to help him consolidate power, but then was trapped in the system. He chose Putin as his successor so that he could retire safely. To keep stability, Russia plays to the idea of themselves as a great empire, despite the reality that many citizens of the “republics” have never seen indoor plumbing.
If there was another choice, what was it? Not to be corrupt? Who would have made that choice?