FlorianH

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Taking what you write as excuse to nerd a bit about Hyperbolic Discounting

One way to paraphrase esp. some of your ice cream example:

Hyperbolic discounting - the habit of valuing this moment a lot while abruptly (not smoothly exponentially) discounting everything coming even just a short while after - may in a technical sense be 'time inconsistent', but it's misguided to call it 'irrational' in the common usage of the term: My current self may simply care about itself distinctly more than about the future selves, even if some of these future selves are forthcoming relatively soon. It's my current self's preference structure, and preferences are not rational or irrational, basta.

I agree and had been thinking this, and I find it an interesting counterpoint to the usual description of hyperbolic discounting as 'irrational'.

It is a bit funny also as we have plenty of discussions trying to explain when/why some hyperbolic discounting may actually be "rational" (ex. here, here, here), but I've not yet seen any so fundamental (and simple) rejection of the notion of irrationality (though maybe I've just missed it so far).

(Then, with their dubious habits of using common terms in subtly misleading ways, fellow economists may rebut that we have simply defined irrationality in this debate as meaning to have non-exponential alias time-inconsistent preferences, justifying the term 'irrationality' here quasi by definition)

Spurious correlation here, big time, imho.

Give me the natural content of the field and I bet I easily predict whether it may or may not have replication crisis, w/o knowing the exact type of students it attracts.

I think it's mostly that the fields where bad science may be sexy and less-trivial/unambiguous to check, or, those where you can make up/sell sexy results independently of their grounding, may, for whichever reason, also be those that attract the non-logical students.

 

Agree though with the mob overwhelming the smart outliers, but I just think how much that mob creates a replication crises is at least in large part dependent on the intrinsic nature of the field rather than due to the exact IQs.

FlorianH1-1

Wouldn't automatically abolish all requirements; maybe I'm not good enough in searching but to the degree I'm not an outlier:

  • With internet we have reviews, but they're not always trustworthy, and even if they are, understanding/checking/searching reviews is costly, sometimes very costly.
  • There is value in being able to walk up to the next-best random store for a random thing and being served by a person with a minimum standard of education in the trade. Even for rather trivial things.

This seems underappreciated here.

Flower safety isn't a thing. But having the next-best florist to for sure be a serious florist person to talk to, has serious value. So, I'm not even sure for something like flowers I'm entirely against any sort of requirements.

So it seems to me more a question of balance what exactly to require in which trade, and that's a tricky one, but in some places I lived seems to have been handled mostly +- okay. Admittedly simply according to my shallow glance at things.

Lived also in countries that seem more permissive, requiring less job training, but clearly prefer the customer experience in those that regulate, despite higher prices.

Then, I wouldn't want the untrained/unexamined florist to starve or even simply become impoverished. But at least in some countries, social safety net mostly prevents that.

Great you bring up Hoffman; I think he deserves serious pushback.

He proofs exactly two things:

  • Reality often is indeed not how it seems to us - as by much too many, his nonsense is taken at face value. I would normally not use such words but there are reasons in his case.
  • In as far as he has come to truly believe all he claims (not convinced!), he'd be a perfect example of self-serving beliefs: how his overblown claims manage to take over his brain, just as it has realized he can sell it with total success to the world, despite absurdity.

Before I explain this harsh judgement, caveat: I mean not to defend what we perceive. Let's be open to a world very different to how it seems. Also, maybe Hoffman has many interesting points. But this doesn't mean, his claims are not completely overblown - which I'm convinced they, are after having listened to a range of interviews with him and having gone to lengths for reading his original papers.

Here three simple points I find compelling to put his stuff into perspective:

  1. You find a moaning gap between his claims and what he has really 'proven' in his papers. Speech: "We have mathematically proven there's absolutely zero chance blabla". Reality: Used a trivial evolutionary toy model and found a reduced form representation of a very specific process may be more economical/probable than a more complex representation of the 'real' process. It nicely underlines that evolution may take shortcuts. Yes, we're crazy about sex instead of about "creating children", or we want to eat sugary stuff as an ancient proxy for actually healthy diet which in our today's world doesn't function anymore, and many more things where we've not evolved to perceive/account for all the complexity. Problem? Is of course nothing new, and, more importantly, it doesn't proof anything more than that.
  2. I like the following analogies:
    1. Room-Mapping Robots vs. Non-Mapping Robot cleaners (Roomba stuff). A not too far-fetched interpretation to Hoffman would be: A (efficient) vacuum robot cannot map the room, it's always more efficient to simply have reduced-form rules/heuristics for where to move next. Well, it's nice to see how the market has evolved: Semi-random moving robots made the start, but it turns out if you want to have robots efficient, you make them actually map the territory, hence today LiDAR/SLAM become more dominating.
    2. Being exposed to a cat, I realize she seems much more Hoffmanesque than us. When she pees on the ground, or smells another weird thing, she does her 'heap earth/sand over it' leg moves, not realizing there's just parquet so her move doesn't actually cover the stink. It's a bit funny then, with Hoffman the species that has overcome reliance on un-understanding instincts in so many (not all) domains, is the one that ends up claiming it would not ever be possible to overcome mere reduced-form instincts in whatsoever domain.
  3. Trivial disproof by contradiction of Hofmann's claim of having absolutely proven the world could not be the way we think: Assume the world WAS just how it looks to us. Imagine there WAS then the billion-year evolutionary process that we THINK has happened. Is there anything in Hoffman's proofs showing that, then there could be only dumans, like humans but perceiving in 2d instead of 3d, or in some other wrong-way-with-no-resemblance-to-reality? Nope, absolutely not. His claims just obviously don't hold up.

Broader discussions highlighting I think in part some fraudulent aspect of Hoffman: The Case For Reality, or also Quora Is Donald Hoffman’s interface theory of perception true? 

In sum: His popularity proves an evolutionary theory for information where what floats around is not what is shown to be correct, but what is appealing; distracting voices debunking it being entirely ignored. I imagine him laughing about this fact when thinking about his own success: "After all, my claim seems to not be that wrong, they do not perceive reality, mahahaaa". According to google there are not merely a million people reading him, but literally millions of webpages featuring him.

Happy to be debunked in my negative reading of him :)

FlorianH2-2

Musings about whether we should have a bit more sympathy for skepticism re price gauging, despite all. Admittedly with no particular evidence to point to; keen to see whether my basic skepticism could easily be dismissed.

Scott Sumner points out that customers very much prefer ridesharing services that price gouge and have flexible pricing to taxis that have fixed prices, and very much appreciate being able to get a car on demand at all times. He makes the case that liking price gouging and liking the availability of rides during high demand are two sides of the same coin. The problem is (in addition to ‘there are lots of other differences so we have only weak evidence this is the preference’), people reliably treat those two sides very differently, and this is a common pattern – they’ll love the results, but not the method that gets those results, and pointing out the contradiction often won’t help you.

I think as economists we can be too confident about how obvious it'd be that allowing 'price gouging' should be the standard in all domains. Yes, price controls often hugely problematic. But could full liberty here not also be disastrous for the standard consumer? It depends on a lot of factors; maybe in many domains full liberty works just fine. Maybe not everywhere at all.

Yes, "Prices aren’t just a transfer between buyer and seller." - but they're also that. And in some areas, it is easily imaginable how an oligopoly or a cartel, or simply dominant local supplier(s) benefit from the possibility to supply at any price without alleviating scarcity - really instead by creating scarcity.

The sort of cynical behavior of Enron comes to mind; can such firms not more easily create havoc on markets if they have full freedom to set prices at arbitrary levels? I'd not be surprised if we have to be rather happy about power sellers [in many locations] not being allowed to arbitrarily increase prices (withhold capacity) the way they'd like. Yes, in the long term we could theoretically entry of new capacity (or storage) into the market if prices were often too high, and that could prevent capacity issues, but the world is too heterogeneous to expect smoothly functioning markets in such a scenario; maybe it's easier to organize backup capacities in different ways. Similar for gasoline reserves; it's a simple to organize thing. Yes politicians will make it expensive, inefficient, wrongly sized; but in many locations in the world maybe still better than having no checks and balances at all in the market just for the hope the private market might create more reserves.

And, do we really need the toilet paper sellers[1] plausibly stirring up toilet paper supply fears in the slightest crisis of anything, if they know they can full-on exploit the ensuing self-fulfilling prophecy of the toilet-paper-run, while instead everything might have played out nicely in the absence of any scarcity-propaganda?

Or put differently with a slightly far-fetched but maybe still intuiting example: We hear Putin makes/made so much money from high gas prices, theoretically it could be an entire rational for the war in the first place. Now this will not have been quite the case, but still: we do not know how many times individual micro putin events - where an exploitative someone would have had their incentive to create havoc in their individual markets to benefit from the troubles he stirred - the anti gouging laws may have prevented. Maybe few, maybe many?

These points make me wonder whether the population is once again not as stupid as we think with their intuitions, and our theory a bit too simple. Yes we all like the always-available taxis, but I'm not sure it practically works out just so smoothly with all other goods/market structures. But maybe I'm wrong, and in the end it's so obvious price controls themselves have so bad repercussions anyway.

  1. ^

    Placeholder. May replace with other goods that fit the story.

Appreciate actually the overall take (although not sure how many would not have found most of it simply common sense anyway), but: A bit more caution with the stats would have been great

  • Just-about-significant  'insignificant and basta'. While you say the paper shows up to incl. 27 there's no 'effect' (and concluding on causality is anyway problematic here, see below), all data provided in the graph you show and in the table of the paper suggest BMI 27 has a significant or nearly significant (on 95%..) association with death even in this study. You may instead want to say the factor is not huge (or small compared to much larger BMI variations), although the all-cause point-estimate mortality factor of roughly 1.06 for already that BMI is arguably not trivial at all: give me something that, as central-albeit-imprecise estimate, increases my all-cause mortality by 6%, and I hope you'd accept if I politely refused, explaining you propose something that seems quite harmful, maybe even in those outcomes where I don't exactly die from it.
  • Non-significance  No-Effect. Even abstracting from the fact that the BMI 27 data is actually significant or just about so: "not significant" reduction in deaths on BMI 18-27 in the study wouldn't mean as you claim "will not extend your life". It means, the study was too imprecise to be exactly 95% or more sure that there's a relationship. Without strong prior to the contrary, the point estimate, or even any value to the upper CI bound, cannot be excluded at all as describing the 'real' relationship.
  • Stats lesson 0: Association  Causality. The paper seems to purposely talk about association, mentioning some major potential issues with interfering unobserved factors already in the Abstract, and there are certainly a ton of confounding factors that may well bias the results (it would seem rather unnatural to expect people who work towards having a supposedly-healthy BMI to behave not differently on average in any other health-releveant way than people who may be working less towards such BMI).

Agree that cued FNs would often be useful innovation I've not yet seen. Nevertheless, this statement

So, if you wonder whether you'd care for the content of a note, you have to look at the note, switching to the bottom of the page and breaking your focus. Thus the notion that footnotes are optional is an illusion.

ends with a false conclusion; most footnotes in text I have read were optional and I'm convinced I'm happy to not have read most of them indeed. FNs, already as they are, are thus indeed highly "optional" and potentially very helpful - in many, maybe most, cases, for many, maybe most, readers.

That could help explain the wording. Though the way the tax topic is addressed here I have the impression - or maybe hope - the discussion is intended to be more practical in the end.

A detail: I find the "much harder" in the following unnecessarily strong, or maybe also simply the 'moral claim' yes/no too binary (all emphasizes added):

If the rich generally do not have a moral claim to their riches, then the only justification needed to redistribute is a good affirmative reason to do so: perhaps that the total welfare of society would improve [..]

If one believes that they generally do have moral claim, then redistributive taxation becomes much harder to justify: we need to argue either that there is a sufficiently strong affirmative reason to redistribute that what amounts to theft is nevertheless acceptable, or that taxation is not in fact theft under certain circumstances.

What we want to call 'harder' or 'much harder' is of course a matter of taste, but to the degree that it reads like meaning 'it becomes (very) hard', I'd say instead:

It appears to be rather intuitive to agree to some degree of redistributive taxation even if one assumed the rich had mostly worked hard for their wealth and therefore supposedly had some 'moral claim' to it.

For example, looking at classical public finance 101, I see textbooks & teachers (some definitely not so much on the 'left') readily explaining their students (definitely not systematically full utilitarians) why concave utility means we'd want to tax the rich, without even hinting at the rich not 'deserving' their incomes, and the overwhelming majority of student rather intuitively agreeing with the mechanism, as it seems to me from observation.

FlorianH0-2

Core claim in my post is that the 'instantaneous' mind (with its preferences etc., see post) is - if we look closely and don't forget to keep a healthy dose of skepticism about our intuitions about our own mind/self - sufficient to make sense of what we actually observe. And given this instantaneous mind with its memories and preferences is stuff we can most directly observe without much surprise in it, I struggle to find any competing theories as simple or 'simpler' and therefore more compelling (Occam's razor), as I meant to explain in the post.

As I make very clear in the post, nothing in this suggests other theories are impossible. For everything there can of course be (infinitely) many alternative theories available to explain it. I maintain the one I propose has a particular virtue of simplicity.

Regarding computationalism: I'm not sure whether you meant a very specific 'flavor' of computationalism in your comment; but for sure I did not mean to exclude computationalist explanations in general; in fact I've defended some strong computationalist position in the past and see what I propose here to be readily applicable to it.

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