What's particularly insidious is that when emotions compress our internal inference graphs, the compression feels epistemically virtuous from inside the frame. It doesn't feel like you've lost nuance — it feels like you've achieved clarity.
Though maybe there are better denominators than "currency in circulation". I might need to think about this more and do some research.
Thanks Nam. Hey quick question, how do you use Monte Carlo type methods well when your hypothetical edge depends on positive autocorrelation? How do you carve the market at its natural joints (or what you're calling "realistic alternative return paths")?
This, to me, is more informative than the cape ratio or the Buffet indicator. Think in terms of Minsky cycles. Still, Keynes's warning is apt. The market can stay irrational longer than I can remain solvent.
The genome performs something like a structure-preserving Monte Carlo simulation at the population level. And then the environment selects from the resulting pool.
For Sperber and Wilson *relevance* is basically the Sharpe ratio of an inference.
This becomes particularly salient within a Brandomian "marketplace of ideas" framework.
The moment you become a partisan is not the moment you accept one side's view of things. It's the moment you accept that side's caricature of everyone who disagrees.
Adoption of a new-to-you ideology is often driven by compression progress (high cognitive returns on investment). Subsequent commitment to the ideology is often a matter of sunk-cost thinking.
Meet the G-complex vitamins. GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon. Deficiency is known to cause excess fat accumulation in the modern environment.
In the marketplace of ideas every participant is a fiat currency issuer. If the marketplace is not disciplined by "institutions of justification" you get "hyperinflation" of the semantic currency (reasons) and most of the reasons in the marketplace become nearly worthless.
Mr. Robot is a pantheon story. White Rose is Chronos. Philip Price is Kronos. Elliot is Prometheus. Angela is Cassandra. And Fernando Vera is Dionysus.
The crisis, if there is one, is that GDP has fallen even faster as a percentage of net worth.
The mainstream framing is all wrong. We're not spending too much, we're spending in the wrong ways. we're spending in ways that drive up asset prices without growing the economy.
FederalDebt/HouseholdWealth
2012: about 26% ($18T/$69T)
2025: about 22% ($37T/$170T)
Our debt has shrunk as a percentage of our net worth!
Why does no one mention this?
Where's the crisis?
This site needs polls.
"I'm not saying [H]. I'm just saying that [E] is exactly what you would expect if [H] were true."
Conspiratorial grifter speak: Inviting their audience to read P(H|E) straight from P(E|H), w/o mentioning alternatives or the prior improbability of H -- wrapped in "humility".
It’s important to remember how impossible that communication task was. To speak with enough confidence to drive coordinated action while maintaining transparency about uncertainty is almost a paradox.
If we don't want socialism, we need to create a better form of Capitalism. Same deal now as in the 1930s.
We have monuments to fallen soldiers. We should also have monuments to failed entrepreneurs.
Datacenters should not use ground water. They should only use surface water. Their use is mostly pass-through, but you can't pass it back into the ground in anything like a timely manner. They're just stealing water from rural folks.
The holy trinity of neoliberal propaganda:
1️⃣ Fiscal restraint = virtue
2️⃣ Low taxes = growth
3️⃣ Public investment = inefficiency
Three half-truths that create a partial narrative that sounds moral to workers, but serves the wealthy far better than the poor.
In the marketplace of ideas most investors prefer to buy and hold index funds. Some prefer to hold THE index fund (as defined by their most important community).
Active management of belief portfolios is far too much work.
The mechanic thinks the academic is looking down on him for not having more book knowledge, while the academic thinks the mechanic is looking down on him for not being able to change his own wiper blades.
The "Reverse Kissinger"? Ally with Rus to keep China at bay?
As we worry about deficits and debt, we need to talk more about how much private wealth there is in the US -- and how much more wealth there is today than there was in 2020. The new wealth of the top 1% alone is in the neighborhood of the entire National Debt (not deficit, debt).
This platform needs polls.
Fun fact: The main research farm for Johnny's Seeds is in Albion Maine.
Very strange watching an immigrant take Donald Trump's job.
In a market with reasonable house prices, buying a house is an alternative for some renters. In this market, very few renters are able to buy. That makes the number of renters higher, pushing up rents.
Again, I don't disagree that we need to build more houses.
Yield = rent/price. So if the price rises a little faster than the rent, then the yield will go down, even though the rent is going up.
I see both being causes.