Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Open Thread, 4/9/2017

Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management was influential in turning me against naive market libertarianism. Market can correct for errors, but when that takes the whole global economy down…. (also, hedge fund guys are genuine assholes who don’t give a shit in many cases)

Why ISIS Declared War on Egypt’s Christians. An analogy here is made to Shia in Iraq. The analogy breaks down because the Shia Arabs of Iraq are about half the population. Coptic Christians are closer to 10%. Because Egypt has a large population there are probably more than 5 million Coptic Christians. Mass migrations as occurred with Iraqi Christian can’t work because there are too many of them.

California is getting so much power from solar that wholesale electricity prices are turning negative. Not surprising if you read Ramez Naam’s The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet.

Syria intervention: skeptical. The best of intentions….

Postdocs getting a pay raise, but many say it’s not nearly enough. I suspect what’s going to happen is that there will be fewer postdocs and they will get paid more.

To Be a Genius, Think Like a 94-Year-Old.

UC Berkeley Was Warned About Its Star Professor Years Before Sexual Harassment Lawsuit. Searle is rightly famous. His ideas may have merit even if he is a horrible person. And for all the moral panic about sexual assaults on campus between undergraduates, one thing you notice if you are in academia is there are a well known list of creepy professors who you hear about, but who are too famous and powerful to confront unless they really, really, step over the line, or, someone is willing to stake their reputation and career on a take-down.

An updated meta-analysis of the ego depletion effect. A big deal. Probably true.

This thread illustrates that New York City consists of three broad groups of people:

1) The affluent, from young finance professionals to the Upper East Side wealthy.

2) The transient. This includes young artists and creative types who live relatively cheap and have few expenses, and will probably move on as they mature, either into another field that pays better, or, to a region they can afford. It also includes immigrants who are just starting out in this country. By the second and third generation many of their children and grandchildren will be moving out of the city.

3) The permanent poor. See the Bronx.

The dynamic upper limit of human lifespan.

Pizza chains are making a desperate push to avoid posting calories on menus. Have you seen how many calories are in one slice?

Two issues with this blog. First, lots of problems with connecting to the MySQL database. A quick hack is that I wrote a script which checks if the database is down every 5 seconds and restarts it if it’s down. Also, lots of 503 errors, probably because of a caching problem. I’ll fix this, but if you have advice, appreciate.

Also, I’m loading the full archives of my content right now. It might be disorganized, but all of it should be searchable soon(ish).

16 thoughts on “Open Thread, 4/9/2017

  1. “Have you seen how many calories are in one slice?”

    Don’t care. The real issue is that American pizzas have crusts that are way too thick, and then way to much stuff is piled on. Thinner crusts, less stuff, a better balance is more important than the number of calories.

  2. Even if true, the accusations against Searle are merely ordinary bad behaviour. He’s a bit of a jerk and a bit of a horndog. Really small potatoes.

  3. “Market can correct for errors, but when that takes the whole global economy down”

    Please do not confuse the modern financial system with a market system. The financial system in modern states is dominated by governments that impound between a third and a half of all production, and which have to recur to frequent and enormous borrowing to stay in power. The financial systems are designed and intended to finance the operations of the government. Any other good derived from them is incidental and secondary. The hedge funders and traders like LTCM are both parasitic and necessary to keep the inherent instability of the fiat currency system from causing more frequent explosions than we experience.

  4. “The dynamic upper limit of human lifespan.”

    Great. Where are they? I’m from Missouri. You gotta show me.

    The oldest human, with a well documented lifespan, alive today is 117 yro Emma Morano-Martinuzzi of Italy born 11/29/1899. The oldest man is 113 yro Israel Kristal who lives in Israel and was born on 9/15/1903. There are 17 women (including Morano-Martinuzzi) older than Mr. Kristal. http://www.grg.org/SC/World

    Jeanne Calment of France, who lived to 122, is the oldest well documented human to have ever been recorded. Jiroemon Kimura of Japan, 116, the oldest man. http://www.grg.org/SC/SCind

    At this point there is no empirical proof of the ability of humans to live for more than 122 years.

  5. I myself had earlier read the NY Times article about the ‘unstoppably creative’ 94-year old battery-scientist dude and was heartened thereby. Now I’ve coincidentally run across a bit of skeptical counterweight to his latest invention claims. (see link) I don’t know how the discussion has progressed since March 20th on the thing…of course I am rooting for the purported tremendous innovation to pan out as true and quickly dominant at full macroeconomic scale. If true–in combination with solar, could very significantly reduce transportation-, hvac-, and light industry- related emissions within a decade?

    https://qz.com/929794/has-lithium-battery-genius-john-goodenough-done-it-again-colleagues-are-skeptical/

  6. Batteries are a technology that is very unlikely to see any breakthroughs.

    First: batteries are a very old technology. They were invented by Volta in 1800. It seldom takes more than 2 generations for a technology to mature. An example: Airplanes, 1903 the Wright Brothers, 1968 the 747.

    Second: Batteries are exercises in inorganic chemistry, a science that is quite mature. The odds are very much against the discovery of a new useful reaction for battery chemistry.

  7. I talked about Freddie DeBoer before, summarizing what I thought his views on genetics and intelligence were. It turns out I was right. Freddie put up a major post detailing why he thought genetics played a role in all human outcomes, including intelligence and academic ability. He also defended why he thinks this belief is compatible with not holding the “hard HBD” opinion that there are fundamental intellectual differences between population groups. I think his defense of the former is far stronger than the later, but I’m personally “HBD neutral” – I admit it’s a possibility, but I see no reason to rush to judgement before all the data is in. Still, the core of his argument is sound – there’s no reason for the left to cling to blank-slatism, as one can admit genetic differences between individuals regarding intelligence without conceding to genetic differences between population groups. One of his key arguments, which I came to independently, is quoted below:

    I also think people sometimes avoid this topic because they’re afraid it leads to conservative political conclusions. Some conservatives seem to think that too. I find that bizarre: if intellectual talent leads to financial security under capitalism, and intellectual talent is largely outside of the control of individuals, that amounts to one of the most powerful arguments for socialism I can imagine. An outcome individuals cannot control cannot morally be used to determine their basic material conditions.

    Apparently he really, really stepped in it, judging by his follow up response, and had a very hostile series of comments made on facebook about his article. I find it interesting in this response he asks his readers specifically to read The Blank Slate and The Nurture Assumption.

    I’ve maintained for awhile I think part of the reason why the left has such a hard time wrapping its brain around the idea of genetic variation between individuals is because the poisonous idea of meritocracy has been accepted by essentially everyone in the U.S. political spectrum. The mainstream left and right both agree that an ideal system is one where those who are “deserving” get ahead – they merely disagree about whether the existing system is just, or if it needs to be rebalanced to create a different set of winners and losers. So if you, for example, say the average doctor is smarter than the average garbageman, you’re seen as endorsing doctor being many times wealthier than the garbageman, because the acceptance that smarter people should be more successful is an almost unquestioned prior. Much of the soft left, I find, never really thinks through their desires to the logical conclusion. When I ask them how the U.S. would be more just if the demographics of Fortune 500 CEOs perfectly mirrored the national population, they’re generally dumbfounded.

  8. yeah ppl asking me about this. what did he expect? the mainstream left lives in an alternative universe of fact now on these issues, though privately many acknowledge reality. good luck with that movement you have….

Comments are closed.