Public Service Announcement Collection

Eliezer Yudkowsky

P/S/A: There are single sentences which can create life-changing amounts of difference.

P/S/A: If you're not sure whether or not you've ever had an orgasm, it means you haven't had one, a condition known as primary anorgasmia which is 90% treatable by cognitive-behavioral therapy.
P/S/A: The people telling you to expect above-trend inflation when the Federal Reserve started printing money a few years back, disagreed with the market forecasts, disagreed with standard economics, turned out to be actually wrong in reality, and were wrong for reasonably fundamental reasons so don't buy gold when they tell you to.
P/S/A: There are many many more submissive/masochistic men in the world than there are dominant/sadistic women, so if you are a woman who feels a strong temptation to command men and inflict pain on them, and you want a large harem of men serving your every need, it will suffice to state this fact anywhere on the Internet and you will have fifty applications by the next morning.
P/S/A: Most of the personal-finance-advice industry is parasitic and/or self-deluded, and it's generally agreed on by economic theory and experimental measurement that an index fund will deliver the best returns you can get without huge amounts of effort.
P/S/A: If you are smart and underemployed, you can very quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense, and if this is the case you can teach yourself to program very quickly and get a much higher-paying job even without formal credentials.

P/S/A: There are single sentences which can create life-changing amounts of difference.

P/S/A: If you're not sure whether or not you've ever had an orgasm, it means you haven't had one, a condition known as primary anorgasmia which is 90% treatable by cognitive-behavioral therapy.
P/S/A: The people telling you to expect above-trend inflation when the Federal Reserve started printing money a few years back, disagreed with the market forecasts, disagreed with standard economics, turned out to be actually wrong in reality, and were wrong for reasonably fundamental reasons so don't buy gold when they tell you to.
P/S/A: There are many many more submissive/masochistic men in the world than there are dominant/sadistic women, so if you are a woman who feels a strong temptation to command men and inflict pain on them, and you want a large harem of men serving your every need, it will suffice to state this fact anywhere on the Internet and you will have fifty applications by the next morning.
P/S/A: Most of the personal-finance-advice industry is parasitic and/or self-deluded, and it's generally agreed on by economic theory and experimental measurement that an index fund will deliver the best returns you can get without huge amounts of effort.
P/S/A: If you are smart and underemployed, you can very quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense, and if this is the case you can teach yourself to program very quickly and get a much higher-paying job even without formal credentials.

First counter-question: why should an individual investor care? Unless you perceive yourself to be in some sort of ranked competition (which is actually the case for professional money managers), why would you care about beating the market?

On a purely rational basis, you have a universe of investment opportunities. You evaluate, to the best of your ability, the future probability distributions of returns from all of them and some kind of a dependency structure (in the simple case, a covariance matrix). From these, you form a portfolio that best matches your risk-return preferences.

If you just want to "beat the market", the simplest answer is leverage. Assuming you believe that the expectation for the equity market is positive, open a margin brokerage account and invest into a diversified equity portfolio on the margin. In the US the equity margin is limited by law to 2:1 (in most cases). Your expectation of return would be the double of the market return. The price that you pay is doubled volatility.

In the context of the US equity market another simple answer is high-beta stocks. Invest in a portfolio of such stocks and if the market return is positive your expected return would be higher. The price that you pay is again, increased volatility.

First counter-question: why should an individual investor care?

If I had $1 billion, even microscopic improvements in the yield of my investment would dominate any income I could hope to earn through wages. If I had $1, my investment yields wouldn't matter -- doubling my principle would be less remunerative than working a minimum wage job for 15 minutes. Somewhere in between owning $1 and $1 billion there is a net worth where it becomes worth it to switch from a generic roughly age appropriate portfolio to something more finely tuned. I had estimated ... (read more)

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