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Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes December 2013 - Less Wrong
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Nassim Taleb
After years of reading econblogs, I now understand that the Federal Reserve is not creating enough money. I don't actually think that understanding is a bad thing.
I can see why inflation can be good for a smallish economy, but the US dollar is widely used as a reserve currency by foreigners, and if they no longer trusted it to stay hard they'd probably switch to gold or Swiss francs or bitcoins or whatnot and... I dunno what would happen, but I kinda doubt it would be nice. (I hardly know anything about macroeconomics, so I'm very likely missing something.)
Nice example of metacontrarianism, BTW: “why don't they just print more money” is something uneducated people often come up with, and most literate people realize there are problems with that, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong.
I think the missing bits here are that (1) creating money needn't necessarily raise inflation, and (2) modest increases in US inflation are unlikely to trigger a mass flight from the US dollar.
Only if the Federal Reserve is in fact not creating enough money.
Interpreting the quotation charitably, it doesn't say that everything you'd learn from news ("or econobullshit") would be nonsense. It just means some of it would be.
“Progressive” as in ‘gradual’ or as in ‘left-wing’?
If the former, how is that a danger? I mean, the same is true about general relativity or quantum field theory.
I will attempt to fix the quote:
The danger of reading quotes like this is the message that some field is wrong and crazy is delivered as an aside when it is an hypothesis worthy of a great amount of questioning that is almost certainly largely incorrect.
He means gradual. If you look to long at random distribution and listen to people who are in the narration business to frame the random distribution you will start seeing patterns that don't exist.
No, those things do in fact make sense. They simply aren't intuitive.