I agree with every paragraph there but one. Unfortunately the paragraph I disagree with is the important one.
The practical point made by the Taleb and Douadi paper, put in terms of observations of actual populations, is that for a fixed value of the Gini coefficient, as the population grows, the actual top 1% will come to own an increasing fraction of the total wealth. This will happen not because of any change in the causal mechanisms by which people acquire differing wealth, but just because the population is larger and is statistically likely to explore more of the fat tail. Observing such an increase therefore cannot be used to argue that the rich are being increasingly favoured, unless a correction is first made to account for this effect.
If that is the practical point made by T&D — and I'm not sure it is — it seems to me fallacious. Doesn't it amount to saying, "the parameters baked into the underlying data-generating process we posit may be constant, so who cares that the actually existing level of inequality is increasing?" It confuses what I really care about (actual inequality) with the imperfect model (the power law) of what I really care about.
There's also a risk of equivocating about what "the rich are being increasingly favoured" means. If it means "the power-law-producing process which, by assumption, decides people's incomes & wealth is itself changing over time to favour the rich", then that would be falsified by the underlying power law being constant over time. If it actually means instead e.g. "the economy will distribute a growing proportion of its output to the rich" or "underlying causal economic processes enable positive feedback loops that engender Matthew effects for income and/or wealth", then it is quite consistent with the underlying power law being constant over time.
If that is the practical point made by T&D — and I'm not sure it is — it seems to me fallacious. Doesn't it amount to saying, "the parameters baked into the underlying data-generating process we posit may be constant, so who cares that the actually existing level of inequality is increasing?"
Taleb is not talking about what one might care about, but pointing out some mathematical facts about fat-tailed distributions (distributions with a power-law tail) and quantiles. The population top centile, he shows, can be a substantially biased under...
Politics as gymnastics for rationalists. No one one Less Wrong is quite sure why politics is a taboo topic or how things got to be that way. What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people. So why not take advantage of that and use politics as a way to measure rationality? Since politics brings out the most irrationality, it should provide the strongest signal. Since there aren't useful objective metrics of how a political discussion went, we'd have to use subjective judgements by neutral third-party raters, kind of like they do in gymnastics. (In the comment thread for this post, feel free to find fights that you have no dog in, improvise a rationality rubric, and grade participants according to your rubric... let's see how it goes.)
Be a sheep. This is probably the exact opposite of what you were taught in your high school civics class. But if my friend Jane is more intelligent, more informed, and less ideological than I am, it seems like voting however Jane is going to vote is a strict improvement over voting however I would naively. It also saves me time, and gives Jane an incentive to put even more time in to carefully considering political issues since she now controls two votes instead of one. Done on a large scale, this could provide an interesting twist on representative democracy. Imagine a directed graph where each node represents a person and an edge is directed from person A to person B if person A is auto-copying person B's votes. There's a government computer system where you can change the person you're auto-copying votes from at any time or override an auto-copied vote with your own personal guess about what's best for society. Other than that, it's direct democracy... all bills are put before all citizens to vote on. Problems this might solve: