TraderJoe comments on What Is Signaling, Really? - LessWrong

74 Post author: Yvain 12 July 2012 05:43PM

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Comment author: TraderJoe 10 July 2012 08:22:27AM * 2 points [-]

[comment deleted]

Comment author: David_Gerard 10 July 2012 10:07:19PM 2 points [-]

No, because "throwing money into it" is better writing.

Comment author: [deleted] 10 July 2012 10:25:08PM 0 points [-]

You know, doing it with intrinsically valuable money is a thing, but if you do that with fiat money you just cause enough deflation to make everyone richer, and the game is not negative-sum. (Or is it? I'm not terribly knowledgeable about macroeconomics, so I might be missing something.)

Comment author: AspiringRationalist 12 July 2012 08:15:05PM 0 points [-]

It is still wasteful, because it involves digging an unnecessary hole.

Comment author: [deleted] 10 July 2012 10:53:21PM 0 points [-]

If you throw your money into the hole its not negative sum, true- it is zero sum assuming that your ratio of the monetary pool reflects your buying power. Either way, you make everyone richer but yourself.

Comment author: homunq comment score below threshold [+] (6 children)

Comment author: homunq comment score below threshold [+] (5 children)

Comment author: MarkusRamikin 23 July 2012 05:55:04AM * 6 points [-]

I know it's low-status to whine about being downvoted.

Asking why you got downvoted tends to be received well and not taken as a whine - if you don't make it sound like one, or start attacking the community before you even get any answers.

Comment author: Grognor 23 July 2012 07:00:36AM * 4 points [-]

The first half of the first sentence of your comment is incomprehensible. "If you throw enough money into the hole that you spend less" is somewhere between gibberish and severely sleep-deprived mumblings.
A -2 score means almost nothing. Two people downvoted your comment, so what?
Calling the community "pathetic" in response to downvotes is hypocrisy.
In all likelihood, the downvoters did not even recognize your "Keynesian slant" and were downvoting because signaling. Oftentimes people will downvote a -1 comment just by the principle of social proof. These are humans, you know.
Don't make up theories about the whole population of this website by two downvotes to a difficult-to-understand comment. Also, you are abusing the term "groupthink", which has a technical meaning that you are not using.

what am I supposed to think?

Anything other than an orthodox-libertarian conspiracy to silence the Keynesians by downvoting small amounts.

Comment author: homunq 23 July 2012 04:25:26PM * -1 points [-]

Point-by-point response:

Thank you. Edited to clarify the meaning.
-2 is certainly at least two standard deviations down for my comments (excluding the "whine" followup, which I was fully aware was going to be downvoted and posted anyway), so I considered it a clear enough signal to be worthy of comment. [Edit: on reconsidering, I realize that I meant below 2.5th percentile, not really 2 standard deviations down. Variance is large, so 2 SD down would have to be almost as far down as one of my best comments is up.]
Hypocrisy? I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Fair enough.
Good points about generalizing and about the meaning of "groupthink". I meant "epistemic closure", not "groupthink", and that was sloppy.
"anything other": I still think it was a reasonable hypothesis (though your use of the word "conspiracy" is an unfair caricature; I was fully aware that it was just two people, and never said otherwise); but if I read you as saying that I should have thought "anything other" as well as this hypothesis, then your point is telling. I did fail to consider any specific alternative hypotheses (mentioning them only generally at the end), and thus deserved the -4 I got for my whine.

Comment author: evand 23 July 2012 05:39:53AM 0 points [-]

Personally, I'm not a fan because I think this conversation is highly off topic for both the original story and the comment thread.

Comment author: bentarm 10 July 2012 02:29:31PM 2 points [-]

Could you replace with "throwing resources into it", per previous Landsburg reference? [or even "throwing diamonds into it".]

I was going to say something similar. However, note that the digging of the hole in order to dispose of money actually is wasteful - personally I"d probably replace with "digging a big hole and immediately filling it in again", as that is not only uncontroversially pointless, it is also almost the canonical example of a pointless thing to do.

TraderJoe comments on What Is Signaling, Really? - LessWrong

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