“I wish we had the education system they have in Doorways in the Sand,” I said... “Did you know, there’s a new Heinlein? The Number of the Beast. And he’s borrowed the idea of that education system, where you study all those different things and sign up and graduate when you have enough credits in everything, and you can keep taking courses forever if you want, but he doesn’t acknowledge Zelazny anywhere.”
Wim laughed. “That’s what they really do in America,” he said.
— Jo Walton, Among Others
I found this Terry Tao blog post helpful. In particular, this paragraph,
It is difficult to prove that no conspiracy between the primes exist. However, it is not entirely impossible, because we have been able to exploit two important phenomena. The first is that there is often a “all or nothing dichotomy” (somewhat resembling the zero-one laws in probability) regarding conspiracies: in the asymptotic limit, the primes can either conspire totally (or more precisely, anti-conspire totally) with a multiplicative function, or fail to conspire at all, but there is no middle ground. (In the language of Dirichlet series, this is reflected in the fact that zeroes of a meromorphic function can have order 1, or order 0 (i.e. are not zeroes after all), but cannot have an intermediate order between 0 and 1.) As a corollary of this fact, the prime numbers cannot conspire with two distinct multiplicative functions at once (by having a partial correlation with one and another partial correlation with another); thus one can use the existence of one conspiracy to exclude all the others. In other words, there is at most one conspiracy that can significantly distort the distribution of the primes. Unfortunately, this argument is ineffective, because it doesn’t give any control at all on what that conspiracy is, or even if it exists in the first place!
But I'm not sure how much this is just restating the problem.
Yes, if we accept your ifs, we conclude that the new business is net negative. This really happens and some new businesses really are net negative (although I think negligible compared to negative externalities). But why think your assumptions are normal? Why think that the fixed cost of the business is larger than the time savings of the closer customers? Why expect no price competition, no price sensitivity?
There is a standard analysis of competition. If you reject it, it would be good to address it, rather than ignoring it. The standard analysis is that competition reduces prices. The first order effect of reducing prices is a transfer from producer surplus to consumer surplus, taken as morally neutral. But the lower price induces more sales, creating increased surplus. The expectation is that the first order neutral effect swamps the second order positive effect, which swamps the fixed costs.
The producer surplus is a rent. It induces rent-seeking. The second company to enter the market is mainly driven by rent-seeking. But by lowering the price they probably produce much more aggregate surplus than they capture. The more competitive the market, the lower the rents and the less new entrants are driven by rent-seeking. Late entrants are driven by the belief that they are more efficient.
The producer surplus is a rent. It induces rent-seeking. One form of that rent-seeking is new entrants, but another form is parasites within the organization, which seem much worse to me. Competition applies discipline which discourages these parasites. If the producers are innovative, you might think that they will make better use of the surplus than the consumers. If you do not expect parasites, maybe it would be better for innovators to capture more wealth. Maybe this was true a century ago, but it seems to me very far from true today. So I think the dispersal of wealth by transferring from producer surplus to consumer wealth is morally good by discouraging parasites within larger firms.
1Putting lamps in ducts is not very different from putting filters in ducts; but with the downside that I'm a lot more worried about fraudulent lamps than filters. I guess it's easy to retrofit a lamp into a duct, whereas a filter slows the air; but you probably already have a system designed with a filter.
The point of lamps is to use them in an open room where they cover the whole volume continuously.
This is standard today, but how recent is it? It looks like the industrial age to me.
How much of institutions is about solving akrasia and how much is about breaking the ability to act autonomously?
We get the word akrasia from Plato, but was he really talking about the same thing?
There is always the question of whether to study things bottom-up or top-down. These are bottom-up studies of what to do if you have a single infected patient. If you had an individual infected with a novel cold, that would be important, but we are generally interested in epidemics. In particular, why do colds go epidemic in the winter? We know there must be some environmental change. Maybe it's a small change, since it only takes a small change in reproduction number to cause an epidemic. Then these controlled experiments might identify the main method of transmission. But maybe the change from summer to winter is a big change that swamps the effects we can measure in these bottom-up experiments.
I think Benquo's claim is that most institutions do want financial fraud. Most people don't, but a big constituency arranges to profit from it and to corrupt institutions. So his advice is aimed at the individual, not to blindly trust institutions.
1Thanks!
I have a lot of quibbles about this, but going back to the main point, yes, this was a separate source of funding from stealing from customers and unlike Enron, not a rounding error compared to the first step.
1via indirect channels like Alameda
What channels other than Alameda? If this was entirely about Alameda, how is FTT adding anything to the story above saying that they stole to give to Alameda? Who are they fooling other than their own internal accounts? The Coindesk article is very late in the story because no one saw the accounts before they tried to get a bailout from Binance, who wasn't fooled.
If a customer puts up FTT as collateral to short bitcoin, then FTX is confused about how much collateral it has. But this is the customer exploiting FTX, not vice versa! This is FTX exploiting all the other customers by falsely claiming that it has hedged risk. But this isn't what took it down. It did manage to largely liquidate shorts before they ran out of collateral.
Could you say more about taste? How fast can you evaluate the taste of a book? If it's fast, could you check whether there was a trajectory over the 12 editions?
That sounds bad. The ultimate proof is a chain of inequalities, but just presenting it is bad compared to deriving it.