Furslid

Because religion cites their ancient texts as authority, their historical teachers as guides and examples to be emulated. And this is a necessary part of many religions which would not survive without it.

Trial by combat is gone, and no one cites the code duello as a legal text. Law firms don't cite a professional duelist as a respected founding member to be emulated.

The theory of the four elements is gone. Scientists no longer cite Aristotle as an authority on physics. "Ipse dixit," isn't used even when Aristotle was right.

The theories of col... (read more)

I actually like that line. There are a lot of people and organizations that are portrayed as rational and evil. Walmart sacrificing all soft values to maximize profit and the robot overlords systematically destroying or enslaving humanity are also views of rationality. They can be used as objections as much as Spock can. This quick joke shows that problems like this are considered, even if they aren't dealt with in depth here.

Funny that the first word of a post rejecting the concept of an identity is "I".

Try dialing down the ridicule. No arguments are made, but you manage to call the opposing ideas ludicrous and ridiculous.

Also try dialing up the empathy. There are some reasons for embracing any belief beyond being unable to accept one's own error. Try to understand why someone might believe or act in a different way.

Failure is always possible. However there are two responses to failure. One is to be happy with having made the attempt. This does not make failure less likely in the future.

The other is to actually engage with and analyze your failure. If you didn't flip the switch, your failure is a failure. You figure out why you came up with a plan that didn't work. If the switch needs to be flipped again tomorrow, you will have a better chance of flipping the switch tomorrow. If some button needs to be pressed tomorrow, you won't likely fail at button pressing for the same reason you failed at switch flipping.

Doing rather than trying is a commitment to the second response to failure.

It's asking for a password to join. What's the password?

Savory and spirit are two different types of uncategories. Savory starts by having a well defined and narrow category, flavor. Then it uses negation to eliminate a portion of that category. The color green isn't sweet, but that doesn't make it savory because green isn't a flavor. I have some other valid uncategorical definitions of this type.

A mongrel is a dog that doesn't belong to any recognized breed of dog. Manslaughter is the killing of one human by another human, without the intent of seriously wounding or killing. Health is the state of a living... (read more)

First, is that because they are different things it's not a contradiction to what I said.

The second is that elasticity is not validly applied to long term supply curves, as they are not a function of supply in terms of price.

Long term supply curves are different than supply curves. They are similarly named, but different concepts.

Supply curves measure supply at a price.

Long term supply curves measure market equilibrium supply as demand changes over time.

The elasticity measurement is the derivative of supply with respect to price. It cannot be applied to long term supply curves.

I'm sorry, that is correct. You were describing a supply curve that doesn't behave normally. So I can't say anything about demand curves. I apologize for the cheap shot.

In the standard economic models, supply and demand curves have elasticity that is a positive, finite number. Infinitely elastic curves are not possible within the standard models.

The priors I start with, for any market, are that it behaves in a manner consistent with these economic models. The burden of proof is on any claim that some market is behaving in a different manner.

Cumulative elasticity = Supply Elasticity/(Supply Elasticity - Demand Elasticity).

A cumulative elasticity factor of one means a demand elasticity of 0.

A completely inelastic demand curve is not to be expected in standard economics, and as such it is an inappropriate prior. Thanks for the math demonstrating my point.

What you are effectively claiming is that there are no suboptimal producers of chickens. Unless every producer of chickens is ideally located, ideally managed, ideally staffed, and working with ideal capital there are differences in production costs.

There is a reason, that economics assumes that the amount of a good supplied changes as price changes, and I haven't seen any argument that exempts the case of chickens.

Also, how does the market create less chickens as demand falls? If there are differences in cost, the highest cost producers leave the market as price falls. Easy to answer with the standard assumptions, but almost impossible with your nonstandard prior.

No. It's true long term as well.

What you have listed are forces that drive the cost of production down. However, they cannot flatten all costs. For example, some locations are better for producing chickens than others. Better weather, cheaper labor market, ease of transportation to slaughter, etc. These factors cannot be cloned.

It's only the marginal producers that have costs at or just below the price.

Basic economics that explains why the cost of chicken will drop. You are ignoring supply curves, and these exist because not all producers are identical. The drive in change of costs is competition among chicken producers.

There is a price for chicken, say 10$ per unit. To make a profit, each producer must produce chicken at less than that price. However, not all producers are making chicken at the same cost. Some are more efficient than others. Some spend 9$ making a unit, some spend 8$. Some could produce chicken for 10$ a unit and don't.. When d... (read more)

No, the difference is that con artists are another intelligence, and you are in competition. Anytime you are in competition against a better more expert intelligence, it is an important difference.

The activities of others are important data, because they are often rationally motivated. If a con artist offers me a bet, that tells me that he values his side of the bet more. If an expert investor sells a stock, they must believe the stock is worth less than some alternate investment. So when playing assume that odds are bad enough to justify their actions.

I'm pointing out that your list isn't complete, and not considering this possibility when we see a correlation is irresponsible. There are a lot of apparent correlations, and your three possibilities provide no means to reject false positives.

You're missing a 4th possibility. A & B are not meaningfully linked. This is very important when dealing with large sets of variables. Your measure of correlation will have a certain percentage of false positives, and discounting the possibility of false positives is important. If the probability of false positives is 1/X you should expect one false correlation for every X comparisons.

XKCD provides an excellent example. jelly beans

I think that this is an application of the changing circumstances argument to culture. For most of human history the challenges faced by cultures were along the lines of "How can we keep 90% of the population working hard at agriculture?" "How can we have a military ready to mobilize against threats?" "How can we maintain cultural unity with no printing press or mass media?" and "How can we prevent criminality within our culture?"

Individual rationality does not necessarily solve these problems in a pre-industrial ... (read more)

It would more likely be user error. I believe 53 is prime. If it isn't then either mathematics is broken or I have messed up in my reasoning. It is much more likely that I made an error or accepted a bad argument.

53 not being prime while having no integer factors other than 1 and itself would break mathematics.

Oops, right. Non-contradiction.

Your list actually doesn't go far enough. There is a fourth, and scarier category. Things which would, if possibly render probability useless as a model. "The chance that probabilities don't apply to anything." is in the fourth category. I would also place anything that violates such basic things as the consistency of physics, or the existence of the external world.

For really small probabilities, we have to take into account some sources of error that just aren't meaningful in more normal odds.

For instance, if I shuffle and draw one card fro... (read more)