Yes, we have to be quite careful here.

Let's take penny stocks. First, there is no exception for them in the EMH so if it holds, the penny stocks, like any other security, must not provide a "free" opportunity to make money.

Second, when you say they are "a poor investment in terms of expected return", do you actually mean expected return? Because it's a single number which has nothing do with risk. A lottery can perfectly well have a positive expected return even if your chance of getting a positive return is very small. The distribution of penny stock returns can be very skewed and heavy-tailed, but EMH does not demand anything of the returns distributions.

So I think you have to pick one of two: either penny stocks provide negative expected return (remember, in our setup the risk-free rate is zero), but then EMH breaks; or the penny stocks provide non-negative expected return (though with an unusual risk profile) in which case EMH holds but you can't consistently lose money.

Does that violate your "risk-adjusted terms" assumption?

My "risk-adjusted terms" were a bit of a handwave over a large patch of quicksand :-/ I mostly meant things like leverage, but you are right in that there is sufficient leeway to stretch it in many directions. Let me try to firm it up: let's say the portfolio which you will use to consistently lose money must have fixed volatility, say, equivalent to the volatility of the underlying market.

Then a person placing a dumb trade is creating a mispricing, which will be consumed by some market agent.

Well, that looks like an "offering to buy a stock for $1 more than its current price" scenario. You can easily lose a lot of money by buying things at the offer and selling them at the bid :-)

But let's imagine a scenario where everything is happening pre-tax, there are no transaction costs, we're operating in risk-adjusted terms and, to make things simple, the risk-free rate is zero. Moreover, the markets are orderly and liquid.

Assuming you can competently express a market view, can you systematically lose money by consistently taking the wrong side under EMH?

For Omnivores:

• Do you think the level of meat consumption in America is healthy for individuals? Do you think it's healthy for the planet?

America has an obesity crisis, but I don't see any reason to think that meat specifically is a major part of it. I'm far more worried about the sugar consumption. If, as part of a general reduction in calorific intake, the meat consumption fell, that would be a good thing, but I worry more about people too poor to afford steak.

Regarding planetary "health" - the damage seems to me to be caused by a lack of property rights and tragedy-of-the-commons situations (see e.g. global warming, fish stock depletion, etc) than meat consumption per se. If reliable property rights could be established, we could all happily consume far more meat than we currently do - and without those reliable property rights, everyone going vegan will make little difference.

• How do you feel about factory farming? Would you pay twice as much money for meat raised in a less efficient (but "more natural") way?

I would (and do) pay a little more for humanely raised meat, but not twice as much. Regarding factory farming - what alternative am I comparing it to? It's worse than happy animals frolicking in the fields, it's better than those animals not existing. As in my judgement, the realistic alternative is much closer to the latter, I am an enthusiast for factory farming, but not in an absolute sense.

• Are there any animals you would (without significantly changing your mind) never say it was okay to hunt/farm and eat? If so, what distinguishes these animals from the animals which are currently being hunted/farmed?

It's context-dependent. If I'm starving on a lifeboat, in extremis I'd eat anything that came to hand - even human! - but I wouldn't resort to cannibalism just out of idle curiosity. There are no animals I'd never eat.

• If all your friends were vegetarians, and you had to go out of your way to find meat in a similar way to how vegans must go out of their way right now, do you think you'd still be an omnivore?

Yes. Meat is delicious and I would seek it out.

For Vegetarians:

• If there was a way to grow meat in a lab that was indistinguishable from normal meat, and the lab-meat had never been connected to a brain, do you expect you would eat it? Why/why not?

I'd need to know more about the way the meat was grown, and why, but no, I don't expect I would eat it. Partly because the fact that this product is classified as "meat" tells me a great deal about the people it's aimed at, and the sensibilities of the corporation behind it. Partly because this kind of artificial creation is highly suspect. But mostly because it's so unnecessary - when you can live a happy and healthy lifestyle without having any truck with meat, why would you want to go down that route?

• Indigenous hunter gatherers across the world get around 30 percent of their annual calories from meat. Chimpanzees, our closest non-human relatives, eat meat. There are arguments that humans evolved to eat meat and that it's natural to do so. Would you disagree? Elaborate.

Humans didn't evolve "to" do anything. That's the naturalistic fallacy. We just evolved. And sure, we have certain adaptations that make it easier for us to eat meat, but we have other adaptations (the shrivelled appendix, for example) that make it harder for us to do so. Unlike most other omnivores, humans can't safely eat raw meat - presumably because we have adapted to early technology such as fire. That makes it very misleading to talk about what's "natural" for humans, because there is no natural human state apart from our technology. But sure, there is a sense in which it's "natural" for humans to eat meat - the same sense in which it's natural for humans to murder our stepchildren, which chimpanzees and most other mammals do. The word I prefer is "barbaric."

• Do you think it's any of your business what other people eat? Have you ever tried (more than just suggesting it or leading by example) to get someone to become a vegetarian or vegan?

As long as governments are pumping billions into agricultural subsidies, as long as corporations are distorting the democratic process and subverting the First Amendment with ag-gag laws, as long as chemicals and pollutants are flooding our rivers, as long as innocent animals are being tortured so you can eat a roast, then of course it's everyone's business. What you put into your mouth may seem like a private decision, but your ability to eat meat rests on a massive industry and supply chain that affects all of us, whether we like it or not. Externalities matter.

Yes, I have encouraged vegetarianism. I have volunteered for Viva in the past. However, there is a time and a place for such conversations. It's better to build trust first, rather than hectoring strangers.

• What do you think is the primary health risk of eating meat (if any)?

The biggest risk is heart disease and related cardiovascular problems. However, the increased cancer risk is almost as bad.

Are the opposite? I assumed the XX/XY goes back to the very beginnings of gender i.e. fishes... how comes very different chromosomes can make the same hormones i.e. AFAIK birds do have testosterone?

I was just wondering abou the following: testosterone as a hormone is actually closely linkable to pretty much everything that is culturally considered masculine (muscles, risk-taking i.e. courage, sex drive etc.) and thus it is not wrong to "essentialize" it as the The He Hormone.

However it seems estrogen does not work like that for women: surprisingly, it is NOT linked with many culturally feminine characteristics, and probably should NOT be essentialized as The She Hormone. For example, it crashes during childbirth: i.e it has nothing to do with nurturing, motherhood stuff (if it had, it should peak at birth and gradually drop as children become more self-sufficient, yet it actually peaks in early pregnancy and drops at birth). Given that birth control pills are estrogen, it reduces fertility (at least in those doses) and there is a common report that it reduces libido as well (at least in those doses, again). The primary behavioral effects seem to be a strong desire to be accepted by one's group (see puberty, "teenage girl syndrome", and once I learned it I saw the word "marginalization" in a different light as well) and mood swings (see: early pregnancy). (I should also add I see more and more health-conscious women warning each other about xenoestrogens in food, increasing the risk of ovarian cancer. They are probably not very good for men either (manboobz?) so I think this should be paid attention to in general, I just want to point out how xenoestrogens seem to have no beneficial effects for women which is a bit weird as well.)

So I just want to say it is sort of odd, estrogen does not represent cultural femininity nearly as well as testosterone represents cultural masculinity.

Any good articles or books or personal opinions that shed some light on this?

I should not be surprised that complex human behaviors cannot be reduced to a hormone. But once I was surprised that many popular, symbolical, role-model men in fact often can be, that everything that a Mike Tyson type symbolizes is T, I expected the same...

A capitalist employer selects an accountant from a pool of 100 applicants. A feudal lord would groom a serf boy who has a knack for horses into the job of the adult stable man.

A capitalist employer grooms a management trainee for a future role, while a feudal lord selects a mercenary from those applying for the job.

My vote is for "false dichotomy." There has been a rise in selection (because the world is freer and more connected) but there is still plenty of grooming too. Note that even in your stable boy example, there was selection.

Cicero wasn't Greek and is most known as a jurist and politician, not as a philosopher.

Would it be fair to summarise your post thus: "aid to the poorest people on earth is an ineffective way to create utils, it is better to invest in western businesses" ?

Now I must say that this is a very long-standing debate. One way this debate has taken place is between Jeff Sachs and William Easterly. (Easterly basically takes the same position as you in this post.) Sachs and Easterly have been writing books on this for years. You provide a link to one general economic history book, and a link to an RCT evaluation of GiveDirectly. This is a good start, but I don't think it brings any new insight, let alone warrant a 90% confidence in your beliefs. The rise of RCT in developement economics came out of the observation that the Sachs-Easterly debate was targeting unanswerable grand questions instead of limited and specific ones. There is now an extensive literature trying to answer the exact question "Can aid interventions create utils? How much?". GiveWell try to answer the same question. I don't think providing some standard arguments from the Easterly camp is advancing the discussion much.

edit: added links

I think that it's worth being more explicit in your critique here.

The OP suggests that colonization is in fact a proven way to turn poor countries into productive ones. But in fact, it does the opposite. Several parts of Africa were at or above average productivity before colonization¹, and well below after; and this pattern has happened at varied enough places and times to be considered a general rule. The examples of successful transitions from poor countries to rich ones—such as South Korea—do not involve colonization.

¹Note that I'm considering the triangular trade as a form of colonization; even if it didn't involve proconsuls, it involved an external actor explicitly fomenting a hierarchical and extractive social order.

You misquoted me

I didn't quote you at all (aside from the very opening bit, which was verbatim, and a few words later in quotation marks), I paraphrased you. It wasn't my intention to paraphrase inaccurately, and I'm sorry if you consider that I did.

On the substantive question: first of all, there is a difference between what you say ("just 39% of the cash transfers boosted assets") and what the paper actually says (on average, assets were boosted by 39% of the cash transferred), and I think it's an important one. Secondly, we are talking here not about businesses but about people, and (regrettable though it may be) people need to eat. If you give money to someone whose family is close to starvation, and they spend a lot of the money on food, that is a good outcome.

(The portion of my comment that offended you was small; have you nothing to say about any of the rest?)

[EDITED to add: Er, of course maybe other bits offended you too; I meant "the portion that you singled out for comment and complaint". EDITED again some days later, to clarify a bit of wording that on reflection was much less clear than I'd thought it was.]