This post strikes me as odd.

The "insufficient quantity" definition matches both what I have seen in economics textbooks, and the common definition of the word. The fact that then choices must be made follows from this definition. If the standard conception follows from your definition, they are equivalent, and I would use the one that matches standard terminology. If it doesn't, I would say that makes the first preferable (as the relevant fact is derived from the definition).

I would expect no one's claims to be flawless, but even if OP claimed the sky is green, claiming that he is wrong because he's not a physicist is still wrong.

For some value of wrong. But the claim that the Fed is literally printing money js also wrong, for some value of wrong. Its like youre saying one side in the discussion deserves charity, and the other doesn't.

Random Commentator's comment was not "You are not an economist, so you are wrong", it was "Are you an economist?". That can .be read as a legitimate concern about understanding the topic.

Jumping on people for making "obvious fallacies" that actually arent explicitly stated at all , is probably a reflection of bias on the part of the jump-.er.

(The Ancient Geeks Law: Any comment by anybody in any discussion will look like an obvious fallacy under a sufficiently uncharitable interpretation)

and their responses arent completely invalidThey seem pretty much like obvious examples of fallacies to me

....when read without the charity you are extending to the OPs claims.

.Your suggestions are possible ways to segue from what OP said into a better discussion, but the replies quoted or paraphrased above aren't conducive to such a discussion.

What does that mean? Maybe you have decided that even if charity is extended, or middle ground sought, nothing good will come of it. But have you tested that, or is it all in your head?

What does that mean? I would expect no one's claims to be flawless, but even if OP claimed the sky is green, claiming that he is wrong because he's not a physicist is still wrong.

Let's say you debate with multiple people "Why is the sky blue and not green"?
(a) A philosopher
(b) A linguist
(c) A physicist
(d) A five year old child

All those debates are different. It's very useful to ask at the beginning of the debate where the other person is common from when you want to target arguments.

I think these examples represent different sorts of fallacies. In the first, the person is making a variant on appeal to authority. In the latter, it's more like the Nirvana fallacy.

However, in either case the commenter doesn't seem worth arguing with. Especially if it's a random person on the internet.

In both cases, your opponents have points, up to a point.

1. You need some sort of justification for the claim, even if it is not personal authority. In particular, if you are actual talking about quantitative easing, that is something much more complex than literally printing money.

2. There's no actual point to saying that something isn't working, unless you have something better in mind. Consider the many people who believe that the whole of society is horribly broken.

Since your claims arent flawless, and their responses arent completely invalid, one thing you could do is pretend they made better versions.

1. OK, I do need to back that up. Well, most economists believe...

2. Ok, there is no point in just complaining. Maybe the government could put together a panel of experts to come up with alternatives.

Wheel of Time-style shields

Ugh, stilling. What a horrible idea that was.

He also assumed circular orbits

The reason I told you that he hates Hillary, is that I wanted to establish Kim as a common cause of the election results and whether the US is nuked. I agree that this should have been stated more clearly. I also agree that the probability of Hillary being elected should probably go up if Kim is still in power (though you can make an argument that being hated by Kim Jong-un is a net benefit to a US politician). I will update the post tomorrow to make this clearer.

In the absence of other information, the setup would lead us to believe that Hillary being elected would increase the probability of a nuclear attack. However, one of the reasons I introduced Laplace's demon was to make it clear that this is not the case, and to make it clear that all market participants are in agreement on this issue.

If you have a proposed estimator of a causal quantity and you are wondering if it is valid, one simple sanity check is to assume the causal null hypothesis and find out whether the estimator will be zero. If it is not necessarily zero, the estimator is biased. That is essentially what I tried to do with this example.

In the case of my example, the market participants all genuinely believe that there is no causal effect of the election results. However, they are not ignoring it: The contracts are just written such that participants are not asked to bet on the causal effect of the election results, but on conditional probabilities.

Defining confounders in general is tricky, I won't attempt to do that. However, I will provide an example of the most relevant timeline where this problem occurs:

You are trading the prediction market at time point t. You expect that at some future timepoint k>t, some event (the confounder) will occur which will affect your estimate of both the probability of the decision at time l>k and the outcome at time m>l. In such a situation, you will bet on the conditional prediction markets based on your beliefs about conditional probabilities, not based on your beliefs about causal quantities.

I provided a simple example where Kim being in power was the only confounder. It was designed such that simply conditioning on Kim being in power would give the correct answer. This was just to illustrate the problem; in real life, it will be more complicated because not everyone will agree on what the confounders are and what needs to be conditioned on.

Is there a summary of the timeline in this example? In particular, when do we know if Kim is overthrown? In order for it to be the confounder you describe, we must know before the election--but then simply conditioning on the election result gives the same chance of being nuked in either case (1/2 if kim is still in power and 0 otherwise).

Maybe I'm not following, but the example is not intuitive to me, and seems contrived.