All of Alex_Shleizer's Comments + Replies

This approach reminds me of the six-sigma manufacturing philosophy which was very successful and impactful in improving manufactured products quality.

1jungofthewon
Thanks for that pointer. It's always helpful to have analogies in other domains to take inspiration from.

Worth adding that the ability to work hard and delay gratification is a privilege, Self-control seems to be 60%[1] heritable (and let's not forget that people also don't choose in which environment they grow up which probably accounts for the other 40%)

In a way, it's privilege all the way down.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763418307905

Why is it better to wake up at 3 am compared to 6 or 7 am?

3Thomas Kwa
I suspect the best sleep schedule is highly individual.
1TryingtoNotDie
I like to watch the sunrise, it also feels pretty inspiring when you complete tasks early and while everyone else is waking up your work for the day is done and you can enjoy your self. Its also a hard thing to do, a small win (the power of habit) something that when I have the discipline to do gives me greater freedom "start your day with a task complete" (make your bed) and chains into getting more and more done that day. Sources: Make your Bed The Power of Habit Extreme Ownership

There is research that claims that suffering might serve as an honest signal to get help from your group and that humans suffer more than other animals due to this reason.

you might have taught your system 1 that emotional suffering is useless for signaling purposes and it stopped using it.

If it's true it could be an extremely impactful and even groundbreaking intervention.

4moderock
I wonder if there's a correlation between the American emphasis on comfort and loss of utility for suffering as a social signal? At least within notable chunks of American culture that I currently have a lens on -- don't live in the US at present, so do take this with a massive salt-boulder -- it seems that visibly suffering quickly earns the sufferer a large amount of sympathy/compassion/support/etc. This begets more visible suffering -- to the point of harmful neuroticism -- in order to garner more support from the community, and I doubt this is in any way a conscious effort on behalf of any of the involved parties. Similar to an unruly child that keeps throwing temper-tantrums because her parents quickly give in and reward the unwanted behavior -- neither the child nor parents are really aware of the feedback loop in which they are trapped. Moreover, in my observation, cultures where publicly visible suffering is ignored (or even punished!) don't seem to suffer from the same levels of neurotic behavior that I regularly see in specific American subcultures -- although increased suicide rates do seem to be an issue for when those cultures have yet to evolve mechanisms whereby suffering can be alleviated.

Interesting post, would love to hear your opinion about my suggested alternative to EMH, I don't see anything in your post that contradicts it. But i'm having a very hard time accepting the idea that you can't beat the market using public data and infinite amount of computing power.

3Richard Meadows
Your formulation is nifty, and intuitively makes sense to me. I am feeling too wiped right now to think about it carefully, but my off-the-cuff response is that it has something to do with the fact that 'informational edge' is a much broader category than information about the actual underlying assets. For example, a complicated day-trading algorithm is on some level a reflection of the fact that the market is missing some information. But that information looks more like 'there is a complex relationship between assets under XYZ specific conditions' than 'the EBTDA figure in Walmart's quarterly report'. I guess this is what most anomalies represent: they are more like meta-information than information. In which case, if you had a superintelligence with near-infinite compute, I think your intuition that it could indeed beat the market is right. I don't know much about quants, but I imagine this is pretty much what they are trying to do, with the difference being that they have bounded resources.

I didn't know about it. Large spread in Indonesia definitely weakens the climate theory.

Both some German cities and New York are listed as potential cities to be under increased risk soon (see the last image at the post) - they actually have pretty similar temperature/humidity profile.

The potential confounders you listed are also relevant to very cold places (northern Europe/Canada) and it seems they are currently less affected.

I agree with the objection regarding Seattle. But I don't think that a situation as bad as in Iran or Italy would go under the radar, the hospitals there are flooded with COVID patients that show the same symptoms over and over and even in the extremely censored China this kind of information eventually leaked.
Spain is only x2 compared to the US right now and this could easily be explained by under testing and proximity to Italy.

Why Iran and Italy and not Thailand and the Philipines?

5Vaniver
Brazil looks like it's also rising pretty quickly, but is especially interesting because both the president and his communications director seem to have it. [Edit: Probably not?]
Vaniver130

Why Iran and Italy and not Thailand and the Philipines?

I think it's too soon to say "not Thailand and the Philippines"; three days ago there were 10 reported cases in the Philippines, then 33, then 49. Italy's trend at a comparable level was steeper--3 then 9 then 76--and then here we are, two and a half weeks later.

As for "why Italy and Iran first", there's both the possibility of "lower spread rate" and the possibility of "weird founder effects." If a careless Italian healthcare worker made a mistake three weeks ago, and a careless Philippine healthcare

... (read more)

Strong form doesn't mean that the prices are "always right" the idea of strong form EMH is that the prices also already incorporate private information (meaning you can't get alpha even if you had insider information) compared to Semi-strong that claims that the markets don't account for private information.

The definition of EMH (from wikipedia) is:

The efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) is a hypothesis in financial economics that states that asset prices reflect all available information. A direct implication is that it is impossib... (read more)

EMH actually claims that sitting down with a blank sheet of paper and gaining an information advantage is impossible, the market prices already incorporated all the public data. I agree that this assumption seems wrong (and the goal of my post was to provide an alternative assumption)