I agree this is an inefficiency.

Many of your examples are maybe fixed by having a large audience and some randomness as described by Robo.

But some things are more binary. For example when considering job applicants an applicant who won some prestigious award is much higher value that one who didnt. But, their is a person who was the counterfactual 'second place' for that award, they are basically as high value as the winner, and no one knows who they are.

Having unstable policy making comes with a lot of disadvantages as well as advantages.

For example, imagine a small poor country somewhere with much of the population living in poverty. Oil is discovered, and a giant multinational approaches the government to seek permission to get the oil. The government offers some kind of deal - tax rates, etc. - but the company still isn't sure. What if the country's other political party gets in at the next election? If that happened the oil company might have just sunk a lot of money into refinery's and roads and drills only to see them all taken away by the new government as part of its mission to "make the multinationals pay their share for our people." Who knows how much they might take?

What can the multinational company do to protect itself? One answer is to try and find a different country where the opposition parties don't seem likely to do that.  However, its even better to find a dictatorship to work with. If people think a government might turn on a dime, then they won't enter into certain types of deal with it. Not just companies, but also other countries.

So, whenever a government does turn on a dime, it is gaining some amount of reputation for unpredictability/instability, which isn't a good reputation to have when trying to make agreements in the future.

Correct.

I used to think this. I was in a café reading cake description and the word "cheese" in the Carrot Cake description for the icing really switched me away. I don't want a cake with cheese flavor - sounds gross. Only later did I learn Carrot Cake was amazing.

So it has happened at least once.

There was an interesting Astral Codex 10 thing related to this kind of idea: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart

Mirroring some of the logic in that post, starting from the assumption that neither you nor anyone you know are in the running for a job, (lets say you are hiring an electrician to fix your house) then do you want the person who is going to do a better job or a worse one?

If you are the parent of a child with some kind of developmental problem that means they have terrible hand-eye coordination, you probably don't want your child to be a brain surgeon, because you can see that is a bad idea.

You do want your child to have resources, and respect and so on. But what they have, and what they do, can be (at least in principle) decoupled. In other words, I think that using a meritocratic system to decide who does what (the people who are good at something should do it) is uncontroversial. However, using a meritocratic system to decide who gets what might be a lot more controversial. For example, as an extreme case you could consider disability benefit for somebody with a mental handicap to be vaguely against the "who gets what" type of meritocracy.

Personally I am strongly in favor of the  "who does what" meritocracy, but am kind of neutral on the "who gets what" one.

Wouldn't higher liquidity and lower transaction costs sort this out? Say you have some money tied up in "No, Jesus will not return this year", but you really want to bet on some other thing. If transaction costs were completely zero then, even if you have your entire net worth tied up in "No Jesus" bets you could still go to a bank, point out you have this more-or-less guaranteed payout on the Jesus market, and you want to borrow against it or sell it to the bank. Then you have money now to spend. This would not in any serious way shift the prices of the "Jesus will return" market because that market is of essentially zero size compared to the size of the banks that will be loaning against or buying the "No" bets.

With low enough transaction costs the time value of money is the same across the whole economy, so buying "yes" shares in Jesus would be competing against a load of other equivalent trades in every other part of the economy. I think selling shares for cash would be one of these, you are expecting loads of people to suddenly want to sell assets for cash in the future, so selling your assets for cash now so you can buy more assets later makes sense.

I dont know Ameeican driving laws on this (i live in the UK), but these two.descriptions dont sound mutually incomptabile.

The clockwise rule tells you everything except who goes first. You say thats the first to arrive.

It says "I am socially clueless enough to do random inappropriate things"

In a sense I agree with you, if you are trying to signal something specific, then wearing a suit in an unusual context is probably the wrong way of doing it. But, the social signalling game is exhausting. (I am English, maybe this makes it worse than normal for me). If I am a guest at someone's house and they offer me food, what am I signalling by saying yes? What if I say no? They didn't let me buy the next round of drinks, do I try again later or take No for an answer? Are they offering me a lift because they actually don't mind? How many levels deep do I need to go in trying to work this situation out?

I have known a few people over the years with odd dress preferences (one person really, really liked an Indiana Jones style hat). To me, the hat declared "I know the rules, and I hereby declare no intention of following them. Everyone else here thereby has permission to stop worrying about this tower of imagined formality and relax." For me that was very nice, creating a more relaxed situation. They tore down the hall of mirrors, and made it easier for me to enjoy myself. I have seen people take other actions with that purpose, clothes are just one way.

Long way of saying, sometimes a good way of asking people to relax is by breaking a few unimportant rules. But, even aside from that, it seems like the OP isn't trying to do this at all. They have actually just genuinely had enough with the hall of mirrors game and have declared themselves to no longer be playing. Its only socially clueless if you break the rules by mistake. If you know you are breaking them, but just don't care, it is a different thing. The entire structure of the post makes it clear the OP knows they are breaking the rules.

As a political comparison, Donald Trump didn't propose putting a "Rivera of the Middle East" in Gaza because he is politically clueless, he did so because he doesn't care about being politically clued-in and he wants everyone to know it.

A nice post about the NY flat rental market. I found myself wondering, does the position you are arguing against at the beginning actually exist, or it is set up only as a rhetorical thing to kill? What I mean is this:

everything’s priced perfectly, no deals to sniff out, just grab what’s in front of you and call it a day. The invisible hand’s got it all figured out—right?

Do people actually think this way? The argument seems to reduce to "This looks like a bad deal, but if it actually was a bad deal then no one would buy it. Therefore, it can't be a bad deal and I should buy it." If there are a population of people out there who think this way then their very existence falsifies the efficient market hypothesis - every business should put some things on the shelf that have no purpose beyond exploiting them. Or, in other words, the market is only going to be as efficient as the customers are discerning. If there are a large number of easy marks in the market then sellers will create new deals and products designed to rip those people off.

Don't we all know that sinking feeling when we find ourselves trying to buy something (normally in a foreign country) and we realise we are in a market designed to rip us off? First we curse all the fools who came before us and created a rip-off machine. Then, we reluctantly decide just to pay the fee, "get got" and move on with our life because its just too much faff, thereby feeding the very machine we despise (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ENBzEkoyvdakz4w5d/out-to-get-you ). Similarly, I at least have felt a feeling of lightness when I go into a situation I expect to look like that, and instead find things that are good.

You have misunderstood me in a couple of places. I think think maybe the diagram is confusing you, or maybe some of the (very weird) simplifying assumptions I made, but I am not sure entirely.

First, when I say "momentum" I mean actual momentum (mass times velocity). I don't mean kinetic energy.

To highlight the relationship between the two, the total energy of a mass on a spring can be written as: $E=\left(1/2\right)p^2/m+\left(1/2\right)k{x}^2$  where p is the momentum, m the mass, k the spring strength and x the position (in units where the lowest potential point is at x=0). The first of the two terms in that expression is the kinetic energy (related to the square of the momentum). The second term is the potential energy, related to the square of the position.

I am not treating gravity remotely accurately in my answer, as I am not trying to be exact but illustrative. So, I am pretending that gravity is just a spring. The force on a spring increases with distance, gravity decreases. That is obviously very important for lots of things in real life! But I will continue to ignore it here because it makes the diagrams here simpler, and its best to understand the simple ones first before adding the complexity.

If going to the right increases your potential energy, and the center has 0 potential energy, then being to the left of the origin means you have negative potential energy? 

Here, because we are pretending gravity is a spring, potential energy is related to the square of the potion. ($x^2$). The potential energy is zero when x=0. But it increases in either direction from the middle. Similarly, in the diagram, the kinetic energy is related to the square of the momentum, so we have zero kinetic energy in the vertical middle, but going either upwards or downwards would increase the kinetic energy. As I said, the circles are the energy contours, any two points on the same circle have the same total energy. Over time, our oscillator will just go around and around in its circle, never going up or down in total energy.

If we made gravity more realistic then potential energy would still increase in either direction from the middle (minimum as x=0, increasing in either direction), instead of being x^2 it would be some other equation.

The x-direction is position (x). The y-direction is momentum (p). The energy isn't shown, but you can implicitly imagine that it is plotted "coming out the page" towards you and that is why their are the circular contour lines.

If you haven't seen phase space diagrams much before this webpage seems good like a good intro: http://www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/Demos/phase-diagram/phase-nodamp.gif.

I am making a number of simplifying assumptions above, for example I am treating the system as one dimensional (where an orbit actually happens in 2d). Similarly, I am approximating the gravitational field as a spring. Probably much of the confusion comes from me getting a lot of (admittedly important things!) and throwing them out the window to try and focus on other things.