All of Daniel V's Comments + Replies

I agree with you. Unless the signal is so strong that people believe that their personal experience is not representative of the economy, it's going to be overweighted. "I and half the people I know make less" will lead to discontent about the state of the economy. "I and half the people I know make less, but I am aware that GDP grew 40%, so the economy must be doing fine despite my personal experience" is possible, but let's just say it's not our prior.

Exactly, which is why the metric Mazlish prefers is so relevant and not bizarre, unless the premise that people judge the economy from their own experiences is incorrect.

Why is this what matters? It’s a bizarre metric. Why should we care what the median change was, instead of some form of mean change, or change in the mean or median wage?

The critique that the justification wasn't great because the mean wage dropped a lot in the example is fair. Yet, in the proposed alternative example it remains quite likely that people will perceive the economy as having gotten worse, even if the economy is objectively so much better - 2/3 will say they're personally worse off, insufficiently adjust for the impersonal ways of assessing th... (read more)

Literally macroeconomics 101. Trade surpluses aren't shipping goods for free. There is a whole balance of payments to consider. I'm shocked EY could get that so wrong, surprised that lsusr is so ready to agree, and confused because surely I missed something huge here, right?

I guess I misunderstood you. I figured that without "regression coefficients," the sentence would be a bit tautological: "the point of randomized controlled trial is to avoid [a] non-randomized sample," and there were other bits that made me think you had an issue with both selection bias (agree) and regressions (disagree).

I share your overall takeaway, but at this point I am just genuinely curious why the self-selection is presumed to be such a threat to internal validity here. I think we need more attention to selection effects on the margin, but I also ... (read more)

I appreciate this kind of detailed inspection and science writing, we need more of this in the world!

I'm writing this comment because of the expressed disdain for regressions. I do share the disappointment about how the randomization and results turned out. But for both, my refrain will be: "that's what the regression's for!" 

This contains the same data, but stratified by if people were obese or not:

Now it looks like semaglutide isn’t doing anything.

The beauty of exploratory analyses like these is that you can find something interesting. The risk is t... (read more)

I really like this succinct post.

I intuitively want to endorse the two growth rates (if it "looks" linear right now, it might just be early exponential), but surely this is not that simple, right? My top question is "What are examples of linear growth in nature and what do they tell us about this perception that all growth is around zero or exponential?"

A separate thing that sticks out is that having two growth rates does not necessarily imply generally two subjective levels.

This can be effectively implemented by the government accumulating tax revenues (largely from the rich) in good times and spending them on disaster relief (largely on the poor) in bad times. It lets price remain a signal while also expanding supply.

Taxation is better than a ban, but in this case it remains an attempt at price control. "Documented" cost increases is doing a lot of work. Better than "vibes about price," but it is the same deal: the government "knows better" what prices should be than what is revealed by the market. I'd argue that if the government doesn't like what the market is yielding, it can get involved in the market and help expand supply itself, which we see governments attempt during disaster relief already.

Agree, we're not so shy about pursuing a good vibe, bad vibes are also informative.

Thanks, you had mentioned the short- vs. long-run before, but after this discussion it is more foregrounded and the "racing" explanation makes sense. :) Though I appreciated the references to marginal value and marginal cost.

You’re assuming that the economy will produce new jobs faster than the factories will produce new chips and robots to fill those jobs.

Well, the assumptions are primarily that the supply and demand for AI labor will vary across markets and secondarily that labor can flow across markets. This is an important layer separate from just seei... (read more)

I like that this post lays out the dilemma in principles A (marginal value dominates) and B (marginal cost dominates). One quibble is that the effects are on the supply and demand curves, not on the quantities supplied and demanded, i.e., it's not about the slopes of the curves but the location of the new equilibrium as the curves shift left or right. It's not about which part "equilibrates" faster (with what?) but about the relative strength of the shifts.

If AGI shifts the demand for AI labor to the right, under constant supply, we'd expect a price increa... (read more)

I'm here to say, this is not some property specific to p-values, just about the credibility of the communicator.

If $scientists$ make a bunch of errors all the time, especially those that change their conclusions, indeed you can't trust them. Turns out (BW11) that $scientist{s}_{publishedinbetterjournals}$ are more credible than $scientist{s}_{publishedinworsejournals}$, the errors they make tend not to change the conclusions of the test (i.e., the chance of drawing a wrong conclusion from their data ("gross error" in BW11) was much lower than the ... (read more)

Supply side: It approaches the minimum average total, not marginal, cost. Maybe if people accounted for it finer (e.g., charging self "wages" and "rent"), cooking at home would be in the ballpark (assuming equal quality of inputs and outputs across venues..), but that just illustrates how real costs can explain a lot of the differential without having to jump to regulation and barriers to entry (yes, those are nonzero too!).

Demand side: Complaints in the OP about the uninformativeness of ratings also highlight how far we are from perfect competition (also,... (read more)

Cooking at Home Being Cheaper is Weird

I like the argument that the scaling should make the average marginal cost per plate lower in restaurants than at home, but I find cooking at home being cheaper not weird at all. First, there are also real fixed costs to account for, not just regulatory costs.

More importantly, the average price per plate is not just a function of costs, it's a function of the value that people receive. Cooking at home does give some nice benefits, but eating out gives some huge ones: essentially leisure, time savings (a lot of things get prepped before service), no dishes, and possibly lower search costs ("what's for dinner tonight?").

A classic that seemingly will have to be reargued til the end of time. Other allocation methods are not clearly more egalitarian and are less efficient (depends on the correlation matrix of WTP, need, time budget, etc., plus one's own judgment of fairness, but money prices come out looking great a lot of the time). In some cases, even prices don't perform great (addressed in some comments on this post), but they're better than the alternatives.

For more reading: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gNodQGNoPDjztasbh/lies-damn-lies-and-fabricated-options?commentId=nG2X7x3n55cb3p7yB

To get Robin worried about AI doom, I'd need to convince him that there's a different metric he needs to be tracking

That, or explain the factors/why the Robin should update his timeline for AI/computer automation taking "most" of the jobs.

AI Doom Scenario

Robin's take here strikes me both as an uncooperative thought-experiment participant and as a decently considered position. It's like he hasn't actually skimmed the top doom scenarios discussed in this space (and that's coming from me...someone who has probably thought less about this space than Robin) (al... (read more)

Paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimates 150%-300% returns to government nondefense R&D over the postwar period on business sector productivity growth. They say this implies underfunding of nondefense R&D, but that is not right. One should assume decreasing marginal returns, so this is entirely compatible with the level of spending being too high. I also would not assume conditions are unchanged and spending remains similarly effective.

At low returns, you might question whether it's good enough to invest more compared to other ... (read more)

That is an additional 15% of kids not sleeping seven hours

I was not aware of the concomitant huge drop in sleep (though it's obvious in retrospect). Maybe it's more important to limit screen time at night, when you're alone in your room not sleeping. Being constantly lethargic as a result may also contribute to (and be a) depressive symptoms. It will be very important to figure out the mechanism(s) by which smartphone use hurts kids.

I agree, I was thinking more generally this isn't a "poker" theory specifically, just one about rules and buy-in. But it's about poker night, so I'll let it slide. The main game rules, though, remain extraneous. Loved the post still!

Mira: You should be able to buy anything with a limit order.

“I don’t feel like paying $250 for an anime figurine, but I left an order up for $50”

If they saw 10,000 orders at a lower price rung ...

As usual the answer is transaction costs

Agree and also perceptions. The idea here is to facilitate price discovery and price discrimination. If only we knew people's WTP and could serve them lower prices acceptable to us when volume isn't moving at the current price! We can adjust prices ad hoc, but maybe a little upfront market research would be better and an exc... (read more)

Why is turbulence worse on planes? The headlines blame it on ‘climate change.’ The actual answer is the FAA told airlines to prioritize saving fuel over passenger comfort, despite passengers having a strong revealed preference for spending the extra cost of fuel to have a more pleasant flight. This then became ‘because climate change.’ This kind of thing damages public trust in all such claims, making solving climate change (and everything else) that much harder.

There are benefits to optimized profile descents (fuel, time, reduced air traffic controller in... (read more)

I agree with Neil here: if you identify with your flaws, that is bad. By definition. If you are highly analytical and you identify with it, great, regardless of if other people see it as a flaw. Like you said and Neil's reply in the footnote, if it's a goal, then it is not a flaw. But if you say it is a personal flaw, then either you shouldn't be adopting it into your identity (you don't even have to try to fix it as noble as that would be, but you don't get to say "I'm the bad-at-math-person, it's so funny and quirky, and I just led my small business and ... (read more)

I quite appreciate the post's laying things out, but it's not convincing regarding Scott's post (it's not bad either, just not convincing!) because it doesn't offer much more than "no, you're wrong." The crux of the argument presented here is taking the word disability, which to most speakers means X and implies Y, and breaking it into an impairment, which means X, and a disability, which is Y. Scott says this is wrong and explains why he thinks so. DirectedEvolution says Scott is wrong "because the definitions say..." but that's exactly what Scott is comp... (read more)

It's very interesting to see the intuitive approach here and there is a lot to like about how you identified something you didn't like in some personality tests (though there are some concrete ones out there), probed content domains for item generation, and settled upon correlations to assess hanging-togetherness.

But you need to incorporate your knowledge from reading about scale development and factor analysis. Obviously you've read in that space. You know you want to test item-total correlations (trait impact), multi-dimensionality (factor model loss), a... (read more)

Who has an alternative hypothesis that explains this data? Anyone? Ooh ooh, pick me, pick me. Perhaps being depressed has something to do with your life being depressing, due to things like lack of human capital or job opportunities, life and career setbacks or alienation from one’s work. Income increases life satisfaction, as I assume does the prospect of future income.

It is amazing to see the ‘depression is purely a chemical imbalance unrelated to one’s physical circumstances’ attitude in this brazen a form. Mistaking correlation for causation here seems

It was a good post! To the extent that whatever I said was value-added or convincing to you, it was only because your quality post prompted me to lay it out.

And like you said, perhaps there is more here. Does a negative (vs. positive) frame make it harder to notice (or easier to forget) that there is a null hypothesis? Preliminary evidence in favor is that people who "own" the null will cede it in a negative frame, whereas they tend to retain it in a positive frame. More thinking/research may be needed though to feel confident about that (I say that as a s... (read more)

Going off localdeity's comment, I think "arrogating the right to choose the null hypothesis" or as you said, "assuming the burden of proof" are more critical than whether the frame involves negations. If you want to win an argument, don't argue, make the other person do the arguing by asking lots of questions, even questions phrased as statements, and then just say whatever claim they make isn't convincing enough. Why should purple be better than green? An eminently reasonable question! But one whose answer will never have satisfactory support, unless you ... (read more)

You're not wrong, and I don't disagree!

In the long run it seems pretty clear labor won't have any real economic value

I'd love to see a full post on this. It's one of those statements that rings true since it taps into the underlying trend (at least in the US) where the labor share of GDP has been declining. But *check notes* that was from 65% to 60% and had some upstreaks in there. So it's also one of those statements that, upon cognitive reflection, also has a lot of ways to end up false: in an economy with labor crowded out by capital, what does the poor class have to offer the capitali... (read more)

Thanks for writing this. I suppose the same could be said about any tool that you have suspicions might be inferior to another on the horizon in your lifetime. As quanticle said, some romance around self-crafting could support the psychological value of the labor. More importantly, I think there are in fact qualia pertinent to our quality evaluations that leave AI productions inferior in important ways than human work...currently. That gap will attenuate and we'll hone our models to be better at producing in a wider spectrum of areas, too.

However, I don't ... (read more)

Upvote for paragraph one, agree for paragraph two.

It's a very narrow (but admittedly compelling) perspective to realize that in particularly bad situations, regulations can compound the badness. But there is plenty of room to debate regulations when it comes to typical cases, and it's probably a better basis on which to evaluate them.

I agree with your comment, but I think the definitional problem is core to the debate rather than something that can simply be discarded. Consumerism is not consumption, but it used to mean consumer protection and empowerment (obviously there is a spectrum there about what constitutes adequate information and the appropriate regulations/interventions to ensure that)...in support of their consumption, which was assumed to be valuable for them. Consumerism has taken on a second, more prominent meaning that itself is a spectrum: sometimes demanding the pricin... (read more)

I strongly agree and wanted to share a similar sentiment.

It is not as simple as "the market says the asset or liability is worth X, so you should too." Businesses are usually going-concerns and it is not really that useful for the company to report itself as merely how things would go down if they were to liquidate today (though obviously considering that possibility is useful, especially if your business could be "runny," and recording the fair value of HTM securities in a note to the financial statements allows readers, like Raging Capital Ventures, to c... (read more)

That's wonderful for him. I wish he had translated that knowledge into the post then! The reader shouldn't have to come away from a post titled "the point of trade" with simply a list of reasons why trade might be nice when those reasons can actually be brought together in a unifying explanation, one that is already well-explained in Econ 101, no less.

Here he talks about his understanding of the textbook explanation, and you can judge for yourself whether it conveys comparative advantage or not:
"[sometimes people get different amounts of value from things,... (read more)

Goodharting - on the other side of things, LessWrong also has posts like this that are designed to review rather than reinvent ideas. There is value in explaining old ideas in new ways or finding previously-unconsidered applications for old ideas.

As you said, it doesn't really change the point, but I'm here to say it's not an alternative bond structure, just that the bond happens to be trading at a discount already at the initial conditions. It will trade at a steeper discount as interest rates rise. It would be even less intuitive, but you could also do this analysis with bonds that are trading at a premium (trading at a smaller premium, or even hitting par or switching to a discount, as interest rates rise).

Matt Levine at Bloomberg also has good comments on this - basically it was a boring bank run/collapse. With it being primarily a duration issue (rather than an impaired assets issue) and a large amount of deposits, I also suspect we'll see an acquisition.

Check the date on this too.

Further illustrating Eliezer's misplaced confidence, Sumner's view is about NGDP targeting, so the success of the BOJ's policy should be based on delivering NGDP growth, not real economic variables like RGDP growth or employment rate as Eliezer implies. They were in fact successful at this (RGDP growth + Inflation = NGDP growth; with RGDP growth continuing on trend and Inflation bucking the downtrend, that's a new NGDP trajectory, baby!). Here, with 100=March 2013 as Kuroda ascended, you can see the shift in CPI trend even before the VAT impact in April 20... (read more)

Chapin is describing a range of gains - "Until I’d gained some muscle, I didn’t know that getting out of bed shouldn’t actually feel like much, physically, or that walking up a bunch of stairs shouldn’t tire you out, or that carrying groceries around shouldn’t be onerous. I felt cursed." If you can remove a general feeling of being cursed and get a license to live in the material world, wow! If you can solve chronic pain with strength training, great! If you can climb stairs without getting tired, a lot of people already can, but good! If you can carry gro... (read more)

Thanks for the analysis, and I mostly agree with your interpretation (having done no further research into this myself), but I'm confused how dividing by 1000 is the problem here. The levels are "basically fine" because 9*-they are well below the FDA/EPA limits, but the CA levels are only about 1 order of magnitude lower, not 3. If they had divided by 100, would we be interrogating their divisor choice? (The current implication is that that arbitrary approach would have been fine since it would correspond to FDA/EPA levels). It makes me think that maybe the impetus to question the arbitrary approach mainly stems from the conclusions not fitting our palate.

Karma downvote for lack of introspection into failures of rationality in a rationality forum.
Agreement upvote for "don't do this" because "that is telling of your own biases" without naming any is just not engaging. It was sadly a throwaway starting line to an otherwise excellent comment.

1. My comment was contra "the case that the categorical imperative tries to pull a fast one." Evaluating this (the point of the OP) very much requires an understanding of intent.

2. Well sure, if you don't care about the point of the OP, you can care about other things. Whether it is a useful framework for you to judge and cajole others in their actions is a very important question! You might still care about intent though. Is a handsaw the right tool for hammering a nail? I would recommend you look at a handsaw's intended use case and rule it out. If you r... (read more)

Ah, makes more sense now. I'm generally not a fan of that approach though, and here's why.

My comment was that your conclusion about the categorical imperative vis-a-vis its aims was off because the characterization of its aims wasn't quite right. But you're saying it's okay, we're still learning something here because you meant to do the not-quite-right characterization because most people will do that, and this is the conclusion they will reach from that. But you never tell me up front that's what you're doing, nor do you caution that the characterization... (read more)

The categorical imperative aims to solve the problem of what norms to pick, but goes on to try to claim universality.
...
The trouble is that the categorical imperative tries to smuggle in every moral agents' values without actually doing the hard work of aggregating and deciding between them.

That would be a problem, if that is what it were doing. The categorical imperative aims to define the obligation an individual has in conducting themselves consistent with the autonomy of the will. Each individual may have a distinct moral code consistent with that obli... (read more)