All of feanor1600's Comments + Replies

Perfect weather for today. I'll be the guy with a blue and white cooler

Warning: segment contains Colbert's version of the basilisk.

0artemium
"We're sorry but this video is not available in your country." We'll I guess I'm safe. Living in a shitty country has some advantages.

I have to agree with Sanderson's first law. One reason I liked HPMOR more than the original Harry Potter was the transition from soft magic to hard (rule-based, well-explained) magic.

How Politics Makes Us Stupid

Ezra Klein's version of Politics is the Mind-Killer.

"smart characters that win"

Miles Vorkosigan saga, Ender's Game, anything by Neal Stephenson.

0kgalias
I started reading Ender's and the world didn't seem to make enough sense to keep me immersed.

Got my dissertation proposal approved.

First paragraph: This dissertation continues the tradition of identifying the unintended consequences of the US health insurance system. Its main contribution is to estimate the size of the distortions caused by the employer-based system and regulations intended to fix it, while using methods that are more novel and appropriate than those of previous work.

The most relevant field here is International Monetary Economics.

After TAing a class on the subject, I became convinced that most people (including economists) would be better off ignoring money most of the time, and just following where the goods went. So think of this as a transfer of $1000 worth of goods from the US to Kenya.

You could get the official answer with an IS-LM-BP model and some masochism.

More seriously, this does make me want to look into theoretical work on the macroeconomics of charity. On the empirical side, the best evidence is that even... (read more)

While I agree with almost all of the antifaq (the general point is apparently more plausible to economists than non-economists), this is pretty misleading:

"The future cannot be a cause of the past."

True, but human expectations about the future can be very important in the present. If you expect that 5 years from now FAI will take over, you won't bother to make many long-term investments like building factories and training new workers.

0[anonymous]
Agree with your agreement about the FAQ, and your disagreement with causal decision theory. It's to be noted that EY acknowledges the limitations of that apparently misleading statement elsewhere with very sophisticated arguments. Though, they were probably judged too tangential to elaborate upon here. In fact, he pioneered alternative perspectives (see: updateless decision theory and timeless decision theory)

"Shorter work weeks didn't just happen. It took a huge amount of effort from unions, which were a lot more powerful then than they are now." I've never understood why people find this story compelling, precisely because of your final clause. If unions were the main force determining hours, why have hours continued to go down now that unions have been drastically weakened?

0fubarobfusco
In the time since the peak power of labor unions, the number of benefits accruing to full-time but not part-time workers has increased, making it more economical to employ part-time workers for a lot of jobs. (Peak labor union membership in the U.S. was in 1955. This was also the year the AFL and CIO merged, thus removing effective competition in the market for union organizations.)

"Groups of workers with higher status get paid better." True. But what is the main direction of causation here?

According to basic economics, workers will get paid their marginal product (how much you add to production). This is a pretty good first approximation. Of course, you can get paid in many ways- money, flexible hours, even status. The higher the status of a job the less it needs to pay to attract workers; this is called a compensating differential. High-level politicians are very high-status but don't make that much. Conversely, very low-status jobs (like janitor or garbageman) have to pay a bit more in money wages to get people to work.

"a normal effect of recessions is for productivity to increase; businesses lay off workers and then try to figure out how to run their operation more efficiently with less workers, that happens in every recession"

This is not true. In fact, the normal effect is the opposite- a productivity decrease. See the data for the US after 1948 here.

If you are looking for a story as to why, in some business cycle theories (such as Real Business Cycle Theory) the recession is caused by a negative shock to productivity.

Involuntary unemployment is bad. Not having to work is good.

"Instead of trying to get a PhD and a job in academia (which is very costly and due to "publish or perish" forces you to work on topics that are currently popular in academia), get a job that leaves you with a lot of free time" Part of the attraction of academia to me is that it is exactly the job that leaves you with lots of free time. A professor only has to be in a certain place at a certain time 3-12 hours per week (depending on teaching load), 30 weeks per year. After tenure, you can research whatever you want, especially if you aren't in a lab-science field that leaves you dependent on grants. Even before tenure I can work on neglected problems, so long as they aren't neglected due to their low prestige.

1drethelin
Yes but before you get tenure you've wasted your most productive and fun youthful years getting tenure.

"don't do a PhD in a country without a universal healthcare system" Funded PhD's in the US commonly include health insurance coverage as part of your stipend.

This is yet more support for your main point: the fact that getting a PhD in some programs/fields is a bad idea does not mean you should avoid a PhD from any program/field.

1) Find academic papers on the subject, see where they got their data 2) Data-only search sites like Zanran, or set google to search only for .xls 3) Question and answer sites, like r/datasets

"I had to copy thousands of lines of data out from the PDFs by hand. Journals prefer PDF format because it's device-independent"

Google "PDF to excel".

Philosopher Michael Huemer has a page "Should I go to graduate school in philosophy?" It begins:

Many philosophy students decide to attend graduate school, knowing almost nothing about the consequences of this decision, or about what the philosophy profession is actually like. By the time they find out, they have already committed several years of their life, and possibly thousands of dollars, to the undertaking. They then learn that their initial assumptions about the field were unrealistically optimistic. They continue in their chosen path, ev

... (read more)
-1buybuydandavis
You could say much the same about most academic departments. A lot of people go to grad school because school is what they're good at.
4diegocaleiro
This link may have changed my life. Thanks for sharing it. Really, thanks.

This is how Scott Sumner describes his own work in macroeconomics and NGDP targetting. Others see it as radical and innovative, he thinks he is just taking the standard theories seriously.

From the same page, "Instrumental variables are rarely used and have generally become viewed with suspicion; their heyday was the 1980s" This is simply not true, at least within economics. Look at any recent econometrics textbook, or search for "instrumental variables" in EconLit and notice how there are more hits every year between 1970 and now.

Any plans to post this elsewhere? I feel like some readers will ignore anything on a site with as many pictures of ponies as fimfiction.

1listic
There are upsides to having a story in one central location, however reaching fewer readers than would be possible otherwsie is a high price to pay for that. I suggest that alternative place should provide readership statistics (as FiMFiction does) and include a note somewhere that canonical place is at FiMFiction (so that discussion will take place there) OTOH, I would like to know how or where higher levels of discourse can be inspired. Unfortunately, on FiMFiction pictures remain legal tender for comments and there are many shallow comments ("uploading is murder" and the like).

More simply, you could just ask economists directly. But then they might tell you that the US President has very little impact on the economy.

The linked IGM poll is great though, it can also give you a good feel for which policies economists agree about, and their comments and links can give you some idea of their reasoning.

Relevant paper: Gelman, Silver and Edlin estimated that the average American voter has a 1 in 60 million chance of deciding the election.

Took it. The autism test makes it seem like it is easy for people to get more or less autistic with time. I would have scored much higher 10 years ago.

"There are all sorts of benevolent aspects of everyday life which are clearly the product of chemistry or engineering or medical science, but it's hard to assemble a collection of concrete, object-level stuff and say "all these things were made by economists!"'

There is a book, "Better Living Through Economics", (the title inspired, I assume, by "Better Living Through Chemistry") that explains some of this. It is largely stories about economists getting the government to work better- ending the draft, stabilizing prices, et cetera.

1sixes_and_sevens
I think we need a sexy fictional economist who solves crimes. If Robert Langdon can uncover millenia-old religious conspiracies and save Rome with an art degree, imagine what someone numerate could do.

I study/teach economics for a living, this made my try to think about why it is useful (besides that it gives me a job).

How To Run A Government

Economics has a lot to say about which government policies will make people better off or worse off. This is a big reason I got interested in economics, but its not very practical for the vast majority of people, who have essentially no influence over government policy (and in fact it is economists who are famous for arguing, perhaps incorrectly, that votes don't matter).

Understand How The World Works

It's always nic... (read more)

4Vaniver
So, I think I'm going to write a sequence called "Economics in 5 concepts," which tries to give a description of opportunity cost, prices carrying information, feedback and equilibria, specialization of labor / comparative advantage / gains from trade, and the seen and the unseen. Anything I'm missing / shouldn't write about / should consider?
3sixes_and_sevens
I'm currently retraining from a moderately successful career in IT into econ/maths, and explaining my motives for this is always an uphill struggle against people's misapprehension of what economics is even about. In many ways it's kind of an invisible discipline. There are all sorts of benevolent aspects of everyday life which are clearly the product of chemistry or engineering or medical science, but it's hard to assemble a collection of concrete, object-level stuff and say "all these things were made by economists!" There's also a problem of motive when it comes to a lay appreciation of economics. No-one develops an amateur interest in physics because they have a crazy partisan political agenda, but in r/Economics/ there are thrice-weekly arguments on the gold standard you can set your watch by. It takes a special kind of nerdery to be interested in something for the sake of interest, but a lot of cranky trouble-causers speak with great unearned authority on economic subjects because they're really pissed off about something.
0BlueSun
Good post. Programming would be my vote for higher level subject most useful to individuals. Then economics (given my bias that it's my area of focus). And really it's helpful to be proficient in both so you can be a good data analyst. But I do think you underestimate how important economics is for "how to run a government." Yes, there are a huge number of near Pareto efficient policies that economists recommend that politicians don't implement for political reasons, but one of the biggest differences between the wealth of nations is how well they apply the lessons of economics. For the most part, countries have access to the same level of science and technology; some rich countries (Hong Kong) have far less natural resources than many that are much poorer; but some countries do a much better job of implementing a good economic collection of rules and regulations and that's why they're so much richer. Teaching economics (especially to the 'elites' who will run day run the country) is hugely important for maintaining those policies.

On the politics question about libertarianism, "distribution" should read "redistribution". Also, ideally the political questions would ask about regulation and/or spending rather than taxes.

I would stay away from the accept/reject terminology and simply say they should assign low probability to this theory due to Occam's razor, and increase the probability if it survives experimental tests.

0NoSignalNoNoise
It's more of a cycle of observation leading to theory leading to more observation and so on. "I bet I can jump that fence" comes before observing whether you actually can, but it comes after observing the fence and your jumping abilities. You wouldn't decide you can jump that fence without first observing it.

Without addressing the substance of the papers, I can say that in practice most health economists still think the RAND experiment is really important. Robin Hanson is not unusual in this regard, the RAND experiment was featured prominently in the 2 graduate health econ classes I have taken, and in recent textbooks and papers.

FYI, the marker on the google map is pointing to the wrong place, even though the address is correct (and works when I type it into google maps myself). La Colombe is just to the southwest of city hall, and looks out at it.

Awesome! I'm in center city and so would prefer to meet there, but it looks like this coffeeshop is right next to a train station so that works.

I assumed when taking the survey that those running the simulation are outside our universe and so ontologically basic.

4Luke_A_Somers
Those people outside the simulation could exist with or without ontologically basic mental features. The questions are totally orthogonal.

I am, I've been hoping someone else would do the organizing.

0Michelle_Z
Same here, more or less. I've considered it, but college is keeping me busy.

As an economics graduate student trying to decide between academia, think tanks, government, and the private sector, I would appreciate it if you could expand on this. In particular, I wonder which jobs have the most novelty (not always teaching the same class or working with the same data), which encourage you to do more/better work, and which have the highest quality colleagues (rated on intelligence or friendliness).

Academics may be relevant as a similar "thinking community". I've heard many academics say they are severe procrastinators. Possible reasons for this are: 1) Procrastinators are attracted to the job, its independence and long-term deadlines 2) The nature of the work makes people procrastinate; research is hard, plus no boss and long-term deadlines mean immediate punishment for procrastination is rare 3) The job makes people feel they have akrasia even when they don't, perhaps because colleagues and competitors seem smarter and harder-working than in other fields

If nothing else, reading LW makes me feel 3)

5Nominull
2 seems like most of the explanation. You can't procrastinate on an assembly line.
0TimFreeman
I procrastinated when in academia, but did not feel particularly attracted to the job, so option 1 is not always true. Comparison with people not in academia makes it seem that option 3 is not true for me either.

"Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible. The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks." -- Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective

0Oscar_Cunningham
This reminds me of something Eliezer said.

"And this essay does remind me a lot of Paul's letter to Galatians - in an entirely good way!" I second this.

"There are numerous law of economics which appear to fall into this category; however, so far as I can tell, few of them have been mathematically formalized."

For better or worse, just about everything in economics has been mathematically formalized. If you are wondering about a specific "law" or concept I can try to dig up examples.

It says that if the voters make the same decisions once the alternative is added, then the voting algorithm does. See Arrow's definition of IIA on page 27 of the 2nd edition of Social Choice and Individual Values (you can find this part for free on Amazon).

0[anonymous]
Which seems to me obviously a bad criterion. You can add a compromise option that none of the voters would choose by way of maximizing their individual utilities, but which would maximize the sum of their expected utilities, for example.

The independence of irrelevant alternatives ("pairwise independence") can also apply to individuals, it is just that Arrow's theorem doesn't directly require it. However, a better statement of the independence of irrelevant alternatives for Arrow is "if all individuals have preferences satisfying pairwise independence, then the group's decision function should also satisfy it". So for group IIA to matter we should have individual IIA

It sounds like you rediscovered the "Core".

This is the evil corollary of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis (that all publicly available information is instantly incorporated into market prices).

Hi. EconPhD student in Philadelphia. Found OB through Marginal Revolution a couple years ago.

I do solemnly swear by the great Wiki that from now until April 1st, I will finish every part of every homework assignment by the midnight before it is due, on pain of food deprivation until the work be complete.

2Unknowns
That's not much of a penalty. It just means that if you stay up all night doing the work, you won't get to eat until breakfast.