Month: October 2017

Why Professors Are Writing Crap That Nobody Reads ‘Cited’ and ‘read’ are distinct, and often these is a long lag between when a paper is published and when it begins to accumulate citations, and many citations don’t show on database searches although the citations still exist. I decided to investigate one of the papers cited… Continue reading Those worthless humanities papers

From Kevin Drum: You Will Lose Your Job to a Robot—and Sooner Than You Think As discussed earlier (and a bunch of other times on this blog), fears of a job-apocalypse are overblown. Despite the trend towards increasing automation, the size of the labor force has grown in lock-step with population growth. The labor force… Continue reading Automation and Post-Scarcity

Trump’s polls are falling, hitting new lows: Trump’s approval rating drops to historic low in new poll Trump’s approval rating sinks to new low in NBC/‘WSJ’ poll Trump’s Approval Rating Drops to Lowest Level Yet in New NBC News/WSJ Poll Trump’s job approval rating of 38 percent is the lowest in modern times for a… Continue reading Trump’s polls are falling, but I’m not worried

The ‘HBD bull market‘ keeps making new highs, lead by yet another quarter of blowout earnings by Google, Amazon, Microsoft (and soon to be Facebook). The S&P 500 closed at yet another record high (and same for the Nasdaq 100): On July 2017, I wrote that Amazon stock would keep going up and that it… Continue reading Another Quarter of Blow-Out Tech Earnings: Not worried about “tech bubble 2.0”

The life cycle of a Trump news dud As the link above shows, the left (but also some on the ‘right’) want so badly for Trump to fail, they have to invent narratives and resort to wishful thinking, when reality alone won’t suffice, such as: The narrative that Trump winning would doom and economy and… Continue reading Anti-Trump desperation showing, and the GOP civil war

The Moldbug Variations Yarvin believes there is no such thing as democracy—and Thiel has said as much, as well. Yarvin’s stunted political imagination prizes strict hierarchies—despotisms, monarchies, and experimental new feudalism via a “patchwork” of corporate fiefdoms managed by absolute dictators who might be appointed by a vote of property-owning “shareholders.” Unlike some advocates of… Continue reading Media Getting NRx Wrong

From Vox, by Scott Alexander: So you’ve learned you’ve got a “pitifully” low IQ. How worried should you be? and Scott Aaronson: Also against individual IQ worries Aaronson as a 4-year-old ‘only’ scored 106 on an IQ test, which as he says himself, seems too low and incommensurate with his academic achievements: I sometimes get… Continue reading Two IQ links by two Scotts

Many articles argue that one shouldn’t hold leveraged ETFs long-term. Like many things, it depends on the situation. For certain leveraged ETFs that have high volatility, that is prudent advice, but for underlying asset classes with low volatility and long-term positive returns (such as the S&P 500), 2x and 3x versions can be held long-term.… Continue reading Why 3x S&P 500 ETFs can be held long-term

This is pretty interesting: Raven’s test performance of sub-Saharan Africans: Average performance, psychometric properties, and the Flynn Effect Abstract: This paper presents a systematic review of published data on the performance of sub-Saharan Africans on Raven’s Progressive Matrices. The specific goals were to estimate the average level of performance, to study the Flynn Effect in African samples,… Continue reading Raven’s test performance of sub-Saharan Africans: Average performance, psychometric properties, and the Flynn Effect

Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, is among many high achievers whose measured IQ was not as high as you’d expect. Kevin Fleming / Contributor, Source: Vox Richard Feynman is regarded as one of the most brilliant physicists who ever lived. That’s why it came as a surprise (to me at least) that his two books… Continue reading Are Successful Writers The Smartest People Alive?