Month: April 2018

The surge from $6600 to $8300 got the usual losers in a frenzy on twitter and elsewhere. Such celebration will be short-lived because the sellers who drove the price from $11600 to $6600 are still here, and they continue to unload Bitcoin in 300-500 coin chunks at periodic intervals as shown below: Bitcoin spent 2… Continue reading Bitcoin update: it’s going lower

Mistakes happen for a reason It’s an interesting theory–that by opening trade relations with China, America gravely miscalculated and unleashed monster of its own doing–but unsupported by evidence. At any rate, Scientism on Twitter had a good elaboration of what it means that “we got China wrong”. What did USG really think? Was it just… Continue reading Does the rise of China pose a threat to the U.S.? Likely not

See part 1 Eliezer Yudkowsky disagrees with Scott’s Crypto Autopsy post, writing: The idea of “rationality” is that we can talk about general, abstract algorithms of cognition which tend to produce better or worse results. If there’s no general thinking pattern that produces a systematically better result, you were perfectly rational. If there’s no thinking… Continue reading Bitcoin and Rationality, Part 2: Why Bitcoin is not like the lottery, and when to sell

From Vox: The Bell Curve is about policy. And it’s wrong. What’s more, despite the mythmaking around Murray, nobody has silenced or stymied him. He is one of the most successful authors of policy-relevant nonfiction working in America today. He’s ensconced at the center of the conservative policy establishment as an emeritus scholar at the… Continue reading Matthew Yglesias regarding Charles Murray and The Bell Curve

Some confuse Jordan Peterson for being an optimist. He’s not. He’s a realist, and sometimes realism calls for optimism, and other times pessimism. For people with high IQs and STEM skills, now is time for optimism. College grads, particularity in STEM, fared the best in the years following the 2008 crisis. For those with average… Continue reading Society’s Invisible Men

Time for something unrelated to politics… STRENGTH TRAINING AND WEIGHT LIFTING FOR SHORT MEN The square-cube law explains the relationship between the height, surface area, and volume of a shape. As you can see in the diagram, when you increase the height of a 2D shape, its area doesn’t increase linearly—it increases by the change… Continue reading Getting the square-cube law wrong

The stock market was up huge today (or as Trump would say, yuge), with the S&P 500 gaining 1.6% on top of .3% gains on Monday. This suggests the market isn’t concerned about the overblown tariffs and the possibility of a ‘trade war’, which I have argued is more about posturing and signaling than an… Continue reading Conveying action is as effective as action

Regarding yesterday’s post, a question that comes up is how does one reconcile biological determinism with free will and one’s ability to take personal responsibility? If some people are preordained to struggle due to poor genes in what has become an increasingly competitive economy, doesn’t it behoove society to help these people? The short answer… Continue reading Reconciling Free Will with Biological Determinism

As everyone is aware by now, Kevin Williamson was hired and then subsequently fired from The Atlantic. Making matters worse, he quit his lucrative gig at NRO, so he’s now worse-off than before unless NRO re-hires him. As I wrote many months ago, Kevin Williamson is pretty extreme, as his comments about abortion (but also… Continue reading Kevin Williamson’s cold dose of reality

I liken politics and news to a carousel, in that it’s the same stuff over and over in a loop. There is the illusion of action because there is displacement and movement, yet the path is fixed and predictable. One could take a newspaper from March 2017 and change the dates to March 2018 and… Continue reading The news carousel