Month: November 2020

It is any really surprise Taleb believes this "Productivity" in academia is not measurable, neither in # of citations, nor # papers. It's a metric for rent seekers & administrators. 1 mil papers/year & few results. If he's not enjoying "productivity", and visibly enjoying Twitter, he should stay that way. Apolafse ti Zoi! https://t.co/MEK8qv0hlj —… Continue reading Move over, Newton

I thought this was pretty fascinating…from the post The verbal tilt model, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard posits a link between IQ and social status, as shown by the matrix below: Regardless of political affiliation, high IQ people, either in terms of quantitative or linguistic/verbal intelligence, have higher social status relative to their peers than those… Continue reading IQ and Social Status and Success

Just as the production–possibility frontier curve describes how to optimize the production of goods, ‘social optimization’ describes how to minimize disagreement and maximize one’s appeal and popularity among a targeted/desired audience. Opinions/views that are too obvious are undesired even though many people may agree with them (such as the banal observation that ‘war is bad’),… Continue reading Social Optimization

From Nassim Tooleb The Masks Masquerade: Incompetence and Errors in Reasoning Around Face Covering Somehow this escaped my attention until only yesterday despite him writing it 5 months ago. As usual of anything written by Taleb, it is easy to refute, and went viral owing to Talweb’s huge popularity as a writer and all the… Continue reading Taleb wrong about masks , again

Tesla stock is above $480/share, but it did a 5-1 split, so the split-adjusted price is $2400, which is a 900% gain from the lows of 2019. This blows even Bitcoin and the vast majority of small cap stocks out of the water in terms of returns, and is even more impressive given how big… Continue reading Predicting Politics is Harder than Predicting Economics and Finance

This is pretty amazing…the S&P 500, after being down as much as 30% in March, has not only recovered all its losses but has also gained 10% for the year. Mind-blowing. If anything, despite my optimism about the market, I was not optimistic enough. How many people predicted such a huge, v-shaped recovery? Besides myself… Continue reading Stock market makes new highs in spite of Covid

From The Atlantic The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse: A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news. Turchin’s core argument ,based on data mining and mathematical modeling, is that an overproduction of elites will lead to societal unrest and collapse in the… Continue reading Turchin is wrong: There will be no coming collapse of America

There is a common misconception about IQ as it pertains to national IQ and the purported ‘dumbing down of society’. Commentators online frequently lament about the existence of such dumbing-down. The misconception has to do with confusing or conflating relative or per-capita intelligence for absolute/total intelligence of a nation. These are related yet distinct enough… Continue reading The IQ debate: Total vs. Per-capita IQ

One thing I have noticed about the smart-left and the smart-right is that they seem to gravitate to a core set of anchor beliefs and experiences that unify them despite being opposites politically, that you do not see with the mainstream left/right. The mainstream left/left have no common ground it would seem, but the smart… Continue reading The smart-left/right vs. mainstream left/right

I think at this stage it is reasonable to assume Trump has lost, in spite of his best efforts to forestall defeat. There is not going to be a recount, not because there was no fraud, but no one in charge wants a repeat of 2000 all over again. Making matters more complicated than in… Continue reading Some election thoughts