Bill Gates Paul put out a video critical of the q-anon movement and how it’s leading its followers astray A came to similar conclusion about how Q has failed to deliver on any of its prophecies. There is no plan, no ‘mass arrests’ of Hollywood…
Similar to the 2020 election, the 2020 election has been dragged into overtime. ‘Stop the steal’ has become a rallying cry against alleged fraud that cost Trump reelection. I don’t care that much who wins or who had the election stolen from whom. It does…
A common narrative you see online is how much cheaper things used to be many generations ago, and how everything is so expensive now. The narrative goes along the lines of “In the ’30s, college cost $5/semester and you could buy a home for a…
A useful heuristic I have found is that well-worn narratives, especially media narratives or narratives promoted by powerful or influential people, tend to be wrong, or at the very least incomplete. You should always be skeptical of narratives even if promoted by academics, the media,…
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,…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…