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 not affect my personal life much either way. I think… Continue reading Skepticism about ‘Stop the Steal’

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 couple thousand dollars. Now everything is too expensive.” Obviously, things… Continue reading Were 1930s ‘cheap’? It depends

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, and experts. Always do your own research to independently verify… Continue reading Questioning commonly held assumptions and narratives

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