Christmas Round-Up

Merry Christmas

From Ben Ben G-G-G-Garrison:

We all want a wall, but for now have to settle for smaller wins. It’s about time we see Trump standing his ground for wall funding instead of caving in to a vague ‘border security’ compromise.

I was right about the Michael Cohen indictment being self-limiting and about Trump not being impeached, but with stock market in free-fall, Trump faces his biggest challenge yet. The economy and stock market were two things working in Trump’s favor in 2017 and 2018, but in spite of the otherwise strong economy, the S&P is within a hair of entering a bear market. I still firmly believe the market will recover, although admittedly the sell-off is worse than I expected, and there will be no recession. People are spooked about Trump’s comments about the fed even though the likelihood of Trump firing Powell, assuming he even has the ability to do so, are slim.

Selling 80% of my Bitcoin stake between $15,000 and $10,000 earlier this year was one of my smartest moves. For those wondering if Bitcoin will come back to $10,000, the answer is almost certainly no. There are thousands of people underwater on their crypto currency investments, and no new money will enter the market. The only reason Bitcoin went from $500 to $20,000 was because hedge funds were pouring money into it, but the money has dried up. Any price spikes will be quickly sold-off. Already, Btcon has fallen $500 in the past 2 days. I’ll probably re-enter when it gets below $200, which is close to where I originally bought in. One of the dumbest arguments you hear by Bitcoin optimists is how many times the media has prematurely called the death of Bitcoin, as if the media being wrong somehow changes the outcome of an entirely statistically unrelated and independent event. As an extreme example of the fallacy of this type of logic, imagine if the media put out a headline every day about how the sun is going to die. The media would technically be wrong for over four billion years, but that does not change the fact the sun will eventually turn into a red giant and die.

Jordan Peterson has now called out Taleb for spreading nonsense about IQ:

Taleb of course replies in a condescending manner.

I would love to see Jordan Peterson make a tweet challenging Taleb to a debate. One thing you may notice is, Taleb never debates anyone. He’ll do softball CNBC and Bloomberg interviews and go on podcasts, but he will never engage in one-on-one debate with an actual intellectual, probably because he knows he will be exposed for the intellectual lightweight he really is. Dr. Peterson, do it. Challenge Taleb to a debate, and if he refuses or backs down, it will prove what I and others have suspected all along. Judging by the comments on Twitter, everyone wants this debate to happen.

But I think Dr. Peterson is too polite to want to humiliate Taleb, or he’s not sure how to debate him. Taleb throws out a lot of jargon and neologisms (terminology such as “convexity”, “2nd order effects”, “fat-tailedness”, etc.) so to debate him would require not getting bogged down trying to parse what these words mean, but rather keeping the discussion focused on empirical evidence of psychometric research instead of mathematical abstractions.