Author: smartistone

I saw this tweet: one things that always reminds me that domain experience is irreplaceable and first principles + 140 IQ alone doesn't cut it is reading tourist LessWrongers talk about the financial markets — yung macro 宏观年少传奇 (@apralky) June 14, 2025 Experience matters, but having a good system or model of the world is… Continue reading Systems are Better than Experience

In response to Curtis Yarvin’s post “The riddle of the niggardly billionaires,” I posit philanthropy is largely ineffective for opposing wokeness. The right is much more successful at affecting sentiment through a more bottom-up or grassroots process starting online, than patronage or indirect power. Negative sentiment can affect the ‘real world’ in material ways, much… Continue reading Why affecting online sentiment is more effective than philanthropy

Twitter’s 2022 revenue sharing program for blue/verified accounts has predictably opened the floodgates of slop for the purpose of boosting engagement and hence ad revenue. Slop differs from your typical spam, e.g. casinos or pills, in that it’s marketed under the pretext of being insightful or new, when it’s either stale and or clickbait. The… Continue reading How ‘slop’ hijacks our senses

Item #1: Bitcoin continues to fall Recall last week Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent refuted the possibly of the U.S. buying Bitcoin to fund the crypto reserve. This led to an immediate selloff of the price of Bitcoin from $120k to $118k. A lot people assumed the selling would temporary, but it has continued to fall.… Continue reading The daily view 8/21/2025 Bitcoin falls, Terence Tao funding cut, Epstein

Why are so many young people delaying family formation? Rather than some deep social analysis, it can simply be explained that men and women alike enjoy having free time. When viewed through the lens of maximizing one’s free time, it makes more sense. Having enough free time is an essential ingredient for being successful. And… Continue reading Careerism is rational

Has society gotten easier or harder? The usual rebuttal is that society is wealthier now compared to, say, 30 years ago. And this is true if you go by the objective economic data, but at the same time it’s hard for me to think of examples where American society has necessarily gotten easier or feels… Continue reading Why everything has gotten harder

I saw this going viral, “Sunny Days Are Warm: Why LinkedIn Rewards Mediocrity“: I, like many people, find LinkedIn particularly annoying. I like the premise of it, don’t get me wrong, a resume you don’t need to update all that often seems cool. Unfortunately though, its turned into the worst possible version of itself. It’s… Continue reading Most content is mediocre because most people are mediocre

Item #1: Bitcoin continue to lag tech stocks; huge profit with shorting method; Scott Bessent rules out any treasury purchases. I covered this yesterday, but this week has been among the strongest in a long time as BTC continues to lag tech stocks. The divergence has is quite pronounced over the past month, for example… Continue reading The Daily View 8/15/2025: Bitcoin, Math, National Debt, AI Bubble?

Two weeks ago I published “More correct predictions , and the role of IQ and forecasting” , in which I predicted no Bitcoin reserve, in addition to the success of Bitcoin hedging method, by modifying it to short Bitcoin 24-7 instead of only during market hours. Just a few hours ago, this bombshell dropped. After… Continue reading Scott Bessent rules out Bitcoin purchases, CPI low: right again

A couple of days ago I argued that the impact of AI (in the context of LLMs) on the economy will be sanguine. This will come to the possible relief of some and to the disappointment of others. There will be no AGI, takeoff, ramp-up or other hyped-up scenarios in which AI somehow escapes its… Continue reading Investing for AGI/takeoff