Often Wrong, But Never in Doubt | Hacker News Reader

Often Wrong, But Never in Doubt

nytimes.com

16 pointstimr16 comments

http://roughly.beasts.org/ gives you another chance to check your calibration. Answer 30 questions from random general knowledge, estimating both the answer and your range of uncertainty. However, it gives you one score which is some kind of combination of your accuracy of estimation and of calibration; you'll have to separate those factors yourself from the full results.

The problem is very simple: What passes for "Economics" is political propaganda. The government wants to spend without limit and wants to believe the economy is "strong" and that they made it "strong", so they call for forecasts that the economy is recovering and they call for economic policies that justify government spending.

Obama actually said "Some critics have said my Stimulus package is just a bunch of spending, but what do you think Stimulus IS?". Equating government spending (which does damage to the economy) with "stimulus".

So long as your doctors are giving the patient poison, and telling you that health is just around the corner, of course they're going to be wrong and you're going to be confused.

Economic is really straightforward. It is just that economic reality is not convenient for politicians.

Less spending, less regulation, and preferably go back to a gold standard or somehow structurally stop inflation.... and the economy will eventually start to get better.

What we have now is a near dead patient whose being injected with ever larger doses of amphetamines to keep him moving and "in recovery". Eventually it will kill him.

Stimulus spending is nonsense and political poison?

So Honda shouldn't borrow money to build a new plant but should save up until they can pay cash? Borrowing now to build productivity and cash flow later is a delicate move on such a large scale, to be sure, but that's a far cry from it being bunk science.

p.s. the gold standard didn't work.

The government never pays back the borrowed money, it just prints money. When it does this it dilutes the total number of dollars out there, which is called inflation. This means that every business then has to spend more to buy the goods and services they need and pay their employees more. Thus, even if the stimulus were perfectly spent, the cost of the stimulus does more damage to the economy than the stimulus could try to fix.

To compare it to a a business taking out a loan is nonsensical. Businesses repay loans, and those loans are backed by assets (such as the business or the plant being built)

You represent exactly the problem I'm talking about. You know nothing about economics and you can't even make an economic argument (re: your assertion about the gold standard) yet you are totally convinced that I said something wrong. You have been taught to believe junk science and not only to believe it, but to believe that anyone who speaks differently is somehow wrong and not worth arguing with. This is ideological conditioning, and politicians use it effectively to be able to put one over on you, and others like you. Since much of the population was educated in government run schools to engage in non-think this way, I will never convince you.

And that is why this countries economy is going to continue to crater, until we have a major political upheaval.

Dude, we get it. You're a libertarian. It's very exciting that you've figured absolutely everything out and can offer a ridiculously simple solution that civilizations for the last ten thousand years have somehow overlooked. It's just too bad that there are shadowy conspiracies aligned against you and other libertarians, and that people are so ignorant and brainwashed that they can't see how effective your exceedingly simplistic recommendations would be if only we could all agree to make vast sweeping changes to how our governments work.

Sorry for the bile, but wow is this ideology, and it's increasing presence on this site, getting tedious to me.

These ideas are not new. They are not as brilliant as you think, and in fact are a sign of intellectual immaturity - a stage that you grow out of once you start to realize how irreducibly complex the actual world is.

Or maybe I'm wrong, and you have figured it all out. Luckily for you we have a system that's perfect for people who know for certain how the economy will behave. Let me know when you've made your billions shorting the US economy. A great way to get past believing in simplistic ideologies is to start putting your money where your mouth is.

You assume my money isn't where my mouth is because yours isn't. Your just insulting me because you don't have a counter argument. It's a shame that so many on this site are so young or poorly educated that they are voting up your name calling and voting down my argument.

I made a killing knowing the housing market was going to be in a bubble. Ni figured this out around 2001 so I got to work both sides-- the run pup and the fall. I make a handsome income betting on economic ignorance in the us, and so I should thank you for taking the other side of some very profitable trades.

I do so well that I don't have to work for others and can fund my own startup ideas at funding levels equivalent to small VC deals or large angel deals.

The reality is, civilizations and economists have figured out the science I am attempting to educate you on. Keynesianism is relatively new, which apparently is news to you.

The problem you have us that you reject the science of economics because it doesn't agree with your socialist religion. You probably don't even think of yourself as a socialist.

Ultimately your ignorance and resorting to personal attack instead of argument, and the ditto head voting in this thread prove my thesis.

Correct, I'm not addressing your argument. What I'm doing is scolding you for highjacking this thread with your simple-minded ideology.

I've always come to this site for interesting and novel ways of looking at the world. What you're offering is neither. We've heard it before.

Perhaps instead of considering all the negative votes as further reinforcement of your views, how about looking at it this way: maybe it's the wisdom of the crowds telling you that your ideology isn't as revolutionary or as brilliant as you think it is, and maybe it's a sign that using HN as a soapbox for it isn't welcome.

This has nothing to do with socialism (or whatever you perceive to be your ideological enemy). It's about the the intellectual value of what you are bringing to the conversation.

You're fucking idiot who has nothing to offer but insults. The reason is that you have been trained not to think. Of course those who do think are quite a threat. So you attack. It really shows hphow pathetic you are.

did you even read the article?

this article is about CFO's inability to estimate their own forecasting abilities. your comment is totally irrelevant.

Actually it is relevant because it is the rejection of the science if economics that kids to the inability to forecast. The housing bubble, for instance was easy to see coming....if you understand economics.

I stopped reading when I got the moon question pretty much dead on.

Thanks for downvoting...here's more info:

When we say we are sure about a certain fact, for example, we may well be right only half the time.

To see how it works, try this little quiz: Give two estimates of the diameter of the moon in miles -- a high and a low one, so that there is about a 10 percent chance that the moon is bigger than the upper estimate and a 10 percent chance that it is smaller than the lower one.

I know that the circumference of the Earth is about 25000 miles, and I know that circumference is pi * diameter, which makes the diameter of Earth about 8000 miles. I also know that the moon is about 1/4th the size of Earth, so I guessed 2000-2500 miles for its diameter.

The correct answer is 2160, so I didn't see the merit in continuing to read an article about how people get overconfident when forecasting.

Interesting. One could have concluded that it was a bad example, but you concluded you have no overconfidence problem.

you concluded you have no overconfidence problem

No, you concluded that. I concluded that the article wasn't worth reading (largely because the author chose a bad example).

Heh. I also calculated it from facts I knew, and got it wrong, even accounting for approximations and uncertainties. The facts I happened to know made for a trickier calculation. (The moon makes one pretty-circular orbit per month following Newton's laws; it subtends 1 degree in the sky. But actually it subtends 1/2 degree -- I haven't checked if this was my only error, but gosh, it sure is easy to goof.)

Now there's a take on the authors thesis I missed the first time around. The fact that you can "know too much" and get the question wrong. In my example, I was so sure the Earth had a diameter or 25,000 miles, but I could have been completely wrong about that fact.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com