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Comment by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | Hacker News Reader

My best friend recently said microeconomics is "bullshit" and I don't know how to handle that. I take it for granted, like algebra, it's like saying gravity is bullshit. What other model is there? They didn't propose one.

> Soon you’ll have no friends

At the rate I'm going. Of course this could all be fallout from the biggest Shiri's Scissor ever fired, hitting the US.

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> I take it for granted, like algebra, it's like saying gravity is bullshit. What other model is there?

I somewhat relate to their position. Something can be probably wrong, even if no better alternative can be proposed. I haven't seen a case in my personal life where the laws of gravity are off by any observable amount. Microeconomic rules felt broken at times.

Maybe no economic model works on everything in advance, and you'd need to first deeply understand situations before actually picking an abstraction, to minimize the denaturation of reality.

>What other model is there? They didn't propose one.

Start with Praxeology (the methodology of Austrian economics). Specifically, Mises’ Human Action.

The simple axiom that all preferences are subjective instantly eliminates a lot of the foundation of micro (and macro) economics as it is typically taught today.

In other words,

  “All preferences are subjective but some ikigais locally align (or at least have positive inner product*)”

In yet further words, Each of us would like to find our ikigai-trading neighbors so as to figure out the pareto-optimal way to move forward in cluster[-fuck]s [for that profane diversity-curious outsider take]

*i see that theHeisenberg uncertainty principle was codependency injected[0] into section 5[1] — a negative example of the very point?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Action#Summary

[1] 5 Causality as a requirement for human action

I had to have an LLM explain this to me what in the world this comment means, but I take it as a positive. Every day is a school day, and I'm glad I don't need to do two hours of background reading to decode this to my satisfaction.

https://cdn.mises.org/Human%20Action_3.pdf

p139, under slight substitution (keeping in mind that Mises wrote in 1940)

> The accomplishment gratifies [the grad student] neither mediately nor immediately. It does not gratify him mediately because his fellow men at best are unconcerned about it, more often even greet it with taunts, sneers, and persecution. Many a [grad student] could have used his gifts to render his life agreeable and joyful*; he did not even consider such a possibility and chose the thorny path without hesitation. The [grad student] wants to accomplish what he considers his mission, even if he knows that he moves toward his own disaster.

see also footnote 23? (would Rao call Mises' geniuses Clueless or Losers?)

* it furthers the great man to enjoy the life of the sage?

I do respectfully interpret {pg,tlb,rtm} as preferring to become genius hunters that fail well to remaining grad students that succeed badly..

(Thanks for reminding me of the cases of Niedermeyer and Takesaki, more appropriate to remember as them grad students rather than geniuses?)

Albeit the more apt metaproblem would be the one of enabling these “grad students” to hunt “genius projects” in teams. not sure if YC itself was meant to be this kind of genius project— i cant tell if that project proved its salt by seducing the {OGs} with a barrage of noble, monastic yet fecund suffering… perhaps not, since they kinda moved on to comfortable spiessig lives (as have their successors, mostly)

::::

vM (good or bad faith?) sidestepped the “Rao Normalization” issue by citing only nonSTEM “geniuses”, YC embraced 2 rounds of “Rao Normalization”: “finding our ikigai by hiring G/GS to find what pple want”

Edit: Rao-Sturgeon Normalization

Lagniappe: https://archive.ph/G5nXO

Cultural revo for the old c. :=> wardriven emigration to the relatively hilly Eastcoast

>these prizes give me the willies … use… the money to help grad students

Echoes of JZY’s straight hook…

(Compare with the ineffective ennoblement of vM’s or Volodya illyich’s line)

https://www.geni.com/people/Mayer-Rachmiel-von-Mises-Edler/6... looks like a railroad Macher

(railroads were for my family what textiles were for my wife's; both techs were spiritual predecessors of inkering)

EDIT: helping grad students reminds me of the ending to Двенадцать стульев !

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcGnYLVixeY (pastiche of « La Danse Apache » )

VIU? Am I missing something? I see an embalming but not an ennoblement?

En wiki claims (via Gorky) he was entitled to sign off as a statskiy sovetnik(‘s son)

> "After we had been married for years it occurred to me that he never puts salt on anything."

The fox doesn't quite manage to brush his tail over his tracks. What is the finest topology in which the "flunked over a hottie" stories form a convergent sequence?

EDIT: next up, BCB bio?

I am disappointed that tlb's middle name is not "Lookaside" but appreciate:

> Arbitrary decisions should be made randomly —TLB

(does gwern know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-discrepancy_sequence#Const... ? they seem unmentioned, as does φ in a circular space...)

(Yes. Low-discrepancy sequences are the WP link for "a special random number generator" in /unsort, and I considered that link to also cover quasi-Monte Carlo etc. I'm not immediately sure what you mean by "φ in a circular space" though.)

My bad, I'd just ^F'd with a purely syntactic search on a few terms.

If you can arrange your space from 0,..1 and identify 1 with 0 to make it circular, obviously (consider 1/3, 2/3, etc.) advancing by any amount in ℚ will fail to explore a lot of the space. The flip side of this is that φ, or 1/φ, are the least-ℚ-like regular things in ℝ: if we consider good approximations to be places in the continued fraction where there's a large entry, that never occurs. (their continued fraction representation is repeated 1's)

This comes up with "how do sunflowers know about φ?", the answer to which seems to be: they don't, they're just creating new seeds in the least-correlated place to all the existing seeds, and because of the property above, that tends to result in apparently-spiraling placements which can be fitted with fibonaccis or φs.

Does that make sense?

That makes sense. Sounds interesting - do you have a favored reference? Quickly looking, I did find https://gwern.net/doc/math/1974-mathai.pdf

Top of my deadtree stack is Chazelle, The Discrepancy Method (1998)

(Father of the regrettably more famous Chazelle, if you’re okay californicating rabbit holes)

Update:

Now that I've pushed BC back to the stack, here's a ref that might be worthier of the (nonnewtonian) process heap

https://archive.fo/4mlUU

(Pls use the usual Chinese bulk carrier resilient doi tricks as might be required)

Lagniappe:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

That sounds like the perfect swith* for me as well — I'd already been meaning to hide some imperative O(n)s behind functional-seeming O(n log n)s, but if soft heaps have no huge constant involved, maybe no rabbits have to be hidden in hats?

* http://bitsnbobstones.watershipdown.org/lapine/unit12.html#:...

Heh, not that any of us would be willing to tolerate getting stuff back in corrupted order ;)

If the constant factors aren't intolerable, it seems like one really ought to be able to do something with the fact that corruption (galois connection connexion?) only happens in one direction (corruption monad as closure)...

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yExwkQYcp0

I would, ipso facto(rio), in the hope that some of these corruptions, like Shakespeare's monkeys, would rephrase the muddled messages I get from the aether in something worth remembering for all time..

Maybe you could get a professor from the Academy of Projectors in Lagado to agree to advise, whereby you could get allocated some time on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engine for your own research?

(thanks for reminding me of "Have not I the most reason to complain, when I see these very Yahoos carried by Houyhnhnms in a vehicle, as if they were brutes, and those the rational creatures?"!)

No favoured reference on my part, but Kragen's played around with this before, so he might have some ideas...

Its also worth placeholdering that PG’s role model is the aanglo neoEdwardian(?) (Bloomsbury) jMKeynes rather than the teutonic (neoVic) vonMises, considering the diverging hypernormal interpretations of their legacy.

(Compare with anglophile GCL?)

Refactoring KST’s (from Rainer?) “only 2 games worth playing, the opening game and the endgame”, i propose: “only 2 things worth doing: showing its possible or making it easy”

That's beautiful. It not only gives us a relatively objective measure of genius, but it also explain's my fencing teacher's opinion that the most beautiful move is "feint direct; direct":

   - the feint direct shows a touch is possible
   - the direct is the easiest possible touch

Of course, that almost never happens. RPF (like TAE) says that if you want to show it's possible, you have to schlep a lot beforehand discovering what's impossible ("you are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike"); Moore's Crossing the Chasm (1991) says that if you want to make it easy, you have to schlep a lot beforehand providing value to people who can make use of your stuff even before it's easy ("You are in a twisty maze of passageways, all different").

EDIT: Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1MlXmNSL7s#t=210s

> Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back —PH

>> Problems… —PH

With gratitude, i’d already riffen on this with “… [YC] proved its salt…”

Riffing on the schlep of “talking to users” my current (more designori-oriented?) variant is “building a marketplace Elon style”

> marketplace Elon style

which would be? (should I comment out my Elon filter?)

Stylewise I'm far more familiar with the agoric stoa*: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

* in both its archeological and its modern incarnations

    Start with Praxeology (the methodology of Austrian economics).

"Start with a fringe ideology that explicitly rejects empirical evidence" is not exactly a good start.

    The simple axiom that all preferences are subjective instantly eliminates a lot of the foundation of micro (and macro) economics as it is typically taught today.

No? If anything, econ 101 classes are basically Austrian economics classes due to how many idealized simplifying assumptions are made. And subjective preference curves are the entire basis of the supply/demand graphs that econ 101 students are bombarded with.

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