Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

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I am an abrasive and "narrow minded" programmer - I believe in careful thought and analysis rather than mood affiliation and talking points. You might be surprised to discover that www.chrisstucchio.com represents my views and my views alone - I feel like you might have confused it with www.allprogrammerseverywhere.com. <- Snarky comment again represents me, not all programmers everywhere.

The article addresses what results are being calculated, and why other things you might wish to model are not included: "I’m going to focus on one specific aspect of it - a Cost/Benefit analysis studying the effects on the government budget, and [minus] the value of the work produced by people benefitting from the program. There are other aspects to consider, but I’m more interested in Monte Carlo than in politics, so I’m going to ignore those for the time being."

The ideology I'm pushing hard here is that you should carefully think and model things, rather than just reflexively saying "ooh complex, here are liberal/conservative talking points." I just picked on Basic Income specifically since I see a lot of discussions about it here (e.g. yesterday), and those discussions are just a mix of vapid and innumerate political talking points by people who clearly don't even have a mental model of the world.

If you want to build a better model, please do it. It will be vastly more useful than the normal discussion we see here on the topic of BI (and on many other such topics).

>you should carefully think and model things

I agree and that's basically my criticism of the article. The underlying economic model can be expressed in 2-3 arithmetic equations. It competes in a field where people routinely spend years to research very sophisticated models that nonetheless often prove inaccurate in the field [1].

To give an analogy, how would this sound as an argument to develop a business: "I assume that we can borrow 10M at 5% interest and pay it back over 5 years and that sales will increase 50% over that period. Here, I wrote some code and it turns out positive. I'm not interested in discussing the reasons for my sales forecast; if you have a different opinion, just write your own code." And we're not even talking about a business here, but the whole economy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econometrics#Limitations_and_cr...

I didn't attempt to claim that my proposal was the economic state of the art. I claimed it was a jumping off point to illustrate how to do monte carlo modelling in the third paragraph.

If you showed me your business forecast, I would indeed tweak the model until I felt the probability distributions governing the assumptions covered all the plausible values. The net result would likely just be a very fat distribution that said nothing. And if so, that's useful information to have.

That's very nearly the result we get here - note that the Basic Job estimates range from $300B to $1.5T. See Scarmig's excellent comment which cuts to the heart of this matter.

> And if so, that's useful information to have.

> That's very nearly the result we get here - note that the Basic Job estimates range from $300B to $1.5T.

The problem I have with this post is this. It is NOT useful information to have.

What is that range based on? Nothing. Your guesses. There is no known probability of the real-life result lying between those values, therefore the values are meaningless.

I'm all for models, models are great, but they need data. There's no point in a model based on assumptions, it's basically just a smokescreen for making your opinion look like fact.

> I would indeed tweak the model until I felt the probability distributions governing the assumptions covered all the plausible values.

Basically you would tweak the model until the result matched your opinion. If you had data of 100 similar startups and you calculated the distributions of their loans and sales growths, THEN AND ONLY THEN is your model useful

edit: I'm giving up on this thread now because I feel like this - http://xkcd.com/386/

To put it bluntly: the assumption that you could model something with such complex (and poorly understood) socioeconomic effects using a mathematical model is ludicrous. The onus is on you to show that you could even possibly account for enough of the important effects, the sufficient variation in their outcomes, unknown and unintended effects, and social reaction/adaption/exploitation. Some of these can't even be measured.

So your call for programming as a response says more about how well you understand the problem space, than anything about an alternative to current political discourse. Not only will people never use mathematical models to express their opinions, even if they did they would still talk past each other and hold tightly only to the answers which confirm their own biases. You misunderstand why and how people exhibit this behavior if you think a numerical mode of expression is the solution.

Everybody has a model. It might be specified in code, it might be a set of equations, or it might be a poorly-specified and half-unconscious set of assumptions and biases in your own head.

I'm having a hard time thinking of a topic involving economics where the latter would be preferable.

The mistake is to think that your set of equations do not merely encapsulate your half-unconscious, poorly-specified assumptions and biases.

They do and that's fine. Now that they're written down, they're conscious and specified, so we can examine both the assumptions and their implications.

The only assumption that is missing is how much is a years worth od disability vs a years worth of BI. The reason I ask is that there is defintiely a population of unknown sized that is on disability that maybe should not be on it (NPR/Planet Money covered this)

http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

without knowing how many would switch from disability to BI and/or BJ - hard to say (I would say based on the disabilities described, like severe back pain so no more construction, more would be inclined to switch to BI and not BJ)

but you are not thinking hard, you are running silly worthless simulations and puffing up your own ego.

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