INGELRII

Moscow and St. Petersburg have many demonstrators, but they are not representative of public opinion.

Levada Center polls are usually considered trustworthy. Levada is an independent polling organization that has been doing accurate polls even under government pressure (they were forbidden from polling during last elections if I remember correctly). Their polls indicate that Putin has ~70% approval ~30% disapproval.

I suspect that if Putin becomes unpopular, Levada polls just stop. Currently they are allowed to do polls because Putin is popular. Things can change fast. Putin's popularity may increase if people believe the propaganda that NATO is the reason for the war, or it collapses.

Not any authoritarian or totalitarian dictatorhip is fascist. Russia is getting there if they get the right energy going.

Robert Paxton (author of Anatomy of Fascism) points out that one feature of fascism is it's flexibility with doctirine and truth. It provides raw emotion and sensual experience.

>Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader's mystical union with historic destiny of his people. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one's petty concerns for the group's good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled cultural critic Walter Benjamin was first to point, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war.

>Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Fascism radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification.

Paxtons short definition is pretty good:

a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

1. Experiments, and natural experiments

2. causal discovery methods + generic assumptions

Economists are really putting effort into sound methodology.

(outside the United States point of view)

In Democracies with a reasonable proportional representation (PR) improving how to choose from N options, or how to allocate M resources, is secondary to the problem of how to select and parametrize N and M.

In PR democracies mechanism design should focus more on how to improve participation and deliberation before final voting.

Deliberation is a process of selecting and articulating options and figuring out problems. Mechanism design for deliberation can emphasize cooperation, dialogue, creativity and reason, as opposed to the use of power that is voting for given choices.

Thanks. Another number to watch is core inflation in the last 2 years. From a few months before covid to the latest number: Nov 2019: 265427, Nov 2021: 283201

Annualized Core CPI is 3.29%. +1.3% higher than the target.

My first order guess is that Fed will decrease asset purchases gradually and an interest rate hike in the next summer might happen if the long-term core inflation is higher than normal. This seems to be what they are communicating.

Relevant to Vitalik Buterin's Crypto Cities article https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/10/31/cities.html

I disagree. Japan, Taiwan, Korea are a good examples. They started by copying and making cheap trash. Gradually improving and catching up. It was not until the 80s when people started to notice that Japanese quality was up. Korea and Taiwan followed.

The corollary of all of this is that copying, mimicry and imitation is not lesser art.

Historically Asian artists and musicians imitated master's styles. Only after you are fully mastering the previous style, you can add something little of your own. "Confucian notion that all forms of creativity are for the collective; any copying or imitating is a high form of flattery, honoring one’s ancestors" [1]

This can extend to intellectual property and copying in industrial production. Making copies of products of others is seen very differently in China "Mutual reliance and sharing for the good of all have been most important for centuries in China, quite unlike the American belief of ownership of copyright and prot protection for the copyright holder."[1] "Intellectual property rights also do not show up in philosophical works or in literature, because of the general belief that knowledge cannot be owned. As we have seen, copying was a virtue in artistic production, and profiting from knowledge and artistic production was immoral." [2]

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[1] The Dissonance between Culture and Intellectual Property in China. Southeast Review of Asian Studies . 2008, Vol. 30, p182-187. 6p.

[2] Intellectual Property Rights and Chinese Tradition Section: Philosophical Foundations. Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Nov., 2006), pp. 1-9 (9 pages)

>It turns out it’s all true. The cars are impressive and their flaws get covered up. Musk is a lying ignorant grifter and he has inspired innovation in the electric car industry. Understanding that these seemingly contradictory things can be true simultaneously is important, because societies who cannot hold these two ideas at the same time may end up following scam artists and false prophets off the cliff and into the abyss.

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Societal Donatism, Bastian Rieck https://bastian.rieck.me/blog/posts/2021/donatism/

Donatists were a group of Christians in the fourth century. Their core tenet was that priests need to be ‘faultless’ in order for their prayers and for their sacraments to be valid.

Societal Donatism & Its Implications

I believe that some recent trends can be seen as a form of Societal Donatism. By this, I refer to the unspoken requirement that any creator in our society needs to be (almost) faultless or (almost) morally impeccable in order for their work to be allowed to persist in the public sphere. If, retroactively, it transpires that a person committed a crime or behaved in an untoward manner, their work is immediately called into question. Are we still allowed to enjoy their music, their films, their lecture materials? Should their awards—if any—be revoked?

Low cost index funds for over 7 year investment horizon.

If you are in the US and just want to keep the value, Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) directly from the U.S. Treasury. https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/tips/r...

> Technology is deflationary, things should get cheaper because we go after producing them in creative ways one demand is high.

And as a consequence the wages you earned by making tech year ago should have less value than the wage you earned today. You should expect small inflation. If you want deflationary money, wages should decline year by year.

If you want to save, don't hold cash.

Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (London: Macmillan and Co. 8th ed. 1920). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Economics_(Marsh...

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The relative fall in the incomes to be earned by moderate ability, however carefully trained, is accentuated by the rise in those that are obtained by many men of extraordinary ability. There never was a time at which moderately good oil paintings sold more cheaply than now, and there never was a time at which first-rate paintings sold so dearly. A business man of average ability and average good fortune gets now a lower rate of profits on his capital than at any previous time; while yet the operations, in which a man exceptionally favoured by genius and good luck can take part, are so extensive as to enable him to amass a huge fortune with a rapidity hitherto unknown.

The causes of this change are chiefly two; firstly, the general growth of wealth; and secondly, the development of new facilities for communication, by which men, who have once attained a commanding position, are enabled to apply their constructive or speculative genius to undertakings vaster, and extending over a wider area, than ever before.

It is the first cause, almost alone, that enables some barristers to command very high fees; for a rich client whose reputation, or fortune, or both, are at stake will scarcely count any price too high to secure the services of the best man he can get: and it is this again that enables jockeys and painters and musicians of exceptional ability to get very high prices. In all these occupations the highest incomes earned in our own generation are the highest that the world has yet seen. But so long as the number of persons who can be reached by a human voice is strictly limited, it is not very likely that any singer will make an advance on the £10,000, said to have been earned in a season by Mrs Billington at the beginning of last century, nearly as great as that which the business leaders of the present generation have made on those of the last.

---8<---

"But so long as" holds no more.

Insurance business is risk management in imperfect world. Quantifying the risk and pricing it is their business.

>Wouldn't it be better to simply invest that money in better security to begin with

ou are arguing for behavior without providing any suggestions on how to achieve it. "Wouldn't it be better to simply do the right thing." is not a solution.

What I propose is a set of policies and incentives that archive what you want.

This issue can be solved with mandatory insurance and compensation structure. For this sensitive private health information compensation should be at least 5 figures per person, no excuses. A data breach involving 10,000 people could cost 100s of millions.

Companies would have to take mandatory insurance against massive data leaks. In order to keep insurance fees reasonable, they would have to implement good security. Insurance companies would do audits because they don't want to lose money. They would promote secure data vaults, require hardware authentication devices from their customers in exchange of insuring them.

Car manufacturers must be prepared to do massive recalls in case there is a fault in the car. Automotive recall insurance is a big business. Same thing. Regulatory structures protecting consumers.

I'm against "entirely" anything.

There are no fixed solutions for organizing society. We don't know what it is to be a human (only strict ideologies are certain what humanity wants and what the goal is). Allowing changes and feedback is the key.

I'M NOT AN ANARCHIST.

Consider the difference between a faceless government and something with a face.

Faceless means impartial, once removed, not having skin in the game. Faceless means not having to take aside. Faceless allows more formality.

Face means somebody who knows you personally. Anarchism means a governing body with a face. People close to you. Society 'freely organizing itself' means politics and people gaining power with social influence. Instead of visible hierarchies, it means invisible hierarchies build from personal relationships.

I want more participatory democracy, more deliberative democracy, not anarchism. Modern liberal democracy with laws and principles and visible hierarchies allows individuals to separate themselves from the village, the mob and the social games involved.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_democracy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_democracy

“Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.” — Charlie Munger, https://fs.blog/2017/10/bias-incentives-reinforcement/

Mechanism design is a subfield of game theory and economics called mechanism design that tackles this directly.

Instead of having a game and figuring out how it works and what is the outcome is when agents play it, the problem is to design a game that creates desired outcomes when selfish agents play it.

It's possible to design mechanisms where utilitarian social-choice function is the best choice even when players are selfish. The most famous result in the field is Vickrey–Clarke–Groves mechanism to achieve a socially-optimal solution in auctions. Quadratic voting and quadratic funding is another interesting mechanism that results good outcomes. Vitalik Buterin is involved with this too.

Unnecessary accuracy is technical incompetence.

Maybe GPT-3 and its successors could be used as a filter to force people to say something or meaningful or get ignored. Instead making new sentences it could be used as a tool to give "cliché index".

Imagine browser filter that kills platitudes, talking points, PR talk, and empty posturing just like ad blocker.

How many of you remember MegaHal (1998) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaHAL

It said many random clever sounding things. For example:

I COULD SHAKE MY TINY FIST AND SWEAR I WASN'T WRONG, BUT WHAT'S THE SENSE IN ARGUING WHEN YOU'RE MUCH TOO BUSY RETURNING TO THE LAVATOR.

COWS FLY LIKE CLOUDS BUT THEY ARE NEVER COMPLETELY SUCCESSFUL.

COWS FLY LIKE CLOUDS BUT THEY ALSO HAVE VERY SAD DEATH. BUT AT LEAST WITTY?

TIME. TIME. WHAT IS TIME? SWISS MANUFACTURE IT. FRENCH HORDE IT. ITALIANS WANT IT, HUH? WELL, I MUST BE THURSDAY. I NEVER COULD GET THE HANG OF THURSDAYS.

CHESS IS A FUN SPORT, WHEN PLAYED WITH SHOT GUNS.

If there is one thing I would suggest for all large open source projects, it's separating the functionality, data model etc. from UI as much as possible.

It should be possible to have two separate open source projects. One is just extensive framework library with good API and the another is user interface. This would allow multiple separate UI's, web interface, command line, mobile, tablet, etc.

(Not native English speaker, non-American here)

Master seems a perfect word to describe anything that is controlling or has authority over the other thing. Things can be a person, organization, device.

Slave seems like a perfect word to describe any concept related to objects that lack autonomy, are controlled or owned by something else.

Master/slave is very common idiom. I understand the issue of racist language, but words are context dependent. Surely racism can't spread trough language associations?

These are not racist language: “I’m slave of my passions”, “I’m master of my destiny”, “I have master degree.”, “He is master of his house.”, “Yes master“ (Star Wars), “Master Sergeant“.

But then using the word in github is somehow racist even tough it is misnomer. Master is not controlling anything, it's main or primary.

There are two types of peer review.

1. Pre-publication peer review Reviewers examine the work before it's presented to the rest of the people.

2. Post-publication peer review Paper on an online forum where others can read and comment and cite them. Papers can be accepted into journals and go trough peer-review later.

Post-publication peer review does not mean that authors can't use pre-publication peer review. Scientists can (and should be encouraged) to ask their colleagues to review papers before posting online to spot errors.

Some fields have long tradition to publishing and circulating working papers, manuscripts, drafts, posters etc. years before they submit the final paper for publication and pre-publication peer-review. That works as well.

Appeal to authority is not not deductively valid and thus it's logical fallacy.

On the other hand very little can be learned with deductive reasoning at once. Deductive chains in debate are very short and shortcuts must be used.

Authority can be used to weigh or prioritize evidence. If you are not doing serious research into the subject, authority is one heuristic that works extremely well.

For example, when two relatively ignorant layman debate in the internet and have limited interest or effort invested to get into the truth. Finding out that something is mainstream view among authorities in the field should end the argument for the time being for the lack of more information. Unfortunately the discussion usually ends with questioning that particular field, then the progress of the society as a whole. Scientists have been wrong before so .. they can also be corrupt ...

True. Corrected.

>This is sadly common on Internet debates

Internet debates can be really good in very small, focused or closed forums where people have time to learn each other over time. Some mailing lists and tiny groups are phenomenal.

Debates that happen between strangers in a single point of time don't have the minimum requirements for a good debate. Without shared context, history and commitment to the debate it's hard to get any results even among people who try hard.

Very true. Two very frequent argumentative errors in online comments are:

1) refuting argument with counterexample.

2) refuting causal argument with alternative cause.

Very few things in the world is universally true without exceptions or universal. Words all or everyone do not imply universal quantification (∀) in normal use of language.

> They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions.

Is there any danger for them? PG seems to have very idealistic view of politics.

As far as I know, any amount of fact checking in politics don't change political views.

Will Fox News lose any viewers over this? Politicians may lose jobs because bad economy, but will they lose votes because they were wrong and ignorant?

H. L. Mencken wrote:

> No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.

I think there is great Mencken experiment going on. Always underestimate public and see how far you can go.

In addition to noise and small changes, the same genome can contain multitude of mutually exclusive anatomical and behavioral traits.

For example, high stress environment might trigger different genetic traits than low stress environment, it's neither nature or nurture but both. In some animals you can get so different phenotype by altering environment that it's hard to recognize that they are the same species.

The idea that the genes just run the same process for the same set of genes and the environment just linearly modulates some traits is not the whole picture.