129 karma · joined April 18, 2020
The author like then lauds some impressive/hard to conduct/large-scale interventions which are formidable but don't really teach us about economic theory, and in fact neither were published in economics journals. Maybe the field should move in that direction, I am agnostic on the point, but the author's argument wasn't coherent in my opinion.
[1] https://rajchetty.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/behavioral_...
[2] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Selective%20Atte...
I think it's more likely they get really caught up in the moment or something among those lines. I am interested in what in what it would be like to go to a concert of a bar with one of these people.
> 1. If you hold your coins at a regulated exchange, sure yeah the authorities can probably get a warrant and seize your Bitcoins.
> 2. If you hold your coins in your own wallet but you write down your private key in, like, your phone’s notes app, and it backs up to the cloud, then the authorities can probably get your cloud provider to give them access to your notes and read the key and use that to seize all your Bitcoins. (This happened to the alleged Bitfinex hack launderers.)
> 3. If you write your private key on a scrap of paper, the authorities can search your house until they find it and seize all your Bitcoins.
> 4. If you memorize your private key, or just write it down somewhere really safe, then they can arrest you and throw you in jail until you tell them what it is, and then seize all your Bitcoins.
Besides going to school for 20 years, being well-fed and rested, presumably it's taking modafinil?
I think this is a common critique, but I also think it is missing the point. What if the question of interest isn't so easily verifiable like in Engineering? Do we just throw up our hands and give up on those questions? [The alternative to good social science is not no social science, it’s bad social science](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/03/12/the-social...).
Finance is also a bit tautological in this regard. It seems that often prediction models are impossible to disprove (e.g., our arbitrage method doesn't work anymore, the market updated). Yes good for putting skin in the game, but doesn't seem like it does much to advance our long-term understanding of humans.
Maybe it makes sense for someone in my position to just go bite the bullet and go through the Eloquent JavaScript even though I feel like I already have a fair grasp of the content? Or learn some key principles of Software Engineering?
> This is not their main priority.
I think you're right to say that this is not their main priority, but I think they actually do quite good letting in more more poor kids (at least better than most people expect).
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/09/th...
I am a PhD student in a non-engineering field. I've been taking as many math and stats courses as I can, but what other courses should I be trying to take if I want to excel as a data scientist? Software engineering CS type courses?
To bring things back to the original question, I think this whole experience has made me skeptical of people who optimize their life around income (past a certain point). At the same time I think chasing a higher income is probably an addictive to some degree, so I understand how people can fall into that and I think it might change people (my girlfriend obviously was not like this when we met).
My takeaway as a low-income person, is that I think high-income people will always dismiss me if I make these types of statements. "Of course he thinks this way, he's just a poor a student!". It's this kind of tautology that makes it impossible to deny being an alcoholic, etc. As far as I'm concerned, from my current position, it is impossible to persuade anyone that is dismissive about low-income people to think otherwise.
She has told me about how her coworkers make fun of men behind their back when their wives are promoted to higher positions than them (e.g., things like "we know who's in charge of that relationship"); asks me questions like how would I afford to pay for my parent's cancer treatment if they were to get cancer; reminds me I will not be able to afford a house while her friends are buying houses; has expressed dissatisfaction for me preferring designer Uniqlo collections rather than actual designer clothing; and has given me a hard time about being in a low income field (not studying CS or engineering).
edited: I thought of more points to add.
However when my longtime girlfriend (working in finance) feels insecure dating a man with a lower income, and is not happy with me because I can't afford / am not interested in luxury vacations and sport cars then my income becomes an issue. When I chose my job I knew I'd be taking a big loss in earnings and I knew I would be okay with that, but when it affects the people important in my life and they think less of me because of my low salary it feels bad.
Do you have any more thoughts about this point? In my own life I’ve seen some of my friends with hotshot jobs develop this sort of mentality, and I sort of don’t know what to make of it. I want to be like “this is a toxic attitude to have!” but at the same time I can’t make a better argument than it’s immoral and without janitors we’d all be dead.