Comment by aebtebeten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aebtebeten | Hacker News Reader

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My bad: I got the fox and lion analogy wrong.

(NdBdM apparently said the prince ought to be able to be both fox and lion; like HKH had both Knecht and Designori? What about Tito?

"The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves."

[not yet checked for context/translation])

Sorry, I'd been too quick to assume it fit nicely in with our early tripartitions, based on some blogiating that I'm not finding in my verlauf at the moment. So I'd been imagining TCCAG (in Graves' telling), d-d-disguising himself as one of the clueless, in order to survive the machinations of the psychopaths that had killed off every other male in his family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio-Claudian_family_tree#Sim...

Found it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_of_elites#Governin... ; it must've been the Burnham connection that set me off on 1984 and then to Rao. Note that here the foxes and lions are distinct people; hence my confusion.

EDIT: Pareto definitely thinks of foxes and lions as distinct, but he must've introduced them somewhat earlier than §2178 (The Mind and Society/The General Form of Society/Force and Class-circulation): https://archive.org/details/ParetoTheMindAndSocietyVol4TheGe...

As to Rao-fox-lion quadrantology.. how to classify pear AI problem? (We can say nang et al were barbarians promoted to founders but that is cheap*. Otoh 1 o the more interesting facts from that case is some partners attempting to empirically price their social media marketing thesis)

JPsmith on JCScott Against the Grain has another take on Rao, proweird being the barbarians trading with the State

Tfound the crucial clause on pants from the Psmith-on-Stripe-Clueless that you pointed at

*>derives much of [][] moral and affective sympathies from the claim that [][] is smarter and better and more efficient [s/_/effective] than anybody else

Insert insider,expert,Feynman,YC,lion,officer,peer,etc

& Whatever is the Other’s (prole,designor,founder,funder,clueless,loser,customer,peer)’s fave metric!

wrt https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-scaling-people-by-claire... , something else about the early middle ages:

During the XIII, tournaments were open invite, and were pretty much war games held over the fields in between villages. Of course, it's very unlikely that anyone not already an aristo could show up with horses and panoply, let alone show up and prove de facto effective, but the few that did had a chance there to win even more horses and armour by ransoming off any captured actual aristos.

Well before the XVIII, tournaments switched to closed format, held in specially built arenas, and an official part of the tournament included going around the room and having everyone introduce themselves (or be introduced, to be even fancier) which de jure kept out any gatecrashed aspiring riffraff.

Might (for those that have central bank control, anyway) imposing an irregular tidal ebb be a useful variant of mode-switching, in order to effectively signal who's wearing (or not) their budgie smugglers?

Pear AI: according to NdBdM's original* scheme, Nang et al were foxes, who had schemed, yet could not defend themselves from the wolf (according to russians, wolves are the "paramedics of the forest", for despite not being doctors, they take care of the sick and elderly...). YC? I suppose they should, if it isn't already there, add some legalese to closing documents so founders bear full responsibility for bringing a clean venture to the table. (there could be a different split of responsibility, but since YC is running a retail operation I wouldn't expect one)

* Had Machiavelli, in writing (1532):

> You must know there are two ways of contesting, the one by the law, the other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince to understand how to avail himself of the beast and the man. This has been figuratively taught to princes by ancient writers, who describe how Achilles and many other princes of old were given to the Centaur Chiron to nurse, who brought them up in his discipline; which means solely that, as they had for a teacher one who was half beast and half man...

been referring to Cicero, De Officiis (44 BC)?

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

> ...there are two ways of settling a dispute: first, by discussion; second, by physical force; and since the former is characteristic of man, the latter of the brute, we must resort to force only in case we may not avail ourselves of discussion.

(I'm surprised I've not read this work until now. With a little skimming, it confirms my reverse-engineering of the cardinal virtues as arising as oppositions [albeit not strictly pairwise]:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

and has interesting things to say about Castalia:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

about immigration:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

Gemeinschaft vs Gesellschaft:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

and even Pareto Optimality:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... )

EDIT: no, lifted, negated, and expanded to chapter length!

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

What is your personal take on the smuggling of budgie smugglers? is it fraudulent?

Central bank: HN had a bit to say on MF’s thermostat, id=4915751, rayiner on pubgoods 4915946

psmith pants-mongering on JW Central Banking 101 (very likely that one o both psmiths econometrician, btw):

>On twitter you can see our real rulers humiliating themselves

[meanwhile on HN…]

On immigration i submit that it is morally wrong to avail foreigners of the capital destructive tools of the geographic rome of our times (which some, ahem, poets identify as carthage of Moloch)

  I arbitrage away regulatory inefficiencies
  You are a smuggler
  They fraudulently profit

(but we shouldn't expect much budgie smuggler smuggling, because although they are small and light, they aren't worth anything. Cicero claims most quotidian decisions are taken between more honourable and less honourable or more expedient or less expedient, and that it is exceptional to weigh the less honourable but more expedient course against the more honourable but less expedient; in this case smuggling budgie smugglers is neither)

Is econometrics something like https://xkcd.com/1838/ ?

Re: rayiner, I'd say Pareto was right on there: a think tank's job is not to discern, as Cicero would have it, but to come up with derivations that fit their funders' residues.

As far as twitter goes, I'm pretty sure foxes have more sense [this is also one of the areas where I take issue with the psmiths[0]: they don't seem to think of CEOs as the hired help; high class house servants as The Virginian (1902) puts it]; the lion has a huge mane but the fox has at least two exits to its den (and, if we believe the eastern tales, more than one[1] tail).

We do get to see some amazing spin on it, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE0GTgTzoxs

[0] with Cicero, it'd be his spiessig bent — but looking at his background he would be; wouldn't he?

[1] to what extent are prison tattoos a means of making it impossible to become a turncoat/change tails? (compare Maori moko: your face is your id card?)

EDIT: forgot capital destruction; that's a wonderful example of a lion (the Rastafarian one) infamous for doing the foxes' dirty work.

Mea culpa. I've done the econometricians a great disservice!

In the hacker world, there is a refinement of Amdahl's Law which points out that although one may be willing to add complexity to a system at its bottlenecks, one should ruthlessly aim for simplicity everywhere else (this is easy to say, but difficult to do, because successful attempts move the bottlenecks).

I like to think of this as a computation being like a mountain stream, where changing the topography only matters at waterfalls; inside of pools it'd just be wasted effort. (to first order; at higher orders I'd hold that adding complexity inside of pools is actively detrimental, while removing it there may [beware of parenthetical above] be helpful)

In the econometrics world, Shapley–Shubik clarifies* the circumstances under which relative power differences between members of a coalition become moot: either they hang together or they hang separately.

* in particular, a functional triad is worth 417/2145.

ERRATUM: also, please correct "amazing spin on it", supra, to "amazing spin on X (né twitter)"

EDIT: even the appearance of a functional triad; for those more utilitarian than Pareto optimal that 417/2145 would be worth hecatombs of glowing boomers. Today I don't enjoy the "P! Who put valenki on management panel?" anecdote so much.

wrt to psmith pants-mongering (hip trendy rascal Archer slid panty?), I always figured that if short squeezes are billionaire's poker (4 years being the longest hand of which I'm aware), betting against a major central bank would be trillionaire's poker.

For most people, it's not a question of if* they know what they're doing, but if you can stay solvent (pace "in the long run") long enough for the tide to go out.

(I don't know about you, but if I ever attempted to attack THB, my net worth would a.a. meet an absorbing barrier at 0)

* if I were a central bank, and someone asked me if I knew what I was doing, I would be tempted to reply "we do not have a single theory, but rather a cluster of models and results".

Did you mean 421? It’s embarrassingly peripheral for now to say that this empirical index (as well as _lambda) is related to “entropy”, or even more shamefully, “sophistication”. Why india not perm, as romer says, population size <-/-> human capital, uk has veto o’er hollywood (only a brit can order hollywood to GTFO) & hollywood has the mandate o heaven, bollywood not (yet) a substitute.

For we need a workable modern definition of lion & fox (the 2 forms of human capital) to cover all the cases. we agree that designori are humans who can switch modes or engage both simultaneously?

[Pants were intended to be a gadget to help foxes adopt a (intellectual) lion mode, or vice versa]

  Lion: embraces externalities/expediencies, values unpredictability & loyalty

  Fox:  rationalizes away externalities, seeks truth, values legibility, respects prowess

(Seems too simple to classify preferred heuristics as DAGs or even poker strats)

[another possible triad is {lion,fox,externality}, so that wolves & traps can be shoved under that last bit]

[you observe that i tried to combine Jacobs & Rao explicitly, Boyd & Nietzsche implicitly]

Concerning historical rhymes, nakamoto “chef marinetti” sakamoto prescribes decentralization, while sam “nielsbohr” altman prescribes AI?

I meant 417, at the margin; adding the 4 (baseline for the penultimate ratio regum) brings us up to 421.

In order to increase genus from camiknickers, should we try the XVI: https://blog.bridgemanimages.com/blog/cutting-edge-fashion-t... , the century of k-clothing?

Agreed on designori[0], but as they stand the animals are slightly problematic, for, as proposed, the sly fox seeks truth, and the brave lion camouflages its actions instead of roaring magnificently.

(prowess is all over the medi lit for bellatores; I think it's a more recent development that we may speak of le preux Souabe. Did Aramis play the designori?)

How about:

  Leopard:
    embraces externalities
    loyal to (direct) superiors
    values camouflage
    respects (brute) strength

  Crow:
    rationalises externalities
    loyal to truth (an abstraction)
    values legibility
    respects (book) smarts

Unlike the popular conception[1] of lions, leopards are known to hide and ambush (they have the spots, after all!); unlike the fox, who's easiest to encounter at dusk and dawn, crows do their thing right out in the open, in the middle of the day, and they don't care who's watching.

[I should check the Panchatantra bestiary to see if they have any suitable animals. Adult literature recognises the two strategies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthashastra#On_spying,_propag... ]

[0] could their strategies be regular? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_design#Regular_uniform_d...

[1] is this because lionesses stalk, but lions let them do the hunting? compare "ne parizh"

I was out of date on my triads; when do we give the uk permanent member seat to india?

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