VodkaHaze

Reddit is a swamp of filth wrt economics comments.

Basically all the subreddits except /r/academiceconomics, /r/badeconomics, /r/econpapers are awful. I'm friends with the mods of /r/economics and they have a really hard time reigning in the masses of ideologues (on all sides) ruining what should remain pure economics discussions.

That's a sequential use. They got the initial strategy with DL, and made it stronger with MCTS

Because that's what team rocket would chant if they upgraded their servers

Limiting your queries to ~12gb, the max ram on one GPU, (beyond which PCIe I/O becomes a bottleneck) will be a problem for business use, I'd think

Something something information asymmetry problem

How do you gather the data? You could learn scraping in python, for example. If you manually input the data, a simple spreadsheet is fine for that.

If you have the data in a non csv format and use excel to transform it into csv, python and R have utilities for that job (python has pandas, I don't use R as much for data cleaning, but I know it can).

The old joke goes: "If the EU tried to join the EU it would be refused for being too undemocratic"

Yes, because things are going so well in Italy and Spain and forcing them to use the same monetary policy as Germany and France is a superb idea

Does it support the entire STL?

Think he has anything right of center cobbled up together in a neatly packed ball

I imagine it's because the dialogue format flows naturally compared to the traditional monologue paradigm in books.

Good to know quantity supplied/demanded is still related to price

Sorry about the ad homs; the reviewer used moral/philosophical instead of technical reasons to argue against (except that point on simulations), so I assumed he was a riled up layperson. I read his review too fast, I guess.

The reviewer's point is this:

"Finally, the author is not asking me to personally give more money to the government, he wants me to support forcing other people to do it. But those other people have average luck, by definition "

But that's wrong; if the tax is progressive, and you take it as given that the successful are lucky, then you are in fact taxing the lucky with a progressive tax. The question is targeting the tax correctly.

It's a legitimate criticism, but he's arguing a strawman.

First off, the reviewer's coinflip analogy is deeply flawed. If you take a million draws from a binomial distribution, it's not going to end up the same as a million draws from an exponential distribution. That has an even deeper meaning when you, as an individual, are one random draw from said distribution, especially if you want to live in a society that considers itself "fair" (whatever that may mean).

Now Frank is not arguing against inequality. Frank is an economist, and almost no serious economist is against inequality as a whole concept (though many are against extreme inequality and, importantly, social immobility) because inequality is what you'd call "incentive compatible".

Frank's policy proposal is consistent and sane, but it will rub some the wrong way, as any policy proposal does. I'm certainly in favor of it; consumption is a better target for progressive taxation than most of what has been proposed this election season. That's the part that got the reviewer so riled up. I'm guessing the reviewer is not a professional economist.

The idea of a progressive consumption tax is consistent with microeconomic theory, too. People value things in an ordinal (not cardinal) manner, and at a sufficiently high level of income this means consumption has to be conspicuous to some degree (that's Veblen's whole insight).

Of course, political feasibility of the policy proposal is one thing, and certainly many worse policies are more politically feasible, as exemplified by how rubbed that reviewer has been by Frank's book.

The main difference between this book and Taleb's book is that Franks book is "Successful people are lucky, here's a policy proposal" and Taleb's book is "Successful people are lucky and also everyone is dumb and I'm so smart"

Read Success and Luck by Robert Frank instead

I'll read this thanks.

Fooled by randomness is his best book, but it's probably getting replaced by Robert Frank's book "Success and Luck" on my recommendation list for that topic.

It's just a good reminder that you might be luckier than you think and that skill doesn't fully explain the successful achievements.

Black Swan is seriously hard to read through; his arrogance is insufferable. The point he's making is fairly self evident; the book just got published at a very appropriate time.

You can get by without reading, or thinking about, his writings. He doesn't deserve the level of fame he has achieved by all standards.

I don't particularly care about his position on GMOs. In fact I sort of agree with it; his point can be reduced to "we're not exactly sure what we're doing here, perhaps we should try to avoid scalable disasters" which is sound.

I was ambivalent towards Taleb a few years ago, but ever since he's upped his online presence he's become actively annoying

The wildest conspiracy theories you've heard are also "the outcome of inductive reasoning based on many observations". Empirical testing is supposed to be statistical, not subject to human bias.

Nitpicking: he's an asset allocation/market expert, not an economics expert. His PhD is in finance, not economics. There's a significant difference.

Are his theories formulated in a rigidly defined and testable manner, and empirically tested?

No, they're "rules of thumb". Rules of thumbs can be great to make complex decisions (like in trading, as he does), but coming up with a few rules of thumb and doing well at your job does not warrant his level of confidence in his intellect.

Seems like he's gone full ZeroHedge

None of his theories are scientific. They're nice mental models to keep of the world, but they certainly don't justify his level of arrogance, especially not towards others who actually follow the scientific process to postulate theories

For someone calling out vanguards of science, he's light on science himself. He pulled all his "theories" out of his ass, with no empirical support or mathematical deduction.

Fooled by randomness was nice and all, and Black Swan was OK (if you can read past his arrogance), but now he considers himself a "public intellectual", and treats himself as the class of a Nobel winner when he has no more credentials than any other random day trader