I think that's a red herring.

I know of no-one who more determindly and sucessfully avoided being foisted upon than me but even I had some schooling foisted on me. I have even, much to my shame, purchased some ties.

but its mostly not in their control, the frivolous bits that make little difference can be controlled but the big stuff like the invention of agriculture was just there for us.


"Are you calling Adam Smith's ideas implausible?"


I dont know what motivated people like Turing or Pasteur. Who's that guy who died testing vaccinations? I dont think the profit motive was always the driver.

I dont think the people who bought mobile phones did so because they realised the immense benefits that would follow to poorer countries who had no wire infrastructure.


One candidate group is very poor people who wouldn't otherwise learn basic stuff like RRR. They benefit immensly but I wouldn't charge them commensurately. I also wouldn't charge for health care based on how much better it made you.

It isn't. It might be a bit beyond the current conversation though.

At the minimum, there is no better judge of what is good than what people want.

Completely unavoidable.

I'm not sure that even the frivolous bits can be controlled in a meaningful way. Every single decision I have made was made because of who I was combined with what I want. Otherwise, I agree.

He goes on a quite long rant covering five books about people looking for profit in helping others.

I meant "profit" in the greater sense. Solving a problem is its own reward for some.

Yet, they helped. Solving your own personal problems tends to solve humanity's problems since the problems mostly rhyme.

We are in concurrance. I was speaking to absolute monetary benefit, not utilitarian benefit. Doubling your money from $1 to $2 is different than doubling your money from $1 gazillion to $2 gazillion.

Well, your argument was persuasive to many early last century until about 1980. This is basically what communism attempted to do (see the great purges in China or Russia), and failed miserably at. They got rid of rich people well enough but just replaced them with an other class of property owners who were far less humane.

I think such episodes have made it instinctively understand that such actions (looting the rich) are a net negative for everyone.

As for today, you also have multiple warring classes which protect those above the fray. The land and business owners (20-40% of the population?) want to protect their assets against the poor and the anti social. So they have an incentive to instinctively support laws that protect the 1% as well. Once you say "people over $X are fair game", you're starting to feel a lot less secure.

It's only really the bottom 20% of so who can see no moral or practical reason to respect property rights. And they're controlled by giving them enough to live somewhat comfortably and locking them in cages when they misbehave. In a world without property rights for the rich they'd definitely be worse off, so there's a moral argument for doing that too, although one I'm not comfortable with to be honest.

You are so, like, whatever...

I need only to know all equilibrium strategies, so like in tic-tac-toe - I don't care what your strategy is. I know the equilibrium strategy (all of them) and can't lose. Feel free to stop acting all smartypants and actually read the article.

to put it bluntly: I can't be wrong since I'm playing in Nash equilibrium and by that you are certainly wrong

I'm not disagreeing, I agree its beyond the scope.


Avoided more than most people thought possible. Only boy in school banned from wearing an otherwise compulsory tie. Its a minor example but huge amounts of stuff are foisted on people.

I have limited control over what I want but when it comes to the the frivolous bits I have a lot of control over getting what I want.


That's annoying but common. I bought the book 'evidence based technical trading' that really hacked me off with its endless rant against non-evidence based technical trading.

I gathered that but it becomes a misleading tautology in this context. Everying in your sense is done for profit but some of it is 'good/bad' in the overall expectation sense and some of it is 'good/bad' in the worthy intentions sense.

Some are better than others. Back to the first point which is spending on high quality research is usually good spending and it doesn't usually matter how worthy the intentions of the people involved.

Yes, I am. You sounded just like my step-daughter in my head.

Sadly, you need to know all of the strategies in order to know whether a stable NE is possible.

I'm fairly good at the whole reading thing, fwiw. I can even comprehend Chezlaw most of the time.

No NE here. A payoff is required and none is to be found here.

I very much hope you aren't using NE to make real life (financial or otherwise) decisions. It doesn't work. There is always some yahoo who will be unreasonable and screw up the calculations.

Nearly everything is foisted upon people. Most social lessons aren't exactly explained well. The whole "don't punch people in the throat" for example, isn't explained.

Most everything is "that is how we expect you to act" even in adulthood.

Not all of this is particularly bad. I wear pants despite not being completely clear as to why I should.

You have some control over each in a sense. Most people are generally fairly happy with what they get (regardless of what they get) which implies that what they want is nebulous and alterable based on circumstance.

More importantly, most people have very limited means to get more (or different) things. I'm doing well, but I can't place my finger on exactly why. Where I am makes absolutely no sense from where I came from in an a priori sort of way.

Such things should be short and, to avoid annoyance, have examples of specific things that definitely don't work. Nothing wrong with a hairbrained or reasonable theory, but if it doesn't relate to reality it is crap. Any good non-evidence-based theory needs to be compared to reality to see if it is fiction or nonfiction.

Doesn't matter if you have excellent reason to think that pigs should fly.


I'm fairly sure we already have the answers built in (much to Dawkins' dismay).

There isn't much real difference in motivating power between "I will get loved" and "I will get cash" and "I feel good about that."

We are super-creepy in our ability to not act like simple theories say we should.

A bit messy with the two "usually"s in there, but I tend to be for research spends so it doesn't matter too much.

and most go along with it quite happily. We seem to be agreeing but I was responding to you saying the reverse.

because just wearing trousers is uncomfortable and somewhat dangerous.

that doesn't imply you have much control over what you want.


To chezlaw's dismay we dont seem to have communicted on this point. The
differetitaion was between good intentions and good expected outcomes (both in a moral sense) and either or both could be either or both of your two motivations

That was unusually deliberate, both usuallies are necessary.

smart lady

feel free to point this in literature. But, so? you were saying:

that is totally wrong.

maybe to much credit to Chezlaw but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt

sure there is, the one that wins gets the title smartypants. And since this is a two-person game we will always have a winner based on the minimax theorem ( additionally the one that posts gibberish, stop posting, or dies first, loses - game with finitely many strategies condition satisfied).

I don't. I optimize my utility EV. Plus cut out the tails. I know not playing optimal but competition is so bad with assessing ev of rare events that I rarely get properly exploited...

I'm fairly certain that in real life a NE equilibrium requires no one acting like a nutcase and breaking the equilibrium.

Without the various players knowing what strategies are available and having a firm grasp of the idiocy of unilaterally changing strategy, I have some doubts that such an equilibrium can be stable.

I'd be more than happy to be wrong. Would save me loads of time trying to figure out what people are going to do next. All of my strategies only have NE existing at the tail ends (except where NE involves not stabbing people in the neck randomly).

Apparently, I am only playing this game on accident. I prefer a game of being understood and understanding when possible.

I don't depend on this forum to prove myself clever. I take some amount of pride in being a bit confused.

Chez probably has a lot to say about rare events that he will probably keep to himself.

I don't cut out the tails when figuring UV. I have a minimum level of uv that I am willing to accept and that enters into the decision making a bit. Moreso as I become more capable of crushing that minimum level.

It is a bit of a quandry. Most people just agree, and the rest just also just agree with something only a micron different.

I meant it more in the opposite direction. You don't have much control over what you get.

It is a function of things you can't control, such as what you want.

I'm fairly certain that you would agree that bad intentions tend to lead to bad results. Correct if wrong.

I'm also fairly certain that you would agree that the vast majority of people have good (or at least neutral) intentions. Correct if wrong.

I'm also fairly certain that you are afraid that the more diligent of the good intentioned people get things wrong. Correct if wrong.

Also, elaboration on the specifities of such things would be appreciated.

I'm fairly certain that "curiosity" counts as a "good intention" most of the time.

Partially agree but not if we include acting with selfish/thoughtless disregard within bad. The free market is littered with these non-good intentions with wonderful results, someone should write a lot of books

but that's a bit OT because my point was that good intentions often have bad expected results. I was differentiating between good intenions and good expected results (some things have both).

A great example is the drugs war. Most people who support this have good intentions.

I agree but not so much if we consider the group who seek power to change things.

but again my point was that the set of actions with good intentions are not the same as the set of actions with good expected results. Its also not the case (I conjecture strongly and wildly) that the intersection of these sets is any kind of sweet spot.

No its very un-diligent do-gooders that get things wrong. They far too easily accept easy arguments with a quick feel-good hit rather than diligently considering the reality. They tend to be guilty of the most trivial fallacies 'drugs are bad therefore we should ban them', 'poverty is bad so a minimum wage is good', 'someone died so something must be done', keynsian economics, somethign went wrong therefore there wasn't enough regulation etc etc

^ not necessarily disputing the conclusions but the argumets are nearly always pitiful and the opposite of diligent. If you mean they put the effort in then maybe.

That makes me concerned you meant something other by 'good intention' than I though you did*. I thought you meant 'intending to do good' but curiosity is only a good intention in the sense that is an intention that we might expect to produce good results.

* but going back I cant reconcile this with your earlier use of bad intention which seems to mean 'intention to do bad'.

The intention of all of the above is to help clarify. This imo is clearly a good intention but I'm not avery confident it has good expected results.

People are playing normally distributed around a evolutionarily stable strategy. That is narrow solution of all existing Nash equilibrium. People that go stabbing around are rare because their strategy is eliminated by natural selection.

What people are going to do next is almost always dictated by their environment. We have a hard time predicting what an individual may do one move ahead but we have no problem predicting an E(x) from a large set of actions - one man/women doing a large amount of action or a population doing actions across all members.

For example - I can never know when my friend will get in a fight but can know across "my friends" population the E(x) of their behavior and who is likely to be in a fight after a while. The reason I cannot predict the first part is because their behavior is dictated by environment and environment gives a computation problem that can only be approximated by a normal distribution. normal distribution = maximal uncertainty

You are plying that game from the day you were born.

There is a catch.

The one that wins gets the title smartypants but the one that looses gets to learn something new and become a better person. So second prize is not a set of steak knives.

I certainly would like to hear what he has to say...

Not cutting tails is an invite to a rare bankruptcy. (ask the options sellers how much of their friends survived crashes)

Basically you are basing your decision on your results, if I get this right. You are making decisions on your equity curve. Once the equity curve starts sloping in the wrong direction (payoff is lower then the minimum uv) you stop and evaluate. And for that to happen you must have an look-back period to do a regression of the slope.

The only thing I see inefficient is that you are not deciding based on the possible/expected variance. It is possible that uv is lower just because you are hit with some "bad luck" so to say.

huh, explain please. The second sentence.

There is no such thing as an evolutionary stable strategy. Ask the dinosaurs.

I do actually agree that living beings act as if there is. Plus the tails. The tails are where the important bits are. (pauses and thinks for a bit) Plus the middle. That is also where the important bits are.

Evolution isn't a game though. It just looks like one. Much the same as gravity and momentum is when looked at by a particular silly viewpoint.

We aren't even good at that. Probably why Chez couldn't finish the first book of the Foundation series.

That is incorrect. People bend their environments. You'd (if you'd known me in younger years) be very very surprised at how a philosophical pacifist could get into so many fights absolutely on accident and purely against his will if he puts his mind to it.

I've given up on the phisosophical pacifism purely because it doesn't match my nature.

I've been gathering friends since the day I was born. A common misconception is that the game is something other than what it is.

I could use a set of steak knifes. Pitty that I will have to settle on figuring out your understanding of the world.

If he produces anything of interest he will probably kick litter over it before emerging from the box. His tendency to do that is one of the reasons why I consider him a friend.

I am fairly sure we are talking past each other. I was stating that I don't ignore tail risk.

They are mostly a bunch of idiots. The ones that do well are just mostly idiots with a large dose of luck.

Nah. More simple than that. If I have 1 billion dollars and that is exactly enough, I want no risk. Above or below that, I want some amount of risk.

I do have a buy-sell strategy for equities that isn't completely different from what you brought up.

My uv for winning a dollar goes down as my previous "good luck" goes up.

Same is true (but slightly less so) for a 10% increase in me wealth.

I make my bets almost purely based on diversion from expected value in real life. It is slightly more complicated than that (I actually base them on "required value" which is a completely made-up concept based on what I need), but that isn't particularly important to anyone but me.

You should read such books. They are complicated and give enough wiggle room for nearly anything to be true.

It kind of goes back to the whole empathy thing. If I decide to be a baker because of the lack of bread THAT YOU WANT, I profit.

Backward looking expected results are a bit silly. They expected good results. They were (looking back) wrong.

Granted, they should have seen it coming (drug war results), but they didn't. Even those against it didn't see it coming.

People are only a bit clever.

The people currently in support might have a pound of good intentions for every ton of stubborn refusal to acknowledge the data.

Silent majority argument is heard.

If you are to conjecture strongly and wildly, you will have to grow a straggly beard. That is very important.

All easily solved by banning idealists who don't look at the available data.

(appreciate the footnotes, but not addressing them directly)

All of that stuff. Also, empathy?

Not sure exactly what you mean. This is nothing to do with actual results. the 'good intentions' and 'good expected outcomes' are before the event. Or (if you meant something different) its not the case that people with good intentions have considered the results at all (of if they have only in a most cursory fashion), thinking is not part of the equation.

That a somewhat ridiculous position that is only hard to attack because it was some while ago. The downside of prohibition is clear and so its its lack of effectivness without ultra extreme sanction. The 'purely good intentioned' dont only not think, they also attack thinking - try to have a onversation on prohibition and the good intentioned produce someone who's kid died from drugs - this isn't a counter-argument its a defense against argument.

We take the best path for us. Mostly that means balancing takinng the drugs we want with avoiding the punishment. For some it means selling the drugs. For many others it means being paid to try to stop them which in practice means trying to make their lives so miserable its not worth the effort. Occasionaly we make things so unpleasant for the vocal moronity that they have to face reality.

There's a parallel with the economy where the good intentioned do everything possible to make everything rosy until cold hard reality smacks them in the face smearing blame in every direction with a pitiful wail of nobody could see that coming.


A tad of idealism but hard-headed realism is required.

This applies to the data, its all fine and dandy being idealistic about data being the answer but being hard-headed realists we have to notice that for any particular issue there (approximately) isn't any and never will be any.

I'm assuming a 0ev baseline so anything that +ev counts as having good expected results.

The 'good intentions' contains actions with -ve, 0 ev and +ve expected results.
The 'good expected outcomes' contains actions with +ev expected results

The intersection is the subset of +ev actions with 'good intentions'

I'm conjecturing that these are nothing like optimal i.e. even though they are all +ev and well intentioned they are far too watered down with poorly thought out good intentions to be particularly good decisions on average. So badly though out that we would be better off if the unthinking well intentioned didn't deviate from what they would do if they had no good or bad intentions

i.e. the baker who just makes bread for profit does more good than one who actions are changed due to some ill-thought out notion of environmental bread even though either way is +ev.

It may not have to be this way, its an observation of how things are and I'd go as far to claim would be in all fairly nearby worlds.

I may not have the beard to carry this off.

Sorry about that. Meant to turn off a few filters that get in the way and accidentally turned off "grammar."

They had convincing arguments for the war on drugs. Not convincing if you happened to look at the last ban and criminalization (alcohol prohibition), but no one bothered to look at that quite telling data, so their good expected outcomes did exist in the way they always do. They expected good outcomes and their points were only really assailable through pointing at the data.

A small nit is that in the USA we do ultra extreme sanctions fairly well. Still doesn't work.

A bigger problem is that those who are willing to think and look at the data are strangely silent. Only the people who want rampant drug use and those who want absolutely no drug use speak.

The real problem with the dead-kid-parent is that they are only told one possible solution to the problem (I think we can agree that having a child die is somewhat painful and to be avoided).

I like the "vocal moronity" thing.

The problem is a bit different than that. Competing moral sentiments abound and it makes the good-intentioned act more stupid than they really are.

I am fairly sure that we agree here. There is always a bit of idealism driving things, but without being very non-silly about the idealistic parts, we run into trouble when reality impolitely shows up.

It involves a bit of thinking, I guess, to get from the last 12 times we tried that it didn't work to it probably won't work the next time.

There is nearly always data that requires matching the theory before action is warranted.

No they didn't. It was just 'drugs are bad we must ban them' with asscociated gibberish about sending messages, god and think of the kids. They never argued as to why it would work.

As opposed to those against who could easily come up with arguments as to why it would really struggle in the real world given human beings exist in it.

Amateurs.

That's not true. The ACer, the liberals and a fair many others speak up. We start a debate fairly regularly but then they bring up the dead kid.

Of course its painful but they aren''t told any possible solution. Whatever we do there will be some dead kids.

ty


I'm not sure that's different.


We ~never have 1 time. Forget 12 times

In the drugs war you can produce data to demonstrate anything as long as you dont actually care about the truth which is that we have no data on which would be better. The argument that it would be better to end the drugs war does not rely on data (apart from the trivial fcat that with the drugs war its not near utopian).

There is the unthinking 'it must be better than this' but obviously we ignore people who say that as they are the unthinking good intentioned.

I'm not denying that they were emotionally charged arguments. There seldomly is any argument about how we should proceed in society that lacks a massive emotional component.

The argument basically (dropping as much emotional baggage as possible):

Drugs cause suffering. At the time we had some fairly bad effects from drug use in the inner cities.

Reducing drug use would reduce drug-related suffering.

Banning drugs will reduce drug use.

Ample data exists from alcohol prohibition.

We aren't the best in the world, but we are the best in the developed world.

We have legal drug use where I am for certain drugs due to the liberals, I will admit.

Then the solution is that we limit the number of dead kids while not making different kids dead.

The strongest argument for legalizing drugs is the lack of necessity for drug dealers to carry arms.

I'm not sure that's different.

Prohibition of alcohol is a reasonable proxy for the current war against drugs. It does better than rhyme.

A proper argument does rely on the available data. Ending alcohol prohibition here ended the dying from the alcohol prohibition. Decriminalizing drugs (and adding a bit of education in its place) in Portugal led to decreased societal costs and decreased hard drug use.

We added seatbelts to automobiles. I'm not generally so optimistic, but in general when faced with problems we generally eventually come upon an acceptible solution.

I went with the less baggage: drugs are bad therefore we should ban them

You have given details about the bad but its exactly the same argument with the same good intentions but no consideration whatsover of whether banning them will be +ev

That's significantly <1 data point. Is still ~0 data points in reality but the argument isn't based on that data - we know this as the same argument as to why prohibition was bad was used before prohibition ended, and was the very argument that helped end prohibition thence producing this meager data.

Its actually the other way around. We have some illegal drugs due to non-liberals.

Sadly us liberals are yet to recover from the catastrophic disaster of the american war of independence. Its possible we never will.

Its certainly an important factor.

How much data did we need to predict that. Did we think they would settle every issue with a game of dominoes?

Its a decent story to help the unimaginative think about the issues.


That's a tautology, no data required. if you mean we needed evidence to realise people were expected to die then see the bit about dominoes.

and that is far worse. Its an example of exactly why data is so misleading. the other side will find a similarly poor example to justify their case. An anecdotal war to avoid thinking that can justify anything.

A question for the data driven idealist like you - your argument is that the results of a recent change in portugal imply the western world will benefit longer term by ending the drugs war. Where is your data to support that argument.

It is just a dance around the problem of people seeing a problem and settling on the most obvious answer without thinking about all of the implications of that particular answer.

It might be important to be forgiving here. People aren't particularly bright.

We have gone down many roads here. We know what happens (more or less) when we ban things for a bit, what happens when we ban things for a longer bit and what happens when we ban things and then retract the ban, and what happens when we decline to ban.

What else could we possibly want to know from the data? Expecting to know how Kenny Smith (aged 18 years, 3 months and 14 days) will do is a bit of of a stretch.

Here (USA) the liberals were complicit in and encouraging of the original bans.

Meh. It was for the best. We are a quite conservative lot and if we hadn't cut ties we would have destroyed what little culture you have.

That isn't really the issue. I'm fairly certain that drug dealers would be more than happy to let the authorities settle disputes if they could. It is incredibly unwise to call the cops and ask them to get your stolen illicit property back from a thief.

It brings to mind all of the important bits. Bringing up such things is very important when dealing with emotionally charged sorts of things.

The major difference between prohibition and the drug war is that the first has been made into some decent movies.

People aren't that smart and generally didn't have the right knowledge (data based) to even consider the possibilities.

Name the similarly poor example they can use. Any one will do.

Fewer deaths, fewer people in jail and less cost.

I'm making the rather large assumptions that the Portugese are human and fairly western.

This appears to be total agreement. Not sure how we dress it up as argument.

Some people however do think about the expected results and some of them are fairly bright.

The use of data I argue against is about solutions. We have ~ no data on how a solution will play out. Your portugal example is an excample of the use of data I object to. You could say portugal doesn't invalidate the argument.


What we want to know is the problem. The data doesn't tell us what we want to know, the problem of data is people look for what they want to know and claim its in the data when it isn't.

I mean liberal liberals proper philosophical liberals, the ones who thunk a lot.

The american war of independence was a total and utter disaster.

This is chezlaw at his finest (worst) because you would almost certainly agree with me if you weren't misled into thinking I meant something I didn't say. The implication is in your head.

You mean it would be a non issue if there wasn't a drugs war?

This is a good point. It seems unreasonable its true. Maybe it isn't and good films will follow repeal.

I feel that you use this generalisation about people to dismiss all people quite a lot. We dont necessarily disagree but as I'm distingusishing between the smarter ones who do consider the possibilities and the rest, we disconnect.

Amsterdam is often cited.

very naughty for someone who needs data to make conclusions. You simply have no data at all that the short terms result in Portugal will transalte to longer term results in the wider world. You are using reasoning not data. You can argue like einstein that its all founded in experience but we're not disagreeing about that.