Results for “from the comments” 1664 found
From the comments, how to hit it big?
I am not endorsing these claims, but I do enjoy a good rant. It is an object lesson in showing how (some) people think about jobs, status, rivalry, and money.
First venture capital is generally consider where washed-out Wall Streeters go, when they can’t cut it in real finance. Very few b-school students start out trying to get into VC. And no, generally Silicon Valley people are not nearly as smart as HFT/algo quants. The type of kids who go to Google or Facebook are generally the Ivy CS students from the upper half of their class who are good at white-boarding problems (e.g. reverse a linked list). The truly brilliant kids, Putnam winners, math olympiads, core kernel contributors, etc. disproportionately go the quant route. (In which at least half will wind up in Chicago).
SV is generally a worse deal than HFT or quant trading. Starting comp is at least 50% higher than the big five tech firms, and goes up at a much faster rate. And definitely way higher than startups, which nearly always under-pay. It’s true in tech you can become a multibillionaire, but that’s extremely unlikely even for the most talented. In general SV is a bad deal for everyone except the small set of people lucky or connected enough to be at the top. Outside founder level, virtually no one gets rich from startups anymore. The equity and options comp is pathetic at best, if not outright fraudulent. (“You’ll be getting 1% of outstanding shares… from this round…”). Even founders have to live on 70k salaries in the Bay Area, then are frequently screwed over or cliff’d by their VCs. For every Google, heck for every Apigee, there’s a thousand no-name flame-outs, where no one but the VCs walk away with a dime.
Compare to quant trading. Compensation is cold hard cash, usually paid out annually, if not quarterly. Not lottery ticket equity with four year cliffs, unlimited dilution and byzantine share classes. Most comp is directly tied to individual trading performance, with clear results from trading everyday. No politics, extremely meritocratic, no being at the random whims of whether your app takes off fast enough to overcome your burn rate. Firms actually compete for talent and pay accordingly, instead of colluding to keep wages suppressed. Unless your ambition is to top the Forbes list, HFT’s a much better deal for someone extremely intelligent like a Math Olympiad. The probability of making “f-you money” before 40 is at least an order of magnitude higher as a prop quant than in the Valley.
That is from Doug.
From the comments, Joseph Henrich on group selection
There are separate issues that get muddled up under this label.
1. There’s a semantic debate among mathematical evolutionary biologists about what the best fitness accounting system is (e.g., inclusive fitness as promoted by the Oxford crowd, or a pluralistic approach favored by most other mebs). This debate will seem totally stupid to economists. This debate shouldn’t be confused with the empirical question of whether intergroup competition has shaped genetic or cultural evolution.
2. The difference between genetic vs. cultural evolution, and between cultural group selection and genetic group selection. Many researchers like Boyd and Richerson have argued against the importance of genetic group selection for humans but FOR the importance of intergroup competition shaping cultural evolution. Much modelling suggests that conditions that normally inhibit the importance of GGS in genetic systems are mitigated in cultural evolutionary systems–because of multiple stable equilibrium (think folk theorem with different populations stuck at different equilibrium)
3. Empirically, a lot of evidence suggests that intergroup competition has shaped cultural evolution (institutions, social norms, religions, etc.)
Two recent target articles in BBS with full commentaries and replies are the places to start
http://www.des.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Richerson/CGS%20for%20BBS.pdf
http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manuscripts/2016%20Norenzayan%20cultural%20evolution.pdf
I would avoid the opinions of web-publishing non-experts, who have not contributed to the primary literature and don’t understand cultural evolution.
In general I thought the comment thread on group selection was excellent.
From the comments
The authors of an article entitled “Mysticism in Literature” (by H.C. Gardiner and E. Larkin) were surprisingly dismissive of Blake, an “I-It” enthusiast (like Wordsworth and fantasy novel world-builders); apparently the real success in the “Mysticism in Literature” world is in the “I-Thou” (Carmelite poets, very generous people, that sort of thing) area. I have long thought that JM Keynes – whose General Theory is in places as well written as Finnegans Wake, as I once read somewhere on this blog – was to his brother Geoffrey (the Blake specialist) what the fictional Sherlock was to Mycroft; a very bright sibling but clearly the exponentially less capable of the two. Economics, though, is often just common sense reiterated and refined with the mistakes thrown out; it seems almost comical to associate something that takes such a long time with young students. I read my first economics book, with a banana-yellow cover, in high school (bought at a Waldenbooks at a Bay Area shopping mall, long vanished; at the same mall, I was in line behind a young woman, now in her 70s, who bought a cassette recording of Rachmaninoff’s 24 variations on a theme of some long-forgotten fiddler. I still remember the shy happy smile on her face – the money she spent must have meant something to her – and how well she was dressed, as if she believed one had to dress elegantly to buy a Rachmaninoff cassette. Writing a comment on this almost (or completely) male-only comment thread, all I can say is she was as likely to be right about the necessity of elegance as me, if not more so. If she is reading this, I don’t remember the town, but it was somewhere just north of Pleasanton).
It doesn’t matter what the post was, that is from another vote another time zone, if only E. Harding were so eloquent…
When does Robert Cottrell just stop reading? (from the comments)
I considered the question of when one should just stop reading, and here is Robert’s take:
I read full-time to edit The Browser, and I abandon a hundred articles for every one that I finish. I generally stop if I hit “eponymous”, or “toxic”, or “trigger warning”, or “make no mistake”. Summary labelling of anything in an article as “complex” means that the writer does not understand or cannot explain the material. I don’t often read beyond headlines that use the words “surprising”, “secret”, “really”, “not” or “… and why it matters”. Any headline ending in a question mark is a bad sign. I know writers don’t usually write their own headlines, but the headline represents a best effort to say what is useful in the article by a sympathetic person who has been paid to read it.
Robert is one of the best readers I know.
From the comments — the economics of Mormon tithing
Jay McCarthy writes:
I am Mormon. I am from Massachusetts, but lived in Utah for a long time, and have lived in prosperous and not-prosperous Mormon areas.
I don’t think tithing is an effective way to get social status.
Let me explain some mechanics. When I get a paycheck, I got to a Web site the church runs and tell them to transfer 10% from my checking account to their accounts. The new online system lets me do it whenever I want, whereas previously (the online system is about eight months old) I wrote a check and handed it to a local church leader. Even in the old days of physical checks, there was extreme paranoia about keeping this an anonymous process. You would occasionally see people handing their checks, but the only people who could know what the amount was was the local leader (called a bishop) and their one or two clerks. (Aside: this local leader and their clerks are lay people that volunteer on a rotating basis for terms of about three to five years.) In the new system, only the local leader sees your tithing amount and maybe a clerk as they print out reports.
The next step is that each year, around the end of the year (December), you have a meeting with the local leader called “tithing settlement”. Before the meeting, you get a sealed letter from a clerk with a statement of all the money you’ve given. You go to the meeting as an entire family (in my case, my wife and three kids younger than 8). It normally lasts about 30 minutes and you spend the time chatting about how things are going in your life and if you have any needs and what is going on. At the end the bishop remembers, “Oh, it’s tithing settlement.” And says, “Is this amount tithed listed on your report accurate?” then asks “Are you a full tithe payer, a partial tithe payer, or not a tithe payer?”. Whatever you answer, he will have no comment about and then you leave.
The other way that tithing is noticed is that every two years you renewed what is called your “temple recommend”. This is an barcoded ID card that is tied to your membership records in the church database. When you want to go to the temple, you bring this card and they scan it to verify that you are allowed in the temple. (Aside, the temple is not where you go each Sunday. There are about 150 in the world. It is for special occasions and most people that are working try to go monthly, but most retired people try to go daily.) During this renewal process, you have an interview with two local leaders—one that you go to church with and one from the administrative unit above that (called a stake). During this interview, you are asked lots of “Yes” and “No” questions (they are encouraged to not require more than “Yes” or “No” answers, because historically some of these leaders changed the requirements to reflect their own interpretations of the rules.) One of the questions is, “Are you a full tithe payer?”. There is no checking of this answer with the answer you give at tithing settlement.
So, in summary, tithing is such a secretive process that I don’t believe it is a good way to get status.
In the preceding discussion, I always wrote “tithing”, but actually we would say “tithes and offerings” because when you pay you can always give additional money. The additional money can be flagged for certain programs. (The tithing CANNOT be flagged.) For instance, one program is called a “fast offering” and it is used for the poor and needy who are local to you. Others are to sponsor a missionary or help build a temple.
I have never heard a local leader with knowledge of offering matters ever say anything about how much a family gave or if they were giving a lot or being generous or anything like that. I have not been a local leader, but I have been on the executive committee of local congregations and attended all the meetings that the local leader did. If they said anything, it would be considered an incredible violation of protocol.
In my opinion, Mormons gain social status within the group by two major ways. First, by externality conformity to norms, such as dressing modestly, having lots of kids, never cursing, discussing the gospel with each other, and so on. Second, by in kind donation of time. Everything that happens at church is done by volunteers and there are many things that need to happen. Each Sunday, meetings are three hours long and there are many classes and lectures that need to be given. The first hour has about three lectures. The second and third hour each have about fifteen concurrent lessons (for different age groups). So, this means that about 33 people need to volunteer to teach for an hour weekly. On the Wednesdays, all youth from 8 to 18 have their own classes and activities at the church that need to be taught by someone. There’s another program for high school students called Seminary (a dumb name) where they are taught about the scriptures EVERY DAY before school. Outside of Utah, this is a volunteer position typically done by one person and is an immense time commitment. (That’s what I do.)
I think these things are much more expensive than tithing and an academic analysis of Mormonism would get more out of studying their impact than studying tithes and offerings.
— A few small comments.
The tithing settlement form says “The Church provided no goods or services in consideration, in whole or in part, for the contributions detailed below but only intangible religious benefits.” I chuckle every time I see that.
I assume that the details of your tithing are considered if you are considered for prestigious volunteer jobs, like bishop.
In executive meetings, we do hear about what percentage of the local membership paid tithing. In my experience, in Utah, social conformity is high but tithing payment is relatively low, but outside of Utah it is the opposite: there are more diverse Mormons and everyone is paying tithing.
Mormon home production is not caused by tithing. It’s explicit motivation is worry about the millennium (a similar impetus to “preppers”) and getting attacked by the government (as happened in Missouri, Illinois, and Utah in the 1800s.) It’s implicit motivation is to gain social status by conformity to norms.
Here is the original post.
From the comments, on sexist pricing
See Pashigian, B. P.. (1988). Demand Uncertainty and Sales: A Study of Fashion and Markdown Pricing. The American Economic Review, 78(5), 936–953. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1807158
Basic idea: there are more and better priced clearance sales for items that quickly go out of fashion, fewer clearance sales for non-fashionable items (e.g., white shirts, blue blazers, grey pants.)
That is from Hal Varian, on the topic of “sexist pricing.”
From the comments, on mass shootings
The comments were numerous, here is one from Malcolm Gladwell:
I see that someone included a link to my recent piece in the New Yorker on this very topic–trying to understand the rash of school shootings. In that piece, I used Mark Granovetter’s theory of riots. Granovetter’s original article is well worth reading: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~spage/ONLINECOURSE/R2Granovetter.pdf
Gladwell’s original piece is here. And here is a comment from Peter Turchin:
Hi all,
My explanation of why the rate of indiscriminate mass murder increased 18-fold between 1960 and 2010 is developed in a series of blog posts. The first one is here:
http://peterturchin.com/blog/2012/12/15/canaries-in-a-coal-mine/
and links to the rest are at the end of the first post.
See also Steve Sailer’s varied comments on the evolution of serial killers, and related matters. There are other interesting comments as well.
From the comments, on Amish health and health care
I was just at two Amish weddings and would add a few observations:
– I wonder what they’d find for a later cohort. Amish folks born between 1890 and 1921 were almost all farmers. Today, fewer than 10% are. Most have far more sedentary jobs–though not as sedentary as mine. But they still eat as if they were out in the fields all day. Obesity is rampant and growing. Also, the diet has changed. The Amish eat a lot of processed, brand name food. They do have their own kitchen gardens, but salads are covered in dressing and cheese. In many homes, every meal (even breakfast!) comes with pie as desert.
– Nobody is left alone in old age. I had a long talk with an older Amish woman who couldn’t believe that, in NYC, some people live alone, interact with no close relatives or friends, have no one to watch over them. Her husband told a story of a very ornery old man with no children or wife who nobody likes but, still, people visit regularly to make sure he’s OK and to give him comfort.
– They absolutely use hospitals for urgent and emergent care. There are big fundraising auctions all the time to help those with big bills. And the church district will also help.
Yes, that is the Adam Davidson.
From the comments — on suicide
Switzerland tolerates assisted suicide since 1942 and there are very interesting numbers. A) From 1995 to 2009, assisted suicide cases have grown but the total number of suicides keeps constant. B) Assisted suicide in 2009 accounted for approx 30% of all suicides. C) Women chose assisted suicide more than men, but men use firearms more than women to commit suicide. D) Peak assisted suicide is between 75 and 84 years old. It seems that people that cross the 80+ years old line are not affected by painful or exhausting diseases thus they choose to life until it ends naturally E) Peak suicide is between 45-54 years old, midlife crisis is real, F) Overall suicide rates for women kept constant even if assisted suicide rates increase. G) Overall suicide rates for men are going down and assisted suicide goes up.
http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/en/index/news/publikationen.html?publicationID=4732
The overall suicide rate in Netherlands between 1999 and 2013 has been between 8.3 and 11 per 100K habitats. The lowest rate was just before the crisis. http://www.cbs.nl/nl-NL/menu/themas/gezondheid-welzijn/publicaties/artikelen/archief/2015/4320-suicide-in-noord-holland-noord-en-nederland1999-2013.htm
The WaPo article would lose its killer headline if the total suicide rate is considered when assessing the “exponential” increase of assisted suicide. This seems like another case of double standards. When someone blows their brains with a gun we have to respect the decision and comfort the family, when someone opens the valve of sodium thiopental with their hand…..it’s just wrong.
That is from Axa.
From the comments, on Greek imports
Greece’s economy is almost a dream example of the point [that imports matter for exports]. Look at their exports (in a handy visual form from Wikipedia):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Greece#/media/File:Greece_Export_Treemap.jpg
Their largest export is refined petroleum/oil, at 9.4% of the total. Greece isn’t making that oil, it’s importing it, refining it, and sending it along. They’re also major exporters of aluminum products, which I understand to be a ‘byproduct’ of their relatively large sources of energy, but they import the bauxite. I also can’t see how the packaged medicament industry in Greece doesn’t require imports of capital for everything from industrial fermenters to ovens, etc., but I’d suspect that most of that is pretty durable and so more imports won’t be needed for a while (though capital controls make would paradoxically make it almost impossible for a successful company to add capacity). Greece also exports a lot of agricultural products, but imports the farm machinery needed to make modern agriculture work.
Greece could print new drachmas until the cows came home and these industries would be unable to expand without new import to capital.
From the comments
Tyler,
Isn’t it funny how so many people hold these two opinions in their heads at the same time:
1) Wall Street is just focused on the next quarter and they push corporations to have short term motives.
2) There was a stock market bubble 15 years ago built around bidding up prices to unprecedented levels for an entire basket of firms which had never been profitable and had no near-term plans for being profitable.
That is from Kevin Erdmann, Kevin’s blog is here.
From the comments, on the political implications of behavioral economics
The classical MU [differential marginal utility of money] argument has, in my view, been moderated by the findings of behavioral economics, namely loss-aversion. Taking from the higher-incomes to give it to the lower incomes may be negative utility as the higher incomes are valuing their loss at an exaggerated rate (it’s a loss), while the lower income recipients under value it.
Many on the Left are too quick to grab on to the findings of behavioral economics as a critique of neoclassical economics, but while they often do point away from simplistic free-market views, they do not necessarily point towards left-wing solutions. They are just as likely to point to non-market conservative views.
For example, isn’t it another consequence of the asymmetry of the utility function with respect to the status quo (loss aversion) that social mobility destroys utility? I mean, if the tide is lifting all boats, then you can argue that it’s still better for everyone (the libertarian view), but if your utility function is heavily rank-based (a standard left-wing view) and you accept loss-aversion from the behavioral literature, then social mobility is suspect from an utility point-of-view.
This sounds shockingly old-school conservative when we discuss our own societies (“why should the children of the poor compete with my kids for a place in a good university? they have lower expectations, after all, State U is a step up for them. My kids, on the other hand, would be crushed if they had to go to their safety school”), but is quite acceptable when discussing international inequalities (“it doesn’t morally matter that people in Mexico have much less material wealth, their society has lower expectations”).
That is from Luis Pedro Coelho.
From the comments, on dissimilation
http://mentalfloss.com/article/58515/why-colonel-spelled-way
“Colonel” is pronounced just like “kernel.” How did this happen? From borrowing the same word from two different places. In the 1500s, English borrowed a bunch of military vocabulary from French, words like cavalerie, infanterie, citadelle, canon, and also, coronel. The French had borrowed them from the Italians, then the reigning experts in the art of war, but in doing so, had changed colonello to coronel.
Why did they do that? A common process called dissimilation—when two instances of the same sound occur close to each other in a word, people tend to change one of the instances to something else. Here, the first “l” was changed to “r.” The opposite process happened with the Latin word peregrinus (pilgrim), when the first “r” was changed to an “l” (now it’s peregrino in Spanish and Pellegrino in Italian. English inherited the “l” version in pilgrim.)
After the dissimilated French coronel made its way into English, late 16th century scholars started producing English translations of Italian military treatises. Under the influence of the originals, people started spelling it “colonel.” By the middle of the 17th century, the spelling had standardized to the “l” version, but the “r” pronunciation was still popular (it later lost a syllable, turning kor-o-nel to ker-nel). Both pronunciations were in play for a while, and adding to the confusion was the mistaken idea that “coronel” was etymologically related to “crown”—a colonel was sometimes translated as “crowner” in English. In fact, the root is colonna, Italian for column.
Meanwhile, French switched back to “colonel,” in both spelling and pronunciation. English throws its shoulders back, puts its hands on its hips and asks, how boring is that?
Derek Lowe on CRISPR, from the comments
Derek writes:
As a scientist in the biopharma world, I can tell you this this does indeed seem very close to being done in humans, and that there is a very high (but still not perfect) chance of success. CRISPR/Cas9 is the real deal, and there are others competing for its spot as well (such as zinc-finger TALEN technology, whose discoverers have just called for a similar moratorium on human germ-line work). There’s no need to whisper about possible Nobel Prizes in this area – the only difficulty for the Nobel committees will be figuring out how to divide the credit and who exactly to recognize.
The first human applications would surely be the obvious single-mutation genetic diseases. In most cases, this would be done best as germ-line work, followed by in vitro fertilization. The children born after such a process would, of course, pass their altered/repaired DNA to their own offspring, and it’s this possibility that has people worried, in case we get it wrong, or in case we start messing around for more arguable traits. (Fixing these problems after you’ve become a fully sized human is harder, because you have to find a way to treat enough cells in the body to make a lasting difference).
Many of the possibilities that people are most worried about are harder to pin down, though. There’s no single gene for height, for example, or intelligence (or Alzheimer’s or diabetes, for that matter, to stick with the fixing-what’s-broken part of the landscape). Many of the really sticky issues are still a bit downstream, awaiting a better understanding of the human genome, but the big fundamental one is indeed here now: the first deliberate editing of the human genetic inheritance. Tyler’s absolutely right about that one – it could be done right now by anyone with the nerve to do it.
Here is Derek’s website.
From the comments: how to restructure basketball (and other sports?)
Kevin Erdmann writes:
I think basketball would be vastly improved if after the 3rd quarter, we just added 20 points to the higher score, and said, first team to that score wins.
Or, for that matter, make it score based instead of time based. It’s halftime when one team gets to 30, and the game is over when one team gets to 60.
It gets rid of all the fouling and time outs at the end of close games, and it means that it doesn’t serve any purpose for the winning team to drain the clock. And, it means that a team that falls far behind has more of a chance to catch up – like in baseball.
Of course this would not maximize ad revenue, which tends to increase with close games as the number of timeouts rises. Furthermore perhaps people do not enjoy the outcome as much if they do not have to wait a bit for it. Nonetheless an interesting idea.