colorint

As a general matter, you can't prove a predicate true or false by automatic means. Logic programming is just as "artful" as imperative or functional programming, because they all run into the same problem: it's impossible to tell the difference between long-running and infinite computation. The question of algorithms for general logic was explicitly addressed as the Entscheidungsproblem, meaning decision problem, which was independently proven undecidable by both Turing and Church:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entscheidungsproblem

The drawback of hash tables is that they're bad for inexact matching. Likewise, when I go to the library, I usually go to the section I'm interested in and let my eyes wander. So something that pseudorandomly organizes books but lets you find them by exact title quickly is not so good.

Risk of borrowers defaulting is the entire ethical justification for lending with interest. Collateralization reduces the risk of the loan, but doesn't eliminate it; after all, cars lose value over time, and businesses may or may not be able to sell assets for enough to cover their liabilities. Indeed, the closest you get to eliminating the risk of a loan is having the federal government guarantee it, so...

That's Dr. Gene Ray, Cubist and Wisest Human to you.

Ironically, the postapocalyptic world will probably still use US dollars. And when it turns out that not enough physical dollars survived the apocalypse, dollars will be the way credit is accounted, with whatever dollars remain being used to periodically reconcile accounts.

In this case it's probably justified: one of the hallmarks of "modern" bubbles, or at least of modern speculative hype that doesn't work out, is that renaming a company based on the hype increases its stock price without any change in the fundamentals. This has a long history, including companies during the dotcom bubble increasing their stock price by giving themselves techy names.

I was playing Pai-Gow poker at a casino with my parents and some friends. The game has side bets, which pay out if you get a good hand, independently of whether you win or lose, and (inversely) proportionate to the probability of the hand. By the numbers they're terrible bets (while Pai-Gow has the, I think, third-lowest house edge, after craps and blackjack), so my friend and I don't bet them, but my parents do. My friend got a great hand, full house maybe, and my dad said, "bet you wish you'd made the side bet," and we both said, "no, we don't."

Keynes sort of sums up this sentiment, just replace economist with philosopher:

Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

The bottom line is, all "practical" viewpoints begin from some particular way of looking at the world, which usually gets hammered out in philosophy. In this sense, I find that pragmatism is usually just someone taking for granted the etiology of their own ideas, which makes pragmatism one of the least interesting positions.

Obviously I don't know what you in particular believe, so I'm just talking about the kinds of people who I've personally seen advance these kinds of positions.

I'm going to issue a coin for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.

national debt [...] no money to go around

Let's imagine that I'm a government that reserves the right to be sole issuer of my country's currency (though for political reasons I've delegated that power to a government-sponsored enterprise whose leadership I appoint). Now let's say I also issue securities denominated in that money. From my perspective, what's the difference between money and claims on money? From a holder's perspective, what's the difference between them? Even the obvious difference, one has yield and one does not, is pretty misleading, since the interbank rate tracks the securities rate.

Cash basis is accepted for the purposes of taxes, but my understanding is that it's not acceptable for legally-mandated reporting. That is, cash basis is not among the generally accepted accounting principles.

Banks can't print money either, and this isn't some "ackshually it's the Mint" thing: banks have the power to create debt. But this isn't special, because you and I also have the power to create debt. What makes a bank special is that debt is its business (so most of its operation concerns the management of debt), and much of its debt can be called on demand, and so we call banks' debts to us demand deposits.

Fractional reserve is just a particular kind of regulation placed on banks' creation of debt, and it usually isn't the most important one. The practical limit of banks is that they have to be able to extinguish their debts (which we call withdrawal), including being able to transfer them to other banks in exchange for cash (which we call clearing), at the whim of the creditors (you and me).

The problems with banks are the problems with debt generally, but that's much trickier than some glib remarks about monetary policy.

It's more of a technical note, but probably the last really important change was the accrual basis, which, as far as I know, was popularized in the 20th century. This is the system of accounting where you record revenues and expenses when you become aware of them, rather than when you pay them, so many things end up being recorded as debts. Notably, this is the currently-accepted way of doing accounting.

The technical definition of inflation is raising prices. It's only a strictly monetary phenomenon if output and velocity are fixed with respect to the money supply. In other words, inflation meaning "more money" is only a technical definition in the kooky world of monetarism.

The biggest sin of the Boomers is, they grew up in a world that was carefully curated by their parents, and became convinced that this was the natural state of things.

He probably means "unity of experience" in the sense that, one's experience is a unity. Look at the whole sentence:

Its nature and import can be expressed only by art, because there is a unity of experience that can be expressed only as an experience.

This sounds like more of a phenomenological point, that there's a richness and a completeness to experience that isn't captured in data or theory, and that only something with comparable richness can begin to approach it.

It's proven unsolvable for computers (i.e., Turing machines). Whether that makes it impossible for humans to solve (as a matter of course, or as a matter of Turing's proof) depends on whether you believe that we are isomorphic to computers. Which, to be fair, is exactly the belief that underwrites artificial intelligence. But then Turing's proof involves a program that inspects the halting oracle you're using, which isn't well-posed for humans evaluating halting.

but am curious as to what the arguments against it are

There's a "philosophical" problem to the effect of, at some point, what are you indexing? But what seems to me to be the more practical issue, and forgive me for this being half-formed, is that it seems like indexing is subtly the wrong thing to do (in a world consisting of only bad choices). The things being indexed are basically weights, for example, the relative capitalization of various stocks, based on some filtering criteria. In order to keep a fund on target with an index, they have to buy and sell according to those weights, and in principle, if the weights change, then the fund's holdings have to change accordingly.

This would seem to me to introduce problems like, if there's a sell-off of some stock so that its price drops, then its capitalization will also drop (capitalization being number of shares times price per share), which would seem to reduce its weight in the index. This should then lead to index funds having a follow-on sell-off. (And likewise for exuberant buying.) So this would suggest to me that, if index funds come to dominate stock holdings, then they should both increase volatility, and result in their holders systematically "buying high and selling low." That is, because an index fund is not the same as an index, but it's in active feedback with the index computation method.

There's also a potential issue, again depending on the level of buy-in, that one should see systematically increasing P/E ratios because of increased overall buying of stocks. That is, in the past, it was not typical for normal people to engage in regular stock purchases (which are held for decades). This would suggest lower dividend yields, which leaves one wondering whether 401ks will become what people think Social Security is, i.e., ever-rising P/Es serving as a transfer from the young to the old that requires continual workforce increases to maintain.

Though I'm not in finance, these are just the things that occur to me in thinking, how would I implement an index fund, and what might that do to the system's dynamics.

Well, Minsky's financial instability hypothesis is at least interesting. His argument is, basically, that there's a cycle wherein: during normal times, people want to beat the averages, so they engage in more speculative bets; as that ratchets up, and speculative positions become increasingly leveraged, a point comes where debt is financing interest on speculative leverage; once enough people get suspicious, further debt isn't extended, so the speculative positions default and drive cascading defaults (since there's "blood in the water"); the after-crash period comes with a renewed sense of caution, and people accept lower yields as the price of earlier speculative frenzy; over time, the caution comes to seem outmoded and people believe that normal times are here again; and so on.

I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it's at least a perspective.

Debt is an asset to the lender, and in case of default (and no hope of renegotiation) the asset is written off. Whether this is "someone paying it" is like asking whether the owner "pays for" a truck that's struck by a meteorite and totally destroyed. Your total claims on stuff (i.e., capital) have gone down, and you might even journal the destruction of the truck as an "expense" (which is, itself, nothing more than a change in capital), but I'd still be wary of saying it's "paid for." Obviously this does mean that having enough assets get struck by enough meteorites can throw you into insolvency.

(In this thought experiment we're ignoring insurance. Or you could imagine an uninsured asset being destroyed.)

Yes, that was Turing's proof. Church's more indirect proof is that it's impossible to prove the equivalence of two lambda expressions. But the real essence of the problem is more like, you can't generally know ahead of time all the values that will be presented inside loop bodies. If you try to actually elaborate the loop then you get caught again: if the elaboration of the loop keeps going on for a while, the problem is re-presented, at what point do you give up? Which is to say, will this program, with these inputs, run forever? But this is basically Church's proof, since this is also the question, am I in exactly the same configuration as before? Without an ability to decide lambda expression equivalence, that question is also hopeless.

Hence the work that gets done in this area constrains the problem down to situations in which you can know enough to decide halting, like traversal of lists or trees that are known to be finite. I bring this up because, when it comes to AI, people want more than this.

It turns out that the problem of deciding whether a predicate is universally valid in an axiomatic system is also undecidable (and, appropriately enough, called the decision problem). That is to say, declarative systems "corresponding to" general computation are also undecidable. Which isn't really surprising, since logical recurrence is isomorphic to functional recursion. Hence also why the examples I could readily find of program synthesis are decidable problems, like deciding the maximum of two numbers or deciding membership in a list.

Yes, so given this, do you (i.e., people optimistic about AI) believe that computer programs will be able to generate meaningful, novel computer programs, given that even the most cursory subproblem is impossible? Obviously I don't just mean metaprogramming, but the sorts of things people want artificial intelligence to be able to do, the singularity and so forth.

Do you believe that artificial intelligence will be capable of deciding, given an algorithm and a set of inputs, whether the algorithm will finish running?

The global financial crisis showed that insurance isn't the answer. The problem with "hedging against all futures" is that the hedging is part of the system, and when the hedge grows to the scale of the thing being hedged, you have to start asking how you hedge the hedge (and so forth). That is, if Equifax can't pay out for a sufficiently large mistake, why would you expect their insurer to be able to do so? And, worse, what if the insurer is "too big to fail," so instead you just have the public serve as the backstop?

Hence I think your latter point is right, executives really need to be more criminally liable. It's hardly unheard of, even if Ken Lay died before sentencing.

I'm acquainted with the general manager of a local hardware chain in my small town that used to run a gas station. The sense I have from talking to him is, the gas station shut down because 1. Kroger put in a gas station that nobody can compete with, and 2. they couldn't sell liquor (because they were across the street from the high school). The gas station also used to have a successful auto repair shop attached to it, so apparently the gas and liquor problems were severe enough that even the auto shop couldn't justify continuing to operate the location---though, I gather, the Kroger gas station was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Obviously this is just one gas station in one small town, but then that's probably all there is to this discussion.

This is all a funny (i.e., sad) thing to have happened: the usual suspects have created a mythology that labor is a "marketplace" that optimizes according to naturalistic laws of supply and demand, which turns into a canard to attack employees. Now that employers are getting what they wish for (from high-end or niche employees, the only ones with any individual power), they really wish it was only an impersonal marketplace for them.

I guess the bigger point is that, when an abstraction gets old and popular enough, it becomes first-class and its specifics get obscured by time. So employment isn't a marketplace anymore, because won't somebody think of the employers! but we just keep the aspects of employees being cogs in the business and call it "culture." Which, of course, the dissenting replies have shown in spades: ask not what your company can do for you, ask what you can do for your company!

There is a serious concern to keep in mind about adaptive cruise control or automatic braking, which is, their inelegant failure modes. For a simpler example, consider that new cars have started including blind spot sensors, which light up an indicator on the side-view mirrors if a car might be in the corresponding blind spot. The thing that baffles me about these is, if that system fails, then the indicator will be off regardless of whether there's anyone in the blind spot, which is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Likewise, if adaptive cruise control fails, you'll probably rear-end someone. So then you get into the same problem, that there's a rare situation in which the failure is potentially fatal. So then you have to pay attention for something that's unlikely, which we're pretty bad at, so what value is added?

Obviously words are a matter of intersubjectivity; we can only understand them from their use, so anything can be money if enough people call it that. If you want to understand why cryptocurrency is not a financial asset, that's because it's not a liability of its issuer. And of course, cryptocurrency is not state money because you can't use it to pay taxes. It seems to me to be most like a sort of nonconsumable commodity, which is strange enough.

The "solvency" of a government (that issues its own currency and only issues debt in that currency) is the same thing as its credibility. Or to tie it to what you said, a government is exactly as solvent as its ability to collect taxes.