jotakami

The variety of social situations in typical schools is narrow and artificial. Once you leave school, never again in your adult life will you be forced to endure such a stifling environment.

If a homeschooled child never leaves the house, then yeah I can see it being a problem. But if they are allowed to go out and experience the world with their parents then they learn social skills by interacting with people of all ages, but mostly with adults who (most importantly) are already socialized and therefore model proper behavior instead of the insanity that goes on in age-segregated classrooms.

The chronic stress of having to complete bullshit assignments on subjects I had no interest in does not justify it. If I could make one law by fiat, it would be illegal to tell a child “You have to learn to do things that you don’t want to do” as justification for the mindless hours of frivolous work. Honestly, judging by the amount of stress it caused me as a child, I’m tempted to call it psychological abuse. Children are human beings too.

Couldn’t agree more. Parents who score high on conscientiousness and are able to set up that kind of home environment are going to have kids with many of the same traits (on average).

I don’t think anyone was denying that...

What I read was a repudiation of the argument that on average poor children fare worse in school therefore a given child from a poor family will necessarily perform poorly. It is entirely possible for a poor child to outperform wealthy peers, and the behavior of that child’s parents or the culture at home may have a large effect on their performance.

This reminds me of the final sentence from Tragedy and Hope, the 1000-page history of the first half of the 20th century by the late Carroll Quigley:

“Some things we clearly do not yet know, including the most important of all, which is how to bring up children to form them into mature, responsible adults, but on the whole we do know now, as we have already shown, that we can avoid continuing the horrors of 1914-1945, and on that basis alone we may be optimistic over our ability to go back to the tradition of our Western society and to resume its development along its old patterns of Inclusive Diversity.”

I believe the previous comment was implying that progress in school and personal development are not the same thing.

I’ve had a similar experience, although with one notable exception: within a week after I began microdosing a certain psychedelic, I spontaneously decided to quit caffeine cold turkey and had no qualms about it. Like some inner voice just said “why the hell do you have to push the accelerator so hard?” and there was no sensible answer so I quit. Unfortunately, that was short-lived because I don’t have a steady microdose supply so now I’ve reverted to my old ways.

Great idea, just have to wait for China to try it out

Because “centralized cryptocurrency” is an oxymoron

There’s already a “genius” solution: fiat currency which can be printed in infinite quantity for virtually zero cost. But, if you don’t like the downsides of fiat then you’re stuck with proof-of-work.

Useful proof of work is not the basis for a cryptocurrency, it is the basis for... useful work. The inventors apparently don’t understand the economic principles behind commodity money.

That’s why I say it’s mostly accounting—you have to convert reality into quantities before you can engineer it, and accounting is the set of rules for measuring and manipulating those quantities. The difficulty lies in the fact that unlike physics, where units are essentially hard-coded into the fabric of reality, the unit in accounting is money which is a social construct.

I believe this sentiment is mostly a symptom of the extreme prevalence of charlatans who use economics as a marketing tool rather than a social science.

Economics is really just accounting, statistics and psychology. But mostly accounting. I think people get really worked up about the “unknowable” parts and fail to see that accounting can open up tremendous insights if we only take the time to understand it well.

If you want to learn about economics for some specific money-making purpose, you’ll probably end up with an incomplete view that frustratingly fails to describe reality most of the time. On the other hand, if you approach the subject simply with an open mind seeking understanding, you will be richly rewarded with deep insights about the structure of society and the human condition.

Where to begin? I’ve been reading about economics for about 15 years, and I have to say that this crisis has brought a level of clarity about certain economic truths that I never would have seen otherwise.

First: accounting. I got an MBA five years ago and accounting was my favorite subject because it is behind everything that a business does. Accounting is the instrumentation that allows humans to organize their activity across tremendous scale and complexity and still be confident that they are producing value (making a profit). In the modern economy, accounting is everything. Try reading Jerome Levy’s “Where Profits Come From” to check your accounting chops: https://www.levyforecast.com/assets/Profits.pdf

I like where you’re going with this but I’m not sure the analogy is quite right. If you’ve read Dawkins, the genome is composed of genes which are basically the quanta of self-replication. He goes on to coin the term “meme” to refer to the analogous units of self-replication in mindspace. In other words, the brain is not analogous to the genome, rather the particular collection of abstractions (memes) which dominate how a particular brain processes and reacts to the world would be its cerebral “genome”.

I think we can say that natural selection operates across all levels of abstraction, because in the end the only objective reality is the biochemical one. Everything else is simulation. There is certainly a strong parallel between capitalism and Darwinian natural selection but I can’t immediately see a way to state that relationship in a clear analogy.

If you’re curious you can find it yourself. Half a dozen comments on this thread have links you can check out. This is an anonymous comment thread, not a tribunal. Do your own homework and make up your own mind.

Also, just as our biological machinery is an engine of negentropy, carving out order from chaos, I think our brains continue that same work in the information theoretic sense of entropy. Humans are insatiably curious because we are alive, and to be alive is to be an engine of order among chaos.

I’m currently working on a PhD in cryptography and I ran into this particular entry a few months ago while trying to wrap my head around entropy as an information theoretic concept. To be honest, it triggered a cascade of revelation that I had not felt since the last time I took psychedelics.

I read another article recently about the unexpectedly large role that randomness plays in embryonic development, and an idea clicked into place:

Life is about sustaining order amongst chaos, negentropy in a sea of entropy. But how does evolution lead to larger and larger pockets of negentropy that are capable of sustaining in increasingly hostile environments? How exactly does evolution lead to more and more “advanced” life forms?

Enter the magic of randomized algorithms. Randomized algorithms can often solve hard computational problems very efficiently, with the tradeoff that they have a small chance of failure. We can envision evolutionary leaps as computational problems, such as finding just the right folded protein to catalyze a particular cellular reaction. The magic of evolution is not just in building stable order, but also in harnessing randomness/entropy to solve environmental problems and then bootstrapping those solutions to solve higher level problems. Think about how just enough randomness is allowed into the process of meiosis to create perfectly functioning new humans that are wonderfully unique.

DNA and RNA are the non-volatile memory of the biological computer. Central nervous systems eventually reached a level of complexity that allowed them to persist memories, which opened up an even higher order problem solving mechanism. We humans have taken it even further with a cerebral cortex capable of abstraction, leading to complex language and the technology to record that language permanently.

I had similar thought, which led me to believe that the closest thing to God is the irreducible quantum randomness in our molecules.

In fact, I believe that life is not exclusively about order, but rather about harnessing randomness (entropy by another name) and capturing its output to bootstrap solutions to environmental problems. Our entire manner of reproduction is about allowing just enough randomness to produce interesting new results while maintaining the integrity of the life-form.

I’m a cryptographer, by the way, so what got me thinking about this was how we put a nice box around randomness to produce cool stuff like encryption and signature schemes.

It’s also “natural” to take your mare over to the prize stallion to get impregnated. Humans can control all the conditions around the “natural” process.

How many times do we need to repeat this... everyone assumes that “came from a lab” means “engineered bioweapon”. No!

Also, people quickly forget that humans have been selectively evolving plants and animals for thousands of years without touching the actual genomes.

Yeah that’s what I’ve been trying to explain to all my reasonable friends who think that the moment I say “it came from a lab” that means this is a bioweapon that was intentionally released. No, actually, there is a chain of evidence that makes an accidental lab leak more plausible than the theory that the virus jumped straight from an animal in a wet market hundreds of miles away from its normal habitat that just happens to be in the same city as a lab that holds samples of virus from that strain.

You are leaving out the single most important element of this whole mess: Eurodollars. There are banks outside of the US that take “real” US dollars and multiply them through fractional reserve lending but totally outside of the Federal Reserve System. When the financial crisis of 2008 hit, everyone “discovered” that Eurodollar liabilities were so entangled with real USD liabilities that pulling them apart would be impossible without completely shutting down global trade and finance for an extended period of time. So, the Fed just temporarily gave access to its liquidity for foreign institutions outside of the FRS to keep things running.

Anyways, my point is that Eurodollars can be created, passed around among foreign entities, and destroyed without ever necessarily touching the US flow of funds.

Ever heard of Eurodollars? That’s exactly what the original article is talking about. There are foreign banks that loan dollars—fractionally—outside of the US banking system. Dollars are needed to settle those debts, and they exist fully outside of the US.

I’m a resident of Gainesville and I was completely unaware of this. Now I know not to send anything sensitive to a local government email address...

I used to constantly read articles like this about how to get motivated to do all sorts of things I thought I needed to do. Then I was diagnosed with ADHD and found a suitable medication.

This is where the problem lies. Sure, liquid assets are as good as cash... until they aren’t. If everyone tries to convert assets to cash simultaneously, then cash gets scarce really quick and the difference between the two becomes clear.

This is completely relevant to the Minsky moment, because it is the illusion of wealth created by inflated asset values that leads people to take excess risks.

My retirement account is up 20% in two weeks from SPY puts and GLD calls

You’re not wrong, but government bonds actually have a somewhat different role in the modern financial system. Specifically, they are used as collateral in the interbank lending market, which means they have exchange value above and beyond the discounted cash flow of the bond itself. Which is basically how negative yielding bonds could even exist.

There’s a difference between capital and printed money. Capital is the result of forgone consumption, of producing more than is consumed. Much of what people call “capital” is really just inflated paper claims to assets. A share of stock is not capital, it is just a fractional claim on the residual earnings produced by a business. Capital isn’t magically created when stock prices are bid up, because the underlying assets (“capital”) of the business don’t change.