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masonium

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The article cites a study by Business Insider, but the link actually links to a completely different article (from the Atlantic) that, ironically enough actually makes the exact opposite point of what this article is trying to make.

Business Insider has an article ( https://www.businessinsider.com/average-americans-beating-wa... ) from 5 days ago about home buying, but I don't see that 44% number anywhere.

I've seen this error a lot when working with two different versions of the same library. Specifically, you can directly include version A, but a different library depends on a version B, with some of that exposed in the public API.

That's mine main contention.

PFOF price improvement might be hundredths of a cent (per-share) off of a 3-cent lit spread. But, if PFOF were banned and all that volume were lit instead, the lit spread might actually be 2 cents, so you'd be saving $0.005 in this universe compared to the one we live in.

PFOF does not tighten "lit" spreads.

PFOF does offer price improvement, which can effectively decrease the spread *for a particular marketable order". However, PFOF drives volume away from the limit markets, which determine the actual spread by which price improvement is measured against. So, it's a bit of a shell game.

Concretely, at least 20% of all stock market volume is internalized in PFOF-style firms (citadel, virtu, et. al). If that volume were all on the lit exchanges instead, the spread on those exchanges would be narrower on average.

What you describe is probably mathematically impossible, but it definitely does not reflect reality.

Facebook's median tenure is 2.3 years, so at least 50% of all people at Facebook were hired during the past 2.3 years. If there were a true 'quota' of 30% of BIPOC during that period (a small fraction of the time since their first DEI report), you would necessarily have at 15% of employees represented as such. By Facebook's own numbers, in the article, that is not the case. So, what can we conclude? Either:

1) Facebook's BIPOC employees leave at a much higher rate than other employees (implying a large problem in and of itself). 2) Facebook does not, in fact, have a 30% minimum quota for BIPOC hires.

Your comment, in fact, would deny not only the implication of the article but even the basic facts therein. We know from above that Facebook is definitely not hiring at 30%, so why in the world would they reject a Black PhD in a relevant field, if the will "just hire any [one], culture fit or not"?

Except any reasonable proposal for a wealth tax typically leaves the first 5-10 million untouched and marginally taxes amounts larger than that. If you have $10 million in the bank, you're not just a "saver" or "refraining from consumption".

Robinson argues that two particular pieces of work are poorly structured logically and insufficiently backed by evidence. He posits a particular source for how these arguments were constructed in the first place (that the authors mistake the assertion of their worldview for evidence of that worldview), and says that this is something the 'Very Smart' can get away with essentially because they allow themselves or are allowed by others to rest on their (earned or unearned) laurels:

    'A lot of time in college is spent teaching students that they cannot simply expound their theories of the world without reference to any scholarly literature. But once you have your credentials, and have made your way into an intellectual sinecure, whether in academia, media, or as a rich guru whose opinions are valued because people think the rich are smart, you no longer need to follow the rules.'
I can't argue for the Mead article (it was behind a paywall and was retracted ten days after its publication date: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12115-020-00496-1... ), but I think Robinson demonstrates this pretty well for the PG essay. As he notes:
    'I want to draw your attention to what is common between these two pieces of writing, because while most of us will probably wave away an essay like Mead’s, the actual *reasoning* in Graham’s is no better.' (original emphasis)
I don't think Robinson makes a claim that the subjects of the articles are vacuous. In the PG case, he claims that the subjects aren't even specified:
    'It’s hard to know what Graham is even talking about most of the time. What ideas does he think are not being debated? What restrictions have been put in place? What are some examples of things that are being affected by the inability to pursue certain lines of thinking? Which norms have eroded and in which institutions and to what degree and what consequences are imposed for Thinking The Forbidden Thoughts? How are we to evaluate whether there has been a loss to intellectual discourse without understanding what has been lost?'

Would you mind being specific? Are you making a claim about the author in general, or this particular essay? What is an example of a claim in the essay that you think is vapid?

That's not anywhere close to the author's core argument. I'll let the author speak for themselves:

    'They also are both good examples of a kind of fake social science, whereby you simply make unsubstantiated observations about human beings that confirm things people already believe, and the reader’s pre-existing feelings (their pre-judgments or “prejudices” if you will) are doing the work that evidence should be doing. I would argue that this kind of writing is extremely common and that we need to watch out for it because, if we share the prejudices of the author, we will end up believing things that may be totally untrue, and we will think we have read a good argument when we have in fact just been told that we were right all along.'
Robinson does note that the respective authors' fame, in some ways, insulates them from realizing the vacuousness of their prose:
    'Incredibly, Graham says that he had nine people review and give comments on his essay before he published it, including Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis. Apparently not one of those people asked Graham “What the hell are you talking about? What is this referring to? Could you please buttress this with some examples?”'
But the vast majority of the articles is dedicated to explaining why the essays are poorly-argued and poorly-sourced, without appeals to the authors' notoriety.

The initial discussion of the article on YC almost touched on what the article hits, noting that Paul Graham is actually quite vague in specifically what behaviors he finds troubling, or what debates he thinks can no longer be had. But, I think the article does a really good job of demonstrating how empty his argument really is.

To be clear, it's possibly a political statement but it's hardly an ad, at least in any sense that people (Americans?) traditionally use the term.

I also don't think that the existence of 'more important' issues precludes the discussion of other issues that may be relevant to a large number of people (or a small number of people, for that matter). I would certainly find it annoying if every political conversation I took part in were interrupted with "Well, that's nothing to be compared to climate change", even if I believed it to be true.

How would that be more complicated? Setting up a DAF is quite simple.

You'd only have to transfer to one address, rather than collect addresses and transfer to one per charity (many of whom probably have to set up wallets). You only have one tax receipt, rather than one receipt per charity. It's slighty-to-massively simpler for the recipient, and it's much simpler for the donor.

In other words, the bet didn't really prove anything other than that the hedge fund industry overall is less attractive than the broader market.

The context of the original challenge suggests that this was the intention. I actually think that it proved something a little stronger.

If some moderately savvy investor were deciding whether to invest her $1m in index funds or hedge funds, she would actually have to choose which hedge fund to invest in. Presumably Ted Seides knows more than our example investor would about hedge funds (and has access to more of them she would). So Ted is an (optimistic) stand-in for how well she would actually have done, which is frankly the more relevant question.

On a related note, Ted probably didn't invest in RenTec, or at least not the Medallion Fund, because he can't. Most funds. like Medallion, that can consistently beat the market will either stop taking additional investments or straight up return capital to investors and trade their own money. Buffett doesn't actually go so far as to claim that no one can beat the market (after all, he did); his claim is merely that our average investor can't really take advantage of it to beat the market themselves.

As a designated market maker, there are probably regulatory requirements that force them to be in the market. Granted, if they'd known the full extent of the damage, they almost certainly would've pulled the plug. But, I'm guessing that was a factor.