mrfredward

Liquid retail stocks follow Benford's law because there is a notion of intrinsic value from the company and an army of quant traders trying to exploit any price inefficiency caused by the retail traders.

With cryptocurrency, the market is less mature and the intrinsic value largely comes from people believing in its value. So really, it would be surprising if we didn't see some Benford's law anomalies associated with people picking numbers.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion; the links above have given me stuff to chew on and calmed the red mist after I got so many drive-by downvotes.

I guess we need to make a distinction between the blog post and the Gary Smith post it links to here.

Gary smith (the person I think you're referring to having spent a career in this) says this:

The market manipulation, the irrational price gyrations, and the enthusiasm of so many investors for investing in bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) is ample evidence that market prices are not invariably equal to intrinsic values.

I entirely agree. A perfectly efficient market should follow Benford's law given enough data.

It's the blog post by Andrew that I think totally misses the point. He leaps from inefficiency which could be market manipulation to this:

I saw this and I was like, well, yeah, isn’t all bitcoin use either crime or manipulation? But then I realized, no, that’s not all of it. Some bitcoin playas are motivated by politics, some by fomo, some are doing anti-virtue signaling...

And never considers the fact that the world is full of people who feel very different paying $100.00 vs $99.99

Benfords law is used to find evidence that the numbers came from a person, not a measurement or mathematical process, right? So anyone who knows what a limit order is should not be surprised to find evidence that humans are involved in picking the prices, right?

It should be obvious that violating Benfords law isn't evidence of fraud or manipulation or even fomo, just evidence that the price is impacted by the people typing in the orders having to pick what number to type in.

Edit: I've softened the language in my comment a bit, but I stand by the fact that this only shows humans are affecting prices, this analysis can't distinguish between fraud and psychological effects around "key" prices, like $10,000.

I am a few months in to a 15 year mortgage after recently refinanced at a 2.125%. Here's a rough breakdown of where each dollar of my last mortgage payment went:

Principal: 60%

Interest: 22%

Escrow(Taxes + Insurance): 18%

And of course the percentage going to interest only goes down with each passing month. The conventional wisdom that you are paying mostly interest in the beginning a) really only applies to 30 year mortgages, and b) was way more true when interest rates were higher. We're currently near some of the lowest interest rates in history, so interest eats a lot less than it used to.

I'll add that I pay a good bit less on my mortgage than it takes to rent an equivalent place in my area. But yes, paying 6% to realtors when you sell is huge, so you still need to own the house a few years for buying to make sense.

Here's an example for something as simple as a hobbyist using a metal lathe in their garage:

For a rough part, you can measure how much material you need to take off, do it in a few passes without stopping to remeasure, and you're within 5 thousandths of an inch or so.

For a shaft that is going to slide or rotate in a bore without too much force, you need to be within a thousandth or two, so for the last pass you will stop, measure carefully, and only take a little bit of material off at a time so that the cutting forces are low and there is less deflection in the tool to throw off the size of the part.

For a press fit (two parts are sized precisely enough that they can be pressed together with a hydraulic press and then never come apart), you need tolerances in the tenths of a thousandth of an inch. For this, you'll dust off your special expensive micrometer, and it's important to let the part cool before measuring, because the heat from machining can cause the part to expand and cause you to take off too much material, which would ruin the part.

So even for the same person on the same machine with the same material, the effort (and therefore cost, if you're doing this commercially) can vary quite a bit based on the tolerance needed.

I don't know aerospace, but I imagine the required tolerances require vary from "looks good from here" (seats in the cabin) to "must ride on a film of oil this many microns thick when spinning at 10,000 rpm." And the manufacturing processes can be anything from "intern with a saw" to "specialized metrology lab with most expensive machines in the world" depending on what engineering specifies.

The downside of seniority based pay is that people who show little to no motivation can end up the highest paid on a team if they simply avoid getting in trouble for 20 years.

I know someone who quit a job at Boeing years ago in part because he was at the bottom of the pay ladder doing tons of work while the highest paid non-manager in his department didn't do anything except keep the printers stocked with paper.

Throwing incentives on competitive people can be toxic, but the opposite problem is that when high performers don't get rewarded the organization will rot.

From the code you linked:

Computing professionals should protect confidentiality except in cases where it is evidence of the violation of law, of organizational regulations, or of the Code. In these cases, the nature or contents of that information should not be disclosed except to appropriate authorities.

The dictionary defines ethics as the field of knowledge dealing with moral principles, sure, and that's not at all what I'm talking about here. Perhaps I erred in using the word too generally and should have been specific in talking about ethics in the professional sense.

The ethical codes that are associated with a profession are different from moral principles that may usually guide us. The first example they gave when I studied this in engineering was that of a defense attorney: trying to help a guilty person get away with a serious crime violates most people's moral standards, but the code of ethics for attorneys demands that they defend guilty people anyway, because our law system is set up with that expectation.

To my original point, someone may claim a moral imperative to tell the world about the company in this article, but the fact of the matter is just about every professional ethics committee or handbook would tell you to uphold your NDA in the situation here. Wasting people's time under false pretenses may be bad, and it isn't ethical to do it yourself, but it isn't so bad that you can just drop your own obligations and blog about it.

And yes I admit some handwaving here since programming doesn't have widely adopted ethical codes yet, but I can guarantee that when they do exist, they won't tell you to violate a contract for something that won't injure anyone and doesn't break any laws.

You've confused ethics and morals. The ethical action (which is about professional standards rather than your conscience) is usually to follow the legal agreement you've signed (barring something that supersedes the NDA like being legally required to report something to regulators).

So no, it isn't unethical for the author to abide by his NDA, arguably the exact opposite is true, though exposing these shenanigans at a personal risk could be argued to be the better moral decision.

From the tweet it looks like an awesome search feature. Just type what you wanted to search for right inline and then it can drop the result in without you ever changing a window or moving a hand to the mouse.

Problem is you don't know whose code you're stealing, which leads to all sorts of legal, security, and correctness issues.

Somewhat buried, but this my favorite takeaway

Errors of omission are generally much more serious than errors of commission, but errors of commission are the only ones picked up by most accounting systems. Since mistakes are a no-no in most corporations, and the only mistakes identified and measured are ones involving doing something that should not have been done, the best strategy for managers is to do as little as possible. No wonder managerial paralysis prevails in American organizations.

I've seen bright forward thinking leaders who delivered results get canned when one reasonable bet doesn't pay off, but mostly I've watched decision-makers stall when action is badly needed. This explains very succinctly what is wrong with so many places I've worked.

I believe width is referring to pulse width, which should be a time unit.

For a very basic CRUD app I tend to agree with you.

But for anyone dealing with synchronization between threads/processes/machines, modeling engineering problems with large systems of equations, complex business domains, systems programming, actually implementing something from an algorithms textbook yourself, cryptography, or any problem that requires you to keep more than one or two things in your head at once to be solvable, focus is important.

And if the simple crud app mentioned before turns into spaghetti through no fault of your own, you'll still need to focus.

So I'm not going to shame anyone for saying they need to focus.

Well of course not, but it's a pretty strong risk factor.

the power differential is so intense that evidence can be ignored

This is a good point from the article to expand on, it's not just coincidence that the Hanoi rat massacre and the Delhi cobra hunt both feature colonial governments.

That quote applies to just about every example given on the perverse incentive Wikipedia page.

Oops, yeah I mixed up some numbers there, would have to be a mustang loaded with options for my comparison.

There is no metric for "inflation for cars". What the BLS data is saying is that the nominal price/quality for cars has stayed the same. So in 1990 you could get a mustang for $20k, and if instead you stuffed 20k in you mattress for 30 years, you could now buy a base model Kia, which when all the positives and negatives are added up delivers similar value to the features of a 1990 mustang. A 2021 mustang costs a lot more, but it's obviously in a different league, hence the adjustment.

Meanwhile, that $20k buys at loss less food, healthcare, education, house, etc which is why "today's dollars" are worth less and why it's fair to say cars got cheaper in inflation adjusted terms.

Worth noting that the executive get paid at least a comfortable base salary for as long as the cash-burning business keeps its doors open, and if hype creates a pop in the equity price their stock options can be worth a lot, even if the business doesn't turn out.

Regardless of whether MoviePass really had a chance at being profitable, or whether the people running it believed it could be profitable, there was money to be made in making it look viable and getting investors. That's a pretty important point that the author needs to understand before calling the execs "clueless."

Take a look at the "Many Assets" subheading in the original post.

Comparing their asset balance with the market cap of its stock is complete nonsense.

Ben Graham, one of Warren buffet's mentors, wrote a famous book called the "Intelligent Investor" which has several chapters on doing exactly that.

Think about it...if a company sells $10 billion in stock, the new stock adds $10 billion to their market cap and they get an extra $10 billion in cash which goes on their balance sheet. And likewise, a company can buy back shares and the reduction in marketcap from destroying shares is equal to the amount of cash assets being removed from the balance sheet. There's a link here.

+1 For Dietrich's version of it. He renames sociopaths, clueless, and losers to opportunists, idealists, and pragmatists, and in general tones the theory down a bit, and I think the result is something that is both more palatable and more reflective of reality.

The opportunists see the corporate world for what it is and do what is best for their careers, the idealists believe in the shared corporate myths and put in the hours to uphold the values they're taught, and the pragmatists value being home for dinner more than climbing the ladder. It describes the broken system without implying all the people in it are broken, and since the focus is really on the incentive systems that create this situation I think that's a better take.

You're forgetting many people live in apartments in dense urban areas

How much sunlight do they get in parking garages?

Contracts are sometimes a useful deterrent, because going to court sucks and can cost you a lot of money. They're also not a replacement for trust, because going to court sucks and can cost a lot of money.

There's an awesome introductory book on information theory which in one chapter resolves Maxwell's demon. The argument is that the energy needed to reliably send a single bit of information (which is needed for making the detector talk to the trap door) depends on the temperature of the fluid (because you have to overcome background noise), and it turns out the minimum energy needed for this communication is exactly equal to the amount that can be recovered from separating out a molecule.

If my understanding is correct (admittedly a big if), it seems the same problem applies to gambling. The energy it takes to communicate whether a gamble has paid off is at least as big as what can be recovered from the gamble.

The book is "An Introduction to Information Theory" by John R Pierce, and it's the most I've ever learned from a $10 paperback.

Is following Conway's law a bad thing, though

Is following the second law of thermodynamics a bad thing? I say so jokingly because thermo is a little more rigid, but I still think it's futile to fight Conway. After all, if you change your org structure to try to beat it, you're actually proving it.

It's not something to beat as much as it's something to inform decisions. Code should be architected with knowledge of how the organization is broken up, and orgs should be structured with knowledge of how that affects the technical side.

I guess all this is to agree with you and say...if breaking up modules in a certain way for small teams is effective for your organization, then it makes sense to do it.

your fundamental nature is flawed. Take these steps to salvation.

When a cheap sales pitch uses the "you're flawed" format, it's usually telling people "we are all flawed, but here's how you can be morally superior to your peers" or "do this thing and you'll receive a divine reward/achieve enlightenment." The promised reward or feeling of superiority is what makes people want to hear the message.

It's cheap to tell an aging church congregation about the dangers of video games and internet pornography, because it let's people pat themselves on the back without making a sacrifice. It's a little harder to tell an audience of young professionals that they need to limit high dopamine activities to find low dopamine activities appealing, and given that it's a real call to action based on a reasonable, falsifiable claim, I don't think it's cheap advice.

This seems like cheap advice that's trying to get me to buy into a lifestyle in order to sell me things.

Funny but I thought the exact opposite. People believe something much more easily when they want it to be true, so the typical sales approach is to tell people what they want to hear. Ridding your life of whatever seems most fun doesn't seem like cheap advice in that regard.

On the other hand, I think you're spot on with creative types too often getting exploited, and the involvement of ego being such a key factor in why/how we hackers get burned out.

It would have been unethical to be the boss of the company that offer new shares, got them bought on a market, but also unblocking all the short sellers in the process.

The stock market exists so that companies can access capital. If Gamestop were able to raise money, pay off some debt, avoid closing some stores and laying people off in the future, and fund a turnaround plan, that would have been the best possible outcome.

The only ethical issue is whether all the information is out there for investors, and in this it wasn't, so they couldn't raise money until whatever they are holding on to is announced.

"Expected value" is a well-defined term from statistics: "In statistics and probability analysis, the expected value is calculated by multiplying each of the possible outcomes by the likelihood each outcome will occur and then summing all of those values." This explanation is from investopedia no less.

Anyway, shorting gamestop has some probability distribution that includes every outcome from making a bunch of money to losing your shirt because of a viral meme (shorting losses have no theoretical limit). That distribution can simultaneously have positive expected value and also be an unattractive bet because of the risk involved...and that's before we talk about shorting fees.

The whole point of capital markets is that companies can raise cash by creating shares, and then use that cash to make money for shareholders. Naked short selling subverts this by letting someone else issue shares of the company and use the cash their own way. Companies have to have a near monopoly on creating their own shares, or the whole system falls down.

If naked short selling is restricted to short term trades in special circumstances (as it is now), the system still functions and market makers have a little more freedom to create liquidity (whether the liquidity is worth the other issues is a question I won't try to answer here). Allow unrestricted naked shorting though, and the next time you buy shares in msft, it could turn out that your investment depends on msft dividends paid by a hedge fund betting on cattle futures more than it depends on microsoft's financial performance.