I'm curious what history Jack Clark is referring to here.
If I think of the last thirty years of policy in most of Europe and the US I'm thinking of a strong trend of deregulation and giving more powers to markets, removing international trade barriers and so on.
That seems to be a dynamic opposite to the one the quoted article is suggesting.
> If I think of the last thirty years of policy in most of Europe and the US I'm thinking of a strong trend of deregulation and giving more powers to markets
That's been the PR spin, but it's not actually true. It's a smoke screen to help governments avoid actual accountability.
For example, the crash of 2008 was blamed on too much market and not enough regulation, but in fact it was the opposite: regulatory thumbs on the scale, for example the US government wanting to encourage home ownership and skewing the mortage market and the money supply and requiring lenders to accept more default risk, and governments implicitly giving a "too big to fail" guarantee to large financial institutions and then being extremely arbitrary in when that implicit guarantee was broken. A true free market would never have produced such a thing.
> removing international trade barriers and so on.
Globalization of trade has been going on for much longer than the last 30 years. If anything, the last 30 years have seen more of things like trade wars (for example between the US and China) and other disruptions to smooth international trade.
> for example the US government wanting to encourage home ownership and skewing the mortage [sic] market and the money supply and requiring lenders to accept more default risk
Are there economists who share your view on this? I don’t see how the issue of repackaging CDS and related products by a financial rating agency has anything to go with the government.
If you’re saying that the government forced buyers to abandon due diligence… I think we will have to disagree about the facts of the GFC
> I don’t see how the issue of repackaging CDS and related products by a financial rating agency has anything to go with the government.
The financial rating agencies are creatures of government regulation.
> If you’re saying that the government forced buyers to abandon due diligence
I said no such thing. I said that government regulations forced lenders to accept more default risk--meaning they were forced to lend to people they would not otherwise have lent to because the risk of default was too high. That's what "subprime mortgages" means, and those were a huge contributor to the crash.
> said that government regulations forced lenders to accept more default risk--meaning they were forced to lend to people they would not otherwise have lent to because the risk of default was too high. That's what "subprime mortgages" means, and those were a huge contributor to the crash.
The ratings agencies are free to rate things as they wish - unless maybe you’re saying there’s a government directive to misrate things?
Also, please clarify how the government is compelling lenders to make loans that don’t pass the lender’s underwriting criteria… this is news to me
It's a half truth; the truth is somewhere in the middle of this and another theory. I'm not an economist, but the start of my professional life was marred by the experience of 2008 so I spent a lot of my time reading about it.
In reality, there were a lot more sub-prime loans but only one of those lenders was actually expected to take on sub-prime loans. That's to say, taking on more sub-prime loans was a choice reflected in an ecosystem of incentives where profits were falling because a few lenders started a campaign to lower borrowing standards and the rest of the herd followed to stay afloat. What also happened was that lenders were essentially over weighting sub-prime loans into these packages and then using their relationships with the privately controlled ratings agencies to rate them the way that would be if they were filled with primes. If you read between the lines lenders found the solution to their profit problem and were trying to justify its stability post-hoc through package ratings. The reality is that sub-primes are highly profitable when they work out because they have high interest rates. When they don't they're not that expensive because generally the property is offloaded but this only works up to a magical threshold depending on a lot of risk variables. Once you go beyond that threshold and the dominos begin to fall, they all fall spectacularly. Risk traditionally should be leveled by packaging them with less risky loans.
> please clarify how the government is compelling lenders to make loans that don’t pass the lender’s underwriting criteria
It didn't. Instead it required the lenders, by law, to change their underwriting criteria so that loans which the lenders would previously have chosen not to make, because they were not within their underwriting criteria, were now within their underwriting criteria. It also passed laws forbidding lenders from refusing loans to people who met their underwriting criteria. This was all done on the theory that encouraging home ownership was a good thing and that lenders had been arbitrarily refusing loans to people and needed to be stopped from doing that.
The book Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy makes a claim to that effect, that US government created some unfortunate incentivizes towards risky credit. It was of course not the only problem that led to the 2008 GFC, but it certainly was a part. I recommend the book, it was detailed and has a global focus, as the author was the Chief Economist at the IMF for some years.
Right, and many of those deregulation moves turned out poorly in hindsight. Governments have ratcheted up control in some cases, but stating that it is a universal law is patently false, although it sounds good as a quip.
Regulations are kind of like security practices. When done well they are often taken for granted, but poor ones get a lot of negative attention. I'm glad that I don't have to wonder if the cereal I buy at a store is filled with rat poison. I'm fine if the government never relinquishes the power to oversee that.
Unfortunately the current leaders in the latest AI craze have not inspired much confidence that they will act responsibly in the future. Maybe if different people were running these companies it would make sense for the government to keep out of it, but in this world we're going to need some reasonable regulation.
Deregulation is not returning power to the people, it's bestowing carte blanche privatization of profits to corpos, in the wake of near complete regulatory capture, while they dump the negative externalities on the public.
At least for Europe this is wrong. I mean yes, there are new trade treaties but internally EU regulations and at least for Germany its regulations increase by the day. Just this year the personal tax declaration form got 10 or so additional pages. And the new supply chain law needs medium to large companies to prove that all their purchases are morally correct (sorry not sure how to phrase this properly). And I don't even follow new laws closely.
> is it not reasonable to assume that the number of security flaws just reflects how insecure most public code is?
It sounds to me like that's not an inference that can easily be drawn. Copilot was trained on predicting code, it doesn't understand the code it produces syntactically. Security issues can be highly context dependent. For example, in most cases it's fine to log a variable, but when it happens to contain a password, it's a security issue. This is a flawed example as the algorithm may be able to learn that variables with names or contexts suggesting that they're secrets should not be logged, but I can imagine much more subtle issues can crop up.
There needn't even be a confounding variable, the direction of causation may simply be reversed: not personality traits -> superager, but superager -> personality traits.
Sounds quite plausible to me that having a good memory at old age leads to a more active and engaged lifestyle leading to happy people that appear less neurotic and more extrovert.
Right, but a well trained ear is exactly what those who don't focus on reading music tend to have ("instead" I might add since someone focusing on reading music doesn't necessarily need to understand it, although understanding of course helps a great deal).
It's interesting that you talk about replicating pieces. This is a "peculiarly Western" way of treating musicianship (and even in the Western world it applies primarily to classical musicians). In most of the world, musicianship is first and foremost judged by ability to improvise and to perform an orally transmitted repertoire of music. Music tends to be made in an improvisatory manner, but within the rules and constraints of a particular style.
It really depends on what kind of musician you want to be. Do you want to play Western classical music, or professionally in recording studios then reading is probably essential. If you just want to make music, it might still be handy and practical but by no means required.
I see lots of hate for oil companies, but not a lot for those who choose to fly a lot or drive gigantic cars. The F150 is America's best selling vehicle, passenger trains are basically unusable in North America, suburbia makes public transport impossible.
We live in a consumerist society where virtually every product we own or use contains plastic or has been shipped from the other side of the world, but we lay blame on those who extract the oil.
I really don't see how it matters. It is this specific comment that is going to "manipulate" you into donating? The disaster happened. Stories as told in this comment happened. The hospital exists, it was severely damaged. In that context, does it really matter whether this person is speaking the truth?
Its not that its going to manipulate me into donating. Its that this sort of action does not ring true. Even if raising funds via 'go fund me' etc is what is purported to happen in many of these events.
If you were involved in an accident of some sort say a car crash, would you say that people should donate to some-cause on account of having heard your story? Would you leverage this event in that way? And if you did, wouldn't you provide some actual evidence that you were there, rather than a couple of links to generic news clips? Surely the bar needs to be a little higher for us to buy into this stuff....
Regardless, this explosion happened and there are many human beings in distress. That alone would be enough reason to donate.
If I was in a car crash, I would not ask people to donate. This is different, this is a humanitarian crisis, and he is not soliciting donations for himself but rather the hospital.
I'm all for questioning things, but come on. There's a giant freaking crater in the ground. And you think, what exactly? This is a grand conspiracy to get you to donate a few dollars. I'm sorry but that doesn't make sense.
Can you elaborate on the connection between this announcement and the platform's value as a platform that fosters discussion you perceive? Do you mean content moderation has turned the site into an echo chamber?
Reddit still feels like a biker bar to me. I don't know how many important conversations hinge on the ability to use racial slurs. My naive take would be: few, if any.
The average age on Reddit is probably 12 anyways, and those tweens upvote factual errors, more readily than correct information. That's on any topic, political or not.
The rate of important problem-solving on Reddit is a big fat goose-egg: Reddit is a counterexample to "the wisdom of crowds."
> I don't know how many important conversations hinge on the ability to use racial slurs. My naive take would be: few.
But that wouldn't be content policy, that would be tone policy. You can say incredible racist things without using any slurs. If you want to police the content, you'll outlaw saying racist things (or rather: things you perceive to be racist). If you want to police the tone, you'll outlaw the use of slurs, insults etc, but allow the content.
I assume that Reddit has an issue with the content, not its presentation.
I wish the average age on Reddit was 12. That would explain a lot of things but it's far from true.
The biggest group on Reddit are millennials, those between 25 and 35 years approx. And it's pretty sad because they don't want to have a civil conversation with anyone. They only want to hear what they already think/believe.
The real value Reddit has it's the small niche subreddits that fly under the radar. Small communities that are not dragged by the hive mentality.
While peer review has its problems, I have the feeling that the problems that we're talking about here are not primarily caused by peer review per se, but by a set of perverse incentives that surround academia these days. I'm talking about the "publish or perish" culture that is results from the (sometimes) automated metrics based on which promotions are decided, grants are handed out and academic staff is assessed. Isn't it these incentives that can create attitudes like "Who cares? It's one more publication!" (as quoted by another commenter in this thread). And isn't an overwhelming amount of mediocre journal submissions that result from this one of the reasons peer review is under pressure, qualified reviewers are rare and politics are so common?
But it also matters how those billions live, and considering that the vast majority live in extreme poverty the picture becomes less rosy. Not to speak of the ecological disasters of climate change and pollution this is causing, which also has an impact on our well being. Modern agriculture and medicine have in a way made it possible for all those people to be alive at the same time. I agree with your last sentence since we obviously can't change the past.
For that matter, the whole point of the primitivist argument is that humans have been quite happy about living in extreme physical deprivation for most of their history. It's only when the social milieu is totally FUBAR that "poverty" as we know it becomes a cause of deep unhappiness and dysfunction. Also as the OP shows, people can also be quite unhappy with their life despite living in a highly developed country and enjoying quite a bit of material wealth.
If I think of the last thirty years of policy in most of Europe and the US I'm thinking of a strong trend of deregulation and giving more powers to markets, removing international trade barriers and so on.
That seems to be a dynamic opposite to the one the quoted article is suggesting.