Strawman/Steelman
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Perhaps no-one cares or shares my confusion with the use
Strawman/Steelman championed by Glen and adopted by others, however: consensus development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man_proposal vs polemical debate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ |
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Interesting. Thanks. I used Ada for 5 years contracting (mostly for the Army) and never once heard any of these terms used that way. And I was part of the group that pitched new projects to our clients. I'm wondering if it simply fell out of use or if I was too holed up in my own little world. We did commonly use the phrases "skeleton" and "fleshing out".
Also FWIW, the straw man fallacy is not solely an adversarial concept. You can straw man yourself. You can accidentally straw man someone. There are 3-way attempts at constructive ... what? ... trialog (?) where each party straw mans the others position on the way to a common ground. Etc. It's unfortunate that we focus on competitive, zero-sum, and adversarial senses of such things. But that need not be the case. On 1/28/21 12:30 PM, Steve Smith wrote: > Perhaps no-one cares or shares my confusion with the use > Strawman/Steelman championed by Glen and adopted by others, however: > > consensus development: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man_proposal > > vs polemical debate: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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Glen -
Thanks.... I never encountered the proposal version in the context of Ada directly, but in the general engineering culture. When I first realized that you were using Strawman in a very different way than I was used to it, I definitely recognized that YOU were not using it in an adversarial way, though I think you were often acknowledging or proposing that others were. I think there is a nuance to the "Strawman Proposal" that differs from "Skeleton" in that it is deliberately detuned, possibly deliberately flawed to leave room for others to contribute. The difference perhaps between a pot of water on a fire with a large nail in it and a pot of water on a fire with an onion? The stone/nail becomes a challenge for others to contribute substantially while the onion carries more assumptions that might actually suppress the generous, collective creativity that ensues from the parable. Once I got past the negative/defensive response to the idea that I might be "putting forth a strawman" I benefited quickly from the alternative conception complementing the "proposal" version. And as you suggest, mostly by applying it to my own thinking/ideas and by recognizing (more often) if I might be accidentally strawmanning someone else. Infinite games all, - St3ve On 1/28/21 2:02 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote: > Interesting. Thanks. I used Ada for 5 years contracting (mostly for the Army) and never once heard any of these terms used that way. And I was part of the group that pitched new projects to our clients. I'm wondering if it simply fell out of use or if I was too holed up in my own little world. We did commonly use the phrases "skeleton" and "fleshing out". > > Also FWIW, the straw man fallacy is not solely an adversarial concept. You can straw man yourself. You can accidentally straw man someone. There are 3-way attempts at constructive ... what? ... trialog (?) where each party straw mans the others position on the way to a common ground. Etc. > > It's unfortunate that we focus on competitive, zero-sum, and adversarial senses of such things. But that need not be the case. > > > On 1/28/21 12:30 PM, Steve Smith wrote: >> Perhaps no-one cares or shares my confusion with the use >> Strawman/Steelman championed by Glen and adopted by others, however: >> >> consensus development: >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man_proposal >> >> vs polemical debate: >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ |
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In reply to this post by gepr
Glen - In the spirit of some of our other woven threads here, I'm wondering how practical it would be to build a natural language parser which could apply rules such as those found in:
Seems like a next obvious step after spell and then grammar checkers? Maybe something to be applied broadly to social media? Is it a first step toward an AI Overlord that is more like an
overzealous English Major than HAL (2001 space odyssey) or the
Lawnmower Man or SID 6.7 (Virtuosity) maybe? I am reminded of
the cautionary tale offered in Jack Williamson's "With
Folded Hands" or "the Humanoid Touch". Even though I knew
Jack and heard anecdotes about these stories, I never heard the
one described in this Wikipedia article... a root source of
those who fear "the Nanny State" (scare quotes intended) perhaps? Maybe easier to implement with Machine Learning and ubiquitous
training (details left to the reader) than something closer to a
rule-based system? My most recent brush with Natural Language
Processing is over 10 years ago and I sense things have progressed
in the interim. - Steve
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases Interesting. Thanks. I used Ada for 5 years contracting (mostly for the Army) and never once heard any of these terms used that way. And I was part of the group that pitched new projects to our clients. I'm wondering if it simply fell out of use or if I was too holed up in my own little world. We did commonly use the phrases "skeleton" and "fleshing out". Also FWIW, the straw man fallacy is not solely an adversarial concept. You can straw man yourself. You can accidentally straw man someone. There are 3-way attempts at constructive ... what? ... trialog (?) where each party straw mans the others position on the way to a common ground. Etc. It's unfortunate that we focus on competitive, zero-sum, and adversarial senses of such things. But that need not be the case. On 1/28/21 12:30 PM, Steve Smith wrote:Perhaps no-one cares or shares my confusion with the use Strawman/Steelman championed by Glen and adopted by others, however: consensus development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man_proposal vs polemical debate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ |
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In an attempt to continue following the alt-right, and having landed on a firm ad hominem character judgement of Curtis Yarvin, I need to track the following 3 people (labeled "Trumpist Intellectuals" in a Bulwark article):
https://gyaanipedia.fandom.com/wiki/Chuck_de_Caro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Anton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelo_Codevilla One of the others, "Tom Trenchard" (e.g. https://americanmind.org/features/a-house-dividing/2020-a-retrospective-from-2025/), seems to be a pseudonym. But I have reasons to believe it might be this guy based on the "Tom Trenchard" URL at americnamind.org: https://isearch.asu.edu/profile/3331751 My point being that your idea for *inducing* reasoning from text (and suggesting changes to that reasoning), I think the most reasonable next step lies in the sentiment analysis and plagiarism identification work that's already going on. I'd like to be able to tell whether Tom Trenchard is actually S. Adam Seagrave by comparing his political writing to his academic writing. I'd actually *prefer* extending that work over your idea because those links you post (and the ideology they imply) seems, feels to me, like top-down imposition of "right reasoning" onto the biology rather than learning, inducing, how animals reason *from* the animal behavior. If we could build up, with ML, coherent models of biological reasoning, *then* we could compare that to extant models of reasoning like that implied in those links. On 1/29/21 8:56 AM, Steve Smith wrote: > In the spirit of some of our other woven threads here, I'm wondering how practical it would be to build a natural language parser which could apply rules such as those found in: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_and_Crooked_Thinking > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Informal_fallacies > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias#List_of_biases > > Seems like a next obvious step after spell and then grammar checkers? > > Maybe something to be applied broadly to social media? > > Is it a first step toward an AI Overlord that is more like an overzealous English Major than HAL (2001 space odyssey) or the Lawnmower Man or SID 6.7 (Virtuosity) maybe? I am reminded of the cautionary tale offered in Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands> or "the Humanoid Touch". Even though I knew Jack and heard anecdotes about these stories, I never heard the one described in this Wikipedia article... a root source of those who fear "the Nanny State" (scare quotes intended) perhaps? > > Maybe easier to implement with Machine Learning and ubiquitous training (details left to the reader) than something closer to a rule-based system? My most recent brush with Natural Language Processing is over 10 years ago and I sense things have progressed in the interim. > > - Steve > > > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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Hah! Yes, tools that help with individual and group self-regulation are
definitely of value and I share any implied bottom-up or peer-peer regulation over *harsh* top down. Like many good things, I think there is a distribution of "archies" as well as "scales"... which means there is always room for *some* top-down regulation. Grooming the "syntax" of my own logic and being able to detect flawed (especially deliberately tricky) logic in others is valuable, but so is, as you indicate, softening the advantage gained by psuedonymous engagement... I just re-read Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and it's sequel which includes a couple of siblings who, as frienemies engage in a multi-year pseudonymic online debate with the covert intention of building one of them (brother) up to become world-leader (Hegemon), even though the other (sister) does not agree with the brother's methods or values, she does agree with the logic of the ends he is pursuing (ends-means conflation/justification). It's pretty clever and lame at the same time (as I find much of OSC's work, compared to how I received it when written 30+ years ago)? OSC (IMO) has demonstrated to me a sophisticated variation of a common Right Wing strategy that I can't describe well but is probably in those lists... probably headed with a variety of "false equivalences". I appreciate your elaborating/enumerating your own ad-hominem character questions on the alt-right. Such is only in my peripheral vision, but still of interest. I may dip at least one level into those characters and see what they are up to. I've been noticing that Prager U. has been really upped their game on YouTube for me at least... talk about duplicitous. FWIW, I inherited a copy of _Straight and Crooked_ thinking from my paternal grandfather who was slightly ahead of his cohort, having been born right before the turn of the 19th century and being the first in his family to get a post secondary education and probably the first generation to get much if any formal education. His family and peers were broadly illiterate and as they became so were not necessarily prepared to parse sophisticated rhetoric laced with deliberate logical fallacies (e.g. general/yellow journalism of the time). uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote: > In an attempt to continue following the alt-right, and having landed on a firm ad hominem character judgement of Curtis Yarvin, I need to track the following 3 people (labeled "Trumpist Intellectuals" in a Bulwark article): > > https://gyaanipedia.fandom.com/wiki/Chuck_de_Caro > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Anton > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelo_Codevilla > > One of the others, "Tom Trenchard" (e.g. https://americanmind.org/features/a-house-dividing/2020-a-retrospective-from-2025/), seems to be a pseudonym. But I have reasons to believe it might be this guy based on the "Tom Trenchard" URL at americnamind.org: > > https://isearch.asu.edu/profile/3331751 > > My point being that your idea for *inducing* reasoning from text (and suggesting changes to that reasoning), I think the most reasonable next step lies in the sentiment analysis and plagiarism identification work that's already going on. I'd like to be able to tell whether Tom Trenchard is actually S. Adam Seagrave by comparing his political writing to his academic writing. > > I'd actually *prefer* extending that work over your idea because those links you post (and the ideology they imply) seems, feels to me, like top-down imposition of "right reasoning" onto the biology rather than learning, inducing, how animals reason *from* the animal behavior. If we could build up, with ML, coherent models of biological reasoning, *then* we could compare that to extant models of reasoning like that implied in those links. > > > On 1/29/21 8:56 AM, Steve Smith wrote: >> In the spirit of some of our other woven threads here, I'm wondering how practical it would be to build a natural language parser which could apply rules such as those found in: >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straight_and_Crooked_Thinking >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Informal_fallacies >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias#List_of_biases >> >> Seems like a next obvious step after spell and then grammar checkers? >> >> Maybe something to be applied broadly to social media? >> >> Is it a first step toward an AI Overlord that is more like an overzealous English Major than HAL (2001 space odyssey) or the Lawnmower Man or SID 6.7 (Virtuosity) maybe? I am reminded of the cautionary tale offered in Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands> or "the Humanoid Touch". Even though I knew Jack and heard anecdotes about these stories, I never heard the one described in this Wikipedia article... a root source of those who fear "the Nanny State" (scare quotes intended) perhaps? >> >> Maybe easier to implement with Machine Learning and ubiquitous training (details left to the reader) than something closer to a rule-based system? My most recent brush with Natural Language Processing is over 10 years ago and I sense things have progressed in the interim. >> >> - Steve >> >> >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ |
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Very nice fuzzification of the interplay between top-down and bottom-up. I thought about preemptively pointing out that in either usage for the text (yours: extracting reasoning, mine: extracting context), there has to be some prior model. All measurement has a prior model. But your characterization of *harsh* (or not) imposition of that model is a good one, especially w.r.t. the newer ML methods.
After I learned OSC was a dyed-in-the-wool racist, I had to back off and reconsider his work. Compared to Lovecraft, I don't think OSCs work is redeemed. I can live without OSC. I don't think I can live without Lovecraft. So I won't re-read his stuff. But I admit it had a big impact when I did read it. I just won't get the benefit of discovering whether or not I'd see a similar difference to yours, reading it later in life. I'm constantly presented with this "cancel culture" issue. When do you simply stop listening to the monster in the corner who peppers his noxious effluvium with (slightly) useful epiphanies? Speaking of noxious effluvium, Brett Weinstein will be on Bill Maher tonight: https://www.real-time-with-bill-maher-blog.com/ 8^D On 1/29/21 12:04 PM, Steve Smith wrote: > Hah! Yes, tools that help with individual and group self-regulation are > definitely of value and I share any implied bottom-up or peer-peer > regulation over *harsh* top down. Like many good things, I think there > is a distribution of "archies" as well as "scales"... which means > there is always room for *some* top-down regulation. > > Grooming the "syntax" of my own logic and being able to detect flawed > (especially deliberately tricky) logic in others is valuable, but so is, > as you indicate, softening the advantage gained by psuedonymous > engagement... > > I just re-read Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and it's sequel which > includes a couple of siblings who, as frienemies engage in a multi-year > pseudonymic online debate with the covert intention of building one of > them (brother) up to become world-leader (Hegemon), even though the > other (sister) does not agree with the brother's methods or values, she > does agree with the logic of the ends he is pursuing (ends-means > conflation/justification). It's pretty clever and lame at the same > time (as I find much of OSC's work, compared to how I received it when > written 30+ years ago)? OSC (IMO) has demonstrated to me a > sophisticated variation of a common Right Wing strategy that I can't > describe well but is probably in those lists... probably headed with a > variety of "false equivalences". > > I appreciate your elaborating/enumerating your own ad-hominem character > questions on the alt-right. Such is only in my peripheral vision, but > still of interest. I may dip at least one level into those characters > and see what they are up to. I've been noticing that Prager U. has been > really upped their game on YouTube for me at least... talk about > duplicitous. > > FWIW, I inherited a copy of _Straight and Crooked_ thinking from my > paternal grandfather who was slightly ahead of his cohort, having been > born right before the turn of the 19th century and being the first in > his family to get a post secondary education and probably the first > generation to get much if any formal education. His family and peers > were broadly illiterate and as they became so were not necessarily > prepared to parse sophisticated rhetoric laced with deliberate logical > fallacies (e.g. general/yellow journalism of the time). -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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Glen,
Thanks for this link. https://www.real-time-with-bill-maher-blog.com/ I took your take to be: "Free speech does NOT entail a right to be gratuitously impolite. That I make people angry when I talk does not speak to its freedom, so much as to its arrogance. " I think the closest I have come to being "woke" in the last year is because I have begun to recognize that while I have a right to say anything I want, I don't have the right to say it in any way that I want. Or to put in less "morally", If I claim that right I should expect to pay the consequences. Nick Nick Thompson [hidden email] https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ??? Sent: Friday, January 29, 2021 3:17 PM To: [hidden email] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Strawman/Steelman Very nice fuzzification of the interplay between top-down and bottom-up. I thought about preemptively pointing out that in either usage for the text (yours: extracting reasoning, mine: extracting context), there has to be some prior model. All measurement has a prior model. But your characterization of *harsh* (or not) imposition of that model is a good one, especially w.r.t. the newer ML methods. After I learned OSC was a dyed-in-the-wool racist, I had to back off and reconsider his work. Compared to Lovecraft, I don't think OSCs work is redeemed. I can live without OSC. I don't think I can live without Lovecraft. So I won't re-read his stuff. But I admit it had a big impact when I did read it. I just won't get the benefit of discovering whether or not I'd see a similar difference to yours, reading it later in life. I'm constantly presented with this "cancel culture" issue. When do you simply stop listening to the monster in the corner who peppers his noxious effluvium with (slightly) useful epiphanies? Speaking of noxious effluvium, Brett Weinstein will be on Bill Maher tonight: https://www.real-time-with-bill-maher-blog.com/ 8^D On 1/29/21 12:04 PM, Steve Smith wrote: > Hah! Yes, tools that help with individual and group self-regulation > are definitely of value and I share any implied bottom-up or peer-peer > regulation over *harsh* top down. Like many good things, I think > there is a distribution of "archies" as well as "scales"... which > means there is always room for *some* top-down regulation. > > Grooming the "syntax" of my own logic and being able to detect flawed > (especially deliberately tricky) logic in others is valuable, but so > is, as you indicate, softening the advantage gained by psuedonymous > engagement... > > I just re-read Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and it's sequel which > includes a couple of siblings who, as frienemies engage in a > multi-year pseudonymic online debate with the covert intention of > building one of them (brother) up to become world-leader (Hegemon), > even though the other (sister) does not agree with the brother's > methods or values, she does agree with the logic of the ends he is > pursuing (ends-means conflation/justification). It's pretty clever > and lame at the same time (as I find much of OSC's work, compared to > how I received it when written 30+ years ago)? OSC (IMO) has > demonstrated to me a sophisticated variation of a common Right Wing > strategy that I can't describe well but is probably in those lists... > probably headed with a variety of "false equivalences". > > I appreciate your elaborating/enumerating your own ad-hominem > character questions on the alt-right. Such is only in my peripheral > vision, but still of interest. I may dip at least one level into > those characters and see what they are up to. I've been noticing that > Prager U. has been really upped their game on YouTube for me at > least... talk about duplicitous. > > FWIW, I inherited a copy of _Straight and Crooked_ thinking from my > paternal grandfather who was slightly ahead of his cohort, having been > born right before the turn of the 19th century and being the first in > his family to get a post secondary education and probably the first > generation to get much if any formal education. His family and peers > were broadly illiterate and as they became so were not necessarily > prepared to parse sophisticated rhetoric laced with deliberate logical > fallacies (e.g. general/yellow journalism of the time). -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ |
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I would say to boost signals concerning claims that,
1) are correct 2) have evidence 3) are novel Other types of signals can be attenuated. Realistically, the media follows this principle above all else: 4) have an audience -----Original Message----- From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of [hidden email] Sent: Friday, January 29, 2021 1:33 PM To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Strawman/Steelman Glen, Thanks for this link. https://www.real-time-with-bill-maher-blog.com/ I took your take to be: "Free speech does NOT entail a right to be gratuitously impolite. That I make people angry when I talk does not speak to its freedom, so much as to its arrogance. " I think the closest I have come to being "woke" in the last year is because I have begun to recognize that while I have a right to say anything I want, I don't have the right to say it in any way that I want. Or to put in less "morally", If I claim that right I should expect to pay the consequences. Nick Nick Thompson [hidden email] https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ??? Sent: Friday, January 29, 2021 3:17 PM To: [hidden email] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Strawman/Steelman Very nice fuzzification of the interplay between top-down and bottom-up. I thought about preemptively pointing out that in either usage for the text (yours: extracting reasoning, mine: extracting context), there has to be some prior model. All measurement has a prior model. But your characterization of *harsh* (or not) imposition of that model is a good one, especially w.r.t. the newer ML methods. After I learned OSC was a dyed-in-the-wool racist, I had to back off and reconsider his work. Compared to Lovecraft, I don't think OSCs work is redeemed. I can live without OSC. I don't think I can live without Lovecraft. So I won't re-read his stuff. But I admit it had a big impact when I did read it. I just won't get the benefit of discovering whether or not I'd see a similar difference to yours, reading it later in life. I'm constantly presented with this "cancel culture" issue. When do you simply stop listening to the monster in the corner who peppers his noxious effluvium with (slightly) useful epiphanies? Speaking of noxious effluvium, Brett Weinstein will be on Bill Maher tonight: https://www.real-time-with-bill-maher-blog.com/ 8^D On 1/29/21 12:04 PM, Steve Smith wrote: > Hah! Yes, tools that help with individual and group self-regulation > are definitely of value and I share any implied bottom-up or peer-peer > regulation over *harsh* top down. Like many good things, I think > there is a distribution of "archies" as well as "scales"... which > means there is always room for *some* top-down regulation. > > Grooming the "syntax" of my own logic and being able to detect flawed > (especially deliberately tricky) logic in others is valuable, but so > is, as you indicate, softening the advantage gained by psuedonymous > engagement... > > I just re-read Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and it's sequel which > includes a couple of siblings who, as frienemies engage in a > multi-year pseudonymic online debate with the covert intention of > building one of them (brother) up to become world-leader (Hegemon), > even though the other (sister) does not agree with the brother's > methods or values, she does agree with the logic of the ends he is > pursuing (ends-means conflation/justification). It's pretty clever > and lame at the same time (as I find much of OSC's work, compared to > how I received it when written 30+ years ago)? OSC (IMO) has > demonstrated to me a sophisticated variation of a common Right Wing > strategy that I can't describe well but is probably in those lists... > probably headed with a variety of "false equivalences". > > I appreciate your elaborating/enumerating your own ad-hominem > character questions on the alt-right. Such is only in my peripheral > vision, but still of interest. I may dip at least one level into > those characters and see what they are up to. I've been noticing that > Prager U. has been really upped their game on YouTube for me at > least... talk about duplicitous. > > FWIW, I inherited a copy of _Straight and Crooked_ thinking from my > paternal grandfather who was slightly ahead of his cohort, having been > born right before the turn of the 19th century and being the first in > his family to get a post secondary education and probably the first > generation to get much if any formal education. His family and peers > were broadly illiterate and as they became so were not necessarily > prepared to parse sophisticated rhetoric laced with deliberate logical > fallacies (e.g. general/yellow journalism of the time). -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . 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At first I agreed with your 3 priorities. But as I worked on some other stuff, I think some doubt has crept in. Each of the bullets has some uncertainty around it. Some things are pretty much but not entirely *certainly* correct. But most things have high uncertainty. Evidence can be slight, plentiful, coherent, contradictory, etc. (E.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/01/28/the-uncensored-guide-to-oumuamua-aliens-and-that-harvard-astronomer/?sh=a5319286abec) And it's difficult for any one clique to know when some thing is novel/new or unique. I have that problem all the time (e.g. Steve's pointing out that the DoD had this long-standing definition of Strawman that I knew nothing about ... new to me, but not new.)
I suppose you can simply add qualifiers: 1) are mostly correct 2) have coherent evidence 3) are novel for some given context Re: Weinstein's Evergreen mistake, I think he screwed up all 3 of them and refused to admit he made any mistake. On 1/29/21 2:00 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > I would say to boost signals concerning claims that, > > 1) are correct > 2) have evidence > 3) are novel > > Other types of signals can be attenuated. Realistically, the media follows this principle above all else: > > 4) have an audience -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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If you don't want to do it, I'll be happy to press Delete on the class of QAnon posts. 😊
(Fine, put tensors on 1-3.) -----Original Message----- From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ??? Sent: Friday, January 29, 2021 2:52 PM To: [hidden email] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Strawman/Steelman At first I agreed with your 3 priorities. But as I worked on some other stuff, I think some doubt has crept in. Each of the bullets has some uncertainty around it. Some things are pretty much but not entirely *certainly* correct. But most things have high uncertainty. Evidence can be slight, plentiful, coherent, contradictory, etc. (E.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/01/28/the-uncensored-guide-to-oumuamua-aliens-and-that-harvard-astronomer/?sh=a5319286abec) And it's difficult for any one clique to know when some thing is novel/new or unique. I have that problem all the time (e.g. Steve's pointing out that the DoD had this long-standing definition of Strawman that I knew nothing about ... new to me, but not new.) I suppose you can simply add qualifiers: 1) are mostly correct 2) have coherent evidence 3) are novel for some given context Re: Weinstein's Evergreen mistake, I think he screwed up all 3 of them and refused to admit he made any mistake. On 1/29/21 2:00 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > I would say to boost signals concerning claims that, > > 1) are correct > 2) have evidence > 3) are novel > > Other types of signals can be attenuated. Realistically, the media follows this principle above all else: > > 4) have an audience -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ |
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Ha! Yes, please. I keep asking people to BE MY CONTENT CURATOR for me. I'm simply too lazy to do all the work to come up with my own opinions. To quote Black Sabbath: "Life's fantasy; to be locked away and still to think you're free."
On 1/29/21 2:57 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > If you don't want to do it, I'll be happy to press Delete on the class of QAnon posts. 😊 > (Fine, put tensors on 1-3.) -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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It's obviously the case that there are a lot of people that just can't form opinions properly.
-----Original Message----- From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ??? Sent: Friday, January 29, 2021 3:01 PM To: [hidden email] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Strawman/Steelman Ha! Yes, please. I keep asking people to BE MY CONTENT CURATOR for me. I'm simply too lazy to do all the work to come up with my own opinions. To quote Black Sabbath: "Life's fantasy; to be locked away and still to think you're free." On 1/29/21 2:57 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > If you don't want to do it, I'll be happy to press Delete on the class > of QAnon posts. 😊 > (Fine, put tensors on 1-3.) -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ |
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In reply to this post by Steve Smith
Has anyone been watching what's happening in the stock market with GameStop? On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 1:30 PM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote: Perhaps no-one cares or shares my confusion with the use Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA mobile: (303) 859-5609 skype: merle.lelfkoff2 twitter: @merle110 - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ |
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Yep. I've logged into my TD Ameritrade account several times to see if they've limited purchases of GME. Supposedly Robinhood did limit purchases. It looked like I could always buy on TDA... but I'm not sure. I would never actually buy GME, *except* to screw The Man. 8^D
On 1/29/21 3:41 PM, Merle Lefkoff wrote: > Has anyone been watching what's happening in the stock market with GameStop? -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen
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So I have been watching this, and it looks just like one more wealth-concentrator on the long term, with smaller shifts in the short term that people get caught up looking at because they involve personality conflicts.
Will somebody tell me where I am wrong in the following? 1. We start with the usual state of affairs, in which hedge funds of various sizes take short positions; in what and how much depends on the capital they hold to cover the short, relative to their other options. They are “big” actors, in the sense that decisions of individual firms can involve moderately large amounts of money. They assume they are the full landscape of big actors, and although they act with cognizance of each other, since they are all using similar research, they do much the same thing. 2. A new “oligopolistic actor” comes in that changes the landscape of participants, which is a group of Reddit-coordinated little fish. They can put a short squeeze on the hedge funds. Those that took too large a position either with too little capital to cover the squeeze until it bursts, or with too little interest in this stock to be willing to take much of a loss on it, will sell off at a loss, and the various little fish will make a little money each, but it will look like a decent chunk when you take them together. The smaller or medium-sized hedge funds that can’t wait this out could be forced into low enough overall returns that their clients will want to withdraw from them, putting them in further trouble, perhaps driving some of them out of business. 3. Meanwhile: the oligopoly move is an ordinary pyramid scheme, and it only works as long as the pool of new buyers remains large enough to pay off the earlier buyers surfing the bubble. Considering that relief and unemployment checks amounted to many hundreds of billions of dollars, if even a modest amount of this is in the hands of the young men who were gamers and are now stuck at home, it can look as if that bubble can continue to inflate for a while. We might even be able to estimate, however, from the overall amount of free money spent into the system, and the part of the public that this young-male demographic accounts for, what the potential size of total gambling capital is for this thing. 4. While attention is on the oligopoly of small fish, and the unprepared mid-sized or small hedge funds that might go bankrupt, there are always larger actors who are well capitalized and can wait out bubbles. They may not have taken positions in this before, when it wasn’t all that interesting, but now seeing that there is a bubble afoot, they had a reason to get in and go short early. They can outlast the short squeeze, and have a reason to do so because of point 5 (next): 5. The pyramid will end when the new buyers are exhausted, and that will be the end of any power for the little-fish oligopoly. At that point everybody who is leveraged will be underwater. Because a lot of this money was in options, the unwinding will be very fast, much faster than if it were just driven by a sell-off of the underlying. The last wave of buyers in will lose essentially whatever they spent. Whichever little fish happened to get out of the bubble before that will collect some of the money from that last wave, and the larger hedge funds who were waiting out the short squeeze will then collect the rest. So, when the dust settles, the net effect? Some money will have changed hands in a quasi-random way, from many small fish who gambled the rent and couldn’t afford to lose it, to a smaller number of other small fish who will collect at varying multiples, but still not enough to meaningfully alter their life trajectories. The Reddit board-makers might collect enough to happily go on to the next scam, but they will not be breaking into any Forbes lists. However, in the net, there will have been a flow of money out of both the oligopoly of small fish and the small or mid-sized hedge funds that didn’t see it coming, and into the wealth of the large funds. In addition to the direct winnings of the large players, because their returns to their clients will go up, they will collect new clients that jumped ship from the hedge funds that bought back out of the short squeeze at a loss. So the macro-thing that will happen is the macro-thing that happens through every other mechanism: whoever has the most capital can wait out the largest spectrum of risks, and will on average gain more capital. This is the ratchet that works through everything. It is not a Fama-French efficient market mechanism, because it works through differential action of constraints, not through Arrow-Debreu “complete” price systems. It is not quite the same, but still related to, the bubble-bailout cycles that I have termed Minsky’s Ratchet, from the arguments made by Hyman Minsky in Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. https://www.amazon.com/Stabilizing-Unstable-Economy-Hyman-Minsky/dp/0071592997 For AOC to be seeking media attention, when there was an early trading freeze, to criticize the hedge funds for looking for protection against the oligopoly doesn’t surprise me, because this is a culture-war thing and responding in the moment to that is what she does. But for Warren (Elizabeth, not Buffett) to allow that to be her caught-on-camera moment surprises me, and seems regrettable. Yes, EW is as motivated as AOC to criticize the use of access by the hedge funds to seek protection when they get beat at their own game, and both are right to mock them and welcome them to go under. But EW’s career has been about how the ratchet of unequal capital constraints moves capital from the small to the large, and if what I said above is correct, I would assume this would be the biggest picture in her view. In the long term, the people who will get hurt mainly are just the people she has made a profession of trying to protect. I would think she would want her on-camera moment to be about not getting distracted from that, and worrying that, yes, market regulations and taxation that encourage game-of-chicken gambling are The Urgent — and structural — Problem. Whether some gambling hedge funds get caught and go under is a sideshow. AOC, too, of course is plenty smart to understand all this (if what I have said above is not wrong), and I expect she probably does. (She was an econ major in college, right?). But her media incentives are a bit different, so for her to mostly emphasize the culture-war thing doesn’t seem strange. So is the above roughly correct? Or do I misunderstand the structure badly enough that I am drawing the wrong macro-conclusion? Eric > On Jan 29, 2021, at 6:45 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <[hidden email]> wrote: > > Yep. I've logged into my TD Ameritrade account several times to see if they've limited purchases of GME. Supposedly Robinhood did limit purchases. It looked like I could always buy on TDA... but I'm not sure. I would never actually buy GME, *except* to screw The Man. 8^D > > On 1/29/21 3:41 PM, Merle Lefkoff wrote: >> Has anyone been watching what's happening in the stock market with GameStop? > > > -- > ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ > > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,vjPYuWV_SOqXmjm9v6nfchPYvTQOERJqzYuZ2EvGnKR7L9JjDHkhv09DfpBYVvGe1tHPFt0RRGwq0ChNxd4eziP-rcFnAxXsqnUAkkBW&typo=1 > FRIAM-COMIC https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,Ng1EbcI2wHi1MUdaZwXmDZg2LgvtvJqHf7DOlh3YY2zT6TsytRdo9rGgU_AUtySrheyJhbod7GCSTftIa0Lyq26aHcwK5Q1ssH2dO5zJRMKCITI,&typo=1 > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . 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EricS,
This is one of the sub-threads I decided NOT to follow early on ... the stock market just seems like gambling to me and I have a puritan thing against gambling. "Never bet more than a quarter!" my father said. "If you win, you feel like a thief; if you lose you feel like a fool." But I found your warnings to E. Warren particularly interesting. Thanks, as always, N Nick Thompson [hidden email] https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ -----Original Message----- From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith Sent: Saturday, January 30, 2021 5:20 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Strawman/Steelman So I have been watching this, and it looks just like one more wealth-concentrator on the long term, with smaller shifts in the short term that people get caught up looking at because they involve personality conflicts. Will somebody tell me where I am wrong in the following? 1. We start with the usual state of affairs, in which hedge funds of various sizes take short positions; in what and how much depends on the capital they hold to cover the short, relative to their other options. They are “big” actors, in the sense that decisions of individual firms can involve moderately large amounts of money. They assume they are the full landscape of big actors, and although they act with cognizance of each other, since they are all using similar research, they do much the same thing. 2. A new “oligopolistic actor” comes in that changes the landscape of participants, which is a group of Reddit-coordinated little fish. They can put a short squeeze on the hedge funds. Those that took too large a position either with too little capital to cover the squeeze until it bursts, or with too little interest in this stock to be willing to take much of a loss on it, will sell off at a loss, and the various little fish will make a little money each, but it will look like a decent chunk when you take them together. The smaller or medium-sized hedge funds that can’t wait this out could be forced into low enough overall returns that their clients will want to withdraw from them, putting them in further trouble, perhaps driving some of them out of business. 3. Meanwhile: the oligopoly move is an ordinary pyramid scheme, and it only works as long as the pool of new buyers remains large enough to pay off the earlier buyers surfing the bubble. Considering that relief and unemployment checks amounted to many hundreds of billions of dollars, if even a modest amount of this is in the hands of the young men who were gamers and are now stuck at home, it can look as if that bubble can continue to inflate for a while. We might even be able to estimate, however, from the overall amount of free money spent into the system, and the part of the public that this young-male demographic accounts for, what the potential size of total gambling capital is for this thing. 4. While attention is on the oligopoly of small fish, and the unprepared mid-sized or small hedge funds that might go bankrupt, there are always larger actors who are well capitalized and can wait out bubbles. They may not have taken positions in this before, when it wasn’t all that interesting, but now seeing that there is a bubble afoot, they had a reason to get in and go short early. They can outlast the short squeeze, and have a reason to do so because of point 5 (next): 5. The pyramid will end when the new buyers are exhausted, and that will be the end of any power for the little-fish oligopoly. At that point everybody who is leveraged will be underwater. Because a lot of this money was in options, the unwinding will be very fast, much faster than if it were just driven by a sell-off of the underlying. The last wave of buyers in will lose essentially whatever they spent. Whichever little fish happened to get out of the bubble before that will collect some of the money from that last wave, and the larger hedge funds who were waiting out the short squeeze will then collect the rest. So, when the dust settles, the net effect? Some money will have changed hands in a quasi-random way, from many small fish who gambled the rent and couldn’t afford to lose it, to a smaller number of other small fish who will collect at varying multiples, but still not enough to meaningfully alter their life trajectories. The Reddit board-makers might collect enough to happily go on to the next scam, but they will not be breaking into any Forbes lists. However, in the net, there will have been a flow of money out of both the oligopoly of small fish and the small or mid-sized hedge funds that didn’t see it coming, and into the wealth of the large funds. In addition to the direct winnings of the large players, because their returns to their clients will go up, they will collect new clients that jumped ship from the hedge funds that bought back out of the short squeeze at a loss. So the macro-thing that will happen is the macro-thing that happens through every other mechanism: whoever has the most capital can wait out the largest spectrum of risks, and will on average gain more capital. This is the ratchet that works through everything. It is not a Fama-French efficient market mechanism, because it works through differential action of constraints, not through Arrow-Debreu “complete” price systems. It is not quite the same, but still related to, the bubble-bailout cycles that I have termed Minsky’s Ratchet, from the arguments made by Hyman Minsky in Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. https://www.amazon.com/Stabilizing-Unstable-Economy-Hyman-Minsky/dp/0071592997 For AOC to be seeking media attention, when there was an early trading freeze, to criticize the hedge funds for looking for protection against the oligopoly doesn’t surprise me, because this is a culture-war thing and responding in the moment to that is what she does. But for Warren (Elizabeth, not Buffett) to allow that to be her caught-on-camera moment surprises me, and seems regrettable. Yes, EW is as motivated as AOC to criticize the use of access by the hedge funds to seek protection when they get beat at their own game, and both are right to mock them and welcome them to go under. But EW’s career has been about how the ratchet of unequal capital constraints moves capital from the small to the large, and if what I said above is correct, I would assume this would be the biggest picture in her view. In the long term, the people who will get hurt mainly are just the people she has made a profession of trying to protect. I would think she would want her on-camera moment to be about not getting distracted from that, and worrying that, yes, market regulations and taxation that encourage game-of-chicken gambling are The Urgent — and structural — Problem. Whether some gambling hedge funds get caught and go under is a sideshow. AOC, too, of course is plenty smart to understand all this (if what I have said above is not wrong), and I expect she probably does. (She was an econ major in college, right?). But her media incentives are a bit different, so for her to mostly emphasize the culture-war thing doesn’t seem strange. So is the above roughly correct? Or do I misunderstand the structure badly enough that I am drawing the wrong macro-conclusion? Eric > On Jan 29, 2021, at 6:45 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <[hidden email]> wrote: > > Yep. I've logged into my TD Ameritrade account several times to see if > they've limited purchases of GME. Supposedly Robinhood did limit > purchases. It looked like I could always buy on TDA... but I'm not > sure. I would never actually buy GME, *except* to screw The Man. 8^D > > On 1/29/21 3:41 PM, Merle Lefkoff wrote: >> Has anyone been watching what's happening in the stock market with GameStop? > > > -- > ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ > > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn > GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailm > an%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,vjPYuWV_SOqXmjm9v6nfchPYvTQOER > JqzYuZ2EvGnKR7L9JjDHkhv09DfpBYVvGe1tHPFt0RRGwq0ChNxd4eziP-rcFnAxXsqnUA > kkBW&typo=1 FRIAM-COMIC > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspo > t.com%2f&c=E,1,Ng1EbcI2wHi1MUdaZwXmDZg2LgvtvJqHf7DOlh3YY2zT6TsytRdo9rG > gU_AUtySrheyJhbod7GCSTftIa0Lyq26aHcwK5Q1ssH2dO5zJRMKCITI,&typo=1 > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ |
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In reply to this post by David Eric Smith
Impulsive, uninformed people, like the capitol rioters, will find themselves further weakened while a few instigators will walk away with a story and some money in their pocket. An appropriate way the wrap-up the rule of the last administration. Hardly a company worth rescuing.
> On Jan 30, 2021, at 3:20 AM, David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote: > > So I have been watching this, and it looks just like one more wealth-concentrator on the long term, with smaller shifts in the short term that people get caught up looking at because they involve personality conflicts. > > Will somebody tell me where I am wrong in the following? > > 1. We start with the usual state of affairs, in which hedge funds of various sizes take short positions; in what and how much depends on the capital they hold to cover the short, relative to their other options. They are “big” actors, in the sense that decisions of individual firms can involve moderately large amounts of money. They assume they are the full landscape of big actors, and although they act with cognizance of each other, since they are all using similar research, they do much the same thing. > > 2. A new “oligopolistic actor” comes in that changes the landscape of participants, which is a group of Reddit-coordinated little fish. They can put a short squeeze on the hedge funds. Those that took too large a position either with too little capital to cover the squeeze until it bursts, or with too little interest in this stock to be willing to take much of a loss on it, will sell off at a loss, and the various little fish will make a little money each, but it will look like a decent chunk when you take them together. The smaller or medium-sized hedge funds that can’t wait this out could be forced into low enough overall returns that their clients will want to withdraw from them, putting them in further trouble, perhaps driving some of them out of business. > > 3. Meanwhile: the oligopoly move is an ordinary pyramid scheme, and it only works as long as the pool of new buyers remains large enough to pay off the earlier buyers surfing the bubble. Considering that relief and unemployment checks amounted to many hundreds of billions of dollars, if even a modest amount of this is in the hands of the young men who were gamers and are now stuck at home, it can look as if that bubble can continue to inflate for a while. We might even be able to estimate, however, from the overall amount of free money spent into the system, and the part of the public that this young-male demographic accounts for, what the potential size of total gambling capital is for this thing. > > 4. While attention is on the oligopoly of small fish, and the unprepared mid-sized or small hedge funds that might go bankrupt, there are always larger actors who are well capitalized and can wait out bubbles. They may not have taken positions in this before, when it wasn’t all that interesting, but now seeing that there is a bubble afoot, they had a reason to get in and go short early. They can outlast the short squeeze, and have a reason to do so because of point 5 (next): > > 5. The pyramid will end when the new buyers are exhausted, and that will be the end of any power for the little-fish oligopoly. At that point everybody who is leveraged will be underwater. Because a lot of this money was in options, the unwinding will be very fast, much faster than if it were just driven by a sell-off of the underlying. The last wave of buyers in will lose essentially whatever they spent. Whichever little fish happened to get out of the bubble before that will collect some of the money from that last wave, and the larger hedge funds who were waiting out the short squeeze will then collect the rest. > > > So, when the dust settles, the net effect? Some money will have changed hands in a quasi-random way, from many small fish who gambled the rent and couldn’t afford to lose it, to a smaller number of other small fish who will collect at varying multiples, but still not enough to meaningfully alter their life trajectories. The Reddit board-makers might collect enough to happily go on to the next scam, but they will not be breaking into any Forbes lists. However, in the net, there will have been a flow of money out of both the oligopoly of small fish and the small or mid-sized hedge funds that didn’t see it coming, and into the wealth of the large funds. In addition to the direct winnings of the large players, because their returns to their clients will go up, they will collect new clients that jumped ship from the hedge funds that bought back out of the short squeeze at a loss. > > So the macro-thing that will happen is the macro-thing that happens through every other mechanism: whoever has the most capital can wait out the largest spectrum of risks, and will on average gain more capital. This is the ratchet that works through everything. It is not a Fama-French efficient market mechanism, because it works through differential action of constraints, not through Arrow-Debreu “complete” price systems. It is not quite the same, but still related to, the bubble-bailout cycles that I have termed Minsky’s Ratchet, from the arguments made by Hyman Minsky in Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. > https://www.amazon.com/Stabilizing-Unstable-Economy-Hyman-Minsky/dp/0071592997 > > > For AOC to be seeking media attention, when there was an early trading freeze, to criticize the hedge funds for looking for protection against the oligopoly doesn’t surprise me, because this is a culture-war thing and responding in the moment to that is what she does. But for Warren (Elizabeth, not Buffett) to allow that to be her caught-on-camera moment surprises me, and seems regrettable. Yes, EW is as motivated as AOC to criticize the use of access by the hedge funds to seek protection when they get beat at their own game, and both are right to mock them and welcome them to go under. But EW’s career has been about how the ratchet of unequal capital constraints moves capital from the small to the large, and if what I said above is correct, I would assume this would be the biggest picture in her view. In the long term, the people who will get hurt mainly are just the people she has made a profession of trying to protect. I would think she would want her on-camera moment to be about not getting distracted from that, and worrying that, yes, market regulations and taxation that encourage game-of-chicken gambling are The Urgent — and structural — Problem. Whether some gambling hedge funds get caught and go under is a sideshow. AOC, too, of course is plenty smart to understand all this (if what I have said above is not wrong), and I expect she probably does. (She was an econ major in college, right?). But her media incentives are a bit different, so for her to mostly emphasize the culture-war thing doesn’t seem strange. > > So is the above roughly correct? Or do I misunderstand the structure badly enough that I am drawing the wrong macro-conclusion? > > Eric > > >> On Jan 29, 2021, at 6:45 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <[hidden email]> wrote: >> >> Yep. I've logged into my TD Ameritrade account several times to see if they've limited purchases of GME. Supposedly Robinhood did limit purchases. It looked like I could always buy on TDA... but I'm not sure. I would never actually buy GME, *except* to screw The Man. 8^D >> >>> On 1/29/21 3:41 PM, Merle Lefkoff wrote: >>> Has anyone been watching what's happening in the stock market with GameStop? >> >> >> -- >> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ >> >> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam >> un/subscribe https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,vjPYuWV_SOqXmjm9v6nfchPYvTQOERJqzYuZ2EvGnKR7L9JjDHkhv09DfpBYVvGe1tHPFt0RRGwq0ChNxd4eziP-rcFnAxXsqnUAkkBW&typo=1 >> FRIAM-COMIC https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,Ng1EbcI2wHi1MUdaZwXmDZg2LgvtvJqHf7DOlh3YY2zT6TsytRdo9rGgU_AUtySrheyJhbod7GCSTftIa0Lyq26aHcwK5Q1ssH2dO5zJRMKCITI,&typo=1 >> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > > > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ |
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In reply to this post by David Eric Smith
Eric - You lay this out so well. Some random observations.
'nuff for now, -Steve On 1/30/21 4:19 AM, David Eric Smith
wrote:
So I have been watching this, and it looks just like one more wealth-concentrator on the long term, with smaller shifts in the short term that people get caught up looking at because they involve personality conflicts. Will somebody tell me where I am wrong in the following? 1. We start with the usual state of affairs, in which hedge funds of various sizes take short positions; in what and how much depends on the capital they hold to cover the short, relative to their other options. They are “big” actors, in the sense that decisions of individual firms can involve moderately large amounts of money. They assume they are the full landscape of big actors, and although they act with cognizance of each other, since they are all using similar research, they do much the same thing. 2. A new “oligopolistic actor” comes in that changes the landscape of participants, which is a group of Reddit-coordinated little fish. They can put a short squeeze on the hedge funds. Those that took too large a position either with too little capital to cover the squeeze until it bursts, or with too little interest in this stock to be willing to take much of a loss on it, will sell off at a loss, and the various little fish will make a little money each, but it will look like a decent chunk when you take them together. The smaller or medium-sized hedge funds that can’t wait this out could be forced into low enough overall returns that their clients will want to withdraw from them, putting them in further trouble, perhaps driving some of them out of business. 3. Meanwhile: the oligopoly move is an ordinary pyramid scheme, and it only works as long as the pool of new buyers remains large enough to pay off the earlier buyers surfing the bubble. Considering that relief and unemployment checks amounted to many hundreds of billions of dollars, if even a modest amount of this is in the hands of the young men who were gamers and are now stuck at home, it can look as if that bubble can continue to inflate for a while. We might even be able to estimate, however, from the overall amount of free money spent into the system, and the part of the public that this young-male demographic accounts for, what the potential size of total gambling capital is for this thing. 4. While attention is on the oligopoly of small fish, and the unprepared mid-sized or small hedge funds that might go bankrupt, there are always larger actors who are well capitalized and can wait out bubbles. They may not have taken positions in this before, when it wasn’t all that interesting, but now seeing that there is a bubble afoot, they had a reason to get in and go short early. They can outlast the short squeeze, and have a reason to do so because of point 5 (next): 5. The pyramid will end when the new buyers are exhausted, and that will be the end of any power for the little-fish oligopoly. At that point everybody who is leveraged will be underwater. Because a lot of this money was in options, the unwinding will be very fast, much faster than if it were just driven by a sell-off of the underlying. The last wave of buyers in will lose essentially whatever they spent. Whichever little fish happened to get out of the bubble before that will collect some of the money from that last wave, and the larger hedge funds who were waiting out the short squeeze will then collect the rest. So, when the dust settles, the net effect? Some money will have changed hands in a quasi-random way, from many small fish who gambled the rent and couldn’t afford to lose it, to a smaller number of other small fish who will collect at varying multiples, but still not enough to meaningfully alter their life trajectories. The Reddit board-makers might collect enough to happily go on to the next scam, but they will not be breaking into any Forbes lists. However, in the net, there will have been a flow of money out of both the oligopoly of small fish and the small or mid-sized hedge funds that didn’t see it coming, and into the wealth of the large funds. In addition to the direct winnings of the large players, because their returns to their clients will go up, they will collect new clients that jumped ship from the hedge funds that bought back out of the short squeeze at a loss. So the macro-thing that will happen is the macro-thing that happens through every other mechanism: whoever has the most capital can wait out the largest spectrum of risks, and will on average gain more capital. This is the ratchet that works through everything. It is not a Fama-French efficient market mechanism, because it works through differential action of constraints, not through Arrow-Debreu “complete” price systems. It is not quite the same, but still related to, the bubble-bailout cycles that I have termed Minsky’s Ratchet, from the arguments made by Hyman Minsky in Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. https://www.amazon.com/Stabilizing-Unstable-Economy-Hyman-Minsky/dp/0071592997 For AOC to be seeking media attention, when there was an early trading freeze, to criticize the hedge funds for looking for protection against the oligopoly doesn’t surprise me, because this is a culture-war thing and responding in the moment to that is what she does. But for Warren (Elizabeth, not Buffett) to allow that to be her caught-on-camera moment surprises me, and seems regrettable. Yes, EW is as motivated as AOC to criticize the use of access by the hedge funds to seek protection when they get beat at their own game, and both are right to mock them and welcome them to go under. But EW’s career has been about how the ratchet of unequal capital constraints moves capital from the small to the large, and if what I said above is correct, I would assume this would be the biggest picture in her view. In the long term, the people who will get hurt mainly are just the people she has made a profession of trying to protect. I would think she would want her on-camera moment to be about not getting distracted from that, and worrying that, yes, market regulations and taxation that encourage game-of-chicken gambling are The Urgent — and structural — Problem. Whether some gambling hedge funds get caught and go under is a sideshow. AOC, too, of course is plenty smart to understand all this (if what I have said above is not wrong), and I expect she probably does. (She was an econ major in college, right?). But her media incentives are a bit different, so for her to mostly emphasize the culture-war thing doesn’t seem strange. So is the above roughly correct? Or do I misunderstand the structure badly enough that I am drawing the wrong macro-conclusion? EricOn Jan 29, 2021, at 6:45 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ [hidden email] wrote: Yep. I've logged into my TD Ameritrade account several times to see if they've limited purchases of GME. Supposedly Robinhood did limit purchases. It looked like I could always buy on TDA... but I'm not sure. I would never actually buy GME, *except* to screw The Man. 8^D On 1/29/21 3:41 PM, Merle Lefkoff wrote:Has anyone been watching what's happening in the stock market with GameStop?-- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,vjPYuWV_SOqXmjm9v6nfchPYvTQOERJqzYuZ2EvGnKR7L9JjDHkhv09DfpBYVvGe1tHPFt0RRGwq0ChNxd4eziP-rcFnAxXsqnUAkkBW&typo=1 FRIAM-COMIC https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,Ng1EbcI2wHi1MUdaZwXmDZg2LgvtvJqHf7DOlh3YY2zT6TsytRdo9rGgU_AUtySrheyJhbod7GCSTftIa0Lyq26aHcwK5Q1ssH2dO5zJRMKCITI,&typo=1 archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . 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Thank you Steve, and especially Eric. As I study new economic models for the real economy, such as the "circular economy" and the "doughnut economy", I am also paying more attention to the financial economy and especially the wild and wooly stock market. I know it's unsustainable, but my hopes are constantly dashed every time I think it's going to crash and it demonstrates its robustness once more. On Sat, Jan 30, 2021 at 10:56 AM Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA mobile: (303) 859-5609 skype: merle.lelfkoff2 twitter: @merle110 - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ |
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