Rabbitisrich

The economist article may overstate the points of the study on which it is based. The authors identified explanatory factors by comparing against a model portfolio reweighted on a monthly basis, before transaction fees, with no adjustments for transaction size to market or liquidity. The idealized Buffett portfolio, taken from 13-Fs, is maintained at fixed weights on a monthly basis, and then updated quarterly. So, if a stock outperforms the portfolio between 13-Fs, it's treated as if it were "sold" until the holding reaches the prior quarter weight. If, in the next 13-F, the stock hasn't been sold at all, then it's treated as if it were "bought" again*. *As far as I understand. Someone else might have a different interpretation of "Buffett's Alpha" by Frazzini, Kabiller, and Pedersen. In any case, some of the comments on the Economist article were upset by the implication that Buffett doesn't have "alpha", but explaining someone's performance isn't the same as saying that they have no skill, at least not in the colloquial sense.

Thanks. I'll check out Plan's blog. I actually retraced Burry's posts a while back thanks to Tariq's blog: http://streetcapitalist.com/2010/03/24/learning-from-michael-burry/ I then spent some time and went over every single one of his posts on Silicon Investor, took me a few days. In case you're wondering, yeah, I'm a big Mike Burry fan. :) Ah, sorry, it was probably Tariq Ali's blog that covered Burry's letters.

Thanks for the link. You might also want to check out Plan Maestro's site for posts about Burry's posts on Silicon Investor. You can see his maturation process leading up to the Nasdaq crash.

Chanos is saying that Dell has plowed billions into acquisitions to end up with the same level of earnings where it was before (which looking back is basically true) - which implies that from an earnings standpoint its high M&A spend is almost equivalent to huge hidden maintenance capex rather than growth capex as its legacy business gets less and less profitable. If it needed the same level of M&A to maintain the same results forever he might have a point. I am inclined to take the other side of that view, but it's worth thinking about. Chanos has a complicated method of expressing that the PC business' contribution to earnings is declining. It also speaks to the problem of trying to normalize FCF for an innovation business. Maintenance/investment capex is difficult to delineate, but that sword swings both ways...

http://www.economist.com/node/21563291

Gay people are born gays..they just realize/reveal it late because of social pressure..A straight person just doesn't become gay because it is allowed. Actually there is much debate about this. Pavlovian Conditioning in my view proves that homosexuality can actually be introduced into any person's sexual preference, think Jails or stranded islands. I think the scientific community's attempt to rationalize that people are born gay is totally baseless. Sorry for being grotesque, but acts of self-love are not romances of the hand. I suspect that people in prison are not actually attracted to other men... though who knows...

Adam and Eve were alone. The importance of their individual decision to have children was essential to the growth rate of the human race because they were the human race. Once you start getting into groups in different ecosystems, the Adam and Eve analogy becomes inapplicable.

Forget closed-minded, it's just not a very useful thought experiment. You are ignoring the specificity of that situation, and imputing your conclusion to reproduction in the real world. Is the real ecosystem a series of Adam's and Eve's deciding to reproduce?

But my point is that... Sorry, wrong thread. It's probably more a sign that bargains have been bargains long enough for people to get their desired allocation, and that NEW bargains are a bit more scarce.

It just comes down to preference in the end. That was my point with Enoch1. I couldn't understand how the "God" universe changes the mechanics of how people make decisions. It just adds another factor, rather than imbuing "objectiveness" into morality, whatever that means.

That's because you are focused on direct effects. A starting point of Adam and Eve makes that direct effect very important. What about the a small group that has just been kicked out of the garden? Will propogation always be supported by each person having children simply because they can? Can you imagine scenarios where overall birthing potential is improved by some people refraining from giving birth and focusing resources elsewhere? This is not a defense of homosexuality as being "natural" but rather to point out that the "two dudes" argument is very narrow in approach.

I wonder whether there would be a positive change in lifetime productivity of any child they adopt. Probably, and probably upwards.

Why the ad hominems? Was there something specific about my response with which you disagreed?

I am not singling you out, I think all of those millions and billions are bigots too. Interesting. Infertile women are allowed to marry. Eric, Perhaps I missed a previous explanation, and perhaps this question is ignorant....but how could the human race expand had it begun with either two dudes or two women? Yes using the example of an infertile woman is a neat little trick, but in all seriousness, how is homosexuality inherently natural if said act cannot inherently reproduce? An infertile woman was inherently created to reproduce.... That's an error of extrapolating aggregate birth/death rates from individual cases. For example, homosexuality may be supportive of family fertility despite its effect on an individual person's fertility. If there are limited available resources, then 2 aunts to one child may be more adaptive than 2 moms to 2 children. There are other what ifs, but the point is that you can't assume maladaption by looking only at direct effects of not reproducing. Also, defining natural by the quality of contributing to fertility is an idiosyncratic use of the term. That would imply that all extinct species were unnatural and that in vitro fertilization procedures are natural.

He is definitely smarter than me, but not for that wager! First note that the wager relies on the unproven statement that there are two possibilities: A specific God concept exists or it does not. What about other God concepts? Or what about concepts not even considered by the wagerers? So you end up with an even bigger problem: How does Pascal assign probabilities to his scenarios? If he can't assign, even with huge errors, a probability to that specific God-scenario, then what distinguishes it from any other scenario? You could just as easily say that God is seeking arch-positivists, and has seeded the world with tests to weed out the faithful. It's simply too unspecified a wager to lead to fruitful insights.

A moral violation in a no-God paradigm? I've been arguing this conditional: if God does not exist, there are no necessarily true moral propositions. Well, I still think that is true. As near as I can tell, you agree. My confusion is that you aren't arguing the conditional. You simply state is as a tautology. Obviously, we can come up with many tautologies, but it would be a trivial exercise without some method to identify it in reality, in other words to find reasons that one concept is more likely than alternatives. Let's ignore the word "morality" because we are getting stuck in language. Please identify how we would distinguish the two universes, God and No-God, when someone commits something that may be considered wrong. There must be a non-trivial difference, as opposed to simply stating that God exists in one, and therefore in that one a wrong is immoral.

Since tautologies are true (necessarily so), I'm not sure it really matters, if all you were asking was how He could contribute to intrinsic morality. But one possibility is to follow Robert Adams: "Any action is ethically wrong if and only if it is contrary to the commands of a loving God". If true, this grounds morality in God's nature itself. Can you provide an example that would show the difference between a moral violation in a God paradigm versus a no-God paradigm? I'm looking for some method of discrimination that doesn't rely upon being true by definition.

Perhaps a better way to phrase my view is to figure out how Proposition I is not simply tautological. Let's agree with both propositions. Now what? What is the non-tautological distinction between the God paradigm and the subjective paradigm that makes the former objective? For example, you do something immoral in both paradigms. What's the non-tautological difference?

Eric, I'm still waiting for your response here. Honestly, I really value your opinion and I'd like to know if what I'm assuming is true for you. Sorry to hijack your question to Eric, but this question is something Enoch1 brings up and I have trouble understanding the perspective. What exactly do you mean by "absolute"? Is there a non-tautological identification for absolute good or bad? What does a morality independent of human preferences look like?

Even with God, the same would hold. God would simply overlay an additional punishment/reward scheme. You would still rely on social instincts, personal preference, et. al. I'm not entirely sure what that second sentence means, but it doesn't seem like you disagreed with anything I said. Maybe you are just emphasizing the second half of the conditional? Not at all. The existence/non-existence of a god has little to do with your interaction with "morality". You currently have a body, which experiences the world in a certain way. Now God exists. So what? What, specifically, are the factors that now make morality intrinsically anything? I don't know all of the factors, but here's one: God is a Necessary Being. So (i) if He is the individual paradigm of what is right, or (ii) if He is the knower of what is right, those moral truths are invariable. Like I said, here's one property that contributes: the fact that He is a Necessary Being. You mean what clarifies for me whether morality is subjective or not? Lots of things: thinking about it for a while, discussing it with others, maybe my biology informs it (ie maybe we are hard-wired to think that), etc. Thanks again for all this, but you still aren't denying my original conditional. Now I'm wondering - did you not intend to do so? I thought that I did respond, but there is still a miscommunication. Even if we hold the Necessary Being proposition to be true, it still contributes nothing to the "intrinsic" nature of morality. It simply supplies a tautology: God is a necessary being, and his knowing of right is by definition right. Let's agree to agree with the tautology. Why do we agree? You are still weighting that information with the tools you have. Your acceptance or rejection of the proposition is dependent upon the relative weights of various sensations that you experience when you consider it. To see why this remains a subjective experience, imagine that something is lost in translation between God's moral proclamations and your understanding. You are fully convinced that you are working in God's name, and, due to the misunderstanding, don't realize that you are doing something "immoral". What next? What happens that identifies the objective nature of morality, in the way that we identify objective nature in other matters?

The key word here is "unnecessary". That's not the same as claiming to have proven a negative. It just means that the models of reality work just fine without having to postulate for a god. This is worth emphasizing because the same miscommunications about logical reasoning keep reappearing throughout the thread.

Same way that I believe in atoms and radio waves; reproducible, conclusive and falsifiable evidence. So, you believe in value investing, although evidence is clearly against it? Most academics largely dismiss value investing, even saying that Buffett's streak was luck. Also, let's say you had a personal story like I discussed. Would that change anything? Where is evidence clearly against value investing? It's been a while since I check it out, but I think Burton Malkiel's Random Walk Down Wall Street has some information about it. I think someone posted a study on the board here a few months ago too about a new study. I haven't looked too much into the research since grad school or so. This is a fairly common miscommunication between atheists and theists that is little more than a language problem around the word "belief". If someone tells you that Santa Claus certainly exists but in a form that is undetectable to all human methods of investigation, you would likely think, "No. No he does not exist." Why? Because his existence is simply unnecessary to explain anything. "I believe that Santa Claus, as you describe him, does not exist", generally does not imply that such a thing is impossible. It simply is an unnecessary feature in your model of the world.

Even with God, the same would hold. God would simply overlay an additional punishment/reward scheme. You would still rely on social instincts, personal preference, et. al. I'm not entirely sure what that second sentence means, but it doesn't seem like you disagreed with anything I said. Maybe you are just emphasizing the second half of the conditional? Not at all. The existence/non-existence of a god has little to do with your interaction with "morality". You currently have a body, which experiences the world in a certain way. Now God exists. So what? What, specifically, are the factors that now make morality intrinsically anything? To clarify, let's say that God exists. Now let's say that aliens exist. There must be something unique about the existence of God that makes morality intrinsically right and wrong. Or perhaps the problem is with identifying what you mean by "intrinsically" right and wrong. Again, you have a body (and a soul? It doesn't make much difference), so you have constraints in your interaction with the universe. 1. What is the contribution of God's existence to intrinsic morality? 2. What effect on your tools (body, mind, soul(?)) clarifies "intrinsic" vs. subjective morality?

No, for me, I am going to view them as good or evil from the context of my social unit. Similarly, Bush is a good moral man to some Christians and to others (families of civilians bombed in Pakistan) he may be viewed as a cruel evil man. Yes I think this is the right way to think about it. If there is no God, morality amounts to nothing more than social instincts, personal preference, biological influence, and the like. There is nothing intrinsically right or wrong - it's all a matter of perspective. Even with God, the same would hold. God would simply overlay an additional punishment/reward scheme. You would still rely on social instincts, personal preference, et. al.

Maybe one way to weed out spammers is to ask for a stock thesis, with some plagiarism check.