rkbabang

That would be my recommendation. I don't know why people feel compelled to discuss politics here - this is and investment board. Granted, politics and investment mix to some extend, but much less than generally presumed. Even Munger said, that politics don't matter much for BRK's business, I don't know why it should matter for us here. That is a little naive I think, I'm not feeling comfortable calling Munger naive, but I stand by that. He should be grateful that he lives and does business in a place where politics doesn't matter much, rather than some other parts of the world that could be mentioned. The problem is that even if you choose not to care about politics, politics can change things which can effect your business.

This is quite good, I think, rkbabang. It makes me wonder about how to achieve this efficiently in a world with Putin. Like, tiny groups can't efficiently do defence, or highway systems, or big buildings, or law systems, or healthcare. But is there some easy way to take a bunch of tiny groups and make agreements between them to deal with these bigger issues, and then agreements between these bigger groups to deal with even bigger issues etc.? I think defense can be done quite effectively without super centralization. Invert the question. How would one go about occupying a land mass the size of the US filled with hundreds of thousands of "states" no bigger than towns or cities and in many cases just voluntary contracts without states at all. All with no centralized authority to surrender to you. With no systems already in place to police or to collect taxes on a large scale. No weapons laws so you have no idea to what extent these people are armed. I suppose you could nuke a few cities and demand the rest of the continent surrender to you, but I think most of the world would have a problem with you if you did that. It's a logistical nightmare, its messy, and therefore safe.

I don't see it as individualism vs collectivism at all. I have no problem with either or a mix of the two. A family is usually a collective, and I don't think it would work well any other way. I also don't see why collectivism couldn't work well in larger groups as well. I see it as aggressive force vs volunterism. I have no problem with a commune type setup if everyone involved agrees to all of the terms and can opt out at any time. It is the "you were born here so you are a member of this group whether you like it or not, now hand over 28% of your income" that I disagree with. I never chose to join this group and have no easy way of opting out. I am a member of a homeowners association, but I choose to be a member and signed the contract, and it doesn't bind my kids to anything for life. I would have no right to bind my children to a contract for which they never, as adults, agreed to. If you want to setup a commune collectivist type society with a group of people, I'm all for that. People did just that in the 60s. I'm not against trying any type of rules as long as they are voluntarily agreed to by all consenting adults involved with the option for getting out without needing to leave the continent or travel to Mars.

I'm not sure if it is even comparable like this. If there is a huge advancement in social media, Facebook can simply change their core code to put that feature into it. Other smaller social networks did stuff like videos, live streaming, stories, etc first and Facebook adopted the ones that worked well. Facebook at launch was a wall that people can write on. Now it is very different. The crypto-currencies are very limited in their ability to change like that. What if someone figures out something better than Bitcoin's block chain? It's almost certain to happen over time. When someone invents a vastly superior crypto-currency, is everybody going to stick with the old one? Over time sure something better might be found. Thus far it took all of human civilization to come up with a solution for the Byzantine generals problems allowing for the trust-less transactions enabled in Bitcoin. Yes, but once a solution to a problem is found using new technology (remember in the grand scheme of things the internet and even computers themselves are new technologies) is the first solution likely to be the best solution? It took all of human civilization to get off the ground, but the Wright brothers original aircraft has been improved upon a bit over the years. But that is just playing devil's advocate a little, because we don't really know. To answer tng's question, cryptocurrencies can be changed in how they work. ETH has forked a number of times to change things and add features, there is a huge debate going on now in the Bitcoin community over forking the blockchain to change some things. It isn't easy to do. Building consensus is never easy to do, and it probably shouldn't be easy to do, but it can be done. If something was invented that didn't evolve a blockchain at all, could bitcoin and others evolve to support that? I don't know, probably not, but I don't think that is likely. I think blockchains in one form or another are going to be the fundamental building blocks for many useful technologies in the coming decades. Blockchain technology in 2017 is like the internet in 1985, most people have no idea it even exists, and even those who are excited about it have no idea what exactly it will look like in a few decades. And maybe the killer app (such as the WWW was for the internet) hasn't even been invented or thought of yet. I think it is possible that revolutionising money is just the beginning of what the blockchain will do. Back in 1985 the internet was supposed to revolutionise mail delivery and personal communication, I don't think many people thought it would change the entire global retail industry or the entire entertainment industry in their lifetimes.

I like that, the messier the safer and better. This is correct and why decentralized power structures are better than centralized ones. Ideally as much power and control should be pushed from nation states down to regions (states in the US) then down to cities then down to neighborhoods/large buildings and in a perfect world down to individuals/families. The reason I'd like as much power as possible to reside at the neighborhood/building level is that these power structures are usually voluntary and private (i.e. condo associations or homeowners associations) rather than compulsory and enforced violently. Also at each level you go down it increases competition as it is easier to move to new buildings or neighborhoods then it is to change cities and much easier to move to new cities than nation states. Variation and selection = evolution. The only way societies/cultures can evolve quickly (non-violently) is through decentralized power structures. The US has been heading in the mostly the wrong direction since June 21, 1788, but it started out so decentralized it had a long way to deteriorate before it turned into what it is now.

Also the argument: "Most people are not going to like it when you say x" says nothing about the validity of x. Is it possible for a small number of people to be correct and the vast majority to be wrong? I would say it is. I guess you could say that I don't think much of efficient market of ideas theory.

I think there is, but then again I've been accused of being an optimist so take this with that in mind. The path is through increased wealth. It is simply easier to help others when you are wealthy and have a lot of free time on your hands. People struggling 24/7 simply to survive and feed their families don't put a lot of effort into which charities they will support this year and where they will volunteer their time. The more people who are freed from subsistence level poverty the more people will help each other. And the more wealth which exists in the world in total the better off humanity will be on average. "Wealth inequality" doesn't concern me in the least as long as people are moving out of extreme poverty in large numbers. Thankfully the numbers of are all moving in the correct direction and have been since at least the beginning of the industrial revolution. It is tempting to force people to do what you think they should do, but I think that always comes with unintended consequences which makes the cure worse than the disease in the long run. Yes some people will hoard lots of wealth, never give anything to charity or help anyone, then pass 100% onto their children who will then squander it. But in the grand scheme of things taxes decreases total wealth in society, so fixing that problem with a few bad apples has a negative net effect on the world as a whole. Most people are good. Again the optimist in me coming out, but if that is true things will take care of themselves as we become more wealthy as a species. If most people aren't good, however, then we are doomed. And having powerful governments won't save us from that doom, rather they will be the cause of it (governments consisting of people as they do). IMHO. In a world of nukes and biological weapons and the coming AI revolution, the only ethical framework which will enable the survival of humanity is the non-aggression principle. You can't initiate force. <--- period. No exceptions. This needs to be applied both to individual people and groups of people (regardless of how large). Initiation of force simply can't be tolerated for any reason in a world where these things exist. Once you start drawing lines elsewhere (well this group of people can initiate that amount of force for these reasons. (i.e. The IRS can tax you because: democracy, or the US government can bomb whoever it likes because: its interests... And terrorism...And democracy.) those lines will be continually moved. If humanity does not adopt this code en masse then conflicts will continue to be started and escalated, over resources and such, and eventually someone will use those weapons.

To further diversify, Tezos looks interesting. I am thinking about participating in the ICO at the end of this month. If you participate in the first 2 days you get 6000 TEZ per Bitcoin which decreases down to 5000 TEZ/BTC over the 10 day offering. It is an open-ended ICO, so the resultant market cap will depend on how many participate, they are hoping to raise $20M. I would be using my current bitcoin holdings to further diversify my cryptocurrency basket, not new money. Some info: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/tezos-receives-investment-smart-contact-system-polychain-capitals-digital-currency-fund/ Tezos, the generic self amending crypto-ledger Tezos.com

Because to a non-libertarian, anything they consider good is a right and must be mandated by force if necessary and anything they consider bad is pure evil and must be outlawed by force if necessary. There is no grey area between must-do and must-not-do. "I'd likely do it, but I wouldn't force someone else to." is an incomprehensible position.

"The Righteous Mind" came highly recommend to me by a good friend of mine. The dead tree edition is currently sitting on my coffee table next in line when I'm finished with the book I'm currently in the middle of ("Seasteading" by Joe Quirk).

Agree 100% when these sort of people are getting excited about stocks or real estate, or other assets they can speculate on, which have a maximum intrinsic value... the one difference here is that bitcoin has positive network effects, so hysteria/speculation can actually end up increasing their intrinsic value Exactly. Similar to Facebook. The more people using it the more valuable it is. The only question is if Bitcoin is the Facebook of cryptocurrencies or the MySpace?

+1 The last paragraph above articulates the largest risk I see investing in these. That was what I was trying to say when I said that I was sure that this was the future, but not sure that it will be Bitcoin. The way I see it is that this will be a winner take almost all industry. There will be thousands of cryptocurrencies but only 1-3 real winners. My cost basis in my basket of these is less than 1% of my portfolio even though the current value is over 8% right now. I'm not buying any more.

+1. The problem with machine learning is that the machine will observe the market and learn how the market works right now, but the market isn't static and these hedge funds are themselves a part of the market and the moment they act on the new information they have an effect on it. It is in a way like quantum mechanics, by making the observation you are effecting the system which you are observing. As more people use this type of algorithm development methodology the algorithms will stop working and new algorithms will need to be developed which will themselves soon stop working, and so on .... It is a race without end. What if your algorithms have never experienced a market crash and have no way to predict it or at least have never experienced a crash which is caused by whatever it is which causes the next crash? You may be left vulnerable to a major loss.

BTW if you've never read anything by Robert Anton Wilson, he was a fascinating guy and a great writer. He uses satirical fiction to get his point across, much like reading The Onion, but you can usually take what he writes at the surface level or two or 3 deeper meanings as well. Read "The Illuminatus Trilogy", it is my favorite of his books. One of my favorite pieces is from the Appendix to the Illuminatus Trilogy called "Never whistle while your pissing". In it he says some things relevant to the current discussion: "Every ideology is a mental murder, a reduction of dynamic living processes to static classifications, and every classification is a Damnation, just as every inclusion is an exclusion. In a busy, buzzing universe where no two snow flakes are identical, and no two trees are identical, and no two people are identical- and, indeed, the smallest sub-atomic particle, we are assured, is not even identical with itself from one microsecond to the next- every card-index system is a delusion. "Or, to put it more charitably," as Nietzsche says, "we are all better artists than we realize." It is easy to see that label "Jew" was a Damnation in Nazi Germany, but actually the label "Jew" is a Damnation anywhere, even where anti-Semitism does not exist. "He is a Jew," "He is a doctor," and "He is a poet" mean, to the card indexing centre of the cortex, that my experience with him will be like my experience with other Jews, other doctors, and other poets. Thus, individuality is ignored when identity is asserted. At a party or any place where strangers meet, watch this mechanism in action. Behind the friendly overtures there is wariness as each person fishes for the label that will identify and Damn the other. Finally, it is revealed: "Oh, he's an advertising copywriter," "Oh, he's an engine-lathe operator." Both parties relax, for now they know how to behave, what roles to play in the game. Ninety-nine percent of each has been Damned; the other is reacting to the 1 percent that has been labeled by the card-index machine." You can read the whole essay online here: http://www.rawilson.com/illuminatus.html#whistle Also the quote from my first post is from the intro to the 1986 version of his book "Cosmic Trigger": The whole thing can be read here: http://www.rawilson.com/trigger1.html

Thanks rkbabang, those are very interesting quotes, and a good summary of how I think much of the time. However, I also see a downside to this approach. Not "believing" in very much or not taking much for granted forces you to constantly re-evaluate every situation you come across. If we recall that half the population has an IQ below 100... just think about that for a moment... then we can see that many people won't have the luxury of constantly evaluating their beliefs in each situation. They need a consistent worldview that allows them to navigate their life efficiently and get back to putting food on the table. I think the benefit of belief structures is just that! It gives people a simple framework to help them deal with the world at large and respond to things that come up without doing serious analysis of each situation. Worldviews can be helpful, especially for day to day life which doesn't take much thought (I'm not going to re-evaluate whether to drive on the right side of the road when I go home tonight), but they should always be subject to destruction. But yes, often when any new evidence is lacking you have to act on your suspicions. The point is that even your most deeply held and cherished suspicions should never be elevated in your mind to beliefs.

Congrats. I read the paper on this forum late 2011 and the high conviction posters were framing this as digital gold. I loved the philosophy of the paper. The math i didnt understand so i stayed away. For others to learn( myself): 1.) What was thesis when invested? 2.) What is current thesis? 3.) When is this vehicle a sell? Or riding it out using power law? Thanks -premfan The math/mechanics of how it works is basically a public ledger secured by "mining" (basically you need enormous compute power to fraudulently edit the ledger) and individual accounts are secured with public key cryptology (i.e. you have a public key and a private key). I can't speak for anyone else, but my thesis was, and is, that this solves a number of problems with government controlled currencies and transaction time and costs (especially remittance of wealth across large distances), and blockchains can be used for other things besides money. With government / central bank controlled currencies you have constant inflation risk. You have no way of knowing, much less controlling, the creation of new units. You are not only at the whim of someone else, but that someone else is a political entity. Politics doesn't make good business, the incentives are not in the right places. With cryptocurrencies you can know how many new units will be created in the future. With bitcoin as an example there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins, but with Ethereum there will be a small perpetual inflation, so you can take that into account when trying to figure out what to value them at. Whereas you have no idea how many US dollars outstanding there will be in year 2026. As far as transaction frictional costs, western union charges an insane amount to send money across the world and there is really no reason for this in the 21st century. With a cryptocurrency there is no difference between sending money to someone in the same room as you as there is sending money to someone on a different continent. You send value directly without middle men. There are many other uses for blockchains other than currencies. There are smart contracts. You could use them to keep track of and trade shares of companies to replace stock exchanges. Any form of database or record keeping where you wanted it difficult, if not impossible, for the records to be tampered with, etc. The risks are that these currencies are easy to create. There is nothing stopping you from downloading the bitcoin code and creating an identical cryptocurrency called premfancoin. You can even change the parameters on how it works or how it is mined, etc. I have no doubt that some form of cryptocurrency is the future of wealth ownership and exchange, but I'm not all that sure it will be bitcoin, which was my thesis for diversifying a little bit. I didn't buy any of the bitcoin clones, such as dodgecoin or litecoin, because my thesis was that bitcoin has first mover advantage and for something to overtake it or even be close to as successful as it a competitor will need to have some type of difference which makes people choose it over bitcoin. Ethereum is very different it is turing complete. I don't think ether will be used much as a currency or a store of long term wealth, but will be used for smart contracts and the creation of businesses which run on its blockchain. It will be more of a short term store of value used for doing business or small everyday transactions, the digital coppers to the bitcoin digital gold. That is how I see it anyway. I bought some DASH and Monero (XMR) because I like their privacy features and I wonder if bitcoin isn't just a little too public. I think there will always be a market for untraceable transactions which can live right alongside bitcoin and ether. DASH and XMR work differently and while I like XMR better, DASH seems to have the better development/marketing behind it, so I diversified into both. I have no idea about when to sell. If my thesis is wrong, sell now. If my thesis is correct then some or all of these will have marketcaps which will be the equivalent of trillions of 2017 USD someday.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all AI's are created differently... Well, of course. Slick marketing aside, all intelligences are.

I've never understood why the trolley problem is a problem. If I know one group of people and not the other (regardless of group size) I flip the switch to save the group I know. If one group is more attractive than the other, I flip it to kill the uglier group. Otherwise why is it my problem? I leave it alone and yell, "Hey you, idiots, get off the tracks!". Because we are making the trolley problem decisions every day of our lives. The cat decision from another thread "spend 3K for your cat surgery or save X cats in a shelter instead" is close to pure example. However, you can even think about "spend Y on a restaurant/computer game/fancy dress or save Z people in Africa" ( https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/ ) as a trolley problem. It's even more skewed in terms of overall value vs. your own convenience value, but we (unconsciously?) choose the first every day (or at least most of the time). Your answer is one choice: base the decision on tribal/familial/emotional attachments. Some people are OK with that, some people disagree. It may lead to very egoistical decisions if taken to extreme. On the other hand utilitarian answers to this have issues too. I don't think it's fake problem in larger context. So I am not completely trolling. (And I posted it on this thread as an example that triggers hot button reactions from people.) Bonus question: if we develop (super) human AI, what kind of ethics should it follow? What should it do in the trolley situations? Should it give you gourmet meals while people are starving in Africa? (Note that fully utilitarian ethics for AI would also have issues...) Edit: there is a side issue to trolley problem that some people cannot consciously kill people even if it means saving others. I find that part less interesting to me. I was just being honest. That is why I spend way more money than I need to on my kids at the expense of saving children in Africa. Many people will answer the question differently when asked, but they are usually lying (either just to the questioner, or both to the questioner and themselves). When the chips are down there aren't many people who would turn a train to kill their child or their best friend to save the lives of 5 strangers. And if everyone involved is a stranger, doing nothing at all is usually the default. It is just human nature, whether people like to admit it or not. As for AI, I would not like to see a single skynet AI that is programmed by a government or one large corporation to have a certain set of "ethics" that would likely be a disaster. I'd much rather there be thousands or millions of AIs who (I said who on purpose) are created differently and who all have or evolve different ethics/opinions/purposes. Variation, competition, and selection is the only way to improve things long term. Any top down decision is likely to be wrong.

I've never understood why the trolley problem is a problem. If I know one group of people and not the other (regardless of group size) I flip the switch to save the group I know. If one group is more attractive than the other, I flip it to kill the uglier group. Otherwise why is it my problem? I leave it alone and yell, "Hey you, idiots, get off the tracks!".

Robert Anton Wilson said it more briefly: "Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead" and "I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions."

The price of many cryptocurrencies continues to move way up, they have been on a tear all week. https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/#USD Bitcoin now has a >$25B marketcap and Ether >$8B. There are 4 cryptocurrencies with marketcaps above $1B, 13 above $100M, and ~185 of them above $1M. My once small speculative/experimental positions in BTC, ETH, DASH, & XMR are starting to look significant.

This is claimed based on stock prices 5 days ( ! ) from the posting. "Strategies" based on sentiment are really crappy IMO ("buy when someone posts positive sentiment on stock, sell when someone posts negative sentiment"). It would be great if they got some long-er term stock return results. But then it's very difficult to research: what is "long-er term"? When would you buy/sell/etc.? Breaking News: Shocking new research shows that online discussion board posters can not accurately predict the 5 day movement of stock prices!!!!!

It isn't as simple as German/American vs. Japanese, because there are Japanese companies which don't have the reputation for reliability (Mazda, Nissan, or Mitsubishi) and after a rough start Hyundai is pretty good now and it isn't Japanese. Since the only thing reliability effects is the re-sale value, which is not something new car buyers focus very much on, maybe the better question is why does Toyota, Honda, and Subaru bother making such reliable vehicles? Surely there must be a point of diminishing returns with spending resources worrying about the 2nd and 3rd+ owners of your products instead of only on the people who buy them new? I'm glad they do though.

Not sure if I am following you on this one. Being born with an IQ of 2 std deviations above the mean for instance is for the most part based on pure 'genepool'-luck. So you have luck (the good genes), and you have an observable cause of your above average investment performance for instance (the IQ). To take a stupid example, I would be very, very, very (did I say very?) surpised to see even one of the great investors among us with an IQ below the mean. They were all for the most part born with that IQ. I see no flaw in that reasoning, and so there is no reason for me that luck could not be observed scientifically (being IQ an obvious one). Maybe just misunderstanding your point though... G. If you look at it from that angle then it is always 100% luck. If you are better at playing the game of life than other people it is simply luck that you were born with the ability and intelligence to acquire such skills. So even if it is all skill it is still just luck. Regardless of how much you think it is skill, you are still lucky you weren't born brain damaged with an IQ of 65. The poor kid born blue with his umbilical cord around his neck who does end up brain damaged could have done something amazing to change the world and became the richest man in history, if not for his bad luck. Luck works both ways.

There are really two kinds of car buyers. The new car people who like to buy or lease a brand new vehicle every 3-5 years and the used car people who like to buy a vehicle which is already 3 years old and drive it for 10+ years. The new car people don't notice much of a difference between the various brands/companies and will tell you that American cars are just as good, or german cars are just as reliable, etc because almost any new car will be pretty good for the first 3 years, but the used car people know that there is a tremendous difference between the different makes.