rkbabang

"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.

If you even have to ask this question, then you have never owned a Toyota. Picture buying a car with $16K miles, driving it until it has 252K miles and in all that time doing nothing but changing the oil about every 10K to 15K miles, replacing the breaks and tires when needed, and doing the timing belt once and a tune up once. That was my experience with just one of the Toyotas that I've owned. BTW I only got rid of it because I wanted a larger vehicle. It still ran like new with over a quarter of a million miles on it. I'd pay a lot more for a Toyota with 200K miles than a Chevy with 60K miles, and so would anyone else in their right mind (see used car prices).

This is absolutely true, but not the whole story. We all play the hand that we are dealt, but some people are better at the game than others. There are poker players who will win consistently and then there are the amateurs who will only win when they happen to be dealt a really good hand. The problem is that when you only ever play the game once it is hard to tell which category you are in.

Your income = 100% = (salary + bonuses + profit sharing + matching + stock plan purchase discounts + stock awards + capital gains + interest + dividends + etc) You pay 20%-75% of that in taxes depending on your income sources and where you live (federal/state/local/property taxes/etc) What you have left even before living expenses is 25%-80%. It is impossible to save 90% of your gross income before tax in the US.

How long ago was this that you were living off $8,000 a year and were you spending <10% of your pre-tax or after-tax income? It would have to have been his after tax income. If he was spending 10% of his pre-tax income he couldn't have been "socking away roughly 90%+" of his income. Both the 10% and 90% would have to have been after tax otherwise the statement doesn't add up.

To be truly ready to retire, in my opinion anyway, regardless of age is to have enough to live off of earning 2%. This way if you earn 3-5% per year you can have the principle continually growing by 1-3% per year to keep up with inflation. This way you can maintain your lifestyle regardless of how long you live. This will work if you retire at 30 or 65. The principle required will depend on how much you need. 2% of 1.5M is $30K. I'm thinking $3M is the minimum, so that you have $60K to live off of.

Yeast in a sugar solution eventually dies either from starvation (ran out of food) or toxicity (alcohol by-product). Infinity = dead ! SD Of course in the long run you are correct, but the universe is a big place, we can expand exponentially for a long time before running out of resources/energy/space. If we stay on this planet while we still have the seas, we won't last very long. Or even if we stay just in this solar system we will last a little longer, but not much. Humanity needs a much bigger frontier.

The top 5 lines on the chart right now express my sentiments toward the IRS exactly.

Is that really true? I would think that there are ways to prevent a failure in one place from compromising all the system. Clearly shutoffs or turnoffs should work pretty fine. But then I am not a mechanical engineer, so ::) In general though, this is a troll thread, so I might not reply to any further comments. What if the tubes were completely sealed every so many yards (or some other distance) and each gate only opened in enough time for the train to go through then closed again?

True, but the same argument could be made for planes. Ultimately all forms of transport have material weaknesses that make them vulnerable to accident or attack (planes = altitude and pressure, cars = bridges and tunnels, trains = any removal of track, boats = mild issue of sinking when holed). Yet, all work extremely well. I have no idea whether the hyperloop will join them, but I won't be surprised if it does. +1. Trains have thousands of miles of unguarded tracks that could be damaged in minutes using a chain and a pickup truck. Cruise ships can now carry as many as 5-6 thousand people, can you imagine if a terrorist sank one? The hyperloop will be vulnerable too, just like every thing else is.