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One set of people got the non-transitory nature right without using any sophisticated modeling or "genuinely trying to figure out what's going on". The other set got it wrong while using sophisticated modeling and "genuinely trying to figure out what's going on". This did not lead me to conclude that causes of inflation post-2020 were hopelessly complex, but that people exercised motivated reasoning and recruited a bunch of pointless complexity rather than just acknowledge the obvious conclusion in front of them.
The whole thing feels like the midwit meme brought to life.
You're claiming that the traders mentioned in the previous post were giving away money? If so, could you elaborate on what you think the cause of error was, since I rather like it when non-me people distribute free cash.
The error is motivated reasoning due to being unwilling to criticize heavy-handed covid-excused policy. The downside is that this is hard to cash in on because it's not a bet on just inflation, but also on how deranged the government is - predicting higher inflation also means predicting a more insane government, which reduces the value of any rewards of predicting correctly.
For the sake of example to illustrate that government insanity matters for economic bets, consider 2 people betting on whether the government will rob them and take half their money. The actual chance of this happening is 50%. But if the bet is even, the payoff matrix looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/HQ1PibN.png. Therefore it's actually beneficial to bet that the government will do nothing.
Edit: It now occurs to me that this might be a novel contribution to game theory and therefore is a bit too much of a reach to be a point of evidence here.
Maybe to economics or betting but surely not game theory
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In Physics 101, there's a class of problems where there are multiple ways to figure out the answer. One is through difficult integration of force and velocity equations. The other is noting that energy is conserved and you can figure it out through simple algebra that way. There's another class of problems where one thing absolutely dominates -- one hard SF author posed the problem in a short story about a spaceship moving through the solar system at 0.25g constant acceleration. Yes, it's a ridiculously multi-body problem, but you can basically ignore all the smaller influences because 0.25g swamps them.
These economic questions tend to be like those problems. Yes, there's a way to make it complicated, but there's also a simple "energy" (money supply/spending) argument. And yes, there's a bunch of other factors, but when you throw around trillions of dollars, they're swamped.
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