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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25230 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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I think the best answer to both @Ben___Garrison and @Frequent_Anybody2984 below is found in this recent NYT article:

New Normal or No Normal? How Economists Got It Wrong for 3 Years.

We can go back and forth one whether the underlying datasets were right or wrong all along, whether the forecast models were accruate within an exceptable margin, and how far out, whether your own prediction or post-hoc interpretation is vindicated.

But the fact is that the 'experts' in their communication, reporting, framing, advisement, and forecasting were wrong. It is plain, and clear and widely known. To disagree, is to disagree with the experts on what the experts believed.

To express confoundedness at this trickling down into people updating priors against experts' guidance or to make silly analogies that this is just 'vibes' from out-of-step, misunderstood lived experiences, is incorrect.

And to alternatively admit, that 'yes, yes experts were wrong for the past 3 years, especially in what they communicated to the public, and in ways very obviously and coincidentally partisan, but please believe the current diagonsis of the economy right now because it's what the expert data tells us', well sure, I'm listening, but you need to do better than make insulting hokey analogies about lived experience or tell me that your Muslim friend is smart, but jihadistic so, I should just listen to the experts now.

Economists first underestimated inflation, then underestimated consumers and the labor market. The key question is why.

Because Economics is a pseudoscience best described as "monkeys flinging shit at the wall to see what sticks"? I swear the US has this conversation like once a decade. "Why didn't the economists predict [x]?" "How could the economists have been so wrong about [y]?" "How did nobody see [z] coming?" Nobody predicted the Great Depression. Nobody predicted the DotCom burst. Nobody predicted Stagflation. Nobody predicted the 08 Recession. "Nobody" here being used to mean "the vast majority or overwhelming majority of those employed in the economic sector" not literally nobody. Yes I know Michael Burry exists. Michael Burry has also predicted ten of the last two recessions, and rather famously aggressively shorted Tesla right before the stock literally doubled in price. Michael Burry is a very smart bear economist, who believes the market is always about to shit itself, and routinely bets on the economy shitting itself, and routinely loses. Sometimes though he's right, and when you hedge your bets and get to play with a billion dollars when you're right you're right big.

The economy is cyclical. It goes up, then it goes down a bit, then it goes up some more, and then down some more, on a roughly ten-year timeline. And every. Fucking. Time. We get a deluge of articles crying about "how did nobody see this coming????" There won't be an economic downturn in 2000. Actually, no wait, the NASDAQ has plunged we're doomed!. Actually, no wait, we're all going to be fine. Not to worry everyone, 2008 is going to be a good year for the economy. OH GOD WE'RE ALL GOING BANKRUPT HOW COULD ECONOMISTS HAVE MISSED THIS!?

Rinse and repeat ad infinitum. Economists have no earthly idea what's going to happen to the market tomorrow, much less six months from now, and not at all a year from now. Anyone who says otherwise is usually trying to sell you something, and the fact that we as a society are completely befuddled by this incredibly boring truth never ceases to amaze me.

There's a partisan bias, but the real problem is that economists were trying to make predictions using models with assumptions that don't apply.

The inflation isn't just coming from the money supply. Covid lockdowns disrupted all global supply chains and the shocks of that are still causing shortages and price hikes.

Also look into the Eurodollar theory. Most of the USD in circulation internationally is fake ledger money issued by City of London banks to maintain liquidity for international trade. A lot of the current trade problems are a result of banks being afraid to issue more, because a crisis can collapse the whole system.

This is the third top level comment in a row on the same topic. Not everyone wants to discuss this topic, it is generally a courtesy to keep a single topic of discussion to a single top level thread. If a current news event topic is way too large (like the Ukraine war, or the Israel-gaza war) then we will try and create a separate thread dedicated just to that topic.

@iprayiam3 and @Frequent_Anybody2984 please try and follow this courtesy for others users.

Sorry! I initially had a much better comment that would have been top level worthy imo but it got deleted by a cat. I should have posted that one as a response.

Understood, but meta food for thought:

  1. when you're responding to two existing top levels at once, it's hard to. Especially when it's increasing branches of generalization. Ben's OP was an analogy for a epistemic process, but delved very densly into a narrow score-keeping point about economics. Sometimes 'thematic' trends are hard to distinguish new topic from old.
  2. The suggested flow is somewhat less effective than it was on Reddit for whatever reason, I'm not sure of. By the time a topic is a day old and two down, it's effectively dead. This flow strattles the line (poorly imo) evenescent stream of conversation and post-style topics. We end up with, in the worst of both worlds IMO- uncommented on posts, vs fleeting conversations.

To the extreme effect, Ben's own post was a response to a thread from last week. He, correctly I imagine, top-leveled it here instead of responding there because that CWR post was effectively dead. The same effect works at a micro scale on top levels within a post. I don't have a suggestion for how to fix, but I'd be interested if anyone else notices it worse than it used to be?

Perhaps, I've just gotten used to DSL's forum style of functionally bumping discussions with the newest comment to the top. Perhaps some of it the (contentious) hiding of thumbs up for so long, but it ends up feeling like posting anything 'down thread' feels like shouting into the void.

Okay, Ben's top level response was to his own post that was a day old. I feel I need to clear that up so as not to present it as being somehow more acceptable than yours or frequent_anybody's.

But, to me, top level responses don't just dilute things to being a single topic that other people might not be interested in but generally feel rude or at the very least represent an etiquette faux pas that can cause unnecessary social strife. The implication being something along the lines of "your response was so bad I need to make another topic just to deal with it." or "I'm so right and you're so wrong that I'm taking this to a top level comment to give my argument that much more value."

Whether or not that's right, I see it that way sometimes, and I can imagine others do as well, and there's no way that's not going to ruffle other people who aren't bypassing the usual method of just responding to someone below their comment.

That's all fair. I can accept that this shouldn't have been a top level.

But you both basically caused the original thread to fall further. Id get it more if there were like five other posts that buried the original discussion, but there aren't.

The sort by new means that your post would have been second if you had both just posted in the original topic. Does being the second post from the top really make you feel like a thread is buried?

And there is a slippery slope problem here. If you two do it, what if everyone that responds to you also just chooses to post at the top level? The threading becomes a useless feature. Your thread gets buried even faster than normal, and no one is happy.

Three posts on one topic isn't bad for readability, but breaking a suggested rule twice in a row is bad for the legibility of suggested rules. I specifically do not want people to see these two courtesy violations and think "ah I should do that too".

There is nothing wrong with reviving a dead topic from last week.

But you both basically caused the original thread to fall further. Id get it more if there were like five other posts that buried the original discussion, but there aren't.

The sort by new means that your post would have been second if you had both just posted in the original topic. Does being the second post from the top really make you feel like a thread is buried?

And there is a slippery slope problem here. If you two do it, what if everyone that responds to you also just chooses to post at the top level? The threading becomes a useless feature. Your thread gets buried even faster than normal, and no one is happy.

Three posts on one topic isn't bad for readability, but breaking a suggested rule twice in a row is bad for the legibility of suggested rules. I specifically do not want people to see these two courtesy violations and think "ah I should do that too".

Fair enough

There is nothing wrong with reviving a dead topic from last week.

I didn't mean to suggest there is

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