Sunday, October 28, 2018

'Idiots think in labels'


Taleb can see the idiocy of the results yes; but as of yet hasn't expressed a view or interest in the methodologies that lead to these distinctions... might make sense for a stochastic person like himself (vice a deterministic person)...




15 comments:

Konrad said...

LOL.

In fairness, all of us tend to think in labels, buzzwords, tropes, and clichés. It’s a habit that humans must constantly guard against. In fact, a crucial part of imperialist propaganda is to instill labels and euphemisms in the mass mind. For example, even anti-war people have been trained to refer to war as “intervention.” Even anti-imperialist people have been trained to echo the claim that foreign leaders are “dictators.”

Labels sustain mobs. For liberals, all right wingers are “fascists” and “Nazis.” For right-wingers, all liberals are “Commies.”

For Franko, everyone but him is an “art major.”

Matt Franko said...

When I say ‘art major ‘ that is a label of expression designating someone trained under a distinct type of methodology...

Take Taleb here... he never seeks to examine how these people ended up this way... does he think they just evolved this way from the apes by random chance mutation?

Hard to tell...

In any regard he thinks people who think in labels are ‘idiots’ apparently without thinking about how that happened...

At least I have never seen him examine process... just the results statistically..

He is a member of the academe so he perhaps has a blind spot there...

Matt Franko said...

He may have an Art Degree in mathematics.... BA in Mathematics.... not ideal for working in material systems...

Greg said...

Wtf is it with your “material systems” BS??

The number of people it takes to build our structures and make our stuff and produce our food is way less than half the planets population

The problems we have to solve are mostly non material. How to create stronger communities, how to create social environments for our children to become decent citizens. Engineers are not the ones most qualified to lead in those areas

Matt Franko said...

That may be Greg but this blog is nominally about Economics not Religious or Philosophical belief systems...

“Stronger communities” wtf does that mean????

So you think if we have a JG all of a sudden the opioid epidemic goes away?

Keep dreaming....

Noah Way said...

Economics is - among other things - the management of material systems.

A bachelor's in electrical engineering has even less value than an arts degree.

Greg said...

The point is we aren’t suffering from lack of mechanical know how or dearth of raw materials. It is not a problem more STEM training will solve. Artists are not the problem..... con artists are. And many have BS degrees

We can make GDP whatever we want by spending enough and accounting for it properly. Our technocratic focus on GDP, Dow levels and other metrics has become misguided

i think the arguments for a JG are strong under current methods for management of our economy but I wish we could get past our Protestant work ethic culture however that’s down the road a ways For now take unemployment off the radar. It’s not necessary for economic stability and it causes most of our social problems


We’ve got the “ how do we get it” mostly solved. Now we need to work on the “who gets what and how much”. and again, engineers are no more helpful than English professors or musicians on that one

Matt Franko said...

Engineers/scientists are trained under methodologies that are more appropriate for working and managing material systems...

Ok Greg what is the problem then?

According to you and idiot Noah everything should be fine then because these Art Degree people in Economics are trained appropriately...

Yet these morons go all around saying shit like “we’re out of money!”, conflating stocks and flows, reification of accounting abstractions, etc all the time...

It’s obviously not fine the Discipline is a disgrace and it’s a disgrace because the people there are not trained appropriately...

You guys can have all the best intentions in the world it means NOTHING here...

Matt Franko said...

“Stronger communities!”

You sound like Hillary with her “it takes a village!” BS....

Matt Franko said...

Hey you guys I got it!

Maybe if we all got in a circle and held hands and sang Kumbaye Ya together these morons wouldn’t think we were “out of money!” anymore??.

Matt Franko said...

Here you guys go:

https://youtu.be/mSUmzMi-vwQ

Give it a try it can’t hurt..... let me know how it works out....

Noah Way said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Noah Way said...

Nonsensical bullshit from someone who can't connect A to B, and for whom C is utterly beyond conception.

Franko, you are a mental midget. Your material competence is stupidity. Your failure to understand even simplistic systems, connections between them, cause and effect, and so on is a clear demonstration of your complete lack of basic intelligence. Your bullshit has been debunked so thoroughly and so repeatedly that you should be embarrassed to keep repeating it. Anyone with half a brain would.

All you are capable of is repeating the same meaningless phrases over and over and over again, like the idiot you are. And thus the delicious perfection of this thread.

Calgacus said...

Matt:So you think if we have a JG all of a sudden the opioid epidemic goes away?

Yup.

Greg:i think the arguments for a JG are strong under current methods for management of our economy but I wish we could get past our Protestant work ethic culture however that’s down the road a ways

The basic argument for the JG is not a Protestant Work Ethic argument. It applies to every economic system that human beings have ever had. There aren't any other methods for management of an economy. Which is why modern national monetary production economies are the ONLY ones in history to have (mass) unemployment. Primitive societies, gift economies understood themselves better than we do, so they did not do such insane and preposterous things to create poverty in affluence, famine in plenty.

Two things about gifts: (a) You had to accept a gift then, or you gave a dire insult. (b) Gifts always had the string of obligation attached. There was no such thing as a Secret Santa Claus gift, a "complete prestation" as Mauss called it, which is only seen in modern money using societies.

That's how all human societies worked for thousands of years. It works. It is implicit in human cognition. That's what the JG is. The state, society should allow anybody who wants to give it a gift (of their labor). This creates an obligation which is recognized by the payment of money. Eventually the obligation is redeemed by (a [kula] chain of) purchases, ultimately the purchase from the state called "taxation". There are no drawbacks to this. There are colossal drawbacks to not doing this. If more people work - willingly, gladly - then more work will be done. For everyone. Everyone is better off. Period, end of story.

The JG argues that it is absurd to make absurd Kafkaesque demands of people. To make demands of people while preventing them from fulfilling that demand. So Kafkaesque that it is actually in Kafka (in The Trial I think he called it The Parable of the Door.)

The argument for the JG is the same as being opposed to slavery. A monetary economy without a JG is too close to slavery, is infected with the same sort of lunacy. If anything not having a JG is less evil than slavery of course, but it is more insane. For a monetary economy without a JG is an insane idea, that only benefits insane people according to their insanely distorted ideas of "benefit". Having slaves on the other hand can give some benefits to the master.

Necker, Fichte, Lincoln, Tolstoy, Keynes & Wigforss understood and stated the argument. (Not to speak of Shakespeare & the Bible) As Herbert Stein noted then and agreed with, the 1962 US Council of Economic Advisers Report to the President made what was basically this argument. (In a particularly novel and insightful way IMHO.) Mosler just reiterates their earlier logic when he says that not having a JG is "logically absurd".

mike norman said...

Taleb is an idiot himself. Remember back in 2010 or 2011 when he said, "Everyone in the world should short Treasuries." What an idiot. The Fed was in the midst of an uprecedented rate cut, QE operation. He knows nothing this guy. I am amazed that people pay any attention to him whatsoever.