Great Moderation
When Lysenkoism had to be dismantled it fell to physicists (eg, Kapitsa & Sakharov). To whom will fall the theory of the 'great moderation'?
New Topic: "What's your vision of true academic freedom?" [Asks @Philip_Girvan.]
An old joke about the diference between the Soviet and US constitutions. Both give freedom to dissent. The US gives freedom the day after.
Academic freedom is about making secure heroes out of Margot O'toole, Doug Prasher & Nassim Taleb instead of pushing them to the periphery.
Academic freedom is freedom to invite a senior colleague to self-copulate for inserting himself before your name on YOUR paper..and survive.
Academic freedom comes from the academic *obligation* to schedule lectures if you have even the possibility of strong disruptive results.
Academic freedom entails a right for a non-expert theorist of high ability to cross boundaries and live on merit without seeking permission.
Academic freedom is the insulation from threat or want to continue in good standing for *any* and *all* contributions & reasoned dissent.
What few people admit is that opposing "String Theory", "The Great Moderation", "Scientist Shortages" etc...leads to excommunication.
This was best put by @BretWeinstein: "Selection is to be feared only when just individuals are prevented from returning costs."
So @ahaspel asks what institutional reforms are needed (which was where I was headed when a birthday party occured in physical reality).
First of all, I am focused primarily on science. If universities can't provide academic freedom, science needs to move homes.
Next: Basic research in science is a public good (inexhaustible and inexcludible). Therefore we need higher levels of public funding.
To maintain academic freedom we need to move resources from what is falsely called 'scientific training' to the compensation of researchers.
To get strong individuals, our target for researchers should be something like MA by 21-22 PhD by 25-26, permanent job by 26-28 (approx.).
Graduate training is actually much shorter than assumed. Typically one is a graduate 'student' in year 1,2 of a PhD and working thereafter.
Raising PhDs should be Eusocial. Giving students to PI's in a 1 on 1 relationship is like parking choir boys with priests. Better in theory.
We must also fund entirely different sorts of people. Without Huxleys, Grossmans, & Hardys you don't get Darwins, Einsteins, & Ramanujans.
A central point: scientists are supposed to be K-selected but universities are hell bent for leather to r-select PhDs.
Yet that's insane.
Research & Teaching in Universities are as perfectly linked as Skiing & Shooting in the Biathalon: tenuously for all but Professors / Finns.
Last point for now: Freedom for academics is precisely freedom from academics. A real marketplace of ideas beats the pants off peer review.
Something occurs to me. If you've never had reason to test your own academic freedom, you may have absolutely no idea what animated me.
On May 23, 2003 an extraordinary talk at NAS called âExactly Backwards: Scientific Manpower Theoryâ was given.There is no record of this.
The talk was so extraordinary that it was repeated again at NAS 11 days later on June 3, 2003. Again there is no meaningful record of this.
The talk presented evidence to the National Academy of Sciences that NAS & @NSF partnered to manipulate markets over scientist salaries.
Now ask yourself why would @NSF be trying to weaken American scientists? Why would NAS help? How would NSF dependent scientists self-defend?
Gauge theoretic economics interest has come recently from @mathpunk @dabacon @diffeomacx @riemanmzeta @tylercowen @ahaspel etc... Loving it.
I should say that Gauge theoretic economics is also all about academic freedom, quashed as it was by the rennegade Boskin Commission idiocy.
T. Geithner 2010: "Welcome to the Recovery!" http://nyti.ms/aItmzd T. Geithner 2004: "Welcome to the Great Moderation!" http://bit.ly/anJ3Ax
Something is becoming clearer to me. Thereâs an academic âdisappearedâ class: for every massive expert failure (e.g. âthe great moderationâ, âWMDâ, dietary fat) those who best called it generally canât be fully seated at the table afterward & weâre stuck w the enabling âexpertsâ.
Except that our institutional mainstream is *pure* fringe:
FreeTrade w/o Kaldor Hicks Transfers
âGreat Moderationâ
Student Loans w/o Bankruptcy
Employer Tethering of H1B
Invasion of Iraq for WMD
Multimillionaire ex-Civil Servants
Black Incarceration
Etc.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/paypal-ceo-grapples-with-fringe-groups-11551016800
I know of no truly working profession.
Medicine: broken. Law: broken. Research: broken. Banking: broken. Mgmt consulting: broken.
Youâll say âSTEM, Tech and CS FTW losers!! Woot!!â
And Iâll whisper âBro, thou dost protest way way too much.â Me thinks.
How are we still such a rich country, then? Apparently having every institution in the country be "broken" isn't that catastrophic??
I didnât know you did impressions! Not really sure. Guessing Timothy Geithner explaining the great moderation of pre-2007? Marty Feldstein on laissez faire? Greenspan on self correcting markets? Brad Delong on NAFTA? Madoff on investing? Krugman on internet commerce? I give. Who?
Câmon Noah. Enough.
People tell me that news has now become commercial and that stories are simply constructed to sell papers/get clicks. This is just nonsense.
Nothing would get clicks, boost circulation or sell papers for a NYT/CNN/NPR like aggressively getting to the bottom of the Epstein story.
As I learned uncovering an immigration conspiracy to use visas to tamper with the free market for STEM labor by our national science complex, no news organization is trying to sell us the actual true stories that move news product organically. The stories we want are held back.
News is a lot like college admissions: itâs an insiders game. We know itâs rigged but canât quite figure out how.
Why take that kid/run that story? Why do you consistently have zero interest in the most interesting kids/stories?
Weâre just now learning *how* rigging works.
Take the current totally synthetic & transparent push for âauthoritative sourcesâ. Such sources would be the ones warning in 2005 that the âGreat Moderationâ was a lie & that a crash loomed. Someone like @nntaleb. Yet they mean the opposite. They mean cheerleaders like @nytimes.
1/ Let me say more clearly what Iâve been intimating. I am suspecting we may risk a colossal public health disaster because we have a terrible paternalistic expert public health culture of âmanagingâ and ânudgingâ populations. And also lying to control public panic & shirk duty.
2/ In essence we developed a culture of magical thinking âexpertsâ who should have been keeping a deeper system for âbottleneck eventsâ, but who for ages have been focused on luck-based âefficiencyâ because for the longest time our luck was amazing. Hence fragility is everywhere.
3/ These folks are our expert class in all areas: finance, policing, firefighting, etc. and they donât plan for suddenly correlated needs. They donât really plan for disasters. They say they do, but they lie to themselves. And then us. Thus we donât have depth to handle crisis.
4/ These people do not generally want to level with us. So they send 2 messages mixed together:
A) Donât overreact/panic and donât blame us. Take personal responsibility and you will be fine.
B) Follow our draconian instructions as if this Armageddon. Martial law minus epsilon.
5/ So many smart agentic people are unnecessarily bewildered because the message is meant for the masses who the elites treat as children. What I surmise is that people in the know think this may be much much worse than theyâve leveled with us about. Hence the severe reaction.
6/ Many are now worried about an under focus in official communication on the threat to young people in terms of morbidity & permanent or long term loss of function. But we arenât hearing much about that yet. We are being told to take personal responsibility for expert failure.
7/ So donât touch your face or go outside and youâll be fine because we donât have close to the beds, reagents, oxygen and masks that actual experts who deal with tail risk would have *insisted* upon in a correlated need event. And do note the word ârecoveredâ. Are they 100%? Ha.
8/ I think the subtext is: âWe, your experts, massively screwed you all. But youâll panic if you hear how bad this could get. So letâs play a game called âjust use common sense and a little martial-law-liteâ and we may not lose too many of us to what is a very serious threat.â
9/ So the âdonât panicâ message disguises the âwe experts *massively* screwed up & know a lot of things that are potentially terrifying that we are not fully openly sharing w/ you yet.â just like the financial crisis in 2008. Hence the number of people saying âitâs just the flu.â
10/ This has been my message: âStop calming us down and sugar coating. You *experts* take the personal responsibility on that you dole out to us and fire yourselves if you downsized our emergency reserve requirements to make quick efficiency gains anytime in the last 40 years.â
11/ In short, we have the wrong expert class and they are likely now finally telling us through their *actions* how serious the risk may be. My advice: toughen up & stop listening to public-health-speak wherever and whenever it conflicts with drastic actions you see being taken.
12/ If youâre young, think about recovery differently. Think about partial recovery that may never come fully back. Push government for answers on what reserves we have & how we can all pitch in to get depth back that has been removed for profit under efficiency & globalization.
13/ I know many agentic technology folks who would leap at the chance to solve problems. People of deep creativity and heroic resolve. Push government to stop with the Public health BS, level with us, and call up the science & tech geeks to leap into action as a brain trust.
14/ Iâm sorry but Iâve been afraid to think this aloud. This is a second version of 2008. Same stupid mindset. The last many years have been a health version of the so-called âgreat moderationâ. Take new draconian measures as the most likely indicator of the scale of the failure.
15/ In short, start tuning out exoteric public health if you have the ability to tune in to esoteric communication between the experts now scrambling to wake up from their failure. If the mixed messages are making you stupid, turn off the audio meant to calm you & watch actions.
End/ I thank several people who I may name later for contributing. As always, my colleague @nntaleb has made versions of these points his lifeâs mission. Thatâs not called being an asshole. Thatâs called heroism. But, I grant you, sometimes they look very similar. Even to me. đ
I didnât follow âFlatten the curve!â
I canât grasp the mask instructions.
I donât grok âHerd Immunity.â
I donât follow the âItâs not the Wuhan Lab!â logic.
I donât get the vaccine target dates.
NB: I also didnât get âThe great Moderationâ, NAFTA or âThe STEM Labor Shortageâ.
The CDC has released six "decision trees" aimed at helping businesses, communities, schools, camps, day cares and mass transit decide on whether it's safe to reopen https://www.cnn.com/webview/us/live-news/us-coronavirus-update-05-14-20#h_621046cd0ac22fb4e65953265da78130
Hereâs the thing: I think this is all proxy speak. I donât think any of this is real. No one is making real sense.
Weâre simply repeating incantations to each other. This isnât science or normal public health. This is what you do when you are pretending too hard to be competent.
So women of color are above white males? And immigrants increasingly voted for Trump? And WHO lied about Masks? And the Fed Lied about The Great Moderation?
Letâs be honest: no authoritative institutions are reliably honest. There are no authoritative institutional sources left.
Vaccines are not 100% safe.
Climate science is not simply âsettled scienceâ.
The COVID virus may well have come from the Wuhan Lab.
Not everything @JamesOKeefeIII publishes is automatically false.
@AndrewYang was never covered fairly by @msnbc.
Masks help.
Your move AP.
If you want to discuss cloud formation and non-linearity in climate models, or the fact that even pure water isnât 100% safe, or the issues in determine COVIDâs origin, you are welcome to come through the âLoopholeâ that is my podcast.
You simplistic corporate sons of bitches.
@jason_pontin @JamesOKeefeIII @AndrewYang @MSNBC Ok. The âoverwhelming consensusâ on the etiology of ulcers? Economists on The âGreat Moderationâ?
I mean I thought that the idea of Pentagon videos of UFOs was total bullshit.
Life just isnât about consensus. And overwhelming does nothing for this American STEM PhD.
Related Pages
- CPI
- Consensus
- The Idealism of Every Era Is the Cover Story of Its Greatest Theft
- What is Occupy Wall Street about?
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