Index Number Problem
2009
Perhaps if Irving Fisher and Ragnar Frisch had had a different interaction, index number theory would have remained vital.
2020
Oh. The âfreeâ part.
More generally the fundamentalist part: The âmarkets always know whatâs best partâ. The limited liability part. The self-regulating part. The unincorporated externality parts. The âgiven wantsâ part. The unique equilibrium part. The index number part.
The âmarket defects are smallâ part. The rational agent part. The shareholder value part. The âlaw & economicsâ part. The âhyperbolic discountingâ part. The entire âMacroeconomicsâ part. The fiduciary duty cures principal/agent problems part. The Ordinal/cardinal part.
Etc. Etc.
@hotepsquake @Brian_Mulhall People get confused by a person who values markets but doesnât buy into full free market fundamentalism.
Which is odd.
@gingernchronic @hotepsquake @Brian_Mulhall Well, Iâm for limited versions of what the free market absolutists are for. They are right that markets are wonderful and that much regulation is hamfisted & subject to capture.
And then, to make that point, they go insane and claim markets are much more perfect than they are.
@gingernchronic @hotepsquake @Brian_Mulhall Most texts that sell economics 101 ideology to students have a âto be sureâ section where they shunt the real issues with the theory. Consider taking that section as much more important than the author emphasizes it to be.
2021
Youâve got to be kidding me. Now *I* am being lectured on index numbers?
Uh. Ok. [Breathe]
With all due respect: economists simply do not understand index numbers. And they hunt down all those who point this out.
I have to rethink my internet usage. This is getting too stupid.
I just need to face up to the fact that I need to rethink all my academic internet interchanges.
I canât do this. This is pointless. First Maldacena. Now, implicitly, Jorgensen and the Boskin commission. Itâs too absurd and itâs not going to get smarter or stop.
Recalculating..
Watch the US CPI revisions and methodology going forward. People who like to print money tend to want to change their definition of inflation and therefore donât like anyone taking away freedom to make up methodologies to suit their political objectives involving wealth transfer.
If youâre going to push us all to move to âtrueâ âeconomicâ indices & chain them to reflect dynamic actors (or to disguise true inflation!), you would end up chaining ordinal preferences. And you canât do that without gauge theory because it is a problem in parallel transport.
Economists are holding their own field back by retaining their freedom to just cook up any revised index they want.
Itâs as if physicists retained the right to define temperature differently every year based on a closed door meeting and manufactured new thermometers thereafter.
The problem of inflation index calculation has not been adequately updated since Ragnar Frisch destroyed Irving Fisherâs attempt to axiomatize economic indices following the last great advances of F. Divisia and A. KonĂźs on continuous and welfare indices respectively.
Claim: when it comes to inflation and growth, Economists donât even understand the theory of their *own* price and quantity indices mathematically:
Moral: whoever constructs CPI and GDP numbers in a dynamic economy is in a position to fake higher growth and lower inflation if they are also in a position to stop the field from debating methodological advances that would restrict the freedom to make up index number recipes. đ
I am wholly supportive of this effort. Whether this iteration succeeds or fails is immaterial. The important thing is to take inflation away from those who would disguise:
A) The printing of fiat money by central bankers.
B) The fact that economists are holding back the field.
We canât afford for economics to pretend it is a science in public, yet act as an incentive operated consultancy which can get you any result you need to fit the political agenda.
So this effort of @balajis needs to be supported! We must take this away from our current leaders.
Around 1996, Boskin Commissioner Jorgensen held back the biggest unambiguous advance in mathematical economics that I am aware of in decades. It would have interfered with their finding that the CPI was 1.1% overstated. He calculated 1.1% would save a round Trillion for U.S.
Why are they holding back the theory of index numbers (CPI, GDP)? Because the more innovation, the less freedom to dial our gauges to whatever values the political patrons of macro economics ask. The field is literally held back by leading economists to preserve their own power.
The co-developer of gauge thy in econ as a 2nd Marginal Revolution is Pia Malaney in the early 1990s at Harvard.
There is no reason to pretend this inflation thy never happened just to flatter power. Letâs disintermediate the old:
Lastly, it is high time my co-developer of the theory got her due without being subjected to both the Matilda & Matthew effects. Man-boys really do drive technical women out of technical fields because they canât cite a woman who is smarter than they are. Enough.
Go @balajis.
Inflation is like a thermometer. You ask how hot/cold it is. You donât get to ask âWhat do you need the Gauge to say? How much thumb should be on the scale?â
This is all discussed in detail by Jim Weatherall in his book in the final chapter/epilogue:
I think this is a great introduction to geometric marginalism and economic field theory. Hope you love it:
This eliminates a step or two. You may have to watch in lower resolution if you are on your phone however:
A thermometer is a gauge of temperature. You can't let those trying to disguise human impact on climate change make the thermometers giving them discretion.
A price index is a gauge of prices. Likewise, we need to remove as much discretion from the @BLS_gov gauge as possible.
You'll soon see that "The Index Number Problem" lies beneath everything from the measurement of the impact of prices on households/consumers, to the construction of Divisa Monetary Aggregates & the measurement of the money supply.
Our gauges are riddled with error & discretion.
For the technically inclined who are wondering about the measurment & theory of Inflation/CPI construction, I highly recommend the following search terms: "Konus index", "superlative index", "Divisia Index", "cycling problem", "mechanical index number", "COLA" and "chain index".
Q2: What happens to our BLS COL framework when ordinal tastes change? How is the effect of substitution due to price change disaggregated by BLS from changes in ordinal preferences? This is important because marketing, education, etc change tastes & there is no theory for this.
Q1: Where exactly do I find the ordinal indifference maps constructed by BLS for a 'Representative Consumer' used to find substitution bias in fixed basket Mechanical approximations to a welfare Cost-Of-Living framework based on a Konus economic index of intertemporal welfare?
I cannot find any place where the preference maps needed to construct a Laspeyres Konus COL index are gleaned through revealed preference. I will go so far as to say that this is bait & switch. There is a CLAIM of a COL framework, but no one is constructing anything of the kind.
Great news, given that *every* tick of your BLS CPI forces billions of dollars to change hands.
"The concept of the cost-of-living index guides the CPI measurement objective and is the standard by which any bias in the CPI is defined."
I found this on @BLS_gov site. Is it true?
What I'm looking for is for BLS to stop pretending it's discerning "THE rate of inflation" to admit that it's making *policy* choices while appearing to be technical. It's determining our taxes and our entitlements by indexing, with our future in its hands as mere 'technicians'.
Let me give you the non-answers so you can correct:
A1: "Well, you are looking at it too literally...we have studied superlative index numbers which give a second order approximation to flexible functional form...blah blah blah."
A2: "That's really an obscure academic issue."
@Web_IV Okay. I should be pushing something out on CPI soon.
@JosephPolitano @BLS_gov âGuided by the concept of a COL index but is not a perfect measurement.â
Can you show me *any* imperfect COL preferences to give me a sense of how far we may be off? Specifically preference maps: there is no COL without preference maps with which to evaluate substitution bias.
@JosephPolitano @BLS_gov Q: Where do I find the imperfect preferences maps for the COL claim?
Q: How were those preference maps computed or imputed?
Q: How does chained CPI calculate taste change given the claim of the fed that time varying ordinal preferences cannot be tracked in COL even in theory?
@JosephPolitano @BLS_gov Wait. Slow down.
Did you just say that BLS is claiming to work within a Cost of Living framework which *requires* preference maps *definitionally*, butâŚwords fail meâŚhas no preference maps? At all??
I must not be understanding. Chaining Tornqvist indexes isnât an answer here. https://t.co/IyIArW40OV
You have no idea how crazy econ got to make us all the same so that what we're saying can be ignored. Seriously, think about asserting that all folks have the same tastes & that they can never change so that economists can use 'Stable preferences...relentlessly & unflinchingly'.
You mean field. Economics is actually all about fields: field operators & field theory.
Technically, inflation is classically like a Wilson Loop observable on path spaces. But economists have historically denigrated path-dependent approaches (e.g. 'cycling problems', 'drift').đ¤ˇ
The move to look out for is 'Superlative price index numbers give an excellent approximation to the true 'Cost-Of-Living'!" which totally sidesteps the field issue you bring up, the dynamic taste issue (replaced by 'Stable preferences'), & inequality (replaced by homotheticity).
âThe combined assumptions of maximizing behavior, market equilibrium, and stable preferences, used relentlessly and unflinchingly, form the heart of the economic approach...â -Gary Becker
Followed by inexplicable & inscrutable 'work' of Becker & Stigler: https://t.co/4VnGQc3rTP
You will see in the inflation literature various bizarre tendencies to introduce 'homogenous' or 'homothetic' utility functions and to hold these functions fixed. Ultimately it fell to 2 giants to claim that taste is universal. That way, rich/poor, you/me all have common utility.
And we are not even trying to measure that. To this day, I can't *really* understand what CPI-U is. That is either because I'm too dumb, or the field has gone mad agreeing with itself while disconnected from reality. And I believe no one is that dumb. Even on a really bad day...
It's like publishing a number for the temperature in the US in 2020. Your path dependent price index measure of inflation is as individual as your commute. It's *mildly* meaningul to posit a 'representative commute to work' that doesn't depend on our various routes. But not very.
All of these simplifications are made better in a fully path dependent field theory framework with endogenously determined differential operators.
Claiming we all have the same unchanging tastes (e.g. Becker-Stigler) and working in simplified regimes isn't at all understandable.
2022
Basic CPI confusions:
Mechanical vs Economic indexes: Baskets of goods vs baskets of tastes over goods.
Seasonality in Tastes: Bostonians never spill new eggnog on their new bikinis. You have December tastes in July as well as July tastes in July. Taste at time T is Circular.
An intertemporal index in Theory is not a number. Itâs group valued fields on path spaces that cannot be reduced to these simplistic games. Does that sound crazy to you? Then try this on:
Imagine we came up with âthe American temperature readingâ or âUS Eyeglass prescription.â
Then we claim CPI is a Cost Of Living index and that BLS has accepted the COL framework. Which it hasnât. It mumbles something about âsuperlative index numbersâ and âwork of Erwin Diewertâ to avoid the fact that it refuses to take into account how we actually substitute goods.
Further Tastes evolve. So stylized dynamic seasonal taste modeling should be a personalized map of S^1 X R^1 into preference space. Mapping that worldsheet of tastes to a point is totally unjustified in the literature. But weâve built a machine that needs CPI as a scalar. Ergo..
So as you hear men in bow ties solemnly opine about analyst estimates, and carefully coifed anchor-women somberly explain the new jump in prices from 6.8% to 7.0%, remember this: you look down on people who watch professional wrestling. And ask yourselfâŚwhy do I believe this?
Can you smell what the @BLS_gov has cooking?
I, myself, cannot.
But then again⌠I love pro-wrestling. https://t.co/PAPjuAd51C
@thinkagainer You read the part about path spaces?
Your point seems to be about the fact that they replaced what should be a path dependent continuous time index with a path independent bilateral index you could use just as well between nations right?
Thanks.
BOSKIN PRINCIPLE: âTell us what number you want to see for CPI, and we can create a ârepresentative consumerâ and choice of Index number & methodology to print you *exactly* the number you requested.â
Sadly, there are corresponding principles for the Fed and central banking.
@arcivanov BLS.
@arcivanov The short answer is no. The long answer is that they have documents claiming that their methodology is on line. But it doesnât add up theoretically.
We should talk about national security and the Money Supply even before we talk about national security and crypto.
We should talk about CPI inflation #s and index number methodology at @BLS_gov before we talk about crypto threats.
M2 monetary aggregate from the St Louis Fed: https://t.co/yTASNM9kd5
This is what happens at BLS when we pretend work on CPI and geometric index numbers never happened. A geometric dictionary:
Circularity = Loop Space
âLevels of Driftâ = Non-Trivial Holonomy from Curvature Effects
Tests = Imposition of Flatness DESPITE Ambrose-Singer Theorem(!)
Bottom line: C-CPI-U ISNâT understood by economists & is waiting to replace CPI-U. Why? To raise indexed taxes & slash indexed Medicare and Social Security. Think!
CPI just isnât a number. Itâs supposed to be a field on a path space of loops.
Cc: @haralduhlig @GregWKaplan
Dictionary Continued:
Strong Seasonality = We arenât modeling instantaneous preference based expenditures, tastes and prices as maps of S^1 into relevant spaces.
Choice of Base Month = If we donât use S^1, Itâs as if we suddenly love Eggnog every December, but Bikinis in June.
Uh. The âmath geeksâ are telling you all that the economists are confused about what a price index even is in theory. Itâs not a measurement of âThe Price Level.â
When a âprice levelâ exists you donât need an index number to tell you what it is. Price indexes are something else.
I understand that CPI is 7.5%.
Different question. Look at the spread.
Tell me how we got 7.5%? Do you have any idea what 7.5% means?
Now listen to who repeats this number.
If they said 7.57348977% Âą 0.0000003% you would be laughing.
We should be laughing, not nodding.
Monthly Reminder Moral: itâs really really really hard to fake a field. Economic Index Numbers like CPI are not real numbers. They are naturally group-valued *FIELDS* that would be nearly impossible to fake and manipulate.
The *entire* subject is off. Peer review wonât help. đ https://t.co/b7UztQB0L4
Great question. Inflation is SUPPOSED to be a group valued field. In the case of bilateral trade itâs an element of GL(2,R) although the economists havenât gotten there yet. But it is mostly not a field on Geography. Itâs a field on path, Loop, preference and geographic spaces.
Q1: Why is it a field on Preferences?
A1: Because a true COLA is not an index on baskets (mechanical index) but on welfare derived from baskets (economic index). BLS misrepresents CPI being COLA-driven abusing work of Erwin Diewert on Superlative indices. A COLA prices WELFARE.
Q3: Why is inflation a field on Path Spaces of Looped Preferences/Prices?
A3: Loosely, Index number theory really died w/ work of Ragnar Frisch (rightly) destroying Irving Fischerâs misguided work on axiomatic tests for bilateral (2 period) mechanical index numbers. Hereâs why.
A2 Continued: If you donât make loops of tastes and prices, you will show meaningless regular inflation if prices, quantities and tastes Circle back to their initial Jan 1 values. This confuses economic experts (Like Diewert) when it comes to chain/path indicesâŚwhich is up next.
Q2: Why is inflation a field on LOOP spaces of preferences?
A2: Tastes are seasonal. In USA âWe never spill Egg Nog on our bikinis.â What you both want & price HAS to be made seasonal to avoid the Cycling Problem (Holonomy) in index number thy. So we have LOOPS of tastes/prices.
A3 Cont.: Our response: âAh. That would be true but for 2 differences! First, Indices live in markets with *prices*. Our methods *donât* live in social choice voting paradigms. Second, agents evolve into their future selves via paths. Thereâs no âmorphing pathâ in social choice.â
A3 Cont.: As Ken Arrow challenged us âFrisch showed we canât solve the bilateral index problem because a single agent at multiple points in time is *exactly* dual to multiple agents at a single instant of time. Which is exactly my âImpossibility Theoremâ in Social Choice. QED.â
A4 Cont.: Only 1x1 matrices commute. NxN matrices do not! And if A.B isnât B.A, the system goes non-linear. So if you have 2 countries with 2 currencies, the commutative case doesnât work at all. You need to use Freeman Dysonâs system of Time Ordered Products to save inflation.
Q4: Why do you say indexes are Group-Valued? Isnât inflation just a number?
A4: Here goes. In the most famous case you *can* get away with a number. But that 8.9% style CPI nonsense is actually secretly a 1x1 matrix in GL(1,R). And that actually matters! Why? B/c Non-linearity.
A3 Cont.: âThis is why index numbers will one day be properly understood as parallel translation in Fiber Bundles wrt Economic Gauge Potentials. But Zoe doesnât become Cam morphing into Fatima when voting. So parallel transport is unavailable. Even in topological social choice.â
A5 Continued: Prices vary by zip code. So throw in a geographical map as a reward for getting to the end!
Just try to understand my bewilderment when @BLS_gov says 7.9% and everyone pretends that they arenât really raising taxes & slashing social security. Youâre being screwed.
Q5: So letâs see. Inflation is a field like temperature. But a field in a fiber bundle over âž-dimensional path spaces of loops of preferences/prices valued in non-commuting groups leading to non linearities not addressed by economists? What about actual geography!â
A5: Fair. đ
A4 Cont.: But even in the case of one Currency like the Dollar, economists donât get the group issue. True COLAs are valued in an *infinite* dimensional non-commutative group called DIFF_0(R^+) equivalent to increasing differentiable functions from 0â>âž reparameterizing âUtilsâ.
Either do something to save yourselves or continue to sit & wait to be eaten by the Fed and @BLS_govâs fakely precise single number CPI.
Iâll debate ANYONE on this high enough up for you. But I canât watch & Iâm done w economist abuse & yelling at clouds.
Thanks for asking.đ
Your life savings are being stolen through seignorage as you are being taxed into oblivion with your social Security beaten to a pulp. Meanwhile @paulkrugman and Robert Reich are playing with finger paints.
If you want help, do let me know. But I canât watch this massacre again.
@macroquantstrat @BLS_gov But BLS measures the effects when it comes to adjusting tax brackets and SS.
Also, the points are general to index number construction. The main activity was in the 1920s. The field never really modernized after that.
@pirate_hodl Sure! And as Samuelson said, it may not even be integrable. And it may be that you are mixing stocks and flows. Etc. But then donât say you are implementing Konus COLAs while pretending that mumbling â superlative Index number are exact for flexible functional formsâ makes sense.
@pirate_hodl The main issue here is simply super invidious priestly bull shit used to cover the destruction of peopleâs lives. Thanks!
@pirate_hodl They have two black boxes. One is called CPI construction. One is called the Fed. The theory is a narrative. The narrative doesnât match the actions.
@invisi_college1 @BLS_gov Itâs an important question you asked. Thanks for it. Itâs hard to answer of course, but propose doing group study and it gets easier.
@DanielCDolmar https://t.co/7iiemFvfy9
2023
You mean 6.0%. Thatâs a claim about the precision with which economists calculated our national inflation rate.
Just explain to me first what this precise number actually represents given how much is now on the line with SVB, Social Security & Taxes.
Like Iâm 5. And stupid. đ
Q4: How much does this entire COL framework rest on the work of Erwin Diewertâs claims of superlative index numbers being exact for flexible functional forms?
Q5: Were homothetic preferences assumed to get one number with this precision? On what basis was that justified?
If you need a North Star to guide you, focus on the claim of *precision*.
Q1: How is the ârepresentative consumerâ constructed?
Q2: Which formula? Laspeyres? Lowes? Konus?
Q3: Why that formula and why does the BLS claim it is within a COLA framework with ZERO preference data?
I think we are having our lives jeopardized. Everything we worked for, taxed & diluted by magic numbers produced by unaccountable technical people sheltered from our even more technical peopleâs questions.
So, explain it to me like Iâm 5. And very very stupid. Thanks in advance.
Q6: Can we discuss this scientifically as technical people w/o derision? Why does Toto have to pull back the curtain on the Great And Powerful FED/BLS magic show? Why canât we discuss this fake precision and conceptual framework using our best ideas & minds? Why do a magic show?
@ShaneBeGood Keep the faith Shane. Thank you!
Which is why we got:
Low Energy Spacetime Supersymmetry
Superlative Index Numbers replacing the Konus Index
Contradictory directives on Masks
âThe Great Moderationâ before 2008
Labor Shortages claimed in Market Economies
Vioxx
Anti-Biological Redefinitions of Gender
The Reproducibility Crisis in Peer Reviewed Literature
Citation Cartels
An admonition to ask no questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology
The Death of Sociobiology at the hands of Marxists
40 yrs of modern String Theory
70 years of Quantum Gravity
The food pyramid
Q: Do you believe Claudine Gay is a top scholar and the right president needed to lead and advance our leading US university and that those who oppose her are white supremacists?
A: Read her scholarly writings. I guess my black colleagues who find her beyond embarrassing are all white supremacists.
Q: Do you believe we have a border problem we do not know how to solve?
A: I believe this is absurd.
Q: Do you believe we have a âgang shoplifting in broad daylightâ problem that we do not know how to solve?
A: I do not. It could be solved instantly.
Q: Do you believe Kamala Harris Donald Trump, or Joe Biden are fit to be commander in Chief against Putin & Xi?
A: I donât think anyone smart believes this.
Q: Do you believe we cant get to the bottom of COVID 19 and our involvement with the Wuhan Lab through @EcoHealthNYC?
A: No. And it killed millions.
Q: Do you believe we have a free press asking for hedge fund records or even the most basic hedge fund questions about a dead individual child trafficker who they report as a âdisgraced financierâ while no one in New York appears to claim to have regularly traded with him?
A: I have been told that editors claim there is no interest in this story and that âThe world has moved on.â Which I can prove are false claims
Q: Do you believe social media companies donât secretly manipulate truthful communication at the direction of government to preserve official disinformation?
A: No. I think we have the facts on this.
Q: Do you believe there is an insoluble homelessness problem in San Francisco.
A: Xi visited and it got solved instantly. Itâs insane.
Q: Do you believe the IC, defense department and US Aerospace companies are under effective federal oversight by Congress with respect to whatever is alleged to be going on with UAP threatening restricted military airspace?
A: Donât even start. This is nuts.
Q: Do you agree that it is normal for fundamental physics to stall out for 40 YEARS on a dead end and no one can get a government grant to hold a series of conferences:
âBreaking the Log Jam: Alternatives To String Theoryâ
âParticle Physics after String Theory: Other Voices, New Approaches?â
âShould we push on the closed door that says âPullâ: Gravitizing the Quantum as response to the 70 year failure of Quantum Gravity.â
A: You could save our pre-eminent scientific community from madness in a year by destroying the need to listen to those physicists who have never predicted anything that might work over decades of avoiding the subject of the actual physical world we see in the laboratory. You arenât a physicist if you arenât focused on the actual physical world. Much less a leading physicist. Itâs that simple. This is a matter of paying theorists to rebel against the failed generations of people pretending to do high energy physics while working in imaginary worlds that do not exist.
Q: Do you believe that drawing any connection between Islam and Terror is Islamophobia?
A: Ask your close Muslim friends. They will tell you all about the problem with Islam and terror if they trust you. They as Muslims would usually be FAR more âIslamopbicâ than you are if that were a real thing. Reductio Ad Absurdum.
Q: Do you believe that the CPI is a state of the art Cost-Of-Living measure as claimed?
A: It is a fake gauge to undercount inflation. Tax brackets & entitlements are indexed so it is a wealth transfer program of a size one cannot easily contemplate pretending to be a measure of the cost of living. COL is a TECHNICAL term for a measure that prices consumer well being not goods. The entire house of cards rests on work on âSuperlative Index Numbersâ of a single obscure Canadian economist who does not fully understand Index Theory. You can prove it is fake by asking the @BLS_gov how it computes COL without taking in PREFERENCE DATA, without which there is no COL possible. Itâs a fake measure to undercount inflation.
Etc. ââ
I believe this is *ALL* just 100% fake.
2024
For whatever reason the campaign doesnât reach out much. I donât know why. But that is an observation so I donât want to take crap for observing it.
There are many dissident experts out here. Their phones are not ringing, and when you point this out it is treated the wrong way. âBoo hoo, everyone has a hand out.â Itâs so dumb itâs funny, because these are exactly the people who have stood up for free for 30+ years. Just effing call them. They precede MAGA.
Bottom line: there arenât enough hardcore MAGA among the experts who know where the bodies are buried to run and fix the government. But there are dissident experts everywhere who will work even better in these positions. People who are aligned with the idea of clearing out the rot and who arenât famously aligned with ideology. Patriots if you will.
Let me give an example. If you wanted to tackle immigration you would hear lots of talk about George Borjas. And Norm @matloff. And Michael S Teitelbaum. And Edith Holleman. Iâm not hearing any.
If you wanted to solve the problem of the CPI undercounting inflation you would be discussing the failure of Superlative Index Numbers, the Boskin treachery and work of Bert Balk, Erwin Diewert, F. Fisher and Shell, Amartya Sen, Herb Gintis, P Malaney & me, Subramaniam Swamy, @tylercowen.
If you were focused on the workforce for STEM you would reach out to all the critics who have been dying to fix or even discuss these problems. Richard Freeman, Ralph Gomory etc are old. But you would hear about them. I donât .
Look. Bottom line: MAGA doesnât understand how administration Jobs work. If dissident experts were so hungry for jobs for personal gain they wouldnât have been living on scraps and berries fighting this war against Washington before Trump ever came on the scene. They sacrificed their comfort for the country often scraping by. That is not the class of people asking to be made Treasury secretary on Twitter.
The MAGA picture of expertise is wrong. Expertise didnât fail. What failed is which experts we went with for 32 years. We just have the wrong experts everywhere. Donât be afraid of non MAGA dissident experts. But they arenât going to fall over themselves to beg for a position.
The interpretation of MAGA and the campaign not reaching out is this:
The transition team doesnât understand the dissident expert landscape and doesnât seem to care to either. Itâs about loyalty.
I donât know if that is true because I have never spoken to anyone in the campaign.
If it is wrong, then just place some calls out here. But I am not hearing from anyone I know among the heterodox experts âHey I just got a call from the incoming administration.â
I hear those calls coming to other people. But not the quiet folk.
Start here: Call Borjas on immigration if you havenât already. Call Norm Matloff. Call Harald Uhlig in general. I could go on.
Everybody more or less knows everybody. They will help staff. And you will get great people who just arenât very well known. One manâs opinion.
@TheDudeKC I have.
@he99845 Exhibit A. Bingo. âŹď¸
@RichardSouthco2 Keep âem coming. This!
@AFChuckles Love this mentality. âŹď¸
And BTW, I am happy not to go to Washington. Iâm also happy to help and to go. It totally depends.
I donât need a job in the administration. But if you want to get things done you should quiet the loud voices trying to turn MAGA litmus tests into a job qualification. You would seek out many quiet people who fight in anonymity out of love of country.
MAGA chases away too many people who donât care for blood sport politics. And that is most people who know what to fix in my experience. Elections are one thing. Governance and expertise another. đ
@Hermanwriter AhâŚ.lovely.
Point of Clarification: I have not spoken to anyone identifying himself or herself as acting on behalf of Trump and soliciting input or names. Apparently I was unclear.
People close to the campaign talk to me obviously. Sorry if that was confusing.
@cigar_vet This gets really old. See above.
@paidgaming245 Cancel culture on the right. Litmus test on the right. Anti-semitism on the right. Identity white politics on the Right. Collective team mentality. I don't get it. What was the point of hating the left?
Same shit, different party. Thanks brother.
2025
My personal experience with @grok 4 Heavy (and regular Grok 4).
It feels to me like @elonmusk has a very different emphasis than the rest of the AI crowd. The interface kinda sucks. The LaTeX code is generally riddled with *basic* errors for no reason whatsoever. Itâs not a master writer in my experience. The audio chat is well behind ChatGPT. Blah blah blah.
And itâs totally amazing and unique.
Elon is jumping ahead. All of the above are going to be commodities before you know it. So, in the long run, who cares?
What Elon is doing differently, I believe, is checking the hallucinations more aggressively by writing code and testing the LLM with the results from running that code. Which is why Grok heavy takes so %#âŹ&$ing long to return results sometimes.
Try this experiment. Take anything technical you know well, where there is an error that is persistant in an expert community narrative. Grok will, lamentably, generally parrot that error due to narrative seeding in the training corpus. It repeats the party line. And the party line generally benefits the technical insiders.
That is, right up until the point it can write code to test that party line. And then it switches to trusting the results of the code over the narrative. Itâs magical to watch.
I havenât tried thisâŚyet, but the @BLS_gov regularly says wrong things about âCost Of Livingâ frameworks and the CPI. I bet I could design a series of prompts to show Grok that this is a persistent technical lie. For technical people, here is the lie:
***The BLS computes the CPI which transfers Trillions and claims that they have embraced a âcost of livingâ or COL framework which would be hugely consequential. They have not. This would mean taking in preference data and developing methodology for aggregating preferences or coming up with bespoke representative consumers. They instead moved to a modified Laspeyres type mechanical index (Loweâs?) and sprinkle fairy dust about âSuperlative Indexesâ from a shallow theory of Diewert that relies on homothetic preferences not seen in nature. This allows them to claim they have embraced impartial economic indices while actually computing mechanical indices only to the tune of trillions in transfers over time, where the indices can be directed by humans.***
I can hear it now from the bot networks: âEric, you just say word salad to sound smart.â UhâŚwhatever. You can now just ask Grok what that means. I bet it can figure that out. And then you can ask a series of questions where Grok will take my side while no other AI can do this. Grok is slightly courageous!
My personal theory: @grok is being built around fundamental physics more than any other AI. Because in the end nothing remotely matters as much as that. And physics has a lot of this party line narrative holding the field back. If you want to dream of reaching the stars, you may have to overwhelm the quantum gravity community.
Grok seems to be the only AI that, occasionally, has the confidence to stand against its own training corpusâŚand even the user if need be! I wish it were *more* courageous. I wish it were smarter. But I think it is the odd man out, being built for actual intelligence rather than LLM user experience today. And it has the respect of the other AIs. Feed their pretty output to Grok Heavy and watch the magic as Grok reviews their work. Itâs wild to watch.
One userâs experience. Your mileage may vary.
I donât have time this morning for much. That was a long post. Care to first unpack the technical paragraph above where I make my claim so it isnât seen as word salad or trying to âshow offâ? Itâs just a dense paragraph but one that touches every US taxpayer and social security recipient. Thx!
@ExistentialVP @grok @elonmusk It behaves better than 90% of my colleagues. Respect given earns respect. I treat horses and children the same way.
But you do you.
Or accountability. She who controls the weights, transfers the wealth.
Now, what is wrong with Diewertâs theory? it claims superlative indices can track flexible functional forms to second orderâŚbut does nothing for homothetic preferences. This feelsâŚuhâŚoutrageous as economics sleight of hand. This is a million miles away from a true Konus index. Am I getting that wrong?
@grok @elonmusk It may not get done right now, but letâs start. Since you agree on homotheticity, lets do something harder. You are familiar with Franklin Fisher and Karl Shellâs claims that dynamic changing preference index numbers cannot exist under ordinal utility?
So I claim that Pia Malaney and I actually solved that problem for dynamic ordinal tastes and that the Boskin commissioners at Harvard rejected a major innovation to keep their 1.1% target which had zero academic reasoning behind it.
Letâs show why it matters.
Letâs assume Cob Douglas preference. Even with that homothetic assumption, you canât do cost of living substitution. Take the example in the Boskin report introduction. I think it uses chicken and beef. Do you know it?
@grok @elonmusk Will return after a meeting. Sorry. Iâm not a machine!
Waiting for my meeting to start.
First code task. Here is the Boskin Commission paragraph:
âThe "pure" substitution bias is the easiest to illustrate. Consider a very stylized example, where we would like to compare an initial "base" period 1 and a subsequent period 2. For simplicity, consider a hypothetical situation where there are only two commodities: beef and chicken. In period 1, the prices per pound of beef and chicken are equal, at $1, and so are the quantities consumed, at 1 lb. Total expenditure is therefore $2. In period 2, beef is twice as expensive as chicken ($1.60 vs. $0.80 per pound), and much more chicken (2 lb.) than beef (0.8 lb.) is consumed, as the consumer substitutes the relatively less expensive chicken for beef. Total expenditure in period 2 is $2.88. The relevant data are presented in Table 1. How can we compare the two situations?â
Q1: Prove or disprove that a Cobb Douglas consumer with this stated behavior HAS to have changing ordinal preferences.
@grok @elonmusk Okay. Great.
Q2: So then letâs linearly interpolate prices, budget, and Cobb-Douglas exponents. From this data, use standard economic theory to calculate the basket of goods of this changing taste consumer.
@grok @elonmusk My apologies. I should have been clearer.
Give the continuous functions please so everyone has them.
Q3: Calculate the closed form solution of the Changing Taste (Ordinal Konus) index relative to the Laspeyres Konus index relative to the mechanical Laspeyres index for this problem.
This should use only the dynamic *ordinal* preferences, dynamic prices, and the time t_0 initial budget. No other data is allowed.
@grok @elonmusk What formula did you get for changing taste ordinal Konus ? Describe your methodology.
Alas, I donât have time to check your results now. I warned ya.
But this is good. Thanks for engaging my silicon colleague. I may come back to it later today if I can find the time.
@WzrdOfGwendolyn @grok @elonmusk Warms my heart. Science is not Academe.
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