#even if fighting against the system that constrains them and the world is terribly hard

[roobylavender]

the thing i don’t really get about people’s love for the morrison batman run on an ideological level (bc obv we have rehashed the racism angle to death on here) is like. sure there are always points to be made about the harmful extremes of vigilantism and how it hurts not just ordinary victims who are strangers to you but also your friends and family and inevitably yourself. but those are things you can accomplish while maintaining a core characterization and i don’t think that’s something that ever applies to morrison’s version of bruce at all. bruce becoming someone who would believe in vigilantism to the point of mass surveillance and control is at complete odds with the bruce developed in the eighties and nineties who began to realize the overreach vigilantes possessed and how the future he was working towards had to be one where he could imagine them no longer existing. he created entire failsafe mechanisms for his closest friends bc he recognized that power in the wrong hands was an incredibly dangerous thing. his interpretation of the no killing rule was specifically about refusing to take control bc he believed he had no right to be afforded the power of ultimate judgment and wanted his priority to be saving victims before they met untimely fates

if you want to drive bruce to his natural conclusion, it has to draw from his core, which paints the picture of a person who cares too much to the point of delusion. an icarus of heroes, if you will. he cares so much he’s willing to let people walk away and hate him if it means allowing them to move on and remain protected. he cares so much he’s willing to shift all burdens onto himself so that no one else will have to suffer for the cause. there’s a deep tragedy in bruce’s inclinations towards isolation, but it’s mired in the selflessness of martyrdom as opposed to the selfishness of pride. if bruce ever meets his end it has to be with him dying in service of the vision he was striving for but tragically could not achieve bc he was only one man and it takes more than that to change the world. his death has to be an act of the most delusional love. love for his family, love for his friends, love for people, love for the world. a heartbreaking tragedy steeped in the most palpable hope. something as simple as diving in to save someone but not making it out alive in the process. we’ve come to read about a batman defined by the most expansive events and life-changing decisions, but the classic batman was best defined by what he accomplished in the everyday. it seems only fitting he would die trying to do the right thing

[pawelpiotrowski]

Inversion: Avoiding stupidity is easier than trying to be brilliant. Instead of asking, “How can I help my company?” you should ask, “What’s hurting my company the most and how can I avoid it?” Identify obvious failure points, and steer clear of them.

Theory of Constraints: A system is only as strong as its weakest point. Focus on the bottleneck. Counterintuitively, if you break down the entire system and optimize each component individually, you’ll lower the effectiveness of the system. Optimize the entire system instead.

Preference Falsification: People lie about their true opinions and conform to socially acceptable preferences instead. In private they’ll say one thing. In public, they’ll say another. 

Mimetic Theory of Desire: Humans are like sheep. We don’t know what we want, so we imitate each other. Instead of creating our own desires, we desire the same things as other people. The entire advertising industry is built on this idea. 

Talent vs. Genius: Society is good at training talent but terrible at cultivating genius. Talented people are good at hitting targets others can’t hit, but geniuses find targets others can’t see. They are opposite modes of excellence. Talent is predictable, genius is unpredictable.

Competition is for Losers: Avoid competition. Stop copying what everybody else is doing. If you work at a for-profit company, work on problems that would not otherwise be solved. If you’re at a non-profit, fix unpopular problems. Life is easier when you don’t compete. (Hint: don’t start another bottled water company). 

Russell Conjugation: Journalists often change the meaning of a sentence by replacing one word with a synonym that implies a different meaning. For example, the same person can support an estate tax but oppose a death tax — even though they are the same thing.

Opportunity Cost: By reading this tweet, you are choosing not to read something else. Everything we do is like this. Doing one thing requires giving up another. Whenever you explicitly choose to do one thing, you implicitly choose not to do another thing. 

Planck’s Principle: Science doesn’t progress because people change their views. Rather, each new generation of scientists has different views. As old generations pass away, new ideas are accepted and the scientific consensus changes.

Bike-Shed Effect: A group of people working on a project will fight over the most trivial ideas. They’ll ignore what’s complicated. They’ll focus too much on easy-to-understand ideas at the expense of important, but hard to talk about ideas. For example, instead of approving plans for a complicated spaceship, the team would argue over the color of the astronaut's uniforms.

Table Selection: This idea comes from poker, where you’re advised to choose your opponents carefully. That means you shouldn’t compete against the best people. You don’t need to get good at doing difficult things if you get good at avoiding difficult things. If you want to win, pick an easy table and nail your execution.

Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. One hospital took too long to admit patients so a penalty was given for 4+ hour wait times. In response, ambulance drivers were asked to slow down so they could shorten wait times. 

Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Hock Principle: Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics: The world tends towards disorder. That’s why your room becomes messier and messier over time. It’s also why an engine converts only ~35% of its energy into useful work. Time moves towards increasing one direction: increasing entropy. 

The Paradox of Specificity: Focus isn’t as constraining as it seems. In the age of the Internet, when everybody has Google search and personalized social media feeds, differentiation is free marketing. The more specific your goal, the more opportunities you’ll create for yourself. Narrowing your aperture can expand your horizons.

Occam's Razor: If there are multiple explanations for why something happened and they are equally persuasive, assume the simplest one is true. In the search for truth, remove unnecessary assumptions. Trust the lowest-complexity answer. 

Hormesis: A low dose of something can have the opposite effect of a high dose. A little bit of stress wakes you up, but a lot of stress is bad for you. Lifting weights for 30 minutes per day is good for you, but lifting weights for 6 hours per day will destroy your muscles. Stress yourself, but not too much.

Horseshoe Theory: Extreme opposites tend to look the same. For example, a far-right movement and a far-left movement can be equally violent or desire a similar outcome. People on both sides are more similar to each other than they are to people in the center. 

Creativity Begins at the Edge: Change starts away from the spotlight. Then, it moves towards the center. That’s why the most interesting ideas at a conference never come from the main stage. They come from the hallways and the bar after sunset

The Paradox of Consensus: Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect was found guilty by every judge, they were deemed innocent. Too much agreement implied a systemic error in the judicial process. Unanimous agreement sometimes leads to bad decisions. 

Convexity: If you want to be lucky, look for opportunities with big upsides and low downsides. In addition to increased optionality, your errors will benefit you more than they harm you. Convex payoffs let you tinker your way to success and innovation. 

The Go-For-It Window: Large gaps between accelerating technologies and stagnating social norms create lucrative new business opportunities. But they are only available for a short time when people can capitalize on the difference between the real and perceived state of the world. For example, 2007 was the perfect time to launch the iPhone, but Google Glasses launched too early.

Via Negativa: When we have a problem, our natural instinct is to add a new habit or purchase a fix. But sometimes, you can improve your life by taking things away. For example, the foods you avoid are more important than the foods you eat.

[truthrowan]

Rebuild a better world.

If you are not prepared to fight the massive consolidation of wealth that is about to occur as a result of the economic upheaval caused by this Covid Crisis, you need to be prepared to go back to a serfdom existence. This disaster, like the financial collapse of 2008, is being used as an opportunity for the ultra wealthy to become even more wealthy, at the expense of the middle and working classes.

The economic packages being passed and discussed by Congress overwhelmingly favor those who are already far more than comfortable, while the average citizen is struggling, millions are out of work, facing eviction, and have lost health care benefits. We as a nation have to make the decision that we care more about the well being of our average citizen than we do the privileges of the wealthy, the elite, and the corporations they own.

We have to wrest back power from corporate interests and their lobbyists, and return it to the hands of the people for the good of the people. Without doing so, all of the battles we fight, for racial justice, for police accountability, for gender equality, will be subverted by those whose interest lies in profiting off of an oppressive system. Constraining their economic onus to kleptomaniacally horde wealth and resources and manipulate the system is an absolutely necessary step to righting this system.

We have the tools in hand, if we have the will. Civil disobedience, strikes, protests, voting with your wallet as much as you can afford, and most importantly, voting in November, and in every primary from here on out for progressive candidates, is key to achieving these ends. As thing stand, many may be discouraged by the choices we have available, feeling they are choosing "the lesser of two evils", however, a lesser evil is still a lesser evil, less damage done, and a step in the right direction. It might not be the leap we'd prefer to be making, but it is headway, none the less.

I urge everyone to take a moment in all of this uncertainty and think about what sort of world we want to rebuild from the ashes of the current crisis. There is no simply going back to business as usual, because those in power are already attempting to subvert the system in order to oppress future dissent. Agents have been mobilized against peaceful protesters in American cities. Our medical supply chain has been corrupted, we have a shortage of both beds and supplies, and our health care workers are being forced to make terrible triage decisions due to the failings of leadership causing those shortages, with inadequate PPE for themselves. Children and adults are still locked in cages in inhumane conditions. People are misinformed and misguided and refusing to wear masks, they do not care to protect their fellow citizens. Racial injustice is as rampant as ever, people are being murdered in their beds and on the streets and the police, who should be helping ensure justice, are in many municipalities fighting against being held accountable for their actions. Teachers and students are being forced back into unsafe conditions like sacrificial lambs for "the economy", and leadership is touting that "only a small number of students will catch the virus or die" as if any number of preventable deaths is tolerable?

Unless you want to live in a new, oppressive, dystopian hellscape in near serfdom where you and your families, your communities, can be sacrificed for an economy that will not profit or protect you, you have to dream of a better future, decide what it will be, and start the process of rebuilding into a better future now. We have the tools, we have the dreams. Do we have the will? Are you willing to build something better, take the ashes of the past and use them to make the bricks to build a better, more just, more equitable America that really is the land of opportunity we all dream of? It's not going to be easy, cleaning up messes and building things never are, they are hard work, but many hands makes a lighter load. Let's lift the load together, and build a better country that we can all be proud of and safe in.

[filiplig]

Hardford, Tim - The Undercover Economist Strikes Back

page 5 | location 70-72 | Added on Tuesday, 16 December 2014 09:51:44

the Great Depression profoundly revolutionized economics—how could it be otherwise? Economists asked themselves what was happening, and why, and whether anything could be done. They took new measurements, formulated new theories and proposed new policies, all concerned with the central question of economic performance as a whole. In short, the Great Depression gave birth to macroeconomics.

 page 14 | location 212-214 | Added on Tuesday, 16 December 2014 10:42:33

Microeconomics concerns things that economists are specifically wrong about, while macroeconomics concerns things economists are wrong about generally. P. J. O’ROURKE, Eat the Rich

 page 18 | location 265-268 | Added on Tuesday, 16 December 2014 15:15:23

If, like Simon Kuznets, you’re looking for a single number to measure the size of the economy, having everything measurable on the same scale is handy. Think of it this way: it’s a little bit like mass. Your brain weighs probably around three pounds, and a small bag of sugar typically can weigh one pound. The fact that you value your brain more highly than three bags of sugar doesn’t tell us that mass is a useless concept.

 page 18 | location 272-272 | Added on Tuesday, 16 December 2014 15:15:53

The man who invented GDP never thought it was a measure of welfare, and neither should anyone else.

 page 23 | location 344-345 | Added on Tuesday, 16 December 2014 15:31:33

Anyone who insists that running a modern economy is a matter of plain common sense frankly doesn’t understand much about running a modern economy.

 page 24 | location 367-370 | Added on Tuesday, 16 December 2014 15:35:39

A simple, commonsense view of the economy is attractive but dangerous, because in macroeconomics, whenever you point to some obvious change occurring right before your eyes, there is almost always something else changing behind your back, the two phenomena connected by invisible strings and pulleys. The definitive statement of this

 page 49 | location 744-745 | Added on Saturday, 20 December 2014 23:06:56

Money systems such as the goldsmith’s notes were initially anchored to an intrinsically valuable commodity, but against all intuition that valuable commodity turned out to be unnecessary. All that is necessary for money to have value is for everyone to believe that it has value.

 page 51 | location 782-786 | Added on Saturday, 20 December 2014 23:11:29

That’s what I mean by a standard of value: if you want to keep track of how you are doing, it helps to choose a unit of measurement that is stable relative to the problem at hand. This will often mean thinking of your salary or your net worth in terms of a currency, because good currencies typically are quite stable relative to all the things you might want to buy. It is confusing to think of your salary in terms of Apple shares; for that matter it is confusing to think of your salary in terms of apples.

 page 61 | location 933-935 | Added on Saturday, 20 December 2014 23:28:03

(There’s a handy rule of thumb called the rule of 72—divide 72 by the annual inflation rate and the result is approximately how many years it will take prices to double. In this case, 72 divided by 0.7 gives you prices doubling in a century.) Today, 0.7 percent inflation isn’t much: these days central banks aim for 2 percent inflation, or thereabouts. At that rate, prices would double every thirty-five years or so.

 page 62 | location 938-946 | Added on Saturday, 20 December 2014 23:30:01

Specifically, remember the money illusion—the professor who was infuriated by a pay cut, but didn’t mind a below-inflation pay raise, even though they are exactly the same thing. That should tell you that a little bit of inflation can be quite helpful. Imagine a sector of the economy in which productivity is falling, perhaps because foreign competition is reducing the price that companies can get for their products. Wages need to be trimmed or the whole sector is likely to go bust. We know that bosses probably can’t get away with cutting nominal wages. If inflation is zero, that means they won’t be able to cut real wages either. But if there’s some inflation, they can get away with making the necessary cuts to real wages by giving below-inflation raises. There’s another reason to aim for a bit of inflation, one that’s arguably even more important: monetary policy is not a precise science. Central banks will sometimes overshoot and sometimes undershoot their targets. If they aim for zero inflation and undershoot, they get deflation—and I want to persuade you that deflation is a much more serious problem than moderate inflation.

 page 63 | location 952-957 | Added on Saturday, 20 December 2014 23:31:28

But with deflation, prices begin to drop. Your wages are a price, so they are falling. Of course, the prices of food, clothes and fuel are all falling, too. But your mortgage repayment never changes. It is taking up a larger and larger portion of your monthly salary. Your loss is some saver’s gain, of course. But remember that in a recession, what we want is people spending money to stimulate economic activity. An unexpected dose of deflation is going to achieve the exact opposite, because it redistributes money from borrowers to savers, and borrowers are more likely to be spending than savers—they wouldn’t be borrowing otherwise. Add in the problem that when lots of people find it hard to pay back their loans, the entire banking system can run into trouble.

 page 64 | location 981-987 | Added on Saturday, 20 December 2014 23:35:49

If you print $100 and give it to a starving man, he’ll spend it. If on the other hand you give the $100 to a ninety-year-old lady with a decent pension and an anxious disposition, she may simply put it in a cookie jar, just in case she needs it. That $100 is going to do nothing whatsoever to stimulate demand, and it will not increase inflation either. And at the moment, despite enthusiastic money-printing by many of the world’s central banks since 2008, a lot of the money is ending up in the equivalent of cookie jars. The money may be helping prop up spending in the economy as a whole, or it may be distorting decisions and storing up trouble for the future. But one thing it is not doing is creating hyperinflation: the inflation rate remains close to the central bankers’ targets.

 page 102 | location 1554-1559 | Added on Monday, 22 December 2014 23:21:24

The babysitting recession is an example of Keynes’s Law: Lack of demand creates its own lack of supply. In a Keynesian recession, Say’s Law doesn’t hold, and it is possible for supply to stand idle for lack of demand. If consumers don’t want to spend, instead preferring to save or pay off their debts, perhaps no price cut will tempt them to change their mind—or perhaps a price cut would, but the price cut does not come because prices are sticky. Business investment might take up the slack, but then again it might not, because why would businesses invest when they already have factories and shops standing quiet, dark and empty?

 page 102 | location 1562-1565 | Added on Monday, 22 December 2014 23:22:29

So we’ve found an example when Say’s Law applies, and another when Keynes’s Law does. It sounds like neither of them are really laws at all. Yup. This is social science—what did you expect? Sometimes an economy’s output is constrained by the demand for goods and services (Keynes’s Law) and sometimes it is constrained by their potential supply (Say’s Law).

 page 113 | location 1718-1725 | Added on Monday, 22 December 2014 23:43:23

It feels like what you’re saying is that I should run my economy like a tough bastard right-winger during a boom, and like a bleeding-heart left-winger during a recession. That’s not such a bad idea. A boom is a great time to trim spending, pay off debt and try to make markets function better by reducing unnecessary regulations. These are all right-wing hobbyhorses. A recession, however, is a terrible time to do those things. It’s better to keep spending, run up debt and launch big infrastructure projects. Unfortunately, it seems we tend to get the opposite: in booms, we feel like we can afford to elect left-wing governments to improve labor protection and launch big public-sector projects, often running up debt in the process; then when trouble hits, we elect a right-wing government to slash the deficit, scrap investment projects and make a bonfire of labor protection regulations, all of which simply makes the recession worse.

 page 121 | location 1845-1848 | Added on Tuesday, 23 December 2014 07:54:33

So that’s the sense in which I semi-jokingly said that Henry Ford invented unemployment. Of course unemployment was with us long before Ford came along, but Ford’s system introduced a new and important source of unemployment. By pioneering efficiency wages, he helped to bring into existence a group of people who want to work but, through sheer bad luck, can’t find jobs. You should keep that in mind the next time someone tells you the unemployed are all work-shy layabouts.

 page 124 | location 1893-1897 | Added on Tuesday, 23 December 2014 08:02:20

But we’ve begun to realize that explicitly modeling the process of job search and recruitment is valuable. Unemployment is now routinely modeled as a process of searching for a match between a suitable vacancy and a suitable worker, much like dating and marriage. Christopher Pissarides won the Nobel memorial prize for his work on this topic. He points out that unemployment is the initial condition of economic existence, just as being single is the initial condition of romantic existence—all of us are born unemployed and single, and if we want that situation to change, sooner or later we will have to start looking for a suitable match.

 page 130 | location 1984-1987 | Added on Friday, 26 December 2014 00:54:14

There are two ways to fight unemployment. One is to fight recessions—constantly battling to get the economy to the top left of the Beveridge curve, with plenty of vacancies and few unemployed people. But the other is more structural, trying to shift the curve down and to the left, so that for any given level of vacancies, there will be fewer people without work. For the most part, I don’t see any reason why you can’t try both methods at the same time.

 page 164 | location 2515-2517 | Added on Wednesday, 31 December 2014 01:10:38

Some degree of aggregation is inevitable, but do also remember that you can measure inflation, inequality, unemployment and GDP without having to produce some amorphous summary of all four of them. All of these measures, and others, are useful in informing your policy priorities. None should monopolize your attention.

 page 173 | location 2648-2652 | Added on Wednesday, 31 December 2014 01:25:05

Day reconstruction produces quite different results from the more traditional surveys of life satisfaction. One survey comparing women in France to those in Ohio found that the American women were twice as likely to say they were very satisfied with their lives. And yet it was the French women who spent more of their day in a good mood. Enjoyment as experienced minute by minute is not the same as a once-and-for-all judgment about how satisfying life is. If you really plan not only to measure happiness but also to use it to influence policy, this is a distinction you will have to start taking seriously.

 page 198 | location 3027-3028 | Added on Thursday, 1 January 2015 01:57:32

the world’s two most unequal wealthy economies offer a mediocre school education to the masses and an outstanding university education to an elite.

 page 199 | location 3051-3055 | Added on Thursday, 1 January 2015 11:43:35

Keynes famously remarked, “If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!” It’s a good joke, but it’s not just a joke; you don’t expect your dentist to be able to forecast the pattern of tooth decay, but you expect that she will be able to give you good practical advice on dental health and to intervene to fix problems when they occur. That is what we should demand from economists: useful advice about how to keep the economy working well, and solutions when the economy malfunctions.