https://www.thechiao.com/blog/Here writes Chiaohttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2023/05/31/autonomous-vehicles-are-a-collection-action-problem/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2023/05/31/autonomous-vehicles-are-a-collection-action-problem/Wed, 31 May 2023 09:48:08 GMTWritten with Claude The challenges facing the adoption of autonomous vehicles are largely self-inflicted. Rather than redesigning our transportation infrastructure and systems around the capabilities of autonomous vehicles, we have insisted on maximum backward compatibility with the existing system centered around human drivers. This insistence on backward compatibility is severely hampering the progress and adoption of autonomous vehicles. If we had taken the same approach when automobiles werehttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2020/03/08/garrett-jones-on-cooperation/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2020/03/08/garrett-jones-on-cooperation/Sun, 08 Mar 2020 11:44:52 GMThttps://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/garett-jones/ One early insight [from Gary Miller’s Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy ] is that Arrow’s impossibility theorem applies to any kind of decision within a firm. If you have three top managers who are trying to decide the strategy of the company, and they disagree slightly on where the company should be taken — wow, that can lead to classic preference cycling, a classic Condorcet paradox . “The only thing that can solvehttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2019/10/07/low-interest-rates-are-bad-for-fundamental-analysis/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2019/10/07/low-interest-rates-are-bad-for-fundamental-analysis/Mon, 07 Oct 2019 12:23:49 GMTInvestors price an asset by predicting the free cash flows (FCF) that the asset generates. Even if you expect to sell the business at some point, if you commit to the decision rule that you never sell unless the returns from a sale are greater than that from the FCF, then the FCF analysis is all you need to proceed - you do not need to worry about what other people think the asset is worth. The asset is priced as if held to maturity. Speculators price an asset without such a simplifying assumptihttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2017/06/18/mininum-wage-and-overtime/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2017/06/18/mininum-wage-and-overtime/Sun, 18 Jun 2017 12:43:24 GMTConclusion The Minimum Wage and Overtime Pay have opposite effects. Minimum Wage laws encourage concentrating work in less people, while Overtime Pay penalises the concentrating of work. For overtime pay laws to help the worker, you have to believe that businesses benefit from concentrating work. This could be due to labor productivity and experience curve effects - overtime laws would then be decreasing labor productivity in order that more of the gains go to the worker instead of the business.https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2017/05/25/generating-a-uniform-distribution/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2017/05/25/generating-a-uniform-distribution/Thu, 25 May 2017 04:16:33 GMTIf you want to get N points uniformly distributed on some interval, but want to generate the randomness point by point.https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2017/05/22/we-can-teach-children-to-be-more-effectively-empirical/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2017/05/22/we-can-teach-children-to-be-more-effectively-empirical/Mon, 22 May 2017 05:57:13 GMTWe can teach children to smell bullshit - Vox A good critical thinker is able to keep track of assumptions made when evaluating evidence, and over time builds up a collection of powerful and general assumptions that accelerate their accurate modelling of reality. Double-blind tests make the least assumptions, but are not the mechanism by which most knowledge is obtained. Teaching children to avoid assumptions altogether is misguided - what they need is to introspect and make more aspects of theihttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2017/05/19/nested-condition-variables-are-fun/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2017/05/19/nested-condition-variables-are-fun/Fri, 19 May 2017 10:38:30 GMTThat release and acquire surrounding the wait are how you allow one of the timelines to start slipping relative to the other one. Condition variableshttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2017/05/16/managing-cost-centers-by-making-them-profit-centers/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2017/05/16/managing-cost-centers-by-making-them-profit-centers/Tue, 16 May 2017 02:53:17 GMThttps://techcrunch.com/2017/05/14/why-amazon-is-eating-the-world/ Amazon benefits not only from the revenue from externalising its internal services, but also from the efficiency and oversight induced as a result. This is similar to the export-driven growth described in Joe Studwell's How Asia Works - East Asian countries gave domestic industries protected markets, conditional on their ability to export and hence prove that they were making goods that were competitive in international markets.https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2017/04/22/housing-transaction-costs-are-really-high/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2017/04/22/housing-transaction-costs-are-really-high/Sat, 22 Apr 2017 12:17:17 GMThttp://www.economist.com/node/9688013 http://www.umac.mo/fba/irer/papers/past/vol11n1_pdf/Article%207.pdf For Singapore, it's around 5%. In Taiwan, it's north of 10%. This is a ridiculous hurdle for an investment. If you bought an apartment in Singapore and pay a 20% downpayment, transaction costs wipe out 5% of asset value right away, setting you back 25% of your equity.https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2017/01/27/cython-is-awesome/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2017/01/27/cython-is-awesome/Fri, 27 Jan 2017 05:31:14 GMTWrote a Cython program to analyse a board game. 2 trillion combinations counted in ~30min on one 4GHz i7 core. 113 lines of Cython code. I've forgotten how fast C is.https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/11/24/cheap-entertainment-and-unmotivated-young-men/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/11/24/cheap-entertainment-and-unmotivated-young-men/Thu, 24 Nov 2016 09:02:39 GMTWhy amazing video games could be causing a big problem for America Erik Hurst on Work, Play, and the Dynamics of U.S. Labor Markets Hikikomori Econtalk: Prior to 1985, leisure patterns were increasing for both higher-educated and lower-educated workers. So--for both men and women. So, men were taking more leisure, usually by working less, in the 1960s and 1970s. Women were taking more leisure by working more in the market but working much less in the home sector. Kind of like we were talking abohttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/11/19/corporate-intellectualism/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/11/19/corporate-intellectualism/Sat, 19 Nov 2016 02:59:17 GMTCorporate Intellectualism is a bizarre imitation of Academic Intellectualism, embracing badly constructed abstractions and peddling platitudes which confer a vague sense of insight and understanding but do nothing to improve the quality of judgments. Popular business education overemphasises Thought Leadership, the addition of structure to problems and facilitating effective analysis. It's pretty high up the Maslow's hierarchy , and rarely what is most needed. There are many more basic yet more https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/10/18/throat-clearing/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/10/18/throat-clearing/Tue, 18 Oct 2016 10:34:41 GMTMy written voice is a separate part of my consciousness. It slumbers for months at a stretch, roused by emotional outbursts every few months. Others are driven to drink, I am driven to write. I have the impulse to write about the follies of others, how clear things are to me and how hopelessly muddled it is to them. It isn't a pretty impulse, and writing was easier when I was younger and less concerned with appearances. That voice IS genuine - underneath I am every bit as arrogant and unmeasuredhttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/10/13/low-cost-passive-etfs-and-magical-thinking/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/10/13/low-cost-passive-etfs-and-magical-thinking/Thu, 13 Oct 2016 10:30:58 GMTReduced activity, low fees and tax efficiency are reasons given for why passive investing is low-cost for the investor. This logic is wrong. Those are reasons why passive investing is low-cost for the fund management company. The reason those cost-savings get passed to the investor is because the product is standardised by virtue of tracking a standard, named index like the S P 500, and multiple companies compete to provide the same product. Without competition, there's no reason for an ETF to bhttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/07/01/comparing-sp500-and-housing-leverage/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/07/01/comparing-sp500-and-housing-leverage/Fri, 01 Jul 2016 23:12:03 GMTAccording to http://realestate.wharton.upenn.edu/research/papers/full/493.pdf The quarterly standard deviation of unleveraged housing returns is 3.4 percent, which is 6.8 percent annualized. With a 20% downpayment, that's a 34% stdev. The SP500 has a standard deviation of around 20%, so to get the same amount of risk I want to be 1.7x leveraged.https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/05/13/how-does-germany-compare-to-the-usa-in-terms-of-median-income/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/05/13/how-does-germany-compare-to-the-usa-in-terms-of-median-income/Fri, 13 May 2016 05:08:26 GMTArticle with the surprising claim that the median income in Germany is lower than that in most US states, when PPP adjusted - https://mises.org/blog/if-sweden-and-germany-became-us-states-they-would-be-among-poorest-states Conclusion: I would say the weak points that bear more looking at are whether the household adjustment (the square root mentioned above) is significant, and also whether if there are net transfer payments that it's really not an expense, but rather a form of savings, in which https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/03/08/the-grammar-of-graphics/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/03/08/the-grammar-of-graphics/Tue, 08 Mar 2016 06:34:22 GMTR's ggplot2 has the most elegant graph API that I know. This article by Hadley Wickham himself is a great introduction to some of the ideas underlying The Grammar of Graphics that he implemented. I think it contains a lot of great ideas for API design. http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/layered-grammar.htmlhttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/03/05/passive-investing-is-cheap-but-not-free/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/03/05/passive-investing-is-cheap-but-not-free/Sat, 05 Mar 2016 02:48:22 GMTExcellent article by Matt Levine Passive investing is a way to make different fund managers compete with each other by forcing them to offer the same product. That competition lowers management fees for the customer. Unfortunately, the predictability of passive funds also makes them targets for other players in the market. On one hand you have actively managed funds that are opaque and difficult for the consumer to monitor, and that charge high management fees which have to be balanced against thttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/02/27/netsurveillance-web-rtsp-url/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/02/27/netsurveillance-web-rtsp-url/Sat, 27 Feb 2016 03:53:29 GMTSpent way too long discovering this. rtsp://IP:554/user=USER password=PASSWORD channel=1 stream=1.sdp?real_stream--rtp-caching=100https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/02/18/was-the-2015-2016-flu-vaccine-spot-on/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2016/02/18/was-the-2015-2016-flu-vaccine-spot-on/Thu, 18 Feb 2016 08:43:36 GMThttp://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu-season-2015-2016.htm The 2015-2016 trivalent flu vaccine protected against: an A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus an A/Switzerland/9715293/2013 (H3N2)-like virus a B/Phuket/3073/2013-like virus. (This is a B/Yamagata lineage virus) According to the latest Flu Express publication from the Taiwan CDC, the prevalent flus so far this season are: A H1N1 (36.8%) A H3N2 (63.2%) B (25.2%) Does this mean they got it completely right this year (for Taiwan athttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/12/18/do-critical-topics-always-bring-abrasive-conversations/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/12/18/do-critical-topics-always-bring-abrasive-conversations/Fri, 18 Dec 2015 05:38:31 GMTThe first rule of Improvisional Comedy the Yes, And rule, compels one to accept what the other person has created ("Yes") and then add something to it ("And") This is something that a skilled conversationist is good at. It poses trouble for the discussion of critical analyses however, because such discussions involve acts of disagreement ("No" - the negation of something the other person said) and of refocusing the discussion are to reduce incidental and nonessential complexity. Being able to dihttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/12/16/where-does-taiwanese-air-pollution-come-from/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/12/16/where-does-taiwanese-air-pollution-come-from/Wed, 16 Dec 2015 01:21:31 GMTConclusion: The pollution now (December) is from China, the pollution in November was locally generated. Earlier this year, there was a bout of posts about whether the air pollution in Taiwan came from China. The air is apparently pretty bad right now, and this time I think it's clear that it's from China. I just pulled this screenshot from waqi.info: Observe that the pollution in Yilan Country, southeast of Taipei, is not that different from Taipei itself. This is what you would expect if the phttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/12/14/what-parts-of-deep-learning-are-modern/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/12/14/what-parts-of-deep-learning-are-modern/Mon, 14 Dec 2015 08:07:39 GMTConclusion: outside of a very brief period in which pre-training with Unsupervised Learning was shown to be helpful, Deep Learning has largely been about hardware brute force, and learning how to use brute force to solve problems. Terms I need to learn more about Pattern Deformations Hessian-free learning Batch Normalisation (Thanks A Breitman) Competing Units Neural networks have been around for a long time. What exactly changed between the 80s and now? Why the resurgence of late? Reading this https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/12/12/deep-learning-with-small-data/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/12/12/deep-learning-with-small-data/Sat, 12 Dec 2015 21:09:35 GMTI looked into the topic a bit more, and found this exchange, which I think makes sense to me. The essence of the argument is that because Google etc. have a lot of data, they develop techniques that can make use of that data. However, if you do not have a lot of data, there are other, maybe less developed, techniques to use. https://medium.com/@ShaliniAnanda1/an-open-letter-to-yann-lecun-22b244fc0a5ahttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/11/03/neal-stephenson-on-the-problem-with-personalised-news-feeds/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/11/03/neal-stephenson-on-the-problem-with-personalised-news-feeds/Tue, 03 Nov 2015 22:37:56 GMTFrom The Diamond Age : That the highest levels of the society received news written with ink on paper said much about the steps New Atlantis had taken to distinguish itself from other phyles. Now nanotechnology had made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it. One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a comhttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/10/31/movies-inside-out-the-little-prince/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/10/31/movies-inside-out-the-little-prince/Sat, 31 Oct 2015 07:40:15 GMTInside Out was amazing because it didn't have a villain . In contrast, The Little Prince portrays all "normal" adults as villains. I never noticed this when I read the book years ago. Youthful angst is a frustration with being forced to obey rules that one can't understand. Prince proposes resolving that dissonance by looking inward, and denigrates the customs of others as senseless and not worth interacting with. Contrast this French approach with the Japanese one in here .https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/10/25/learning-to-accept-unknowability/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/10/25/learning-to-accept-unknowability/Sun, 25 Oct 2015 00:11:31 GMTConspiracy theories and superstitions have the same origin. They are both attempts to deny the pervasiveness of randomness in life. People who become overly invested in a low-noise worldview are prone to late-life conversions to superstition because they are so invested in the idea that the world is predictable that they would rather switch hypotheses on the basis of noise (and hence overfit) than admit that the signal-to-noise ratio is that low. Admitting Unknowability is much more terrifying thttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/06/20/wittgensteins-ladder/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2015/06/20/wittgensteins-ladder/Sat, 20 Jun 2015 04:14:55 GMTAustrian Philosopher Wittgenstein once described the structure of his expositions as such: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. This concept is known as Wittgenstein's Ladder (wikipedia: do read this) A lhttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2014/12/01/lagged-asset-correlations-a-thought-experiment/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2014/12/01/lagged-asset-correlations-a-thought-experiment/Mon, 01 Dec 2014 11:21:09 GMTSuppose I start a fund that imposes a 1-day withdrawal lead time, and takes your money and invests it in the S P 500 on day 0, but then reports the day 0 return as the day 1 return, the day 1 return as the day 2 return, and so on, reporting the return on day 0 as 0. This fund has a return which is a tiny bit less than the S P, but is completely uncorrelated on a daily basis. It would, however, have an almost perfect correlation on an annual basis, and that's why you wouldn't invest in such a thihttps://www.thechiao.com/blog/2014/10/29/the-legitimacy-of-capture/https://www.thechiao.com/blog/2014/10/29/the-legitimacy-of-capture/Wed, 29 Oct 2014 02:36:49 GMTEconTalk on regulatory capture and economists: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/10/luigi_zingales.html Incentives are important to think about, because getting incentives wrong can mean pitting another human against you, and by symmetry there is no telling who would win when that happens. Immediate material gains are a part of incentives which are relatively easy to understand. What's discussed in this podcast under the label of capture is the fact that there are systematic influences that