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Rick Sint
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Rick Sint
@rickwsint
Quantitative finance practitioner. Ex-physicist. Post-Lakatosian. Looking for the best coordinate system to map the last few centuries of intellectual history.
New York, NY Katılım Eylül 2017
234 Takip Edilen297 Takipçiler
We’re never 100% sure about anything, but there is nothing we're more sure about than that
Kekius Maximus@Kekius_Sage
Are we 100% sure nothing can surpass light speed?
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Rick Sint retweetledi
Rick Sint retweetledi
@noryus @hahussain Nicely put. Answers to this question that use the word “inelastic” have failed to appreciate the cognitive state of the asker.
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@hahussain There is 0 reason that the correction should be linear. Suppose you need 1L of water to live each day, you're 100 people, world production is 100L per day and drop 10%, do you think price will only go up by 10%?
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Before Hormuz Closure:
Price of oil barrel was $60
After Hormuz Closure:
Price of oil barrel is $100
20 percent of global supply oil flows through Hormuz, so why did global price jump by 40 percent when it lost only 20 percent of supply?
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@skdh No one actually understood it, as a physical theory rather than just a calculational heuristic, befoe Bohm in 1952. And for decades after that it was still just a handful of people who did because they overcame Bohr’s dogma that physics is not about what nature *is*.
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Also, most of the quotes from physicists who supposedly said that no one understands quantum mechanics don't exist.
The one person who clearly said this was Richard Feynman, but it was also clearly a joke.
It is frequently attributed to John Wheeler, but I found no evidence that Wheeler said anything of the sort.
There is a second-hand quote (related through Heisenberg) that Niels Bohr said if you aren't shocked by quantum mechanics you don't understand it.
The only other verifiable quote I have been able to find came from Sean Carroll.
Personally I think it comes down to what you mean by "understanding". We understand the maths just fine, it's not all that difficult. Does it make intuitive sense? Depends on how much time you have spent with it.
x.com/Leophilius/sta…
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Overly democritized primaries, besides being a key factor in the rise of Trump and right-wing authoritarianism, may also be one for Dem urban dysfunction.
@JonahDispatch @GarettJones—maybe you were on top of this already.
Nicholas Bagley@nicholas_bagley
@ProfSchleich Why do Democrats cater so much to public sector unions? A study from @dbroockman, @j_kalla, J. Calao and G. Huber sheds some light on the question.
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@katrosenfield Don’t blame the drunk driver. He couldn’t control the steering wheel. Everyone on the road could see him swerving. Just give him room.
The author of the solution to this problem is Ronald Coase.
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Writing about the BAFTAs controversy, I was initially more sympathetic to Davidson but also willing to concede that maybe this was a "difficult for all involved" situation
Then I discovered *why* Davidson was in the audience, and my soul left my god damn body
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@KelseyTuoc @selasayer @politicalmath Isn’t it much more parsimonious to say that Khelif’s family were just mistaken about his sex at birth? People are mistaken about biological facts all the time. Why should that force us to de-biologize a fundamentally biological concept?
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@selasayer @politicalmath Intersex people who were identified as a woman at birth, and raised as women, and learn from a DNA test in their 20s that they have a Y chromosome, are women under every 'trad' definition and in every 'trad' society, and also under my definition and in my society.
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When I see John Lithgow say this, I assume that he has no idea what JK Rowling has actually said and he is naively trusting the people who tell him that she is anti-trans
Variety@Variety
John Lithgow says J.K. Rowling's anti-trans views are "inexplicable" and "people insisted I walk away" from playing Dumbledore in HBO's #HarryPotter but "I chose not to do that." “I take the subject extremely seriously. She has created this amazing canon for young people and it has jumped into the consciousness of the society. It’s about good versus evil, kindness versus cruelty. I find her views ironic and inexplicable. I’ve never met her, she’s not really involved in this production at all. But the people who are, are remarkable. It upsets me when people are opposed to me having anything to do with this. But in ‘Potter’ canon you see no trace of transphobic sensitivity. She’s written this mediation of kindess and acceptance. And Dumbledore is a beautiful role. It was a hard decision. It made me uncomfortable and unhappy that people insisted I walk away from the job. I chose not to do that.” Read more here: variety.com/2026/film/glob…
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@Jess_Riedel @krishnanrohit You make them fungible and make them far less dependent on future costs (of mining tech and labor), which is what the underlying commodity is supposed to hedge against. Hence you increase hedge effectiveness.
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The storage underground is a pretty negligible fraction all the costs involved. So the question is why dig it out if you're just going to store it.
You can absolutely own the rights to a known gold deposit and trade those rights with others without excavating it. That is, the rights can be a store of value. Their value will be less than the market value of the extractable gold because of the cost of extraction. So the question is why dig it out rather than trade the rights at their reduced value. Note that, to a first approximation, you're now *indifferent* to whether you dig it out or not.
By digging the gold out, you make the valuable item fungible, rather than just tradeable, which has obvious transaction efficiency benefits, which breaks the symmetry on the indifference.
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I've been reading up on tether buying a ton of gold, and I cannot get over the weirdness of actually having physical gold reserves. Like you dig it up out of the ground, refine it process it generally take a lot of pains to transport it, only to put it back underground. Why!!
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@DavidDeutschOxf @Sam_kuyp you guys at least acknowledged this problem instead of, e.g., just pulling implausible rabbits out of your decision-theory hats. But you just have this oblivious, Copenhagen-esque air of pretending that the specific, well-founded counterarguments simply don’t exist.
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@DavidDeutschOxf @Sam_kuyp measurement probabilities (i.e., the entire empirical content of QM) from a formalism that is just devoid of any intuitive link to them.
I’d be more sympathetic if…
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Ditto. I can't see the mechanism – how the irrationality is still being transmitted down the generations. Positivism has lost its power. How has instrumentalism remained a passionate dogma among physicists despite its absurdity?
Sam@Sam_kuyp
Every time I return to many-worlds, it seems so natural, so consistent with the rest of physics, and so perfectly attuned to the mathematics of quantum theory, measurement, and entanglement, that I find myself genuinely puzzled as to why it remains so controversial.
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@DanielJHannan Wishful thinking. Unfortunately most people are not instinctive classical liberals. There’s big swath of anti-liberal populists, skeptical of even pro-America immigrants, of companies that profit from foreign workers, and of complex institutions they mistake for conspiracies.
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Rick Sint retweetledi
@davidasinclair @Nature This (bizarre, philosophically radical) conclusion is not something that follows from the experiment. It's a particular (philosophical) theory that is a very bad explanation for the experiment. Much simpler, physical theories (like Bohm's or GRW) are much better explanations.
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The double slit experiment is one of the weirdest results ever. Particles don’t have a position until they are observed. New @nature paper shows this is true for molecules with as many as 7000 atoms. Someone should definitely try this with viruses
nature.com/articles/d4158…
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Rick Sint retweetledi
GenAI will not replace human ingenuity. It will simply raise the floor for mediocrity so high that being "pretty good" becomes economically worthless.
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@McFaul You have to think of this from the perspective of a foreign investor. The crazy thing is that even after Jan. 6, Trump was re-elected. Even if the public has shifted 60/40 against him, this maniac got two terms. Maniac risk is now a serious issue in buying a 30y Treasury bond.
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This is not true about the American "public."
"The public in the US think the US is entitled to a certain position in the world where there is no room for decent behaviour and where there are no norms and rules."
Polls show very clearly that the American people radically disagree with Trump on Greenland, NATO, and Ukraine.
And many Americans, including me, have been speaking every day about Trump's insane behavior.
Lars Christensen@MaMoMVPY
The problem isn't Trump. The problem is the US. When the outside world observes Trump's insane behaviour and his threats against allies, and we at the same time observe that there is no real action from the US public, Congress, the US Supreme Court, or the US media about this insanity, we will all have to conclude that the US accepts this behaviour. The public in the US think the US is entitled to a certain position in the world where there is no room for decent behaviour and where there are no norms and rules. That means that we all have to conclude that the US — not only Trump — has betrayed the international order that the US, with its Western partners, were the main architects of after the Second World War. This is the conclusion that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney so clearly laid out in his speech at Davos yesterday. We simply cannot trust the US to play by the rules any more. Therefore, we also fundamentally have to ask ourselves — should we trust the financial and economic structure which is an integral part of the global rules-based order? Americans live in the illusion that the US can do everything on its own, despite the fact that the US for nearly 20 years has lived beyond its means. US private and government consumption has been funded by, among others, European central banks and pension funds. But we now have to ask ourselves — why would we trade in dollars? Why would we put our savings into US Treasury bonds? If the US is not a rules-based society, we cannot trust the dollar to be a stable currency, and it would be insane to hold dollars. As domestic US institutions are eroded and governance structures destroyed, the US will be turned into an emerging market economy — or more accurately, a de-merging economy. If the US threatens the territory of allies, then the US acts as an authoritarian bully nation. Nobody in their right mind would lend money to the US government. If the US doesn't live up to its international obligations and respect the sovereignty of other nations, why would we expect the US government to honour its debts? If Trump can tariff nations that will not give up their territory, then there is certainly no reason to believe that the US will not introduce capital controls. And if that is a risk, why would you risk investing in the US? It is not a question about Europe standing up to the US. It is a question about being prudent with our investments — about reducing risks. Every day Trump remains in office, distrust of the US increases, and the cost for the US will go up day by day. And this is irreversible. It takes years to build trust, but you can destroy it by your actions in minutes. Europe has now completely lost trust in the US. And so has Canada. It is up to the people of the US to demonstrate that Trump is an 'outlier', and it is up to the American people to stop him. If you don't do that, we will have to assume that this is what the US is about — whether the name of the President is Trump or something else, whether the President is a Republican or a Democrat.
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