EPTOff-Topic General Discussion - Page 5087
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Alaric
France45622 Posts
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Carnivorous Sheep
Baa?21245 Posts
On May 28 2015 02:28 Alaric wrote: Y'know other countries have stuff akin to memorial day, right? Yes but they don't have it on the last Monday of May. In your attempt to elevate your own intellectual standing by pointing out what you (mistakenly) assumed to be a gap in my knowledge, you have instead merely exposed your own inability to synthesize and contextualize information, proving yourself to be a sententious pedant. | ||
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Lost My Will To Live
Botswana601 Posts
On May 28 2015 02:29 Carnivorous Sheep wrote: Yes but they don't have it on the last Monday of May. In your attempt to elevate your own intellectual standing by pointing out what you (mistakenly) assumed to be a gap in my knowledge, you have instead merely exposed your own inability to synthesize and contextualize information, proving yourself to be a sententious pedant. Okay, you're toxic. | ||
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GhandiEAGLE
United States20754 Posts
Remember when he quit the thread? | ||
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jcarlsoniv
United States27922 Posts
On May 28 2015 02:29 Carnivorous Sheep wrote: Yes but they don't have it on the last Monday of May. In your attempt to elevate your own intellectual standing by pointing out what you (mistakenly) assumed to be a gap in my knowledge, you have instead merely exposed your own inability to synthesize and contextualize information, proving yourself to be a sententious pedant. Well, let me tell you this - I am shamelessly self-involved. I spend hours in front of the mirror making my hair elegantly disheveled. I worry about how this album will sell, because I believe it will determine the amount of sex I have in the future. I self medicate with drugs and alcohol to treat my extreme social anxiety. You are a faker - ADMIT IT. You are a fraud - ADMIT IT. Yeah, you're living a lie, living a lie, your life is living a lie. You don't impress me - ADMIT IT. You don't intimidate me - ADMIT IT. Why don't you bow down, get on the ground, WALK THIS FUCKING PLANK YEAH. | ||
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GhandiEAGLE
United States20754 Posts
On May 28 2015 02:38 jcarlsoniv wrote: Well, let me tell you this - I am shamelessly self-involved. I spend hours in front of the mirror making my hair elegantly disheveled. I worry about how this album will sell, because I believe it will determine the amount of sex I have in the future. I self medicate with drugs and alcohol to treat my extreme social anxiety. You are a faker - ADMIT IT. You are a fraud - ADMIT IT. Yeah, you're living a lie, living a lie, your life is living a lie. You don't impress me - ADMIT IT. You don't intimidate me - ADMIT IT. Why don't you bow down, get on the ground, WALK THIS FUCKING PLANK YEAH. Do you Do you need something? | ||
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Carnivorous Sheep
Baa?21245 Posts
On May 28 2015 02:38 jcarlsoniv wrote: Well, let me tell you this - I am shamelessly self-involved. I spend hours in front of the mirror making my hair elegantly disheveled. I worry about how this album will sell, because I believe it will determine the amount of sex I have in the future. I self medicate with drugs and alcohol to treat my extreme social anxiety. You are a faker - ADMIT IT. You are a fraud - ADMIT IT. Yeah, you're living a lie, living a lie, your life is living a lie. You don't impress me - ADMIT IT. You don't intimidate me - ADMIT IT. Why don't you bow down, get on the ground, WALK THIS FUCKING PLANK YEAH. At least I compose my own vapid, pseudointellectual drivel instead of copypastaing from some seventh tier alt rock band. | ||
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jcarlsoniv
United States27922 Posts
On May 28 2015 02:45 Carnivorous Sheep wrote: At least I compose my own vapid, pseudointellectual drivel instead of copypastaing from some seventh tier alt rock band. Psh, "copypasta", who do you think I am. I typed that shit out. I just happened to be listening to Say Anything and you showed your hipster consumerism. Don't worry, Cheep, for you I won't ever have rough sex with Molly Connolly again. | ||
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Alaric
France45622 Posts
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GhandiEAGLE
United States20754 Posts
On May 28 2015 02:48 jcarlsoniv wrote: Psh, "copypasta", who do you think I am. I typed that shit out. I just happened to be listening to Say Anything and you showed your hipster consumerism. Don't worry, Cheep, for you I won't ever have rough sex with Molly Connolly again. He probably just googled it. | ||
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Requizen
United States33802 Posts
I wish I too could become a mod so my past toxicity was washed away and forgotten. | ||
TheYango
United States47024 Posts
On May 28 2015 02:28 Alaric wrote: Y'know other countries have stuff akin to memorial day, right? Other sites have mods akin to Cheep, but we only bother complaining about the one we have. | ||
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Gahlo
United States35173 Posts
On May 28 2015 03:05 TheYango wrote: Other sites have mods akin to Cheep, but we only bother complaining about the one we have. The RLew ban thread says otherwise.~ | ||
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Lord Tolkien
United States12083 Posts
Also, Rand Paul blaming ISIL's existence on US "hawks". OMFG. So many levels of retarded. Save me from this stupid argh. The fact he said this on MSNBC means he'll win brownie points too. Bleh. | ||
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Alaric
France45622 Posts
On May 28 2015 03:05 TheYango wrote: Other sites have mods akin to Cheep, but we only bother complaining about the one we have. That may be because I'm currently exhausted, but you'll have to explain me what this has to do with the post you quoted. | ||
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TheYango
United States47024 Posts
Touche. | ||
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Gahlo
United States35173 Posts
On May 28 2015 03:15 Lord Tolkien wrote: To be fair, it's not as if Cheep is wrong in that Alaric's comment had little to no bearing on the discussion of rampant Memorial Day consumerism (of which I happily partook in). Also, Rand Paul blaming ISIL's existence on US "hawks". OMFG. So many levels of retarded. Save me from this stupid argh. The fact he said this on MSNBC means he'll win brownie points too. Bleh. Idk, seems kinda reasonable to me. Bomb a people's land for decades on and off and expect them to go "aww man, shucks."? Of course people re going to get angry and hate us. | ||
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Lord Tolkien
United States12083 Posts
On May 28 2015 03:26 Gahlo wrote: Idk, seems kinda reasonable to me. Bomb a people's land for decades on and off and expect them to go "aww man, shucks."? Of course people re going to get angry and hate us. That has absolutely nothing to do with how/why jihadist movements like ISIL have formed across the Mideast/Maghreb/SS Africa? Ill elaborate when off the fone. | ||
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MoonBear
Straight outta Johto18973 Posts
On May 17 2015 05:26 Lord Tolkien wrote: + Show Spoiler + On May 17 2015 05:20 Eppa! wrote: An engineer, a chemist and an economist get stranded on an island and they find a tin can with soup. The engineer says: we should get a rock and smash it open. The chemist say we should heat it up and the pressure will force it open. The economist says lets assume we have a can opener. Neoliberalism is seriously a cancer in economics and needs to die. My plebeian opinion is that destruction of capital is based on annex I western ideas of cyclical growth. Hm? How does that relate precisely... Besides which, neoliberalism is mostly a pejorative term that is largely outdated nowadays, given mainstream economics have largely reached consensus (on the basis of neo-Keynesianism with Classical undertones). They all use the same models, whereas the main determinant of difference being how much they weigh individual variables (their general view on the elasticity of prices [from 0-1] being the easiest method of figuring out where on the Keynesian/Classical "spectrum" one falls). http://freakonomics.com/2012/07/25/the-secret-consensus-among-economists/ Moonbear can correct me if I'm wrong. Sort of. We're going to focus here on macroeconomics. This is the field of economics that deals with the big stuff like unemployment, inflation, government spending, etc. Basically all the big country economics stuff, and not the smaller economics stuff like consumer preferences. (This is a gross generalisation but will suffice for the purpose of thi post.) A trend in macroeconomics over the past few dacades has been the pursuit of mathematical purity. It is the idea that all problems can be reduced to simple mathematical problems. For example, we can represent things like inflation statistics, consumer spending, and other things as variables. Combine all these variables into one big model, press a few buttons, and hey presto! Your model can now start telling you how the economy should behave when you start tinkering with the variables. This is higly seductive for multiple reason. But there are two key reasons that stand out above them all. The first is the power of maths. When you prove something with maths, you prove it. There's no ifs, there's no buts. If the maths says it's true, then it must be true. Having no ambiguity is highly desireable for people because it means people don't try to argue back with your conclusions. They have to go fight your tedious maths instead. The second is that once you have a model you can tinker with it and start creating predictions. Now you're not just telling people what the model tells you. You're now able to start telling people what to do based on your model. And that gives you power. The power of influence. And that influence means macroeconomists over the past three decades have become incredibly important in advising government and policy decisions. There is of course a catch. All of this obscures the fact that mathematics is only a tool. And your model is only as good as the assumptions and variables you put into it. Just because you have an incredibly complicated model doesn't mean you can actually predict the future if it's an unrealistic model to begin with. Take the use of mathematics in physics for example. You could construct a model about how the Earth moves around the Sun. You could, for example, model the Earth as a cube. There's nothing stopping you from doing that after all. And your model might predict that the cube Earth could never possibly rotate around the Sun and therefore it must mean the Sun revolves around the Earth. That example was, of course, completely ridiculous. If you begin with flawed assumptions (e.g. Earth is a cube) then your conclusion is utter gargabe. Your model in unrealted to reality. Unfortunately, this is something that happens in Economics all the time. In the interest of mathematical tractability (i.e. making problems easy to solve) a lot of things in macroeconomic maths is hand waived away "in the interest of simplicity". Or sometimes just because it's inconveient or you don't like it. Really, you don't even need justification sometimes. This creates an awkward environment where models are used to justify and "prove" theories in the interest of furthering someone's career or ideology. It doesn't matter if what your model is doing actually matches reality or not. Who cares? And it is this divorce of theory and reality which is the real terror. Because remember, the ability to predict is what gives macroeconomists influence over governments and policy. But what happens when your macroeconomics is unrelated to reality? I have previously referenced the debacle that was Reinhart and Rogoff but did not really go into it. (The New Yorker article has a good summary though.) But the TLDR is that the inability for two professors to use Excel correctly lead to the "proof" that many countries relied on to justify austerity measures following the financial crisis of 2008. This is like taking theorycrafting from /r/LeagueOfLegends and using it to justify economic policies which have very real implications for millions of people. Pushing back against bad economics is quite difficult. Macroeconomics is not a "hard science" so to speak. You can't conduct tests in a lab repeatedly like you can in Physics. Well, you could try but mass experimentation of economic policies on people is incredibly unethical not to mention problems such as control groups and random variance. And you're dealing with people. People don't always respond or behave the same way every time. The reason why we can generally rely on weather forecasts is because Mother Nature doesn't care what the weather channel says. She'll keep doing whatever she wants to do. But if you release an important economics report that forecasts unemployment is growing too fast and hit 10% next year, people might react in response to your report which means your prediction may never happen. So there's always going to be some amount of guessing involved. There's also the problem where a large number of people studying economics now-a-days don't really understand what they're learning (especially when it comes to the hard maths involved). And these people train the next generation while not understanding it, who train the next, etc. So you also have that problem too. In fact, forget mathematics. Let's go even more basic. One of the first things you learn in Economics 101 is the idea of Opportunity Cost. If you've ever studied Economics, even in high school, you'll have heard of this term. Well, here is a study where 199 professional economists were asked multiple-choice question about opportunity cost and only 21.6% of respondents got the question right. (Ferraro and Taylor, 2005) It's like... I dunno 199 professional Physicists not knowing what the difference between kinetic and potential energy is? Things have recently come to a head in the real world. One of the top leading economists at New York University Paul Romer recently wrote a paper taking shots at two Nobel winners Robert Lucas and Edward Prescott about the shoddy use of mathematics in economics. He accuses them and other economists of what I described above, which is basically using mathematics dishonestly to further their ideological beliefs and ignoring reality. Even in the world of adacemic economics where people constantly take pot shots at each other, this is quite something. Although considering how important and how much economics impacts people's live, it's somewhat no surprise how ideologically driven the economics has become. Anyway that's my ramblings on the subject. As always there are inaccuracies and generalisations in what I write in the interest of brevity and simplicity. | ||
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Zergneedsfood
United States10671 Posts
agreed | ||
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