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Here's my pitch:

You have a package go missing, and you don't know why. It shows as delivered, but you never saw it. You check the ring camera to see what happened to it, and one of your kids picked it up, took it inside, forgot about it, and when you asked, was too dumb to piece together, "Oh, THAT package."

A progressive wealth tax has benefits as well. I just think there's value in pointing out the impact that such a small percentage has. Implementing even a fraction of a percentage would make a serious impact; we don't need to go whole hog right here, right now.

My ideal starting point for a progressive wealth tax would max out at 2%, because that's within a standard deviation of annual S&P growth.

I understand the perspective that the extreme wealth taxes wouldn't change the quality of life of the ultra-rich... but do you know what the long term impact on the economy would be?

I don't. And I study this kind of thing. This is not the kind of system that responds well to massive, overnight changes. Most Americans get their food by buying it... if we fuck up, and the economy irretrievably crumbles without a backup, people will starve.

As desperate as people may be for radical change, it is worth it to make these proposals in a responsible way, and ensure that we're not doing more harm than good.

Yeah, their budget is now 90% secret police activities, and only 10% the kinds of things that are actually important.... like interfacing with INTERPOL, and acting as a barrier to arms dealing and human trafficking.

Since we can't abolish something 90%, we need to assign those duties to another organization, until ICE is left with nothing except evil/redundant duties, and THEN abolish it.

Why did you write this?

It's literally from a Chick Tract. It's an ancient meme... circulating for the past 10 years or so.

KYM

Whether the person posting it is right or wrong, it's not really an endorsement of religion. It's like "scapegoat", or "omg".

Apes of the Nation.

So your technique for breaking down ideas is to invoke an appeal to majority, and then be condescending about it?

Holy shit, I'm outmatched. It might take years for me to recover from the epic own I've just received.

I concede. There are countless other discussions that need your brave insights. It would be selfish to take up even one second more of your time. Godspeed.

Yeah, if that were the only thing I wrote, my contribution to this discussion would be complete garbage.

OK, let's see the evidence for that assertion.

Using prediction markets to estimate the reproducibility of scientific research - PMC

There's one.

But obviously it's not a guarantee if you don't know what you're doing. We also have documentation on where these methods fall short, such as when it's based on exponential growth, rare events, or something else that humans are bad at understanding. Infectious Disease Forecasting.

But again, good statisticians are prepared to address those things.

And you have no idea of the mechanisms that shape that market.

That's even better. If I don't understand the mechanisms shaping the market, I won't be able to correctly identify predictive variables for my model. In that case, I would be better off trusting the prediction market.

Obviously it would be better if the person building the model understood the mechanisms... but that takes time and money. If you're managing 30 models, that might not be worth it.

I think it's like plane crashes. We hear a lot about when things go wrong, but if it actually works, there's nothing to talk about.

A friend's grandmother lives in an HOA. She never has issues.

We should probably have the dues, complaints, charters, and whatnot be public to avoid some of the mystery. You wouldn't move to a new state without being able to look up the constitution, other laws, or tax rates on a public site... (well you shouldn't anyway). I don't understand why we've decided it's okay at the community level.

You probably live in a blue area. (Most people live in a blue area.) The actual situation is that we've polarized. People around you, in the blue area, have moved left. People elsewhere, in the red areas, have moved right.

Pew Research for some graphics.

In certain ways, this has been a victory for civil liberties. Gay people from small towns can move to a place where they might have entire neighborhoods of likeminded people. Trans people from small towns can move to a place where they won't be shot on sight. Hell, someone in NYC who suddenly finds Jesus can go to a smaller town where no one will make fun of them for proselytizing AND they can hang out with likeminded people AND they get cheaper rent.

But it's also more dangerous than it has ever been to be an immigrant. Wealth inequality has been rising. Increases in wages has been vastly outpaced by increases in the cost of housing and healthcare, and combined with inflation, we're making more units of USD, sure, but we aren't able to sustain any better a quality of life. Corporate Taxes were increased for small companies, and cut for large companies.

Depending on whether you're more focused on the kinds of people living around you, or on the wide-reaching systemic changes that have been taking place, you're going to notice different things. The really really important stuff that has shifted to the right is kind of boring, so you wouldn't have seen much reporting on it.

If the contract isn't something that meets the criteria for an efficient market, then yeah, it's not something that can be used to give reasonable probabilities.

But for something like, winner of the democratic presidential primary, or the proce of gold in a month... then it's genuinely a better predictive model than what a statistician would be able to come up with.

It doesn't provide anything beneficial to anyone but its owners.

For statistics purposes, it gives me something incredibly beneficial. Simply by knowing the price of a contract, I can know with decent accuracy how likely something is to happen.

If you're not in the field, you wouldn't necessarily appreciate how valuable that is.