You’re saying finding the people most incentivized by money is the feature we should be optimizing for?

If you select those people, what’s to keep them from creating a system that gives them ever more amounts of money, to the detriment of their constituents?

Maybe a better system for selecting civil servants is…I dunno…a system that optimizes for that “service” part? It’s shocking how in the last few decades we’ve convinced ourselves that money is the only filter that motivates people and is the inherent driver of all human action.

>The only reason people make money off of stocks is because at the end, someone gives those companies money.

Small quibble. The reason why people make money off stocks is largely because people think people will give those companies in the future. People aren’t just trading on dividends, they’re trading on PE ratios.

Otherwise, companies like Tesla would be worth much less than Toyota (which gets more revenue, higher gross profit, and higher profit margins).

True, but a company has to be shown to actually make things that people want. If Tesla didn't sell cars or sold very little, they won't be hyped up as much as they are now.

I think if you look at the numbers, it doesn’t make sense. For Toyota to have a similar market cap at their current PE, they would need to sell something like 95% of the total cars worldwide. So unless people think Tesla will have a worldwide automotive monopoly, they are paying for something other than what they’re doing with cars.

I’m only playing devils advocate here but the counter argument is society is very complex and it takes time to understand it to a sufficient degree. Short term limits would mean a Congress making impactful decisions without fully understanding the ramifications, or they just rely on unelected bureaucrats and lobbyists to tell them what to do.

The counter counter argument is that you could be a career politician working your way up: two terms at city council, two as mayor, two as governor etc…and by the time someone is voted into the national stage they presumably have decades of experience.

I’m not defending congressional trading, but there are potentially other confounding variables (emphasis on potential). Leaders may tend to be older, have more appetite for risk, or leadership may correlate with wealth/status because “the connected” can also raise more money etc etc. Unless those types of variables are controlled for, it should temper how strongly we draw conclusions.

I didn’t get a chance to read the entire NBER paper, but an important nuance is that it takes an industry-normalized perspective.

It could be possible that someone in Congress has insider information about a specific industry that helps them, but not about a specific stock. For example, if I knew about specific legislation that would impact auto manufacturers I may have a better idea to get in or out of that sector without necessarily knowing if Ford will do better than GM.

To your point about meta-analysis it would also be useful to know if members are worse than normies at picking industries as well.

What bothers me is when people treat the third as some sort of virtue. I think operating in the ethical gray areas makes them feel smart instead of unethical.

Morality is not about intelligence, but some folks believe living by morals is submitting oneself to the lack of intelligence (or stupidity even). The real [evil] geniuses prune their decision tree by not considering morality so they maintain optimum efficiency.

That link is more marketing than substance. Is there any data on how well these models perform? For example, how well does their predictive maintenance work, how much risk-adjusted money savings does it provide, what data streams does it require?

I never understood why in these types of discussions, things seem to be shoehorned into a context where usefulness is only measured in some sort of economic ROI. Economics isn’t an end; it can a means to one, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only one.

That's the entire high level premise of AI, as I understand it: Loosening economic constraints that bind us, so that we can do whatever we want to do most (which might still be work, I don't know, but that is outside the scope of this thread).

What else could it possibly do for us?

Except the current premise is largely based on constraining humans to the drudgery that AI cannot do. Current AI is more focused on creative works, not on folding the laundry and replacing faucets.

I had a professor decades ago who was near retirement who related how when he was an undergraduate he had to write a paper about what humans would do with all their newfound free time since they would only need to work a dozen hours a week. I’m sure similar conversations were had at the onset of steam power and electricity; we’ve been crafting the same pipe dream for generations.

My point is that we should care about quality of life as the main measure. Economic output is a proxy for that, and sometimes a poor one.

I wonder how much of that is driven by poor performing behavioral models. There was a HN article from a few weeks back and it only had an accuracy of about 70% determining if someone was awake or asleep. I would guess that the secondary behavioral data used in this data (like cardiovascular fitness) are much harder to predict from raw sensor data than being awake or asleep.