Hopefully Interesting

One bit of economic theory that doesn't get talked about is marginalism.  That is, that the value of things and how they affect our behavior is usually based on how much adding or subtracting a little bit from our current circumstances changes them.  The classic examples is that we put a much higher price on diamonds than on water even though the total value we get from water is much higher than from diamonds since we'd quickly die with no water.  But we have lots of water and few diamonds so we get more value from one more diamond than one more cup of water, and thus we put a higher prices on the diamonds despite water having a higher total and even average value. The same can apply when people are trying to incentivize different behaviors.  A while ago my state was considering a carbon tax which would raise the price of gasoline among other things.  But all the money it raised would be distributed evenly back to the state's tax payers.  My coworker was co...

  Metaculus is a website where you can make bets on the future.  There are some websites like this, like Polymarket , where you make bets in real money but Metaculus isn't like that - generally the only thing at state is one's pride and what you can learn from the collective wisdom of everybody making predictions on a question.  I say generally because occasionally someone will bankroll a tournament on some questions they're particularly interested in getting good predictions for, I'll hopefully have another blog post on one of these soon, but that's very much the exception. Sometimes it's fun to look through the predictions I've made and see where I most disagree with everyone else.  For me the top entry is my optimism about robots compared to the rest of the site. Here I am giving robotic cooks by 2030 67% percent odds when most other people have it at 25%.  Why am I so optimistic here?  Mostly because robotic foundation models have been making great str...