Alice might correctly bet that Bob is wrong by 2x on his belief about how many angels a Chuck believes Bob thinks fit on a pinhead. Correct but meaningless to non-angel-believers. Especially if *nobody* actually believes in angels. Only in other people’s beliefs about angels.
Conversation
When you are in traffic, you *are* traffic, but at least everyone is going somewhere from somewhere
When you traffic in beliefs about beliefs, you *are* belief... it’s like traffic that’s just going around in circles without trying to get anywhere from anywhere else.
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Imagine driving around in traffic purely to hit the green stretches on google maps and beat the times on the red stretches. Grand theft auto joyriding. Imagine if that kind of driving behavior were 95% of traffic and you were in 5% trying to drive to work or home or go shopping.
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Now imagine if the government printed money just to pay people to drive around for no reason. So you get paid by the mile, and big bonuses if you beat point to point times predicted by google maps. I suspect that’s what the economy is at this point.
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This week has made me realize that my financial anxiety is 100% a function of my cash positions and guaranteed cash receivables. I‘ve had like zero emotional reaction to watching my retirement portfolio tank. It’s too far away in time. About 20 years before I plan on touching it.
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That’s because as a largely passive investor, I’m screwed only if everybody else is as well, which means I have bigger problems anyway. Still the adrenalin rush of my small side bets on individual stocks doing well helps me understand the true market gambling addicts.
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The pros say I have high time preference. I say they have low reality preference. We’re both right. For eg I bought $1500 worth of $ZM last week (yes, I’m sheeple). That’s my current play limit. I’d be pleased if that blew up to 15k. But I’d be 10x as pleased with 10k Fed airdrop
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Why? The latter is more real. Like driving to work. The former is less real, like driving around to catch green stretches on google maps.
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But buying $ZM is still more real to me than say buying S&P puts, even though that’s an impoverishing mindset. If my Zoom bet goes to zero, I’ve learned something. My thinking about virtual future is off. I’m wrong to believe that we’re poised for secular shift to remote work.
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What have I learned if I lose the same amount on a miscalled S&P put? Just that I was wrong about beliefs about beliefs among a bunch of MtG-playing gods. Strikes me as... not very satisfying or meaningful. It’s also the reason I haven’t stocked up a million rolls of toilet paper
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Yep, TP hoarding beyond your immediate needs, factoring in stock outs due to average TP-insanity levels, is the same exotic-financialization trader mindset. It’s just accessible to the prepper-poors. “Woohoo, I’ll sell my surplus TP at 100 rounds of ammo per roll when SHTF.”
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Note though that vacuity of the underlying beliefs is what *creates* huge upside potential. A great stock bet might appreciate 10-100x. A great derivative bet can net you >1000x. A division by zero effect. That’s why nihilism makes for good traders. It rewards low meaning more.
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You get high returns in 1 of 2 ways: betting on less meaningful stuff, adding more leverage to bets on more meaningful stuff (trading on margin). Two vectors away from reality. This is why I like crypto btw. It’s completely open about operating with a very low reality preference.
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