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(At least in the UK, numbers starting 077009 are never assigned. So I've memorized a fake phone number that looks real, that I sometimes give out with no risk of accidentally giving a real phone number.)
Okay. Make it £5k from me (currently ~$6350), that seems like it'll make it more likely to happen.
If you can get it set up before March, I'll donate at least £2000.
(Though, um. I should say that at least one time I've been told "the way to donate with gift said is to set up an account with X, tell them to send the money to Y, and Y will pass it on to us", and the first step in the chain there had very high transaction fees and I think might have involved sending an email... historical precedent suggests that if that's the process for me to donate to lightcone, it might not happen.)
Do you know what rough volume you'd need to make it worthwhile?
I don't know anything about the card. I haven't re-read the post, but I think the point I was making was "you haven't successfully argued that this is good cost-benefit", not "I claim that this is bad cost-benefit". Another possibility is that I was just pointing out that the specific quoted paragraph had an implied bad argument, but I didn't think it said much about the post overall.
My guess: [signalling] is why some people read the Iliad, but it's not the main thing that makes it a classic.
Incidentally, there was one reddit comment that pushed me slightly in the direction of "yep, it's just signalling".
This was obviously not the intended point of that comment. But (ignoring how they misunderstood my own writing), the user
- Quotes multiple high status people talking about the Iliad;
- Tantalizingly hints that they are widely-read enough to be able to talk in detail about the Iliad and the old testament, and compare translations;
- Says approximately nothing about the Iliad;
- And says nothing at all about why they think the Iliad is good, and nor do roughly 3/4 of the people they quote. (Frye explains why it's important, but that's different. The last 6 lines of Keats talk about how Keats reacted to it, but that doesn't say what's good about it. Borges says a particular line is more beautiful than some other line (I think both lines are fine). Only Santayana tells me what he thinks is good about the Iliad.)
So like, you're trying to convince me the Iliad isn't just signalling by quoting Keats, saying essentially "I'd heard the Iliad was so good, but it took me forever to track down a copy[1]. When I did? Blew my mind, man. Blew my mind." Nonspecific praise feels like signalling, appeal to authority feels like signalling, and the authority giving nospecific praise? This just really solidly rings my signalling bells, you know?
- ^
I misunderstood Keats when I first replied to the comment. I'd assumed that when he said he "heard Chapman speak out loud and bold", he had, you know, heard someone named Chapman speak, perhaps loudly and boldly. Apparently it was what is called a "metaphor", and he had actually just read Chapman's translation.
Complex Systems (31 Oct 2024): From molecule to medicine, with Ross Rheingans-Yoo
When you first do human studies with a new drug, there's something like a 2/3 chance it'll make it to the second round of studies. Then something like half of those make it to the next round; and there's a point where you talk to the FDA and say "we're planning to do this study" and they say "cool, if you do that and get these results you'll probably be approved" and then in that case there's like an 85% chance you'll be approved; and I guess at least one other filter I'm forgetting. Overall something like 10-15% of drugs that start on this pipeline get approved, typically taking at least 7 years.
A drug that gets approved needs to make about $2 billion, to make up for the costs of all those trials plus the trials for the drugs that didn't get approved. And it has about 10 years to do that before patent protections expire, because you filed the patent before doing the first human studies and you only get 20 years from that point.
Typically what happens is someone forms a company for a specific drug, and while it's in fairly early trials the company gets bought by a big pharma company. The trials themselves are done by companies that specialize in running clinical trials.
Ross says Thalidomide was sort of the middle of a story. The story started with Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which he wrote as a "look at the horrible conditions meat packers have to endure" but what the public took from it is "excuse me, there are human fingers in my sausages?" So after that was the pure food and drug act which said that anything had to be just the thing it said it was.
But then a drug came which was exactly what it said it was, and that thing was bad for people. So after that you needed to do studies to show safety, but they were less rigorous than they are now?
And then thalidomide happened, which was fine for most people but caused birth defects when taken by a pregnant person. When it came up for approval, the beurocrat looking at it happened to have previously looked at rabbits and seen that drug uptake and metabolization could be different in pregnant rabbits, making something otherwise non-toxic become toxic. And so she said the company needed data about safety in pregnant people, even though this was a non-standard requirement at the time. The company tried to avoid that, she insisted, and it never got approved in the US. But standards still got stricter.
(It did get approved in Europe. It's relevant that Germany didn't like tracking birth defects due to previous history, so the problems weren't noticed as early as they might have been.)
One of the times when regulations got stricter, part of the story is that at the same time as public outrage, there also happened to be a bill in progress for reasons of punishing pharma for something something, so that's the bill that got through.
At some point you started to get patient advocacy groups, saying "we are dying while you hold this drug up", and the FDA would pay attention to that. And then the pharma companies would get involved in those groups, and now it's at the point where you kinda need one of those or the FDA will be like "why would we prioritize you?"
There are drugs that the FDA wants to encourage but which aren't profitable, e.g. helping with diseases common in the third world and rare in the US. One motivation is if you make one they'll give you a priority review voucher, good to help another drug of yours get approved faster. These vouchers are transferrable, and the market price is... I think $100k or $200k?
With covid vaccines, the government said "if you produce a thing that satisfies these criteria, we will buy X amount of it for sure". That took some uncertainty out of the process and helped things get made.
Sometimes a drug will succeed in trials but not get pushed forward for various reasons, sometimes just falling through cracks. One drug this happened with was a covid treatment, which seemed to reduce hospitalizations by 70% in vaccinated people. When it was in development the FDA said it was unlikely to get emergency use authorization, and the company dropped it.
(Related: VaccinateCA got a lot of funding for a while, and then after the funders themselves got vaccinated, it got less funding.)
Later the company was going bankrupt, and they sold off their assets, which included "drugs that seemed promising but we never went anywhere with", including this one. Ross was involved in some other company buying up that drug.
You can do trials for covid much cheaper than for cancer drugs. For cancer you'll often have a list of a smallish number of people and try to find the specific individuals who give you the best chance of a statistically significant result based on comorbidities and such, and have someone specifically approach the people you want. For covid the cheap thing to do is: everyone who comes to your clinic with a cough gets the drug and gets a covid test. Later you find out if they had covid and (thanks to a phone call) what happened to their symptoms. And you can do this sort of thing somewhere like Brazil, instead of doing it in the most prestigious hospital (where there are a bunch of other studies going on distracting people). But it's kind of a weird thing to do, and if trials fail your investors might be like "why didn't you do the normal thing?"
Though this particular story for weight exfiltration also seems pretty easy to prevent with standard computer security: there’s no reason for the inference servers to have the permission to create outgoing network connections.
But it might be convenient to have that setting configured through some file stored in Github, which the execution server has access to.
Yeah, if that was the only consideration I think I would have created the market myself.
Launching nukes is one thing, but downvoting posts that don't deserve it? I'm not sure I want to retaliate that strongly.
I looked for a manifold market on whether anyone gets nuked, and considered making one when I didn't find it. But:
- If the implied probability is high, generals might be more likely to push the button. So someone who wants someone to get nuked can buy YES.
- If the implied probability is low, generals can get mana by buying YES and pushing the button. I... don't think any of the generals will be very motivated by that? But not great.
So I decided not to.
No they’re not interchangeable. They are all designed with each other in mind, along the spectrum, to maximize profits under constraints, and the reality of rivalrousness is one reason to not simply try to run at 100% capacity every instant.
I can't tell what this paragraph is responding to. What are "they"?
You explained they popped up from the ground. Those are just about the most excludable toilets in existence!
Okay I do feel a bit silly for missing this... but I also still maintain that "allows everyone or no one to use" is a stretch when it comes to excludability. (Like, if the reason we're talking about it is "can the free market provide this service at a profit", then we care about "can the provider limit access to people who are paying for it". If they can't do that, do we care that they can turn the service off during the day and on at night?)
Overall it still seems like you want to use words in a way that I think is unhelpful.
Idk, I think my reaction here is that you're defining terms far more broadly than is actually going to be helpful in practice. Like, excludability and rivalry are spectrums in multiple dimensions, and if we're going to treat them as binaries then sure, we could say anything with a hint of them counts in the "yes" bin, but... I think for most purposes,
- "occasionally, someone else arrives at the parking lot at the same time as me, and then I have to spend a minute or so waiting for the pay-and-display meter"
is closer to
- "other people using the parking lot doesn't affect me"
than it is to
- "when I get to the parking lot there are often no spaces at all"
I wouldn't even say that: bathrooms are highly rivalrous and this is why they need to be so overbuilt in terms of capacity. While working at a cinema, did you never notice the lines for the womens' bathroom vs the mens' bathroom once a big movie let out? And that like 99% of the time the bathrooms were completely empty?
My memory is we didn't often have that problem, but it was over ten years ago so dunno.
I'd say part of why they're (generally in my experience) low-rivalrous is because they're overbuilt. They (generally in my experience) have enough capacity that people typically don't have to wait, and when they do have to wait they don't have to wait long. There are exceptions (during the interval at a theatre), but it still seems to me that most bathrooms (as they actually exist, and not hypothetical other bathrooms that had been built with less capacity) are low-rivalrous.
None of your examples are a counterexample. All of them are excludable, and you explain how and that the operators choose not to.
I'm willing to concede on the ones that could be pay gated but aren't, though I still think "how easy is it to install a pay gate" matters.
But did you miss my example of the pop-up urinals? I did not explain how those are excludable, and I maintain that they're not.
Thing I've been wrong about for a long time: I remembered that the rocket equation "is exponential", but I thought it was exponential in dry mass. It's not, it's linear in dry mass and exponential in Δv.
This explains a lot of times where I've been reading SF and was mildly surprised at how cavalier people seemed to be about payload, like allowing astronauts to have personal items.
Sorry, I didn't see this notification until after - did you find us?
I agree that econ 101 models are sometimes incorrect or inapplicable. But
I don’t know how much that additional cost is, but seemingly less than the benefit, because three months later, the whole of Germany wants to introduce this card. The introduction has to be delayed by some legal issues, and then a few counties want to introduce it independently. So popular is this special card!
The argument here seems to be that the card must satisfy a cost-benefit analysis or it wouldn't be so popular, and I don't buy that either.
Ah, I can sometimes make fridays but not tomorrow. Hope it goes well.
they turn a C/G base pair to an A/T, or vice versa.
Can they also turn it into a G/C or a T/A? I wasn't sure if this was an example or a "this is the only edit they do". Or I might just be misunderstanding and this question is wrong.
I think Ben's proposal is: between rounds, it takes a while to split the whole deck into suits, all hearts in one pile and all spades in another and so on. Instead you can just pick out four hearts, and four spades, and so on, and remove 0/2/2/4 cards from those piles, and shuffle the rest back into the deck. But no matter how you shuffle, I don't think you can do that without leaking information.
The Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson
I think I've read this twice, in my early teens and early twenties, and loved it both times. But I'm now 34 and can't talk about it in depth. I think past-me especially liked the grimness and was impressed at how characters seemed to be doing things for internally motivated reasons. (IIRC Donaldson calls this giving characters "dignity". I feel like since then I've picked up another term for it that's temporarily slipped my mind.)
I still think A Dark and Hungry God Arises and This Day All Gods Die are excellent book titles.
A caveat is that back then I also loved Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books, and I think that by my mid-twenties I enjoyed them but not so much. So plausibly I'd like the Gap Cycle less now than then too? But I want to re-read.
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
I once saw a conversation that went something like: "I don't find writing quality in sci-fi that important." / "You clearly haven't read Too Like the Lightning".
I wasn't sure if the second person meant TLTL's writing is good or bad. Having read TLTL, both interpretations seemed plausible. (They meant good.)
I found it very difficult to get through this book, except that the last few chapters were kind of gripping. That was enough to get me to read the next one, which was hard to get through again. Ultimately I read the whole series, and I'm not sure how much I enjoyed the process of reading it. But they're some of my favorite books to have read, and I can imagine myself re-reading them.
Crystal trilogy by Max Harms
I enjoyed this but don't have much to say. As an AI safety parable it seemed plausible enough; I hadn't previously seen aliens like that; I occasionally thought some of the writing was amateurish in a way I couldn't put my finger on, but that wasn't a big deal.
just make 4 piles of 4 cards from each suit and remove from those
I don't think you can do this because at least one person will see which cards are in those piles, and then seeing those cards in game will give them more info than they're supposed to have. E.g. if they see 9h in one of the piles and then 9h in game, they know hearts isn't the 8-card suit.
(The rules as written are unclear on this. But I assume that you're meant to remove cards at random from the suits, rather than having e.g. A-8 in one suit, A-Q in one, and A-10 in the other two. If you did that then getting dealt the Q or J would be a dead giveaway.)
I think Causality would be good for this. Levels have their full state visible from the start, and there's no randomness. There's a relatively small number of mechanics to learn, though I worry that some of them (particularly around details of movement, like "what will an astronaut do when they can't move forward any more?") might be "there are multiple equally good guesses here" which seems suboptimal.
Actually, there's one detail of state that I'm not sure is visible, in some levels:
When you come out of a portal, which way do you face? I think there's probably a consistent rule for this but I'm not sure, I could believe that in some levels you just have to try it to see.
they are by definition rivalrous ("the consumption of a good or service by one person diminishes the ability of another person to consume the same good or service"), as only one person in a stall at a time, and the timeframe doesn't matter to this point.
Why does timeframe not matter? If there's a pay-and-display parking lot, with enough spaces for everyone, but only one ticket machine, would you say this is rivalrous because only one person can be using the ticket machine at once?
Bathrooms aren't zero rivalrous, but they seem fairly low-rivalrous to me. (There are some people for whom bathroom use is more urgent, making bathrooms more rivalrous, e.g. pregnant people and those with certain disabilities. My understanding is these people sometimes get access to extra bathrooms that the rest of us don't.)
(As for dirtiness, all I can say is that the public bathrooms I've used tend to be somewhere between "just fine" and "unpleasant but bearable". I did once have to clean shit from the toilet walls in the cinema where I used to work, but I believe it's literally once in my life I've encountered that. Obviously people will have very different experiences here.)
they are extremely excludable: "Excludability refers to the characteristic of a good or service that allows its provider to prevent some people from using it."
Depends on details. London has some street urinals that afaict pop up at night, they have no locks or even walls, they're nonexcludable. Some are "open to everyone the attendant decides to let in", and some are "open to everyone with a credit card", and these seem just straightforwardly excludable. Other bathrooms can be locked but have no attendant and no means of accepting payment, so they're either "open to everyone" or "closed to everyone", and calling that "excludable" feels like a stretch to me. I suppose you could say that you could install a pay gate so it's "excludable but currently choosing not to exclude people", but then it depends how easy it is to install one of them.
So I guess Stuart is named for John Stuart Mill and Milton for Milton Friedman, but what about Carla (is CARLA an acronym?) and Victoria (Tori?)?
Note that to the extent this is true, it suggests verification is even harder than John thinks.
In any case, where is this hedging discussion happening?
I've seen and taken part in discussions about hedging on LW, but the thing that made me write this comment was a conversation on Duncan Sabien's facebook.
What things are over-discussed?
Interesting question, but nothing comes to mind.
A thing that feels under-discussed when it comes to hedging is, hedging doesn't just have to be swapping from "X" to "I believe X". You can say "the sky looks blue" or "wikipedia says the sky is blue" or "rumor has it the sky is blue" or "IIRC the sky is blue" or "if I did the math right, the sky is blue".
I for one welcome our new AI overlord whom I unwittingly helped install. Otherwise I'd need to feel conflicted about my actions this weekend.
I still have questions about one of the puzzles. Will the solutions be made available somewhere (ideally in a format where people can try them unspoiled first), or should I just ask?
Ah, thanks, I see now. You're saying that even if it's written with the small end before the big end according to the way the words flow, the direction of eye scanning and of mentally parsing and of giving a name to the number is still big end before small end? Similarly I might write a single word sdrawkcab in English text but the reader would still read it first-letter-to-last-letter.
Curious, when handwriting, what order do you write in?
Even better, Daniel then get to keep his equity
I missed this part?
Isn't this showing that Hebrew and Arabic write numbers little-endian? Surely big-versus-little-endian isn't about left-to-right or right-to-left, it's about how numbers flow relative to word reading order.
Ask me about the 2019 NYC Solstice Afterparty sometime if you want a minor ops horror story.
Consider yourself asked.
(I confess I have no idea how to interpret the agree-votes on this.)
Yeah, I was wrong to suggest/assume that the definition is original to you and not the way it's defined in other communities that I just am not familiar with.
It still seems like you're making the core mistake I was trying to point at, which is asserting that a word means something different than what other people mean by it; rather than acknowledging that sometimes words have different meanings in different contexts.
Like, people are talking about what sort of toppings should be on a donut and how large the hole should be, and you're chiming in to say you came around on donuts when you realized that instead of being ring-shaped with toppings they're ball-shaped with fillings. You didn't come around on donuts. You just discovered that even though you don't like ring donuts, you do like filled donuts, a related but different baked good.
I only came around on faith once I realized it was just Latin for trust, and specifically trust in the world to be just as it is.
This really just seems to me like you're asserting that what a word "really means" is some weird new definition that ~no one else means when they say the word.
(I don't know Latin. Nevertheless I am extremely confident that the word "faith" in Latin does not specifically refer to the concept of "trust in the world to be just as it is".)
Also now running as an in-progress youtube short series. (I haven't read the original.)
"It seems a lot of our pills cause vomiting as a side-effect?"
"Yeah, the company knows about it but it's tricky to fix."
"How so? Our competitors don't have this problem, and we make basically the same products, right?"
"Right, no, it's a corporate structure issue."
"?"
"If a pill does too much or too little of something, we have a group of clever people whose job it is to care about that and to reformulate it slightly to improve it. If it doesn't kill enough pain, the analgesic division will step in. If it causes clotting, the anticoagulant folks have a look. If it makes your bones brittle, it'll be the antiosteoporosises. You see? But if it causes vomiting-"
"Right, yeah. There's no one to take ownership of the problem, because-"
"There is no antiemetics division."
Oh, huh. Searle's original Chinese room paper (first eight pages) doesn't say machines can't think.
"OK, but could a digital computer think?"
If by "digital computer" we mean anything at all that has a level of description where it can correctly be described as the instantiation of a computer program, then again the answer is, of course, yes, since we are the instantiations of any number of computer programs, and we can think.
"But could something think, understand, and so on solely in virtue of being a computer with the right sort of program? Could instantiating a program, the right program of course, by itself be a sufficient condition of understanding?"
This I think is the right question to ask, though it is usually confused with one or more of the earlier questions, and the answer to it is no.
"Why not?"
Because the formal symbol manipulations by themselves don't have any intentionality; they are quite meaningless; they aren't even symbol manipulations, since the symbols don't symbolize anything. In the linguistic jargon, they have only a syntax but no semantics. Such intentionality as computers appear to have is solely in the minds of those who program them and those who use them, those who send in the input and those who interpret the output.
I can't say I really understand what he's trying to say, but it's different from what I thought it was.
Yeah. It's still possible to program in such a way that that works, and it's always been possible to program in such a way that it doesn't work. But prepared statements make it easier to program in such a way that it doesn't work, by allowing the programmer to pass executable code (which is probably directly embedded as a literal in their application language) separately from the parameters (which may be user-supplied).
(I could imagine a SQL implementation forbidding all strings directly embedded in queries, and requiring them to be passed through prepared statements or a similar mechanism. That still wouldn't make these attacks outright impossible, but it would be an added layer of security.)
A large majority of empirical evidence reported in leading economics journals is potentially misleading. Results reported to be statistically significant are about as likely to be misleading as not (falsely positive) and statistically nonsignificant results are much more likely to be misleading (falsely negative). We also compare observational to experimental research and find that the quality of experimental economic evidence is notably higher.
I'm confused by this "falsely negative". Like, without that, that part sounds like it's saying something like
when a result is reported as "we observed a small effect here, but it wasn't statistically significant", then more often than not, there's no real effect there
but that's a false positive. If they're saying it's a false negative, it suggests something like
when a result is reported as statistically insignificant, that makes it sound like there's no effect there, but more often than not there actually is an effect
...but that's (a) not a natural reading of that part and (b) surely not true.
Were SQL a better language this wouldn’t be possible, all the command strings would separated somehow
SQL does support prepared statements which forbid injection. Maybe you're thinking of something stronger than this? I'm not sure how long they've been around for, but wikipedia's list of SQL injection examples only has two since 2015 which hints that SQL injection is much less common than it used to be.
(Pedantic clarification: dunno if this is in any SQL standard, but it looks like every SQL implementation I can think of supports them.)
Planet Money #902 (28 Mar 2019): The Phoebus Cartel
Listened to this one a few weeks ago and don't remember most of it. But half the episode was about the phoebus cartel, a case of planned obsolesence when lightbulb manufacturers decided that no light bulb should be allowed to last more than 1000 hours.
Writing this for Gell-Mann amnesia reasons: in the episode someone says there was no benefit to consumers from this, but I'd recently seen a technology connections episode on the subject saying that longer lasting incandescent light bulbs are less energy efficient (i.e. more heat less light) for physics reasons, to the extent that they could easily be more expensive over their lifetime. Seems like an important caveat that PM missed!
The other half was about psychological obsolesence, where manufacturers make long-lasting goods like cars cosmetically different to convince you you need a new one.
Planet Money #1717 (9 Feb 2024): A Lawsuit for your broken heart
Keith met woman, fell in love, got married, had kids. She helped with his BMX company and she'd post sickeningly cute things on facebook about how she had the best family.
Then Keith saw some very messages she was exchanging with some other guy (from him: «do you like how tall I am», «show me a bikini pic», that kind of thing). He got mad, called him, said «never fucking talk to my wife again» and thought that would be the end of it.
It was not the end of it. She had affair, they got divorced. A bit later he was catching up with an old school friend who'd been in a similar situation, and she told him she was suing the woman her husband had cheated with. You can do that?
These are heartbalm laws and they're kind of archaic. In the past if a woman got engaged and the man broke things off, she could be ruined, so she got to sue him for breach of promise. There's also seduction, where she could sue someone for lying her into bed. And criminal conversation, which is adultery. And the one relevant to the show, alienation of affections, where you can sue someone for damaging your marriage.
Most states have abolished these, partly because public perception moved towards women using these in ways that were unpopular, this is where the term "gold digger" took off. There were also a bunch of famous people who got sued.
But a few states still have alienation of affections, including North Carolina, which is where most of the suits are. Possibly because that's where most of the legal experts in them are.
Keith presents evidence that his marriage would otherwise have been happy: the sickeningly cute facebook posts, messages between him and his ex, messages from her to her girlfriends saying the marriage would have been fine if not for this other guy. (She subsequently married him.)
And because marriage is in part an economic arrangement, his lawyer also talks about the work that the ex had been doing for the company, and all the unpaid labor she was doing like childcare and washing dishes. The hosts point out it's kinda weird that Keith is suing some other guy for the unpaid labor his ex wife used to do. But that's what's happening, and Keith wins the suit and is awarded $8 million.
Other guy files for bankruptcy. Keith probably won't get anything from him, and still owes his lawyers thousands of dollars in fees. But he says it was worth it.
Nice!
Wikipedia says his mission began on 08/29/1498 and ended on 01/07/1499 (so about 3 months).
It looks like this is just one leg of the return journey. In total the outward journey was about 10 months and the return was about 11, and both spent 3+ months without landing.
Hm, do you want to go into more depth? Intuitively I agree this is obviously distortionary, but I'm finding it awkward to think through the details of the distortion.
One thing that comes to mind is "if the market is at 10% but you think 5% is "correct" according to what seems like the spirit of the question, you're going to expect that the market just doesn't get resolved, so why bother betting it down". But I feel like there's probably more than that. (E: oh, the dynomight essay linked above mentions this one as well.)
Thanks! Yeah, I think that's making the same basic point with a different focus.
And that makes me more confident in changing the title, so doing that now. (Original title: "Conditional prediction markets are, specifically, conditioned on the thing happening".)
Maybe a pithier title would be "Conditional prediction markets are evidential, not causal"?
The problem was so common that shipowners and governments assumed a 50% death rate from scurvy for their sailors on any major voyage.
Sticking my neck out: roll to disbelieve that 50% of sailors on major voyages died in general, let alone specifically of scurvy.
Ways to change the claim that I'd find much more believable:
- 50% of those who got scurvy died of it
- A 50% death rate was considered plausible, and the possibility was planned for, but it wasn't common
- "Major voyage" here is a much smaller category than I expect; think Magellan rather than Columbus.
Note that in general there's no contradiction between
"X is a very not-Y trait, in fact just about the least Y trait there is"
And
"Nevertheless, one can be X and also overall very Y"
Planet Money: The Maine Potato War
The standard potato today is the russet, mostly associated with Idaho and Washington, but in the... 70s? 80s?... it was some other kind from Maine.
These potatos were sold on the New York Mercantile Exchange, and in particular you could buy and sell futures there. Futures are good for hedging, farmers could lock in the price early to avoid risk of a crash, and buyers could lock it in early to avoid risk of a rise. You could also just speculate, with no intention of ever seeing a potato. Speculators are generally good for markets because they put a bunch of money in there which helps them flow better.
The big Western potato farmers didn't like that Maine potatos were on the exchange, because it gave them an advantage. So one year they entered the market with like a million dollars worth of contracts. (I vaguely recall that these were buy contracts, but I think it fits better with the rest of the story if they were sell.) Trading is weird for the year, and when things finally play out after close date, the Western farmers collectively owe the market millions of pounds of Maine potatoes, possibly more than existed in the entire state of Maine.
They try to get around it by offering russet potatoes instead, but buyers say no dice. So in the end they just default. They have to pay back the buyers plus pay heavy fines. I think banned from the exchange for a bit? Short term expensive for them.
But long term very good for them! Markets don't like defaults, so the Maine potatoes are removed from the exchange a bit later.
I think he is using the argument as a soldier.
I see. That's not a sense I pick up on myself, but I suppose it's not worth litigating.
To be clear, skimming my previous posts, I don't see anything that I don't endorse when it comes to literary criticism. Like, if I've said something that you agree with most of the time, but disagree with for literary criticism, then we likely disagree. (Though of course there may be subtleties e.g. in the way that I think something applies when the topic is literary criticism.)
You mention that “awesome” and “terrible” are very subjective words, unlike “blue”, and this is relevant. I agree. Similarly, media criticism is very subjective, unlike dress colors.
Media criticism can be very subjective, but it doesn't have to be. "I love Star Wars" is more subjective than "Star Wars is great" is more subjective than "Star Wars is a technical masterpiece of the art of filmmaking" is more subjective than "Star Wars is a book about a young boy who goes to wizard school". And as I said above:
I’m comfortable with “Luke is a Jedi”, and I think it’s importantly different from, say, “Yoda is wise” or “the Death Star is indestructible” or “the Emperor has been defeated once and for all”.
And I think the ways it’s different are similar to the differences between claims about base-level reality like “Tim Cook is a CEO” versus “the Dalai Lama is wise” or “the Titanic is unsinkable” or “Napoleon has been defeated once and for all”.