reckoner2

People seem to believe that cryptocurrencies are either a scam/waste/bubble or that they are an amazing technology that the future of financial tech will be built upon. And there is this battle between the sides.

I think that both are equally true! Prices are obviously driven by speculation, there is tonnes of fraud, and no regulation. It is a wild wild west goldrush situation right now. Maybe this is unfortunate but I'm also not surprised by it. Isn't this how all markets get started? I don't have great sources but I think the situation was similar for the securities markets for many years.

I also think the blockchain is an incredibly remarkable piece of technology that it will be put to use in increasingly important and useful roles and that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. Both can be true.

How is this possibly true? I've increased my vertical jump by nearly two entire feet through years of training in volleyball. Everyone can increase their vertical just like they can increase their squat. It's a full body compound movement.

It is tough, if not impossible to know for sure in cases like these. The most effective way is the use of controlled studies. The population is split such that the only difference between the groups is one variable. The very simplified version is that sometimes you find that there is only evidence for a correlation (between say relationships and good health), and other times you can find evidence for causation.

In this case it looks like they found the later.

The quality of social interaction is very important. None of the relationships you described seemed overly healthy. The study shows that it was good, warm, reciprocal relationships that factored into improved mental health. I work on a trading floor as well, and while I do enjoy it, I put in lots of work to have healthy social relationships outside of work.

This approach has always interested me. I can train an decent Cats Vs. Dogs classifier in a few minutes. But real human intelligence takes many years of continuous and varied input to develop.

Are there systems out there that are taking influence from newborns being exposed to the world? An unsupervised learning system with a huge array of inputs running for years?

Has anyone been able to do this? Is anyone working on it?

I only follow the field as a hobby, but as far as I can tell we are nowhere near getting to this point. I think the ability to combine all these parts in a way that the sum is greater than it's parts is going to require many many breakthroughs still.

As an owner of an iPhone 7 and a Pixel I'd say there are not many. Google Assistant is way ahead of Siri at pretty much every imaginable task, and Google Photos can do a lot more than iOS Photos.

That said, none of those features interest me much. And I'm not sure how many average consumers they do interest. It's more of a 'oh, that's cool I guess'. I prefer my iPhone 7 still.

This might not be a useful answer for you, but are you sure any of that is necessary? You can spend months pre-validating an idea and never get anywhere.

Go talk to potential customers now. Find people who are willing to pay for what your are going to build. Once you know they exist, then you can start worrying about market size and the rest. At this point having real life people who want to pay you is infinitely more valuable than any hypothetical data and analysis.

> However, a human prodigy can apply their genius to many domains

I'm not sure how true this is. It's pretty rare to find someone who is a genius in more than one domain. Einstein was famously offered the presidency of Israel. Sure, he could probably do well in other sciences, but he was smart enough to know he could not apply his genius to unrelated domains.

There are professionals out there whose job it is to help out people in situations like yours. Before you make any life changing decisions I would talk to one.

CEO's, Hedgefund Managers, Sport Stars, they all talk to psychologists. Give it a try.

I don't mean to come off as harsh, but your reasons are wrong. Piketty isn't some random guy who threw together some numbers and came up with a theory. His work is extensively researched and reviewed. He's thought of and responded to every objection you made. If you are interested in the topic then you should definitely read his book.

Take a look at your numbers again. You have made multiple mistakes. Your 8.4% annualized rate is wrong - You can't just take the start and end points to calculate an average. Plus, you are plugging quarterly data into yearly calculations.

> Here is a question Piketty didn't ask: what percent of dynastic, billionaire wealth was created in a single generation in America? Not addressed at all. (And I read his book and wrote to him with my criticism, which he didn't reply to.)

Actually he has addressed this, and the answer is relatively little. Most wealth in the world is passed down from one generation to the next, growing at a rate faster than the economy in general. Many of the richest families in the world from centuries ago are still the richest families. Other than in small pockets of the world, like silicon valley, new money is pretty rare.

Some thoughts: While working in finance I was able to talk to many people who's work was related to economics. Employees at banks and brokerages, governments and regulator bodies. Most had heard of Piketty, and many agreed with his basic premises (r>g, and all it entails). His reach actually surprised me.

But I also had contact with academics, and like the article said, it's not so much that academics are refuting Piketty, but that they simply aren't studying the same problems that he is talking about. From what I've been told, a lot of academic work in economics is focused on incredibly unique and specific problems. It isn't "fashionable" to be studying something so broad and perhaps abstract as inequality.