zjacobi
Joined 9 years ago
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Member since
Dec 19
Recent submissions
Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
That's for the joystick. The actual glasses have a much larger battery.
Comment · 8 years ago
First: longer days worries me if they aren't starting later. American schools start WAY TOO EARLY and probably make children chronically tired because of this. See https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/parenting/back-to-schoo...
Second: Even if this school has good results, it seems unlikely that it will scale well, because it's relying on more money (from outside donors, etc.). You can't throw more money at a problem, then declare you've come up with a general solution.
From Larry Summers talking with Tyler Cowen:
COWEN: And this is K–12.
SUMMERS: Yeah. That’s likely to be the most effective thing that you can do, but that you need to be very careful not to succeed by cannibalization. Many, too many, philanthropists interested in education decide they’re going to set up a charter school. Only their charter school is only going to admit highly motivated kids with highly motivated parents.
Their charter school’s going to pay 20 percent more than the regular schools and cherry-pick the best teachers out of the regular schools. Then they’re going to be really thrilled about how they have better achievement than the regular public schools when it’s clear from the nature of their model, selecting the kids and cherry-picking the teachers, that it is supremely nonreplicable.
I would say impose a replicability constraint on yourself and innovate in the area of education. My general view has been that a lot of the way successful innovation happens is alongside big systems.
(Link: https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-larr...)
Comment · 8 years ago
When Schwartz and Friedman wrote their monetary history, they found three variables that contributed to the total money supply:
1) High powered money supply produced by the central bank 2) Money held in deposits, available to be increased via the fractional reserve multiplier effect 3) The deposit:reserve ratio, which shows the strength of the fractional reserve multiplier effect
The financial crisis seems to have tanked 2 & 3, such that the Federal Reserve would have needed to do much more QE than it did to keep up with demand for money.
They also found that price growth and wage growth are affected by history: a history of slow money growth predicts an increase in money supply will be absorbed by more output. A history of high money growth suggests that more money growth will lead to modest output changes and an increase in inflation.
Scott Sumner echoes your fear about a coming recession, but thinks that appropriate NGDP growth via the right amount of money printing can lead to a soft landing without inflation. Given that this has been his entire career, I think it is very possible that we won't necessarily see renewed high inflation.
Scott Sumner post here: http://www.themoneyillusion.com/the-next-five-years/
Comment · 8 years ago
I've been reading through Anna Schwartz's papers on monetary economics and I think they're the real story on what economists still don't get about the 2008 crisis.
If you read through the old monetarist research, you see that change in money supply has a better correlation with recession than basically anything else. This holds true even when you control for the possibility of reverse causation, when you make sure that you're actually dealing with a leading indicator of this cycle rather than a lagging indicator of the next cycle, etc, etc.
Keynesians think that the only measure of how tight or loose monetary policy is comes from interest rates, so they can't wrap their heads around how 1% interest rates can still be tight money. The real story of the economics crisis is that the banking crisis deposit:reserve ratio through the floor. This means that a bunch of money disappeared as banks preferred liquidity. The central bank didn't do enough to replace this money, so people couldn't hold the money balances they wanted and stopped spending. The Fed said they were doing all they could to spur inflation, but that's obviously false. The central bank can always inflate the currency and the fact that they weren't hitting their inflation targets shows that they had tight money.
Keynesians ultimately don't think money is important enough to model and until they change that, they're going to be confused.
Comment · 8 years ago
I've played it a few times with friends and I have to agree the defenders have an easier time (although it certainly feels more intimidating to play the defender). I think defenders heavily benefit from most people's familiarity with chess. It's very easy to distract someone with pieces they can capture, then sneak your king out the side.
Comment · 8 years ago
> While the hc QI community was getting over checklists because of the number of studies showing it to be a largely ineffective intervention, he ignored the pile and kicked off a second wave
I just thumbed through meta-analyses on Google scholar and this definitely doesn't look like the results of recent research into checklists (e.g. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bjs.9381)
It seems like there are problems getting people to agree to do checklists or keep with them, but if you come up with the right checklist and get the right buy-in, you do see fewer complications.
(If anyone wants to look at the recent research for themselves, here's the Google Scholar search I used: https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?as_ylo=2014&q=checklist+su...)
Seems to give a huge productivity boost.