Independent watchmaker in Germany | Building Tourbillon watches
Oppenheim, Deutschland
Joined January 2022
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Robin Israel retweeted
Heard this today from a smart European:
Europe has subcontracted security to America. Its economy to China. Energy to Russia and its labor force to the Islamists.
This model now has completely collapsed.
Robin Israel retweeted
9/ That’s why I find it misleading to say that @stephen_wolfram has shown that complicated strategies “vastly outperform” Tit for Tat, if that is meant as a general conclusion about which strategies succeed.
What he has shown is that they outperform Tit for Tat in the first tournament, against the initial uniform distribution of strategies. That’s interesting. But it is not the same as showing that they prevail under evolutionary dynamics.
10/ And there is a second unanswered question. Axelrod’s deepest conclusion was never merely “Tit for Tat wins.”
He identified qualitative characteristics of successful strategies: they tend to be nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear.
Do Stephen’s successful finite-state machines obey those principles? Do they violate them? Do entirely new principles emerge? I would genuinely like to know. Stephen doesn’t really ask.
11/ In fact, I like one part of Stephen’s approach very much: exploring an entire class of strategies rather than privileging a few favorites.
But Nowak and Sigmund had already made essentially that methodological move, for a different class of strategies — and then took the crucial next step of studying the flow on strategy space.
12/ So I don’t think the issue between us is simple versus complex. Nor is it whether toy models adequately describe the real world.
The issue I’m raising is a static all-against-all tournament versus evolutionary dynamics.
Those are different experiments, answering different questions.
13/ Here is the experiment I’d like to see with Stephen’s finite-state machines.
Start with his wonderfully rich strategy space. Start uniformly if you like. Have everybody play everybody, just as Stephen does. Then use the results to change the population and do it again. And again.
Now watch the distribution flow through strategy space.
What survives? What invades what? What are the attractors? Are there cycles? And what general principles characterize the strategies favored by the long-term dynamics?
14/ Until we know that, I don’t see Stephen’s result as a debunking of Axelrod. I see it as the first step in a potentially very interesting evolutionary experiment — one that stops just where, for me, the most interesting science begins.
I’d be very interested to know where you disagree with this. And as I said before, I’d enjoy discussing it with you and Stephen sometime rather than trying to sort it all out on X.
Robin Israel retweeted
Dear Nassim @nntaleb,
I’ve seen you refer a few times to @stephen_wolfram's recent finite-state-machine experiments with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and in particular to his finding that some of the more complicated strategies vastly outperform Tit for Tat. Since I think you and I may still be speaking past each other about what bothers me here, I wanted to spell out my position carefully.
I wrote out this long note with the help of ChatGPT. The ideas and arguments are mine; the language is ChatGPT’s, with my approval.
1/ First, I’m not trying to defend the Prisoner’s Dilemma, game theory, or simple models as adequate descriptions of the real world. Maybe they are adequate, maybe they aren’t. That’s a separate question.
What I’m interested in here is much narrower. I want to compare simulations with simulations — Axelrod’s, Nowak and Sigmund’s, and Wolfram’s — and ask what their results actually show.
2/ Stephen does something interesting and very much in his characteristic style. Instead of hand-picking a few strategies and having them compete, he enumerates all finite-state strategies of a given size and has every strategy play every other strategy in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.
He then ranks the strategies by how well they did against this initial, uniform field of opponents. Some complicated strategies substantially outperform Tit for Tat.
Fine. I believe the computation. But then, essentially, he stops.
3/ This is the key point for me. There is no next generation in which the successful strategies become more abundant and the unsuccessful ones become rarer. There is no repeated selection changing the population of opponents.
Stephen has performed what amounts to one round of an evolutionary tournament: everybody plays everybody, their scores are calculated, and we see who did best against the original population. But the population itself is not then allowed to evolve.
4/ That matters enormously because the original population contains every strategy in equal abundance, including lots of terrible ones: unconditional cooperators, easily exploited strategies, and other “suckers.”
A strategy that is particularly good at exploiting those weak strategies can score spectacularly well in that first tournament.
5/ But suppose we now use those scores to form the next generation. The suckers become rarer or disappear. The successful strategies become more common. Everybody now faces a different distribution of opponents.
So you run the tournament again. And again. And again.
What succeeds in round 1 need not succeed in round 10, or round 1,000, because the strategies themselves create the environment in which subsequent selection occurs.
6/ This isn’t merely a hypothetical objection. Decades ago, Martin Nowak and Karl Sigmund took a closely related methodological approach. They considered an entire parameterized family of strategies rather than a few hand-picked favorites, started with a broad distribution across strategy space, and then did the crucial thing that Stephen does not do here: they let the population evolve.
7/ What happens is fascinating. Early on, nasty strategies can flourish by exploiting weak ones. But as the weak strategies disappear, the ecology changes, and reciprocal strategies can prosper.
With errors present, more forgiving strategies can emerge. If the population becomes too forgiving, exploiters can invade again. The result can be extraordinarily long evolutionary transients and cycles.
8/ So there may be no meaningful sense in which one strategy simply “wins.” Success is frequency-dependent: it depends on which other strategies are currently abundant, and those abundances themselves change through selection.
Robin Israel retweeted
I'm on a mission to make this plot as publicly recognizable as the one with the holes in the WW2 airplane
Robin Israel retweeted
nothing in social science is axiomatic. MV = PY is a theory. However i would argue that it explains and resolve huge amounts of confusion in economics.
and yes money printing generally means prices go up. but its not that simple.
The variables are not completely independent. By printing money you can give it to people and those people have an incentivize to spend it (partly because it will become worth less over time but that’s a whole nother can of worms) which increases V (economic activity) which increases P (prices) but also Y (economic output) because more people with more money spending it increases demand which increases the incentivize to increase supply which drives building of new stuff.
This is exactly how the fed works and why it expands the money supply when there is an economic downturn and then contracts it when there is an economic boom.
The problem is that this creates a vicious cycle where printing money spurs growth but not necessarily productive growth because people are spending it because their dollars will be worth less in the future rather than because that thing itself is really worth it to them.
Furthermore, this creates a parasitic effect which saps purchasing power from the people who touch the new dollars last (because by then the new higher prices will have settled into the economy) and gives its to the people who got them first (because they could spend them before all the prices went up). This is known as the cantillon effect and is a huge component of our worsening income inequality.
furthermore, the fact that everyone knows the fed will just print money to bail the economy out when they take too much risk or invest in stupid things, it causes the system to go way out on the risk curve and spend artificially. This leads to a cycle where the money supply is never fully contracted by the time the last “hit” wears off, leading to a slow increase in the money supply over time.
The fed, and most economists, argues that without inflation you would see slow economic growth because people would hoard dollars instead of spending, expecting the purchasing power of their dollars to appreciate. However Austrian economists argue that people will still spend they will just spend more intelligently thus leading to more sustainable growth.
To the fed’s credit, if all your competitors are juicing and you aren’t, you are gonna lose. Furthermore, people are irrational and prone to hype cycles. If the fed did not control the money supply, we could see run away bubbles or run away depressions, due to the reflexivity of economies (bullishness begets bullishness, bearishness begets bearishness).
At the end of the day, the fed is stuck between a rock and a hard place and the only viable solution is to print baby print.
Thus, really your only option as an individual to not have all your wealth inflated away is to own as many durable scarce assets as you can which will appreciate (or ideally outpace) the price increases.
Robin Israel retweeted
I think a lot of people are very confused about the whole discussion about platforming, censorship etc.
I believe it is your right to eat anything you want. Even things that are terrible for you, like dog shit.
I also believe that it is your right to tell other people that you enjoy eating dog shit.
I also believe it is your right to have people on your show who believe eating dog shit is good for you. Even if you don't challenge them at all, while challenging anyone who comes on your show to say dog shit eating might be bad for you.
I also believe it is my right to say that what you are doing is wrong, bad and harmful. It is my right to point out that you are clearly partisan on the dog-shit-eating issue and in the wrong direction. It is also my right to say that in promoting terrible ideas you are being irresponsible. It is also my right to not want to associate with you and to think that other right-thinking people shouldn't either.
This simple distinction appears to be beyond a lot of people. Just because you hold or promote terrible ideas doesn't mean you should be censored or prevented from speaking. But I think it is essential that you are challenged very robustly on those ideas.
The Right has been so (rightly) focussed on defending free speech that many people now routinely (and in some cases deliberately) confuse criticism for censorship.
Any movement has to engage in a battle of ideas to work out which ideas it wants to adopt and which it doesn't want to include. Saying "this idea should not be acceptable in our movement" is not censorship, it's hygiene.
Charlie Kirk understood this very well. It's amazing how so many people who call themselves his friends do not.
Robin Israel retweeted
The key to having more time is doing less, and there are two paths to getting there, both of which should be used together:
(1) Define a to-do list and (2) define a not-to-do list.
In general terms, there are but two questions:
What 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?
What 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcome and happiness?
The goal is to find your inefficiencies in order to eliminate them and to find your strengths so you can multiply them.
Robin Israel retweeted
6yo: What’s the biggest number?
Me: There are an infinite number of numbers so there’s no biggest one.
6yo: What’s the biggest number you know the name of?
Me: A googolplex.
6yo: Which is bigger, a googolplex or a googoobazillion?
Me: There’s not a number named a googoobazillion.
6yo: If there are an infinite number of numbers, there must be one named a googoobazillion.
Checkmate.
Robin Israel retweeted
Relative fat mass, a measure that uses only height and waist measurements, is more closely correlated to body fat percent than is body mass index.
Here's the formula for relative fat mass:
Robin Israel retweeted
We’re drowning in dopamine.
Why scrolling, snacking, and bingeing leaves you feeling empty... 🧵
Robin Israel retweeted
This one made me laugh. Germany closed its perfectly fine nuclear power plants, decimated its industry with higher energy prices, damaged the climate with keeping coal power plants instead, and it started importing French nuclear power.
Can you name a bigger nonsense?
Chart @DanielKral1
It's possible that much of the bad stuff happening in the western world during the last two decades is the result of constant chinese intelligence work.
The German industrial downfall and the American woke culture war are only two examples that could be the result of mass manipulation.
Robin Israel retweeted
Britischer Konfliktforscher warnt vor Bürgerkrieg: „Fast alle Voraussetzungen erfüllt“
Der britische Konfliktforscher Professor David Betz vom King’s College in London warnt im Gespräch mit der „Berliner Zeitung“ vor der ernsthaften Möglichkeit von Bürgerkriegen in Westeuropa. Seine Prognose stützt sich auf etablierte wissenschaftliche Modelle, sagt er, und antwortet auf die Frage, was ihn in seiner Analyse bestärkt: „Weil in Westeuropa heute fast alle strukturellen Voraussetzungen für einen Bürgerkrieg erfüllt sind – und zwar in einer Form, wie man sie in der Fachliteratur als geradezu ,idealtypisch‘ bezeichnen würde.“ Er nennt drei Hauptindikatoren: die tiefe gesellschaftliche Spaltung, einen beschleunigten Statusverlust der ehedem dominierenden Mehrheitsbevölkerung und einen dramatischen Zusammenbruch des Vertrauens in die Institutionen.
Die Spaltung sieht Betz darin begründet, daß politische Debatten heute nicht mehr an Sachfragen, sondern an Identität, Ideologie und Gruppenzugehörigkeit festgemacht würden. Besonders gefährlich sei die „polarisierte Fraktionalisierung“, bei der man sich nach der Linie der eigenen „Stammesgemeinschaft“ richte. Der Statusverlust – zweite Voraussetzung –, in der Forschung „Downgrading“ genannt, bedeute, „daß nicht mehr die Sprache, Werte und politischen Prioritäten dieser (bald ehemaligen) Mehrheit den Ton angeben“. Dieser Prozeß sei jedoch kein Volkswille, sondern werde von post-nationalen Eliten vorangetrieben, für die „Nation und Grenzen Anachronismen“ seien. Der Zusammenbruch des Vertrauens schließlich führe dazu, daß Gesellschaften „sozial bankrott‘ gehen“ könnten.
Ökonomische Faktoren verstärkten die Gefahr: stagnierende Produktivität, explodierende Verschuldung und der Bruch des Versprechens, daß es der nächsten Generation besser gehen werde. Multikulturalismus und Identitätspolitik hätten die gemeinsame Basis zerstört. Sollte es zum Konflikt kommen, stünden sich laut Betz zwei Hauptlager gegenüber: „Nationalisten gegen Post-Nationale“ und „Einheimische gegen Neuankömmlinge“. Betz hält zwar langfristig einen Sieg der nationalen Idee für wahrscheinlich, warnt aber vor einem enormen Preis: „unzählige Tote, zerstörte Infrastruktur, jahrzehntelanger Wiederaufbau“.
Auf die Frage, warum seine Kollegen das Thema nicht öffentlich thematisierten, antwortet der britische Forscher: „Meine Thesen stützen sich auf etablierte Forschung. Die Annahme, der Westen sei ,immun‘ gegen Bürgerkrieg, ist wissenschaftlich nicht haltbar. Viele Fachkollegen sehen ähnliche Risiken, äußern sich aber nur hinter verschlossenen Türen.“ Die Wahrscheinlichkeit eines Ausbruchs innerhalb der nächsten fünf Jahre schätzt er als hoch ein, da er „keinerlei politische Anzeichen für eine ernsthafte Problemlösung“ sehe.
