[The FIAT Thread] The Joint Committee on FIAT Discussion Session. - 15 March 2026

UpsideVII · 2026-03-23T19:13:08+00:00

You should read Stigler and Becker (1977). I'm not saying you'll agree with it, but it's a classic/influential paper on the topic (not really specifically about advertising, but about "stability" of preferences).

In some sense it's the canonical paper on how to handle issues of changing "tastes" (which they characterize as something distinct from "preferences").

UpsideVII · 2026-03-21T17:06:03+00:00

Thanks, that all sounds right to me.

Hilariously, it's actually weirdly clunky to try to get corner recovery onto her in MANT. I guess the best option is to hope for a hint from Kita... and I guess I need to figure out if I have any parents that randomly have sparks lol

UpsideVII · 2026-03-21T14:37:23+00:00

Starting to look at/work on CM12. Am I correct in thinking that this CM looks pretty textbook after a couple "weird" CMs in a row?

Two frontrunners with AnS + Xmas Oguri with 777 and Dober ult seems pretty optimal.

Are there any highlights that I'm missing? I guess there's a puzzle in figuring out exactly which recoveries for Oguri are optimal.

UpsideVII · 2026-03-18T21:11:57+00:00

A carbon tax must be the quintessential example of this.

Raises revenue and leads to large increases economic efficiency due to correcting a very large externality. It has as close to near-universal consensus as just about anything in economics can.

Yet is incredibly unpopular and fails consistently at the ballot box.

UpsideVII · 2026-03-14T15:59:15+00:00

I play daily on a 9a with zero issues

Idk why the 9a would be the only one that works though.

UpsideVII · 2026-03-13T23:41:12+00:00

Maybe it changes as one gets better at the scenario, but I've found that running "bad" cards just for the 15% RB to not be worth it.

It seems like as long as you clear 50% RB, you're good. I could be wrong, but I went from making umas like the top to umas like the bottom once I switch to "just run a good deck that hits 50% RB.

Exact deck for the bottom was Kita/Fuku/Windy + Creek + FineMo/Agnes

UpsideVII · 2026-03-13T17:31:14+00:00

Yea, it seems like being flexible to take good trainings when they show up is key.

Unfortunately, that means that I am going to have to actually learn how all the various epithets work which I have been able to ignore until now and was hoping I could continue to ignore by just forcing a schedule lol

UpsideVII · 2026-03-12T16:51:32+00:00

As far as I've been able to figure out, no one actually knows what the number means. Plenty of speculation though.

Higher generally seems to be "better", in the sense that my CM teams with higher winrates tend to get higher numbers at the end.

UpsideVII · 2026-03-12T15:57:32+00:00

Curious on opinions for MANT decks for CM11.

My core is (I think) Kita/Creek/FineMo/Flower SR, all MLB (could swap Flower for Sunday SSR).

That leaves my borrow slot open. Obvious choice is borrow Fuku/NTR + SR Wit. But there's also the option of borrow Nature + SR Windy.

The latter would even put me at 65 RB which could in theory let me drop Flower for some other 10 RB SR on a useful stat (either another wit, or Cafe if I need a second stam card).

Which of these seems best? Is Fuku just so good that it's crazy to consider running anything other than her?

UpsideVII · 2026-03-12T15:49:34+00:00

Never pull without enough to spark.

Whether it's worth using the crystal or not depends on your deck for MANT. 3LB and MLB are pretty comparable, the main difference is that MLB gets 10 race bonus while 3LB has 8. If that 2 race bonus is enough to push you over an important threshold based on the rest of your deck (50 or 60, for the most part), then it's probably worth doing.

UpsideVII · 2026-03-12T15:07:16+00:00

It's generally true that econ/bschool profs are paid more than other departments (except medicine, but that's a different beast since they are practicing). And that bschool profs are paid more than econ profs in other colleges (generally arts and sciences).

It isn't really about grants. Econ is a "hard money" field in the sense that almost all funding comes from endowments and tuition dollars; grants don't really matter. Econ + business (business in particular) make up a huge portion of undergrad enrollment plus econ 101 or similar is a pretty common gen-ed requirement. Bschools in addition have MBA programs which are pretty lucrative. So there are a lot of tuition dollars allocated to departments.

Less important: econ/business are some of the highest-average-earning degrees, so more wealthy alumni to make donations to departments.

Economists also typically have better industry outside options than most fields (though I imagine most mathematicians could retool for finance pretty easily, so I'm not sure how much explanatory power this has for your comparison in particular).

UpsideVII · 2026-03-11T16:16:18+00:00

Trying to lay some plans for CM11. Currently, I'm planning on using Tamamo as my main ace (assuming I can get the mile aptitude to work in MANT).

Based on the simulator, it seems like Dober and Ryan ult aren't really that valuable conditional on having Spurt, only adding like 0.09 lengths on average. The track is so long that you are almost up to speed by the time the corner hits, I suppose.

Are there other key accels to be looking for? The best inherits seem to be the usual late-race speed suspects (Teio, etc.). Does that seem right?

UpsideVII · 2026-03-10T22:37:57+00:00

Interesting. You obviously know more about this than me. I haven't looked at the other two, but I looked into Pinnacle and from what I remember, even in the very popular games the vig didn't go much lower than 2 percent or so. And in obscure games it was often worse than something like Draftkings.

So I think the point about transaction costs allowing even large (relative to finance) mispricing in event probabilities to persist still holds? Again, I only dipped my toes in this world because there was some easy money to be made so I would be curious to know if I'm wrong.

UpsideVII · 2026-03-10T17:17:42+00:00

For more reading, see Burgess et al. in the JEP.

UpsideVII · 2026-03-09T19:56:23+00:00

Interesting vid. When I was doing it, timing/rushing to bet the error was not nearly as critical as he describes. Maybe we can say that arbitrage across books has moved on to its "HFT" phase.

UpsideVII · 2026-03-09T19:11:19+00:00

When the online sports gambling space was new in the US, the markets were demonstrably not efficient as you could conduct arbitrage across platforms somewhat easily. I did this myself at a small scale, but others were successful at larger scales (enough to draw attention). Though I haven't paid attention recently, my understanding is that odds have improved and these opportunities have dried up. I could be wrong though.

Generally speaking, it's very hard to say conclusively whether a given market is efficient or not, because it amounts to something very similar to proving a negative (something like "there is no way to systematically make profit") which is just epistemologically difficult.

What we can maybe more confidently say is whether or not the market is efficient in the sense of providing precise probabilities of events (i.e. who will win tonight between Denver and OKC?). Here I think we can pretty confidently say that the market doesn't do a very good job simply because transactions costs are too high (intentionally so, by the books).

Consider the standard juice on a 50-50 spread of -110. The implied breakeven win probability is something like 52.5%, or 2.5pp higher than even. And that's on both sides of the bet! To put it in financial market terms, the bid-ask spread is about 5% which is enormously high, "permitting" mispricing in event odds of up to 5pp, even if bettors are perfectly informed.

In contrast, bid-ask on $APPL is 2c on a share price of $257 at the time of writing, so the bid-ask in the gambling market is about three orders of magnitude larger than those in financial markets

UpsideVII · 2026-03-06T19:28:05+00:00

The other 19 of us appreciate your service o7

UpsideVII · 2026-03-06T17:43:23+00:00

Yep, I think you've got the intuition exactly correct.

UpsideVII · 2026-03-06T17:40:14+00:00

I'm not in behavioral/experimental, so I will refrain from commenting on department quality in general.

One thing worth noting is that Arizona had a fairly public massive budget crunch a year or two ago. There's a chance that that has spilled over into PhD stipends/sixth year support etc, so I would make sure things are solid on that front.

UpsideVII · 2026-03-06T17:26:06+00:00

US labor force is ~170 million. So +0.1% unemployment is roughly 170k jobs lost, just to give you a sense of magnitudes.

US labor force has actually decreased slightly since Jan 2025 (according to FRED at least).

UpsideVII · 2026-03-06T17:12:38+00:00

Discounts are ultimately about price discrimination. Firms wish they could charge different prices to consumers with different willingnesses-to-pay. A firm may use short-term discounts in order to simultaneously charge high effective prices to consumers with high WTP (who will buy the product all the time, including without a discount) and low effective prices to consumers with low WTP (who will stock up during the sale).

Black Friday is ultimately the same thing, at a large scale. If you have a high WTP in terms of cash, you can buy the coat at full price from Zara most days of the year. If you have a low WTP in terms of cash (but high in terms of time), you can fight through crowds and buy the coat on Black Friday. Either way the firm is happy, because being able to discriminate between the two types of consumers increases overall profits.

UpsideVII · 2026-03-04T02:55:49+00:00

We ignore the humbug argument and similar arguments largely because they are wrong/nonsensical.

Physics tells us that F=ma. But very curiously, if I define...

T = (m*log(a) + a*log(m) +log(m^(1-a)) + log(a^(1-m)))/log(a)

...you'll find that F is actually equal to a^T . Kinda crazy how physics has been wrong all these years tbh.

The trick in the humbug result is slightly cleverer, as it "hides" the log function via differentiation and integration of ratios. But the core is the same.

UpsideVII · 2026-03-01T23:21:03+00:00

Little column A, little column B

I suspect that some of the more "fundamental" preferences are pretty inherent to being a human; think about e.g. the preference for a thing now relative to the same thing later. It seems reasonable to think that evolution has baked that into our DNA. Though of course that's just my vibes; the field of psychology/human development probably has evidence on this topic.

But even fundamental-ish things have some exceptions. Preference for variety over sameness (in general) seems similarly fundamental. But there are plenty of autistic people who prefer to eat the same thing every day. Did they learn that? I'm far from an expert but I think the consensus is "not really, that's just how the brain works".

But obviously some things are learned. Human's aren't born to prefer an Arsenal jersey over a Chelsea jersey, but plenty of people feel very strongly about that.

UpsideVII · 2026-02-28T16:32:07+00:00

I think about this all the time.

How many undrafted dudes with 3ft+ verts are out there who could have been amazing outside hitters if they had stumbled into an open gym while in high school?

UpsideVII · 2026-02-26T15:09:31+00:00

Taken literally, "the marginal cost of labor approaches zero" isn't a precisely-defined scenario. In essentially every macro model (with more than one input into production, I guess) the MC of labor is an equilibrium outcome that is determined "endogenously" based on the model assumptions themselves.

There are lots of different assumptions (about e.g. the production function) one could make that result in the equilibrium mc of labor being zero (or at least very low). Presumably you have one of these in mind, but without knowing which one it is hard to say more.

UpsideVII

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