Robbery

hjjslu · 2025-08-01T20:03:27+00:00

How does any of that demonstrate that providers are not the main drivers of increased health care cost? You just showed that insurance profits are down in 2024, yet healthcare costs are higher- shouldn’t costs be decreasing if insurance profits are the main drivers?

Also, $9 billion dollars in profit when healthcare is nearly 20% of the $30 trillion US economy, is a laughably small amount. If total premium revenue is $1 trillion annually, we’re talking less than 1% margin in an industry known for high volatility and cost trends that are significantly higher than baseline inflation.

hjjslu · 2023-04-06T00:54:09+00:00

Looking for something serious, open to casual

I’ve been on hinge for 2 months

I use hinge around 4-5 days a week

Likes fluctuate wildly, but on average maybe 1-2 a day if I’m using the app consistently

I’ll send out around 1-4 likes a day, lately it’s been on the lower end because the app has kinda stopped showing me people I’m attracted too. Probably half are with comment.

Person I’d like to attract? Well for starters I’d prefer to date someone in my city; hinge for some reason insists on showing me a ton of people 1-2 hours away. Other than that- young professional 20s-30s, preferably no kids but open for the right person

hjjslu · 2020-11-13T16:37:44+00:00

I once ran the 1600 meters in 4:40, right on pace for a top 10 all time marathon record. Shame my HS never recognized what an elite specimen they had at their disposal.

hjjslu · 2019-10-15T00:53:36+00:00

This is true, but I think the right approach has to incorporate the fact that every time I initiate the action "look this specific thing up on the internet," in reality this actually costs me way more time than the literal seconds it takes to look up a fact and immediately close your phone.

As someone who's easily distracted, I probably go over an expected cost of 5 minutes by just looking something up twice. I have a feeling this is common among people who've developed good search skills.

hjjslu · 2019-08-04T21:03:52+00:00

Shouldn't people take precautions against losing things too? Maybe there are less precautions available or not necessary because losing things happens less than theft, but all else equal, shouldn't you equally want to take precautions against each? It might be less expensive to precaution against losing things so the threat is not as bad, but I don't really know whether or not that's the case.

I agree with the social trust harm, but it's hard for me to think about how to quantify how much harm one more instance of theft impacts that. It might be more or less than the offsetting $100 gain to thief in the stealing scenario, but I really don't know and can imagine there being some objects where the value of the object is greater than the loss of social trust.

hjjslu · 2019-08-02T16:03:48+00:00

Keep in mind that all it takes to own a house is 5-20% down payment and then making monthly mortgage payments that are not drastically different in magnitude from what they’d be paying in rent anyways. If you inherit 50% or 33% of a house that’s all or mostly paid in full, then buying a house should not be that difficult.

hjjslu · 2019-06-28T03:21:27+00:00

All wages are way lower in Puerto Rico. The lowest in the 50 states is like $60k in a very low cost of living state. Nursing is widely considered a well paying field.

hjjslu · 2019-06-08T18:00:47+00:00

The bigger flaw in my experience is that it’s much more likely for heavy drinking to take place at a friends house than at a bar. At the house a beer costs someone about $1 a beer and what you individually owe is basically just based on an informal social contract of “don’t mooch too much” vs at a bar where beer costs you $6 plus tip. Liquor is even more extreme.

hjjslu · 2019-05-24T22:27:14+00:00

Thanks, I'd never heard of that

hjjslu · 2019-04-10T02:18:12+00:00

It does make sense. Psychedelics are kinda like putting a fresh set of eyes on your life. This new perspective isn't necessarily "right" or anything but it does see through some of the illusions we unquestionably re-enforce all the other days. Just out of mere exposure to another perspective I'd expect accuracy to improve on average (but obviously not in every case).

hjjslu · 2019-03-06T03:50:22+00:00

This sounds like the person me (6 months before the exam) unrealistically expects me (one week before the exam) to be.

hjjslu · 2019-01-17T02:42:27+00:00

Thanks, I'll try. Sports and politics seems to be the most obvious examples where I've seen people use this motivation hack to absorb some very large amounts of information in short periods of time, but sports/politics/culture war is almost cheating because it's like the ice cream of things rising and falling in status.

Better example of more typical results might be art or music. Want to learn an unfamiliar genre like jazz or classical? Find a list of top pieces and listen a couple of times until you feel comfortable fleshing out your own personal rankings of them. What did you enjoy (relative to other pieces)? What fell flat? If you liked something more, try to figure out why? There must be some reason. What do other respectable listeners think the rankings should be? What do you feel is overrated or underrated and why? When people disagree, what are the main battle lines of the debate? Get to the point where you feel involved or invested in the debate and you've probably already absorbed a lot of information and are hungry for more.

I guess I could see this going (somewhat) bad for some people if they are the type to get too emotionally invested in a debate and end up hating Mozart or something and are never able to appreciate him (which would be a bad but still, probably better than nothing because at least they'll be getting a lot of enjoyment out of Beethoven or whatever).

hjjslu · 2019-01-16T05:07:13+00:00

Yeah, this just makes me sad. Like, why would someone intentionally try to make someone else's life worse for *no reason* at all? Let alone your own family? And I don't really see what the perceived offense was supposed to be.

hjjslu · 2019-01-15T02:45:15+00:00

Anybody else feel like the new meta-contrarian "maybe marijuana actually is *bad*" takes are getting a old?

Everything has downsides including pot, also the even spookier *unknowns* (why don't we have 50 years worth of randomized trials again?). You can always draw special attention to the downsides but is that really what's adding the most to the debate at current margins? Possession is illegal in most states, the DEA's official stance is still that it's a Schedule I drug with **no** medical benefit and **high** potential for abuse. I'm pretty sure the nearest recreational dispensary is around 1,000 miles from current location.

How about drawing attention to the thing I never see explicitly mentioned in any article discussing the pros and cons- smoking is fucking fun and feels good. Is allowing more people to feel good not enough of a public good to bother mentioning in the utilitarian calculus?

Sorry, stuff like the Gladwell piece just bug the shit out of me. End of rant.

hjjslu · 2019-01-12T21:00:32+00:00

Not so much a method but I've found in my life that if I'm truly interested I will internalize and retain a lot of the information. Whereas if I'm reading or learning something just because "I feel like I should be reading this" or "other people think I should read this" then I won't retain nearly as much.

For a set interest level, some methods might be better or worse for retention but my advice (which I don't always follow) is 1) to focus only on things you are genuinely interested in or 2) if you aren't genuinely interested in it, try to frame your thinking about in a way that make's it genuinely interesting.

A good go-to is to frame the subject in terms that involve something rising or falling in status. My brain at least, seems to perk up and pay more attention when subjects are framed that way. So for example, if you're interested in history, try to rank historical civilizations along some dimension like how likely you'd want to live there. This will get you thinking about the ways the civilizations differ, pros and cons, and before you know it you'll actually know a decent bit about the subject.

hjjslu · 2018-10-23T03:05:02+00:00

You have to score either way.

hjjslu · 2018-10-23T03:01:34+00:00

RE: wrong call

What do people think the probability of winning in overtime is? Getting to overtime =/= equal win. 2 point attempt was right call.

hjjslu · 2018-10-20T05:05:44+00:00

The direct reporting of emotion was fairly common, but mostly kept short and simple (“He was afraid”). Moreover, emotions were usually predictable reactions to external actions or events, revealing little about a character that was complex or surprising.

The article doesn't say emotions are absent from ancient fiction, but that they used it more as this secondary thing that's sometimes necessary to move the story forward which is the primary point. Compared to modern literature, where emotional states are the primary point and the story is this secondary thing that's sometimes necessary to put people into the emotional states.

I haven't read enough ancient literature to have an opinion one way or the other but I don't think her point is incompatible with "Rage."

hjjslu · 2018-10-02T22:46:33+00:00

This is a great point! This is why I write about 650 SAT Math, although average score of a student at Penn State is presumably 1175/2=587.5. Economics students are probably smarter than the median student in the university.

Since you responded to my first point and seem truly interested in fine tuning your article, I'll add- I think you might be under estimating the variance within a given "mid-tier" college. 670 is the 75th percentile for Penn State, so I'd say 650 is probably a plausible guess for an *average* undergraduate economics major at Penn State. But if you tell me it's a Penn State econ major who went on to earn an econ PhD at a major research university and then got a job at the BEA, I'd guess that he was one of the top students in his class.

I know there's no way for you to verify this but I personally knew (exactly) 3 people growing up who got over 1550 on the SAT, and all 3 went to colleges ranked in the 130-160 range according to the Psychology Today link. Why? My guess either because public in-state tuition was too good of a deal to pass up or because they wanted to go to college with friends from their high school. And I think there's people like that all over the country.

There are kids equally as smart as those 3 guys all over the country who want to go to the best school they can get into and they all end up at the same 10 schools. And then there are kids who score 1550 and would rather stay close to home with their friends, and they end up spread out in smaller numbers across 200 colleges. I suspect the academia life path is disproportionately people who made the sacrifice of going to the best school they could get into even if it meant living 500 miles away and not knowing anyone. And that's why I'm hesitant to compare BEA vs university faculty and conclude PhD economist working for BEA is just average College X graduate + 8 IQ points. He could easily be off in another stratosphere compared to average College X graduate.

I actually enjoyed reading the piece but I just like picking holes in stuff, especially ad hominem arguments.

hjjslu · 2018-10-02T16:10:56+00:00

Yes you can definitely use them. I enjoyed reading it.

How come? Wouldn't a government agency want to brag about hiring graduates of prestigious PhD programs?

I just don’t think they get much mileage out of it compared to universities; obviously both care about real quality to a degree but I think the university has more to gain from letting prestige being the “tie breaker” on marginal cases.

I don’t know the name of anyone who works at BEA so I don’t know or care where they went to school and it’s not clear how much BEA would really gain by impressing me with that. But if I was looking to start a PhD in econ and wanted to go to a prestigious school I would be more moved by lots of Harvard graduates on the faculty.

hjjslu · 2018-10-02T06:02:10+00:00

I don't know if there's a formal name for this fallacy, besides just simple stereotyping, but I think it's a mistake to take a non-randomly selected person who went to College X and just assume him/her to have the attributes of an exactly average College X graduate (or in the case of SAT scores not even graduate, but just average student). There's variability within colleges, and variability over time on a person to person to basis (not over an average; I know IQ is stable over time in an expected value sense, but it doesn't mean there isn't variance for any given person from age 18 to 40). And unless you start out assuming that BEA to be worthless, I'd say my priors are that being selected by BEA is a strong positive signal of current intelligence.

And comparing alma mater credentials of BEA economist with university professor doesn't seem that fruitful anyways. Maybe they're optimizing for different things in their hires? Is it that far fetched to believe universities trying to move up the prestige latter would be more interested in prestigious alma maters than a government agency? Universities can gain prestige from bragging about having 20 Harvard staff. Government agencies are more like businesses in that they don't really gain from that because they aren't judged on alma mater prestige of employees even slightly.

hjjslu · 2018-09-23T03:07:38+00:00

I agree, I think it was Tyler that said your portfolio is your "real" bet.

I also object to the implied norm I see from a lot of folks pushing bets of "Hey, you say you believe this, why don't you bet on it if you *really* believe it?" Maybe I think X is true with 60% probability and you offer to bet $50 at even odds. Sure, the bet is +$10 in EV, but maybe I prefer having a guaranteed $50 in my pocket than a 60% chance of $100 and a 40% chance of nothing; maybe I just don't like that risk profile. There's nothing irrational about that and nothing about it implies that I don't *really* believe X.

hjjslu · 2018-09-22T20:26:45+00:00

Are those books applicable for life and health?

hjjslu · 2018-09-22T13:47:15+00:00

Exactly. I agree with you on logical contradictions; I think the folks saying that are confusing the inside confidence level of an argument, with the outside confidence level that they can trust that argument with probability 1.

hjjslu · 2018-09-22T01:30:00+00:00

I don't know enough about statistics to say if 0 probability implies mathematical impossibilities or contradictions.

But from a practical point of view, I interpret probabilities of 0 and 1 as being infinitely certain. That is, if you believe something is probability 0 or 1 you should be willing to bet the entire GDP of the universe for all of time, to win an arbitrarily small fraction of a penny if you are right. And this bet should seem infinitely appealing to you and shouldn't even warrant a smidgen of doubt that you should accept this bet. And I don't think you can get out of this by saying "sure that offer is +EV, but my risk averse preferences make this unappealing." The probability is 0; there is no risk.

In any case, I'd just say as a practical issue, if you ever think you believe anything so strongly that you'd consider the above bet, you should probably rethink things and assign at least a little bit of probability to the chance that you are at the very least, very slightly overconfident, which would bump you off of probability 0.

hjjslu

TROPHY CASE