Tuesday, January 30, 2018

But The Stock Market

2008. I hadn't ever investigated politics/economics much. I had recently graduated college and started my career. Then the Great Recession hit, and there was a presidential election. That freaked me out and suddenly increased my interested in the topic. I decided I should probably put a little effort into figuring out how the economy works and vote accordingly.

I was really unsure how to evaluate the various theories and arguments for explaining the problem + solution on all the different sides. Then I remember coming across this, which was a big turning point in how I approached it.

It dawned on me: why not just look at the evidence of how the economy has done under the presidents of different parties? As shown above, the stock market did much better, on average, under Democratic presidents. When I looked at any other economic indicator - inflation, unemployment, GDP - the same pattern held up. So I decided, despite having considered myself a conservative all my life up to that point, I would support Obama. And sure enough, in keeping with the historical trends I had noticed, during his presidency the stock market grew more than under the average presidency.

I continued learning about politics/economics though, and at some point I decided the stock-market-performance-per-president was not a good way to judge which side is better on economics. The stock market is a mysterious beast, the president is just one of so many variables, correlation is not causation, etc. I no longer reached to that data to support my opinions on politics/economics.

...

Fast forward to now. Trump has been president for a year, and the stock market has been doing very well. And some people are pointing at that as evidence that Trump has been good for the economy. That is strange, obviously. If the stock market 1 year into Trump's presidency shows that Trump/Trumpism is good for the economy, don't you have to be consistent with your logic? Shouldn't you then believe that, on average, Democrats are better presidents? Shouldn't you believe that Obama was a good president?

You also have to consider this:

Stock markets globally have been doing very well the past year. In fact, we are underperforming compared to other countries. So Trump is doing great things, to cause stocks across the world to go up, and causing our own stock market to grow slower than the others?

Monday, January 15, 2018

The hard problem of ... matter?

Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don’t know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery...

I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is... It’s the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.

The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour...

Many make ... the Very Large Mistake ... of thinking that we know enough about the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can’t be physical. We don’t. We don’t know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, except ... insofar as we know it simply through having a conscious experience.

We find this idea extremely difficult because we’re so very deeply committed to the belief that we know more about the physical than we do, and (in particular) know enough to know that consciousness can’t be physical. We don’t see that the hard problem is not what consciousness is, it’s what matter is.

We may think that physics is sorting this out, and it’s true that physics is magnificent. It tells us a great many facts about the mathematically describable structure of physical reality, facts that it expresses with numbers and equations (e = mc2, the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction, the periodic table and so on) and that we can use to build amazing devices. True, but it doesn’t tell us anything at all about the intrinsic nature of the stuff that fleshes out this structure.

-- link