Wow, the society contribution comment was supposed to be edited/deleted. Felt a bit harsh and unfair. I had rephrased with the more gentle second part about hindsight science.

Well, now you know what I really think. /s

> One thing I like to annoy economists with: "You don't contribute anything to society "Economics is remarkably good at explaining why what just happened was inevitable."

guilty as charged ;)

SimpleStacker

Another example is when people are asked to pick a random number from 1 to 100, 37 comes up more often than it should.  37 has the quality of "randomness" to the human mind where numbers like 1, 50, and 100 do not, despite all being equally likely.

Yes, that. And LLMs just mimic that human behavior.

I had a similar experience when asking classmates in gradschool for random numbers to decide which exercise number I'd tackle next. Out of 20 questions, all theodd numbers came out first.

down, to the point where the excess gains disappear.

Yeah, that's the thing with market inefficiencies. They tend to get arbitraged away.

One thing I like to annoy physicists with is: "Econ is harder than physics, because in physics the behavior of the objects you model doesn't depend on your model of the objects' behavior."

One thing I like to annoy economists with: "You don't contribute anything to society "Economics is remarkably good at explaining why what just happened was inevitable."

math

science

Arbitraging language models for gains?

south_korea_ln

> Another example is when people are asked to pick a random number from 1 to 100, 37 comes up more often than it should.  37 has the quality of "randomness" to the human mind where numbers like 1, 50, and 100 do not, despite all being equally likely.

Yes, that. And LLMs just mimic that human behavior. 

I had a similar experience when asking classmates in gradschool for random numbers to decide which exercise number I'd tackle next. Out of 20 questions, all theodd numbers came out first.

>  down, to the point where the excess gains disappear.

Yeah, that's the thing with market inefficiencies. They tend to get arbitraged away.


> One thing I like to annoy physicists with is: "Econ is harder than physics, because in physics the behavior of the objects you model doesn't depend on your model of the objects' behavior."

 One thing I like to annoy economists with: "You don't contribute anything to society "Economics is remarkably good at explaining why what just happened was inevitable."

Just kidding.

I don't have econ friends.