708 sats \ 5 replies \ @k00b 16 Nov 2023 freebie \ parent \ on: _Broken Money_ book club, part 4 bitcoin
The nature of the invisible hand is that people making better predictions in the market are favored. So even if the market as a whole will never be quantifiable, the market is competing on approximations that aim to quantify parts of it, and the invisible hand will guide the market closer and closer to making it quantifiable - even if it never gets there exactly.
Having said that, this leaves a bunch of room for pseudo-scientific claims of quantifying markets better and I'm on board with fully leaning into skepticism of it.
Your response reminds me of the whole theory of technical analysis. I was interested in stock trading in a former life. I never trusted TA, but it is intriguing that human herd emotion can be charted and used as a predictive tool. Of course, "models" fail all the time, so these strategies never approach the level of science.
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TA is another beast all together I think. The kind of quantification I'm talking about doesn't make price predictions as much as it tries to say "who/why/how/etc are people most unhappy when using products in this market category."
It's related to TA in that it's trying to help you draw conclusions that are otherwise hard to draw though.
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You are doing this in a way when designing SN algorithms and even features, I guess. I remember when you gave Car a little jab: "See, you wanted bookmarks, but you dont use them." Predicting what people want and how they will react.