20 ms·

Too Clever by Half

704 points by moat 8y ago

stcredzero 8y ago
They are, to use the wonderful Brit phrase, too clever by half...not good in the meta-game. And the meta-game has turned against the coyotes with a vengeance. Here's the thing about the meta-game: It's very contextual. Coyotes can't play the meta-meta-game of thinking about your context and possibly changing it. Some human beings can.
m3kw9 8y ago
He’s just saying block chain is the next CDS(credit default swaps)
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  ...but for individual instead of for institutional investors: > Turns out that B̶i̶t̶c̶o̶i̶n̶ a AAA-rated tranche of Alt-A mortgages wasn’t the store of value that coyote-math “proved” it was, to the detriment of i̶n̶d̶i̶v̶i̶d̶u̶a̶l̶ institutional investors who put a significant portion of their portfolio into these securities, and to the ruin of those who used leverage to acquire these securities.
  - m3kw9 8y ago
    I think opensourced block chain implementation is way more transparent than the bundled derivative instruments the bankers made. The problem is that people will still invest in stuff like shit coins or use stuff like Tether where nothing is transparent
nazca 8y ago
The only issue with his metaphor is that coyotes have been doing very well at the meta game. At the time of European contact there were no coyotes anywhere near Connecticut. Lewis and Clark didn't encounter them until they hit the great plains. Actually only a few decades ago there were no coyotes near the eastern US. But coyotes are clever and they've learned to adapt and live in close proximity to humans. And as we've changed the landscape and removed & added various animals and plants to the landscape they've found niches that work for them and have expanded their range greatly.
- stevenwoo 8y ago
  Slightly OT but the evidence we have strongly suggests that exterminating the wolf is the primary reason for the expansion of the range of the coyote to most of the continental USA. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170516-when-wolves-return-to-the-wild-everything-changes http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170516-when-wolves-return-t...
  - endorphone 8y ago
    Here in Ontario (and likely elsewhere), the majority of coyotes are actually coywolves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf). We have them on the property regularly and they are no problem at all, but they are larger and more adaptable than the coyote of old.
  - snowwrestler 8y ago
    Undoubtedly true when looking at the continent overall, but the salient point is that coyotes are thriving today in suburban and in some cases even urban environments. These are not areas that were ever owned by wolves, and to the point of the blog post, areas that require coyotes to "play the game" well with humans.
- bergoid 8y ago
  Something similar is happening in Europe. The golden jackal [1], a close relative to the coyote, is expanding its range northward and westward from the Eastern Mediterranean [2]. They are breeding now in Austria [3] and recently an animal was spotted by a camera trap in the Netherlands [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_jackal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_jackal [2] https://phys.org/news/2015-07-expansion-golden-jackal-europe-tricky.html https://phys.org/news/2015-07-expansion-golden-jackal-europe... [3] https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/ANNA_109B_0073-0076.pdf https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/ANNA_109B_0073-0076.pdf [4] https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/First-golden-jackal-spotted-in-the-Netherlands.htm https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/First-golden-jackal-spotte...
- hangonhn 8y ago
  But the biggest winner in the meta-game is the coyote’s domesticated cousin: the dog. They are the darlings of the human world. If earth was imploding and we had to leave for another inhabitable planet, I bet there would be a few dogs and cats aboard those spaceships. Not so sure there would be room for coyotes. Caring for dogs is now a many billion dollars industry and growing. Dogs might be dumber than coyotes but they’ve totally won the meta-game by being thoroughly domesticated (though one can argue at a cost to their dignity and independence). There is an obvious analogy here.
r4unwud 8y ago
It's really sad to see this article about animal abuse on the front page of HN.
- nurettin 8y ago
  You did not read until the part he starts drawing parallels between Bitcoin and the 2008 mortgage crash.
  - ars 8y ago
    Nevermind that - what animal abuse? r4unwud, I didn't see any animal abuse mentioned in the article.
    - 454934632 8y ago
      Shock collars are animal abuse.
    - celticninja 8y ago
      They are referring to the zap collar being used on the dogs.
  - 454934632 8y ago
    In that half do they un-abuse the animals?
- FuckOffNeemo 8y ago
  Edit: I'll be copy pasta'ing this comment to every top level comment about animal abuse here. Shock collars can be used for abuse. But fuck, they can do so much good. = = = = = I'm happy to see you down voted here. I have had to employ shock collars for foster dogs who were capable of jumping 10 feet fences in the past and these things work a damn charm. They were the last option available to me after trying every other option. But damn do they work. After a day or two the 'beep' of the shock collar is enough negative reinforcement to stop the dog(s) from retrying the ol' 10 foot pole vault. And before I let my dog(s) use it I tried it on myself. The shock it's self was pretty harmless, certainly not comfortable, but the longer I stayed near the perimeter the more often the shocks were deployed. I learnt my lesson quick enough. Except for one of my foster dogs anyway, he was a 60kg athletic failed pig hunting hybrid mongrol named Loki, looked like a Bull Arab crossed with a Great Dane. I named him Loki because of his tenacity and ingenuity for getting in trouble. He learnt if he ran up the adjacent wall (attached to the house, that didn't have an invisible fence line) quick enough, he could be mid-flight before the shocks were administered and when momentum is carrying you through the air at 12 feet, over the shock line, the shocks don't do shit. You're already flying. And the shocks stop well before you hit the ground on the other side so you can gracefully land and wonder a few streets to go meet Nani at the local Cafe for free biscuits and pats for an hour. While I rode my bicycle home to 'rescue' him from getting fat. Alas. Similar to the Cayote. His abuse from prior owners saw him lose the meta-game in the long run. The abuse saw massive changes in behavior between loveable giant to dangerous beast from the smallest changes in environment. Even after 12 months of behavioural monitoring and professional dog therapy from I and his rescue organisation, he was not for long for this world. The level of risk from his occasional aggressive outbursts at times were just too high. Still one of my favourite dogs. Miss the guy every day. Anyway. Thanks for reading. And PS, as a last option. Shock collars are great. They save lives.
AlexCoventry 8y ago
I'm curious about what people appreciate in this essay. In the end, I don't think I learned anything valuable from it.
- wpietri 8y ago
  If you're actually curious, I'd suggest leaving off the slam next time.
  - AlexCoventry 8y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. I removed it.
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  That you can be clever and win and still lose, and someone less smart may actually do better. I ignored the second half (read it though) because I thought it was quite a stretch from the coyotes to financial instruments. Actually, it's all quite a stretch as far as the details go, while the general idea that I stated at the beginning is true but not exactly original.
  - jaggederest 8y ago
    I think the take away is basically that you're optimizing for the the sum of all series, which means that focusing on winning either the battle or the war by itself is fruitless and counterproductive. I agree, in a lot of ways, I prefer to make situations win-win because it leads to better long term outcomes. It's as much about framing as it is about succeeding in the short or long term.
vpontis 8y ago
I really enjoyed this article. Summary Coyotes are too clever because they know that people shaking jars full of coins can’t hurt them. Thus the animal control patrol has to get called and when they don’t shoo, the animal control person who loves animals has to shoot the coyote. Coyotes are winning the mini-game of each human interaction, but they are losing the meta-game of what society will do if coyotes aren’t scared. Personal Connection This reminds me of a turning point that I had in high school. When I was young, I would get in trouble and try to get around the rules each time I got in trouble. /“Well, technically…”/ But at some point I realized that most of the time you aren’t getting in trouble because you are breaking the rules. You are getting in trouble because you are making the rule makers unhappy. Once I had that realization I was able to focus on relationships with the rule makers and figure out what they actually cared about. This allowed me to break the rules just as much but without getting in trouble.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  The problem is that the rule makers in high schools are sometimes (often?) incredibly petty people with a very poor understanding of human psychology and communication, not tremendously much empathy for the students, and very little personal consequence when they make a mistake even if that has drastic consequences for the student (and as a result little time spent introspecting about their mistakes). I never got in particularly much trouble, but many of my friends were screwed by minor miscommunication which incompetent adults escalated beyond any reason. And yes, under the circumstances (assuming the goal is to avoid problems, instead of to aggravate the staff, perform ad-hoc psychology experiments, or the like), any high school student should avoid contradicting the staff in public, start by acquiescing to any request that doesn’t pose an immediate injury risk, disengage quickly and completely and then marshal their parents’ help if there has been any kind of mistake that will affect them academically. Few teenagers have figured this out though. To any high school rule makers out there, please read How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, https://amzn.com/1451663889/ https://amzn.com/1451663889/ and in general, please try to treat the students with basic respect.
  - sjcsjc 8y ago
erikpukinskis 8y ago
This is unrelated, but they mention The Great Financial Crisis which made me remember the Recession of my youth. It devastated my family. My father was in construction. That market seriously ebbs. I remember a faint feeling I had back then: resentment towards families who happened to be in industries that weren’t hit. Not because I thought it was unfair that we were hit, I just resented that they didn’t even have to notice what was happening. And I just had to check myself about this Great Financials Crisis. Lucky timing, I have been pretty employable the last 20 years. The “crisis” was always a political skirmish to me. I cared about it, but it seemed small compared to past crises. Just now it occurred to me though, that whatever millions of people are going through exactly what I did, their families collapsing. And I’m the one can not notice that. I’d like to securitize those families.
- plankers 8y ago
  FamilICO -- pegged to the net worth of the world's poor. Not sure I'd buy that coin.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    If BLM and the feminists are right, the coin is undervalued. What is the probability that they are right?
    - ben_w 8y ago
      As Google can’t find it, I’d say NaN percent. Even if the coin did exist economists do actually know how poor the poor are, and so would include racist and sexist pay policies in the coin price (assuming cryptocurrencies can even be tied like that); and even if they didn’t know that neither BLM nor feminists are claiming their pay turned out to be Monopoly money or chocolate coins. BLM started as a result of black people being treated like their lives didn’t matter, hence the name, not their poverty not mattering.
    - sgt101 8y ago
      Feminist here. I have a plan : we will make money by paying a significant percentage of western government officials in the new "poor coin".
utkarsh_apoorva 8y ago
The State still cannot tell the Coyotes from Raccoons. Especially so because neither of them show there form truly until the deed is done. Thus the Coyote population control. The utopia of a Coyote population playing the meta game will indeed happen some day - just that the time isn't right. Yet! So the same Animal Control that goes around looking for masked men with rifles, also chases those who leak the rightful information to the People. The question is not who is right - the question is are the People ready? And what's the ratio of Coyote's to Raccoons. And how exactly do you tell them apart pre-facto.
- mcv 8y ago
  I think because the raccoons are in the government. If Bear Stearns is a coyote, Goldman Sachs is a raccoon. They don't mind breaking stuff for profit, and yet they always get some people in every single US government.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> When the dog gets close to the wire, the receiver starts to beep, and when the dog gets all the way to the “fence” boundary, the receiver generates a small electric zap. I know, I know … it’s negative reinforcement and it’s a shock collar and all that. Don’t care. It’s fantastic for us and our dogs. That's disgusting.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  Do you know what's worse? Your dog straying out of the farm and getting eaten by a bear. Or run over by a truck
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
    Oh it's for the dog's own good? Well in that case you can lock it up in a pen so it can't get out, or the bears come in. That will keep it safe. Nothing wrong with that, is there?
    - brazzy 8y ago
      What exactly are you arguing for?
    - raverbashing 8y ago
      Thanks, that was hilarious.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
        You're welcome, I can see you were eager to engage in meaningful conversation.
- solotronics 8y ago
  How would you keep a dog from straying into the wild and getting injured? These are pets and not wild animals able to survive in the bush on their own.
raverbashing 8y ago
> Coyotes can change the world. (But) Not if they fetishize ANY financial instrument as an intrinsic aspect of a commitment to liberty and justice for all. Because it’s not. This. In <blink> and <marquee> tags
pitaj 8y ago
I think the metaphor is a stretch, especially when applied to Bitcoin. There were many factors which played a part in the financial crisis, including the following non-exhaustive list which were not mentioned is the essay: - By bailing out big banks and other institutions, the government signaled to these institutions to pile on risk because they'd just be saved by the government when things went bad - Policy which gave incentives for risky mortgages under the intention of helping the poor - Tax policy continuing to give incentives for people to buy houses instead of renting
gowthamgts12 8y ago
I was reading this in Dwight K Shrute's voice. lol
sunstone 8y ago
PayPal was one of the few financial innovators to dodge animal control. They were first and they were fast.
- JulianMorrison 8y ago
  And they were compliant. Their business model was not "you can use this new form of money to mail order cocaine".
  - ballenf 8y ago
    I don’t think they really care about the drug trade near as much as large scale tax avoidance.
- r_singh 8y ago
  They were the friendly coyotes that managed to invent something that did not threaten the state.
alaxsxaq 8y ago
There is a pretty good book about the history of the Coyote - Coyote America by Dan Flores.
80386 8y ago
When I was in school, there were the people who seemed smart and the people who seemed like they worked hard. The people who seemed smart won the minigames. They got good grades with little effort. But somehow, they ended up with no institutional support -- in fact, the school hated them. Eventually one of the teachers (who was visibly insecure about her own intelligence and competence) cooked up a nonsense pretext to get some of them expelled. One kid's parents brought a legal challenge, the school settled for a year's worth of college tuition, and last I heard his parents had withdrawn him from college to pack him off to rehab for heroin addiction. The only other expellee I've heard from left the country, never to return. The people who seemed like they worked hard didn't always get the best grades. But the institution went out of its way to make life easier for them, and they're all doing alright now.
- bachbach 8y ago
  The education system prioritizes the average, the mean, mediocrity. It's a political aim I believe - I expect without our 'schools' society would look completely different - the spread of outcomes much wider.
- internetman55 8y ago
  People hate their superiors unfortunately. This is why I think rich/high IQ parents need to put their kids around other rich/high IQ kids: proles/low IQs will tear your children apart out of jealousy, possibly leading to mental disorders and drug addictions
  - tclancy 8y ago
    That does not seem like a recipe for a solid society. And suggesting the poor are the cause of the rich's mental problems & substance abuse is . . . well, it's something.
  - mykull 8y ago
    You're assuming rich and high IQ go together. We don't live in a meritocratic society and as such, that's not true.
- deleted 8y ago
mcv 8y ago
Appropriately, this article is a slightly-too-clever way of talking about three things at the same time.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
r_singh 8y ago
The most relevant take away from this article (for me) is how the coyotes (crypto and currency experts) invented Bitcoins, raccoons over leveraged it out of dumb greed (investors) and the state took notice and acted out of sheer desperation to not lose control and once again rendered the invention useless by gaining more control than before (the part that is currently in its early stages right now). Update: I think the article insinuates an interesting take on the invention of cryptocurrencies (by coyotes), their bubble (by raccoons) and their suppression (by the state). But IMO in this case, the state suppressed the invention not just because they fear what the coyotes have produced but also what raccoons have done with it (with the whole ICO bubble, etc.).
- 0xBA5ED 8y ago
  Of course, bitcoin's own limitations would've prevented it's widespread use, with or without the over-speculation (lack of throughput and excessive energy consumption).
  - r_singh 8y ago
    That's true. The idea holds up better if looked at from an all cryptocurrencies perspective rather than only Bitcoin. Also because states aren't just trying to control / suppress Bitcoin alone but all cryptocurrencies. For example, here in India the central bank has banned all cryptocurrencies.
- etherael 8y ago
  They don't have control though. At best, they sabotaged just the bitcoin core blockchain, and those who were in it to destroy the state and central banks forked off into bitcoin cash. They also provoked a tidal wave of "financial innovation" in the sector with now dozens of independent blockchains, some utterly anonymous, over which they have zero control. If their campaign was the bring this under their power, it cannot be viewed reasonably as anything other than a miserable failure. Also the analogy to the metagame does not acknowledge the reality that actually those in power in the metagame are a predatory parasitic coercive force in themselves, and their brand of coyote cunning is just traditional machiavellian politics rather than financial innovation backed up with cryptographic peer to peer networks. It's not a war between animal control and coyotes. It's a war between many coyotes executing different strategies. While both the sheep and the raccoons just try to get by as best they can.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Argh - please dang, can we have subtitles, or something, to reduce the numbers of clickbait non-descriptive titles. Sincerely, Infuriated of Norwich.
w_t_payne 8y ago
At least part of the point of the article seems to be about narrow specialization creating blinders that inhibit deep strategic thinking. I can see very strong parallels with systems thinking and the role that systems engineers play within the V-model.
shishy 8y ago
What do people think of his connection between Credit Default Swaps and all these ICOs?
- AlexCoventry 8y ago
  I don't see any useful insight in it.
huffmsa 8y ago
The true meta-gamer of the story snuck by with a single sentence reference. So I'm calling you out barn cat. You think you can sneak by having your cake and keeping your solidarity and standoff distance from the humans but also benefit from the free housing + healthcare + steady food when you don't want to kill mice + affection when you decide to wander over to the main house. But I'm onto you.
- zippitydoodah68 8y ago
  Actually the parasite infestation (fleas), lack of affection and food when they want it (except through hard work), temperature variations, etc...make the barn cat a misanthrope. Every house cat owner knows that the house cat is the 'meta game mastermind'. Hell, they've engineered the system to care about their safety so much that it is cruelty to have them reproduce via the species own painful biology. Letting them out into the street is homicidal. If they get pests they inflict them on their caretaker and every other discomfort is communicated to the human caretaker willy nilly. When they want to exert themselves they can be amazingly cruel, subtle, unpredictable and unyielding. House cats win.
  - fhood 8y ago
    I'm not a fan of having house cats. Indoor only cats develop weird psychological issues at a rate that makes me suspect that living inside isn't all that healthy for them. Every cat I have owned has been an indoor-outdoor cat. There are downsides. They tend to be less affectionate and more independent than house cats, but they also seem healthier and happier than the indoor cats I have known. Also they don't need a litter box. That is a biggy.
    - zippitydoodah68 8y ago
      Well, having an indoor cat means keeping an indoor cat happy which is a larger problem (for the caretaker) but indicative of the meta supremacy in house cat behavior. In all seriousness I would rather take the time to care for a house cat than to deal with the possibility of roadkill/injury, disease, pests or other accidents of nature. If the cat is a problem for you then don't own one?
jrootabega 8y ago
Reminds me of when Andy Dufresne thought he was protecting himself when he told the warden he'd never tell anyone about cooking his books.
- handsomechad 8y ago
  what scene in shawshank are you referring to
  - jrootabega 8y ago
    When Andy's trying to get the warden to let Tommy tell them he's innocent https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_IrCgt-Bt1I&t=3m53s# https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_IrCgt-Bt1I&t=3m53s#
  - habitue 8y ago
    The scene where Andy Dufresne told the warden he'd never tell anyone about cooking his books
  - ElysianEagle 8y ago
    It's this scene (around the 3:55 mark in this clip): https://youtu.be/_IrCgt-Bt1I?t=3m55s https://youtu.be/_IrCgt-Bt1I?t=3m55s
kemonocode 8y ago
I'm quite amused to see all that veiled scaremongering when it comes to crypto, even if it has a grain of truth. Yeah, truly the ones who get involved in it can be thought of as either coyotes or raccoons, but I think prohibition and "the war on drugs" only shows how much can something be made desirable by making it unfit for public consumption, and at that point the animal simile breaks down. Not to mention that, as other commenters have mentioned, coyotes have been rather successful in spite of human encroachment, just like cryptocurrencies grow stronger in the face of looming regulation and sanction. Sure, it might scare off some raccoons and kill some coyotes in the short term, but it's going to be still there. And for all the "coyote institutions" that perished, there are still many more.
- kortex 8y ago
  I don't know if it's scaremongering because I'm not entirely sure what point the writer is getting at. The angle I chose to read is that, cryptos acting all "You can regulate us, because distributed blockchain! Muahaha!" is the 1st order game, akin to the coyote calling bluff on the noisy can. Government types developing an ill will towards the defiant cryptos is the neighborhood moms getting pissed at the bold coyote. The animal control is the 2nd order game. Regulators come in and crack down on cryptos. Put the squeeze on exchanges, make it hard to cash out to legal tender.
- AlexCoventry 8y ago
  I am no coyote or raccoon. I'm more like a German Shepherd / Corgi cross.
coyote-w-912 8y ago
The author describes how coyotes win the "skirmish game" when they casually walk into suburban yards and demonstrate that they are not afraid of the humans when they do things to scare them away such as make loud noises at them. However, they lose the "meta-game" when animal control shows up and puts them down because they won't go away. The author uses this analogy to compare coyotes to financial innovators. His argument is that every time financial innovation gets out of control and the economy at large is impacted, larger powers step in and squash it. He argues tha this is what happened in the 2008 financial crisis with mortage backed securities, and that this is the same thing happening now with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. I disagree with the parallel he draws to cryptocurrencies. While I don't necessarily think cryptocurrencies will dominate the world, and Governments may even succeed in reigning them in, they aren't in the same category as other financial innovation. Mortgage backed securites were the coyotes stalking across the laws of suburban moms, hoping animal control wouldn't interfere. Cryptocurrencies are a coordinated attack by a pack of coyotes on animal control headquarters. They were designed specifically to be as government-resistant as possible. Now, animal control has a lot of firepower and they can call in reinforcements. Governments have a lot of resources and powers they can draw on to stop and regulate cryptocurrencies. However, these coyotes are well aware of the meta-game, who the true enemy is and they're gunning hard for him. Before bitcoin, no currency that wasn't backed by a government lasted long before being shut down by a government entity. Bitcoin has been going for nine years now, and in that time further innovation has given us Monero and Zcash which are even more censorship and surveillance resistant. The primary attack vector, the only one that's worked, has been made by the "racoons" at Blockstream and their investors from Visa and the banking industry. This is a much more subtle attack than direct government intervention. In a nut-shell, when Satoshi left the project, he left a guy named Gavin Andresen in charge. Gavin trusted the wrong person with commit access to the project, who was co-opted by the banking industry and who then booted him from access. Thos current group of developers crippled Bitcoin by repeatedly refusing to expand the block size and moving forward developing the "Lightning Network" which is nothing more than a copy of the current inter-bank payment system and which, quite frankly doesn't work.[1][2] They also took over the r/bitcoin subreddit as well as the bitcointalk forum and completely censored it.[3] The fact that the racoons have taken this more subtle approach, suggests to me that the enemies of Bitcoin now believe that attempts to shut it down by more direct mean will fail. However there are still a lot of coyotes working on other cryptocurrency projects. These coyotes are clearly playing the meta-game, and for now they're winning. [1] Summary of what the lightning network is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g [2] Discussion of a developer who tried to implement micropayments with lightning network, but had to switch because it did not work well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew2MWVtNAt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew2MWVtNAt0 [3] A (brief and incomplete) history of censorship in /r/Bitcoin: https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of-censorship-in-r-bitcoin-c85a290fe43 https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor...
phendrenad2 8y ago
I've long had the suspicion that in domesticating animals, we've dumbed them down severely. And I sometimes wonder if humans were smarter before civilization replaced evolution as the driving factor for intelligence.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  > And I sometimes wonder if humans were smarter before civilization replaced evolution as the driving factor for intelligence. this is an odd proposition. evolution has not been replaced; rather, the evolutionary pressures have changed. in any case, civilization is not much more than 10,000 years old, which is pretty short in evolutionary timescales. and although we employ some measures (ie social services) to prevent the weakest from dying outright, it seems like long term strategic thought is more important than ever. for instance, it takes 5-7 years for a high school grad to get a master's degree. can you really envision an adult hunter-gatherer working towards something for that long without seeing the fruits of their labor? their environment mandated a much shorter term focus to avoid starvation or lethal competition from other humans.
  - phendrenad2 8y ago
    Well, if humans haven’t changed in 10,000 years then the author’s thought that domesticated animals are different is also false.
    - sangnoir 8y ago
      What are you basing that assertion on? For starters, animals had way more generations than humans in those 10,000 years - probably by an order of magnitude or 2 depending on the animal.
  - bachbach 8y ago
    This: > it seems like long term strategic thought is more important than ever is true for the minority only. Of course any description of what's happening and what can be done to prevent it is to the right of the Overton Window and is thus illegal to discuss on this forum.
justherefortart 8y ago
Oh no, poor finance jerkoffs got ripped off by their own cleverness. Nothing says dbag like Alabama man who now lives in Connecticut crying over dead asshole financial firms. We've had 4 (or more) of these banking/finance ripoffs in my fucking lifetime. Bankers and finance assholes are the scourge of mankind. I got a degree in Finance just so I could avoid the bullshit these fucking assholes use to rip everyone off. A State Bank as the author is so scared of, like the one in North Dakota, won't run into any of these issues. Because their goal isn't profit at any cost, it's providing banking and investment services. tl;dr; fuck this guy
- jeffreyrogers 8y ago
  A local commercial bank and a New York investment bank are really different things. The financial industry has caused some large problems, but it's also a big part of why the modern world works as well as it does. I don't think you're being charitable in your criticism of the article.
  - justherefortart 8y ago
    The modern world works well for whom? Laughable.
    - jeffreyrogers 8y ago
      When would you rather be alive? There are tons of problems with the world today and many that we can fix but aren't. But the idea that things are worse now than before is just not true.
      - justherefortart 8y ago
        I'm a white guy in American born to two college educated parents. My life isn't representative of everyone on this planet. I won the birth lottery. I'll pick the future, since it's a futile exercise.
      - mykull 8y ago
mason55 8y ago
I take issue with the way he describes securitization as if it's some horrible evil. Securitization (and financialization in general) just takes big balls of intertwined risks and breaks them apart into little balls of (theoretically) consistent risk so that everyone can get the amount of risk they desire. Imagine a company that has a single customer. There's a 50/50 chance that the customer will pay. If the customer pays then the company makes a ton of profit, if the customer doesn't pay then the company goes out of business. For the company, this is probably more risk than they want to take. But there's probably hedge fund out there who has enough money to survive the customer not paying and is willing to take that risk for a fee. So the company can go to the hedge fund and say "if the customer pays us in the future we'll give you all the money. In exchange give us 40% of it right now". And the company is happy because they have a 100% chance of staying in business. And the hedge fund is happy because (if the risk was priced correctly) they have a positive expected value in the trade. That's all securitization is.
- raesene9 8y ago
  That's true in that it's what securitization is meant to be but unfortunately as was seen in the mid-2000's it proved extremely difficult to accurately price the little balls of risk and the money being made in doing the selling and breaking apart those balls provided an incentive for people to keep the pipeline of loans going well past what was prudent. In the UK we ended up with all sort of shenanigans like "self-certified mortgages" where the person taking out the loan was allowed to certify their ability to repay. with that kind of product it's very difficult to classify risk of non-repayment as you can't believe the evidence provided (necessarily).
dgudkov 8y ago
If any animal has won the meta-game it's the cats. Yes, those adorable, cute, dumb bastards. They badly lose on any tactical level. But man, win on the strategical level so much.
- kortex 8y ago
  We got some kibble from an aunt that the cat isn't keen on. She'll eat it if and only if she's starving and it's the only stuff around. Also we use a feed puzzle tower where she has to paw the kibble through holes to get it into the "bowl". We mixed the bunk kibble with the good stuff to try to coax her to eat it, but she sniffs each kibble and ignores the inferior stuff. Well, the bunk kibble is round and likes to roll away. So in the course of getting at the good stuff, the round garbage unworthy for the princess scatters everywhere, gets stepped on, attracts ants, etc. Well, I'm left with a tupperware full of the mixed kibble that I have to use up, so I just pour it into the bowl so it doesn't scatter. Pesky poking has given way to the buffet. I don't know if you knew you were playing, but good game, cat, good game.
csomar 8y ago
Okay. Let's slow down here: The OP says. >> And they’re not that smart. I’d put our barn cat up against a raccoon any day on any sort of cognitive test. We think raccoons are clever because they have those anthropomorphic paws and those cute little masks and even a Marvel superhero with its own toy line, but please. Raccoons are takers, not schemers. From Wikipedia >> Zoologist Clinton Hart Merriam described raccoons as "clever beasts", and that "in certain directions their cunning surpasses that of the fox." The animal's intelligence gave rise to the epithet "sly coon".[120] Only a few studies have been undertaken to determine the mental abilities of raccoons, most of them based on the animal's sense of touch. In a study by the ethologist H. B. Davis in 1908, raccoons were able to open 11 of 13 complex locks in fewer than 10 tries and had no problems repeating the action when the locks were rearranged or turned upside down. Davis concluded they understood the abstract principles of the locking mechanisms and their learning speed was equivalent to that of rhesus macaques. Learning speed equivalent to the macaques? You gotta be kidding me. These creatures are underestimated and the author might just not like them? I mean, look at his eyes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raccoon_climbing_in_tree_-_Cropped_and_color_corrected.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raccoon_climbing_in_tree_... That guy looks really smart and self aware.
- derstander 8y ago
  I agree. Having grown up in a rural area near raccoons and eastern coyotes, I definitely prefer the latter. I don't _know_ why, but if I were to wager a guess it's probably because they remind me of dogs. Maybe an unconscious bias shared by a lot of people thanks to the domestication of the dog. Raccoons, in my experience, definitely seem intelligent. I think the author just needs a proxy for a villain. I can't be alone in thinking that the author has chosen poorly; the fault he finds in the coyote is, by his own admission, not shared by the raccoon. The raccoon is successful in both the mini- and meta-games.
- fhood 8y ago
  I am a big fan of raccoons as well. I think they are hilarious. They are just smart enough to seem stupid if that makes any sense.
mfoy_ 8y ago
I'm not sure what the connection was, exactly, but this story talking about coyotes and raccoons in finance gave me an epiphany of understanding about Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
jmull 8y ago
I read the entire article. My take: don't bother unless you have some time and are looking to be mildly entertained (very mildly IMO). It's fluff. The central analogy is a little amusing but doesn't even roughly fit reality. In chasing its premise the article ignores a key dynamic of "financial innovation" schemes, which is that the schemers largely avoid the negative consequences of their schemes. Well, the money spigot stops at some point, which the schemers see as a tragedy, but they generally aren't losing too much of what they grabbed before the end. In 2008, I think most had to endure talk of losing their bonuses (not actually loss of bonuses, just talk and sometimes a temporary delay). The real consequence is that they have to get back to work building up a new scheme so they can do it all again.
- zasz 8y ago
  Yeah, basically nobody went to jail, and yet, he considers Bear Sterns losing its independent existence to be the equivalent of a coyote getting shot? Sloppy thinking there.
denverkarma 8y ago
Perhaps the post itself is too clever by half. It was about “why Bitcoin is going to fail” and yet all anyone is discussing is its well-told animal analogy.
- opinionator1 8y ago
  Probably because it's pretty obvious that Bitcoin is going to fail.
code_duck 8y ago
This reminds me of the scene in the Indiana Jones movie when someone comes up and starts challenging Indy with a bunch of flashy sword moves. Rather than engage him that level, where he is definitely outclassed, Indy simply draws his pistol and shoots him: https://youtu.be/anEuw8F8cpE https://youtu.be/anEuw8F8cpE
M_Bakhtiari 8y ago
>I know, I know … it’s negative reinforcement No it isn't. It's positive punishment.
mholt 8y ago
Slightly OT: For us on our farm back in Iowa, the clever animals were the raccoons. It got to the point where we had to put locks with keys on the grain bins; metal hooks and clasps---even some requiring refined motor skills to open---were not enough to keep the buggers out. Fortunately, they couldn't pick the locks. :)
XnoiVeX 8y ago
Truly HN quality post!
chb 8y ago
Closes the article by implying that the federal government is a monolithic political entity ("the State") that stands apart from private financial interests. And then quotes Jesus. Way to stay true to your roots.
rossdavidh 8y ago
Fun article, interesting point, and I don't even necessarily disagree (entirely, anyway), BUT: coyotes have a larger range now than they have had since long before humans showed up in North America, largely because humans cleared out their main competitors, the wolves. And raccoons are not stupid, although they are destructive. So, I get what the author is trying to say with this little parable, but the fact that the central facts it is using (coyotes losing out, raccoons are stupid) are both false, it makes me more than a little suspicious of the conclusion, when I otherwise might not be.
MattyRad 8y ago
Very interesting. One might also say something like "half measures break the whole." The conclusion drawn about the State getting stronger and weakening mobility for coyotes seems like a legitimate concern too. In the case of Bitcoin, being such a foray into uncharted territory, I'm unsure of how you would be good at the meta game, or figure out how racoons will abuse your radical new idea. Maybe I need to improve my meta game, heh.
jcoffland 8y ago
> The coyotes know exactly where the invisible fence begins and ends, without the benefit of ever wearing a shock collar. How do I know? Because they intentionally leave their scat on their side of the invisible fence, creating a demilitarized zone as precise and as well-observed as anything on the Korean peninsula. Occasionally a coyote will try to test our dogs by leaving its scat juuusst over the line on our side of the DMZ. My question is, why does the human think coyote scat on the other side of the line was precisely placed and scat on his side of the line is an intentional provocation? A more reasonable explanation is that the coyotes don't know exactly where the invisible line is.
deciplex 8y ago
>But the trait that ALL domesticated species demonstrate relative to their wild species is a smaller brain. I’d bet it’s happening with humans, too, but that’s just an observation for another day. It is: http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why-brain-shrinking http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-...
- AlexCoventry 8y ago
  Associating brain size with intelligence is facile. As the article points out, no one knows why cranial volume is shrinking, and there's no clear connection to intellect.
tylerjwilk00 8y ago
If you enjoyed this article and especially the parallel between animal populations and human behavior. I recommend reading about [1] Evolutionarily Stable Strategy and specificly the book [2] The Selfish Gene by [3] Richard Dawkins. The gist of it is that survival strategies are only viable given the distribution of the behavior throughout the entire species or population. Similar to a finicial market, some strategies work only when a small percentage of the population exhibits the behavior. A bonus is that, like the phrase Too Clever by Half, Dawkins is also British. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins
bachbach 8y ago
> I’d bet it’s happening with humans, too, but that’s just an observation for another day. Ho Ho! Tell me more brother. I am curious. This links up with David Krakauer's ideas I'll bet.
ravensraven 8y ago
Hands down one of the best reads I have had in a longgg while

704 points by moat 8y ago

They are, to use the wonderful Brit phrase, too clever by half...not good in the meta-game. And the meta-game has turned against the coyotes with a vengeance. Here's the thing about the meta-game: It's very contextual. Coyotes can't play the meta-meta-game of thinking about your context and possibly changing it. Some human beings can.

m3kw9 8y ago

He’s just saying block chain is the next CDS(credit default swaps)

ItsMe000001 8y ago
...but for individual instead of for institutional investors: > Turns out that B̶i̶t̶c̶o̶i̶n̶ a AAA-rated tranche of Alt-A mortgages wasn’t the store of value that coyote-math “proved” it was, to the detriment of i̶n̶d̶i̶v̶i̶d̶u̶a̶l̶ institutional investors who put a significant portion of their portfolio into these securities, and to the ruin of those who used leverage to acquire these securities.
- m3kw9 8y ago
  I think opensourced block chain implementation is way more transparent than the bundled derivative instruments the bankers made. The problem is that people will still invest in stuff like shit coins or use stuff like Tether where nothing is transparent

nazca 8y ago

The only issue with his metaphor is that coyotes have been doing very well at the meta game. At the time of European contact there were no coyotes anywhere near Connecticut. Lewis and Clark didn't encounter them until they hit the great plains. Actually only a few decades ago there were no coyotes near the eastern US. But coyotes are clever and they've learned to adapt and live in close proximity to humans. And as we've changed the landscape and removed & added various animals and plants to the landscape they've found niches that work for them and have expanded their range greatly.

stevenwoo 8y ago
Slightly OT but the evidence we have strongly suggests that exterminating the wolf is the primary reason for the expansion of the range of the coyote to most of the continental USA. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170516-when-wolves-return-to-the-wild-everything-changes http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170516-when-wolves-return-t...
- endorphone 8y ago
  Here in Ontario (and likely elsewhere), the majority of coyotes are actually coywolves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf). We have them on the property regularly and they are no problem at all, but they are larger and more adaptable than the coyote of old.
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  Undoubtedly true when looking at the continent overall, but the salient point is that coyotes are thriving today in suburban and in some cases even urban environments. These are not areas that were ever owned by wolves, and to the point of the blog post, areas that require coyotes to "play the game" well with humans.
bergoid 8y ago
Something similar is happening in Europe. The golden jackal [1], a close relative to the coyote, is expanding its range northward and westward from the Eastern Mediterranean [2]. They are breeding now in Austria [3] and recently an animal was spotted by a camera trap in the Netherlands [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_jackal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_jackal [2] https://phys.org/news/2015-07-expansion-golden-jackal-europe-tricky.html https://phys.org/news/2015-07-expansion-golden-jackal-europe... [3] https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/ANNA_109B_0073-0076.pdf https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/ANNA_109B_0073-0076.pdf [4] https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/First-golden-jackal-spotted-in-the-Netherlands.htm https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/First-golden-jackal-spotte...
hangonhn 8y ago
But the biggest winner in the meta-game is the coyote’s domesticated cousin: the dog. They are the darlings of the human world. If earth was imploding and we had to leave for another inhabitable planet, I bet there would be a few dogs and cats aboard those spaceships. Not so sure there would be room for coyotes. Caring for dogs is now a many billion dollars industry and growing. Dogs might be dumber than coyotes but they’ve totally won the meta-game by being thoroughly domesticated (though one can argue at a cost to their dignity and independence). There is an obvious analogy here.

r4unwud 8y ago

It's really sad to see this article about animal abuse on the front page of HN.

nurettin 8y ago
You did not read until the part he starts drawing parallels between Bitcoin and the 2008 mortgage crash.
- ars 8y ago
  Nevermind that - what animal abuse? r4unwud, I didn't see any animal abuse mentioned in the article.
  - 454934632 8y ago
    Shock collars are animal abuse.
  - celticninja 8y ago
    They are referring to the zap collar being used on the dogs.
- 454934632 8y ago
  In that half do they un-abuse the animals?
FuckOffNeemo 8y ago
Edit: I'll be copy pasta'ing this comment to every top level comment about animal abuse here. Shock collars can be used for abuse. But fuck, they can do so much good. = = = = = I'm happy to see you down voted here. I have had to employ shock collars for foster dogs who were capable of jumping 10 feet fences in the past and these things work a damn charm. They were the last option available to me after trying every other option. But damn do they work. After a day or two the 'beep' of the shock collar is enough negative reinforcement to stop the dog(s) from retrying the ol' 10 foot pole vault. And before I let my dog(s) use it I tried it on myself. The shock it's self was pretty harmless, certainly not comfortable, but the longer I stayed near the perimeter the more often the shocks were deployed. I learnt my lesson quick enough. Except for one of my foster dogs anyway, he was a 60kg athletic failed pig hunting hybrid mongrol named Loki, looked like a Bull Arab crossed with a Great Dane. I named him Loki because of his tenacity and ingenuity for getting in trouble. He learnt if he ran up the adjacent wall (attached to the house, that didn't have an invisible fence line) quick enough, he could be mid-flight before the shocks were administered and when momentum is carrying you through the air at 12 feet, over the shock line, the shocks don't do shit. You're already flying. And the shocks stop well before you hit the ground on the other side so you can gracefully land and wonder a few streets to go meet Nani at the local Cafe for free biscuits and pats for an hour. While I rode my bicycle home to 'rescue' him from getting fat. Alas. Similar to the Cayote. His abuse from prior owners saw him lose the meta-game in the long run. The abuse saw massive changes in behavior between loveable giant to dangerous beast from the smallest changes in environment. Even after 12 months of behavioural monitoring and professional dog therapy from I and his rescue organisation, he was not for long for this world. The level of risk from his occasional aggressive outbursts at times were just too high. Still one of my favourite dogs. Miss the guy every day. Anyway. Thanks for reading. And PS, as a last option. Shock collars are great. They save lives.

AlexCoventry 8y ago

I'm curious about what people appreciate in this essay. In the end, I don't think I learned anything valuable from it.

wpietri 8y ago
If you're actually curious, I'd suggest leaving off the slam next time.
- AlexCoventry 8y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I removed it.
ItsMe000001 8y ago
That you can be clever and win and still lose, and someone less smart may actually do better. I ignored the second half (read it though) because I thought it was quite a stretch from the coyotes to financial instruments. Actually, it's all quite a stretch as far as the details go, while the general idea that I stated at the beginning is true but not exactly original.
- jaggederest 8y ago
  I think the take away is basically that you're optimizing for the the sum of all series, which means that focusing on winning either the battle or the war by itself is fruitless and counterproductive. I agree, in a lot of ways, I prefer to make situations win-win because it leads to better long term outcomes. It's as much about framing as it is about succeeding in the short or long term.

vpontis 8y ago

I really enjoyed this article. Summary Coyotes are too clever because they know that people shaking jars full of coins can’t hurt them. Thus the animal control patrol has to get called and when they don’t shoo, the animal control person who loves animals has to shoot the coyote. Coyotes are winning the mini-game of each human interaction, but they are losing the meta-game of what society will do if coyotes aren’t scared. Personal Connection This reminds me of a turning point that I had in high school. When I was young, I would get in trouble and try to get around the rules each time I got in trouble. /“Well, technically…”/ But at some point I realized that most of the time you aren’t getting in trouble because you are breaking the rules. You are getting in trouble because you are making the rule makers unhappy. Once I had that realization I was able to focus on relationships with the rule makers and figure out what they actually cared about. This allowed me to break the rules just as much but without getting in trouble.

jacobolus 8y ago
The problem is that the rule makers in high schools are sometimes (often?) incredibly petty people with a very poor understanding of human psychology and communication, not tremendously much empathy for the students, and very little personal consequence when they make a mistake even if that has drastic consequences for the student (and as a result little time spent introspecting about their mistakes). I never got in particularly much trouble, but many of my friends were screwed by minor miscommunication which incompetent adults escalated beyond any reason. And yes, under the circumstances (assuming the goal is to avoid problems, instead of to aggravate the staff, perform ad-hoc psychology experiments, or the like), any high school student should avoid contradicting the staff in public, start by acquiescing to any request that doesn’t pose an immediate injury risk, disengage quickly and completely and then marshal their parents’ help if there has been any kind of mistake that will affect them academically. Few teenagers have figured this out though. To any high school rule makers out there, please read How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, https://amzn.com/1451663889/ https://amzn.com/1451663889/ and in general, please try to treat the students with basic respect.
- sjcsjc 8y ago

erikpukinskis 8y ago

This is unrelated, but they mention The Great Financial Crisis which made me remember the Recession of my youth. It devastated my family. My father was in construction. That market seriously ebbs. I remember a faint feeling I had back then: resentment towards families who happened to be in industries that weren’t hit. Not because I thought it was unfair that we were hit, I just resented that they didn’t even have to notice what was happening. And I just had to check myself about this Great Financials Crisis. Lucky timing, I have been pretty employable the last 20 years. The “crisis” was always a political skirmish to me. I cared about it, but it seemed small compared to past crises. Just now it occurred to me though, that whatever millions of people are going through exactly what I did, their families collapsing. And I’m the one can not notice that. I’d like to securitize those families.

plankers 8y ago
FamilICO -- pegged to the net worth of the world's poor. Not sure I'd buy that coin.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  If BLM and the feminists are right, the coin is undervalued. What is the probability that they are right?
  - ben_w 8y ago
    As Google can’t find it, I’d say NaN percent. Even if the coin did exist economists do actually know how poor the poor are, and so would include racist and sexist pay policies in the coin price (assuming cryptocurrencies can even be tied like that); and even if they didn’t know that neither BLM nor feminists are claiming their pay turned out to be Monopoly money or chocolate coins. BLM started as a result of black people being treated like their lives didn’t matter, hence the name, not their poverty not mattering.
  - sgt101 8y ago
    Feminist here. I have a plan : we will make money by paying a significant percentage of western government officials in the new "poor coin".

utkarsh_apoorva 8y ago

The State still cannot tell the Coyotes from Raccoons. Especially so because neither of them show there form truly until the deed is done. Thus the Coyote population control. The utopia of a Coyote population playing the meta game will indeed happen some day - just that the time isn't right. Yet! So the same Animal Control that goes around looking for masked men with rifles, also chases those who leak the rightful information to the People. The question is not who is right - the question is are the People ready? And what's the ratio of Coyote's to Raccoons. And how exactly do you tell them apart pre-facto.

mcv 8y ago
I think because the raccoons are in the government. If Bear Stearns is a coyote, Goldman Sachs is a raccoon. They don't mind breaking stuff for profit, and yet they always get some people in every single US government.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

>> When the dog gets close to the wire, the receiver starts to beep, and when the dog gets all the way to the “fence” boundary, the receiver generates a small electric zap. I know, I know … it’s negative reinforcement and it’s a shock collar and all that. Don’t care. It’s fantastic for us and our dogs. That's disgusting.

raverbashing 8y ago
Do you know what's worse? Your dog straying out of the farm and getting eaten by a bear. Or run over by a truck
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  Oh it's for the dog's own good? Well in that case you can lock it up in a pen so it can't get out, or the bears come in. That will keep it safe. Nothing wrong with that, is there?
  - brazzy 8y ago
    What exactly are you arguing for?
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    Thanks, that was hilarious.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
      You're welcome, I can see you were eager to engage in meaningful conversation.
solotronics 8y ago
How would you keep a dog from straying into the wild and getting injured? These are pets and not wild animals able to survive in the bush on their own.

raverbashing 8y ago

> Coyotes can change the world. (But) Not if they fetishize ANY financial instrument as an intrinsic aspect of a commitment to liberty and justice for all. Because it’s not. This. In <blink> and <marquee> tags

pitaj 8y ago

I think the metaphor is a stretch, especially when applied to Bitcoin. There were many factors which played a part in the financial crisis, including the following non-exhaustive list which were not mentioned is the essay: - By bailing out big banks and other institutions, the government signaled to these institutions to pile on risk because they'd just be saved by the government when things went bad - Policy which gave incentives for risky mortgages under the intention of helping the poor - Tax policy continuing to give incentives for people to buy houses instead of renting

gowthamgts12 8y ago

I was reading this in Dwight K Shrute's voice. lol

sunstone 8y ago

PayPal was one of the few financial innovators to dodge animal control. They were first and they were fast.

JulianMorrison 8y ago
And they were compliant. Their business model was not "you can use this new form of money to mail order cocaine".
- ballenf 8y ago
  I don’t think they really care about the drug trade near as much as large scale tax avoidance.
r_singh 8y ago
They were the friendly coyotes that managed to invent something that did not threaten the state.

alaxsxaq 8y ago

There is a pretty good book about the history of the Coyote - Coyote America by Dan Flores.

80386 8y ago

When I was in school, there were the people who seemed smart and the people who seemed like they worked hard. The people who seemed smart won the minigames. They got good grades with little effort. But somehow, they ended up with no institutional support -- in fact, the school hated them. Eventually one of the teachers (who was visibly insecure about her own intelligence and competence) cooked up a nonsense pretext to get some of them expelled. One kid's parents brought a legal challenge, the school settled for a year's worth of college tuition, and last I heard his parents had withdrawn him from college to pack him off to rehab for heroin addiction. The only other expellee I've heard from left the country, never to return. The people who seemed like they worked hard didn't always get the best grades. But the institution went out of its way to make life easier for them, and they're all doing alright now.

bachbach 8y ago
The education system prioritizes the average, the mean, mediocrity. It's a political aim I believe - I expect without our 'schools' society would look completely different - the spread of outcomes much wider.
internetman55 8y ago
People hate their superiors unfortunately. This is why I think rich/high IQ parents need to put their kids around other rich/high IQ kids: proles/low IQs will tear your children apart out of jealousy, possibly leading to mental disorders and drug addictions
- tclancy 8y ago
  That does not seem like a recipe for a solid society. And suggesting the poor are the cause of the rich's mental problems & substance abuse is . . . well, it's something.
- mykull 8y ago
  You're assuming rich and high IQ go together. We don't live in a meritocratic society and as such, that's not true.
deleted 8y ago

mcv 8y ago

Appropriately, this article is a slightly-too-clever way of talking about three things at the same time.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

r_singh 8y ago

The most relevant take away from this article (for me) is how the coyotes (crypto and currency experts) invented Bitcoins, raccoons over leveraged it out of dumb greed (investors) and the state took notice and acted out of sheer desperation to not lose control and once again rendered the invention useless by gaining more control than before (the part that is currently in its early stages right now). Update: I think the article insinuates an interesting take on the invention of cryptocurrencies (by coyotes), their bubble (by raccoons) and their suppression (by the state). But IMO in this case, the state suppressed the invention not just because they fear what the coyotes have produced but also what raccoons have done with it (with the whole ICO bubble, etc.).

0xBA5ED 8y ago
Of course, bitcoin's own limitations would've prevented it's widespread use, with or without the over-speculation (lack of throughput and excessive energy consumption).
- r_singh 8y ago
  That's true. The idea holds up better if looked at from an all cryptocurrencies perspective rather than only Bitcoin. Also because states aren't just trying to control / suppress Bitcoin alone but all cryptocurrencies. For example, here in India the central bank has banned all cryptocurrencies.
etherael 8y ago
They don't have control though. At best, they sabotaged just the bitcoin core blockchain, and those who were in it to destroy the state and central banks forked off into bitcoin cash. They also provoked a tidal wave of "financial innovation" in the sector with now dozens of independent blockchains, some utterly anonymous, over which they have zero control. If their campaign was the bring this under their power, it cannot be viewed reasonably as anything other than a miserable failure. Also the analogy to the metagame does not acknowledge the reality that actually those in power in the metagame are a predatory parasitic coercive force in themselves, and their brand of coyote cunning is just traditional machiavellian politics rather than financial innovation backed up with cryptographic peer to peer networks. It's not a war between animal control and coyotes. It's a war between many coyotes executing different strategies. While both the sheep and the raccoons just try to get by as best they can.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago

Argh - please dang, can we have subtitles, or something, to reduce the numbers of clickbait non-descriptive titles. Sincerely, Infuriated of Norwich.

w_t_payne 8y ago

At least part of the point of the article seems to be about narrow specialization creating blinders that inhibit deep strategic thinking. I can see very strong parallels with systems thinking and the role that systems engineers play within the V-model.

shishy 8y ago

What do people think of his connection between Credit Default Swaps and all these ICOs?

AlexCoventry 8y ago
I don't see any useful insight in it.

huffmsa 8y ago

The true meta-gamer of the story snuck by with a single sentence reference. So I'm calling you out barn cat. You think you can sneak by having your cake and keeping your solidarity and standoff distance from the humans but also benefit from the free housing + healthcare + steady food when you don't want to kill mice + affection when you decide to wander over to the main house. But I'm onto you.

zippitydoodah68 8y ago
Actually the parasite infestation (fleas), lack of affection and food when they want it (except through hard work), temperature variations, etc...make the barn cat a misanthrope. Every house cat owner knows that the house cat is the 'meta game mastermind'. Hell, they've engineered the system to care about their safety so much that it is cruelty to have them reproduce via the species own painful biology. Letting them out into the street is homicidal. If they get pests they inflict them on their caretaker and every other discomfort is communicated to the human caretaker willy nilly. When they want to exert themselves they can be amazingly cruel, subtle, unpredictable and unyielding. House cats win.
- fhood 8y ago
  I'm not a fan of having house cats. Indoor only cats develop weird psychological issues at a rate that makes me suspect that living inside isn't all that healthy for them. Every cat I have owned has been an indoor-outdoor cat. There are downsides. They tend to be less affectionate and more independent than house cats, but they also seem healthier and happier than the indoor cats I have known. Also they don't need a litter box. That is a biggy.
  - zippitydoodah68 8y ago
    Well, having an indoor cat means keeping an indoor cat happy which is a larger problem (for the caretaker) but indicative of the meta supremacy in house cat behavior. In all seriousness I would rather take the time to care for a house cat than to deal with the possibility of roadkill/injury, disease, pests or other accidents of nature. If the cat is a problem for you then don't own one?

jrootabega 8y ago

Reminds me of when Andy Dufresne thought he was protecting himself when he told the warden he'd never tell anyone about cooking his books.

handsomechad 8y ago
what scene in shawshank are you referring to
- jrootabega 8y ago
  When Andy's trying to get the warden to let Tommy tell them he's innocent https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_IrCgt-Bt1I&t=3m53s# https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_IrCgt-Bt1I&t=3m53s#
- habitue 8y ago
  The scene where Andy Dufresne told the warden he'd never tell anyone about cooking his books
- ElysianEagle 8y ago
  It's this scene (around the 3:55 mark in this clip): https://youtu.be/_IrCgt-Bt1I?t=3m55s https://youtu.be/_IrCgt-Bt1I?t=3m55s

kemonocode 8y ago

I'm quite amused to see all that veiled scaremongering when it comes to crypto, even if it has a grain of truth. Yeah, truly the ones who get involved in it can be thought of as either coyotes or raccoons, but I think prohibition and "the war on drugs" only shows how much can something be made desirable by making it unfit for public consumption, and at that point the animal simile breaks down. Not to mention that, as other commenters have mentioned, coyotes have been rather successful in spite of human encroachment, just like cryptocurrencies grow stronger in the face of looming regulation and sanction. Sure, it might scare off some raccoons and kill some coyotes in the short term, but it's going to be still there. And for all the "coyote institutions" that perished, there are still many more.

kortex 8y ago
I don't know if it's scaremongering because I'm not entirely sure what point the writer is getting at. The angle I chose to read is that, cryptos acting all "You can regulate us, because distributed blockchain! Muahaha!" is the 1st order game, akin to the coyote calling bluff on the noisy can. Government types developing an ill will towards the defiant cryptos is the neighborhood moms getting pissed at the bold coyote. The animal control is the 2nd order game. Regulators come in and crack down on cryptos. Put the squeeze on exchanges, make it hard to cash out to legal tender.
AlexCoventry 8y ago
I am no coyote or raccoon. I'm more like a German Shepherd / Corgi cross.

coyote-w-912 8y ago

The author describes how coyotes win the "skirmish game" when they casually walk into suburban yards and demonstrate that they are not afraid of the humans when they do things to scare them away such as make loud noises at them. However, they lose the "meta-game" when animal control shows up and puts them down because they won't go away. The author uses this analogy to compare coyotes to financial innovators. His argument is that every time financial innovation gets out of control and the economy at large is impacted, larger powers step in and squash it. He argues tha this is what happened in the 2008 financial crisis with mortage backed securities, and that this is the same thing happening now with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. I disagree with the parallel he draws to cryptocurrencies. While I don't necessarily think cryptocurrencies will dominate the world, and Governments may even succeed in reigning them in, they aren't in the same category as other financial innovation. Mortgage backed securites were the coyotes stalking across the laws of suburban moms, hoping animal control wouldn't interfere. Cryptocurrencies are a coordinated attack by a pack of coyotes on animal control headquarters. They were designed specifically to be as government-resistant as possible. Now, animal control has a lot of firepower and they can call in reinforcements. Governments have a lot of resources and powers they can draw on to stop and regulate cryptocurrencies. However, these coyotes are well aware of the meta-game, who the true enemy is and they're gunning hard for him. Before bitcoin, no currency that wasn't backed by a government lasted long before being shut down by a government entity. Bitcoin has been going for nine years now, and in that time further innovation has given us Monero and Zcash which are even more censorship and surveillance resistant. The primary attack vector, the only one that's worked, has been made by the "racoons" at Blockstream and their investors from Visa and the banking industry. This is a much more subtle attack than direct government intervention. In a nut-shell, when Satoshi left the project, he left a guy named Gavin Andresen in charge. Gavin trusted the wrong person with commit access to the project, who was co-opted by the banking industry and who then booted him from access. Thos current group of developers crippled Bitcoin by repeatedly refusing to expand the block size and moving forward developing the "Lightning Network" which is nothing more than a copy of the current inter-bank payment system and which, quite frankly doesn't work.[1][2] They also took over the r/bitcoin subreddit as well as the bitcointalk forum and completely censored it.[3] The fact that the racoons have taken this more subtle approach, suggests to me that the enemies of Bitcoin now believe that attempts to shut it down by more direct mean will fail. However there are still a lot of coyotes working on other cryptocurrency projects. These coyotes are clearly playing the meta-game, and for now they're winning. [1] Summary of what the lightning network is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g [2] Discussion of a developer who tried to implement micropayments with lightning network, but had to switch because it did not work well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew2MWVtNAt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew2MWVtNAt0 [3] A (brief and incomplete) history of censorship in /r/Bitcoin: https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of-censorship-in-r-bitcoin-c85a290fe43 https://medium.com/@johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-histor...

phendrenad2 8y ago

I've long had the suspicion that in domesticating animals, we've dumbed them down severely. And I sometimes wonder if humans were smarter before civilization replaced evolution as the driving factor for intelligence.

leetcrew 8y ago
> And I sometimes wonder if humans were smarter before civilization replaced evolution as the driving factor for intelligence. this is an odd proposition. evolution has not been replaced; rather, the evolutionary pressures have changed. in any case, civilization is not much more than 10,000 years old, which is pretty short in evolutionary timescales. and although we employ some measures (ie social services) to prevent the weakest from dying outright, it seems like long term strategic thought is more important than ever. for instance, it takes 5-7 years for a high school grad to get a master's degree. can you really envision an adult hunter-gatherer working towards something for that long without seeing the fruits of their labor? their environment mandated a much shorter term focus to avoid starvation or lethal competition from other humans.
- phendrenad2 8y ago
  Well, if humans haven’t changed in 10,000 years then the author’s thought that domesticated animals are different is also false.
  - sangnoir 8y ago
    What are you basing that assertion on? For starters, animals had way more generations than humans in those 10,000 years - probably by an order of magnitude or 2 depending on the animal.
- bachbach 8y ago
  This: > it seems like long term strategic thought is more important than ever is true for the minority only. Of course any description of what's happening and what can be done to prevent it is to the right of the Overton Window and is thus illegal to discuss on this forum.

justherefortart 8y ago

Oh no, poor finance jerkoffs got ripped off by their own cleverness. Nothing says dbag like Alabama man who now lives in Connecticut crying over dead asshole financial firms. We've had 4 (or more) of these banking/finance ripoffs in my fucking lifetime. Bankers and finance assholes are the scourge of mankind. I got a degree in Finance just so I could avoid the bullshit these fucking assholes use to rip everyone off. A State Bank as the author is so scared of, like the one in North Dakota, won't run into any of these issues. Because their goal isn't profit at any cost, it's providing banking and investment services. tl;dr; fuck this guy

jeffreyrogers 8y ago
A local commercial bank and a New York investment bank are really different things. The financial industry has caused some large problems, but it's also a big part of why the modern world works as well as it does. I don't think you're being charitable in your criticism of the article.
- justherefortart 8y ago
  The modern world works well for whom? Laughable.
  - jeffreyrogers 8y ago
    When would you rather be alive? There are tons of problems with the world today and many that we can fix but aren't. But the idea that things are worse now than before is just not true.
    - justherefortart 8y ago
      I'm a white guy in American born to two college educated parents. My life isn't representative of everyone on this planet. I won the birth lottery. I'll pick the future, since it's a futile exercise.
    - mykull 8y ago

mason55 8y ago

I take issue with the way he describes securitization as if it's some horrible evil. Securitization (and financialization in general) just takes big balls of intertwined risks and breaks them apart into little balls of (theoretically) consistent risk so that everyone can get the amount of risk they desire. Imagine a company that has a single customer. There's a 50/50 chance that the customer will pay. If the customer pays then the company makes a ton of profit, if the customer doesn't pay then the company goes out of business. For the company, this is probably more risk than they want to take. But there's probably hedge fund out there who has enough money to survive the customer not paying and is willing to take that risk for a fee. So the company can go to the hedge fund and say "if the customer pays us in the future we'll give you all the money. In exchange give us 40% of it right now". And the company is happy because they have a 100% chance of staying in business. And the hedge fund is happy because (if the risk was priced correctly) they have a positive expected value in the trade. That's all securitization is.

raesene9 8y ago
That's true in that it's what securitization is meant to be but unfortunately as was seen in the mid-2000's it proved extremely difficult to accurately price the little balls of risk and the money being made in doing the selling and breaking apart those balls provided an incentive for people to keep the pipeline of loans going well past what was prudent. In the UK we ended up with all sort of shenanigans like "self-certified mortgages" where the person taking out the loan was allowed to certify their ability to repay. with that kind of product it's very difficult to classify risk of non-repayment as you can't believe the evidence provided (necessarily).

dgudkov 8y ago

If any animal has won the meta-game it's the cats. Yes, those adorable, cute, dumb bastards. They badly lose on any tactical level. But man, win on the strategical level so much.

kortex 8y ago
We got some kibble from an aunt that the cat isn't keen on. She'll eat it if and only if she's starving and it's the only stuff around. Also we use a feed puzzle tower where she has to paw the kibble through holes to get it into the "bowl". We mixed the bunk kibble with the good stuff to try to coax her to eat it, but she sniffs each kibble and ignores the inferior stuff. Well, the bunk kibble is round and likes to roll away. So in the course of getting at the good stuff, the round garbage unworthy for the princess scatters everywhere, gets stepped on, attracts ants, etc. Well, I'm left with a tupperware full of the mixed kibble that I have to use up, so I just pour it into the bowl so it doesn't scatter. Pesky poking has given way to the buffet. I don't know if you knew you were playing, but good game, cat, good game.

csomar 8y ago

Okay. Let's slow down here: The OP says. >> And they’re not that smart. I’d put our barn cat up against a raccoon any day on any sort of cognitive test. We think raccoons are clever because they have those anthropomorphic paws and those cute little masks and even a Marvel superhero with its own toy line, but please. Raccoons are takers, not schemers. From Wikipedia >> Zoologist Clinton Hart Merriam described raccoons as "clever beasts", and that "in certain directions their cunning surpasses that of the fox." The animal's intelligence gave rise to the epithet "sly coon".[120] Only a few studies have been undertaken to determine the mental abilities of raccoons, most of them based on the animal's sense of touch. In a study by the ethologist H. B. Davis in 1908, raccoons were able to open 11 of 13 complex locks in fewer than 10 tries and had no problems repeating the action when the locks were rearranged or turned upside down. Davis concluded they understood the abstract principles of the locking mechanisms and their learning speed was equivalent to that of rhesus macaques. Learning speed equivalent to the macaques? You gotta be kidding me. These creatures are underestimated and the author might just not like them? I mean, look at his eyes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raccoon_climbing_in_tree_-_Cropped_and_color_corrected.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raccoon_climbing_in_tree_... That guy looks really smart and self aware.

derstander 8y ago
I agree. Having grown up in a rural area near raccoons and eastern coyotes, I definitely prefer the latter. I don't _know_ why, but if I were to wager a guess it's probably because they remind me of dogs. Maybe an unconscious bias shared by a lot of people thanks to the domestication of the dog. Raccoons, in my experience, definitely seem intelligent. I think the author just needs a proxy for a villain. I can't be alone in thinking that the author has chosen poorly; the fault he finds in the coyote is, by his own admission, not shared by the raccoon. The raccoon is successful in both the mini- and meta-games.
fhood 8y ago
I am a big fan of raccoons as well. I think they are hilarious. They are just smart enough to seem stupid if that makes any sense.

mfoy_ 8y ago

I'm not sure what the connection was, exactly, but this story talking about coyotes and raccoons in finance gave me an epiphany of understanding about Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

jmull 8y ago

I read the entire article. My take: don't bother unless you have some time and are looking to be mildly entertained (very mildly IMO). It's fluff. The central analogy is a little amusing but doesn't even roughly fit reality. In chasing its premise the article ignores a key dynamic of "financial innovation" schemes, which is that the schemers largely avoid the negative consequences of their schemes. Well, the money spigot stops at some point, which the schemers see as a tragedy, but they generally aren't losing too much of what they grabbed before the end. In 2008, I think most had to endure talk of losing their bonuses (not actually loss of bonuses, just talk and sometimes a temporary delay). The real consequence is that they have to get back to work building up a new scheme so they can do it all again.

zasz 8y ago
Yeah, basically nobody went to jail, and yet, he considers Bear Sterns losing its independent existence to be the equivalent of a coyote getting shot? Sloppy thinking there.

denverkarma 8y ago

Perhaps the post itself is too clever by half. It was about “why Bitcoin is going to fail” and yet all anyone is discussing is its well-told animal analogy.

opinionator1 8y ago
Probably because it's pretty obvious that Bitcoin is going to fail.

code_duck 8y ago

This reminds me of the scene in the Indiana Jones movie when someone comes up and starts challenging Indy with a bunch of flashy sword moves. Rather than engage him that level, where he is definitely outclassed, Indy simply draws his pistol and shoots him: https://youtu.be/anEuw8F8cpE https://youtu.be/anEuw8F8cpE

M_Bakhtiari 8y ago

>I know, I know … it’s negative reinforcement No it isn't. It's positive punishment.

mholt 8y ago

Slightly OT: For us on our farm back in Iowa, the clever animals were the raccoons. It got to the point where we had to put locks with keys on the grain bins; metal hooks and clasps---even some requiring refined motor skills to open---were not enough to keep the buggers out. Fortunately, they couldn't pick the locks. :)

XnoiVeX 8y ago

Truly HN quality post!

chb 8y ago

Closes the article by implying that the federal government is a monolithic political entity ("the State") that stands apart from private financial interests. And then quotes Jesus. Way to stay true to your roots.

rossdavidh 8y ago

Fun article, interesting point, and I don't even necessarily disagree (entirely, anyway), BUT: coyotes have a larger range now than they have had since long before humans showed up in North America, largely because humans cleared out their main competitors, the wolves. And raccoons are not stupid, although they are destructive. So, I get what the author is trying to say with this little parable, but the fact that the central facts it is using (coyotes losing out, raccoons are stupid) are both false, it makes me more than a little suspicious of the conclusion, when I otherwise might not be.

MattyRad 8y ago

Very interesting. One might also say something like "half measures break the whole." The conclusion drawn about the State getting stronger and weakening mobility for coyotes seems like a legitimate concern too. In the case of Bitcoin, being such a foray into uncharted territory, I'm unsure of how you would be good at the meta game, or figure out how racoons will abuse your radical new idea. Maybe I need to improve my meta game, heh.

jcoffland 8y ago

> The coyotes know exactly where the invisible fence begins and ends, without the benefit of ever wearing a shock collar. How do I know? Because they intentionally leave their scat on their side of the invisible fence, creating a demilitarized zone as precise and as well-observed as anything on the Korean peninsula. Occasionally a coyote will try to test our dogs by leaving its scat juuusst over the line on our side of the DMZ. My question is, why does the human think coyote scat on the other side of the line was precisely placed and scat on his side of the line is an intentional provocation? A more reasonable explanation is that the coyotes don't know exactly where the invisible line is.

deciplex 8y ago

>But the trait that ALL domesticated species demonstrate relative to their wild species is a smaller brain. I’d bet it’s happening with humans, too, but that’s just an observation for another day. It is: http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-why-brain-shrinking http://discovermagazine.com/2010/sep/25-modern-humans-smart-...

AlexCoventry 8y ago
Associating brain size with intelligence is facile. As the article points out, no one knows why cranial volume is shrinking, and there's no clear connection to intellect.

tylerjwilk00 8y ago

If you enjoyed this article and especially the parallel between animal populations and human behavior. I recommend reading about [1] Evolutionarily Stable Strategy and specificly the book [2] The Selfish Gene by [3] Richard Dawkins. The gist of it is that survival strategies are only viable given the distribution of the behavior throughout the entire species or population. Similar to a finicial market, some strategies work only when a small percentage of the population exhibits the behavior. A bonus is that, like the phrase Too Clever by Half, Dawkins is also British. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins

bachbach 8y ago

> I’d bet it’s happening with humans, too, but that’s just an observation for another day. Ho Ho! Tell me more brother. I am curious. This links up with David Krakauer's ideas I'll bet.

ravensraven 8y ago

Hands down one of the best reads I have had in a longgg while