3 ms·

Assets being priced proportionally to their currently-generated use-value isn’t how efficient markets work even in principle. If that were so, you could make p

Assets being priced proportionally to their currently-generated use-value isn’t how efficient markets work even in principle. If that were so, you could make predictable profits just by buying anything whose current adoption was currently on a predictable upward trend. An asset’s present price is first and foremost an estimate of its future price. As Andrew Critch put it, the reason the stock market is hard to predict is that it’s a prediction.

scraegg 7y ago
Why would someone even say something like this? There are multiple models of how pricing works. Models at their core are incorrect because they simplify a complex thing to something that can be used for predictions. They are good models when they help your predict correctly and they are bad models if they can't help you make predictions. But all are "wrong" on purpose. Therefore there must be different models because people want to predict different things. And of course neither of them is how things really work. "this is not how X works" doesn't need to be said, because yes that's the idea of using models. Otherwise you wouldn't use models. "this is not how it works in principle" assumes that there is no model that would claim previously said statement. And since you can create unlimited amounts of models of course you can very often construct a model where the statement works. I suggest instead of claiming such a thing it might be more interesting to think about how such a model would help more or less to predict things. PS: I believe The Intelligent Investor or how that book was called and a social model called Communism are both promoting models that connect use-value to price-value. So it's not even far fetched. It's a very common thesis for discussing pricing of investments.

3 ms·

Assets being priced proportionally to their currently-generated use-value isn’t how efficient markets work even in principle. If that were so, you could make p

by Eliezer 7y ago

scraegg 7y ago
Why would someone even say something like this? There are multiple models of how pricing works. Models at their core are incorrect because they simplify a complex thing to something that can be used for predictions. They are good models when they help your predict correctly and they are bad models if they can't help you make predictions. But all are "wrong" on purpose. Therefore there must be different models because people want to predict different things. And of course neither of them is how things really work. "this is not how X works" doesn't need to be said, because yes that's the idea of using models. Otherwise you wouldn't use models. "this is not how it works in principle" assumes that there is no model that would claim previously said statement. And since you can create unlimited amounts of models of course you can very often construct a model where the statement works. I suggest instead of claiming such a thing it might be more interesting to think about how such a model would help more or less to predict things. PS: I believe The Intelligent Investor or how that book was called and a social model called Communism are both promoting models that connect use-value to price-value. So it's not even far fetched. It's a very common thesis for discussing pricing of investments.