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I think this article is trying to make a political statement, "Our leaders have just done something that is going to cause a future problem, a crash". I have o

I think this article is trying to make a political statement, "Our leaders have just done something that is going to cause a future problem, a crash". I have only read the linked article, I think the followup might be available, but I'm not going to read it before posting this -- because this article was meant to be clickbait, to get you hooked and possibly mis-informed. The article as it stands (incomplete) contains some classic argument fallacies. It is an "appeal to authority", by attempting to explain control theory. This person knows something. The examples all result in bad things, airplanes crashing, hard drives (crashing - perhaps a stretch). Bicycle at the edge of a cliff. Eating too much ice cream. Chernobyl. This is a possible "appeal to emotion". The final issue is an "incomplete comparison". The graph at the bottom of the article shows housing prices -- all of the previous examples have mathematical models which can explain the behavior. For the last graph no model (the equations) is presented. Without a model you cannot use control theory to analyze the zeros and poles. The last graph wants you to believe in a continuing upward trend, the fallacious argument, implies that whatever the Canadian political change that has been made is going to make this trend to zero, despite the intention to keep it trending upwards. Background: A long time ago, as a mathematics undergraduate, I did take a course in control theory, it was run out of the engineering department. It was somewhat awkward as quite a few mathematical terms were not-quite-the-same. I get the same unease when reading this for poles, zeros and right-half-planes. Any engineering textbooks that use j for sqrt(-1) instead of i (because that is taken) is an indicator. Yup, this could be construed as an "appeal to authority".

any1 4y ago
Textbooks that use j instead of i are an indicator of what? Why is slightly different notation awkward? It's not as if notation is always consistent within the field of mathematics, right?
- VogonPoetry 4y ago
  The context of the writer. Apologies if I implied that the notation semantics were important -- letter exchange is free; concept change is not. What I indented to mean was the use of the terms poles and zeros is a bit wonky. Attempting to be cute with a physicist's hat, a pole is a "black hole", an entity you must not cross because the calculus will not work. It is a discontinuity, a singular value. There are worse things in mathematical generalizations; a cut / line in a manifold. But tools to cope.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
fluoridation 4y ago
That's not an appeal to authority. An appeal to authority is "P is a statement in the topic T. A is an expert in T. A says P is true. Therefore P is true." If I draw a parallel between two topics and proceed to explain one of them in order to argue something about the other one, that's not an appeal to authority. It could be that the reader fails to understand the explanation and instead treats the writer as a trustworthy authority. That would not make the argument an appeal to authority or even fallacious. It could be that the analogy is poorly justified, which would make the argument incomplete, or it could even be that the writer failed to understand some subtle aspect of the second topic that makes the analogy inappropriate. Neither of these would be appeals to authority.
- VogonPoetry 4y ago
  In this case the author (A) is setting themselves up as an authority in (T). The statement (P) in this article has not been revealed, but because (and I suspected separated) is in the followup (which I have now read). The followup does refer back to the "now you know about poles" -- the appeal to authority.
  - hmry 4y ago
    Setting yourself up as an authority isn't a fallacy. It's a rhetorical device. (Though I am not sure what makes you say that anyway. The article didn't particularly strike me as the author setting themselves up as an authority, beyond what is inherent in writing an article that explains something.) If they made the argument "I am an expert in control theory, therefore what I think about Canadian politics is correct", that would be an appeal to one's own authority. But I didn't see anything like that in the article.
  - fluoridation 4y ago
    >The followup does refer back to the "now you know about poles" -- the appeal to authority. How is that an appeal to authority?
    - VogonPoetry 4y ago
Victerius 4y ago
I call it the "Ian Malcolm syndrome", in reference to the character (a mathematician) in Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park who tries to apply mathematical concepts to the dinosaur attraction to try to show why it is doomed to collapse. There are a lot of similar posts online about people trying to use chaos theory (or what they believe chaos theory is), "systems theory", and other obscure concepts to explain why, for example, climate change will be the end of us all, or the global economy will enter a depression, or any other extremely pessimistic macro scenario. I see three reasons why these people are doing it. (1) To draw attention to themselves as someone with a superior intellect (which they actually aren't) (2) To construct an analysis no one has constructed before, in a "all these professional economists are saying the same thing, but here's why they're all misleading themselves, thanks to my ace card of a theory" kind of way, and (3) A love for the hyperbole, for dramatic outcomes. A classic economic prediction like "Inflation pressures will potentially slow down growth in the short term, but the behavior of the economy over the next 12 months remains unpredictable" is not enough. It MUST be "A catastrophic economic collapse is inevitable", or "We are going back to the Middle Ages by the end of the decade", or "Hundreds of millions will die in the next few years".
- sebastos 4y ago
  Er, Ian Malcolm, the character who was introduced so that he could arrogantly predict that the park would collapse, only to get his satisfying come-uppance when... he turns out to be completely correct?
- Natsu 4y ago
  Why doesn't all the same analysis apply to your making of "Ian Malcolm syndrome" itself?
yt-sdb 4y ago
I agree. The author uses technical jargon but is clearly intending the reader to be non-technical. Otherwise, footnote 1 should just be in the main text. The rhetorical effect, intended or otherwise, is an appeal to (the author's) authority. As you say, the author then switches to a topic he likely much less expertise in (housing prices, inflation, etc.) while relying on the reader to believe that this new problem shares some mathematical foundations with the original set of problems.
TimPC 4y ago
I’m curious what the right half plane zero in housing is. In general, we correct inflation through interest which we raise gradually waiting a month or two to observe the effects of a 0.5% raise. I think that should be sufficient to avoid the control feedback effects he talks about in this article.
- jbay808 4y ago
  The RHP0 in (Canadian) housing comes from including mortgage interest payments -- a term that increases in proportion to interest rates -- in the measurement of the CPI.
VogonPoetry 4y ago
I have now read the followup article. There are, to me some language red flags. The followup article now uses "we' -- suggesting this is not the work of an individual. This was not present in the initial post. An attempt is made to build a model. Curiously a visual programming model is now used. No explicit differential equations are given. If the equations are not given there is no way to check the model. So "pole" and "zero" analysis is mute. There are no tests to validate this model against past situations - an easy and free test, the past history is known. If the model that has been created and can predict the future, why would was it not run it against the past and show the predictive success? The built model is only presented against the current situation -- is it circumstantial / opinion based. My understanding of science is -- build a model that can predict the future / what happens accurately, i.e. matches the measurements. The consensus agrees that this is the (current) best model. Prices are ultimately influenced by a sentiment factor, a value derived from a I have no idea what human feeling / property. Some power "enabled" humans have been endowed with a much higher influence on this parameter. Where is this value expressed in the predictive equations?
- dukeofdoom 4y ago
  Canada does not have 30 year mortgages. Most home owners have mortgages with 3-5 year terms. Since 3-5 years ago rates were low, and home prices were low, people's mortgage expenses are still low. However that's about to end. As people either bought at much higher prices in the last 2 years, and/or the older mortgages are getting renewed at higher interest rates. This will result in drastic increase in what people need to pay to stay in their home.... possibly causing a market crush.
  - jimbob45 4y ago
    3-5 year mortgage? Aren’t the monthly payments totally destructive to one’s financial health?
    - kspacewalk2 4y ago
      The renewal periods are typically 3-5 years. The standard mortgage amortization period in Canada is 25 years.
starkd 4y ago
I admit I was a bit disappointed by the end of the article. But I don't think it was strictly an appeal to authority. The author is evidently a very good writer, but he might have done a better job at summing up a conclusion. It's very difficult to tell just what point he was trying to make. He never even said just what his inputs and outputs are in his housing model. Even if he is saving that for a later article, he should have at least mentioned that.
CFLAddLoader 4y ago
The author of the article has had their understanding of systems eat their understanding of humans. Every time they make a realization about people, it immediately gets turned to getting more understanding and control over the world. Which doesn't leave any room to grow for their understanding of humans. This makes it really hard for them to write an article for non-technical people. To do so, they would have to connect the human side of things to the systems theory side of things. Which they can't do, because they don't understand the human side of things. They aren't using bad-faith arguments to convince you that they are correct. They simply have no idea how to talk to you. They are in fact trying to be helpful, by presenting what they think is really useful information to understand and control the world with. Their help is useless to you, but they are trying.
syntaxfree 4y ago
“the math that I know is THE math to explain inflation, political instability and more”
TimPC 4y ago
The follow-up article tries to argue there is an over five year lag to interest correcting inflation based on undisclosed principles of a model they don’t provide equations for. Their argument is in effect that the growth of roughly 30% of the inflation basket of goods (housing) dominates the shrinking of the other 70% of the inflation basket of goods. The analysis is suspect as they don’t seem to model how much the 70% shrinks or slows in growth at all. They also aren’t very numerically precise on the interest effects on housing prices and misanalyze how mortgages work in Canada. Their analysis argues that roughly 4% of mortgages are replaced every year while 96% retain the same rates. This makes it hard to argue interest rates have the desired effect size but that doesn’t stop them from trying.
- jbay808 4y ago
  > The analysis is suspect as they don’t seem to model how much the 70% shrinks or slows in growth at all. It doesn't model it at all. The trajectory of ex-shelter CPI is taken as an input. For the provided scenarios, all non-shelter components are assumed (as a scenario premise, not a prediction) to instantly return to a 2% growth rate and stay there.
skybrian 4y ago
This seems uncharitable. The author is trying to explain how knowing a bit of control theory could be helpful for understanding economics. Unfortunately they’re having trouble writing for a general audience, perhaps due to being too comfortable with the math. This doesn’t mean anything nefarious, just that they could use an editor.
eftychis 4y ago
Comment: j is used instead of i in certain contexts -- e.g. circuits -- when it is possible to confuse it with the current (same letter used). As e.g. an Electrical and Computer Engineer you just move back and forth on sqrt(-1) notation appropriately. Not sure beyond that about the not quite the same terminology -- not my experience but who knows. The article is kind of a "layman's article" to put it politely. I am erring towards the side of hocus pocus -- if economics were that well behaving and linear and composable as the author models, it would be a solved field years now. And control theory wouldn't exist as a field for 50 years, as it would have been solved. Do the components diverge? Where in the complex plane are they defined to begin with? Anyways. Also: if you should learn something: Central Banks have a terrible track record, and despite what they keep saying are political. The joke is that they are the blind driver with a gas and break pedal that have a 2 years delay. So good luck to us all.

any1 4y ago

Textbooks that use j instead of i are an indicator of what? Why is slightly different notation awkward? It's not as if notation is always consistent within the field of mathematics, right?

VogonPoetry 4y ago
The context of the writer. Apologies if I implied that the notation semantics were important -- letter exchange is free; concept change is not. What I indented to mean was the use of the terms poles and zeros is a bit wonky. Attempting to be cute with a physicist's hat, a pole is a "black hole", an entity you must not cross because the calculus will not work. It is a discontinuity, a singular value. There are worse things in mathematical generalizations; a cut / line in a manifold. But tools to cope.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

fluoridation 4y ago

That's not an appeal to authority. An appeal to authority is "P is a statement in the topic T. A is an expert in T. A says P is true. Therefore P is true." If I draw a parallel between two topics and proceed to explain one of them in order to argue something about the other one, that's not an appeal to authority. It could be that the reader fails to understand the explanation and instead treats the writer as a trustworthy authority. That would not make the argument an appeal to authority or even fallacious. It could be that the analogy is poorly justified, which would make the argument incomplete, or it could even be that the writer failed to understand some subtle aspect of the second topic that makes the analogy inappropriate. Neither of these would be appeals to authority.

VogonPoetry 4y ago
In this case the author (A) is setting themselves up as an authority in (T). The statement (P) in this article has not been revealed, but because (and I suspected separated) is in the followup (which I have now read). The followup does refer back to the "now you know about poles" -- the appeal to authority.
- hmry 4y ago
  Setting yourself up as an authority isn't a fallacy. It's a rhetorical device. (Though I am not sure what makes you say that anyway. The article didn't particularly strike me as the author setting themselves up as an authority, beyond what is inherent in writing an article that explains something.) If they made the argument "I am an expert in control theory, therefore what I think about Canadian politics is correct", that would be an appeal to one's own authority. But I didn't see anything like that in the article.
- fluoridation 4y ago
  >The followup does refer back to the "now you know about poles" -- the appeal to authority. How is that an appeal to authority?
  - VogonPoetry 4y ago

Victerius 4y ago

I call it the "Ian Malcolm syndrome", in reference to the character (a mathematician) in Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park who tries to apply mathematical concepts to the dinosaur attraction to try to show why it is doomed to collapse. There are a lot of similar posts online about people trying to use chaos theory (or what they believe chaos theory is), "systems theory", and other obscure concepts to explain why, for example, climate change will be the end of us all, or the global economy will enter a depression, or any other extremely pessimistic macro scenario. I see three reasons why these people are doing it. (1) To draw attention to themselves as someone with a superior intellect (which they actually aren't) (2) To construct an analysis no one has constructed before, in a "all these professional economists are saying the same thing, but here's why they're all misleading themselves, thanks to my ace card of a theory" kind of way, and (3) A love for the hyperbole, for dramatic outcomes. A classic economic prediction like "Inflation pressures will potentially slow down growth in the short term, but the behavior of the economy over the next 12 months remains unpredictable" is not enough. It MUST be "A catastrophic economic collapse is inevitable", or "We are going back to the Middle Ages by the end of the decade", or "Hundreds of millions will die in the next few years".

sebastos 4y ago
Er, Ian Malcolm, the character who was introduced so that he could arrogantly predict that the park would collapse, only to get his satisfying come-uppance when... he turns out to be completely correct?
Natsu 4y ago
Why doesn't all the same analysis apply to your making of "Ian Malcolm syndrome" itself?

yt-sdb 4y ago

I agree. The author uses technical jargon but is clearly intending the reader to be non-technical. Otherwise, footnote 1 should just be in the main text. The rhetorical effect, intended or otherwise, is an appeal to (the author's) authority. As you say, the author then switches to a topic he likely much less expertise in (housing prices, inflation, etc.) while relying on the reader to believe that this new problem shares some mathematical foundations with the original set of problems.

TimPC 4y ago

I’m curious what the right half plane zero in housing is. In general, we correct inflation through interest which we raise gradually waiting a month or two to observe the effects of a 0.5% raise. I think that should be sufficient to avoid the control feedback effects he talks about in this article.

jbay808 4y ago
The RHP0 in (Canadian) housing comes from including mortgage interest payments -- a term that increases in proportion to interest rates -- in the measurement of the CPI.

VogonPoetry 4y ago

I have now read the followup article. There are, to me some language red flags. The followup article now uses "we' -- suggesting this is not the work of an individual. This was not present in the initial post. An attempt is made to build a model. Curiously a visual programming model is now used. No explicit differential equations are given. If the equations are not given there is no way to check the model. So "pole" and "zero" analysis is mute. There are no tests to validate this model against past situations - an easy and free test, the past history is known. If the model that has been created and can predict the future, why would was it not run it against the past and show the predictive success? The built model is only presented against the current situation -- is it circumstantial / opinion based. My understanding of science is -- build a model that can predict the future / what happens accurately, i.e. matches the measurements. The consensus agrees that this is the (current) best model. Prices are ultimately influenced by a sentiment factor, a value derived from a I have no idea what human feeling / property. Some power "enabled" humans have been endowed with a much higher influence on this parameter. Where is this value expressed in the predictive equations?

dukeofdoom 4y ago
Canada does not have 30 year mortgages. Most home owners have mortgages with 3-5 year terms. Since 3-5 years ago rates were low, and home prices were low, people's mortgage expenses are still low. However that's about to end. As people either bought at much higher prices in the last 2 years, and/or the older mortgages are getting renewed at higher interest rates. This will result in drastic increase in what people need to pay to stay in their home.... possibly causing a market crush.
- jimbob45 4y ago
  3-5 year mortgage? Aren’t the monthly payments totally destructive to one’s financial health?
  - kspacewalk2 4y ago
    The renewal periods are typically 3-5 years. The standard mortgage amortization period in Canada is 25 years.

starkd 4y ago

I admit I was a bit disappointed by the end of the article. But I don't think it was strictly an appeal to authority. The author is evidently a very good writer, but he might have done a better job at summing up a conclusion. It's very difficult to tell just what point he was trying to make. He never even said just what his inputs and outputs are in his housing model. Even if he is saving that for a later article, he should have at least mentioned that.

CFLAddLoader 4y ago

The author of the article has had their understanding of systems eat their understanding of humans. Every time they make a realization about people, it immediately gets turned to getting more understanding and control over the world. Which doesn't leave any room to grow for their understanding of humans. This makes it really hard for them to write an article for non-technical people. To do so, they would have to connect the human side of things to the systems theory side of things. Which they can't do, because they don't understand the human side of things. They aren't using bad-faith arguments to convince you that they are correct. They simply have no idea how to talk to you. They are in fact trying to be helpful, by presenting what they think is really useful information to understand and control the world with. Their help is useless to you, but they are trying.

syntaxfree 4y ago

“the math that I know is THE math to explain inflation, political instability and more”

TimPC 4y ago

The follow-up article tries to argue there is an over five year lag to interest correcting inflation based on undisclosed principles of a model they don’t provide equations for. Their argument is in effect that the growth of roughly 30% of the inflation basket of goods (housing) dominates the shrinking of the other 70% of the inflation basket of goods. The analysis is suspect as they don’t seem to model how much the 70% shrinks or slows in growth at all. They also aren’t very numerically precise on the interest effects on housing prices and misanalyze how mortgages work in Canada. Their analysis argues that roughly 4% of mortgages are replaced every year while 96% retain the same rates. This makes it hard to argue interest rates have the desired effect size but that doesn’t stop them from trying.

jbay808 4y ago
> The analysis is suspect as they don’t seem to model how much the 70% shrinks or slows in growth at all. It doesn't model it at all. The trajectory of ex-shelter CPI is taken as an input. For the provided scenarios, all non-shelter components are assumed (as a scenario premise, not a prediction) to instantly return to a 2% growth rate and stay there.

skybrian 4y ago

This seems uncharitable. The author is trying to explain how knowing a bit of control theory could be helpful for understanding economics. Unfortunately they’re having trouble writing for a general audience, perhaps due to being too comfortable with the math. This doesn’t mean anything nefarious, just that they could use an editor.

eftychis 4y ago

Comment: j is used instead of i in certain contexts -- e.g. circuits -- when it is possible to confuse it with the current (same letter used). As e.g. an Electrical and Computer Engineer you just move back and forth on sqrt(-1) notation appropriately. Not sure beyond that about the not quite the same terminology -- not my experience but who knows. The article is kind of a "layman's article" to put it politely. I am erring towards the side of hocus pocus -- if economics were that well behaving and linear and composable as the author models, it would be a solved field years now. And control theory wouldn't exist as a field for 50 years, as it would have been solved. Do the components diverge? Where in the complex plane are they defined to begin with? Anyways. Also: if you should learn something: Central Banks have a terrible track record, and despite what they keep saying are political. The joke is that they are the blind driver with a gas and break pedal that have a 2 years delay. So good luck to us all.