I am less familiar with finance, but I see this all the time when HN discusses legal matters. The conversation is almost pure noise, because it's dominated by people who have so little knowledge of the topic in question that they don't even recognize a term of art when they're seeing one. Which, in turn, engenders fundamental misunderstandings, and so the whole conversation ends up being a sort of large-scale trainer battle at the gym that specializes in strawman-type Pokémon.
Imagine if a discussion of programming were dominated by non-programmers who are seemingly willfully ignorant that, in the context, the word "functional" does not mean "designed to be practical and useful, rather than attractive."
Yeah, he's just strawmanning and shaming a hypothetical group for the applauses of a circlejerk.
No, it's just that it's not interesting when an expert is right about their domain expertise so we don't talk about it.
The issue is people getting skewed by this and then inferring that it must mean, on average, that their outsider opinion is as valid as experts, but really, it's not.
If RobinHood tells me how clearing houses work, they have a huge reason to lie to me.
Given what we say in cases like Enron, Bear Stearns, I am shocked and dismayed at the eagerness of Hacker News contributors to so readily accept whatever Robinhood tells them as 100% gospel.
Where were all these experts on clearing houses a week ago, warning of this exact risk? Because plenty of people had opinions on Gamestop, that maybe the SEC would halt trading altogether etc, but not a single person mentioned this clearing house liquidity issues until it happened. And I still really can't get a good explanation for why if I had 10k in my non-margin account that cleared over a year ago I can't use that to buy a stock(or withdraw for that matter, though hopefully that's temporary). OR, if people were allowed to sell stock, who were they selling to?? Clearly SOMEONE was allowed to buy! A lot of misdirection around things like margin accounts.
Robinhood didn't give any real explanation until many hours later. But they're apparently just "poor communicators." Amazing how a billion dollar company filled with conflicts of interest making a totally unprecedented restriction that actively helps their hedge fund investor simply can't possibly be committing any sort of fraud.
Because nobody's ever committed fraud before, a Robinhood press release must be treated as the "facts". This is insanity . Robinhood are not the "experts" in this case, their version of truth is probably the least reliable of all parties.
Interestingly, we weren't cutoff uniformly in all markets. NY desk was trading about 75% of regular volume for 4 days into the bankruptcy before someone (SEC?) told them to knock it off.
There's a lot going on in Robinhood's back office and legal teams of which we are not aware. While I'm as pissed as anyone that they shutoff trading, I'm open to the idea that the shutoff was for far more mundane reasons than collusion with Citadel and Point 72.
Robinhood did not halt trading or shut off trading.
Robinhood prevented _buying_ Gamestop and only allowed selling.
That’s entirely different. It can only do one thing - drive the price down which is market manipulation. It’s supposed to be illegal.
Reading the SEC's letter (in the OP), you can clearly see the SEC wants everyone to sell out of their position and make this whole thing go away. RH no doubt has an army of lawyers and compliance people whose entire jobs/careers is to predict what the regulator wants and proactively be their lapdog. (The regulators meanwhile are completely free to be Monday-morning quarterbacks and retroactively assess fines to anyone, despite providing no concrete guidance of what to do in an unprecedented situation like this one.)
If they hit their collateral limits, they have two options.
1. Stop all trading for a few days, as the trades settle, the funds clear, and the collateral requirements drop. Cue millions of pissed users who want to close their positions, but can't.
2. Only stop trades that increase their collateral requirements - buys.
There's also option 3 which is 'immediately get kicked off the settlement networks and go into bankruptcy, because they are trading past their collateral requirements.'
Which of these three options would manipulate the stock price less, and screw over fewer people, in your estimate?
This was actually a very fair, by-the-books standard trading halt. It just happened to benefit the short sellers who had been squeezed because they could easily find people willing to sell.
You definitely could still buy GME if you found some extremely random call option holder who needed to sell to cover their position. This would not be changing a net new position, just like selling to someone looking to cover a previous short, and this was never blocked - it’s just there was no volume for this, nobody owned calls and needed to sell.
If there are enough mechanisms of "Crony Capitalism" at play, to cause most of the trading apps in existence to halt trading, this is definitely something that needs to be investigated.
Likewise, if there are enough of these crony mechanisms involving collusion between Facebook, Twitter, Square, Stripe, and Visa targeting people, this also warrants investigation. It seems to be part and parcel the same sort of thing.
People have been calling stuff like this out since the 80's!
This is a fine way to settle debates about the health/viability of a publicly traded company, but it doesn't help much when the point of contention is a question of law.
Someone comes in and describes from first principles what a reasonable system would look like, and then someone else haughtily chastises them because that isn't how the existing system works. But if you read it as they intended it, i.e. as a policy proposal rather than a legal opinion, then the fact that it isn't the existing system is the point. The intention is to change the system to make it that way and the desired response is either support or a criticism of the mechanics of the proposal rather than its basis in existing law.
First, they believe that their system is how the world should work, and therefore how it would work if only someone, somewhere, weren't interfering. The result is conspiracy theories.
Second, they have not fully thought out the consequences, or don't care about them, and dismiss the historical consequences of similar systems in the past. Reasoning with people who ignore evidence in favor of their theorizing is difficult.
you must be new to the internet.
My opinion (see below for how I have defined these)
Outsider expert > establishment expert for public ally challenging and overturning norms
Any expert > layperson on the basic facts (ignoring statistical aberrations, of course)
“Outsider” being unconstrained by norms, not afraid to be cast out of a long established peer group
“Expert” has deep grasp of contemporary facts, second and third order consequences, puts in controls to remove cognitive biases, deep curiosity and healthy scepticism.
“Layperson” being someone who is probably intelligent, but grasps quickly onto unfamiliar concepts and data and makes heuristic calls based on limited data.
I dare say that most people here on HN have been hit by upper management telling them to do something stupid or impossible. I'd even wager that most have had them get defensive when you try to explain why doing X isn't a good idea.
That's effectively what I see when someone criticizes "experts" broadly and generally. I've long accepted that there are many individuals that know a lot more about subjects I know little about. While I have a pretty good read on things related to computers, I'm more than willing to admit that I'm not an expert in science, medicine, climatology.
So who should I trust? Should I trust the youtuber that's "Found" the secret that the "so called experts" are trying to hide from the public? Or should I look to the actual experts actually working in the field and take their word for it? Or do I take the harder route and try and build understanding on the subject on my own?
I certainly have tried to expand my personal understanding in general. However, what I've found is that by and large the experts actually know what they are talking about. You should generally trust them. The place where I've found a LOT of misinformation is the "skeptics" that hurl doubt without evidence while denigrating "experts". That is the place where I've found outright lies.
Evidence of such BS artists include Flat earthers, Anti-vaxxers, and climate change deniers. Those are all flat out wrong positions. There's mountains of evidence and experts against each of those positions and mostly lies or misrepresentation in favor.
[1] As the saying goes.
It's from Arthur C. Clarke.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/155962-when-a-distinguished...
Red lines with green ink --> use a thermochromic ink, change the temperature.
7 lines all perpendicular to each other --> sure, in 7+ dimensions.
Solve the climate crisis --> geo-engineering.
(y'know, if you're faced with something which seems obvious, and the expert is struggling, why? And should you simply trust them and give up? Why is the extra "explanation" just the same thing repeated again and again? How difficult it is to say "I still don't understand" after several of these explanations. And then at the end it's less clear whether the request is reasonable, if you use spoons as a proxy for other things).
Right. It's the expert's blind spots that contain the best nuggets of value.
But financiers, bankers, and economists have a much less convincing record - and that's after you filter out the ones who have been caught breaking the law.
What the OP comment was citing wasn't that. Rather, it was people like me - reading that document, not knowing the terms but assembling some form of self reinforced "knowledge".
There's a difference between very well informed outsiders which rival experts and random people. Thinking I know more about vaccines and the dangers than researchers, doctors, etc is moronic. I have no foundation to be making that decision, and beyond the obvious "free will" arguments, i shouldn't.
In many US states, the legal definition of "assault" is much different than the battery most people picture.
Robbery is not larceny.
Burglary is not larceny.
Your peers probably don't know what robbery actually is.
Yet my next thought was in the "forest vs trees" direction which as far as I can tell as someone with homemade popcorn watching both this thread, and the "meme stock" story (saw that phrase last night),
I will suggest that as in the case of the peers' ignorance of specific legal definitions,
it's the thought or thrust that is usually being grappled with, and the dimension of argument is usually not e.g. about the specific crimes some person might be guilty of or not, but rather the fact of their wrongdoing. Where "wrong" is not a legal concept full stop.
So too in the case of the GME thing, if not this thread; I suspect that there is a lot of implicit meta-argumentation going on,
and that some of what I see in this thread appears to be missing (or more likely, dis-missing) that, to engage in "tree" level quibbling.
(All said, I do agree words and their meaning matter; and that when we want to use them informally, because specificity in some domain is not germane to our argument, we would do well to be explicit about that...)
This is effort to learn vs. making hasty judgements issue.
I have studied several subjects over 100 - 1000 hours as an outsider, but that does not mean that I can criticize experts. I can ask pointed questions maybe. Being intellectually humble is good.
In this issue outsiders should at least read everything Matt Levine writes on the subject as a starting point.
When? Who? Are you talking about, say, Dr. Burry and the mortgage bubble? Because he was definitely an 'expert' already.
Definitely not one of the anointed "experts" who followed the too-common family connections, Ivy League, and i-banking VP path.
> Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. This whole website is supposed to be a testament to that!
Even granting that these statements are accurate (which plenty of sibling comments are willing to dispute) I don't think these statements suggest that "Stay in your lane" is bad advice.
Why? It's a question of distributions. For any given task/field there are a lot more laypeople than experts. Consider the following simple model where we quantify some arbitrary ability score. If lay people's scores are normally distributed with a low mean and expert's scores are normally distributed with a high mean we can still see the best lay person beating all the experts simply because there are so many more of them.
"You don't know more than the 'experts'" is good advice for almost everyone even if there are counterexamples.
There's a separate problem I think you're trying to point at where in some fields credentials don't correlate as well with expertise as one would hope. But even if credentials are an imperfect proxy for expertise, they are probably better than just trusting your gut in the absence of any expertise of your own.
> Pretty much the only field which hasn't been embarrassed by an outsider of late is physics, [...]
This seems an idiosyncratic take on the current state of science to me. I've seen plenty of examples of a field being embarrassed by insiders (e.g. the replication crisis of psychology) or seen great results from experts who were not particularly recognized by the system as set up (see Yitang Zhang's work on the twin prime conjecture). What I don't think I've seen is a field's dogma being overthrown by a complete outsider. For the sake of my own calibration, I'd welcome any examples of this.
People with the stock industry conspiracy theories are doing the exact same thing as voter fraud people. That is, people with almost no information are forming theories about a secret cabal of the powerful keeping them down.
The reality which is becoming obvious is that trades were at several brokerages were halted because of capital requirements for brokerage firms. The capital requirements for some of these meme stocks changed, the stocks were very broadly held at these brokerages, and they simply didn't have the capital on hand where it needed to be to cover the requirements. That's (1) a lot more boring, and (2) a lot more complicated than a conspiracy about market fixing, so it doesn't get attention outside of people who actually know.
It's one thing to study this in your own time and make meaningful contributions. It's another to assume that simply because you have an opinion, it's somehow valid.
In this particular instance something seems to be fundamentally broken.
Don't confuse cause and effect. This doesn't mean all anti-consensus ideas are genius and progress. Most are still just junk. See the "all big thinks initially looked like toys" meme for another example.
But jumping to crystals? Seriously?
The broker I used to work at has a big disclaimer on all their marketing stating that 77.9% of retail clients lose money when trading with them.
Doesn't stop people signing up thinking they can beat the market...
In 1999, the rational move would be to short tech stocks as they were over valued, but those who tried it lost lots of money because they didn't factor in how crazy investors were at driving up the price.
You can technically be right but still end up losing everything.
https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...
What do the regulations and laws actually mean and how are they actually in real life enforced historically? Oh yeah appeal to authority. We're literally talking about the authorities.
Laws and regulations -- and business arrangements and customs -- aren't some kind of objective external thing to be observed scientifically from first principles. That's the whole error. Like if you can show a logical flaw you can prove they are't really so because they must be logical! They are socially constructed and the result of human action, by people with the power to do so, for particular ends. They are continually re-constructed by human action, they are constructed by the powerful.
The guy is disliked for taking too much credit for things, not for "having non-consensus views" - which is sort of the opposite problem.
See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-critic... for scientists dismissing his theories of physics.
I respect him for his work in programming. I dislike him for assuming that success makes him correct in whatever theories he comes up with in physics. Particularly when he has failed to produce any testable predictions.
It is fairly obvious that this is not the case for most people in threads about GME.
Being cognizant of our (humans’) fantastic, ego-bolstering tendencies is a good thing.
there is some good to come of it, but i do wonder if the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater. true experts can handily defeat nonsensical arguments in their fields and unusual viewpoints can enrich their thinking.
If so...relative to today?
This is an interesting point. The statement I read from her is saying that N95s are hard to wear for long periods of time, so people will wear them improperly. So the overall adherence is higher with cloth coverings and have a net higher benefit.
She’s not saying “don’t wear n95s” she’s saying “we don’t recommend it because...”
This is an important distinction.
Also N95s have to be fit tested to be effective. So randos buying N95s and wearing them will frequently not work.
That was the excuse doctors were giving me in March that they all suddenly dropped. Are N95s without perfect fits worse than cloth masks, which don't have fit tests either? Are they better than no masks? Was Facebook wrong to stock up on N95s for employees during wildfire season?
> So the overall adherence is higher with cloth coverings and have a net higher benefit.
This is one of the worst things public health experts seemed to just be totally wrong about. They were obsessed with "risk compensation", where if you make things safer in the wrong way people will act riskier so it doesn't help. But this doesn't actually seem to happen.
This is the important question. Well are they? I’ve seen a lot of people wearing N95s and almost every one of them are wearing them incorrectly. Is this better than a cloth mask? I don’t know. But having huge gaps on the bridge of one’s nose where air flows is really bad to reduce risk. And my favorite is seeing them work with beards that prevent a seal.
I can’t find any tests of cloth mask vs bad n95. Saying “common sense” as the reason is not a compelling reason to try to get 300M people doing something.
I don't think this is true. No box of 3M N95 masks I've ever bought has said anywhere "failure to fit test this mask renders it ineffective." 3M Aura masks have an instruction video on how to maximize the fit, but thats just a bit on how best to adjust the little metal bit that clamps around the nose.
An ill-fit N95 that might not be perfectly adjusted to conform is still way better than a cloth mask which isn't intended to seal at all.
Some masks are just incompatible with some faces, it’s greaT that Aura’s have an instruction video, that doesn’t mean it will work for all people.
> An ill-fit N95 that might not be perfectly adjusted to conform is still way better than a cloth mask which isn't intended to seal at all.
I think you’re probably right. But I don’t know of a study that tests this because N95s are measured as conforming to spec, not when they are worn improperly without a seal at the nose and chin. I hope we get some info on this.
The Dirextors (and Fauci’s) comments weren’t about this though, they mentioned how N95s are uncomfortable and thus hard to wear consistently. Try wearing an N95 for 6 hours of school. Especially without training. I think the recommendation for cloth masks is because of the ability for people to wear them.
So the recommendation is not based around optimal standards of use, but around likely use.
This doesn’t mean that N95s don’t protect people. I wear them in public. I’m just trying to correct GP’s criticism that someone the CDC director’s comments are incorrect or illogical.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/topics/respirators/disp_part...
i always find it fascinating to hear people's take on science and medicine
especially when conclusions that have weight reach politically hazardous territory
Not saying that a yearly check-up isn't beneficial (it is), just that they shouldn't be prescribing Type 2 diabetes medications on the spot (and getting kickbacks) and instead should tell the patient to stop stuffing their faces so much.
To my mind, I'm doing the equivalent of chiding front-end beginners for not spending a few minutes reading the part of the ecmascript spec that describes the language's primitive values. (Or at least a primer that covers the names of those types.) That spec is free, and I can probably find the relevant section faster than I can type this sentence.
Actually, it took me a minute and a half-- it's in section 6.1.6: "ECMAScript Language Types" of the ECMAScript 2020 spec.
It doesn't take much longer to skim that section and start a mental model with at least the name for each primitive type.
Armed even with that superficial knowledge, a beginner is less likely to make mistakes in communication with others. E.g., they are less likely to read a tutorial on symbols, confuse it with a tutorial on strings, and/or waste the author's time asking a question about strings.
Someone who hasn't read the spec (or at least a primer) might assume that those words are synonyms, or perhaps that "symbol" refers to the content, or has something to do with unicode code points, or has the same relationship and single and double quotes in ecmascript.
I have no doubt such a beginner can concoct all kinds of interesting definitions for "symbol" from first principles. Perhaps in some cases their own idiosyncratic misunderstanding describes some "alternate ecmascript" language that has superior features to the real ecmascript. That we can so easily construct these alternate realities is cool in and of itself and is an obvious part of the learning process.
What isn't cool is when a critical mass of commenters who don't know and won't learn the basic terminology pretend to have a discussion about a topic which in reality each comment is in it's on parallel universe of idiosyncratic terminology. Especially on this topic, it's extremely likely that one's idiosyncratic, uneducated take is going to be immensely more boring and fruitless when compared to accurate and well-informed takes on what played out in the stock market over the past week.
I look forward to posting something like this the next time the topics of macroeconomics or unions come up.
And I am so sick of the HN-trademark "I'm smarter than the average bear" arrogance that you display here. Pick an article about nuanced subjects like COVID vaccines, the 737 Max, the law in general. Guaranteed the comments section here has dozens of people incorrecting each other about semantics of these subjects in which they are not domain experts.
Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but your opinion is worth less than that of a domain expert.
You know he's a total crank right.
Is that you, Michael Gove.
> You're welcome to your opinion but this appeal to authority is seriously wearing thin.
It is you, Michael Gove.
> Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders.
Certainly the spread of COVID19 in the UK and US is evidence that something can spread with the encouragement of "non-consensus outsiders".
You're welcome to your opinion but this appeal to authority is seriously wearing thin. Pretty much the only field which hasn't been embarrassed by an outsider of late is physics, and even that might not last forever (I remember the smugness with which Stephen Wolfram is routinely dismissed from having non-consensus views of physics).
Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. This whole website is supposed to be a testament to that!