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TGGP's avatar

> Firms last less than 20 years on the S&P500, and they fall mostly from their cultures going bad.

Isn't regression to the mean another explanation? Firms on the list are usually lucky in some way, and over time luck gets redistributed.

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Jack's avatar

"they fall mostly from their cultures going bad" is a non-falsifiable statement. Almost anything bad can be blamed on culture if one has an ounce of creativity.

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TGGP's avatar

I thought Joseph Tainter's claim about "complex societies" (which we could say are cultures) collapsing also verged on tautological.

https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/the-collapse-of-complex-societies/

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Jack's avatar

I have never seen a satisfying definition of "culture collapse". In biology you can have a definitive end of a lineage, genes that no longer propagate into the future. With culture there is rarely if ever a clean death in that way. Cultures morph, remix, combine. Rome collapsed in the sense of political continuity, but the Roman culture continued and our society today bears many of its imprints.

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TGGP's avatar

I think Rome may be atypical, lots of other cultures died without leaving as much of a mark.

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Isha Yiras Hashem's avatar

I keep on forgetting what Futarchy is.

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Justice Howard's avatar

Hello Robin, I've always wondered how prediction markets and futarchy handle Knightean uncertainty, the unknown unknowns. I have confidence they are the best way to handle risk, the known unknowns, but what about the latter?

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Robin Hanson's avatar

Formal models of the kinds of info we have ways to model show them to work well.

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