"The Commission will closely review actions taken by regulated entities that may disadvantage investors or otherwise unduly inhibit their ability to trade certain securities. In addition, we will act to protect retail investors when the facts demonstrate abusive or manipulative trading activity that is prohibited by the federal securities laws. Market participants should be careful to avoid such activity."
This should scare the crap out of Robinhood from what happened yesterday.
Robinhood says that they basically couldn't fulfil the buy orders because they ran out of money, or couldn't fulfil the orders without breaking the rest of the platform. I imagine whatever the reason there's going to be lawsuits.
As has been stated elsewhere, it is easier to recover from alienating customers than it is from running afoul of the SEC. They ran a very real risk of being forcibly shut down by regulators if they didn't slow trading.
I don’t agree. See Tesla. Elon frakked up with the SEC but not his customers (or his fans) and so Tesla a couple years later is on top of the world. I doubt Robinhood will survive this. They built their whole brand around rallying for the little guy at the expense of the fat cats. It’s literally their name.
Tesla isn't an investing firm. They don't even really have much in the way of acquisitions yet. Tesla would have to do something pretty blatant to really piss off the SEC. Elon's $420 tweet was greeted with a slap on the wrist precisely because "you're new here, aren't you?".
The better analogy would be if SpaceX pissed off the FAA.
Tesla actually made an official statement on their website about going private within 24 hours of the tweet. That's what reduced it to a slap on the wrist.
Nope. The question was whether it’s worse (in terms of recovery time) to crap on the SEC or your customers, and in which case you’ll recover faster. Elon frakked with the SEC and rightfully had to pay a price for it. But they recovered quickly. I don’t think Robinhood will.
The best thing is to not frak with either the SEC or your customers. And that’s probably always an option, even if it might mean sacrifice.
I don't agree. I think they provide a valuable service they should stay whole IF they can fix their capital issue and make their customers whole. You didn't forsee what was happening and neither did I because it was unprecedented. If not let them sink, someone will provide a similar service and learn from it. The SEC shouldn't be in the market of shutting down companies because a new phenomenon happened, let the market do that, unless something illegal has occurred.
Why would you post that without including information about the event and brokers you are referencing. You're not really adding to the information content on this site.
It is completely clear that they betrayed their customers' trust.
I know some people think "but that's not illegal so they did nothing wrong". Those people are bad and should feel bad. And I think in this case enough customers are angry that robinhood will not escape the consequences of its actions.
I only said I would be unsurprised to learn they acted illegally.
I admit the "suck at lying" thing is more my opinion than fact at this point.
Do Robinhood's terms guarantee that their users can buy any stock at any time? Does Robinhood in any way ask or imply that their users cannot use another service? I'm just not sure what trust they betrayed here.
>They clearly violated their customers' trust, so their customers should leave them.
They did? That might be the case according to the Popular Narrative (that the Hedge Funds phoned them and said "shut it down"), but reality is that they couldn't front the deposits for the customer's trades, due to the insane volatility. In that case it's less violating their customers' trust and more having a product that couldn't handle extreme circumstances well. They are a discount brokerage after all, some compromises had to be made.
The narrative doesn't matter. It's a PR problem. Lots of people wanted to buy GME, then RH suddenly cut them off, offered no reasonable explanation, and then their CEO went on the news to just spew some content-free noise. Sure, there were reasons behind this ban, perhaps good reasons - but they weren't explained by RH, and RH to this moment didn't even admit to the cause of the problem.
Sounds like solid ground for loss of user trust to me.
The CEO said they couldn't cover deposits. He only started spewing nonsense when the obvious question about RH having liquidity issues came up. He didn't lie to retail RH clients, but he may have lied to RH investors. Then again, it's funded by private equity, so it's likely they know all this.
All of this makes sense given the emergency cash infusion of 1B RH got this week.
They over a day to say that. Instead, they decided it was clearer to say "we're temporarily restricting trading due to volatility". If what you said really was the issue... Why not just say that? They're a startup. They'd be forgiven. Why hide behind vagueness?
I do agree that they bungled the whole thing badly, but I also think they were probably trying to prevent a run on their accounts when they were already cash strapped.
It's a highly regulated industry. Brokers can't just take actions. Perhaps they hit some regulatory corner case and nobody knows how the SEC is going to react.
I'm somewhat out of the loop. If RH is low on money due to lending it out, then they have to stop lending. But the decision was to stop allowing buy orders on GME if I read and remember that correctly. What's the issue? Don't investors deposit money into their RH accounts and then purchase the stock from that money, giving RH a commission? That should be good for RH, so I'm not getting this. I probably just miss some info, hope I'm not asking a stupid question.
It is aimed at the people who shut down buying GME, then tried to create a downward trend at unusual low volumes to try to scare the wallstreet bets crowed into abandoning their positions in GME to allow short positions to recoup their gigantic losses.
It failed mind you. The shorts are still bleeding and the GME hold is continuing though just at a slightly reduced price.
Retail investors who have bought GME can afford to wait out the antics of hedge funds, but those funds are on borrowed time to try to turn the loss of a century into some kind of win, or they are done for good. Ask yourself, who do you think is trailing the borders of legality? A teen who goes “hmm GME at 100$? Sure why not, I’ll take 10” or the hedgefond manager calling all his friends to stop trading because his fund is going bankrupt on a stupid bet he made that he would have gotten away with if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.
This is QAnon/Kraken/Dominion level crankery. The MAGA types are happy to believe in voter fraud conspiracy theories with no evidence because they hate the Democratic party, and here you are doing literally the exact same thing here except replacing "Deep State" with "hedgefond managers".
People like you make fun of the QAnon-types but you're just as willing to indulge in deranged evidence-free conspiracy theorizing as long as it accommodates your ideological priors.
Shorting more than 100% of the stock is excessive and irresponsible. That figure is not a conspiracy theory: it is public information that the SEC releases monthly.
Whether hedge fund managers did make a call to their buddies is not the only thing in question here (although the SEC will surely determine the truth). Shorting a stock drives the price down and, while this is no less legal than buying a stock, the question is whether shorting 136% of the stock counts as outright manipulation. Reddit kids have done nothing but pop an artificial bubble, they did not participate in manipulation; as the hedge fund managers and their buddies claim.
> QAnon
I have yet to see the baby cookbook or other evidence of their ridiculous claims.
The parent commenter claimed that brokerages were colluding to drive the price of GME down to benefits the shorts. That is QAnon-level evidence-free conspiracy theorizing. The clearing houses were demanding more collateral and brokerages couldn't afford or didn't want to put it up.
> whether shorting 136% of the stock counts as outright manipulation
I refer you to the snarky top comment about how all the Dunning-Kruger victims who claim manipulation do not actually know what manipulation is. Shorting a stock is not manipulation and neither is lots of people deciding to short a stock. 136% of the stock is shorted because a lot of people were shorting it, not because Some Guy decided to single-handedly short 136% of the float.
> Reddit kids have done nothing but pop an artificial bubble
So GameStop was an artificial bubble at $10 but not at $500? Really?
IB claimed to have hiked margin to 100% which is a reasonable response. However, I have heard from many sources that they in fact rejected buy orders even with cash - which, if true, and I have every reason to believe so, makes any explanation about margins and technical reasons seem ridiculous.
There is surely some deeper non public reason that every single retail broker - but no single institutional broker - stopped accepting GME buys but kept honoring sells. It might or might not be a call from hedge fund buddies, but it is still likely illegal.
When I was working at a hedge fund, I once executed a few hundred mil notional on a supposedly anonymous exchange, taking advantage of an obvious counterparty mistake.
Within 10 minutes, I got a call from said counterparty, telling me that next time I do that, they’ll make sure I’m kicked off the exchange.
Anonymous my ass. Legal my ass. And yet, it happened - I’m sure I wasn’t the first or the last - the other side kept making those mistakes. I stopped taking advantage of them. This kind of behavior is rampant in Wall Street. Only difference is it has been done now in the open, very visibly, and with thousands - perhaps tens of thousands - identifiable victims.
The problem is that when hedge funds get in trouble they do not go to jail, are not prohibited from doing business and the penalties (fines) are ineffectively weak.
Given the track record of holding the powerful accountable is terrible, I don’t think this is directed at hedge funds but is a warning to the little people.
> The problem is that when hedge funds get in trouble they do not go to jail
Criminal prosecution is held to a much higher evidentiary standard than civil fines. Almost all market related crimes, including manipulation and insider trading, require mens rea. Proving state of mind beyond a shadow of a doubt is really difficult to do. Especially when the defendant is sophisticated enough to know the law and have access to high-quality legal advice.
Any US Attorney would absolutely love to have the feather in his cap of sending a billionaire hedge fund manager or investment banker to prison. Hell, the reason Rudy Giuliani is a household name is because he managed to do that. But no prosecutor is going to bring a case that he has no chance of winning.
Given that it makes much more sense to target enforcement with civil fines rather than criminal prosecution. You can tie up your resources to fight expensive, hard to prosecute criminal cases. Or you can quickly settle for reasonable fines, and cover many more cases with the same set of limited resources.
It’s common for hedge funds (and more importantly, the people who run them) to be prohibited from doing business. “Barred from the securities industry” is the term typically used if you’re looking for examples.
It's clear that everyone should be lawyering up depending on what positions they had when they started pumping this idea to the masses. That said, I'm a big believer in "a fool and his money". If there are hedge funds or retail investors out there who, perhaps, didn't understand all the risks of what they were doing, protecting them from their folly only causes more problems in the future.
As horrible as this sounds, now is the time to let everyone fail. Hard. If we don't, no lessons will be learned.
IANAL, but to me it seems like it would be very difficult to convict retail investors of investing in a stock they believe has value and then telling other people they invested in a stock they believe has value. Unless there are chat records of a few redditors coordinating an astroturf campaign while twirling their mustaches or whatever, I don’t see how this could be aimed at retail.
Regulated entities who have access to tools or information not available to retail investors, or who applied financial pressure to manipulate access to the markets, or did not disclose conflicts of interest...that seems like a much easier case to make.
It's also not as if hedge funds are employing thousands of welders or craftsmen. These are high risk financial strategies by people who qualify as professional traders - "I didn't know" isn't an excuse anymore. If they lose the game, they get to eat their losses.
We will probably see a few retail traders get burned, and I suspect anyone wanting to do trading in the future is going to have to fill out more disclaimers.
Maybe not hedge funds but I estimate that the majority of what laypeople call "hedge funds" are not hedge funds. There are tons of firms that just run money for ordinary people. At my old firm they have shorted blackberry in thousands of individual margin accounts, and those accounts are losing money on paper and might have to realize losses in order to rebalance their risk.
I'd have some questions if my low risk or medium risk investment firm was making large shorts. Shorts are very risky for a whole bunch of reasons - which is also why they can be high value. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure every high risk fund can find at least one pensioner invested in them, but if your firm is well known for shorting then you can't pretend to be anything but high risk/high reward.
These aren’t large positions and that is the point. If a short position that was 2% of your account suddenly becomes 10% of it, now you have a problem, and the problem wasn’t caused by a wrong investment thesis, it was caused by a mob of kids online.
The big traders probably have friends in high places, so I suspect they're going after WSB and not wall street who caused the issues in the first place.
I know of cases from the Danish market where the financial service authorities went for people who had tried driving the price up in a pump and dump scheme for a small penny stock. Using internet forums and a couple of trading accounts.
They made a few thousand dollars and got months in jail for it.
The problem with wsb is that it has gotten so big and there are too many involved at this point.
It's not really that the government can't go after WSB. Sure they're not going to prosecute 2 million degenerates, but it's not like they can't round up 50 of the big names to make a statement.
It's that there's really no appetite in the federal government for going after retail traders. Retail trading as an industry took a very long time to build and ham-fisted enforcement could tank it harder than a few lawsuits ever could.
Make no mistake, this was going to happen eventually. There's infinite ability to gather information, infinite ability to share it. Retail collusion was inevitable. The people who built the industry knew it was going to happen. They prepared for it. Everyone, including the SEC, knew it was only a matter of time before something like this happens.
Denmark did that because there's much greater financial regulatory capture than there is here.
With the amount of media attention WSB has been gaining, this is setting itself up for "Wall Street versus The People" situation. It may be politically tough to go against the retailers now, particularly mid-pandemic and with all the other political comorbidities US is suffering from.
It's been that for a while. Lots of people on social media have been framing it as another Occupy Wall Street, except this time they've figured out how to make the elites hurt. There's plenty of people who don't care how much they lose when it bursts, because Wall Street is set up to lose more.
This is not about "Wall Street versus The People" or WallStreet vs Retail (small investors) it is about federal securities laws. And you know where the law is? In court. I think court needs to decide whether what is WSB doing illegal or legal.
If after bubble pops it's shown that an elite group of WSB traders made huge profits while a large amount of retail traders lost their entire investment, I think there's going to be plenty of public appetite for nailing the market manipulators to the wall.
There is no "probably." It is well-known that people leave their civil servant jobs at regulatory industries, after putting in their time, and bring their know-how and connections to big banks and hedge funds in return for cushy salaries.
There is an NPR (National Public Radio) show called "This American Life" and several years back it had an episode devoted to this. They interviewed regulators. The big banks, for instance, will have an office on site for a regulator. The pull is to "go native" at some point.
2. for not shutting down all trading on their app (allowing sells of GME without manipulated the market, even if blocking sells would also have bad effects)
3. For allegedly tipping off Citadel before shutting off GME trading (unconfirmed but they will likely investigate this claim)
No. WSB is not "a regulated entit[y]" that "disadvantage[d] investors or otherwise unduly inhibit[ed] their ability to trade certain securities". Robinhood is and did.
That's the first part but the second part is a separate statement against market manipulation generally. In the law, manipulation is forbidden to anyone, not just brokers and dealers.
Lack of separation? If it turns out they did take any direction on this from anyone holding a short position in GME I would imagine RH is fully and completely screwed, as are their investors.
this is all hypothetical, which is why I used the word if. If they did what WSB is accussing them of, which I think is probably doubtful, RH is in really really big trouble...
There's been some speculation that what WSB are doing could be market manipulation or otherwise illegal. The fact that this statement only mention retail investors in the context of protecting them makes me suspect that the SEC's not going for it.
> In addition, we will act to protect retail investors when the facts demonstrate abusive or manipulative trading activity that is prohibited by the federal securities laws. Market participants should be careful to avoid such activity.
"Market participants" here is referring to retail traders. Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because you're the little guy, you're exempt from the law. It's like how the capitol rioters were sure they were on the side of America but the FBI (and half of America) sees things very differently.
A lot of government regulation is about protecting the little guy from other slightly more unscrupulous little guys. "The public" is not a monolithic entity - folks can and do screw each other over even when purporting to be part of the same mass movement.
Could be? It's an open, publicly-documented market manipulation event. How can there be any question about it? You might decide that this kind of manipulation is OK due to it's stated goals, but that doesn't make it not manipulation.
Which is one take, certainly. But the problem is once you say that this is a market manipulation event you run into other issues.
Is going on CNBC and talking about the strength of a company that you invested in market manipulation? Before this blew up you certainly had more reach.
Is posting "research" or holding a conference call and telling people a company is garbage while you have the company shorted market manipulation? What about when you short a company and sell a ton of shares to induce panic? What about algorithms that are created to trade shares to reach a certain profitable price based on internal holdings/analysis?
Here's another thing - if WallStreetBets was incorporated into a hedge fund and took a huge long position is that market manipulation? It seems to me the main difference is that they aren't behind closed doors talking privately in a legal fiction called a company that is really the problem here...
You have to define what you mean by manipulating the market and apply that equally under the eyes of the law. The fact that this was done publicly makes it all the more interesting. Had it been done behind closed doors (like so many things are on Wall Street) it would have been an open and shut case, but it wasn't.
So sure, let's say it's a market manipulation event. Ok. Can you tell me what isn't a market manipulation event?
If WSB was a hedge fund they just have to buy some of GME - not all or even too much. Other hedge funds could buy some too.
Just have a "dinner conversation" about it.
Just like you and a few hedge funds can get together and collectively short GameStop and other companies... as they are doing now.
There's no rule that I know of that says only one entity can make a specific investment.
-edit-
Don't forget that hedge funds ARE on the other side of this trade. WSB and retail do not have the ability to move this solely on their own. I wonder how long until they're on CNBC/Bloomberg "we saw a great opportunity in the market and executed our position well". If it's market manipulation - was it market manipulation to even have heard about WSB and entered the trade? WSB is a nice scapegoat for the real money that caught these hedge funds in a bad position. Didn't take long before WSB became alt-right, white supremacist, market manipulators... etc.
It isn't. Hedge fund managers have "idea dinners" with dozens of their friends all the time to discuss what plays they are thinking... they frequently also bring in guests that represent companies, or even politicians/former politicians to discuss lobbying strategies to keep this exact type of collusion and market manipulation legal for them.
But as soon as a bunch of the dreaded "retail investors" start doing it in the open, Wall Street calls on K Street to save them.
That's amazing. So they basically found a legal protocol to do things that would otherwise be illegal, and institutions like judges and the SEC just let that happen?
It could be argued that r/wallstreetbets is a public forum. Anyone can join. Think of it like a virtual conference room.
If I walk into this room and yell “Everybody buy GME to screw the hedge funds” am I engaging in market manipulation? There is no formal or informal agreement to do so if someone says “ok great idea” and go buys GME.
Besides how are they going to enforce the laws? Match IPs to ISPs and extradite all the thousands if not millions of people across the world who bough stock? If a fine is issued do they just divide it up by the number of people who commented in wallstreetbets and held stock? Or is every person fined individually?
How is this worse than the sell walls that hedge funds use to deflate a share price?
The truth of the matter is the SEC dropped the ball. They were probably too busy having a wank while on pornhub [0].
In December as soon as the share price started to rise GME was placed on the NYSE threshold securities list for large numbers of “failure to deliver”. Keep in mind it had entered this same list earlier in the year. Followers of wallstreetbets were suspicious and believed that illegal naked short selling was occurring so they informed the SEC [1].
Then a few weeks later the stock rose 10% then 50% the next day leaving the call options ITM on a Friday afternoon. What did the SEC do? They sat on their hands over the weekend instead of suspending trading of the stock and performing an investigation.
If you actually read that link that case is so extraordinarily different than the reality of what’s happening today I don’t know how you can argue this in good faith.
> I don’t know how you can argue this in good faith
I'm not an expert and am rather dumb.
What do you think the differences are?
Differences:
* One hedge fund versus a multitude of investors
* Owning all the securities vs only a portion
The similarities are:
* Intentionally buying all the stock to cause a short squeeze
* Explicitly recalling borrowed shares to cause a short squeeze
To be clear, I'm not arguing that what wallstreetbets is doing is illegal but something fairly similar is. I thought an actual example of market manipulation was relevant to the conversation.
A short squeeze in and of itself is not illegal. The squeezers were not prosecuted in 2008 when they held onto VW even though it briefly became the most valuable stock in the world. Seeing an opportunity to advantage oneself of a bad short position is just trading, nothing fancier than that.
The Falcone case is much more complicated because it was a single person buying the entirety of the market. Much weirder mechanics at play. Squeezes are always carried out through the self-interest of uncoordinated parties, be they retail investors or firms.
well, the case reached a settlement so i would not say it was litigated in the sense of establishing case law or legal precedent.
it's interesting- it reads as though harbinger bought bonds and demanded delivery. can you imagine it! asking to take possession of the thing you just bought is painted as manipulation!!!
You realise that all of this stuff has specific rules. There are specific rules about posting research, there are specific rules about media (newspapers and TV), there are specific rules about algorithms (I will answer your questions: no, no, no, no...the last question is...odd, if you know about sure-win algos then you must be very rich).
And all of this stuff has happened before, it happened in 2000, lots of people went on bulletin boards, and some ended up going to jail for market manipulation. The difference between doing it publicly and privately is huge, that is a necessary component of market manipulation (generally speaking, market manipulation isn't very effective if you don't have anyone to baghold for you).
I'm certainly no expert in the rules at play here, but I can't fathom how posting on a public forum and saying "let's all go buy $GME and screw these hedge fund guys!" would not be absolutely protected by the First Amendment. There's no fraud or anything like that, and you're not posting anything false or misleading about the company.
If a bunch of people feel like it's a good idea and want to join in, then it is what it is.
Because there is the first amendment...and there is securities fraud. You are saying: anything that anyone says at any time has no legal consequence because of the first amendment...no.
Misleading stuff is being posted on wsb. And some people are likely not being honest about what they are doing (i.e. telling people to buy when they are selling). This is how pump and dumps work. If you buy a stock worth $5 for $300...your only option is to sell to someone who knows nothing. That is what it is happening now.
The stuff about hedge funds only came later, it is funny that people are citing this now (as ever, financial markets and ex-post rationalisations...human reasoning is amazing). All this stuff about revolutions against bankers, and the wealthy, and politicans leaping onto it...lol. The funniest thing about this is that people who have the least knowledge believe they need protection the least...and when this blows up, they will still say it is rigged. Oh well. Plus ca change.
I'm more of a "spirit of the thing" than "this is what the text says" kind of guy.
I'd argue that those things aren't fundamentally different than anything going on via WSB (assuming no bot accounts saying buy buy buy or something similar).
I think the difference is that for these other items there's nobody around to measure the impact.
No. If you do any of those things wrong then you will get charged.
There aren't bot accounts. There are people telling other people to buy who are probably selling (there is a reason why DFV isn't posting anything but account updates). No conpsiracy theory around bots, the people manipulating the market are there, they are posting on a public forum. It doesn't get more cut and dry.
I just don't see a difference in manipulating the markets through official channels versus unofficial channels. If CNBC wants to have me or reddit user r/deepfuckingvalue (Keith Gill) on their platform instead of WSB sure I'll give them some stock picks too.
There's a bit of nuance. We're using the word "manipulation" to mean two different things -- one is the colloquial meaning, and yes it's very obvious that the price was manipulated in that sense. As far as the legal definition of manipulation is concerned though, we haven't necessarily met all the requirements.
Applying this logic, perhaps we can get "professional" stock ... manipulators off the TV. CNBC can go away entirely. Marketing speak would be replaced with value charts. Ban all forums that discuss specific stock values.
Then prevent people from buying stocks in groups. Mutual funds, ETFs, etc... all of these abstractions on abstractions, we can throw them away. The more abstractions we throw away, the closer we get to what all this should actually be meant to serve; people.
Absolutely. I mean, what's different now in comparison to Ackman shorting hotels then going on CNBC and saying hotels are going to burn financially? Except for the fact it's one rich guy compared to thousands (maybe millions?) of not so rich folks.
People are free to purchase stock how they want to. If those people collect together and discuss potentially profitable strategies for trading who is to stop them? Do you think its possible youve fallen ill to the rhetoric that this is bad purely because the rich people didn't get their way?
I have a general, all-purpose opposition to financial trading that’s about exploiting weird market structure tricks to screw people over rather than expressing beliefs about the value of the underlying things being traded. Institutional traders too often get away with doing that kind of thing, and I’m hardly losing sleep over the particular targets of this campaign, but we can’t let the takeaway here be “it’s fine as long as retail investors get to play too”.
The issue with that argument is that it's really not “it’s fine as long as retail investors get to play too," it's “it’s fine until retail investors get to play too”
The point is that it's not fine. The institutional investors who have historically said it was fine were wrong. If the average retail investor comes away thinking scummy tactics are cool now that you and I can use them, it'll be a disaster for the cause of real financial reform.
It's hypocritical to only now be concerned with "scummy tactics" when the little people found a way to turn them on the big money. No one seemed to really care until hedge funds started losing billions due to a situation they created.
I'm just not sure what to tell you here. I'm not gonna support unethical trading practices because other people might have hypocritical reasons to oppose them. Again, it's not just this one event; I really am worried that the SEC will be unable to implement market reforms here because Robinhood traders argue it's their turn to exploit the system.
The idea that there has to be behind the scenes coordination (i.e., non-publically available communication/information) runs pretty clearly through all of them, but IANASEC
>Could be? It's an open, publicly-documented market manipulation event.
Strange question, what's the bar for market manipulation? For example if a company took out debt to buy their own stock in order to drive up the price would that count?
So do everything up to specifically stating the effect that you want, and it’s not market manipulation? This is the “emperor’s new clothes” absurdity of this whole system.
The whole fucking market has been manipulated by various parties this year, most notably by the Federal Reserve, yet there’s only a moral panic when some firefighter from Long Island gets a little taste?
Stock buy back is perfectly fine and its authorization is usually announced in a press release. Hiding that you are taking new debt to do just about anything would be illegal.
Persuading people that they should invest in X company for Y reason is not market manipulation. People who take a short position frequently announce their short publicly, with the express aim of achieving their goals.
Matt Levine did a pretty good job explaining why it probably doesn't fit the traditional definition of market manipulation in his newsletter on Tuesday[1], see the second section titled "But is it securities fraud?"
Maybe one or two specific individuals, but you're right in general. That's the part that frightens me the most here. The tactics that are being used are equivalent to the ones used by sideshow street racers and political riots: if we get thousands of individuals to break the law at the same time and place then law enforcement will be ineffective.
It certainly _feels_ like an organized riot, but I'm not 100% sure that it is. In a riot, there are organizers and instigators, and then there is a mob who follows them. Here, I'm not really sure that the organizers exist: the closest thing I can see is the Reddit user DeepFuckingValue, and all they do is post screenshots of their position in GME without futher comment. And have been doing so for the best part of a year.
> Could be? It's an open, publicly-documented market manipulation event.
And required the coordination of a 18th century war to pull off. It's one thing if this was "led" by an individual, organization, etc. but it wasn't. It was the wisdom of the crowds who played by the very same rules that the hedge funds play.
> You might decide that this kind of manipulation is OK due to it's stated goals
Where did every stock holder publicly state their case? If Jim Cramer says "i think you should buy AAPL" and everyone does it, is that manipulation?
"Although some short squeezes may occur naturally in the market, a scheme to manipulate the price or availability of stock in order to cause a short squeeze is illegal."
It's an open question whether this case is more of a natural occurrence or "a scheme to manipulate", given that it's all randos who found a Schelling point and are now hyping each other up. I think it's fair to say it's unprecedented.
"scheme to manipulate" is the keyword here, patting each other on the back for riding market volatility on a forum about stocks isn't neither novel nor illegal.
it would be quite different if they were to coordinate the sale moment or the sale prices; for the latter, I don't see much coordination beyond memes, for the first SEC might have a point and there's many posts walking a thin line suggesting friday will be the day.
however this is a billion dollar operation which include many players and wide interference by multiple actors ranging from unclear to blatant business relationships; I wouldn't be surprised by anonymous plants joining wsb trying to stir up a movement and coordinate sales/prices to create a solid case where there is just a feeble suspicion; and as a matter of fact there has been quite many fresh accounts (either low karma, no posts in a long time, no posts at all etc) joining in just to propose to hold until a certain price or date is reached.
Is there any actual evidence of naked short selling? The only evidence I've seen people raising is that the total value of the shorts was over 100%, but that can happen completely legitimately if the people who buy from short sellers allow the stock to be sold short a second (or third, fourth, ...) time.
I don't get why loaning out an already loaned stock is legal. Short selling should be limited to first gen loans. Otherwise it's like Beavis and Butthead in the Candy Store episode where they keep loaning the same dollar back and forth.
Interesting.. WSB was 100% orchestrating a short squeeze. They were telling anyone who would listen and in fact using it to rationalize what they were doing..
scheme (verb): make plans, especially in a devious way or with intent to do something illegal or wrong.
Discussing buying stock on a public forum is certainly not devious, and although the goal is to cause short positions to lose a bunch of money I would argue that it's neither illegal nor wrong.
You could argue that but you’d be clearly wrong on American law and jurisprudence. If the goal is to cause other market participants to lose, that it specifically against the letter of the law.
If I were the short-sellers I'd be a bit aggrieved at the SEC not going after WSB here.
People keep saying that the hedge funds 'knew what they were getting into', and are therefore fair game. But they could well have thought that they were protected by this regulation. It's unlucky for them that they got squeezed by loveable retail investors rather than another hedge fund that the SEC would have no qualms about prosecuting.
In the debate between the free market vs regulation, the worst possible outcome is to have people thinking they are protected by regulation when they in fact aren't.
The shorters should form a class action and sue wall street bets, I'm sure a 5 dollar check in 3 years and a year of free stonk advice will cover it right?
Wall street bets is not an organization, and does not really even have a defined membership, and I've never heard of a court case with a class as a defendant. But I suppose that would be a really amusing circus show. Class of shorters vs class of buyers.
This worldview seems like one of the biggest problems facing America right now.
We should strive for equal rules and justice for all, rather than first deciding how likeable or sympathetic the parties involved are and then changing the interpretation of rules to favor the group we perceive as being inherently more deserving of our favoritism.
It kinda feels like that to me. The nostalgia value of owning 1 share of GameStop is pretty important considering the joy that going to that store brought to me as a child. I can totally understand if 20 million people also want in, especially given the idea that we're fighting against a short position to cause a squeeze. It's like a dumb feel-good movie where we had a bake-sale and everyone buys a cookie for an unreasonable price to help our favorite local grocery store avoid bankruptcy by the evil liquidators who want to turn it into a Walmart.
That's the thing: there is NO QUESTION as to the motives of the r/wsb traders. They are overtly conspiring to raise the price of shares in order to force specific parties to buy it. That's manipulation!
Is it illegal to corner the market on a product because you know someone else is going to need to buy it, so you can charge them a lot because they must buy from you? It seems like what is being done is pretty much this; just for a large definition of "you".
Yes, it is broadly illegal to corner or attempt to corner any market, and the law directs the CFTC to step in and and void commodities contracts or take whatever other actions it deems appropriate when it finds that a market has been destabilized. See 7 USC 12a(9).
To raise cash? Shorting a company in terminal decline, but that will never die and will live on the pink sheets forever, is a great way to take a gain without ever having to pay the taxes.
And you just described a form of market manipulation. Except that we can't know Melvin's true motives because for some weird reason, hedge funds don't have to make their methodologies public.
So why are you getting mad that retail investors are engaging in the same practices that hedge funds can do with impunity?
Well... they will start by redefining "market manipulation" to encompass all activity they now consider disruptive (also suitably redefined). This is America today.
There's no need for SEC to redefine market manipulation - IMHO the "pumping" activity of at least some WSB activists would perfectly match the existing legal definition of market manipulation as written to prevent historical "boiler room" type activities.
On the other hand, in these discussions I have seen a bunch of assertions that what the shorting hedge funds or HFTs are doing is "market manipulation" - now that is an attempt to redefine market manipulation to something entirely different than what it is/was.
Doesn't "retail investors" refer to any individual, non-professional, investor? Sounds like to me the SEC is warning any party involved in this, RH and WSB included.
It's harder to pursue this if there were hundreds of thousands involved. Maybe they'll go for the people who organized this, or the one who profited massively for it. But I don't see it possible to sue a million person.
what are you talking about? the real fraud and market manipulation was perpetrated by Robinhood and Shitadel when they shut peoples’ ability to buy the stock while still allowing it to be sold. They know this is illegal but they were betting on the fines being less than the losses. They need to be taught a real lesson. Those responsible for this intentional, flagrant violation of the most basic free market principles should go.to.jail.
If anything Robinhood allowing people to continue buying volatile assets while not being able to meet their clearing house's requirements would be something to run them afoul of the SEC.
The map isn't supposed to be the terrain; Generating wealth isn't the same as generating money, and the stock market seems to exist almost entirely for the latter, at the cost of the former.
We're in a situation where playing in the market is a better strategy than using the market for its legacy purposes (you know, buying partial ownership in companies) and the number of financial tools created specifically to exploit the ability of wealth to generate additional wealth vastly out match everything else.
Anyway I've got paperhands and bailed on my positions days ago by following some old WSB advice that's actually worth while - "take your profits when you want to"
What are the odds of a flash crash in the next week as a result of this activity? The system of banks and market makers and clearing houses is a always way more coupled than the the owners let on... history shows they don't know how to risk manage these sorts of situations.
Newest from the front lines, Freetrade (UK trading app) just blocked buy orders for US stocks... but they explicitly pin it on "a sudden and unexpected decision by our FX provider, and their bank"[0]. In another statement, they also express their deep unhappiness about it[1].
Assuming they're being honest - and I see no reason to doubt it - it's refreshing, compared to Robin Hood's communications, and more importantly it highlights your point. The "backend" of the market seems way more coupled than I imagined it is.
> The "backend" of the market seems way more coupled than I imagined it is.
Exactly. Overlay this on the backdrop of a frothy, juiced up market and a bunch of angry people on their phones (I bought a few GME out of spite at $360 after considering it way back at $15)... one little push could cause the market to throw a rod, I feel. These people run the system at max RPM with minimal oil as it is.
Corrobating on this, same thing happened on my side that all US financial products (apart from regular deposits, cheque (or check?) and loans including credit cards) were suspended "beyond our control", so there is some action taken by US-based fincacial companies due to this (either because of laziness or genuine worry that they might be punished).
Nota bene: I do hold some Nokia stocks, but it is from (Nasdaq) Helsinki and not from NYSE and it was already in my possesion waay before these brouhaha. I don't hold any other stocks that were affected, including stocks for GameStop.
From a distance, this is all a storm in a teacup. It's a small handful of stocks, and every single one in S&P500 is waaaay bigger, in terms of trading volumes and market cap.
Anything can happen, but in finance terms, this is tiny so far.
The issue isn't GME market cap vs the S&P 500. It's that the clearing houses, exchanges and other intermediaries that guarantee every trade may go bankrupt due to the $15+ billion loss on options that they may have to cover.
I'd be very worried about Robin Hood's solvency, since they let people trade on margins, and retail investors are presumably difficult to get debts out from. I seriously doubt they underwrite their own options, more likely they just sell some broker's options.
Otherwise... sure some funds might lose a lot of money. But a lot of money for a fund (and it's investors). I wouldn't say we're seeing anything like systemic risk. If nothing else, Redditors' pockets are only so deep, and there's only so much meme stocks they can buy.
So where does it leave us? Perhaps Robin Hood might go under (though it looks like they learnt their lesson and got some cash, so maybe not). Some funds went under, and maybe some other will too. But generally, funds are not major systemic risk. They are speculative money. It's been going on for long enough that clearing houses requested the higher margins already. I don't think banks have any real skin in this game.
What was so terrible about 2008 financial crash, from the technocratic point of view, was that it was banks that were affected, and they are, among other things, the very plumbing of the financial system we all depend on.
Of course life can prove me wrong :) but I'm not remotely worried atm.
Clearing houses cover any shortage of money due to one party not paying up. So if someone sells an option on an exchange, then doesn't pony up, the clearing house must. And if too many people don't pony up, the clearing house is in trouble.
Except it is far more complicated. Does Robin Hood allow the selling options? That would seem ridiculously stupid if it does, but let's say yes. The clearing house has nothing to do with the seller, or in fact probably with Robin Hood. It will be dealing with Robin Hood's dealer, probably a big bank (think JP Morgan or the like), and there's a cascade of who-owes-who.
Robin Hood clients ought to pay to Robin Hood if they owe money on short options, but if they fail, then Robin Hood must cover that to the broker. The broker wants to make sure it doesn't lose any money on trading with Robin Hood, because if it does, it still needs to make good to the exchange. And only if the broker fails, then the clearing house gets involved.
If you can only buy options on Robin Hood (or, in any case, cannot be short), then there isn't much of an issue there. The issue would arise if the broker cannot pay the option payouts, but that's very unlikely. Banks deal with option trading all the time, and spend lots of money on hedging their exposure to the underlying stock. This is essentially a solved problem, and the scale of what's going on is way too small to stress that.
Let's say you are buying an option contract on an exchange. You don't know who is selling to you and whether they can actually pay you when the time comes. In order to solve this issue, intermediates act as a guarantor of all transactions allowing investors to treat each seller the same. This lets investors only care about price instead of "who".
I am not an expert, I only have very surface knowledge and don't know the exact chain of intermediaries for each market but I know one such guarantor is the Chicago mercantile exchange.
> On Thursday, Robinhood was forced to stop customers from buying a number of stocks like GameStop that were heavily traded this week. To continue operating, it drew on a line of credit from six banks amounting to between $500 million and $600 million to meet higher margin, or lending, requirements from its central clearing facility for stock trades, known as the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation.
Because of the volatility of the stock, I believe. 100->300->200->300 in the space of no time at all. You could've watched the stock just jump all over the place in real-time, pretty much.
What's small for the whole market isn't necessarily small for Robin Hood.
It's not out of the question that Robin Hood could go under as a result of these shenanigans. Just very unlikely that would trigger any serious fallout downwind.
It's down to minutiae in the collateral brokers have to post to ensure that the clearing house doesn't eat losses. Trades on Wednesday aren't settled until Friday, so if a brokerage firm dies in the interim they have an obligation to complete a bunch of trades that they might not have cash for, and unwinding that exposes counterparties to the price moves in the interim. RH users have been buying a lot of meme stocks that move a lot in price, so they have to put up vast amounts of funds to ensure that nobody else suffers losses if they were to back out of the unsettled trades.
I’d be very careful about making this assumption. There is always bleed over in unexpected ways. When these stocks spiked on Wednesday the market as a whole came down hard. Perception is extremely important and if people start to fear that brokerages could be insolvent or just lose faith in the valuations of stocks as a whole it could definitely effect the entire market.
I follow the markets, and the market does a hard mini-crash about once every two weeks. You don't notice it as a buy-and-hold investor, but it raises the hackles of many short-term traders.
Barely more than zero because there are market circuit breakers now and broker dealers are supposed to be limiting order flow so that HFTs can't be submitting huge numbers of orders that are massively far away from what the security is trading at. Of course some broker dealers play much faster and looser than others but if shit really hits the fan the circuit breaker catches it.
The last giant crash was triggered by a single party (Bear Stearns) running out of credit. Do not underestimate the events that could follow if this volatility destabilizes a large market participant.
That was the point of my original post. Not that current events are comparable to historical events as far as the mechanism of crisis is concerned... but that stresses like the ones today have a way of uncovering new and interesting failure modes which people collectively wrote off as unlikely.
There's definitely going to be some impact on other stocks, as at the very least, retail trading apps overcompensate and block buys on other stocks (including Freetrade for all the US stocks right now). Hard to quantify the magnitude of the impact, though.
"Likewise, issuers must ensure compliance with the federal securities laws for any contemplated offers or sales of their own securities."
If GameStop management was thinking of selling some shares to the public (or directly to those who really need shares to cover their shorts) at some crazy price they'll have to be careful.
AMC was lucky to have a lot of convertible debt outstanding which has been converted without any action on their part.
Is it my imagination, or did this SEC statement not actually, you know, actually say anything, except "we're the SEC, and we're going to do the thing that it's our job to do"?
extreme stock price volatility has the potential to expose investors to rapid and severe losses and undermine market confidence
It's not the SEC's role to protect investors from risk or losses, rapid or otherwise, and saying that the recent activity "undermines confidence" is just another way of saying "increases risk", which is not their job. They should ensure confidence by guarding against fraud, but not to protect against losses by institutions that never thought that activist investors would work against their own interests.
This isn't really manipulation that we're seeing: it's people betting against the institutions that themselves bet against companies combined with a fair bit of FOMO.
Protecting investors is literally the first part of the SEC's three part purpose statement.
The SEC came into existence because retail investors lost huge amounts of money in the 20's in speculative bubbles. The same thing is going to happen here so the SEC is literally doing what it was set up to do.
Don't cherry pick the portion of my statement you want to criticize: I did not say it wasn't the role of the SEC to protect investors.
I said it's not their role to protect investors from loss. Clearly it has a role in protecting investors by requiring disclosures that allow informed decision making, policing fraud, etc.
I can’t help but think about Bill Ackerman when I see stories about stock shorting and their dangers. Isn’t this exactly what Bill Ackerman did? He shorted Herbalife and then went on TV (there’s even a Netflix documentary) And he lost. How is that not market manipulation? What if Ackerman did not have a position in the company, would it not be market manipulation then? It seems like what Reddit did was stand on a soapbox in the public square and say buy the stock,
> In addition, we will act to protect retail investors when the facts demonstrate abusive or manipulative trading activity that is prohibited by the federal securities laws. Market participants should be careful to avoid such activity. Likewise, issuers must ensure compliance with the federal securities laws for any contemplated offers or sales of their own securities.
I'm no stock player, so I may not be reading the implied meaning correctly. But on the face of it, it seems at least as recognizing WSB-driven buyers as valid players in this match.
(However, it's an open question whether they consider WSB's attempt at short squeeze as an organic thing, or a coordinated stock manipulation. The latter, as I understand it, is strictly illegal.)
What did you expect them to do? Go around arresting people? Stop trading on every market? Say that Robinhood is no longer allowed to trade?
It's a giant government body that overseas a very large tender market of money, they can't just make rash decisions. They need to review, see how it plays out in the longer term, and see how the government is going to want to adjust.
I don't think technically anything (minus the robinhood/other people restricting buying, and even that who knows) that's going on is really "wrong-doing" on the surface. Everything seems to be by the book.
So they'll need to dig deep into the stock and find evidence and provide that evidence to the body that reviews stuff.
You probably won't hear of any changes for months if not years if at all.
"In addition, we will act to protect retail investors when the facts demonstrate abusive or manipulative trading activity that is prohibited by the federal securities laws. Market participants should be careful to avoid such activity."
I don't understand the current lessons being drawn by the public from this situation.
I don't think shorting stocks (even to 140% of its float) is a bad thing. And, the hedge fund managers that shorted GME don't deserve to be bankrupt.
Shorting stocks, in general, is a beneficial action for the market because it helps prevent shares from becoming overvalued.
The problem that GME highlighted is that it's too easy to purposefully trigger a short squeeze.
One possible solution seems to be that the SEC should make it easier to borrow shares to short a stock. And, in so doing, they should make it harder to purposefully trigger a short squeeze.
There's nothing wrong with greed if it doesn't hurt others...The SEC's ultimate goal should be to have a fair and efficiently priced market at all times. In this case, it seems like the party that needs to be protected is the hedge funds....What am I missing?
Not knowing how hard it is to provide the service fo their "core market infrastructure," I couldn't tell if it was just a self-complimentary way to boast or genuine technical feet.
Regardless, the prominence of the note was strange and set an immediate defensive tone.
What made it really odd was the arc of tone to "Market participants should be careful to avoid such activity." An elegant threat.
It seems like Robinhood, when it stopped trading on GME, decided to literally transfer money from the WSB retail traders to the funds who were short on the stock. But if Robinhood needed to halt trading in order to just survive as a brokerage, (and could demonstrate so), would that justify its behavior? Does anyone know more about laws and regulations concerning brokerages here?
>It seems like Robinhood, when it stopped trading on GME, decided to literally transfer money from the WSB retail traders to the funds who were short on the stock.
Preventing purchase orders would cause the stock price to go down.
The funds short the stock gain wealth from the stock price declining.
Holders of the stock lose wealth. Clients who want to buy "lose" the opportunity to gain wealth.
The suspension of the ability to buy into the hype absolutely hurt the long folks (mostly retail WSB types) and helped the short folks (the big hedge funds which are short GME).
There's nothing all that new about this. Read "Extraordinarily Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", which is over a century old. It describes all the classics - a pump and dump, a Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme, a "bubble", "tulipomania", etc - from the first time they appeared on a large scale.
These are mostly 19th century tricks. That's when finance and newspapers got big enough to make them work at scale. The SEC was established after the 1929 bubble got so big it took down the whole country.
Meanwhile, the latest thing on Reddit is pumping Dogecoin.
In all these things, the people who get in late and don't get out early are the losers. It's zero-sum, after all.
When a startup seeking a C round does it, it's
-disruption
- moving fast and breaking things
- seizing market advantage by nimbly circumventing slow-moving or antiquated regulation.
When a nihilistic stan does it, it's
- <various pejoratives>
- <motivated by ignorance or abuse or amorality of various types>
Argumentation over terminology, expertise, etc., is secondary,
to the ways in which this is about power, which informs every aspect of how, why, who, and what. Including the language used and appeals made by those who have it, traditionally have it, and defend it, against those who do not.
Many of the details being argued over are interesting mostly because argument over such details is another tool of the powerful.
There is really only one simple concept needed to understand what the SEC cares about.
When a big hedge fund is selling a stock short, they can do so without even borrowing it. As a result, the buyer ends up not owning it and the stock fails to deliver - called a fail.
There are a lot of easy penalities that could be applied here. Reprice based on lowest price in intervening period prior to deliver. Provide a 10% rebate per day if not delivered T+3, up to perhaps a 200% rebate. Etc.
But instead, nothing happens, the fail to deliver just continues. I took a look at Gamestop on the fail to deliver list. It's been there forever.
I don't trade, but the whole fail to deliver game seems rotten.
The response is pretty weak. The system was gamed for so long and small companies were driven out of existence.
They are pretty saying, let's see how this plays out and we figure out after the fact what to do.
As a programmer and an aspiring amateur quant myself I always ponder upon the possibilities of more people starting & managing mini hedge funds (e.g. with a starting captial of 200~500k?) with a mix of fundementals + algo-trading with multi-agent simulations, game-theoretic modelling, etc.
As more platforms like ploygon.io, alpaca.markets emerge as well as more DeFi stuff gaining tractions, I really hope in the next 10 years regulations, etc, in the financial space would leave more rooms for smaller players to thrive.
> The Commission will closely review actions taken by regulated entities that may disadvantage investors or otherwise unduly inhibit their ability to trade certain securities. In addition, we will act to protect retail investors when the facts demonstrate abusive or manipulative trading activity that is prohibited by the federal securities laws.
Hopeful sentences for the ones who long GME. How often does the initial statement SEC makes actually matter?
The problem with experts is that they often accept things and normal that the general public finds unacceptable. The SEC experts probably see a lot of "Normal" level of manipulation and improper activity that folks outside the industry would find wholly unacceptable and would like reformed. This happens to a lot industries where bad behavior is normalized and ignored by both players and regulators.
I am naive here, can someone explain what is the economic utility of a stock market ?
For example, its easy to understand utility of food, cloths, car, house, money. But I am not able to find a reason about stock market existence for day-to-day trading, where secondary stocks are traded daily after IPO. It seems none of the day-to-day trading money/profit ever goes back to business to help them to improve that business.
Secondary markets provide liquidity for primary investors which makes making primary investments much more attractive. A stock market is just a highly organized kind of secondary market. How many VC investors there would be if they could never sell, or if they could only sell at prices which were random? Without a secondary market all investments would be permanent and that would make investing much less attractive.
Secondary markets also provide important capital allocation benefits. They make it easier for good companies to raise additional capital (e.g. via a rights issue) or buy other businesses (using their shares). They also provide an important benchmarking role allowing non-listed companies to price transactions on the basis of listed company valuations.
"Our core market infrastructure has proven resilient under the weight of this week’s extraordinary trading volumes." - this is flat out false. The market infrastructure was supposedly unable to handle the desired buy volumes under high volatility on meme stocks, resulting in multiple retail brokerages disabling purchases of the meme stocks.
This statement seems like a big ball of nothing. Basically the SEC is aware of what's happening (how could they not be?) and maybe they'll do something about it or maybe they'll decide that it's all within the law.
1. Reads a technical document outside their domain.
2. Feels dumb because they don't have a grasp on any of the concepts.
3. Too busy to use the very internet which some of them probably helped build to magically render learning materials to the screen in front of them at zero marginal cost.
4. Sees the word "manipulation"
5. Substitutes the laymen's definition of "manipulation"
6. Builds a fantasy World of Wall Street from first principles around that definition
7. Argues their fantasy first-principles Wall Street against other participants' fantasy first-principles Wall Street
8. Everyone leaves sync'd on the fantasy of feeling smarter than when they arrived.
If you know more than others, that's wonderful. Please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. None of what you wrote here helps anyone learn—it just puts others down, makes you sound supercilious, and makes the community worse. A comment like this stuck at the top of a thread, letting off fumes and polluting the environment with meta nastiness, is one of the worst things that can happen on HN. No one intends it to happen—I'm sure you had no such intention, nor did the upvoters, but it's the default that we co-create on the internet unless we consciously do otherwise.
If you just pour acid on stuff that you scorn, it may get heavily upvoted because everyone is feeling anger and scorning others is a way to relieve that feeling—but you can't pour acid without pouring it on the commons, which is extremely fragile. By getting upvoted, the damage you cause is amplified 1000x. People posting here need to take care of the commons, the same way none of us would pour toxins into a mountain lake, leave campfires burning in a dry forest, or litter in a city park.
I totally get how frustrating, nay maddening it is when others are wrong and ignorant on the internet and self-satisfied about it. But being a good citizen on HN means learning to tolerate the pressure and metabolize the irritation this activates in you. Then you can come back to the commons with a response that builds it up—for example with interesting, relevant information—rather than tearing it further apart.
Our brains are hard-wired to weight painful impressions—like internet comments that seem dumb or wrong—much more heavily than pleasurable ones, like comments we agree with. This makes it feel like HN is dominated by wrongness and dumbness and meanness to a greater extent than it actually is. We all need to become more aware of this mechanism (especially by observing our own reactions more closely) so we don't destroy this place by making the mistake of feeling like it's already been destroyed. The truth is that it's hovering precariously in between.
It's a humorous injunction that could be gainfully posted at the top of most controversial threads. Nothing wrong with warning people against bias and groupthink. Especially when the matter is deeply technical and outside of most participants'expertise.
From my perspective it's more important to protect the commons from going up in flames.
Generic warnings about "bias and groupthink" have no helpful effect anyway, let alone snarky putdowns of others. Apart from adding off-topic noise, they polarize the audience into a "like and agree" tribe and a "dislike and disagree" tribe. Then the two go after each other in increasingly nasty and unthoughtful ways.
If you actually want to reach people you have to do it differently. If you (I don't mean you personally, but all of us) don't actually want to reach people, but just to vent bile, that's not what this site is for, and there are other places to do it.
been loving HN for 8 years (n coming!) mostly due to the self-constraints commentators here generally have on the amount of meta-nastiness they (accidentally/intentionally) leak out
and as the population grows am hugely thankful for the moderation too
I feel like “resist the urge to post claims about concepts outside your domain/grasp” is clear, actionable advice that improves the community. What if you spent more time policing that, instead of policing of tone of people trying to make it better? Take care of the commons earlier, and then these type of posts wouldn’t be necessary.
I’m not sure why you would question the intentions of the upvoters - do you believe they don’t understand how the upvote system works? It seems clear they had every intention of promoting OP’s message and forcefulness with which it was delivered.
There are other ways to make such points which don't break the site guidelines. You're ignoring the damage to the community that I'm writing about, which is much more important. Massive, low-information, vicious flamewars are the biggest existential threat to the community.
I don't believe that either the commenter or the upvoters wanted an off-topic flamewar to be pinned at the top of the most popular thread on HN's front page. That would be malice! Outcomes like this happen on the internet, not by deliberate malice, but because a large number of small contributions—usually made without much attention, and without thinking of the overall health of the community—compound into a damaging outcome.
OP directly addresses the topic with the goal of improving the community. That you think it is both OT and malicious makes me incredibly sad. Calling that particular subset of voters thoughtless because you disagree with them is a nasty brand of solipsism.
Everyone’s brain is a time series database of experience, with a variety of heuristic shorthand’s built in. Presuming they should all consume and process information the same way is arrogant.
Perhaps take some of your own advice; one comment in this thread has not damaged HN.
Consider; for me OP did not leave as painful an impression as the helicopter parenting and scolding that followed. Trigger the Streisand Effect at your own risk.
I don't think I disagree with any of that. But if you're implicitly arguing that more of the GP would be just fine for HN, then I do have to disagree.
Moderation comments are an unfortunate evil. To some extent they do the very things we're scolding others for. I don't feel very good about that and I'd love to find a better way—especially because they're even more tedious to write than they are to read. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... Unfortunately, the system doesn't regulate itself with community and software mechanisms alone. There needs to be a moderation mechanism as well, i.e. humans who are giving the system their primary attention and giving feedback to it. I'd never claim that the way we do it is the only way or the best way, just that it's better than nothing.
While I have you: could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I’m not the only one that lives here that visits HN. It seems the house internet is blocked from signing up. I use my phone in privacy mode. Internet points don’t mean much.
Honestly though, Reddit/HN without a comment section would be great. Let messenger systems handle propagation.
irc.ycombinator.com would probably be much easier to moderate and be a lot healthier for everyone too.
Personally, I think smart people just do this. When I got sick with COVID I cannot begin to describe the number of people who became doctors during this unprecedented time, only to send me outdated comments, articles, and speculation.
All of these people thought they were smarter than the instruction I received from a real doctor, nurse practitioner, and the CDC. These were smart people, though, and mostly (but not limited to) highly educated engineers.
I agree in principle. Then in real life example you will have real doctors and nurses giving conflicting advices and having wildly different viewpoints on the details.
The easy to point to example is how a lot of doctors viewed masks at the beginning of the pandemic. Or how trickle down economics is also endorsed by experts. Or experts opinions on mental health drugs. And so many other subjects where it won’t be hard to find an expert on the dumb side of the argument.
I think we should rely on experts, but we can’t dismiss people’s doubts or research just with a “I’ve seen a real doctor” slight of hand.
"how a lot of doctors viewed masks at the beginning of the pandemic"
Ok, so I've looked into the history of this a little, and most of the mask mythology seems misunderstood.
Prior to 2020, most medical professionals believed most viruses, and corona viruses particularly, could not be transported as aerosols. This was a subject of research where the data had not come in.
About late March, it began to appear that the virus could be an aerosol. Hard results did not come in until April and May, and many in the field discovered they had egg on their faces.
Conflicting advice is to be expected with new information.
My frustration is that, here in Canada at least, there is still an outdated way of talking about the virus as if it's a surface / hand sanitation issue, and much of the public policy (especially around school openings, etc.) still seems to be ignorant of the absolutely essential role that shared air has in transmission. Public authorities have failed to really drive home the reality of the virus, and instead we get sanitation theatre, a pantomime of virus control, and parents clambering to get schools reopened (while the numbers plummet since they've been closed after Christmas)
Example, a local wine shop in my small town where you are not allowed to touch the bottles, but I see the staff inside with their masks off when there's no customers in the store.
Frankly, I think people really just don't _want_ to believe it's aerosol transmitted. Because the consequences for public policy would be so drastic; no malls, no factories, no schools, etc. should really be open if you admit it.
It’s possible that it’s just been so long since we had a bad respiratory pandemic that medical advice assumes everything is food poisoning and norovirus, where cleaning surfaces actually does matter.
But it’s also possible they’d have to admit grandma-type adages about opening the windows actually work and office buildings don’t let you do this anymore.
If you go to ontario public health website and read their summaries on current covid papers, you'll note that the vast majority of papers come to the conclusion that schools have almost no impact on the spread of covid.
But no, keep applying youre second grade logic: spreads through air-> indoor places unsafe-> CLOSE EVERYTHING.
That's not to say some of it isn't security theater (ie my parents were washing cookie boxes with soap some a couple of months ago), but those measures aren't being driven by the public health, but rather the unrelenting fear mongering of the media.
I've also looked into it a little and come to the opposite conclusion. Here is one study from Singapore in 2014 that showed surgical and n95 have about a 68% and 95% efficacy respectively at preventing SARS transmission https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4293989/ Masks have also been shown to provide protection against the common cold (many strains of which are also coronaviruses) and seasonal flus https://www.livescience.com/7661-masks-protect-colds-flu.htm...
In the absence of more specific information about SARS-COV-2 early in the pandemic, surely it would have made sense to default to using the preventative measures that were known to be effective at controlling SARS and other known respiratory diseases? Especially when these measures come with no real risks.
It's true that they didn't know with 100% certainty, and China's misinformation about human to human spread in the beginning and not allowing the CDC team in early to investigate certainly didn't help either. Maybe these experts, including Dr Fauci, the CDC, and WHO, just made what turned out to be very bad judgement calls and they honestly thought that masks wouldn't prevent the spread of the disease. But by far the likeliest explanation in my mind is that these institutions knowingly lied to the public in an attempt to manipulate people into not buying masks, and I still find that to be absolutely unconscionable.
"In summary, despite the various mechanistic arguments about which organisms can be potentially airborne and therefore aerosol-transmissible, ultimately, the main deciding factor appears to be how many studies using various differing approaches: empirical (clinical, epidemiological), and/or experimental (e.g. using animal models), and/or mechanistic (using airflow tracers and air-sampling) methods, reach the same consensus opinion. Over time, the scientific community will eventually form an impression of the predominant transmission route for that specific agent, even if the conclusion is one of mixed transmission routes, with different routes predominating depending on the specific situations. This is the case for influenza viruses, and is likely the most realistic."
Honestly, I'm not sure what you're asking. Some kind of admission that the US health field ignored research because "eww, icky Asians?" Evidence that the US health experts knew of the research but are Snidely Whiplash-ish, mustache-twirling evil? As far as I can tell, they're just as confused as any other scientist trying to do their best, with the additional constraint that they have to provide an answer to a question and that any nuance in that answer will be ignored anyway.
The link I posted is to a 2019 paper discussing how and why some viruses are considered airborne transmissible such that masks would help. (Single papers don't usually settle complex questions, right?)
cactus2093's links are to a paper discussing the difficulty of getting people to use masks correctly and a science popularization article describing an unnamed study from the University of New South Wales and an unidentified CDC study. The first link does include references about the utility of masks, to articles titled "Risk of transmission of airborne infection during train commute based on mathematical model", "Knowledge about pandemic influenza and compliance with containment measures among Australians", "Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses: systematic review", "Professional and home-made face masks reduce exposure to respiratory infections among the general population", and "A schlieren optical study of the human cough with and without wearing masks for aerosol infection control", but those don't seem to imply the issue is settled. The second link does go on to say, "While some governments are already stockpiling masks for use in emergencies, MacIntyre said these guidelines had been implemented without evidence to support them. "We now have provided that evidence," she said," but it's difficult to evaluate the last sentence.
> Prior to 2020, most medical professionals believed most viruses, and corona viruses particularly, could not be transported as aerosols. This was a subject of research where the data had not come in.
cactus2093 replied
> I've also looked into it a little and come to the opposite conclusion. Here is one study from Singapore in 2014 that showed surgical and n95 have about a 68% and 95% efficacy respectively at preventing SARS transmission https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4293989/ Masks have also been shown to provide protection against the common cold (many strains of which are also coronaviruses) and seasonal flus https://www.livescience.com/7661-masks-protect-colds-flu.htm...
There's two ways I can see you interpreting this.
1) You are being extremely narrow in your focus and saying that you are talking specifically about viruses being transmitted as aerosols (although the overarching topic here is about whether or not masks are effective). And thus, since there was no research specifically about this, then there's no reason to recommend masks. This doesn't address the point that there's research that shows masks are effective against similar kinds of viruses.
2) You actually are talking about effectiveness of masks and saying that viruses could not be transmitted via aerosol was to say that because they are not shown to be transmitted via aerosol, then there's no evidence that masks would work, in which case, again, we're back to the issue that there was research prior to 2020 that showed masks are effective against similar kinds of viruses.
So the question remains, are you wrong about your assertion that
> Prior to 2020, most medical professionals believed most viruses, and corona viruses particularly, could not be transported as aerosols. This was a subject of research where the data had not come in.
and if not, what are we missing about what you're trying to say?
> Some kind of admission that the US health field ignored research because "eww, icky Asians?"
There was certainly the perception that Asians wearing masks was ridiculous. Whether or not this perception extended to American experts and influenced their conclusions is unknown to me.
"There's two ways I can see you interpreting this.
"1) You are being extremely narrow in your focus and saying that you are talking specifically about viruses being transmitted as aerosols (although the overarching topic here is about whether or not masks are effective). And thus, since there was no research specifically about this, then there's no reason to recommend masks. This doesn't address the point that there's research that shows masks are effective against similar kinds of viruses.
"2) You actually are talking about effectiveness of masks and saying that viruses could not be transmitted via aerosol was to say that because they are not shown to be transmitted via aerosol, then there's no evidence that masks would work, in which case, again, we're back to the issue that there was research prior to 2020 that showed masks are effective against similar kinds of viruses."
Backing up a bit...
As far as I've seen, there are three primary routes for infection for respiratory diseases: 1) contaminated surfaces, 2) (large) droplets produced mostly by coughing or sneezing, and 3) (small) aerosol particles produced by normal activities like breathing and speaking.
The normal measures against 1) are avoiding touching possibly contaminated surfaces, washing your hands, and not touching your eyes, mouth, etc. And roughly speaking, that's about all you can do.
The normal measures against 2) are staying distant (i.e. 6ft) and keeping interactions short because the droplets do not remain airborne long, and covering your face when you cough or sneeze. Masks would certainly be helpful in the case of 2), but not especially so because a) the normal measures work fairly well, b) most people do not want to wear a mask[1], c) many people who do wear a mask do not do so correctly, and d) the supplies of medical grade masks were (are?) sketchy. (Both of the links provided are specifically aimed at b) and c), no?)[2] A study of 1000 students at an Australian university is interesting, but the advantage of a) don't necessarily overwhelm b), c), and d).
There are no normal measures against 3). The only useful measures are to avoid all contact with potential carriers, significantly improve indoor ventilation and air filtration (aerosols remain airborne for a very long time), and properly using medically-effective masks when interactions are required. Transmission by asymptomatic carriers is primary, hard epidemiological evidence of 3).
From your limited choices, my closest meaning is your 1). But,....
Now, put yourself in the place of someone making an official policy recommendation in, say, February or early March. You don't have hard evidence that masks are required, but you do understand that they will provide some marginal benefit. On the other hand, ensuring that masks are worn consistently and correctly is an uphill struggle (as we have seen over the last year). Further, the supply of medical grade masks where their use is required, hospitals for example, is not infinite. Oh, and you want to make the minimally invasive recommendation you can, because you actually aren't out to cause as much damage as possible by, say, killing the economy. Beyond that, you know that at some point you are going to be facing pandemic fatigue, where people stop taking the situation seriously and then things get very bad (as in last summer, last fall, and earlier this winter). What do you do?
As it turns out, they were wrong about some of their assumptions. Being wrong happens. It is not proof of an evil conspiracy or even of a conspiracy of stupidity. It's people who are pretty good at what they do, making what they think are the best choices, and being wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616014 (No, really, "The Plague Year" in the New Yorker is probably the best history of the pandemic so far, and explicitly touches on a lot of these issues---including medical professionals saying, "yeah, we were wrong.")
[1] I am talking about the US specifically, not Taiwan, Japan, or anywhere where mask wearing is more common socially.
[2] Everyone wearing pressurized, highly filtered contamination suits at all times would prevent essentially all cases of respiratory disease transmission. But no one is going to push that idea without a really, really good reason.
> But by far the likeliest explanation in my mind is that these institutions knowingly lied to the public in an attempt to manipulate people into not buying masks,
As I remember it, the advice wasn't "don't wear masks," the advice was "stay home." If they said "go buy masks," that would mean leaving your house to get a mask, which would directly contradict the more important advice of staying home. Also if they said wear a mask when you leave the house it would have been interpreted as "it's ok to go on with normal events as long as we have masks" which wasn't the message they were trying to send, either. The message was stay home, and at the time it was probably the right message, and not a lie.
Yeah, no. People could have worn masks they already had, ordered masks online if any were available, the market for home-made masks would have emerged like it ended up doing later. And even if people did go out to buy masks, people were already going out on essential trips like the grocery store, pharmacy, and continuing to go to work for many people. Making one trip to buy a mask and then wearing that mask on all other essential trips for the next few weeks would have been a big net win even if you did have to go into a store to buy that mask.
> As I remember it, the advice wasn't "don't wear masks," the advice was "stay home."
There was “stay home” but also “stop buying masks because you are stopping medical, first responder, etc. personnel from getting them and they aren't useful for the general public” during the initial PPE supply shortage and hoarding.
This wasn't a lie, AFAICT, but Aa statement that was completely correct public health statement in the context it was given that was widely interpreted as an individual health statement.
> was completely correct public health statement in the context it was given that was widely interpreted as an individual health statement.
There was no misunderstanding, the message was "don't wear a mask unless you're sick, masks don't help the wearer they only help keep a sick person from spreading it to others around them". That was just a lie at the time, we didn't know that for sure and we had every reason to suspect the opposite.
> There was no misunderstanding, the message was "don't wear a mask unless you're sick, masks don't help the wearer they only help
I've heard lots of people say that was the message, but it wasn't the one I heard and it's not the one I find in any of the documented statements from public health officials.
I definitely remember a lot of talk from experts saying non-surgical masks don't work and that surgical masks should be saved for medical professionals.
> Prior to 2020, most medical professionals believed most viruses, and corona viruses particularly, could not be transported as aerosols.
That’s most American medical professionals. And they mostly seemed to believe you would get yourself sick faster by touching your eyes after taking the mask off wrong, or that masks provided 0% protection unless you wore an N95 with a fit test, or that if they didn’t lie about them being useless people would steal them from hospitals. They certainly didn’t believe they were truly useless, since they were all wearing them for procedures.
Actually, wasn’t the excuse for suddenly being like “face masks are good actually” that they didn’t know COVID had asymptomatic spread before then? That’s even worse than not knowing it spread through aerosols.
> This was a subject of research where the data had not come in.
By using the technique of “not assuming all of Asia is primitive and superstitious”, it was easy to figure out what to do without an RCT. Note there isn’t evidence that surgical masks help during surgery either.
Yeah, I think what a lot of people going on TV failed to really express is that there was so much unknown about this new virus, that this is the best information we have to go on RIGHT NOW. And then when that changed, they didn't make it explicit enough that they were changing their advice based on NEW DATA. Partially this is just the soundbite driven media, where even if it was explained, that often doesn't make the 10 second clip replayed.
My company had a zoom conference with a very well respected British doctor, he won something more or less equivalent to a nobel prize in mediciine, and he told my company, on May 4th, that masks are not necessary. This was already a bit head scratching, but what I feel he probably meant, but certainly did not explicitly say- is that its not a priority for an individual to wear a mask when there are shortages for front line workers.
But mix a changing message with an inbred resistance to being told what to do and the inconvenience of a mask, and this comes out the end for many as "They don't know what they are talking about these "experts!", I don't need to listen to them, they can't get their story straight!" and here we are...
> My company had a zoom conference with a very well respected British doctor, he won something more or less equivalent to a nobel prize in mediciine, and he told my company, on May 4th, that masks are not necessary. This was already a bit head scratching, but what I feel he probably meant, but certainly did not explicitly say- is that its not a priority for an individual to wear a mask when there are shortages for front line workers.
This comes off as blatantly lying to us for our harm, not "they don't know what they're talking about". If someone lies to you and knowingly puts your life at risk through the lie, it's very rational not to believe anything they say in the future. This is not mere mixed messages.
If government and/or experts want to have non-negative credibility, they are going to have to start consistently telling the whole truth.
> Then in real life example you will have real doctors and nurses giving conflicting advices and having wildly different viewpoints on the details.
Exactly. Real life example - someone I know asked her doctor about getting the Moderna covid vaccine while pregnant. The doctor not only said it was ok, but also verbally recommended it and gave her a written paper to help her get the vaccine. She was able to get it a couple days ago. Then yesterday the World Health Organization announced that pregnant women should not be getting the Moderna vaccine because they were not included in the trials.
So who’s right here? It’s hard to trust a “real doctor” when something like this happens.
It also happens that, doctors in particular, barely see you for 5-15min, that is not enough time for them to fully understand what is going on with you and your whole history. It’s only enough time for them to make a quick judgement based on their pattern matching abilities from their own experience and then give, an educated, recommendation. But they are not really vested in you in particular, you are just one more, and if their recommendations don’t work for you, they usually don’t really care and won’t go down the rabbit whole with you, at the most they’ll just refer you to someone else.
But that ... that's not exactly incompatible. The WHO makes very simple blanket statements that are safe in general.
A doctor usually looks at an individual. (And we know a lot of pregnant women got infected with COVID. We know that hospitalization was higher for them, but also that mortality is the same - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6925a1.htm?s_cid=mm... , so the immune reaction should be the same too)
The real problem is that it's impossible for a non-expert to gauge the expertise of any of these entities (your full-sized real-life walking-talking doctor who you know for a deacade, the WHO and anyone in between). Even simply asking many questions is just the illusion of getting informed (not just because there's rarely any time for proper answers as you mentioned), but because the answers are biased, so this naturally biases the next question too. (Unless there's enough time and effort to go through years of science and try to falsify whatever theory is being communicated with very targeted questions, it's close to useless/futile effort.)
> But they are not really vested in you in particular, you are just one more,
Yep. Agreed. Also usually primary care physicians are better at "bedside manner" and pattern matching than at real medical science. (Because it's not really their job to have 20 doctorates in every subfield of biology.)
>Or how trickle down economics is also endorsed by experts.
Trickle-down economics is not explicitly endorsed by anyone, because it's a pejorative. That's like saying "totalitarianism is popular in some countries"; you might think those countries are totalitarian, but they don't.
Indeed. Even then, as a term, it refers to a specific regan-era tax policy.
What many on the left assume it means, is a sincere description of growth "raising the tide"; and how ridiculous an idea that is.
Of course the tide has risen to an unprecedented degree in human history both since the term "trickle down" was invented; and moreso, over the last 40 years.
Except the tide you're describing is global, and the policy in question was domestic, and wages and assets within the middle and lower economic classes have indeed stagnated in relation to almost every other economic indicator within the country, which is why "many on the left" consider this argument to be invalid.
The problem, to me, isn't peoples curiosity or attempting to broaden their horizons. I think the outcomes of this are largely good; it encourages discerning people to exercise caution and makes for good light conversation. Where things get off the rails is when people believe their tentative research or association with a domain makes them authoritative in some sense.
I read the same waffling about masks you did, the information I read (since it was inconsistent) led me to believe that I should wear masks more than directed. I did this out of an abundance of caution because at the time early research eerily concluded that not much is known about the longer term effects of this virus, there was stark contrast in the symptoms various people had, and that there were layers to exercising prevention. I acted in a similar manner when I limited my social circle.
The difference in the way, I think, these people used much of the same information that I did is that it became authoritative to them. After they'd read enough articles straight from the CDC it made them feel qualified to interpret them. I'm reminded of one guy who demanded I get another PCR test before he hung out with me, even after I hadn't experienced a fever for 10+ days. For some context, when I got sick I came back negative on both tests I was given. I was later told my viral load was not high enough on those days, ironically these also happened to be some of the worst days of the virus. It was only after I lost taste and smell that the doctors realized I had COVID. My friend cited all the reading he had done as evidence that I just wouldn't accept his "perspective". When I asked the doctor about getting both PCR and an antibody test she responded, "Do you have an actual reason? We already knew you were sick." In reality, the time which I would've been contagious had long passed, yet my friend couldn't get it out of his mind that transmission was a possibility.
Another example is a friend whose brother had gotten COVID a few months back. His symptoms were certainly worse than mine. Where I didn't experience much trouble breathing, he did among other things. I went on a walk one day because it was one of the days in between being sick that I had some energy and wasn't overcome with brain fog. I shared that I was exhausted after this short walk and that I'd probably stave off a walk for a few days to see where I was at. She chastised me for going on a walk, explaining that her brother had been told not to exercise for three to six months, and that it seemed as if I was taking COVID as a joke. What I realized after googling this specific treatment plan is that it's usually given to people with some form of cardiomyopathy and other conditions (none of which I have.) I am now about 3 weeks removed from having COVID and I'm back to riding my bike, which is consistent with what my doctor told me. My doctor told me recovery has a lot of variables and I'll need to go at the pace that I'm comfortable with and listen to my body. Regular checkups should help to that end as well.
The theme among these people is when I tried to explain what doctors had told me and why I was going to stick to what they were saying (more generalized as drawing boundaries) I was met with harsh rejection. The key here is that authoritative sources were no longer respected. The fact of the matter is that doctors do take a bit to arrive at consensus and that can be frustrating to a public opinion that is waiting on them for their own sanity, but just because you landed on the correct conclusion a couple times (or even a more conservative solution that kept you equally safe) does not make you an authoritative source. So, I'm not going to tell people to stay in their own lane but you can't just go lecture people based on your own understanding. That's when you forget that all of this information you gather outside of your own domain is good for exercising caution and light conversation.
I saw plenty of smart people ahead of institutions and real doctors on masks and to some extents other aspects of the pandemic.
Yes, in general if you don't know much on a topic you'd on average do best if you listen to the experts but you can outperform that if you can identify the right kind of smart people with a good track record.
"Right kind of people" have no accountability to their advice. A doctor can't really just hazard a guess without actual facts to base them in or risk losing their ability to practice and/or reputation. "Right kind of people" can be and are often plenty wrong about things but it fades into obscurity and they are never held accountable.
Of course they are right sometimes but on many issues with a binary choice (should or shouldn't wear masks) that's a 50% chance.
In the long run you want to be able to discern hearsay, opinion, and rumors from facts and accountability to them.
You see it today when inquiring if a pregnant woman should get the vaccine. Doctors won't really advise you because although they maybe feel it's totally safe if you're far enough along, they would be held accountable if something happened. They can be "pretty sure" about things, but that isn't enough. Meanwhile, "very smart person" on Twitter can reference a bunch of content from unaccountable people that says it's safe and come off as an expert when they aren't. It's easy to be "right" when you don't have skin in the game and especially so when no one is going to hold you to account for all the times you were wrong or misinformed.
Last spring I was briefly lectured by a maskless doctor who said I shouldn't bother with the mask I was wearing at an appointment. I shrugged and kept my mask on. A month or two later I saw him again. He was wearing a mask that time and didn't complain about mine.
That doctor didn't just avoid guessing. He gave unsolicited advice, on limited information, that turned out to be exactly wrong and somewhat dangerous.
>A doctor can't really just hazard a guess without actual facts to base them in or risk losing their ability to practice and/or reputation.
No, but one doctor might base advice on one study he saw another on a different one. Having skin in the game helps but it is also well documented that doctors might be overly cautious due to risk of litigation and thus sometimes chose suboptimal courses of action.
>Of course they are right sometimes but on many issues with a binary choice (should or shouldn't wear masks) that's a 50% chance.
No, this isn't a real coinflip. There's evidence for and against things like this, and some people have learned better than others how to evaluate such evidence and can definitely do better than 50%.
That is the single most frustrating part of the pandemic for me:
* There was preliminary evidence from the experts it might work.
* At some point Trump got wind of this and mentioned it.
* The media, in an effort to portray Trump as wrong, went on a crazy cherry-picking campaign to show HCQ as completely ineffective. "HCQ does not work" was the prevailing sentiment for almost the entire past year because of this, even though evidence was still coming out it does work under certain circumstances.
* Now that Trump is out of office, our understanding of HCQ is shifting back to exactly what that preliminary evidence said that Trump repeated.
"They included 30 569 patients with systemic lupus erythematosus or rheumatoid arthritis who were already taking hydroxychloroquine in the 6 months before what was considered as the start of the pandemic in England and 164 068 patients with these rheumatic diseases who did not use hydroxychloroquine. The study found no significant difference in standardised cumulative COVID-19 mortality associated with hydroxychloroquine use (0·23% among hydroxychloroquine users and 0·22% among non-users) with an adjusted hazard ratio of 1·03 (95% CI 0·80–1·33)."
"Among patients exposed to patients with SARS-CoV-2, hydroxychloroquine, administered within a median duration of 2 days as post-exposure prophylaxis, did not reduce the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19 infection within 14 days, compared with placebo (vitamin C)."
"Researchers assessed each patient’s condition 14 days after being assigned to a treatment group. They used a seven-category scale ranging from one (death) to seven (discharged from the hospital and able to perform normal activities). The results showed no significant difference between the hydroxychloroquine and placebo groups. The scientists also found no differences in any of 12 additional outcomes, which included mortality 28 days after assignment to a treatment group or time to recovery. Based on the data, they concluded that hydroxychloroquine was not an effective treatment."
"Several published rigorous studies have demonstrated similar findings. In the well-conducted clinical trials published to date, hydroxychloroquine has been evaluated in a wide variety of populations, ranging from patients with severe illness2-4 to individuals at risk of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, in whom the drug was used as primary prophylaxis5; these studies failed to show any beneficial effect of the drug. This raises the question: How did medicine get to the point where so many studies were conducted assessing the possible benefit of hydroxychloroquine, that led to nearly identical findings, and have been published in major journals?"
"Among patients hospitalized with Covid-19, those who received hydroxychloroquine did not have a lower incidence of death at 28 days than those who received usual care."
"New prescriptions by specialists who did not typically prescribe these medications (defined as specialties accounting for ≤2% of new prescriptions before 2020) increased from 1,143 prescriptions in February 2020 to 75,569 in March 2020, an 80-fold increase from March 2019."
To be fair, professional medical advice was especially low-quality in the early days of the pandemic. What was important was public health messaging, picking some lowest-common-denominator messages and having everyone repeat them. It wasn't hard to be better informed than that.
>> To be fair, professional medical advice was especially low-quality in the early days of the pandemic.
They primarily suffer from dogma IMHO. For example, now they know people with breathing difficulty should be kept in prone position. I dont know if that applies outside of Covid19, but I thought it was really interesting to see them learn it. Like "oh, what we'd normally do is bad but this variation is good".
Medicine also suffers from a fear (justified) of litigation. If they dont follow accepted practices they may get sued if someone dies. The funny thing with Covid was watching that fear when there was no accepted treatment. Seeing them say "The FDA hasn't approved that for covid" when they hadn't approved anything at all yet.
> Medicine also suffers from a fear (justified) of litigation.
very US-centric. Medical litigation in many others parts of the world doesn't work in the same way, and isn't a driving force in the way medicine is practiced.
I absolutely agree with the main thrust of your comment, but I want to point out that in unprecedented times specifically, the odds that a smart non-expert is more correct than an expert are substantially higher than in normal times.
Sadly, many doctors and nurses are statistically illiterate. I know, because I (try to) teach them statistics. Remember, the Surgeon General of the CDC said that, "[masks] are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus," perhaps in some misguided belief that avoiding panicked mask-buying was more important than a mask-wearing public.
[Sorry for insulting our healthcare heroes, but ... evidently y'all haven't been responsible for teaching them evidence-based medicine. It ain't easy.]
Can you link to the papers that were available in March 2020 that showed that masks are effective?
Use any definition of "mask" and "effective" you want, but preferably effective should include some concept of "prevents spread of respiratory disease".
Covid is a serious illness. Far too many people have been told, and believe, that they can continue their normal day to day life so long as they put mask on. This is untrue, and this advice has driven mass infection and death.
This is a pandora's box. My recollection of the events is this: around March 2020, there were some links to somewhat shoddy studies of effectiveness of masks in case of other diseases, but the official statement was that masks were not proven to be effective - but that's because there was no randomized control trial performed to check mask effectiveness against SARS variants, and how could there be?
This spins off into a whole discussion of how evidence-based medicine can lead you off the cliff when you follow its letter, and not spirit, because despite something being bloody obvious, there is no RCT proving that.
> but that's because there was no randomized control trial performed to check mask effectiveness against SARS variants, and how could there be?
The argument was not "we can't do tests because this is new", the argument was "we've got dozens of studies across a range of settings and respiratory diseases (which we expect to act similarly to covid) and we struggle to see any benefit, until we drop the quality of the research down".
IIRC the argument was "we can't say it works because we have no relevant tests at all". That's what I remember from March, but I may be misremembering.
No, I can't. Can you link to papers that show flossing is effective? Probably not, but the mechanism is so obvious that essentially all dentists will tell you to floss.
Further, mask-wearing was already a well-established practice in medical settings to prevent the spread of respiratory disease from practitioners to patients.
> believe that they can continue their normal day to day life so long as they put [a] mask on. This is untrue
Combined with some coordination on travel restrictions and quarantines, it seems Taiwan has been able to keep that normal day-to-day life for the majority of Taiwanese.
> Further, mask-wearing was already a well-established practice in medical settings to prevent the spread of respiratory disease from practitioners to patients
We don't see much benefit there, either. See the "clean surgery" papers.
> We concluded that household use of face masks is associated with low adherence and is ineffective for controlling seasonal respiratory disease.
"Do masks work, if you use the right type of mask and wear it properly?" isn't particularly controversial (the answer is probably "yes") but it's a stupid question because we don't care about optimal use, we care about real world use. And in the real world people might improperly wear a mask and go outside when they're symptomatic.
We don't have much good quality evidence for that, but here's a study that showed people were prepared to do things like wear masks, but were less prepared to self-isolate or book a test if they had symptoms: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.15.20191957v...
"However, during a severe pandemic when use of face masks might be greater, pandemic transmission in households could be reduced."
Later: "Although our study suggests that community use of face masks is unlikely to be an effective control policy for seasonal respiratory diseases, adherent mask users had a significant reduction in the risk for clinical infection. [...] Adherence with treatments and preventive measures is well known to vary depending on perception of risk and would be expected to increase during an influenza pandemic. [...] Therefore, although we found that distributing masks during seasonal winter influenza outbreaks is an ineffective control measure characterized by low adherence, results indicate the potential efficacy of masks in contexts where a larger adherence may be expected, such as during a severe influenza pandemic or other emerging infection."
I've posted links before, and I'll try to find them when I'm not on my phone. But you're right.
It was an open question, but the general opinion before 2020 was that masks would not be particularly useful. Sketchy results started appearing in March with better days in April and May. Several experts said, "we were wrong."
Medical grade masks are very useful. Others are less so. But they primarily prevent you from giving the virus to others.
There's been ongoing debate about the effectiveness of masks to prevent the spread of the influenza virus for years now. There were a lot of studies after the H1N1 pandemic since mask wearing was "recommended" but to my knowledge no state or federal mask mandate was put in place.
Our review highlights the limited evidence base supporting the efficacy or effectiveness of face masks to reduce influenza virus transmission. An important concern when determining which public health interventions could be useful in mitigating local influenza virus epidemics, and which infection control procedures are necessary to prevent nosocomial transmission, is the mode of influenza virus transmission between people and in the environment.
The interesting thing is everything they recommend, we've adopted during COVID, including physical barriers and front line workers additional PPE equipment:
Physical barriers would be most effective in limiting short-distance transmission by direct or indirect contact and large droplet spread, while more comprehensive precautions would be required to prevent infection at longer distances via airborne spread of small (nuclei) droplet particles [19]. In healthcare settings, stringent precautions are recommended to protect against pathogens that are transmitted by the airborne route, including the use of N95-type respirators (which require fit testing), other personal protective equipment including gowns, gloves, head covers and face shields, and isolation of patients in negative-pressure rooms
In this community-based, randomized controlled trial conducted in a setting where mask wearing was uncommon and was not among other recommended public health measures related to COVID-19, a recommendation to wear a surgical mask when outside the home among others did not reduce, at conventional levels of statistical significance, incident SARS-CoV-2 infection compared with no mask recommendation.
People are already debunking this Danish study but here's a CDC study showed even when people do wear masks, they were still getting sick:
In the 14 days before illness onset, 71% of case-patients and 74% of control participants reported always using cloth face coverings or other mask types when in public,” the report stated.
In addition, over 14 percent of the case-patients said they “often” wore a face covering and were still infected with the virus. The study also demonstrates that under 4 percent of the case-patients became sick with the virus even though they “never” wore a mask or face covering.
Personally I feel like masks aren't stopping the spread mainly because people either use one or two masks continually without cleaning them daily, or put them on dirty surfaces thinking its ok and then putting them back on, or simply not wearing them over their nose. Masks would probably be effective if people wore them properly and only used them once. Hoping 300 million people all follow those simple rules is a bit hopeful to say the least.
> Hoping 300 million people all follow those simple rules is a bit hopeful to say the least.
There seems to be something different about the US population than, say, the Taiwanese population regarding mask usage. I don't have a good explanation for it, because I think blaming "culture" is lazy research.
Sorry, edited after you wrote this. I took out the reference to the Trump administration because it wasn't helpful to the main point of many doctors not being experts on epidemics.
I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude. Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. You can almost set your watch to how often an outsider will analyse a situation from first principles and make money off the 'experts', especially in the stock market.
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!
Point #3 doesn't seem consistent with the idea that this is just a "stay in your lane" attitude. "Lurk before you leap" might be a better phrase. You've got to do at least a little homework before you can understand a technical topic well enough to make sense of what you're reading.
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."
This seems like a strawman. The OP isn't arguing against outsider/non-expert discussion. He's just satirizing HN's specific tendencies to spin off of a headline/article first glance into a let-me-teach-you-something fan fiction vs fan fiction argument.
> Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality
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 a physicists tells me something about how the solar system works, they don't have much reason to lie to me.
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.
Maybe not apples-to-apples, but... I worked on Lehman's Tokyo electronic trading desk in 2008. When we went bankrupt, it wasn't our clients, or even the exchanges which stopped our trading. It was our clearing banks.
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.
Playing devil's advocate, it's possible that the lawyer/clearing bank/regulator gave the instruction to cutoff all trading in the name, and cutting off only buys was the lesser of bad options. (Had they also cutoff selling, it would have been even worse!)
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.)
Robinhood's collateral requirements increase when their users buy stock, and decrease when their users sell stock.
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?
They did halt both buying and selling of net new positions. They did not halt adjustments of existing positions (calls & shorts).
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.
I don't take what Robinhood says at face-value because they have proven to be a sketchy-ass brokerage. That said, I still find their statements infinitely more valuable than baseless conspiracy theories floating around. Why would Citadel risk jeopardizing their lucrative relationship with Robinhood just so they might be able to successfully manipulate the market?
If RobinHood tells me how clearing houses work, they have a huge reason to lie to me.
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!
Of course, an outsider can't simply declare something to be true by dint of being an outsider. You need to reason it. Or, in the market, bet on it, and you'll see who wins out. But experts should be held to the same standard.
> Or, in the market, bet on it, and you'll see who wins out.
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.
The other issue is that it tends to be underspecified whether a discussion is about law or policy.
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.
On the other hand, many people who reason from first principles fall into two fallacies:
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.
The non-consensus outsiders who make progress have done the reading. They know what the consensus is, they know all the concepts and the jargon, and they disagree about something. Your post can be interpreted to mean "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge". That's anti-vax thinking and argument. That is not a way to make progress.
I would frame this on two axis:
1) outsider vs establishment
2) expert vs layperson
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.
So Michael Mauboussin is kinda of my obsession in this area. Basically, if it's a field with a lot of luck involved in outcomes, don't trust the experts (finance and economics). If it's heavily skill based (chess), trust the experts.
The non-consensus outsiders who make progress have done the reading. They know what the consensus is, they know all the concepts and the jargon, and they disagree about something.
Pretty well captured by that old comedy sketch "The expert" [1]
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.
If an old, grey haired scientist tells you something is possible, he's probably right. If he tells you something is impossible, he's probably wrong.[1] But if a hundred scientists tell you something, they might be wrong but it's still the way you want to put your money.
Experts are almost always right, assuming their assumptions are infallible. The skeptic's criticism is often not directed at the expert's conclusions but their axioms.
Red lines with green ink --> use a thermochromic ink, change the temperature.
7 lines all perpendicular to each other --> sure, in 7+ dimensions.
The Expert sketch is all dramatic and frustrating, I rather like the Mitchell and Webb spoon design sketch for a quieter view of the problems of designing and communicating
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu9nhExp5KI
(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).
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.
Right. It's the expert's blind spots that contain the best nuggets of value.
Expertise is not a Boolean. I'd trust a qualified physicist to make useful predictions about quantum devices, an EE to model an analog circuit, and a structural engineer to design a bridge that doesn't fall down.
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.
I always hear these sorts of criticisms of economists and financiers but I just don't think they hold water overall. Usually when I hear econ get flak the conversation rapidly devolves into criticisns of the abstract fairness of a solution rather then its priorities and effectiveness within the context. You see this constantly in the US when politicians from either side talk about the bank bailouts, the national debt, minimum wage, immigration, etc. Suddenly, rather than having anything resembling a sober and informed discussion about the topic and the current expert consensus, everyone just starts soapboxing about fatcats and entitlement while larping as intellectuals as they promote fringe 'theories' that happened to coincide with their political objectives. Meanwhile the actual economists and their suggestions get either drowned out or misrepresented.
Very well said, thank you. That was my objection, too. Outsider is a meaningful distinction in that they're still a domain expert (or something), just not inline with the standard.
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.
I think bullets 3 and 5 were the main point of that comment. It wasn't well-said, but it is in fact valuable to spend a moment to get familiar with the jargon a person is using, even if that jargon happens to have homonyms with a different field's jargon. That effort is what allows us to "swim out of our lanes" as you might say.
Fair enough, it's more the condescending attitude that rubs me up the wrong way. And if the words regulators use mean to them different things than they mean to everyone else (the people whom the regulations are ostensibly supposed to protect), that's probably interesting in itself! If you are charged with 'theft' under a law that defines 'theft' in a very different way to how you or your peers would define it, that's probably going to be a problem. So I'm all for a discussion on what the jargon actually means, if anyone has any insights beyond making general snipes at the HN community.
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...)
OP isn't asking us to defer to experts - he's arguing there are laypersons not doing enough research before forming an entire theory of how an industry works.
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.
Non-consensus outsiders who later succeed are usually still experts in the field, not people who are completely unaware that parts of a field exist or people who joined up in the past few hours.
> Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. You can almost set your watch to how often an outsider will analyse a situation from first principles and make money off the 'experts', especially in the stock market.
When? Who? Are you talking about, say, Dr. Burry and the mortgage bubble? Because he was definitely an 'expert' already.
> Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. You can almost set your watch to how often an outsider will analyse a situation from first principles and make money off the 'experts', especially in the stock market.
> 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.
It's not about staying in your lane, it's about being more aware of your ignorance. What you notice, over and over, is the people talking the loudest about most things have very little real idea about whatever they're talking about. The truth is almost always more boring than the most attention-grabbing theory, this bias found all over for the non-expert with the big opinion needs to stop.
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.
The existence of outsiders disproving consensus opinion with a more-correct contrarian one does not mean every outsider with a contrarian opinion is right.
But there's really an entire class of people who have no clue what they're talking about weighing in on things that they clearly do not understand.
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.
>> Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders.
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.
From what I can tell almost no professional investers beat the market, almost nobody wins the lottery. Why should I listen to lottery players or professional wall street gamers?
I'll take it you've never gotten a bad diagnosis from a doctor. Those too are disastrous, gets put in your medical record, and local doctors will agree for the sole sake of not refuting another local doctor.
Which, if accompanied by an empathic and engaged healer who manages to fully invoke the power of whatever is that drives the placebo effect, just might stand a chance of being more effective (in certain cases).
Hey, it's not market manipulation when you're an academic or part of the oligarchy of experts with invested positions. These people are to be cherished and flaunted on news media to state their "unbiased" opinion of market movements. It's manipulation when you're an average joe telling other average joes to stick it to a firm that's trying to bankrupt another company that's struggling through the pandemic.
Market experts have been caught with their pants down many times before because of the actions of uninformed investors.
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.
Redditors made millions of dollars. A couple hedge funds lost billions. Where did the rest of the money go to? Other institutional investors. Nearly 10% of Gamestop is held by a mutual fund where experts try to pick undervalued stocks.
When it comes to how the authorities will act, is one of the few places that appeals to authority are absolutely reasonable.
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.
People on HN are merely a (rather biased) sample of people in the world. Just as people in general can dislike him for different reasons, people on HN do as well.
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.
Sometimes opening your mouth and saying the wrong thing is the quickest way to improve your understanding. Starting with an incorrect premise and then talking/arguing things out until your understanding comes more in line with reality is a pretty healthy tact. Essentially Agile development, just applied more broadly.
i think overall people are feeling a little burned by trump's anti-filter and rampant conspiracy theories that have taken hold recently and as such are retreating to respect for status and authority.
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.
It is a good example of it, eg anything American doctors would’ve told you about wearing face masks was wrong until it wasn’t (and the CDC director is still telling people not to wear N95s), they still give terrible diet advice like telling diabetics to eat more carbs, and so on. Doctors are quite bad at making reasonable decisions when they don’t have an RCT in front of them.
> CDC director is still telling people not to wear N95s
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.
> 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.
>Also N95s have to be fit tested to be effective. So randos buying N95s and wearing them will frequently not work.
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.
Not completely ineffective, but ineffective at filtering the designed 95%. Here’s NIOSH’s page [0] defining fit testing and why it’s important. You don’t see this warning because it’s on NIOSH’s site, just like you don’t see the definition of all the stuff and just have the certification is for your test.
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.
Yup. Your average PCP/internist is good at one thing: analyzing your symptoms and directing you toward someone who actually can help you.
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.
Well, the advice specifically is more like "dear Type 2 diabetics, don't forget that if you eat less than 200g of carbs every day, you'll die of heart attacks from that evil saturated fat".
> I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude.
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.
>I am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude.
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.
> 3. Too busy to use the very internet which some of them probably helped build to magically render learning materials to the screen in front of them at zero marginal cost.
I will say that I’m not too busy for this at the moment, and getting to my very basic level of understanding has required me to sort through, at the very least, a fairly decent chunk of reference material and reading interpretations and explanations online.
Like, here’s some things I’ve been grappling with understanding recently:
How do settlement risk, clearing brokers, and clearinghouses work? Why does buying an ordinary stock carry so much settlement risk?
Why do market makers buy stock for delta hedging? How do they figure out how much stock to buy?
To make an analogy, it feels like I’m some kid in chemistry class who just learned how to draw bond diagrams, and then I watch a video of someone talking about how they figured out the structure of some chemical using Raman spectroscopy.
- prior the 1980s, when you bought a stock a physical stock certificate was passed back and forth between your broker and the broker selling the stock
- as you can imagine, as trading volumes increased this became unmanageable. In fact, at one point, the exchanges would close every Wednesday just to give people time to catch up on all of the exchange of certificates
- everyone, rightly, agreed that there needed to be a better way and the idea of a clearing house emerged. In this model, all of the physical certificates lived in one place. Ownership was tracked via a central "database" (originally not electronic). This made it MUCH easier to transfer ownership aka "settle". This is very similar to how gold is traded e.g. the NY Fed holds it for other countries etc
- An added benefit of a clearing house: it's easy to see how much everyone owns of everything. e.g. if one party is over leveraged or has gone extremely short, in theory, the clearing house can choose to not deal with that party or, more flexibly, request additional capital etc.
Here is also a specific example about settlement risk:
- let's say you report all of your trades to your clearing broker (think of them as a mini-clearinghouse)
- a data file gets lost or corrupted and the clearing broker says "Wait! Something is wrong! We are not letting you trade until we get this figured out!"
- EVEN IF YOU ARE CORRECT and they are wrong, you now have market risk because you may be holding a position that is losing you money. So much money in fact that it might drive you out of business.
The above is an actual answer to a settlement expert when asked "What is your nightmare scenario?". This in turn, could have ripple effects to other clearing brokers and trading firms and is generally all part of "settlement" or "clearing' risk.
Source: have worked in fintech trading for many years.
Thanks for the background info. Why can't the database be updated ~instantly though? Is it just because of legacy systems that handle settlement in periodic (daily?) batches?
Also, couldn't a broker eliminate this risk by just making assets "unavailable to trade" until they've been settled? Granted, I understand why brokers wouldn't want to do that under normal circumstances, but it seems like something they should be able to enable when liquidity becomes a problem.
To me, "Your cash can't be spent yet because the TSLA sale you just made hasn't settled" would seem a lot more understandable than "We're halting GME purchases".
> Why can't the database be updated ~instantly though? Is it just because of legacy systems that handle settlement in periodic (daily?) batches?
The legacy systems reason is a big one. There are banks with mainframes built in the 80's as part of the critical infrastructure. Another reason is that everyone doesn't communicate directly with the main clearing house. e.g. brokers clear with other brokers who then clear with the clearing house etc.
> To me, "Your cash can't be spent yet because the TSLA sale you just made hasn't settled" would seem a lot more understandable than "We're halting GME purchases".
There have been interesting solutions to disputes. e.g. I think it was NYMEX that had a rule for floor traders along the lines of "If Trader A and Trader B have a clearing issue, NEITHER of them gets to trade till it is taken care of." Given that these traders traded with each other multiple times a day coupled with they were making no money during this dispute, both parties were incentivized to come to an agreement.
Not an expert myself, but I've been interested in the field for a while.
The clearinghouse ultimately moves the security and money to their right place, and allows brokerages to let each side move on faith that everything will be right once the dust settles. On settlement risk, a key point is that there usually isn't a huge amount of risk. This is why DTCC is nearly imperceptible for retail players. In this case, the volume and short situation is so extreme that clearinghouses are getting antsy that there may not be enough of the securities available to actually make good in the end, so they're twisting arms at brokerages and requiring they have 100% of it on-hand so that there's no surprises when they go to officially give the buyer their security and the seller their money. This is obviously very expensive, which is why brokerages started limiting buying of volatile securities, have had to take out money to get 100% hedge on these trades, and why RH is allowing trading of volatile securities but only in volumes of 5.
Market makers buy stock for delta hedging because if they don't, they could get caught out and either deliver at a loss or not be able to deliver at all. Figuring out how much you need is a trick of the trade; if you or I knew what their strategy was, their position could be in danger.
Speaking as a long term value investor who is mostly noshing po'corn and watching, I have a couple of questions:
Don't the settlement worries provide evidence of naked shorts? (Naked shorts being selling a share without being sure the share would be available at settlement? And naked shorts illegal?)
Wouldn't the normal procedure be to halt all trading until the issues had cleared up? As opposed to allowing positions to be closed, but not opened?
Naked shorts are not impossible, especially if you're talking about naked call options. They're comparatively rare (being illegal just means you get fined if you get caught, it's really "not that serious" for a big player), and small timers aren't allowed to participate, but they're not impossible. An even bigger point than that is that the short doesn't necessarily have to be naked in the legal sense for you to fail to deliver, especially when a security has gone completely Texas like GME has.
This situation is rare. Halting all trades is very scary for all parties involved. It's way worse for just about everybody than asking brokerages to have 100% collateral is.
But halting trading is not entirely uncommon. It's what happens when weird stuff is going on. I've never heard of preventing opening new positions while allowing positions to be closed.
Whenever I read about a topic that I don't know much about, part of me is always wondering if the writer is throwing all these exotic words and greek letters in there because they are really an essential to understanding the topic, or because they just want to over-complicate it to sound smart and blow their own horn.
On one hand we have Occam's Razor: "the simplest solution is almost always the best." On the other we have "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." How does one know which to apply?
I don’t know how you could possibly reason about options without understanding delta, and gamma makes sense to me too since it’s just the derivative of delta as the underlying value changes.
As a math person, I’ve never heard “gamma” to mean the derivative of a change (a delta). For example, I was always taught that speed is v=delta-x/delta-t (distance over time). I’ve never heard gamma to mean that.
Speaking as a math major, gamma means, like, a million different things. It’s just a letter. There are only 26 latin letters, 24 greek letters, the capitals, and then a few oddities like blackboard bold, fraktur, cursive, etc. You run out pretty quickly and end up reusing letters.
Just like pi means different things in different contexts. It might be a permutation, projection, a function which counts prime numbers, or it might be half the period of sin. I might write π(10) = 4, or π ≈ 3.14…, or for π in P, etc. I might say that π is the right inverse of ι, in other words π∘ι = id, and point to some digram with a bunch of arrows.
Delta is not just “a change” in this context. It is specifically the rate of change of an option’s value with respect to the value of the underlying security. Just like pi, delta and gamma mean different things in different contexts.
The market maker has sold you an option that goes up in value as the stock goes up. The more the stock goes up, the more the market maker owes you. It hedges this by buying something else that goes up in value as the stock goes up—specifically, stock. Its option pricing model—the Black-Scholes formula or a related model—tellsit how much stock to buy; that output is a number called “delta” and ordinarily expressed as a percentage. Delta is the sensitivity of the option price to the stock price; the higher the delta, the more the option behaves like stock. The more in-the-money the option—for a call option, the higher the stock price is relative to the strike price—the higher the delta will be. A loose, nontechnical, incorrect but still sometimes helpful way to think about delta is as “the probability that an option will end up in the money.” A 100-delta option is so far in the money that it is sure to convert into stock, so it's just stock. A 0-delta option is so far out of the money that it can’t possibly convert into stock, so it’s just worthless. A 50-delta option is roughly at-the-money—a $50-strike call when the stock is trading at $50—and could go either way. The more stock-like an option is, the more stock the market maker will buy to hedge it. Here,Bloomberg’s OV page computes a 37.57% delta for the Jan. 29 $50 call as of last Tuesday; I rounded up for ease of use.
If you are remotely interested in these kinds of things I can heartily recommend reading Matt Levine (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...). He's at the same time educating and entertaining and what is more leaves out all the bile and negativity that is connected to these topics in other places. Gamestop is covered in recent issues.
Please don't respond to a bad comment by making the thread even worse. This is also in the site guidelines, which include a very clear statement of what to do instead:
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
In general it's good for people to be more aware of the fact that, outside of a few narrow technical domains, HN users are no less foolish, uninformed, and irrational as you those will find anywhere else on the internet.
>> 6. Builds a fantasy World of [X] from first principles around that definition
That is most every online discussion these days. I would only add "first principals learned at highschool and/or undergrad". The real scientists/lawyers/doctors with deep backgrounds in fields, the ones who dare to talk online, stand out like sore thumbs.
I don’t know where this perspective comes from. Reading the SEC note suggests that they are actively investigating or looking to actively investigate to see if there was market manipulation. No conclusions made as of yet.
When the market wildly diverges from steady state operations, this is an entirely reasonable thing for the SEC to do. An unstable market hurts the average person far more than a stable one.
Yeah it is essentially just a boilerplate post that just says "We heard and are looking into it" essentially. It will probably be months to years after the event for them to conclude who if anyone rose to the level of illicit market manipulation or other offenses and who would be responsible. Robinhood was at risk of being fined by the SEC for their infamous infamous leverage glitch as opposed to the users. (Not sure if it ended in a real fine as the media lost interest post patch.)
Yes, it's a reductionist argument that can apply to literally anything. Let's just delete all user discussions on the internet, and only allow PhD granted experts to discuss things on panels where they must provide primary sources for everything.
Or you could simply point out when someone is wrong, and explain why, assuming you are an expert. Then we all learn.
Yeah you're not wrong. I think HN is pretty good here though - we do have genuine experts (on tech) that correct people. That's why I value HN so much - I learn a lot even when I make stupid, wrong comments.
I didn’t mean to imply anything about who should be permitted to post or the subject matter of posts. My apologies that it came across that way. I simply meant it as an observation.
I could explain, as you suggest, and so could other experts. In my experience the likelihood of a response with denials, shifting goalposts or similar is much higher than an acknowledgement and gratitude for education. I’ll pass, but others might enjoy the challenge.
We shouldn't make fun of people for not knowing things, but it's perfectly okay to make fun of people for being narcissistic enough to think they are experts on a topic and arguing fervently based on their shallow and distorted understanding of the topic and hand when they are clearly not.
I think it would be helpful if folk highlighted when they don't know an area and are not experts. I think this is a better way to do it because it is clear that the person is trying to learn rather than spouting nonsense. Also, it takes a lot of effort to correct people, and when emotions are high this is a painful process. The RH post was a great example of this.
I've commented on some of the RH posts and got downvoted because people didn't like the facts (and I think maybe took it personally too). I've worked in Finance long enough professionally to know that I don't understand this fully and few people do. I do know enough to know when the comments are nonsense though.
I think that some of these issues comes down to respect and also arrogance. Imagine going into a new field and after 30 seconds deciding that you know everything (the Dunning–Kruger effect?)! Have a little bit of respect for those in the field and listen. Feel free to comment/ask, but don't spout 'facts' without checking and I think we'd all move forward faster.
The other reason that listening and not spouting fiction is a good idea is that it is a lot of effort correcting people d that effort could otherwise be spent elsewhere. Folk have good will, but there's a finite amount that shouldn't be wasted! Once that's run out they look to use their time effectively. Correcting you /again/ won't be up high on the list.
So, the HN "Genius" is just like most other people on the internet? I think the problem isn't with the HN "Genius", it's you expecting people on HN to not behave like people.
Stop putting STEM workers on a pedestal. We're still just people. Like everyone else.
I have to admit, this wasn't me to a tee, but I did initially believe manipulation of any kind - whether you do so to push the price up or down is illegal. My basis for this was from several friends who have been financial planners for 10+ years and two have lived off day trading for more than 15 years.
Then I had a few people tell me, "Nope, its called a "short squeeze" and totally legal. Then I had to go back and do some research on how short squeezes work. Then I found several instances where this had happened, just not nearly as public because of social media.
The small amount of research opened my eyes to the fact even though something may seem illegal, in the finance world, there's a lot of gray areas and details most people will never know about until something like this happens.
The flood of articles about this topic hitting the front page, and the flood of comments on those articles full of conspiratorial thinking, have been surprising.
Even during the election, the controversy following the election, and the Capitol riot, the front page didn't get taken over by a flood of articles. Something is different this time. It was not good. I hope it won't happen again.
The moderators on this site do great work, and I'm sure this caught them by surprise and they did their best. I hope a controversy like the one that happened with WSB and Robin Hood in the past few days will not be able to take over this site to such an extent again.
Your criteria for moderating/censorship is that the post suggests a conspiracy? Are you not worried the scope might be wider than intended and the net cast snag ideas tagged as conspiracies that aren't or are later discovered to not be?
Or is the criteria that it's a negative and implicates mainstream institutions?
I'm asking an honest question in good faith because I'm nervous at people conflating fringe ideas and extremist ideology with merely non mainstream ideas or suggestions.
There were quite a few stories about this on the front page (many of which were duplicates), and a frenzy of posters positing conspiracy theories in the comments to those posts -- stuff like accusing Robin Hood of being paid off by hedge funds, general conspiracies about market manipulation and rigging, and trolls posting WSB-style content.
If I want to see a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories there are plenty of other places to go. HN is not supposed to be the kind of site where that happens. Somehow the norms that prevented that from happening before on this site, even during times of extreme political controversy, have been broken.
Thoughtful people who have been on this planet for decades build up a world view based on the countless examples of actors on the world stage behaving the way that they do. A single article or internet search is not how we are informed.
"let's not discuss anything because we aren't experts or even amateurs in _____________. HN discussion is therefore useless and I declare the site be taken down immediately, post haste"
It's because "ze nerds" have rebuilt multiple industries that were "too hard to understand", because they work bottom-up, from first principles and reject gatekeepers. They 've even created an entire substitute version of the 'conomy which currently most people are mocking, but soon will be using daily.
Please don't do psychological mass-diagnosis of large internet communities, including HN, in HN comments. Those are always an invention because there isn't nearly enough data to assess anything like that.
Meanwhile, when you do this (I don't mean you personally), it's always to bash the other side of some $issue, which is just the sort of flamebait and provocation we're asking people to avoid here—regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are.
You say "narcissists", I say I'm tired of seeing people shutting down anyone who uses their brain to try and comprehend the facts - and god forbid they know some math and are capable of formal reasoning.
This approach is just teaching people to repeat memes after pundits and not use their brain - instead of teaching them to work on better reasoning skills, and applying these skills to the problems they face, while accounting for their lack of expertise.
Discussions should be about arguments, not people's authority. If you see someone being wrong and you know better because you've studied the field for longer, point out the flaws in their arguments, offer corrections, but embrace that they're at least trying for understanding, instead of condemning them.
I totally agree that merit of arguments should be earned by the argument, but on HN there's an awful lot of bad arguments posited in terms of "I think it probably works THIS way based on how I imagined up the entire industry in my head" that then go on to try to make a "hoho those stupid industry insiders, they didn't see solution X" point on said completely imaginary model. IE, not very rigorous models being used overconfidently.
> "I think it probably works THIS way based on how I imagined up the entire industry in my head"
That's how every opinion anyone's ever had works. Everyone has a mental model, which they use to understand the world. If you have a problem with the specifics, address them. Otherwise, you are simply appealing to authority.
Of course. But there's a difference between studying or being involved in an industry to formulate your model and being confident in that, and being confident in pure conjecture. Mental models are great and they're really all we have to understand the world, but they should be based in some kind of observation.
The arguments posited in terms of "I think it probably works THIS way ..." are arguably the best ones - they qualify someone's lack of expertise and save the reader from assigning undue confidence to claims :).
That said, Internet discussions are run on Cunningham's Law - you say what you think you know, and others will call your errors out, or challenge your assumptions. As long as people don't read any single comment as gospel, but consider the whole discussion in context of their own knowledge, applying basic critical thinking, everyone gets to train their reasoning skills and learn something. I'd expect this to be a baseline on HN.
I'm confident being the protagonist of that XKCD is a rite of passage in this industry :).
I think that there's a real problem with people using 'Cunningham's Law' as a way to learn. It might be fine for that person (because they know their limits), but then anyone reading it could incorrectly quote that person as being right (because it wasn't corrected). These ideas are then duplicated and we get into a real mess where we can't differentiate widely held views vs the experts/most agreed upon view by experts.
In general, this can't be a way to move forward as a society if people just make stuff up.
Just because people are replying to your take, doesn't mean they are narcissists. Its possible to look at an argument and engage it without being triggered. People that disagree with you are not automatically x-ists. Though it sure is easier to believe they are, since that way you don't need to consider the alternative.
I don't think it's narcissism, I think it's the dynamic described in the SSC post, Weak Men Are Superweapons:
>>Alice said something along the lines of “I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder. They should stop thinking they’re ‘so speshul’ and go see a competent doctor.”
>>Beth answered something along the lines of “I diagnosed myself with autism, but only after a lot of careful research. I don’t have the opportunity to go see a doctor. I think what you’re saying is overly strict and hurtful to many people with autism.”
>>Alice then proceeded to tell Beth she disagreed, in that special way only Tumblr users can. I believe the word “cunt” was used.
Alexander explains what's going on as:
>>Beth chose to stand up for the people who self- diagnosed autism without careful research. This wasn’t because she considered herself a member of that category. It was because she decided that self- diagnosed autistics were going to stand or fall as a group, and if Alice succeeded in pushing her “We should dislike careless self- diagnosees” angle, then the fact that she wasn’t careless wouldn’t save her.
>>Alice, for her part, didn’t bother bringing up that she never accused Beth of being careless, or that Beth had no stake in the matter. She saw no point in pretending that boxing in Beth and the other careful self- diagnosers in with the careless ones wasn’t her strategy all along.
How dare you call me, specifically, a narcissist with this comment!
(But to be serious, I think it’s easy to accidentally take forum comments personally because the physical act of reading HN comments, social media DMs, and text messages are all basically the same. So maybe it’s easy for our emotions to get mixed up.)
Exactly this :) I should have used a word that carried less weight than "narcissist". Parent comment seemed like an obvious joke but it sucked most of the oxygen out of the thread.
One really good example in that link is a user trying to claim that race & iq is the determining factor in economic outcome while dropping racial slurs as examples to justify racism against Asians and other groups that he thinks are ALL "wealthy" and "smart".
It's a great illustration of parent's comment. Taking an outdated model and then using it to justify his/her own skewed views. Sort of like how we use colour labels created by a Swedish pseudoscientist to reduce ethnicities to is being heralded as a great achievement.
You got a good point. SV types like HM tend to be textbook examples of Dunning-Kruger in action.
1. Read Wikipedia on another field
2. Decide, based on that knowledge, that the field is “ripe for disruption”
3. Usually fail miserably if parasitic ad tech isn’t the core business model
Even politicians show more humility than these people. It’s as if typing into a computer makes them think they are omniscient high priests. Most of them even have the gall to call themselves engineers. We don’t call machinists engineers, and most programmers are digital machinists.
Congrats, you hit the Smarty's Catch 22--thinking you found the error in the smart people's oversimplified reasoning with oversimplified reasoning and then throwing stones.
Yeah. Common sense no longer makes sense. Let me write a technical document stating how killing half of population is justified, but it is not for laymen to understand.
Depends on whether your document's field is microbiology and "population" commonly refers to lethal viruses that we want eradicated, or it is sociology and population specifically refers to humans.
Which is exactly the parent's point. Don't assume words mean the exact same thing from one field to another.
This should scare the crap out of Robinhood from what happened yesterday.