Brian Lui
@brianluidog
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I blog about making correct decisions. I used to be an equity research analyst and portfolio manager. I run on chaos energy, please be understanding
Sydney, Australia
Joined January 2018
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Last Seen Profiles
Pinned Tweet
Just moved to Sydney so I'm starting a thread about funny or cool stuff I'm noticing!
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I worry about "stuff that forces you to lie." Like airlines ask you "do you have a cold, cough, tiredness, itchy nose, sniffles or your foot hurts?" And if you have sniffles your choices are to tell the truth, miss your flight and lose $600, or lie. That's bad incentives.
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Something I've wondered about: why do airplanes care about weighing your carryons, instead of your body weight + carryons? Why is a 95kg person + 5kg carryon fine, but a 60kg person + 40kg carryon gets a heavy penalty?
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Honestly I don't care about CO2 climate change any more. Easily solved with current technology. Care more about air pollution, heavy metals, microplastics, etc. It's annoying that climate change took over environmentalism
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If you're not prepared for it, the cognitive decline due to aging can be a shock. For example, at my age I can no longer quickly multiply two digit numbers in my head, or consider a hypothetical scenario where I didn't eat breakfast
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@p_millerd
@idea_soup
If I'm playing a video game and there's a button marked "punch yourself in the face for no benefit" you bet I'm mashing that button
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@scottastevenson
This came up because our kids asked about it. It's really tough to explain "lying is ok in this instance because both parties know"..
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For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. If John Galt Bank is not immediately fully backstopped and depositors protected,
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Thought about how school knowledge is still relevant to adults. Physics might seem like useless abstract knowledge, but it has many real-world applications.
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I encourage my kids to learn guitar instead of the Chinese default of piano. Guitar is faster to learn, more useful socially, good for jamming with friends, more portable, and cheaper, while teaching the same skills as piano.
This is what people call "instrumental rationality".
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Imagine being the strongest interviewer in the world and your epithet is "the new Lex Fridman"
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Objection: a heavy carryon would take up too much space.
This can't be it - if that was the reason, carryons would be charged according to volume, not weight.
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"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
- someone who never built a ship
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Objection: It would be embarrassing for people to weigh themselves.
This can't be it - you would be weighing the person and baggage at the same time. So you wouldn't know their weight.
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The effective altruism forum is page after page of FTX stuff as you'd expect, but one of the pinned posts on the front page is still "What matters to shrimps?"
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Objection: It's politically incorrect.
This can't be it - airlines in countries where no one cares about it also don't do it.
So what's the business reason for this?
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So after discussing this with some friends, it seems like I'm the only person who reads books by tearing out each page after reading. Most people either use a bookmark or fold the page to keep track of where they're at
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It's fairly hard to convince people that anonymous Twitter posters with names like "fbifemboy" and "autism capital" are better informed than Matt Levine
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I will stay on Twitter and wait for it to be repossessed by Goldman Sachs. I think Goldman Sachs will do a good job.
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*taps mic* Traditional PLA doctrine is that a short, sharp war against the US is enough for deterrence, because the US can't endure many deaths due to domestic political pressure. So in some ways, the US handling of covid is a very powerful form of costly signalling
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In fundamental equities research, one of my secrets was was that I used the "annoying face" method to generate alpha. This method involves meeting management or seeing videos/PR of them, and seeing if their face was annoying or not
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Warning: serious thread. I may regret this later but it’ll be cathartic for me now 1/
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For people who want more variance in how clean their dishes are
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Normies do not even know what a room temperature superconductor is. "Oh like cold fusion?" Your too-online brain is just in a completely different world.
Normie investors are saying "You mean room temperature semiconductor?" You are living like 4 weeks in the future
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Here's a solution for universities that want to keep admitting the same number of disadvantaged minorities, and ALSO admit on the basis of merit:
keep admitting more students on merit until you reach the required number of minority students! This is a win-win solution.
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Just realized when people say "yolo", meaning "you only live once", they mean it as an encouragement to do a risky thing. I always understood it as meaning to be extra cautious because you can't rewind if you mess up 😱
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"Brian, explain brain rewiring right fckn now, in one breath, standing on one foot" in a 1-page screenshot
in the interest of scenius-building I now issue an open challenge to all my mutuals to QT this tweet with "<name>, explain <your thing> right fckn now, in one breath, standing on one foot" in a 1-page screenshot
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So freestyle is useful because it's the fastest, breaststroke is energy efficient and easy to take breaths, and backstroke is good for when you need to inhale water through your nostrils. But what's the purpose of butterfly? It seems like a stupid thing to me.
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Here's a question that seems to offend people without children more than people with children:
In terms of taking care of one child, what's the number of dogs you'd have to own for it to be an equivalent amount of effort?
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If you get a sense of revulsion looking at their annoying face, and every second you interact with them it's like having your hands in gooey slime, then that's your intuition/subconscious telling you that this counterparty is not reliable.
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What I learned was that it's specifically *annoying* face that works. Don't look for ugly face, or stupid face, or old face, or young face, or cunning face, or ruthless face, etc. ONLY annoying face works.
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Somehow, this applies like 10x more in crypto, where you can get huge alpha just by avoiding all projects where the founder/top people/biggest fans have annoying faces.
Hope you enjoyed this thread! Please 'like' and 'subscribe' for more
7/end
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@krishnanrohit
This makes sense - if space is the scarce resource. Then my puzzlement would be, why is the charge primarily by weight and not volume? E.g. with the various factors we learned about, it seems like the standard charge should be $X per cm³, each baggage must weigh 20kg or less
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tfw u can make safely make fun of people just by repeating what they say verbatim
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It's funny that it took a slightly bad demo to make people realize that google search is bad and chrome is bad
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The alpha is that if someone's face is annoying, don't invest in them. They will trick you somehow.
You can get stronger signal by looking at their top lieutenants and whether they have annoying faces or not, too.
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Banking tip for Hong Kong people! Did you know that in some countries, like Australia, you can open a bank account online from overseas as a non-resident? Just felt like putting that out there for no particular reason
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@AaronBack
@niubi
POV: your adversary is winning an economic fight by buying avocado seed removers and inflatable backyard pool bars
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My new dream is to be at a dinner party where
@KevinSimler
and
@robinhanson
's amazing book The Elephant in the Brain can be enthusiastically discussed without killing the mood. (Would it be full of crazy people?)
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KRAMER: It's an RPC for them.
JERRY: How is it an RPC?
K: They just RPC.
J: RPC what?
K: Jerry, all these microservices, they RPC everything.
J: You don't even know what an RPC is.
K: Do you?
J: No, I don't.
K: But they do. And they're the ones doing the RPCs.
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I joke about Hong Kong, but in reality these few weeks have been crushing me emotionally. It’s a profound sadness that dampens the colors of regular life, and infects everyday encounters with its languor. 2/
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Idea for new EA thought leadership -
There is a 1 in 5 probability of war breaking out over Taiwan by 2030. Here's what we can do to increase this probability so that AGI progress is delayed:
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Businesspeople know this! Operators/active investors know this! Most passive minority investors do not, or else they think it's too low status of a technique to use.
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Ok so Sweden has IKEA, Norway has crude oil, Finland has permanent peacetime war readiness... but what does Denmark contribute to the world? Do we even need Denmark
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Here's another useful heuristic for spotting dodgy people that I call the 'nickname principle'. I don't know exactly why it works, but I've had good results with it.
The mechanism is: if the locals have a nickname for you, assume there's a grain of truth in the nickname.
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Why is Philippines food so bad? Like, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam have lots of different food that tastes great. The Philippines has... adobo? Pancit? Come on
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@rsnous
Spreadsheeters can add code to their spreadsheets whenever they want. I'd like to see coders add spreadsheets to their code !
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17) Australian cooking recipes that say "10 minutes prep time" assume that the reader is an octopus drinking 4 cups of espresso
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Was chatting about cuisines and we came up with this consensus graph
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People who don't do inbox zero: how do you know when you need to reply to an email?
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20) In Australia you can park on the side of the street in most places, for as long as you like, for free. This is known as "street parking". It's a really stupid idea
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An evil financier offers you this Faustian bargain: each can of regular Coke you drink, he will give you $1, increasing by $1 for each Coke thereafter (so $1, $2, $3...)
However, if you don't drink a can in any 24 hours period, the payments stop forever. Do you take this deal?
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See results
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Something I've thought for a long time is that Canada and Australia are very similar (Anglosphere democracies, small population/large landmass, raw materials exporters). But Australia is really functional and Canada is stupid and insane. How come?
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Here's the secret I use to judge whether a company is worth joining, a group is trustworthy, a family is loving, a country is well run:
How easily do the leaders apologize?
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What is Bayesian reasoning? The room temperature superconductor paper is a great example:
🧵
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I can't believe we made this spreadsheet barely a year and a half ago 🫡
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Why do our teenagers have to risk permanent injuries and years of prison to protect the rest of us, instead of going out with friends, or experiencing first love, or playing video games? 5/
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The Economist runs article with line of best fit graphs based on 2 (two) observations
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@Noahpinion
The post-Deng method for selecting leaders was for Deng to select the leaders twice in a row
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What if my children were 10 years older, old enough to understand right and wrong? What if they said, "Dad, I’m outraged at this injustice. I must fight, even though the risks are immense and success is doubtful. If I die, I have no regrets. Whatever happens, I love you." 7/
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Very worried about the UK situation. There's no off-ramp for Truss, who is backed into a corner and unpredictable. My suggestion:
- proceed with tax cuts
- zero immigration
- EU agrees with all UK demands
We need to de-escalate when she has her finger on the nuclear button
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> He laughs and says "It's a good coup, sir"
> I join
> It's exile
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Why do volunteer medics have to be blinded for providing first aid? 3/
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Why do the police, government, and courts have to be demolished like this? Our civil society and social trust were built by our predecessors through decades of hard work, why does it have to be thrown away? 6/
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@paulg
That's great! A trick I use is to change the entire text to a different font. So if it was in Calibri, for example, I'd change it to Times New Roman or something like that. For some reason, my brain thinks of it as a completely new piece of writing!
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@ATabarrok
Most of these are bad underspecified questions that are "guess the teacher's password" I think. I wouldn't put much weight on these questions
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I wrote blog: why tight feedback loops are dangerous and don't help you master things
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If food is served in a conical or pyramid shape, it's a scam. These shapes look like they contain half the volume of the similar diameter cylinder/cube, but they only contain one third as much. Don't trust swindlers who do this
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Here's an example, with no comment on whether it's an annoying face or not
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"The Firm" is a famous 1991 novel by John Grisham. The plot is instructive:
🧵
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Why do breastfeeding mothers have to ask about the effects of tear gas on their babies? 4/
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What should I do then? I stay home watching the news, I observe safely from a far-away footbridge, I feel distraught yet I do nothing. Could I really tell them to think of themselves first? 8/
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Hmm. Imagine if there was a track and field event where it's like running but you have to goosestep like those soldiers at the India-Pakistan border. It looks cooler and it's more intense exercise!
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Remember a brief period in the 2000s where people believed that increasing your income didn't increase your happiness? Lots of people truly believed that lmao
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As a Cantonese person, my first experience of Sichuan food was reading the menu and thinking, wow, this stuff sounds really spicy. I should start off easy with a mild dish. This "water-cooked fish" sounds nice and safe!
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Warren Buffett, quickly becoming known as "the new Walter Schloss"
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@devonzuegel
I like applying mimetic desire here. What's are things where saving money is socially encouraged? Cheap flights, cheap hotels, groupon-type products. Spend more on those. Spend less on things where big spending is socially encouraged.
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Musk WINNING again as he miraculously avoids being the owner of "most value destroyed at a tech company in 2023"
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The "impossible trinity" of financial markets. You can choose at most two out of the following three: easy to do, big size available, profitable. And most of the time you can only choose one. Cryptocurrency market as an example.
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@lesley_pizza
Not much of a covid effect for me, I think... it's been declining at a steady rate that mostly seems to be slowed by exercise and sleep
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