Intelligence <> athletic ability
“Rationality” <> epistemic health.
Follows from this that some ideas can act like infections and make you stupider, and others can make you both smarter but less rational (game theory for example, or bayesian reasoning)

Tbh with billionaires specifically I wouldn’t be surprised if being risk prone is both correlated with “idiocy” but also a requirement for extreme non inherited wealth

Tbh I’ve long accepted that “multiple intelligences” isn’t just cope, very much a real thing. By far the best accountant at my last workplace (10x more productive than anyone else) was a hardcore believed in astrology. Like, read books about it and watched 200 view youtube videos in his free time

Like, even if you’re very experienced, if your analysis ever brings up the kurtosis of a distribution or whatever I’m going to suspect something fishy is going on. Much less an undergrad. Only exceptions are proofs I guess, in which some minimum exposure can be acceptable if absolutely necessary.

GDP also has similar problems. Prices are a powerful statistic but with real limitations as you say.
Idk your background but maybe you’ll find the mean field game HANK literature interesting. Not a fan of microfounding myself but it’s an interesting approach to these questions

Yeah. The preference transitivity assumption has problems but is understandable if you’re doing consumer demand theory. Very silly to apply it to politics

Ah, no, liking Obama, Hillary, Bloomberg and Romney predate 2016

My uncle is a latino catholic finance guy who likes Bernie Sanders, Mitt Romney, Biden, Hillary, Kamala Harris, Obama, Bloomberg and Ron de Santis. Identifies as a centrist, totally incomprehensible politics

This is true I guess but unless you calculate the inflation rate of each individual household consumption basket this feels like an isolated demand for rigor, that also isn’t really falsifiable

I guess I agree that those are rhe most widely applicable skills yes. If I were to focus on Finance I’d center GARCH models maybe

Yeah I don’t see a company’s price ever falling below its certain distributions, not consistently, if only because, as you say, it’d get arbitraged away.

I’m sure I’ll eat crow eventually but Basil IV means that the only way we get financial contagion is if there’s some huge shock to HQLA (mainly US treasuries). Debt ceiling breach is the only shock of that type I can see happening.

Real animal spirits time.
Tbh will have to chew on this. Like, I think the bigger (as in, with more potentiam buyers) and more public a stock gets the more “meme-like” it gets, but I do think that investors in, for example, private equity do take into consideration their expected future cashflows

I think there probably is for small caps. Big factor is that many investors believe that stock price is tied to possible future cashflows, so self fulfilling prophecy

I would take popularists more seriously if they microfounded their model. Like, political views being exogenous to persuasion (and individual issue popularity holding when issues are bundled) are not trivial assumptions to make! You have to justify them beyond gesturing at individual issue polls

Tbh I don’t know if it’s actually true, though given how useful linear regression is it wouldn’t surprise me. Still, it’s a silly point even if true

@notthedarkweb.bsky.social you want to go into finance right? Any textbook or paper recs?

Nothing wrong with studying that, but it doesn't seem to give any insights around constructing portfolios which include major assets like real estate or private equity.