Benfords law is used to find evidence that the numbers came from a person, not a measurement or mathematical process, right? So anyone who knows what a limit order is should not be surprised to find evidence that humans are involved in picking the prices, right?
It should be obvious that violating Benfords law isn't evidence of fraud or manipulation or even fomo, just evidence that the price is impacted by the people typing in the orders having to pick what number to type in.
Edit: I've softened the language in my comment a bit, but I stand by the fact that this only shows humans are affecting prices, this analysis can't distinguish between fraud and psychological effects around "key" prices, like $10,000.
I guess we need to make a distinction between the blog post and the Gary Smith post it links to here.
Gary smith (the person I think you're referring to having spent a career in this) says this:
>The market manipulation, the irrational price gyrations, and the enthusiasm of so many investors for investing in bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) is ample evidence that market prices are not invariably equal to intrinsic values.
I entirely agree. A perfectly efficient market should follow Benford's law given enough data.
It's the blog post by Andrew that I think totally misses the point. He leaps from inefficiency which could be market manipulation to this:
>I saw this and I was like, well, yeah, isn’t all bitcoin use either crime or manipulation? But then I realized, no, that’s not all of it. Some bitcoin playas are motivated by politics, some by fomo, some are doing anti-virtue signaling...
And never considers the fact that the world is full of people who feel very different paying $100.00 vs $99.99
> the world is full of people who feel very different paying $100.00 vs $99.99
Agree, though that effect is not constrained to Bitcoin. Retail orders, for instance, follow Benford's law. This is despite well-documented psychological biases towards e.g. certain digits, whole numbers, round numbers, et cetera [1]. Benford's law [2] derives from deeper mechanics.
As you point out, however, a better control would have been not all prices in public stocks, but retail orders.
Liquid retail stocks follow Benford's law because there is a notion of intrinsic value from the company and an army of quant traders trying to exploit any price inefficiency caused by the retail traders.
With cryptocurrency, the market is less mature and the intrinsic value largely comes from people believing in its value. So really, it would be surprising if we didn't see some Benford's law anomalies associated with people picking numbers.
Anyway, thanks for the discussion; the links above have given me stuff to chew on and calmed the red mist after I got so many drive-by downvotes.
Benfords law is a perfect example of something that is cool and compelling and then gets applied inappropriately all over the place by people who don’t know better. Voting, for example.
> Benfords law is a perfect example of something that is cool and compelling and then gets applied inappropriately all over the place by people who don’t know better.
Yes, but an Ivy-League educated Professor of Economics who created Yale's first course on the stock market under the mentorship of a nobel prize winner (for his work on the stock market) and whose research specialty is statistics and financial markets should be able to use Benford's law correctly.
That this analysis was then repeated by Columbia is also pretty strong credibility.
Usually because the pop-description is, as usual, misleading. People find data covering "several orders of magnitude" and just assume by some cosmic fact that Benford's law should apply, despite the mechanics being their data having no reason to imply that the law holds.
This is exactly it. If you look at price changes as bitcoin approaches round numbers, you can see that a significant number of people have their limit price set to something like $10,000. When it would approach those round numbers, it would be stuck just under that number for a while. If the price cracked the round number, meaning all those limits got sold, the price would then slingshot much higher.
I am a few months in to a 15 year mortgage after recently refinanced at a 2.125%. Here's a rough breakdown of where each dollar of my last mortgage payment went:
Principal: 60%
Interest: 22%
Escrow(Taxes + Insurance): 18%
And of course the percentage going to interest only goes down with each passing month. The conventional wisdom that you are paying mostly interest in the beginning a) really only applies to 30 year mortgages, and b) was way more true when interest rates were higher. We're currently near some of the lowest interest rates in history, so interest eats a lot less than it used to.
I'll add that I pay a good bit less on my mortgage than it takes to rent an equivalent place in my area. But yes, paying 6% to realtors when you sell is huge, so you still need to own the house a few years for buying to make sense.
Yea, you are right about the 2% interest rates changing the breakdown. I was referencing numbers I ran back when rates were 3-4%. That said, most folks still rely on 30 years mortgages!
I got a 30 year fixed at 3% back in march. My first payment had 40.7% going towards principal which is not bad at all in my opinion. Also, I wouldn't count property tax and homeowners insurance as something additional about owning as you are effectively paying that when renting, it is just baked into the rental price. Stupid realtor fees though definitely will bite you in the ass.
Here's an example for something as simple as a hobbyist using a metal lathe in their garage:
For a rough part, you can measure how much material you need to take off, do it in a few passes without stopping to remeasure, and you're within 5 thousandths of an inch or so.
For a shaft that is going to slide or rotate in a bore without too much force, you need to be within a thousandth or two, so for the last pass you will stop, measure carefully, and only take a little bit of material off at a time so that the cutting forces are low and there is less deflection in the tool to throw off the size of the part.
For a press fit (two parts are sized precisely enough that they can be pressed together with a hydraulic press and then never come apart), you need tolerances in the tenths of a thousandth of an inch. For this, you'll dust off your special expensive micrometer, and it's important to let the part cool before measuring, because the heat from machining can cause the part to expand and cause you to take off too much material, which would ruin the part.
So even for the same person on the same machine with the same material, the effort (and therefore cost, if you're doing this commercially) can vary quite a bit based on the tolerance needed.
I don't know aerospace, but I imagine the required tolerances require vary from "looks good from here" (seats in the cabin) to "must ride on a film of oil this many microns thick when spinning at 10,000 rpm." And the manufacturing processes can be anything from "intern with a saw" to "specialized metrology lab with most expensive machines in the world" depending on what engineering specifies.
I don't know much about machining but this was a really cool explanation for the significant/difficulties of tolerances, thanks for explaining mrfredward
The downside of seniority based pay is that people who show little to no motivation can end up the highest paid on a team if they simply avoid getting in trouble for 20 years.
I know someone who quit a job at Boeing years ago in part because he was at the bottom of the pay ladder doing tons of work while the highest paid non-manager in his department didn't do anything except keep the printers stocked with paper.
Throwing incentives on competitive people can be toxic, but the opposite problem is that when high performers don't get rewarded the organization will rot.
You've confused ethics and morals. The ethical action (which is about professional standards rather than your conscience) is usually to follow the legal agreement you've signed (barring something that supersedes the NDA like being legally required to report something to regulators).
So no, it isn't unethical for the author to abide by his NDA, arguably the exact opposite is true, though exposing these shenanigans at a personal risk could be argued to be the better moral decision.
Ethics and moral philosophy are synonymous. I don't think they're confused, but you can consult a dictionary if you like.
>The ethical action (which is about professional standards rather than your conscience)
No, as somebody who has studied moral philosophy academically, this is your own unique definition and not normal. Any amount of research from a credible source like plato.standord.edu or even wikipedia will support this.
The dictionary defines ethics as the field of knowledge dealing with moral principles, sure, and that's not at all what I'm talking about here. Perhaps I erred in using the word too generally and should have been specific in talking about ethics in the professional sense.
The ethical codes that are associated with a profession are different from moral principles that may usually guide us. The first example they gave when I studied this in engineering was that of a defense attorney: trying to help a guilty person get away with a serious crime violates most people's moral standards, but the code of ethics for attorneys demands that they defend guilty people anyway, because our law system is set up with that expectation.
To my original point, someone may claim a moral imperative to tell the world about the company in this article, but the fact of the matter is just about every professional ethics committee or handbook would tell you to uphold your NDA in the situation here. Wasting people's time under false pretenses may be bad, and it isn't ethical to do it yourself, but it isn't so bad that you can just drop your own obligations and blog about it.
And yes I admit some handwaving here since programming doesn't have widely adopted ethical codes yet, but I can guarantee that when they do exist, they won't tell you to violate a contract for something that won't injure anyone and doesn't break any laws.
I think the defense attorney example seems to be a bit of an exception. Even in that scenario, the law also requires a prosecutor. The partiality of each opposing side is required for the system itself to be impartial, and if the defense attorney has a sense of ethics, they will only participate if they know that someone else is arguing the prosecution's side as well (or if they're about to run out of food and have no other alternatives, but that's a different story).
Re moral imperatives and tradeoffs: even these guys had a code of ethics https://www.bullmarketgifts.com/Framed-Enron-Code-of-Ethics-... The "ethical thing to do" does not always come from a book or a committee, instead it's dictated by the moral principle most specific to the situation at hand and taking into consideration the widest breadth of weighted personal interests and needs. In any case, I'm not sure I agree with this statement "just about every professional ethics committee or handbook would tell you to uphold your NDA". Nor do I believe that I can speak for just about every committee without consulting them beforehand, so I can't know what they would come up with in this situation.
In the end, I just fail to see why ethics in the professional world should receive special treatment. Different domain, same principles and rules.
To the extent there is a difference, I'd say that "ethics" is what you say you would do, and "morals" is what you actually end up doing when placed in a specific situation.
But, it's been well over two decades I was pursuing a degree in philosophy.
It is you who is confused - ethics and morals are basically the same thing, and both are about processes to figure what is ethical and what isn't according to some set of ideas; neither is about prescribing anything, and there certainly isn't anything like The Set of Ethical Things and The Set of Unethical Things. "X is ethical" is always a short-hand for "within the framework I and/or my surroundings or audience subscribes to X can be argued to be ethical".
Has he confused them? The only code of professional ethics in this industry I've ever been asked to consider is the ACM one. https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics
By my reading of it, I'd feel obligated to publicly address this, and I don't consider it a breach of any sort of ethics I'd believe in, besides.
> Computing professionals should protect confidentiality except in cases where it is evidence of the violation of law, of organizational regulations, or of the Code. In these cases, the nature or contents of that information should not be disclosed except to appropriate authorities.
This code of ethics, like all others, has limitations. Here, it has failed to consider all cases, namely the case where the entity whose confidentiality is being protected doesn't exist anymore. That doesn't necessarily mean your quote isn't relevant, just that it shouldn't be given the final say until we've balanced it out with the rest of the document and looked at the tradeoffs involved.
Not breaking the NDA is an issue w/r/t:
- 1.2 "Well-intended actions, including those that accomplish assigned duties, may lead to harm. When that harm is unintended, those responsible are obliged to undo or mitigate the harm as much as possible."
- 2.2 Maintain high standards of professional competence, conduct, and ethical practice.
- 2.7 "As appropriate to the context and one's abilities, computing professionals should share technical knowledge with the public"
- 2.7 again "a computing professional should respectfully address inaccurate or misleading information related to computing."
Lastly, since the company's actions were clearly in violation of the Code and potentially causing harm, I could simply argue that the public is the ultimate appropriate authority (since none seem to be more appropriate in this case) and that not breaking the NDA would have been unethical by the very passage you chose to quote.
From the tweet it looks like an awesome search feature. Just type what you wanted to search for right inline and then it can drop the result in without you ever changing a window or moving a hand to the mouse.
Problem is you don't know whose code you're stealing, which leads to all sorts of legal, security, and correctness issues.
>Errors of omission are generally much more serious than errors of commission, but errors of commission are the only ones picked up by most accounting systems. Since mistakes are a no-no in most corporations, and the only mistakes identified and measured are ones involving doing something that should not have been done, the best strategy for managers is to do as little as possible. No wonder managerial paralysis prevails in American organizations.
I've seen bright forward thinking leaders who delivered results get canned when one reasonable bet doesn't pay off, but mostly I've watched decision-makers stall when action is badly needed. This explains very succinctly what is wrong with so many places I've worked.
For a very basic CRUD app I tend to agree with you.
But for anyone dealing with synchronization between threads/processes/machines, modeling engineering problems with large systems of equations, complex business domains, systems programming, actually implementing something from an algorithms textbook yourself, cryptography, or any problem that requires you to keep more than one or two things in your head at once to be solvable, focus is important.
And if the simple crud app mentioned before turns into spaghetti through no fault of your own, you'll still need to focus.
So I'm not going to shame anyone for saying they need to focus.
>the power differential is so intense that evidence can be ignored
This is a good point from the article to expand on, it's not just coincidence that the Hanoi rat massacre and the Delhi cobra hunt both feature colonial governments.
That quote applies to just about every example given on the perverse incentive Wikipedia page.
It should be obvious that violating Benfords law isn't evidence of fraud or manipulation or even fomo, just evidence that the price is impacted by the people typing in the orders having to pick what number to type in.
Edit: I've softened the language in my comment a bit, but I stand by the fact that this only shows humans are affecting prices, this analysis can't distinguish between fraud and psychological effects around "key" prices, like $10,000.