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It's only become clear in recent months, and it's understandable why Millhiser didn't understand it--it wasn't explicit in the indictment--but Bragg's case didn't rely on federal election law; as argued before the jury it was New York State election law, section 17-152 https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/alvin-bragg-trump-case-legal-theory-rcna154413

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It seems to me the Fed is blundering into the incorrect instrument setting from a combination of

a) reluctance to move in a way that would surprise the market (when that is exactly what policy should do (The control theory point i an example) and

b) reluctance to move one way if there is any chance of. having to reverse.

There is of course no good reason to think that r* = 5.25. And it does NOT think that. But whatever model that says that r* ≠ 5.25% should 1spit out an r for every run of the model.

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Your analogy is flawed; the point is that you can't see the 300 undergraduates to check whether they are computer science majors. In fact, you are alone in the dining room, you are not a computer science major, and and you have concluded that since all known undergraduates are not computer science majors, there are no computer science majors. After all, if the other 299 were all CS majors, odds are 299:1 that you'd be one of them instead of yourself.

And you haven't addressed Carroll's point. You are a scientist, and you have decided, pace Hume, to accept the principle of induction. You believe that the universe follows regularities and laws, and that you can work out what these laws are by observation and reasoning. Your observations and reasoning lead you to conclude that you are overwhelmingly likely to be a Boltzmann Brain, which never made any observations at all. The Boltzmann Brain theory is self-refuting.

And and and the whole edifice is a construct of fairy dust and moonbeams in the first place. The "standard model of cosmology" is not the standard model of physics, and does not have the same ontological status. That's why there are competing cosmological models which coexist alongside the "standard" one and cannot be refuted scientifically. Carroll is a cosmologist, and a philosopher, so of course he is going to take this seriously. That doesn't mean we have to.

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My sense of what is required here differs a bit from what the good doctor suggests. However, I think an under-appreciated issue here is that the Fed assigns a cost to directional changes of the funds rate. They cover this in gibberish about attenuation, but it is just a misplaced effort at credibility management. And it does create serial correlation in rate changes, just as the good doctor worries about.

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It seem to me that is undermines credibility in the claim to be data driven.

It's the way the CDC lost credibility, giving the same advice whatever the state of the infection, % vaccinated, etc.

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