davidmanheim

"The SEC needs to hire more quants and fewer lawyers."

Only if they want to manage what may be an unmanageable problem. The truth will always be that if a regulator understand the market, they could easily multiply their salary by a factor of at least 2, and typically more like 10, by going to industry. The tide won't go back, shout as Canute may. (I worked at an I-Bank for a while, and the CFO, when asked about the auditors understanding of our complex transactions, was quoted as saying something along the lines of "I wish our auditors understood our business well enough to audit it - because then I could hire them for 10 times what they are being paid. We desperately need those people.")

Regulatory capture and the inability to regulate to to political pressure is the biggest issue facing any such body - and not to change subjects, but this is a campaign finance and income inequality issue.

The moral basis, as I understand it, is "that’s not a healthy or effective way to live."

So, for example, giving 95% of your income for 2 years, getting burned out, and giving up leads to less good being done. Which is why he advises taking time to think about what you're willing to do, and making a policy for yourself.

It's very unclear!

But we have a really, really long way to go before it's an issue, and indoor air quality is a big deal for infectious disease transmission, so it seems like a good idea to make marginal progress, and also to study the issue of how to ensure children's immune system development is healthy.

You might want to read his tweet thread that addressed several of these points recently: https://twitter.com/willmacaskill/status/1559196018062786560 And the new book goes into a lot more detail on this.

On error theory, I'm not as familiar with this, but I think Will's slightly older book, "Moral Uncertainty" would have more to say: https://www.williammacaskill.com/info-moral-uncertainty

I'm not fully up to date on modern economic mechanism design, but I'm aware of the issues. Continuous markets are not, as far as I am aware, cannot be even theoretically incentive compatible or strategy proof - something that even having an auction every second would create.

Continuity of market prices is an illusion, based on economic assumptions that are demonstrably false. The increased liquidity has helped exactly one set of participants in the market - large firms that collect the fees, and do the automated trading. Economic policies that enrich these firms at the expense of retails investors and the physical economy seems like a strange thing to favor.

And if a firm needs sub-second liquidity in an asset in order to hedge thir exposure, it's because they are taking large risks that cannot be hedged in the market directly with derivatives. A firm with $1b in equity that has offsetting +/- $1 trillion in liabilities and assets is probably dynamically hedging themselves - liquidity masks this instability until a crash happens. Aren't these firms bad for economic stability? Wouldn't the economy be better off without them?