Welcome To My Substack!
I have been blogging at blogger.com for many years. Since all the hot action is happening on Substack these days, I decided to move here.
The title of my blog, “The Best Kind of Correct”, is a Futurama reference and not an assertion that I am more likely to be correct than other commentators.
The topic of this blog is basically whatever I feel like writing about at the moment. I write a lot about libertarian themes through an economic lens. My old blog, grokinfullness.blogsplot.com, has a large number of posts on drug policy (specifically the so-called opioid epidemic, but also more generally), property rights, the minimum wage, healthcare policy, immigration policy, the regulatory state, etc. I will continue in this vein, occasionally rewriting old posts and resharing them here. I rarely comment on the crassly partisan stories of the day. That is, if you’re looking for commentary on the latest dumb thing the president has done, this isn’t your stop. That is a well-filled niche, and you can scratch that itch elsewhere if you like.
Who am I? I’m a finance professional. Specifically I am a credentialed actuary (property and casualty, not one of those life and annuity barbarians). My educational background is in the hard sciences, specifically physics. But I love all of them. Yes, even you, chemistry. My main area of professional expertise is predictive modeling, GLMs and GBMs mostly, applied to insurance applications (mostly loss and retention models). I am also a father of three very silly small children, who are relentlessly pestered with Dad-jokes. Our household sometimes reaches Bandit Heeler-levels of shenanigans (when the safeties are off). I hold black belts in multiple martial arts, and I have a disgusting sense of humor that I keep strictly quarantined from my professional life and even most of my family.
Why should you listen to me? Frankly, I wouldn’t recommend it. But some very smart people whose judgment I mostly respect have been following me for years, and they sometimes offer praise, re-post pieces I have written, mistake me for much more competent bloggers, or ask me to write papers with them.
A few ground rules. I expect thoughtful, snark-free comments. I will delete with extreme prejudice low-quality comments and I will ban repeat offenders. I will do this while failing to live up to my own standards. I occasionally share my true feelings on someone’s competence or inner motivations, which usually means revealing my uncharitable take on someone else’s opinion. Usually when I do this I end up editing what I’ve written to be less confrontational before hitting the “publish” button, but it is sometimes useful to share the raw emotional reaction. That is fine, to share for the sake of radical transparency, but I recommend not opening your comment that way. That’s likely to get you banned around here.
With that set down, welcome to the inner parts of my brain. My very human brain, which is definitely made out of meat and is totally not a computer.