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Nice review of what sounds like an interesting book.
One small objection: "Cleaning data is the fundamental task that defines data science as a role: statisticians and economists buy clean data from somebody."
Man I wish. I spent more than a year of my PhD (cumulatively and not all at once) cleaning various kinds of data. I joked w/ an adviser once that I thought I had signed up for an economics PhD but it turned out I was getting a PhD in data cleaning.
Finding pre-cleaned, nice data for a project is like finding a $100 bill on the street. Doesn't happen.
I really liked the book. I wrote my own review trying to dissect their secret sauce and I believe it to be their data pipeline. The focused on it from the very beginning and wasn't sexy at all. From the book:
> Piecing together a custom-built database, Straus purchased historic commodity-price data on magnetic tape from an Indiana-based firm called Dunn & Hargitt, then merged it with the historic information others in the firm already had amassed. ... Using an Apple II computer, Straus and others wrote a program to collect and store their growing data trove.
> Over time, Straus and his colleagues created and discovered additional historical pricing data, helping Ax develop new predictive
models relying on Carmonaâs suggestions. Some of the weekly stocktrading data theyâd later find went back as far as the 1800s, reliable
information almost no one else had access to. At the time, the team couldnât do much with the data, but the ability to search history to
see how markets reacted to unusual events would later help Simonsâs team build models to profit from market collapses and other
unexpected events, helping the firm trounce markets during those periods.
They also took market prices as nearly devoid of real life meaning. I was originally very skeptical of this approach as it requires immense discipline and rigor to avoid data mining. You see economists do that where they create a signal for something like the 23 month lag of GDP. Why 23 month lag? Because 1-22 were insignificant. But they seem to get away with it due to their strong academic background.
> Hereâs what was really unique: The paper didnât try to identify or predict these states using economic theory or other conventional methods, nor did the researchers seek to address why the market entered certain states. Simons and his colleagues used mathematics to determine the set of states best fitting the observed pricing data; their model then made its bets accordingly. The whys didnât matter, Simons and his colleagues seemed to suggest, just the strategies to take advantage of the inferred states.
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/how-renaissance-technolo...
I met a Renaissance guy at a party once. His description of data cleaning was "it's like you have a pile of gold bars buried beneath a couple of tons of shit".
I started doing some work with ML models and immediately realised that around 80-90% of my code was dedicated entirely to data cleaning and preparation. Glad I got some practice before diving into a PhD honetly
So the article basically says that programmers are perfectionist jerks and you shouldn't hire them.
Too bad programmers are actually the ones you need the most. Trading is mostly a technical problem, which requires a technical organization to be solved well. You're not going to be successful if you only hire MBA types and cannot build a culture of technological excellence.
The article was talking about the first computer science guy in a team of mathematicians. I don't know if mathematicians should be called technical, but they're hardly MBA types.
It lost me with the first line. How does this make sense? Did word definitions shift on me again?
Most systematic hedge funds are a racket; they either got lucky, or have a strategy that only works in one market regime.
Are you objecting to the word racket? Most hedge funds are not legally fraudulent, but they are fraudulent in that they sell an expensive product that is by pretty much all measure worse than the cheap off-the-shelf product.
Selling ion bracelets to give you increased energy is not legal fraud either, but most people would say it's a fraud nonetheless. The same goes for most hedge funds.
Itâs not really that simple. Some funds outperform the market consistently (BRK isnât a hedge fund but is a good example of outperformance) Others stick to their name and hedge against certain things.
Itâs so hard to truly evaluate performance by all metrics, it might as well be impossible.
For the average person, the best way is probably to stick their money in the S&P 500 and forget about it. But what about outliers, like founders with 95% of their wealth in company x? They might want to hedge their bets as it were.
I believe he is trying to say that most multi-market hedge funds (systemic hedge funds) are a fraud because the models that get generated typically only work in the market that the data modelling was done for.
âEd Thorpeâs Princeton Newport and its successor âŠâ
Heâs been at it for decades. What did Ed figure out half a century ago?
Btw, Edâs a math guy also:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_O._Thorp
Bet sizing, maybe? It's certainly destroyed some big funds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_O._Thorp#Bibliography
Thorpe didn't have much success in stat arb after Princeton Newport was broken up. TGS did. I'm not sure I'd credit Thorpe with whatever they were doing.
They should absolutely get Tom Hardy to play Jim Simons. Who to play De Kapitein, then?
This book is phenomenal and it also charts why Bob Mercer has become so dangerous to American democracy, so quickly - because after acquiring SCL group (the umbrella for Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ, who worked with Trump/Bannon/Brexit), he has a cognitive warfare firm thatâs essentially funded ad infinitum by Renaissance Tech. constant money machine.
The Ai solved markets from Renaissance have given one of their top members effectively infinite influence over the political landscape, because he doesnât need to do anything anymore to keep the AĂ printing machine going.
> he doesnât need to do anything anymore to keep the AĂ [money?] printing machine going
This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how systematic trading strategies differ from some other ML problems. It's an adversarial, nonstationary environment. The same strategies don't just keep working indefinitely. (Not to mention the fact that maintaining any complex production software system requires an enormous amount of work, even completely ignoring the need to keep developing new alpha. For instance, consider the case when certain oil prices went briefly negative in 2020 -- even if _your_ software was so perfect that it was unaffected by that event [hah!] remember that many of the counterparties you actually trade with may not have been as clever. This is just one small example. as markets evolve, they will find ways to turn up new bugs in your code.)
I am aware of it being an adversarial environment, but right now they are on top and they can afford the âmaintenanceâ fees on keeping the machine going, probably with a lot of the top AĂ talent thatâs available to recruit (considering their earnings). Mercer himself can just live off the earnings.
I guess we need someone to counteract Soros, don't we?
So the opposite of using your money to promote civil society and fund education is to help steal elections?
I could never get into serious trading because current markets are irrational. Being a good trader these days is not about knowing what's going on; it's about being irrational in the same way as the most irrational rich fools... But it's difficult to tell which group of rich fools you should imitate. Which completely insane narrative will become the new reality? There seems to be no method to the madness. It's just plain madness.
I'm kind of diversified right now. Some of my money is in value-adding businesses and some is in speculative crypto ranging from "This project has potential" to "This project is 100% hype-based and has no viable technological future but could be big financially because insanity is becoming a reliable trend."
Engineers can determine the cause of a bridge collapse because thereâs agreement that if a certain amount of force is applied to a certain area, that area will break. Physics isnât controversial. Itâs guided by laws. Finance is different. Itâs guided by peopleâs behaviors. And how I behave might make sense to me but look crazy to you.
Morgan Housel. The Psychology of Money.
Trading has little to do with financial or economic models. And it definitely can be irrational.
But it can be predictable if you can predict the behaviour of other traders, because price is determined by supply and demand for the asset. The underlying value is a small part of determining how other traders will value it.
lol - you left out emotion. If traders were only motivated by pure supply/demand. Ha!
Price is determined by supply/demand. Traders are _motivated_ by cocaine and memes...
People who raise hell with OSHA because the CEO is a heavy smoker: jerks.
That doesn't seem jerkish. Second hand smoke in the work place is bad for everyone.
Yeah the author has a very uncharitable view towards Magerman. You can disagree with his political actions but I don't think he came off as a jerk, as much as someone who was aware of the old boys club nature of RenTech and wanted to change it.
Ugh. I recall the thick yellow sludge in the computers at a new job in 90s where everyone chain smoked. I asked how many years old it was. âSix monthsâ
Promptly gave 2 weeks notice in.
I wandered through the rest of the blog. What an amazing asshat. He should be on display somewhere. His rant about US health issues[1] is breathtaking.
What sort of person begins a description of autism like this?
Autism. Iâm not sure this doesnât fall into the category of âinsanity.â It may also have something to do with hormonal disruption. Either way, the fact that some huge fraction of the population who thinks they donât have to be kind and thoughtful to others because âmuh disability.â
I don't want to read the biography he is referring to but I do want to read a psych profile of Scott Locklin. He is the platonic ideal of a cranky, covid-denying asshat.
[1]
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/11/20/us-public-heal...
Please don't take HN threads on offtopic flamewar tangents. That's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Edit: And boy was this a doozy. Not cool.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
you should spend sometime in special education classrooms in America. You'd be shocked what is considered a disability. You have to realize once you have a documented disability it opens up things like lifelong disability payments.
Imagine you have an E student, 16 years old. You have major anxiety over the thought of supporting them for the remainder of your life as it seems unlikely they'll ever be able to able to hold a job/achieve financial independence. Disability can be your ticket and parents hire what's know in the industry as advocates who you guessed it advocate for their student to be labeled and receive support for having a disability. I can tell you it's a surefire way to ensure your child receives passing grades w/ out doing anything at all b/c you can relabel the lack of effort as due to their disability.
It's akin to drug addicts learning the in's and out's of the hospital system to receive pain medications. Pain has a lot of wiggle room and ppl will milk it just they like do disabilities.
I just looked it up and the number of kids on disability started to skyrocket in the early 90s. In 1980 there were about 260k kids on disability. By 1990, there was ~300k kids on disability. In 2000 there was nearly 900k.
> Let's imagine that happens. Jahleel starts doing better in school, overcomes some of his disabilities. He doesn't need the disability program anymore. That would seem to be great for everyone, except for one thing: It would threaten his family's livelihood. Jahleel's family primarily survives off the monthly $700 check they get for his disability.
https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
You should read the rebuttals to the NPR piece which I think is one of the worst reports NPR has ever done. The journalist should have done better research. This was something I would expect out of a conservative think tank and completely missed the boat.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/04/18/177745599/form...
I mean yea - another way to look at is if you're making $700 per month doing nothing you'd need make at least $701 to even consider from a pure economic perspective - realistically more like $1000+ to be motivated enough to go to work.
So many will write that off but then you have the a ha moment of what if I do work under the table so that's what you do - best of both worlds free money and extra cash. Problem obviously is a lot of ppl choose illegal options especially considering how profitable they are.
> _Imagine you have an E student, 16 years old ... it seems unlikely they'll ever be able to able to hold a job/achieve financial independence._
I'm confused; that sounds like a disability to me. If someone loses the genetic lottery and can't hold a job or achieve financial independence then that does seem like a pretty good use of disability funds. What is the alternative?
Maybe I misunderstood.
I think, in this example, the student isn't medically disabled, but is just a lazy nogoodnik who hangs out on YCombinator all day instead of studying.
Even if all of this is true, it doesn't disprove the existence of autism as a legitimate disability or diagnosis.
You have no idea what you are talking about and frankly your understanding of special education and people with disabilities is obscene.
Schools aren't necessarily even the best place to get that help and that's a big problem despite the provisions of the IDEA or your local state laws and programs.
Anything that can be gamed will be gamed. It's a hard problem.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/a-complex-problem-riches...
> _High-fee private schools are claiming the most HSC disability provisions despite the independent sector having the fewest students with special needs, as new data shows claims increased by a third in the last four years_
HSC is the Higher School Certificate, the highest secondary school examination in this state.
It might be a hard problem, but I think we can all agree the solution is not to declare that autism is fake and anyone claiming to be autistic is just an asshole.
Autism is actually hard to fake and requires a diagnosis.
see also:
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/08/12/things-the-est...
aside from the "COVID denying", he's also refreshingly unwilling to bow to the trend towards dilution of language in favor of obfuscation of meaning. Direct and entertaining rants have their place and he's good at them.
What is it about the scientific method and changing your advice based on new evidence is so difficult for some people to understand?
> The same dipshits who now think you should wear a mask while outside by yourself insisted that they were ineffective, because they knew the mask factories had long since been outsourced to China, and they wanted those masks for hospital worker to have while doing tiktoc videos. Now we have to wear them forever, because muh consensus or something.
Wow
The mask advice didn't change because of any new evidence. It changed because the public health authorities stopped being worried about health care providers not having enough PPE. The real problem was that in the first place, instead of lying and saying masks did not work (which they knew was false at the time), they should have said "Yes, masks work, but the highest risk people are health care workers so we are using the government's eminent domain power to commandeer supplies of PPE until we know all health care workers have enough, so until that happens it will be very difficult for private individuals to obtain masks."
Because there was no new evidence, the only thing that changed were the incentives. The evidence was always there and most of the rest of the world that didn't suffer from mask shortages recommended wearing masks and made them readily available for their residents. The countries that were not prepared for this decided it was best to lie and spread misinformation that masks don't work, or people are too stupid to put a mask on properly, or that there's nothing to be concerned about in the hopes that COVID would not be a long term global lockdown type of pandemic.
Whatever disagreement you might have about the author of this website, don't give a pass to the people who were at the helm during this pandemic. They failed the public along numerous basic metrics and that doesn't change simply because this author may or may not be an asshole.
> Because there was no new evidence...
But there was. The WHO recommendations, which I assume is what he is referring to, were based initially on data that suggested an non-aerosol transmission and then evidence was produced that lead to the theory of aerosol transmission.
One can certainly criticize the WHO and other health organizations for moving too slowly but the issue I am referring to isn't that.
There is a general tendency on the right to point to changing advice as some sort of proof of a conspiracy or idiocy on the part of the health officials. I see it all the time (as a daily lark I read Gab) and it points to an obvious lack of understanding on the part of a large part of the population (deliberate or not) about how science works on a fairly fundamental level.
It's not just changing advice. It's refusal to acknowledge the false certainty with which the original advice was given, and that undermines any reason to trust the certainty with which current advice is being given.
If the WHO had said in the early days 'We're 55% certain masks do more harm than good' and then said 'we've looked at more data and are now 60% certain masks do more good than harm', I doubt many of us would be clowning them to the degree we are. It's the fact they spoke as if they had 100% certainty in one direction and then as if they had 100% certainty in the other that gives the impression these people don't know what they're doing.
Aerosol transmission is not the only reason to wear a mask and in fact most masks that people wear including surgical masks do not provide great protection against aerosol transmission, you need an N95 mask for that.
It was always known, even prior to COVID and by the WHO (who posted as much on their website), that coronaviruses spread via respiratory droplets and that's what most masks are effective at protecting against.
Because coronaviruses spread through droplets, there was concern that touch would be a significant vector of transmission. Droplets will land somewhere; then what?
If the virus could persist viably on surfaces, handling a soiled mask properly would be absolutely critical to getting any benefit from it, and handling it improperly would be risky. People wiped down their groceries for the same reason.
With the benefit of real data, we now know that touch is a negligible vector. The novel coronavirus does not persist viably for long on any surface. So masks are an excellent trade off.
_> If the virus could persist viably on surfaces, handling a soiled mask properly would be absolutely critical to getting any benefit from it, and handling it improperly would be risky._
That's not a reason to tell people that masks don't work. It's a reason to tell people that masks _do_ work, provided you take precautions A, B, and C. And you should also say _why_ those precautions are necessary--because of the assumed risk of touch transmission--so people can apply common sense, since no amount of advice from a central authority can possibly cover all individual cases.
This is obviously off-topic, and has nothing to do with the submitted article's content. [1] But the ship of keeping this on-topic has already sailed, so I might as well add my two cents: Fauci himself said the reason they discouraged people from wearing masks was that "it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply". [2] There is a utilitarian argument for white lies, but public health officials did lie categorically.
[1]: I have flagged the woke-scolding comment which started the digression; likely to no avail as it matches the biases of the egregore.
[2]: Fauci's interview with The Street:
https://archive.ph/T4uZI#selection-809.0-813.507
>> [1]: I have flagged the woke-scolding comment which started the digression; likely to no avail as it matches the biases of the egregore.
You should probably look up dang's statements about this sentiment because its pretty funny how frequently this gets dragged out from literally anyone who feels disagreed with and hes got a nice rant about it.
:-) Is it this one? ->
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870
Yes! It even has the search link to the other times he has responded to it. Thanks for finding that :)
> They failed the public along numerous basic metrics and that doesn't change simply because this author may or may not be an asshole.
Asshat. I think he has far too much understanding of his basic character flaws and limitations to be an asshole. Its what makes his commentary especially wonderful. He isn't some ignorant asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else. He seems to know how smart he is and what his failings are but it doesn't stop him.
His frequent use of 'muh' speaks to a very elitist and classist view of modern society that has to come from, I assume, some sort of rural or less sophisticated upbringing of his.
Unlike hatebags who write for Breitbart or Infowars this guy is a wonderful combination of contradictions, insight and sheer bile.
Its f*$king breathtaking.
Calling people names as a form of argumentation is very rarely wonderful.
You don't need new evidence to come to a new understanding of policy measures.
We were worried about supply chains, and then we weren't.
In a supply chain constraint, Doctors get masks, because they need them.
Beyond that, the general population for whom masks are marginally useful, can have them.
Because 'masks are a policy' then we have to wear them in certain environments with strict oversight, I think this has led some people to believe that they are some kind if 'important tool' when of course they are not, they're just a small measure, but an important one in the aggregate.
The author is perfectly within his rights to be curmudgeon, but he's not very reasonable in his argumentation, he's more or less venting and name calling, which is unfortunately the reality of most of the anti-vaxx populism: there are very few well orchestrated skeptic arguments.
> your advice based on new evidence is
Because based on that old evidence that seemed so sure at a certain moment in time the lives of hundreds of millions of people were negatively affected (lockdowns, job losses etc), so one could forgive a part of those people for not giving a damn about the evidence subsequently changing and we being closer to the truth, in a scientific way.
Almost no-one cares about science, even the majority of people who materially support science by giving scientists money don't care about science (most of them have ulterior motives, like the ability to militarily be superior relative to their foes based on said science, or the ability to gain even more money compared to what they put in etc), long story short almost nobody really cares about science in the way that (some) scientists do, i.e. getting us closer to the "truth" (whatever that "truth" is).
In that respect, telling those hundreds of millions of people something like "but, you see, we were doing science when we were negatively affecting your lives based on evidence that proved out to be further to the truth compared to the evidence that we have now" means, in the best case scenario, that you're taunting them, in the worst case, that you're taking those millions of people for utter fools that should just sit like ducks in the way of science.
For instance:
>If youâre capable of writing a makefile, youâre capable of learning how to behave in public in a way that doesnât make people want to fling you from the roof.
Following a link from his "Stuff I like" page I also found this excellent blog-post [1] about the modern-day corporate antitrust industry, the author reminds me of Christopher Lasch and his writings on (good) populism that can still save our (Western world) democratic system (or the most important principles supporting it). For example I didn't know this fact:
> In 1931, Jackson, the last Supreme Court not to graduate from law school
which I found pretty interesting, especially as he was pretty instrumental in implementing some important New Deal stuff (I'm not and American and as such many of those facts were knew to me):
> Jackson, a country lawyer from upstate New York, became one of the central lawyers in the New Deal, resurrecting the Antitrust Division in 1937 and a few years later sitting on the Supreme Court
[1]
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-big-law-cartel-how-an...
Bookmarked for review later. Canât wait to get all steamed up about something some guy said.
I use twitter for that.
We need a new acronym for this. Candidates:
AaaS: anger as a service
PoaaS: pissed-off as a service
We could try other emotions, but this seems to be the biggest addressable market.
I thought we already had a word: doomscrolling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling
Another suggestion:
CaaS: Cortisol as a service
Does that have anything to do with this blog post in particular? I would wager your comment is off topic
That depends on whether the original post was about the book review or about him :-)
I think you are correct though that I am wildly off-topic but when one discovers something like this you really need to point it out.
Reminder of the HN Guidelines [1]:
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
[1]
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is a direct quote from the blog:
"The main upside to all this for me anyway is middle aged to old men like me have giant cocks compared to 20-somethings because we werenât exposed to this shit in the womb. Of course most of the 20-something year old American women are obese and mentally ill anyway, so itâs a wash."
How do you appropriately comment on something like this? Other than to point out that this is not someone worth having a conversation with? And yet this blog hits the front page,and therefore requires engagement of some sort. Pretending, against all evidence, that you are engaged in a good faith, curiosity driven conversation when faced with stuff like this does not seem like an appropriate, rational strategy to me.
I'm a 20-something woman and I'm not offended by that. He's using hyperbole for effect, obviously. Don't take everything you read personally; very rarely is it intended as such.
> And yet this blog hits the front page,and therefore requires engagement of some sort.
It really doesn't. If someone's writing bothers you, just move on with your life. I promise that railing against this dude will not stop him from blogging.
I'm not sure this much common sense is appropriate for the Internet; thank you for trying to inject some much needed perspective.
I don't know how people like the OP and many others in this thread have the energy to be constantly offended and wound up over so many things utterly out of their control. Nor how anyone that has to live with them can put up with it too.
People have a fascinating tendency to blindly defend people that are perceived to be rich or academically gifted. I see it very often on Twitter and here on HN.
Considering that this entire article is nothing but some guyâs _opinions_, I think that a post like the following would be fully germane and on-topic:
âI get the distinct impression that this guy thinks very highly of himself, and I wouldnât be surprised if a good chunk of his worldview exists solely as a collection of subjective âtruthsâ that serve only to prop up his massive ego.
Some people have an inability to distinguish between the behavior of a smart person and the behavior of a blowhard asshole. This can lead to the very embarrassing tendency to defend or mimic blowhard assholes because they think maybe that they will be perceived as more intelligent by doing so, or _even more embarrassingly_ some folks might actually think that by publicly agreeing with this guyâs ridiculous stances that maybe theyâll get noticed and let into some imaginary Cool Kids Club where they can rub elbows with the Financial Elites.
Neither are really the case. Scott Locklin isnât going to Kramer into this thread and hire folks that post in agreement with him about COVID or mental health or whatever, nor are the posters defending this stupid asshole[1] coming off as Big Brain Geniuses.
I did not care for this review, and I do not care for his opinions about anything, really. I wasnât aware that this book existed and the subject matter sounds vaguely interesting, Iâll put it on my maybe list.â
[1] Yes. Itâs entirely possible to be good at math _and_ still be an insufferably stupid asshole. That might be the only thing Scott and I agree on, though I suspect that from his perspective that doesnât apply to him, Mr. Big Brain Genius.
Average penis size has shrunk, though, right? And obesity does have negative effects on pregnancy, and you'd rather your mother weren't mentally ill.
Obesity's definitely exploded over the last 60 years.
(Isn't obesity in 20-30 y.o. women in america above 50%?)
What's wrong with what he's said, here?
> Of course most of the 20-something year old American women are obese and mentally ill anyway
Do you not recognize this as misogynist? I can't tell if you're trolling or not.
Yes, in the upper middle class bubble this is misogynist.
Everywhere else -- that doesn't require one to adhere to trends in order to survive -- this is just a histrionic take.
Scott is lambasting both sexes, so he gets a pass as a conflict-seeking goblin speaking his mind.
Or perhaps we've been too sheltered for far too long that this is what the "real" world is like?
Impossible to discern; we are a reflection of our environment.
I am quite serious in my praise for this blog. It is breathtaking. I disagree with almost everything he says but I am still reading it.
I believe the author was banned from HN a while back.
I find his bluntness funny and somewhat admirable, where I disagree with him and not. Might be a regional thing, we're both New Englanders.
Is calling Mississippi "Amerikwaanza" a New England thing?
No but not getting offended by it or laughing at the absurdity of it might be.
Politeness > accuracy & honestly is a very common preference, but not mine.
You can be honest and accurate without being needlessly nasty/mocking as the quote seems to be
Your sentiment is a really common and insidious one that way too many people use to feel smug and "rational" about being mean
People are allowed to be blunt and even curmudgeon, there's nothing wrong with that, it's just one of the many dispositions we can assume. That's diversity. This is a personal blog and it's totally reasonable the he takes this posture, it's slightly refreshing. If this were a public intellectual being taken seriously, or if he had a huge audience, then there would be more scrutiny, but otherwise he's just a guy with an odd way of communicating with a small soap-box on a small corner. It's fine.
> That's diversity.
Careful - you'll cause some heads to explode before they can retreat to their safe spaces...
Based.
> " Politeness > accuracy & honestly "
These concept are pretty much orthogonal. While I don't disagree that insistence on politeness can get in the way of good discourse, it is an all-to-common mistake to read or promote _lack_ of politeness as a signal of honesty and accuracy - which manifestly isn't the case.
It's also often done in a lazy way. Which doesn't imply the thinking is also lazy, but there is a good correlation.
In practice they are far from orthogonal.
That doesn't match my experience at all, and I suspect it isn't unusual.
You need an editor. It was impossible to read, it felt a like a bunch of notes written as you read it. That's fine, but do not call it a review. The RE, the after, the post,the after, this is poor. Sorry.