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JoshuaZ comments on Occupy Wall Street: Predictions, Speculations - Less Wrong
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Comments (41)
General worry about mindkilling makes me wonder how good a topic this for LW.
If one wants specific predictions, I will note that Prediction Book has two related wagers to OWS. See 1, 2. However, neither of these addresses issues like success of the movement (or what success would even be defined by). I'd certainly welcome in that context more specific predictions of the results.
I almost entirely forgive that due to this:
That makes it seem almost worst to me. That means that one knows that it is offtopic and that it has little to do with rationality and posted it anyways.
I don't much care for either of those predictions. I'm happy to see the communicable disease one so strongly estimated against -- seriously, was a single wager anything other than 99% against? -- but that other one is poorly defined. What is "major" violence, contextually?
To the point of predictions regarding the 'success' of OWS: I don't know, right now, that this is a defineable question. It seems to me that not even the protesters themselves know what it is they want, exactly, besides "making things not suck".
The major violence one has a definition discussed in the comment thread. Anything leading to fatalities is apparently the agreed definition. I agree that the communicable disease one is extremely unlikely and not terribly useful (the highest percentage estimate given by anyone is 3%.)
Ahh. I didn't see there was a comment thread for the site. Interesting.
That being said -- is there anything required about intentionality of the fatalities? Pepper spray can kill people with allergic reactions. Tasers can and have killed in the past. A good solid thwack upside the head can kill if you're really unlucky.
But if we restrict it to clearly intended fatalities -- that's just a symptom of protests of duration and volume, more than anything else, is it not?
I don't know. The thread hasn't discussed intentionality. That is probably worth bringing up explicitly there. As to duration and volume- well yes, to a large extent, it is a measure of that. The prediction has a set deadline. So one way of looking at it is predicting certain volume before a specific date.
Ahh. Took a bit of puzzling to figure out where the deadline was -- that "known in 23 days". So really that prediction ought to read "There will be at least one incident of major violence at the Wall Street OWS protest within thirty days." That's a rather significantly different claim than "There will be at least one major outbreak of violence during the Occupy Wall Street protest."
Yes, the website design isn't always great. I generally try to put the deadlines in my predictions but most people don't.