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JoachimSchipper comments on Feed the spinoff heuristic! - Less Wrong
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This is a nitpick, but this protocol is at least underspecified. Aside from the need to prove that you made the predictions before the events, you also need to be able to prove that you made no other predictions before the event.
(I've always wondered why no pump-and-dump scammers use this: after ten "buy/short <volatile stock>" mails, 1/1024 of your mailing list will have received 10/10 correct predictions from you (and another 10/1024 will have received 9/10 correct predictions.) Which should be enough to convince quite a few to buy up some penny stock (with the scammer taking the other, profitable side of the trade.) In the spirit of this post, it's probably not profitable enough. Or spammers are stupid.)
They used to, in the days of snail-mail, and that scam became one of the common examples of selection bias and other issues because it's so nifty; why don't they with email? Probably difficulty of getting through, as pointed to.
Getting someone to receive 11 mails in a row is hard, because of immune responses to spam. Getting someone to actually read those mails is hard, for a similar reason. Needing a large number of recipients and using stock-related terminology both make it harder. And then, even if you got through defenses and actually convinced people that you could correctly predict stock prices, most of them still wouldn't do anything about it.
Thanks for the stamper link, I was hoping something like that existed.
The latter could be helped by some stamping service that would allow you to include your name in the stamping request, with some publicly available provision for finding out how many requests someone made in a time period. If Carl actually attached "Carl Shulman" to the request, and to no others, and we had independent reason to believe that was his True Name, we could assume he wasn't running the 10^1024 scam.
You're looking for people smart enough to understand the scam and dumb enough to fall for it. That seems much less profitable than existing scams.
Right, the thought would be to do this in public fashion, so that recipients can search for other results to see you hadn't posted others.