Open Thread, Jul. 6 - Jul. 12, 2015

MrMind

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

If anyone would have a way of knowing, that kind of methodology would have made us mega-rich long ago by investing, shorting etc.

Sort of if you don't see millions of dollars suddenly going to effective altruism and MIRI then LW is probably not that much better at figuring it out as anyone else :)

My wild uninformed guess is that the "troika" institutions will accept some property of the Greek state in return for writing off a big part of the debt. The Greek state has things to sell, like its majority stake in Greece's biggest electric power company, and this would help the lenders get something for those bad debts in order to save face towards their voters.

7Houshalter11y

That's not really true. You need to make correct predictions many times on many different things to get significant returns from your initial seed investment. There are also a lot of details like finding someone to take your short, and getting it at just the right time before the market crashes. There also is such a methodology to make really good predictions. Train a bunch of people through practice to be good at forecasting the future and learn from their mistakes, and take the top performers from that group: http://www.economist.com/news/21589145-how-sort-best-rest-whos-good-forecasts [...] They even beat CIA analysts: http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so-you-think-youre-smarter-than-a-cia-agent There is also this guy. I remember him from the book Automate This, that he was supposedly able to predict exactly how Iran would act back when they were developing nuclear weapons. His method, as best I understand it, is to simply list everyone involved that has influence, and predict they will do exactly what benefits them individually the most.

3James_Miller11y

This is too strong given that predictions have probability estimates associated with them, and some predictions are better than others. For example, a prediction of a 1% chance of a Greek civil war is better than predicting a 50% chance of one.