We should not forget that from an evolutionary perspective (if we regard groups as the players) it is advantageous to have at least some bias in favor of the group you belong to. Groups which don't do this, are out-competed by groups who do.

Of course, too much bias leads to extremism. However, no bias at all might lead to the extinction of the group in question.

Re: your last question: yes.

(a) It is very difficult to perceive qualitative differences for people 1 sigma+ above "you" (for any value of "you"), but it is enormous.

(b) How much "science process" does this community actually understand? How many are practicing scientists, as in publish real stuff in journals?

The outside view worry is there might be a bit of a "twenty something knowitall" going on. You read some stuff, and liked it. That's great! If the stuff isn't universally adopted by very smart folks, there are probably very good reasons for that! Read more!

My argument boils down to: "no, really, very smart people are actually very smart."

Hey everyone,

This is my first post!

This is what I've been wondering lately:

Who is the best sales person in the world? Who knows?

‘Sales competitions’ generally refers to ‘in-house’ competitions established by managers to motivate their sales people to compete against one another.

Recently I began thinking about the prospects for a ‘world sales tournament’ of sorts:

Successful sales people have lots of money. But sales is derided, whether it be in real estate, ‘charity mugger’ fundraisers, or even the people doing tenders for defence contracts.

What if we could could take their money, convert it to prestige, and take a smooth commision on the whole thing?

Sales tournaments! The World Series of Sales! The Sales Olympics. Major League Sales. Who says sales people ought to pay an entry fee anyway (except, perhaps to get a manageable number of entrants). If there are companies out there with products or services to sell, getting the best, most competitive sales people in the game to sell them is a highly desirable service itself. In return for product to sell, said product and service companies could sponsor the competition.

Sales people have difficulty switching industries, despite their highly tuned sales skills. Product and industry knowledge is easy to pick-up, but soft skills are tougher to gain. Never-the-less, recruiters are reluctant to pick up sales people from other industries - the numbers don’t always make sense. Someone working for a luxury car dealership may have huge sales numbers, but a luxury hand bag dealer might not be able to translate the numbers over. Having a high sales ranking, in a similar way that programmers are ranked in coding competition websites, could make for a highly desirable piece of career capital.

An online ‘quick and dirty’ version could be coded for email marketers and telemarketers that could be conducted in a distributed fashion in the likeness of coding competitions. But, a large scale, potentially TV-friendly could be much more profitable.

There’s an EA aspect to this too. Rationalisation of sales human resources may make Effective Altruism fundraising more quantified. And, with the birth of this idea here - the earliest competitions, or the non-profit ones could be ‘selling’ those GiveWell recommended charities as options for prospective donors. Major League Fundraising/Philanthropy! The same could be said about politics - if this become ubiquitous, voters could try to adjust their interpretations of the policy-offerings of politicans by their sales ability.

I reckon there could even be ‘team sales’. People might barrack for particular sales team’s their affiliated with - Say the Farmers Marketing Cooperatve of California (made up name) may consist of 10 members, but be supported by hundreds of farmers. Then, when it comes to a competition, say to raise money for Development Media International, one of GiveWell’s charities, people would support them like a sports team. Imagine that, people caring as much about charity as sports teams, or their online gaming leagues! In a sense, this is the gamification of sales.

If you have read this till here, you are the kind of person I want to help me build this. Please do get in touch, preferably publically as a comment here and privately (yes, twice! Once for people to know who’s involved, and twice for contact details which you may prefer not to publicly disclose) with a contact email address so I can keep everyone involved in the loop and we can decide upon a work cycle.

Equity split for founding team, including myself will be by negotiation among all of us. I forsee an equal split of total equity - an equal partnerships, for those involved.

I have NEGATIVE karma on LessWrong. My writing is evidently unappealing. Why would I start a blog when it would generate negative publicity about myself?

You are talking about why penny stocks are volatile and yes, that's all true. However it's also true that the upside/downside asymmetry is especially pronounced for them.

if you buy a stock, you could come out arbitrarily well-off, but your losses are limited to the amount you put in. But if you short, your payoffs are limited to the current price, and your losses could be arbitrarily big, until you run out of money.

This is accurate.

it feels like an important asymmetry

This asymmetry comes from the fact that prices are non-negative numbers and do not dip below zero.

Effect on the market? Off the top of my head, here is a couple: long-term shorts are more risky than they seem; and shorting penny stocks (stocks with a low price, typically below $5) is also "extra" risky because your upside is small, but your downside is not.

I think it has other problems besides abstraction and technical language. Example 1: "for the continuous of character" doesn't appear to be grammatically correct and it's not clear what you actually mean by it (is one of the words an autocorrect error for something else?). Example 2: when you ask "is there [a] name for this?" it's not clear what "this" actually refers to.

(Also: the key virtue of technical language is its ability to capture certain concepts precisely. In cases where it fails to do this, you should at least seriously consider abandoning technical language.)

It seems like the point of your answer to Bryan-san is to say that your intended audience won't need to expend time and effort decoding what you wrote. I think you are wrong unless the intended audience is empty.

Since you apparently don't value your readers' time enough to make your meaning clearer, I'll have a go. I may well fail, for exactly the same reason as it seems like a paraphrase might be useful.

People often have attitudes towards particular classes of things (e.g., someone might think that trees are dangerous, or that men are sexy). Our ideas of those classes are often based on "typical" examples we've encountered (the oak tree in the neighbour's garden; Brad Pitt). So suppose something comes along that kinda fits one of these classes but differs from those typical examplars in some way (e.g., a blade of grass is a bit like a tree but much smaller; Maggie Smith is a bit like Brad Pitt but older and female). Should we expect that difference to change those attitudes?

If something like that is the question you're trying to answer, I think it's obvious that the answer is: The question is much too vague to be answerable, in the same way as "Suppose I'm thinking of a number. Is it an odd number?". Some differences affect (or should affect, or could reasonably be expected to affect) some attitudes. Some don't. Without more information there's nothing more to say.

(Note: I do not myself generally consider trees dangerous or men sexy. Hypothetical examples are hypothetical.)

Placebo doesn't affect objective outcomes anyway.

Elaborate? I'm pretty sure that's not correct, at the very least when it comes to pain, immune system things, autonomic stuff, and possibly some musculoskeletal stuff.

I have both acted as a reference and had my references called. In my experience, references are only called after a person has been interviewed (at least once), immediately before a final offer is made. No one wants to have their professional references having to field a bunch of phone calls, so they expect that the companies they contact will be serious about offering them a job before that happens. The references are not to generate interest in you, they are to confirm that the company's interest in you is well-founded.

Suppose someone offers you the chance to play the following game:

You are given an initial stake of $1. A fair coin is flipped. If the result is TAILS, you keep the current stake. If the result is HEADS, the stake doubles and the coin is flipped again, repeating the process.

How much money should you be willing to pay to play this game?