This has some similarities with early smallpox variolation, right? (And some differences, like the numbers.)

EV on A’s life expectancy is strongly positive.

Depending on your AI timelines :p

Why not?

Mostly "priors on this kind of thing".

(I might be able to get something more specific but that comment won't come for a week minimum, if ever.)

Oh, that sounds right. I confess I wasn't thinking at that kind of scale.

My intuitive reaction is

• This is super neat as a theoretical construct!
• I notice that I don't expect it to work in practice.
• I'm not convinced real markets do something much like this but maybe I need to read more closely or think harder.

With 0.1% chance, transparently take a random decision among available decisions (the randomness is pre-set and independent of specific decisions/market data/etc.)

As a note, I think this doesn't need to be uniformly random. So if there's a decision that you a priori think is a terrible idea, you can downweight it in the random choice, as long as the market prices don't affect that.

A trader will probably want considerably more than 1000x payout if the probability goes down by 1000x, right?

(Re the "missed the point" reaction, I claim that it's not so much that I missed the point as that I wasn't aiming for the point. But I recognize that reactions aren't able to draw distinctions that finely.)

and neighboring ones, like “two key insights” or whatever

I... kinda feel like there's been one key insight since you were in the community? Specifically I'm thinking of transformers, or whatever it is that got us from pre-GPT era to GPT era.

Depending on what counts as "key" of course. My impression is there's been significant algorithmic improvements since then but not on the same scale. To be fair it sounds like Random Developer has a lower threshold than I took the phrase to mean.

But I do think someone guessing "two key insights away from AGI" in say 2010, and now guessing "one key insight away from AGI", might just have been right then and be right now?

(I'm aware that you're not saying they're not, but it seemed worth noting.)

Suppose in 2025, the median prediction is that it'll happen in 2027. Suppose in 2028, the median prediction is that it'll happen in 2030.

Will that be enough empirical evidence, for you to conclude that the crowd is repeatedly predicting short timelines which never materialize?

Anecdote: in 2022, my recollection is that Ethereum had been planning to switch to proof of stake for years, and that project had been repeatedly delayed. In June, my brother bet me that it wouldn't happen for at least another two years. It actually happened in September 2022.

An interesting exercise might be: given a photo, don't necessarily try to geoguess it, but see if you can identify the features that an expert might use to geoguess it. (E.g. "the pattern of lines on the road doesn't mean anything to me, but that seems like it might narrow down the countries we might be in?")

The internet can convey much more information much more quickly, but radio is still better for creating common knowledge, in part because of its limitations (like having a fixed small number of channels).

The internet has lots of channels, but there are only a small number of official government channels.

I'm tickled by the idea of: the coup's success depends on which side first manages to convince an aide to change the password to the presidential twitter account.