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All of datscilly's Comments + Replies

Playing with DALL·E 2
datscilly20

Some suggestions for testing the limits of abstract, or spatial reasoning:

the back of the letter 'E'
the back of the letter e
back of the number 42
the back of the last letter in the alphabet

underside of flat earth

the view of earth from 1,000,000,000 km away
view of earth from a million miles away
a view of bacteria using a billion times magnification

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What would be the pros and cons of a government-backed, property-based cryptocurrency?
datscilly20

That part also jumped out to me as a leap in logic, but I think there's a case to be made for that scenario, that gives it some chance of happening (~50%). It would be the first crypto accepted by the US government. That's a great marketing tagline, and even if the US created some random crypto linked to gasoline, tobacco, or marijuana taxes it'll probably be hyped. Also, it seems that almost anything marketed as a cryptocurrency leads to speculation, even though this proposal is actually more like a digital asset or security.

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What would be the pros and cons of a government-backed, property-based cryptocurrency?
datscilly20

I wonder if a motivation for this post has to do with Georgist-style land value tax. Turning these land leases into securities will create a market with market prices for the land leases, making it easier to assess the value of, and tax, the land.

There's the issue of differing value of different plots of land. Land isn't fungible, but if large enough swaths of land are similar enough to be grouped up, then it could work.

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1Asgård
Hey datscilly, thanks for your two comments. I could very well believe that the ACX-hosted Book Review and later research had tinged my thoughts on this. I still need to understand more of the Land Value Tax to see how something like that could be integrated into this idea. I think the majority of BLM land could probably be bundled under a similar swath. Alternately, large chunks of land in Russia, Canada, Alaska, South America, etc. could maybe benefit from a similar program. Like I said above, the land has been classically unattractive, but remote work, global internet, a drive out of some cities, and whatever interest this program would generate could lead to the land being seen as much more attractive in the coming decades.
The EMH is False - Specific Strong Evidence
datscilly90

For the Perpetual Futures arbitrage, the return on investment is sensitive to the price difference between the future and the underlying asset. A price difference of 0.3% is needed for 10% returns per month (since 1.1^(1/30) ≈ 1.00318), while a price difference of 0.1% only gets 3% per month. I went on Binance and checked the spot price vs. the futures price for a moment in time; it was about $50 difference for BTC, or 0.085%.

So I am convinced that it's profitable to arbitrage crypto futures; I predict the rate of return for the next 12 months at 10% - 40%... (read more)

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1dr_gorilla
Some random thoughts from a stranger on the Internet: - The spot-perp difference is expressed as the funding rate (which is the way how perpetual swaps are pegged to the underlying, more long perp => positive funding => longs pay shorts => less longs, except in extra-speculative bullrun like recently). This mechanism has been working so far, because people are successfully massively arbing it! - Binance has funding rate settlement every 8h, IF you had a constant 0.085%ROI, compounded 3x/day, you would end up with [insert LOT of digits]%/y. In practice, the funding is left-skewed, but not centered on that high value tho :/  (see https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/crypto-markets/futures/btc-funding-rates for mean apy values) - It's basically doing a basis arb (long basis, to be precise), an interest rate arb with a variable rate (you play the yield). Arthur Hayes described it as the "NakaDollar floating rate bond" (see https://blog.bitmex.com/all-aboard/ he has been trading it since 2013, successfully is an under-statement) -"There's a chance of losing everything": long spot/short future, if you don't leverage it, you're fully collat! You're not long crypto, you're literally delta-neutral - Why such arb still exists (in a not-so efficient market - see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214845020300673 for another piece of your "not sot" argument) ? Because of dollar-value (see Arthur Hayes post supra) -Opportunity cost? Indeed, it can be quite huge, guess it's a risk-profile discussion from there -Comparing to staking : staking is cool, but, in terms of $, NOT delta neutral (you're long eth!) - if the market tanks, your 12%APY in eth can be worthless (on nakadollar bonds, even if the settlement is most of the time in btc/eth/whatever, your ROI is in $, hence the name). Ofc, dollar-value/inflation comes again into play then...
3sapphire
I was quite explicit the current perp trade will only go on so long. You can lever the trade some amount to get to 5 or ten percent. Though there are limits to how much leverage you can use. Imo you certainly should not compare a low risk investment to a plan that involves going long crypto.
Forecasting Thread: AI Timelines
Answer by datscillyΩ13440

A week ago I recorded a prediction on AI timeline after reading a Vox article on GPT-3 . In general I'm much more spread out in time than the Lesswrong community. Also, I weigh more heavily outside view considerations than detailed inside view information. For example, a main consideration of my prediction is using the heurastic With 50% probability, things will last twice as long as they already have, with the starting time of 1956, the time of the Dartmouth College summer AI conference.
If AGI will definitely happen eventually, then the heuristic gives us... (read more)

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2grantschneider
https://elicit.ought.org/builder/J2lLvPmAY quick estimate, mostly influenced by the "outside view" and other commenters (of which I found the reasoning of tim_dettmer to be most convincing).
4NunoSempere
Your prediction has the interesting property that (starting in 2021), you assign more probability to the next n seconds/ n years than to any subsequent period of n seconds/ n years. Specifically, I think your distribution assigns too much probability about AGI in the immediately next three months/year/5 years, but I feel like we do have a bunch of information that points us away from such short timelines. If one takes that into account, then one might end up with a bump, maybe like so, where the location of the bump is debatable, and the decay afterwards is per Laplace's rule.
Ben Pace*Ω5100

For example, a main consideration of my prediction is using the heurastic With 50% probability, things will last twice as long as they already have, with the starting time of 1956, the time of the Dartmouth College summer AI conference.
 

A counter hypothesis I’ve heard (not original to me) is: With 50% probability, we will be half-way through the AI researcher-years required to get AGI.

I think this suggests much shorter timelines, as most researchers have been doing research in the last ~10 years.

It's not clear to me what reference class makes sense he... (read more)

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steven0461's Shortform Feed
datscilly50

I think the Metaculus crowd median is among the highest-quality predictions out there. Especially when someone goes through all the questions where they're confident the median is off, and makes comments pointing this out. I used to do this, some months back when there were more short term questions on Metaculus and more questions where I differed from the community. When you made a bunch of comments of this type a month back on Metaculus, that covered most of the 'holes', in my opinion, and now there are only a few questions where I differ ... (read more)

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