People asked for a citation so here's one: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/age%2520and%2520scientific%2520genius.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiJjr7b8O-JAxUVOFkFHfrHBMEQFnoECD0QAQ&sqi=2&usg=AOvVaw0HF9-Ta_IR74M8df7Av6Qe

Although my belief was more based on anecdotal knowledge of the history of science. Looking up people at random: Einstein's annus mirabilis was at 26; Cantor invented set theory at 29; Hamilton discovered Hamiltonian mechanics at 28; Newton invented calculus at 24. Hmmm I guess this makes it seem more like early 20s - 30. Either way 25 is definitely in peak range, and 18 typically too young(although people have made great discoveries by 18, like Galois. But he likely would have been more productive later had he lived past 20)

It sounds pretty implausible to me, intellectual productivity is usually at its peak from mid-20s to mid-30s(for high fluid-intelligence fields like math and physics)

Confused as to why this is so heavily downvoted.

These emails and others can be found in document 32 here.

but it seems that even on LW people think winning on a noisy N=1 sample is proof of rationality

It's not proof of a high degree of rationality but it is evidence against being an "idiot" as you said. Especially since the election isn't merely a binary yes/no outcome, we can observe that there was a huge republican blowout exceeding most forecasts(and in fact freddi bet a lot on republican pop vote too at worse odds, as well as some random states, which gives a larger update) This should increase our credence that predicting a republican win was rational. There were also some smart observers with IMO good arguments that trump was favored pre-election, e.g. https://x.com/woke8yearold/status/1851673670713802881

"Guy with somewhat superior election modeling to Nate Silver, a lot of money, and high risk tolerance" is consistent with what we've seen. Not saying that we have strong evidence that Freddi is a genius but we also don't have much reason to think he is an idiot IMO.

Looks likely that tonight is going to be a massive transfer of wealth from "sharps"(among other people) to him. Post hoc and all, but I think if somebody is raking in huge wins while making "stupid" decisions it's worth considering whether they're actually so stupid after all.

Good post, it's underappreciated that a society of ideally rational people wouldn't have unsubsidized, real-money prediction markets.

unless you've actually got other people being wrong even in light of the new actors' information

Of course in real prediction markets this is exactly what we see. Maybe you could think of PMs as they exist not as something that would exist in an equilibrium of ideally rational agents, but as a method of moving our society closer to such an equilibrium, subsidized by the bets of systematically irrational people. It's not a perfect such method, but does have the advantage of simplicity. How many of these issues could be solved by subsidizing markets?

Discord Message

What discord is this, sounds cool.

That's probably the one I was thinking of.

I know of only two people who anticipated something like what we are seeing far ahead of time; Hans Moravec and Jan Leike

I didn't know about Jan's AI timelines. Shane Legg also had some decently early predictions of AI around 2030(~2007 was the earliest I knew about)

Some beliefs can be worse or better at predicting what we observe, this is not the same thing as popularity.