All of Max Entropy's Comments + Replies

I feel like we're the blind men with the elephant more often than we'd like to admit. A lot of the time when two people make conflicting claims about society, really they're both right about their substrate of society and the world is just twice as big as either thought.

Another shocker for most people: 20 million people in the US live in trailer parks. People with similar life circumstances tend to accumulate in similar places, only see those places, and thus vastly underestimate the diversity of life experience. (This is also true of everything in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KpMNqA5BiCRozCwM3/social-dark-matter)

I've played Figgie a fair bit and don't think it's a good tool for teaching epistemics outside of a Jane Street trading internship.

To actually learn with it, you first need a number of motivated playing partners. They need to be quite skilled for their actions to be informative, and the game sucks before they reach this point. In my experience people don't reach this skill level within their first couple hours of play. It also requires N custom-made decks for N rounds of play, or for everyone to install a specific app. So it's really only practical for a t... (read more)

8Fejfo
Figgie may not be a good game but it's certainly better then poker, what game would be better then Figgie?
4flusterclick
Having learned about this game right now, this is my idea to set up a random deck (so not field-tested, and maybe I'm misunderstanding): Separate into 4 piles of 12 cards, according to suit, face down. Another person moves the piles about like in 3-card Monty until no one knows where each suit is. Randomly choose 3 piles to remove 2, 2, and 4 cards. Or always remove 4 from the first, 2 each from the next ones, from left to right or by whatever convention. Shuffle together remaining piles, deal.
2Ben Millwood
You can make a figgie deck by taking a normal deck of cards and removing 1, 3, 3, and 5 cards from randomly-selected suits. This is easiest to do if you have a non-participant dealer, but if you don't, it's not too hard to come up with a protocol that allows you to do this as part of shuffling without anyone knowing the results.

Love this idea, and +1 on Jon Gjengset and Neel Nanda.

For finance though, I'm skeptical of your recommendations (DeepFuckingValue and Martin Shkreli). The former made his money pumping-and-dumping meme stocks, and I get the impression the latter has been selected for fame (like recommending Neil deGrasse Tyson to learn physics).

In general, I think finding good resources in finance requires a much stronger epistemic immune system than nearly any other field! There's so much adverse selection, and charlatans can hide behind noisy returns and flashy slide dec... (read more)

1Parker Conley
Thanks for the Git recommendation; added!
1Parker Conley
Thanks for the feedback! I too am skeptical of the finance videos, agreeing that the video probably came across my radar due to the figures being popular rather than displaying believable tacit knowledge. I've gone back and forth on whether to remove the videos from the list or just add your expert anecdata as a disclaimer on the videos. In the spirit of quantity vs. quality, I'm leaning toward keeping the videos on the list.