Huh. Vienna Teng was my top artist, too and this is the only other spotify wrapped I've seen here. Is she popular in these circles?
Even a year ago, I would have bet extremely high odds that data analyst-type jobs would be replaced well before postdocs in math and theoretical physics. It's wild that the reverse is plausible now
Annoying anecdote: I interviewed for an entry-level actuarial position recently and, when asked about the purpose of insurance, I responded with essentially the above argument (along the lines of increasing everyone's log expectation, with kelly betting as a motivation). The reply I got was "that's overcomplicated; the purpose of insurance is to let people avoid risk".
By the way, I agree strongly with this post and have been trying to make my insurance decisions based on this philosophy over the past year.
Some ideas discussed here + in comments
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families
Oops, yeah the written programs are supposed to be deterministic. The point of mentioning the RNG was to handle the fact that an AI might derive its performance from a strong random number generator, which a C code can't emulate.
To clarify: we are not running any programs, just providing code. In a sense, we are competing at the task of providing descriptions for very large numbers with an upper bound on the size of the description (and the requirement that the description is computable).
I personally used beeminder for this (which I think originated from this community)
Little thought experiment with flavors of Newcomb and Berry's Paradox:
I have the code of an ASI in front of me, translated into C along with an oracle to a high-quality RNG. This code is N characters. I want to compete with this ASI at the task of writing a 2N-character C code that halts and prints a very large integer. Will I always win?
Sketch of why: I can write my C code to simulate the action of the ASI on a prompt like "write a 2N-character C code that halts and prints the largest integer" using every combination of possible RNG calls and print the max + 1 or something.
Sketch of why not: The ASI can make us both lose by "intending" to print a non-halting program if it is asked to. There might be probabilistic approaches for the ASI as well, where it produces a non-halting program with some chance. If I can detect this in the simulations, I might be able to work around this and still beat the ASI.
Spotify recommended first recommended her to me in September 2023 and later that September I came across r/slatestarcodex, which was my first exposure to the rationalist community. That's kind of funny.