LESSWRONG
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All of 2irons's Comments + Replies

Don't You Care If It Works? - Part 1
2irons80

"Does this change your confidence in Bob managing your retirement investments?"

  • if he never held himself out as a quant based investor or using a method reliant on much analytical or quantitative research I wouldn't worry about it.

Maybe he's been good at choosing ETF's because he's great at listening to investors and trader chat - can feel which arguments are about to dominate the market and allocates capital accordingly. Maybe he sits by a high performing proprietory trading team in his bank and you're piggy backing off of all their trades a... (read more)

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0Jacob Falkovich
Upvoted for criticizing the actual point :) I agree that Bob is probably a weak analogy because who knows how stock-pickers actually pick stocks? I hope I didn't construct a reverse intuition pump. Still, Eliezer's job is either a research mathematician or a philosopher of epistemology, depending on what matters to you. Both those jobs depend quite a bit on getting the rules of probability right. I think disagreeing with Eliezer on the rules of probability isn't something one can ignore. You also hit an important point with the question: is Bob a quant researcher? Or more specifically, what's his epistemology in each domain? A few years ago I met Robert Aumann, everyone's favorite theist-mathematician. It's clear to me that Aumann has separate epistemologies for claims about God, Israeli politics and game theory. I read his book about games with incomplete information, he actually goes to the trouble of writing out every single proof, it never says "God told me this is the upper bound". If Aumann tells me "I've proven with rigorous math than an AI boxing system is possible", I sit up and pay attention. If he tells me "AIs don't have souls so humans will always be superior" I won't take that argument seriously. Eliezer claims and seems to have a single epistemology (EWOR) that he applies to all domains. Because of that, his accuracy in one domain directly reflects on the dependability of EWOR, and thus on his accuracy in other domains.
9Eliezer Yudkowsky
"Does somebody being right about X increase your confidence in their ability to earn excess returns on a liquid equity market?" has to be the worst possible question to ask about whether being right in one thing should increase your confidence about them being right elsewhere. Liquid markets are some of the hardest things in the entire world to outguess! Being right about MWI is enormously being easier than being right about what Microsoft stock will do relative to the rest of S&P 500 over the next 6 months. There's a gotcha to the gotcha which is that you have to know from your own strength how hard the two problems are - financial markets are different from, e.g., the hard problem of conscious experience, in that we know exactly why it's hard to predict them, rather than just being confused. Lots of people don't realize that MWI is knowable. Nonetheless, going from MWI to Microsoft stock behavior is like going from 2 + 2 = 4 to MWI.
Twenty basic rules for intelligent money management
2irons00

I think you can win using this strategy - but it requires a lot of patience. Certainly years - with the possibility of decades. You'd have to be sure of your strategy and sure of your belief in your strategy, changing tact when offside is the worst thing you can do if you are playing a deep value game.

It remains a winning strategy because of that cost.

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Twenty basic rules for intelligent money management
2irons100

My wife had a poor history of saving when we first met while saving and planning ahead financially are one of my strongest areas of discipline. However I think our differences were as much a function of circumstance and nurture as anything innate. Overall I think she wins hands down on discipline, intelligence and foresight vs me.

Because of this core discipline, intelligence and foresight– over time she’s moved far closer to my spending and saving habits having seen their value (and in turn I’ve loosened up, and would still acknowledge it'd probably be ... (read more)

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