All of at_the_zoo's Comments + Replies

That post made me write this post, but I'm not sure that I'm referring to the same thing. Basically I mean something like "people whose beliefs or actions are so unreasonable, even on things that they should have thought long and hard about, that they seem to belong to a different species from myself." Like Robin Hanson in this tweet or Elizer Yudkowsky when he thought he would singlehandedly solve all the philosophical problems associated with building a Friendly AI (looks like I can't avoid giving examples after all). I'm pretty sure these two belong in the top 0.1 percentile of all humans as far as being reasonable, hence the title.

2Ben Pace
For the record my update here has been of the sort "I should expect from the outside that I would also see this sort of behavior from myself without a very targeted effort to avoid it, as it seems to me like a human universal" rather than "This is an easy mistake for me to avoid".

You could use things like being able to outperform the market, being consistently ahead of the Overton window, finding a reception for your less objectively verifiable ideas among (a small group of) other high-performing individuals. This doesn't guarantee that you're not still a lizardman among the 99.9%+ lizardmen, just in a high-performing contrarian cluster (hence my rule #1), but at least rules out being a crazy person living in a normal world (unless you're just hallucinating all of the evidence, but there's no point worrying about that).

Sorry for being unclear. I meant producers of those commodities, except for uranium for which I also have some exposure to the commodity itself.

If you spend any time following stock touts on twitter / stock picking forums etc you will see these people quickly.

The people I follow generally don't advertise their track record? For the hedge fund manager I mentioned, I had to certify that I'm an accredited investor and sign up for his fund letters to get his past returns. For the ones that do, e.g., paid services on SeekingAlpha that advertise past returns, it has not been my experience that they "then fail to do so out of sample" (at least the ones that passed my filter of being worth subscribing ... (read more)

Without even checking, I can think of a bunch of assets which 7x'ed since Jan 2020. (BTC/general crypto, TSLA, GME/AMC etc).

I figured that's the first thing someone would think of upon hearing "7x" which is why I mentioned "This was done using a variety of strategies across a large number of individual names" in the OP. Just to further clarify, I have some exposure to crypto but I'm not counting it for this post, I bought some TSLA puts (forgot whether I made a profit overall), and didn't touch AMC. I had a 0.1% exposure to some GME calls which went to ... (read more)

4SimonM
Right, I wasn't disagreeing with you, just explaining why 7x isn't strong evidence in my own words. Yes, but I don't think there's a huge amount of value in doing that. If you spend any time following stock touts on twitter / stock picking forums etc you will see these people quickly. To be clear, I have no interest in dissuading you from trading. You've smashed it - you have confidence in your edge - go wild. I'm more cautioning people from following you thinking this is easy. Financial markets are extremely competitive and hard. It's easy to mistake luck for skill and I don't want other people losing money they can't afford. I generally find posts like this are net-negative EV. I wouldn't with something like that. However, assuming 250 trades each done on 5% of your capital, you'd need to be returning >15% on every single trade to return 7x. My experience say that's unlikely, but ymmv. If that is the case then yes, you have serious edge and please take my money. (Especially if those are after tax returns!). I'm not sure what the value would be for me doing it? I'm not sure adding my word saying "I think this guy is legit because I saw a track record" would bring much value to either of us. I guess if I worked for a fund which might have interest in hiring people then I guess I might. But at the times when I have been in those roles, if someone turns up and makes implausible claims about returns, I politely show them the door. I wish you the best of luck. I have never achieved anything close to those levels of returns, but would sorely love to do so.

1 in 5 isn't especially strong evidence.

I agree this isn't a very strong argument. I think theoretically we can probably get a much tighter probability bound than 20% by looking directly at the variance of my strategy, and concluding that given that variance, the probability of getting 600% return by chance (assuming expected return = market return) is <p for some smaller p. But in practice I'm not sure how to compute this variance. Intuitively I can point to the fact that my portfolios did not have very high leverage/beta, nor did I put everything i... (read more)

SimonM120

Without even checking, I can think of a bunch of assets which 7x'ed since Jan 2020. (BTC/general crypto, TSLA, GME/AMC etc). So yes, I agree this depends on the portfolio you ran.

Personally, I have seen enough people claiming to outperform, but then fail to do so out of sample. (I mean, out of sample for me, not for them) for me to doubt any claim on the internet without a trading record.

Either way, I think it's very hard to convince me with just ~1.5 years of evidence that you have edge. I think if you showed me ~1k trades with some sensible risk parameters at all times, then I could be convinced. (Or if in another year and a half you have $300mm because you've managed to 7x your small HF AUM, I will be convinced).

I currently have ~100 positions spread across: uranium, copper, lithium, oil, fertilizer, shipping, Nvidia Google Microsoft Baidu (hedge against short AI timeline), a basket of SPAC/deSPAC commons&warrants (which I bought after the SPAC sector became severely depressed), individual "value stocks" and "special situations" in various other sectors. Most of these were entered within the last few months, and my portfolio looked pretty different before that, but I can't really talk about what I was doing before without risking de-anonymizing myself.

2Annapurna
Thank you.  I am inferring that your investing portfolio is 100% in equities and equity derivatives, and it seems that quite a bit of it is in high beta stuff.  So you combine high beta with derivatives (leverage), and you get a great combination of risk that in the 22 months that you've invested paid off quite handsomely.  Congratulations, your ability / willingness to bear risk combined with timing has worked. I hope we get to see future updates on your strategy. 

The efficient markets model says that any strategy during this period had expected return of 50%.

Wait, I think this is wrong. It actually says that any beta 1 strategy had the same expected return as the market as a whole. If my portfolio had a beta of 2, for example, either by using leverage or by buying only high beta stocks, then my expected return would be double that of the market.

I wish I could say that I kept my portfolio's beta at or below 1 at all times, which would make the reasoning easier, but I did sometimes trade derivatives that arguably ... (read more)

1johnswentworth
See my answer to Paul below. Same thing applies for the CAPM: it's an approximation, and the expected value formula is the efficiency condition which correctly accounts for how much margin one should actually expect to be able to get, as well as the effect of margin calls. (In the expected value formula, beta is wrapped into the discount factor; the CAPM approximation pulls it out.)

I recommend looking at commentators as a source of data, but doing your best to not believe anything that could reasonably be classified as an opinion rather than a fact. That includes opinions about what topics deserve attention.

This must be the biggest disagreement between us. I think I couldn't possibly have gotten the return that I did if I had followed this advice, especially the latter part about what deserves attention. Can you say more about why you think this?

ETA: Aside from the fact that it seems to have worked in practice, my theory is that i... (read more)

5PeterMcCluskey
I'm a bit unclear how to map your generate versus detect distinction onto my thoughts. Very little of what I do seems like generating ideas. I'd describe my process more as noticing possibilities / finding ideas, then evaluating them. My experience says it's harder to evaluate ideas than to find them. I doubt that I'm unusually good at finding ideas, so there's something strange about our disagreement. I'll guess it's due to some combination of you being unusually good at evaluating ideas, and being overconfident about those evaluations. I find new ideas mostly by looking at more companies than most other investors. That's likely more time consuming than your approach, and sometimes feels like a mind-numbing search for a needle in a haystack. But I never exhaust the supply of new companies to look at (e.g. there are many non-US stock exchanges that I haven't found time to look at). My concerns with commentator opinions: * Neglected topics / ideas tend to be more profitable than ones that get adequate attention, because getting attention tends to cause stocks to be efficiently priced. * Framing effects: if I frame issues the same way as others, I'll have some of the same biases they do. * Social pressures: commentators have more goals than just making money for their followers. It's hard for me to avoid being influenced by that. Here are some more specific guesses as to why you might value commentators opinions more than I do: * Your approach works a couple of years per decade, maybe when there's a large influx of inexperienced investors, and underperforms the rest of the time. You might still be right in this case if the outperformance is high enough in the best years - I might have overweighted median years in evaluating my experience. * Something has changed to make your approach usually work better (e.g. Seeking Alpha might have made it easier to distinguish good commentators). I haven't thought much about these issues for over a decade. * You're unus

Seems a good idea. Thanks for the question.

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See also this Twitter thread for some additional insights into this story. Given the politically sensitive nature of the topic, it may not be a great idea to discuss it much further on this platform, as that could further antagonize various camps interested in AI, among other potential negative consequences.

2magfrump
I appreciate the thread as context for a different perspective, but it seems to me that it loses track of verifiable facts partway through (around here), though I don't mean to say it's wrong after that. I think in terms of implementation of frameworks around AI, it still seems very meaningful to me how influence and responsibility are handled. I don't think that a federal agency specifically would do a good job handling an alignment plan, but I also don't think Yann LeCun setting things up on his own without a dedicated team could handle it.
2magfrump
I would want to see a strong justification before deciding not to discuss something that is directly relevant to the purpose of the site.

Hacker News discussion about why Margaret Mitchell was fired. Or see this NYT story:

Google confirmed that her employment had been terminated. “After conducting a review of this manager’s conduct, we confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct,” read a statement from the company.

The statement went on to claim that Dr. Mitchell had violated the company’s security policies by lifting confidential documents and private employee data from the Google network. The company said previously that Dr. Mitchell had tried to remove such files,

... (read more)
2magfrump
Noted that a statement has been made. I don't find it convincing, and even if it did I don't think it changes the effect of the argument. In particular, even if it was the case that both dismissals were completely justified, I think the chain of logic still holds.

See also this Twitter thread for some additional insights into this story. Given the politically sensitive nature of the topic, it may not be a great idea to discuss it much further on this platform, as that could further antagonize various camps interested in AI, among other potential negative consequences.

Answer by at_the_zoo30

One relatively easy and low-cost idea: buy some physical Bitcoin and/or gold, hide them somewhere, and hedge them with short positions (in Bitcoin futures and/or gold ETFs) if you don't want to be too exposed to their price movements. It's probably a good idea to have some exposure to them anyway as a hedge against inflation. And in case it's not clear, physical Bitcoin means on a hardware wallet that you can easily hide and carry with you when you need to move.

1Xodarap
It would be surprising to me if gold was useful. The things you most want are presumably travel (flight/car/fuel for your car), and those things generally seem to be sold by large corporations which don't accept gold. I guess in theory if you have some gold and your assets get frozen but your neighbors assets are still liquid, you could sell them gold in exchange for cash (or crypto)? But I'm not sure if you can even buy plane tickets with cash these days. You can definitely use cash for buying gas though I guess.

Ah, I think you're right. It seems like they want an "ethnic studies" version of everything and students have to take at least one ethnic studies course per year. I'm not a huge fan of that and it seems like it is taking some well-deserved criticism.

FYI, there is virtually no criticism within the city / school district itself, because (1) it's too progressive / left-leaning and (2) anyone who does offer criticism gets labeled as "racist" or "white supremacist", even if the critic isn't white. (Look up "internalized oppression" if you're not already fami

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1Darkar Dengeno
Agreed on both counts, yeah. I still don't think this is actually evidence against the possibility of the political nexus shifting away from social justice (in fact, I would count it as evidence we're near peak intensity) and I still think there is a lot of value to trying to understand and capture interesting insights from the social justice movement, but I don't think a real concerted effort do do this is possible until things relax a bit. If someone can think of reasonable ways to verify whether the cultural toxicity of the SJ fight has 'moved on' I would be willing to make a public prediction that it will have done so in five years. Maybe some kind of random sample of twitter fights? Or a survey of leftist tumblr?

The curriculum isn't mandatory

I believe this is a mis-reporting, or talking about part of the curriculum. See pages 27 and 28 of this presentation:

We believe that all courses should incorporate Ethnic Studies curriculum, however at a minimum, students should participate in 4-5 ethnic studies classes in high school, i.e., a minimum of 1 ethnic studies course per year. [...]

A graduation requirement is a way to ensure that Ethnic Studies classes reach all students.

1Darkar Dengeno
Ah, I think you're right. It seems like they want an "ethnic studies" version of everything and students have to take at least one ethnic studies course per year. I'm not a huge fan of that and it seems like it is taking some well-deserved criticism. Looking at this presentation through the lens of the original post, it seems like what the Ethnic Studies Board is trying to do is create safe spaces and reduce perceived harms against minorities (hence, I think, why they want to make sure there's an "ethnic studies" version of every core class: so that the people they feel will best benefit from this curriculum can use it for their entire high school education). I'm not sure they have fully considered the consequences of doing this (especially opportunity cost: all the class time spent on "ethnic studies" math is time not spent on, well, math) but I see no objection with the goal of providing minority students with a curriculum which will fit them better, in and of itself. This is an interesting discussion which touches on education philosophy (how do we know the curriculum the Ethnic Studies Board has produced actually accomplishes its goals?), optimal resource allocation, language, culture, and (yes) race. But it is not a discussion we can have if seeing the phrase, "countering dominant narratives" makes the participants blind to anything else there.

This sounds unlikely, uncharitable, and frankly more than a little conspiratorial. I'm not even sure if this is something most social justice advocates would even want.

It's already happening IRL. See this Reason article:

The district has proposed a new social justice-infused curriculum that would focus on "power and oppression" and "history of resistance and liberation" within the field of mathematics. [...]

If adopted, its ideas will be included in existing math classes as part of the district's broader effort to infuse ethnic studies into all subjects

... (read more)
1Darkar Dengeno
Right, so, a few things: There is a huge difference in my mind between forcing teachers to adopt a specific curriculum with political implications and providing them the resources to include political topics as they see fit. I'll admit, looking over the framework itself feels pretty icky. There are a few things I like about it, though. I've long felt that more history of mathematics should be included in math curriculum (for much the same reason as history of science should be included). Seeing how our understanding of math as changed as new concepts were invented makes it feel more like a living process (off the top of my head, you could probably get a lot of mileage out of just looking at how the conception of numbers changed from the Greece to Rome to India). This is practically proto-rationalism. Getting kids to question why things are accepted as the correct answer ('because that's what the book says' vs 'because I can prove it given ZFC axioms') and understand that there is a way they can see for themselves if something is true. I didn't say the framework was perfect. This is just one example of clear progressive-coded language and yeah, I have a hard time defending why this ought to be in a math curriculum. Going back to my earlier point, though, Christian-advocacy groups do sometimes try to get evolution taken out of public schools (or have creationism taught alongside evolution as an equivalent 'theory'). I'm not saying that it never happens or that there aren't extremists or that no effort should be put into wacking back insanity. But trying to paint evolution vs creation as the most important debate ever feels silly now. And more than that, for people who think religion vs atheism is the most important fight ever, trying to get one side to recognize good arguments on the other is like pulling teeth. Politics is the mind-killer. The fact that, as I write this, a reasonable-if-flawed attempted steelmanning of an ideology that the LessWrong community

Can you explain why "the only measure available is indeed the ordinary amplitude-squared measure"?

Also, I'm confused about this:

Continuity: If you prefer |A> to |B> and |B> to |C>, there's some quantum-mechanical measure (note that this is a change from "probability") X such that you're indifferent between (1-X)|A> + X|C> and |B>.

According to the Wikipedia entry you linked to, a probability measure is a real-valued function, but X here is apparently just a number? What's the significance of your parenthetical note here?

0Manfred
It's kind of an abstract mathematical fact. If you are fine with that, I recommend reading Everett's original paper, which includes this fact as equation 34. The significane is that now we're talking about some "fundamental" property of the universe, rather than probability, which is more about our ignorance of what's going to happen. Um, so if that description of probability didn't make sense, the distinction won't make much sense.

This seems relevant:

Five: US tax law prohibits public charities from getting too much support from big donors.

Under US tax law, a 501(c)(3) public charity must maintain a certain percentage of "public support". As with most tax rules, this one is complicated. If, over a four-year period, any one individual donates more than 2% of the organization's total support, anything over 2% does not count as "public support". If a single donor supported a charity, its public support percentage would be only 2%. If two donors supported a charity,

... (read more)
2MichaelVassar
Yes