All of Bojadła's Comments + Replies

Could you make it more clear how you would change the original Harris market to avoid the problem? I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "base question and a conjunctive market". I figure you're talking about the "other" option in the market you link, which prevents N/A. But how do you add that to the Harris market? Is it just adding one more option "Another person not listed here is nominee and Harris wins"?

5kave
Happy to clarify. Similar to what Ben said, you work out the conditional probabilities from other markets. First, here's a fact about probabilities that you'll need to use: the probability of "A conditional on B" (for example, "Harris wins conditional on choosing Walz as her VP") is equal to probability of "A and B" ÷ probability of "B" (so, "The Harris-Walz ticket wins" ÷ "Walz is the VP") . So whenever you want to know P(A|B) (the probability of "A conditional on B"), you can instead ask P(A&B) (probability of "A and B") and P(B). That's what the linked market (more-or-less) does. It asks "who will be the next US VP?". This is basically asking "if the presidential candidate picks this person as the VP, will their ticket win?". You can divide this by the probability "will the relevant presidential candidate pick this person as VP", to get the conditional probability you want.
2Ben
My guess is that you just don't have any conditionals, but work them out from other markets. Eg. One market on  "Harris wins with X on the ticket", one on "Harris looses with X on the ticket", "Harris chooses X for VP" and so on. Then the chances of her winning, conditional on different candidates, can be worked out by comparing how these markets are doing.

I read your post but didn't understand it immediately. After thinking about it, I wrote what I feel the main points are in my own words. Maybe this makes it more clear to others too. Or maybe the OP will comment that I misunderstood something.


The "Harris market" can be seen as (is functionally equivalent to) a collection of markets. Each market has the following form:

Would Harris win, if {person} were her Vice Presidential nominee in 2024?

Each market resolves as follows:

  • Yes, if {person} is the nominee and Harris wins.
  • No, if {person} is the nominee
... (read more)

I agree and I am putting my money where my mouth is.

I will play this game under the rules linked in the OP with me as the gatekeeper and anyone as the AI. I will bet at odds 10:1 (favorable to you) that I will not let the AI out. The minimum bet is my 10 k USD against your 1 k USD and the maximum bet my 100 k USD against your 10 k USD. We will use a mutually accepted LW community member as referee.

If you believe you have at least a 10% chance of making me let the AI out, you should take this bet. I predict no one will take me up on it.

I speculate that the ... (read more)

2lsusr
I too am confident enough as gatekeeper that I'm willing to offer similar odds. My minimum and maximum bets are my $10,000 USD vs your $1,000 USD.
1[comment deleted]
2the gears to ascension
I don't care to compete because I expect to lose, but strategies that might work against this seem like they'd look like investment pitches. that's typically what gets people to move that much money, after all.

The bet has been lost. The merge wasn't allowed. https://archive.ph/MDYWF

The share price of Spirit Airlines (NYSE: save) dropped to 50%.

I consider it unlikely that my interactions with ChatGPT 3.5 (that led to my original post) played a significant role as training data that helped make ChatGPT 4 so much better.

Why do you consider it unlikely?

If I was good at memorization (model parameter size) but bad at reasoning then your original post showing up in my training data would help me.

I'm also curious how much of the improvement comes from improvements to the hidden and secret prompt that Openai adds to your Chatgpt interactions. Unfortunately we can't test that.

4VipulNaik
Good question! First, my original post didn't provide the correct answers for most questions, only what was wrong with ChatGPT. Going from knowing what was wrong to actually giving correct answers seems like quite a leap. Further, ChatGPT changed its answers to better ones (including more rigorous explanations) even in cases where its original answers were correct. Second, ChatGPT's self-reported training data cutoff date at the time it was asked these questions was September 2021 or January 2022. To my knowledge, Issa didn't ask it this question, but sources like https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/16m6yc7/gpt4_training_cutoff_date_is_now_january_2022/ suggest that it was September 2021 at the time of his sessions, then became January 2022. So, the blog post, published in December 2022, should not have been part of its training data. With that said, the sessions themselves (not the blog post about them) might have been part of the feedback loop, but in most cases I did not tell ChatGPT what was wrong with its answers within the session itself.

Also, to be clear, nothing in this post constitutes investment advice or legal advice.

I often see this phrase in online posts related to investment, legal, medical advice. Why is it there? These posts obviously contain investment/legal/medical advice. Why are they claiming they don't?

I guess that the answer is related to some technical meaning of the word "advice", which is different from its normal language meaning. I guess there is some law that forbids you from giving "advice". I would like to know more details.

Edit: This question was answered in a p... (read more)

You are implying that it is hard to get Samsung expose. Why? On their website [1] they list several ISINs. Some of them I can buy in through my usual broker. They aren't special.

[1] https://www.samsung.com/global/ir/stock-information/listing-Info/

2Jonas V
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/082714/how-invest-samsung.asp 

My problem is that you link libsyn in the post but it doesn't contain all episodes. I was able to find the other episodes but I would still like for the post to be updated.

1Solenoid_Entity
Ahh good point, sorry I didn't notice that. I'll update the post shortly.

Are you no longer updating the libsyn version? The most recent episode there is from August 2022 while the other sites have newer episodes.

1Solenoid_Entity
Thanks for checking! The Libsyn feed has been redirected, it's now hosted on BuzzSprout. All new episodes should still be going to all the platforms. Are you having trouble with any of the platforms, or just the Libsyn site itself? That one won't work anymore, unfortunately.

Is it possible to buy the book as an ebook? Why not?

4Drake Morrison
Someone did a lot of this already here. Might be worth checking their script to use yourself.
4Raemon
It is not, the reason for which is "it's extra work and we haven't done it and are fairly busy." (Note you can read the posts online. I have a partly completed auto-ebook-maker that converts LessWrong Sequences to ebooks but ran into a couple difficulties I never got around to finishing)
6MondSemmel
Wow, that's a great page! Apparently each book is available as an online sequence, including the ability to track reading progress etc., minus whatever edits have been made to the essays for print publication.

Do you OP have access to secret (non public) information related to the bet?

9RatsWrongAboutUAP
No.
-1Throwaway2367
Asked 6 days ago, still no answer, yet OP commented a bunch in that time. Hmmm..

The link to the 36 questions is paywalled. I am pasting them here.

  1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
  2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?
  3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?
  4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?
  5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
  6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
  7. Do you have a secret hunch about ho
... (read more)

Could you recommend (or link to a recommendation) of what first aid kit to buy? What should it contain? How expensive should it be? Where should I buy it from?

It is 2022-10-16, roughly one year after the post was made. The S&P 500 has not dropped below 3029 at any point. It is currently at its lowest value since the post was made at 3583.

https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/indices/equity/sp-500/#overview

2FCCC
Yep, down from 4327 at the time of posting, but not down enough for my prediction to be correct. As far as I can tell, the main issue with my prediction was the Fed moving soooooo slllllooooow to increase interest rates, past the point of utter delusion on their part. Not only does this mean delaying the market crash, it means the dollars in which they are valued were worth less (meaning higher stock prices than they would've been with less inflation). If I'm charitable to myself, I'd say right in direction, wrong in magnitude. And potentially only wrong in time frame, if it does drop below 3029 over the next few years. But there's other things I missed, like Russia invading Ukraine. And even if I knew that was likely, I wouldn't have predicted the West's massive financial sanction response. But though much of the inflation blame got put onto the war, inflation was high before the invasion. I also should have looked into the past performance of the Fed to see how late to the party they've previously been. I've been doing some backtests to get more accurate investment decisions. Will do an update when I'm happy with my methodology.

Which resources do you recommend to start learning meditation this way?

You can go unbelievably far with the book The Mind Illuminated, that was my primary ressource and generally considered the best way to start, the book describes a 10-stage journey from complete noob to meditative virtuosity, with detailed instructions about the pitfalls and goals of each stage. For any questions you might have the subreddit r/themindilluminated is very active and you can quickly get answers if you post there. The subreddit r/streamentry is also a place for "serious meditators", in the sense of people who don't just meditate for stress reli... (read more)

This might be "optimal given your state of knowledge about ROB" but it isn't "guaranteed to succeed more than 1/2 of the time". For example:

My prior is that Rob always picks a positive and a negative number.

Actually Rob always picks two positive numbers.

Thus when we play the game I always observe a positive number, guess that it is the larger number and have a 0.5 probability of winning. 0.5 is not greater than 0.5

2Oscar_Cunningham
Right, I should have chosen a more Bayesian way to say it, like 'suceeds with probability greater than 1/2’.

How do you know the story was written by EY?

There is a certain story, which I will not name here in order to reduce the spoiler-y nature of the following description.

Yes this is the book. Maybe you could put it into spoiler tags in your comment.

1justinpombrio
Yikes I missed that, thank you.

Alternative explanation: Your mother did participate in the scam in some way and is too embarrassed to admit it. (You know your mother better than I do. I'm just saying this might have happened and you might not have considered it.)

Thank you for this answer. You also helped make another point of confusion clearer: When I read the op I wasn't sure what the interpretation of number theory is. There must be one or the incompleteness theorem wouldn't apply but what is it?

Based on your comment here I understand this better and it makes more sense why people might disagree about for example the continuum hypothesis being "reasonable". While mostly everyone agrees on the standard ZFC axioms not everyone agrees on the interpretation of ZFC.

Then there must also be hardliners who take ZFC as t... (read more)

I'd like to use this post to ask a question I've had for a while about the incompleteness theorem and the halting problem but never had a good chance to ask.

When I first heard that that any sufficiently rich formal system, together with an interpretation, has strings which are true but unprovable or that it is not possible to determine whether a program halts, this felt like an amazing and important discovery. But when I think more about the standard proof of the halting problem, or the hear this explanation of incompleteness theorem or the English "this s... (read more)

2rossry
It is definitely impossible to (in general) determine whether a given program is equivalent to a specific Weird Program. This is a consequence of the halting problem itself! I think the question about "statements I care about" is, at its core, a question about aesthetics and going to be kind of subjective. For example, does the above statement about not being able to prove the equivalence of programs qualify? (Or would it be non-interesting if one of the programs being compared were sufficiently weird?) Another statement that might or might not qualify is of the form "the 8,000th Busy Beaver number is less than N" -- see The 8000th Busy Beaver number eludes ZF set theory. Though, admittedly, Yedidia and Aaronson did that one by asking whether a particular conjecture-counterexample-finding program halted, so maybe that's also too contrived for your aesthetics?
9Sam Marks
[Epistemic status: I think everything I write here is true, but I would feel better if a passing logician would confirm.] Great question! The important thing to keep in mind is that truth only makes sense relative to an interpretation. That is, given a statement S in your system, you can ask whether it's true in a particular interpretation, but it might be true in some interpretations and false in others.  Here's a fun fact: S is true in every interpretation of the system if and only if S is provable. (Proof: clearly if S is a theorem then it is true in every interpretation. Conversely, Godel's completeness theorem says that if S is true in every interpretation then it is a theorem.) So when you ask for "naturally occurring" true-but-unprovable statements, do you want 1. a statement which is true in every interpretation but unprovable? or 2. a statement which is true in some interpretation but unprovable? If it's (1), then the fun fact above says that no such statements exist. If you want (2), then by taking the contrapositive of the fun fact, you'll see that this is the very same as asking for a statement S such that neither S nor 'not S' is a theorem! In other words, you're looking for a statement which is independent of your system. And you probably already know of oodles of these: the axiom of choice is independent of ZF set theory, the continuum hypothesis is independent of ZFC, large cardinal axioms, etc. -- I have a feeling that this purely mathematical explanation may have done nothing to cure your core confusion, so let me write something else here which I think strikes more at the heart of the question. We often like to think that the integers exist; that there's a God-given copy of the integers sitting out there in metaphysical space, not a formal model, but the real thing which the axioms are trying to capture. By the discussion above, we know that no matter what axioms we impose, we'll never be able to fully capture the integers (because any f

Look for custom form fitting earplugs. I find the generic throwaway ones uncomfortable and wouldn't be able to sleep with them. Custom ones are made based on a mold of your ear and fit perfectly and are more expensive. The ones I have fit snugly enough that I feel no discomfort wearing them in general and only a little when sleeping on my side (with pressure on my ear through the pillow). I've slept with them 5 days of the week for the last half year which has improved my sleep significantly because I am very sensitive to noise. They also work well when traveling.

1Jan Czechowski
Thanks for this piece of advice - I actually invested in custom earplugs, it cost me around 60eur and 2h of visits and commute. They are not really perfectly comfortable in the night, but they help in the morning, when my Wife gets up earlier than me, she doesn't wake me up anymore.
3ChristianKl
This is a bit surprising to me. I have custom fitted earplugs for protecting my ears against loud music will still letting me hear the music clearly. I wouldn't wear those to sleep because they are made out of silicon and thus harder then throwaway ones. If you found a specific brand of custom fitted earplugs very comfortable it would be great to know which one worked for you.

Previous suggestion on LessWrong suggests that savy uses of PolyMarket don't do that. They would create a Yes/No share pair and then sell the No for a few of 2% of $0.09.

Could you explain this more or link to a previous suggestion? I don't get it.

3ChristianKl
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nezKGutEuwYGhK29j/exploiting-crypto-prediction-markets-for-fun-and-profit is a previous post that explains how to interact with prediction markets and it's in the comment section of it.