All of Conflux's Comments + Replies
Hi! I’m the person that wrote that Manifold newsletter. My opinion: you’re totally right, and it was sloppy to include that as justification that Whitmer was a reasonable choice.
In the counterfactual universe where that conditional market didn’t exist, I might have written that section anyway; it started because I personally believed that a Harris-Whitmer ticket would have about those odds, and it just so happened that the conditional market agreed so I cited it. (In my head it was fine because Whitmer had some chance to be the VP in the past, so the odds ...
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1I'm really impressed with your grace in writing this comment (as well as the one you wrote on the market itself), and it makes me feel better about Manifold's public epistemics.
Your comment about flax eggs is very validating to me; I used them once, to make vegan brownies when I did the Seven-Day Vegan Challenge, and they were not good. I’ve now updated substantially in favor of trying them for recipes like muffins!
I don't think I've ever commented on one of your posts, but I've probably read about fifty of them! Seeing your name listed as the author of a post is a good guarantee that I'll find it interesting and thought-provoking.
"Regression to the mean" is also known as "reversion to the mean," by the way, which I think is a clearer name.
I'm quite interested in voting systems, but I was surprised to discover that the general consensus is that score beats approval! I checked it out and it seems to be a robust finding that in real life people understand & are happier with score, but this surprised me.
I'd think that since there are so many options for score, it'd be a bit overwhelming and hard to figure out how to optimize. Whereas with approval it's basically "vote for the minor candidates you like better than the major ones; and also vote for your least unfavorite major cand...
I thought this provided a lot of clarity about membership norms! I definitely have had the experience of arguing with people based on different understandings of which norms the server/group operated under.
To me, the textbook example of something that runs under Coalition Norms is a for-profit business. Does this not fit in that category cleanly, an oversight, or just omitted to keep the list of examples minimalistic?
I think I have a pretty simple solution to this: treat 0 as the point when each being is neither happy nor unhappy. Negative numbers are fine. You can still take the sum. In the example, this seems like just subtracting 10 from everyone, which is 0 in the dogless state and -3 with the dog. Thus: no puppy.
I appreciated this! I didn't know much about o1, and this gives me a much better understanding of how it's different. My brain finds Abram very trustworthy for some reason.