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Updates and Reflections on Optimal Exercise after Nearly a Decade

I may be missing something, but it's not obvious to me from a physics perspective that running up hills is less impact-on-the-joints per effort, though from experience I agree it's true. Maybe I don't understand how impact is measured.

As long as your mass is rising at a constant rate, ascending vs. descending doesn't change the downward force your feet must exert. Yeah, there will always be some vertical acceleration, like when cresting a hill, but unless one is running staircases with landings every 10 steps this wouldn't be representative of the workout.... (read more)

3romeostevensit2y

I think poor form when running on flat ground is also a component. It is easy to magnify your impact by over striding, which happens less on ascent.

The Base Rate Times, news through prediction markets

kenakofer2y10

I'm super excited for this! First impressions of site:

The colorful graphs are eyecatching and fun. Some graphs have too much going on, with all the markets and different resolution criteria. Some visual simplification desired.
It seems that platforms get different colors in different graphs? I desire each platform to have a consistent style.
Icons rather than platform names all over the place would feel good
I love the "China position paper" annotation. I want to see lots of that.
On the US debt graph, one of the vertical line annotations is probably not displ

kenakofer2y22

This is a something I frequently get hung up on: If the AGI is highly intelligent and socially manipulative, but lacks good motor skills/advanced robotics, doesn't that imply that it also lacks an important spatial sense necessary to understand, manipulate, or design physical objects? Even if it could manipulate humans to take arbitrarily precise physical actions, it would need pretty good spatial reasoning to know what the expected outcome of those actions is.

I guess the AGI could just solve the problem of human alignment, so our superior motor and engineering skills don't carelessly bring it to harm.

1[anonymous]2y

There are robotics transformers and general purpose models like Gato that can control robotics. If AGI is extremely close, the reason is criticality. All the pieces for an AGI system that has general capabilities including working memory, robotics control, perception, "scratch" mind spaces including some that can model 3d relationships, exist in separate papers. Normally it would take humans years, likely decade of methodical work building more complex integrated systems, but current AI may be good enough to bootstrap there in a short time, assuming a very large robotics hardware and compute budget.

Latent variables for prediction markets: motivation, technical guide, and design considerations

kenakofer2y10

Thanks for being patient with my questions. I'm definitely not solid enough on these concepts yet to point out an exploit or misalignment. It would be super helpful if you fill out your LVPM playground page in the near future with a functional AMM to let people probe at the system.

Flipping is the only symmetry that exists for unidimensional cases.
If you have multiple dimensions, you have a whole continuum of symmetries, because you can continuously rotate the dimensions into each other.

What do you mean by unidimensional cases? So like if the binary LVPM&nb... (read more)

2tailcalled2y

No problem, answering questions is the point of this post. 😅 The playground page already has this. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will see this info: If you make bets, then the numbers in this section get updated with the costs and the payouts. But I guess my interface probably isn't very friendly overall, even if it is there. 😅 I am talking about the dimensionality of Y, not the dimensionality of →X. In the markets I described in the post and implemented for my demo, Y is always one-dimensional. However, it is possible to make more advance implementations where Y can be multidimensional. For instance in the uncertainty about the outcome of the Ukraine war, there is probably not just a Ukraine wins <-> Russia wins axis, but also a war ends <-> war continues axis.

Latent variables for prediction markets: motivation, technical guide, and design considerations

kenakofer2y10

So this is in fact true: LVPMs will not be totally unique, but instead have symmetries where some options do equally well. The exact type of symmetry depends on the kind of market, but they mainly look like what you describe here: swapping around the results such that yes becomes no and no becomes yes.

I'm not a savvy trader by any means, but this sets off warning bells for me that more savvy traders will find clever exploits in LVPMs. You can't force anyone to abide by the spirit of the market's question, they will seek the profit incentive wherever ... (read more)

3tailcalled2y

Hmm I'm not sure what exploits you have in mind. Do you mean something like, they flip the meaning of the market around, and then people who later look at the market get confused and bet in the opposite direction of what they intended? And then the flipper can make money by undoing their bets? Or do you mean something else? Yep, in half along one specified dimension. There's a few different ways. If someone bets to set the market state to a θ that flips the fixed dimension, the market implementation could just automatically replace their bet with −θ so it doesn't flip the dimension. The payouts are symmetric under flips, so they will get paid the same regardless of whether they bet θ or −θ. Alternatively you could just forbid predictions in the UI that flip the fixed dimension. Flipping is the only symmetry that exists for unidimensional cases. If you have multiple dimensions, you have a whole continuum of symmetries, because you can continuously rotate the dimensions into each other.

Latent variables for prediction markets: motivation, technical guide, and design considerations

kenakofer2y10

So if I'm understanding correctly, you're saying a LVPM market Y could be displayed without a title, and traders would still converge toward finding the joint probability distribution function? So instead of making a LVPM titled "Will Ukraine do well in defense against Russia?", I could make a LVPM that says "Hey, here are a bunch of existing objective questions that may or may not be correlated, have at it", and it would be just as functional?

If so that's pretty neat. But what stops Trader1 from interpreting Y as "Will Ukraine do well in defense against R... (read more)

3tailcalled2y

Yep. So this is in fact true: LVPMs will not be totally unique, but instead have symmetries where some options do equally well. The exact type of symmetry depends on the kind of market, but they mainly look like what you describe here: swapping around the results such that yes becomes no and no becomes yes. The way I usually handle that problem is by picking one of the indicators as a "reference indicator" and fixing it to have a specific direction of relationship with the outcome. If the reference indicator cannot be flipped, then all the other indicators have to have a fixed direction too. (One could also do something more nuanced, e.g. pick many reference indicators.) I don't know whether this is necessary for humans. I mainly do this with computers because computers have no inherent idea which direction of the LV is most natural for humans. I don't know if it would be a problem for people. It's not something that happens iteratively; while you can flip all the parameters at once and still get a good score, you cannot continuously change from one optimum to an opposite optimum without having a worse score in the middle. So if it is an issue, it will probably mainly be an issue with trolls.

LESSWRONG
LW

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