Max Entropy
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Max Entropy has not written any posts yet.
Max Entropy has not written any posts yet.
Holy cow, you've walked the exact path I'm walking right now! I used to be super into Bayesian epistemics, AI risk, etc. Then my world model kept seeing ... large prediction errors. I quit AI risk and quant trading, and now see most of our institutions (science, press) as religious/fallible. Now I'm super into vipassana, storytelling, Kegan levels, NVC, IFS, form is emptiness. I'm even considering training at a monastery.
I have a couple questions for you:
I feel like we're the blind men with the elephant more often than we'd like to admit. A lot of the time when two people make conflicting claims about society, really they're both right about their substrate of society and the world is just twice as big as either thought.
Another shocker for most people: 20 million people in the US live in trailer parks. People with similar life circumstances tend to accumulate in similar places, only see those places, and thus vastly underestimate the diversity of life experience. (This is also true of everything in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KpMNqA5BiCRozCwM3/social-dark-matter)
I've played Figgie a fair bit and don't think it's a good tool for teaching epistemics outside of a Jane Street trading internship.
To actually learn with it, you first need a number of motivated playing partners. They need to be quite skilled for their actions to be informative, and the game sucks before they reach this point. In my experience people don't reach this skill level within their first couple hours of play. It also requires N custom-made decks for N rounds of play, or for everyone to install a specific app. So it's really only practical for a trading firm internship program.
I have what I would call unusually good epistemics, and... (read more)
Love this idea, and +1 on Jon Gjengset and Neel Nanda.
For finance though, I'm skeptical of your recommendations (DeepFuckingValue and Martin Shkreli). The former made his money pumping-and-dumping meme stocks, and I get the impression the latter has been selected for fame (like recommending Neil deGrasse Tyson to learn physics).
In general, I think finding good resources in finance requires a much stronger epistemic immune system than nearly any other field! There's so much adverse selection, and charlatans can hide behind noisy returns and flashy slide decks for a very long time. The KL-divergence between what competent looking YouTubers say and what actually works is extreme.
My recommendations would be:
Other recommendations:
For a mix of legal and reputational reasons, I will have to be a little vague in describing the experiences I had.
Part 1: social forces (outside view)
There were a bunch of social forces that led me to form an outside view that the AI risk community doesn't converge to truth. I'll describe one, storytelling.
One thing I've learned is that the stories we tell ourselves are models of reality. Life experiences are too numerous; every narrative is a simplification, and there are many narratives (models) that fit the experiences (data). And the default process that humans use to construct narratives is very unscientific - lots of rationalising, forgetting, selecting based on what frame... (read 723 more words →)