Leechblock type browser extensions: 7 points
I simply use an app called Hosts Editor on my phone to map reddit.com to localhost. This instantly broke a habit I had of wasting time on reddit (an activity I generally regret after the fact, but that I still tended to do whenever I had a few spare minutes) and increased the time I spent on reading more interesting content (instapaper, or books). No downsides I have noticed.
I was surprised at this:
In a recent survey, just 1 percent knew we had cut extreme poverty in half, and 99 percent underestimated the progress. That survey wasn’t just testing knowledge; it was testing optimism—and the world didn’t score so well.
The survey seems to be the one described here: http://www.glocalities.com/news/press-release-global-povert-survey.html
...It reveals that 87% of people around the world believe that global poverty has either stayed the same or gotten worse over the past 20 years, when the exact opposite is true – it has more tha
There are a lot of people with incentives to convince you that things are horrible.
Notable categories are people who want to mobilize you to do something, e.g. protest, and people who want your money.
He might have been lucky rather than have a good strategy, yes. Hard to tell.
Oh, I agree. He himself claims that many analysts were saying the same things, and that you would need to be an imbecile to not notice what was going on at the time. My feeling is that he himself does not feel that he made an impressive prediction, and was actually just pointing out that it would inevitably go wrong at some point. in fact he has been talking about the issue for long before 2008, it just happens that the publication of his book came at just the right time to make it look like he predicted it just before it happened. (I may be wrong, and am ...
Taleb's strategy is to absolutely make many bets with high payoff, low downside, expecting most of them to not pay out.
eg. http://www.newsmax.com/finance/StreetTalk/Nassim-Taleb-Shorting-Treasuries/2010/02/04/id/348993/ he was wrong, but as he puts it:
“You have a very small probability of making money,” he said. “But if you’re right, you’ll never see a public plane again.”
another quote:
"I did 700,000 trades in career, was "wrong" on between 650,000 and 695,000."
We can assume that he is either lucky, or well calibrated, since he ...
Source for the 2008 crisis prediction would be his book The Black Swam (I remember checking the publication date when reading The Black Swan, since it did seem very prescient):
...Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling
I don't think that the dev's touched predictionbook in quite a while. In general discovery of interesting public predictions doesn't work well because it's not easy to search and there are no tags.
Yes, this is true. I believe they accept pull requests but there has not been much development for a long time and the site is quite basic.
I didn't know about this one, thank you!
(some previous discussion of predictionbook.com here)
[disclaimer: I have only been using the site seriously for around 5 months]
I was looking at the growth of predictionbook.com recently, and there has been a pretty stable addition of about 5 new public predictions per day since 2012 (that is counting only new predictions, not including additional wagers on existing predictions). I was curious why the site did not seem to be growing, and how little it is mentioned or linked to on lesswrong and related blogs.
(sidebar: Total predictions (based on the IDs of ...
I did the poll
Coming up with criteria and metrics on the economy is pretty easy
I think it can be quite hard to do this in the context of evaluating a presidency. For example while you could look at GDP, unemployment, etc. it can be hard to determine if the president had much impact on those numbers.
Does anyone know if there have been efforts to quantify the impact of a president on the economy? I would imagine that most of the change is due to randomness/external factors.
Education
This is another tricky one, in that we might need to wait more than 4 years to see the results for a lot of metrics.
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