All of Pablo's Comments + Replies

I think there is a vast difference between Gerard and Kruel, not just in the damage each has caused but also in their intellectual honesty and responsiveness to argument (null in the case of Gerard, decent in the case of Kruel, at least from my recollection).

One of the biggest online threats to rational discourse, “RationalWiki”, just reached a settlement with all but one of the eight plaintiffs suing them, and deleted the corresponding biographical entries. They are also considering pre-emptively removing all their other hit pieces—countless articles that have ruined careers, stifled research, and brought entire fields of inquiry into undeserved disrepute.

I agree this looks promising and is the reason I bought long-dated SPY calls a few weeks ago (already up by 30%). But I would feel more reassured if I felt I could understand why such an opportunity persists. What is the mental state of the person on the other end of this trade?

Can you share the spreadsheet/code on which the calculations are based?

Yeah, that makes sense, especially if combined with the feature that allows users to disagree with specific parts of the post, as Michael notes. (Though note that the disagree vote is anonymous, whereas disagreeing with a selection is public, so the two aren’t fully comparable.)

This is currently at –1 despite being a carefully reasoned post on an important topic. I wonder if the downvoter(s) would have used the disagree vote instead had it been available. (More generally, it is unclear why that button is available in comments but not in posts.)

I'm still thinking about how to hedge incase the upcoming chaos turns the market sour

Have you thought more about this? How about VIX call options?

Thanks—I understand now. I thought $855 was the price SPY would reach if the current price increased by 50%. 

If you buy a $855 Strike price call for that date and SPY increases 50% by then you get a 12x return.

I never traded options, but isn’t the return you get critically sensitive on the date before expiration by which the strike price is hit? If this happens just before expiration, my understanding is that the option is worthless: there is no value in exercising an option to buy now at some price if that happens to be the market price. More generally, it makes a big difference whether the strike price is hit one week, one month, or one year before expiration.

Are you making any implicit assumptions in this regard? It would be useful if you could make your calculations explicit.

Mmh, if there is no reason to take that particular trader seriously, but just the mere fact that his trades were salient, I don’t see why one should experience any sense of failure whatsoever for not having paid more attention to him at the time.

Still, my main point was about the reasons for taking that particular trader seriously, not the sense of failure for not having done so, and it seems like there is no substantive disagreement there.

Why do you focus on this particular guy? Tens of thousands of traders were cumulatively betting billions of dollars in this market. All of these traders faced the same incentives.

Note that it is not enough to assume that willingness to bet more money makes a trader worth paying more attention to. You need the stronger assumption that willingness to bet n times more than each of n traders makes the single trader worth paying more attention to than all the other traders combined. I haven’t thought much about this, but the assumption seems false to me. 

Audible has just released an audio version of Nick Bostrom’s Deep Utopia.

I was delighted to learn that the audiobook is narrated by David Timson, the English actor whose narrations of The Life of Samuel Johnson and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I had enjoyed so much. I wonder if this was pure chance or a deliberate decision by Bostrom (or his team).

pollsters will have attempted to correct mistakes, and if they knew that there would be an R/D bias this time, they'd adjust in the opposite way, hence the error must be unpredictable.

Exactly. Silver has discussed this dynamic in some of his old FiveThirtyEight articles. The key is to appreciate that polling error is not an effect one can naively predict by looking at past data, because it is mediated by polling agencies’ attempts to correct it.

Silver’s model and most other lines of evidence indicate that the US presidential race is as close to a tossup as it gets. But, as of this writing, you can buy Harris contracts on Polymarket for 38 cents. The explanation for this apparent mispricing seems to be that, over the past few days, a single pro-Trump trader has poured tens of millions of dollars into the platform. “Domer”, the author of the linked tweet and Polymarket’s most successful trader to date, claims that this effect has depressed Harris’s contract price by around five cents, though I am u... (read more)

There is an archived version here.

See also this comment by Gwern.

What are, in you assessment, some of the most cost-effective ways of throwing money at the problem of reducing existential risk?

This was an interesting read, which I only discovered because the post was highlighted on the front page. I took some quick notes, which I share below in case they are useful to anyone.

• Rescuing Jews during the Holocaust wasn’t an especially effective “intervention”, compared to the internal politics of each Nazi-controlled country where Jews lived.
• Moreover, rescuers didn’t appear to have many common traits, so creating would-be rescuers to prevent future genocides is not very tractable.
• One trait that appears to have been shared by rescuers is that they “we

If the strategy failed in predictable ways, shouldn't we expect to find "pre-registered" predictions that it would fail?

This, and see also Gwern's comment here.

“How many Oxford dons does it take to change a lightbulb?”

CHANGE‽‽‽

Greg Lewis discusses this at length here.

Metaculus generates lots of valuable metrics besides the "meaningless internet points" about which Zvi and others complained. If Yudkowsky had predicted regularly, he would have been able to know e.g. how well-calibrated he is, how his Brier score evolved over time, how it compares to the community's, etc.

There is no need to create a Flashcards tag when we already have Spaced repetition.

Keynes's view of Leninism seems similar to Russell's, and may have been influenced by it. Here's a quote from The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (published in 1920):

Bolshevism is not merely a political doctrine; it is also a religion, with elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures. When Lenin wishes to prove some proposition, he does so, if possible, by quoting texts from Marx and Engels. A full-fledged Communist is not merely a man who believes that land and capital should be held in common, and their produce distributed as nearly equally as possible. H

Thanks for the explanation.

Speaking personally, I would much prefer that contributions judged to make an article net worse be reverted than downvoted, both because this gives the contributor much clearer feedback and because it improves the quality of the article, relative to the opinion of the user deciding whether to downvote or revert. If other users disagree with that assessment, the karma system can perhaps then be used to resolve the disagreement, or to at least contribute to a resolution by conveying a signal whose meaning is now much easier to disc... (read more)

I'm not sure how to interpret the downvoting of a recent edit I made. I simply clarified a sentence and replaced a dead link with the version archived by the Wayback Machine. Downvoting substantive posts without providing an explanation is often justified given the difficulty associated with pinpointing the nature of a complex disagreement, or because the signal the downvote is meant to convey is relatively clear from the context. But with a simple, atomic edit that seems unambiguously (very mildly) positive, at least from a commonsense perspective, such unexplained downvotes are apt to leave an editor puzzled and unable to draw any valuable lessons, except perhaps that they should simply abstain from contributing in the future.

Related:

This week, I’ll spend 40–50 hours in Virtual Reality (Immersed), like I did last week and every (work) week for the last 2½ years. It’s not just fun and games — there are plenty of those, along with exercise, meditation, creativity, socializing, etc. — but for this article, I’m only focusing on (and counting) the work.
 

Yes, really: 8–10 hours a day strapped in. I’ve encountered a fair amount of skepticism about both the technology and the general premise, many nit-picks about the software, or how it fails to match some preconception about how things “should” work.

I decided to switch to Emacs 1.5 years ago, and I feel it's the most important computing decision I made since... starting to use a computer? I may write a more detailed post on what things I use Emacs for, but here I just wanted to endorse the above recommendation, including its caveats ("Don't bother with it though if you don't have some time to invest in learning it"), and emphasize that Emacs can fulfill many needs besides "code editor" (I am not a programmer myself).

Thanks, but this post is no longer updated and the link is not broken on my website. (If you think that's confusing, despite the notice at the top, I may consider replacing its contents with just a link, though retaining the content may make it more discoverable.)

Thanks for the update!

chaotic History of Economic Analysis

The word 'chaotic' was an adjective I chose to describe the book's content, rather than part of the book's title. :)

Related to the ReplicationMarkets example: on Metaculus, there is an entire category of self-resolving questions, where resolution is at least in part determined by how users predict the question will resolve. We have seen at least one instance of manipulation of such questions. And there is even a kind of meta-self-resolving question, asking users to predict what the sentiment of Metaculus users will be with regard to self-resolving questions.

The probability I would assign to #8 intuitively is about 0,41. Math based on my other three predictions yields (doing the calculation now) 0.476. I am going to predict the math output rather than my intuition.

I think the correct response to this realization is not to revise your final answer so as to make it consistent with the first three. It is to revise all four answers so that they are maximally intuitive, subject to the constraint that they be jointly consistent. Which answer comes last is just an artifact of the order of presentation, so it isn't a rational basis for privileging some answers over others.

The contracts are denominated in USD, and they pay in that currency. But you trade on margin, and the collateral can be in any currency (crypto or fiat). In your example, you get back the BTC plus 15% of what that BTC was worth in USD when you made the trade. 

Incidentally, TRUMPFEB is now trading at 0.16 (i.e. implied 16% chance that Trump is president next February). This looks insane to me (and I have bet accordingly). I'd be curious if you or others have further thoughts on what might be going on.

I'm not sure I understand your argument, given that FTX allows traders to keep balances in both USD and BTC, but in any case historically FTX prices have been in line with Betfair/PredictIt prices, so I doubt this consideration is relevant.

I'm too lazy to look it up, but I did research this a couple of weeks ago and found that 538 had indeed outperformed the markets both in 2008 and 2016 (I wasn't able to find data for 2012). This is not very informative, though, since it's just a couple of cases. Much better is to look at the state-level predictions and use brier scores as a measure of forecasting performance.

man do I wish that there was just one large market with minimal fees

Such a market exists, though unfortunately it is restricted to countries where most LW users are not citizens of.

Only the first article in the comment is by Silver, on whose expertise the original poster is basing his recommendation. That article doesn't discuss mail-in ballots or voter suppression, and in fact his main point is that the time remaining until election day (almost three months when the article was written) combined with uncertainties due to Covid-19 meant that the race was still open back then. Those considerations have much more limited force at present, when only 16 days remain, and Biden's lead has widened considerably. 

If you've been at all li... (read more)

The book is dedicated "for Peter, who convinced me". Maybe that mysterious Peter is the ultimate cause of Christian's interest in Al alignment and his decision to write a book about it?

Makes sense! Thanks for the explanation.

a frustratingly well-paywalled, yet exhaustive, complete and informative overview of the IARPA's FOCUS tournament

Since you quote from a section that is behind the paywall, I assume you have access to the article. If so, could you make it available? Or just send it to me (name@surname.com) and I'll upload it to my site and post a link to it here and on LW. Thanks!

Thanks for writing this—just a couple of days ago I thought it might be a good idea to get food pedals.

Since you use Karabiner, have you considered using goku to create "complex modifications"? It might help you make your keyboard more ergonomic and hence ease your wrist pain. I personally like to use the spacebar as a modifier key, and control the arrow keys with spacebar-j / k / l / i. You can also set spacebar-a / s / d / f to delete letter/word forward/backward. I actually have hundreds of modifications, but these are amongst the most ... (read more)

Also it is good that you had here an example of something that a lot of people would view as a negative case (making the invention of the hydrogen bomb faster).

There's also the example of a work without which the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent deaths of tens of millions of people in famines and mass killings, may not have occurred. But until you mentioned it, I hadn't realized that fiction appears to be more often credited with having a positive than a negative influence, whereas for philosophy the reverse seems to be the case. Would be interesting to move beyond impressions and come up with a more rigorous way of testing this.

To reasonably conclude that PredictIt's limits are "limits of prediction markets"—as your title asserts—you need to show either that the other existing prediction markets also exhibit these limits, or that there is a fundamental theoretical reason for expecting such limits to be exhibited by any prediction market. As far as I can tell, you do neither. (You do say that «similar analysis is applicable to any [prediction market]», but you never justify this assertion. In fact, of the six problems you note, I think the only one that may be plausibly claimed to be inherent to prediction markets is #4, and even that one may be potentially solvable.)

Of course genetics isn't everything. This is recognized in the third law of behavioral genetics. Researchers who rely on twin studies do not assume otherwise.