By the way, my mom told me recently she was speaking with a friend from Russia. Her friend went to a clinic and tested positive for covid. Then they went again and tested negative. They asked what the deal was. They were told by a doctor in a very straightforward manner that: “the state tells us how many positive tests we can report per week.” There’s some chance that they don’t even do testing in some clinics, but just assign results randomly to people following the state’s prescription.
Alexei(Alexei Andreev)
I strongly agree with this sentiment, and currently Arbital’s course is to address this problem. I realize there have been several discussions on LW about bringing LW back / doing LW 2.0, and Arbital has often come up. Up until two weeks ago we were focusing on “Arbital as the platform for intuitive math explanations”, but that proved to be harder to scale than we thought. We now pivoted to a more discussion-oriented truth-seeking north star, which was our long-term goal all along. We are going to need innovation and experimentation both on the software and the community levels, but I’m looking forward to the challenge. :)
- 6 Dec 2016 3:08 UTC; 8 points) 's comment on A new reference site: Effective Altruism Concepts by (EA Forum;
I think overall I just appreciate that you guys did something for April 1st. It made the website / community feel a bit more alive.
Okay this is weak sauce. I really don’t get how people just keep letting the AI out. It’s not that hard to say no! I’m offering to play the Gatekeeper against an AI player that has at least one game as AI under their belt (won or not). (Experience is required because I’m pretty sure I’ll win, and I would like to not waste a lot of time on this.) If AI wins, they will get $300, and I’ll give an additional $300 to the charity of their choice.
Tux, if you are up for this, I’ll accept your $150 fee, plus you’ll get $150 if you win and $300 to a charity.
Apparently contacting IBO directly doesn’t work for this. They told me I should contact the school directly. After some searching, I was able to find the email of the IB Coordinator for that school.
This comment was written in response to you feeling confused about what strategies to explore. I might write a fuller post about it, but for now here’re the thoughts off the top of my head:
Calling marking anti-inductive is correct, but it’s not helpful when trying to find strategies (as you’ve just noticed). I’d break down the strategy research process steps into:
1) Can you find a strategy (algorithm + data) that historically has performed well?
2) Can you find this strategy in such a way so as not to find a ton of other strategies that worked by random chance?
3) What % of the market has figured out this strategy?
From Eliezer’s post:
Let’s say you see me flipping a coin. It is not necessarily a fair coin. It’s a biased coin, and you don’t know the bias. I flip the coin nine times, and the coin comes up “heads” each time. I flip the coin a tenth time. What is the probability that it comes up heads?
If you answered “ten-elevenths, by Laplace’s Rule of Succession”, you are a fine scientist in ordinary environments, but you will lose money in finance.
In finance the correct reply is, “Well… if everyone else also saw the coin coming up heads… then by now the odds are probably back to fifty-fifty.”
Right. But if it’s slightly more complicated than just looking at the coin, then suddenly we can have an edge:
1) May be not everyone can write the code to compute which way the coin is facing (algorithm). May be not everyone can see the coin (data).
2) May be other people are looking at the weather and the weather has been sunny nine days in a row.
3) May be not everyone can run their algorithm fast enough to make the trading decision in time. May be others figured out this strategy, but they’re not confident in it enough to deploy a lot of money.
So once you find your strategy, you might be in a pretty small group of people who have discovered it. So you’ll be fine in proportion to how much money is allocated to this strategy vs how much capacity it has.
And the lesson is: aim for a strategy complexity that’s simple enough to pass 2), but complicated enough that most people haven’t found it. And the bar for that is actually not that high (at least in crypto).
I’m now a father of a 3 weeks old girl. So your parenting posts are extra useful and appreciated!
Okay, this discussion is very quickly degrading into complete nonsense. So, I’ll try to correct and address the mistakes that I can spot.
First, to everyone that says that everyone should avoid videogames because of X (X = games are addicting / too much fun / whatever): typical mind fallacy. There is nothing inherently wrong with the concept of games. There are people that can play games in a reasonable manner, even with friends.
Which brings me to my second point: Zynga and Facebook. When I think ‘games’, those are the types of games that come last. Everyone who attacks them is attacking a straw-man. Consider real games like Dreamfall for those who love stories and adventure, Dance Dance Revolution for those who like active/physical games, and The Incredible Machine for those who like puzzles and lego-like games. And I am not even going into the more mainstream games that have a lot of positive features of their own. If you find that a game isn’t fun/educational/interesting enough for you, don’t play it.
Point three: if you pick a game that you want to play, then having a community and friends who play it too is very beneficial. If you want to play DDR to stay fit, then having other people who play DDR and compete/play with you is great.
Point four: games are a time-sink/Skinner box and don’t offer anything in return. Again, not all games. Figure out what you want from games, and then find games that offer it. It’s possible that what you want can’t be fulfilled by games, and that’s fine; then games are just not the right tool for the job. But if you want to relax, if you want to spend some time with friends, if you want to have a fun shared experience, games offer a pretty good way to do so. And the fact that they are virtual is not a detriment. People still read science fiction (or HP:MoR), see movies based on fiction, etc...
Point five: a thousand times more people can die from video games, and you are still astronomically more likely to die while driving your car. Stop this line of thought. “Those are rare, but they do happen” is rationalizing. People die from pretty much everything you can think of.
For real though! I mean, the concept of a “rationalist newspaper” has been floated around for a while now. But now I have a much better sense of what it might look like. This is a great way to get news; I feel like I’m learning about the world in the process too.
There is a number of fundamental topics: shorting, different asset classes, leverage, volatility, futures/derivatives, liquidity, market making, arbitrage, hedge fund investment structure, momentum / mean reversion. It’s true that for all of these you can go and read about them on Investopedia or something. But I know I personally read LW a lot and if someone explained the basics of some field I don’t know much about here there’s just a higher chance I’d read and trust them.
On the more advanced side: constructing trades based on your beliefs, public funds (e.g. SPY), options, finance history, most theory, macroeconomics. There are a lot more topics here for sure; it’s hard to generate them on the spot.
I guess I’m also thinking that many people *do know* because they have heard some concepts being brought up a few times (not necessarily on LW) and it piqued their interest.
I’m definitely not an expert, but it does sound like a few people moved the goalposts. It sounds very similar to the “AI can’t play chess” argument switching to “well, it’s not really playing chess, it’s just following rules” and then to *quietly mumbling something about it not having the True representation of chess*.
So, I agree with the core point. GPT-2 is writing! And it’s writing pretty damn well. Whatever is left has more to do with the general cognition skill than writing.
Renamed.
Hmm it’s not that I find them confusing, and I even managed to explain them to someone who didn’t know about them. I think it just feels… too high complexity or something. Like there’s a simpler version just around the corner. Maybe I’d benefit from 3 positive and negative real life examples of each level.
Here is my person take on why it’s complicated:
When you ask someone if they would like a debate platform and describe all the features and content it’ll have, they go: “Hell yeah I’d love that!” And it took me a while to realize that what they are imagining is someone else writing all the content and doing all the heavy lifting. Then they would come along, read some of it, and may be leave a comment or two. And basically everyone is like that: they want it, but they are not willing to put in the work. And I don’t blame them, because I’m not willing to put in the work (of writing) either. There are just a handful of people who are.
So the problem is definitely not on the technical side. It’s a problem with the community / society in general. Except I’m hesitant to even call it a “problem,” because that feels like calling gravity a “problem.” This is just the way humans are. They want to do things they want to do.
- 29 Mar 2017 18:37 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on What’s up with Arbital? by (
Below are some valuable comments about this topic posted elsewhere by someone else. I’m simply copying them over here since the OP doesn’t have a LW account:
“”“If your current job position is already almost optimal for your goals, then it’s possible you can do a few interviews, get a few offers and pick the best one, which will give you some marginal improvement. Or use those offers to leverage a raise at your existing company.”””
And you don’t even have to apply at 72 (!!!?) companies. After one year of employment, I applied at three other companies, got offers from two, leveraged them off each other, then used those offers to negotiate a raise in the range of 50-100%. All while working full time (with some vacation days for interviews).
(I did not have a lot of free / social time during those weeks, though.)I haven’t finished reading original article, but there are often downsides to leaving a job (golden handcuffs, business relationships, social relationships, etc). So staying can be best even if the offer isn’t as good on paper, depending...
Also, original article really only applies if you’re in an industry where labor is relatively liquid and your talents are highly desired by employers. This is a privilege workers in the software industry (me and OP) have; the vast majority of workers probably can’t really follow this advice.
The amount of money I can make working for a company isn’t even close to how much money I want to donate. There are multiple reasons to believe I will succeed, some of which I’ve listed above. Another reason for doing a game startup comes from Michael Vassar’s advice: “Find something that inside view says you’ll definitely succeed at, and outside view says you’ll definitely fail it. Do it and see what caused the discrepancy.” This is the fastest way to fix your perception of the world.
Starting a successful company is not magic. There is a set of skills, and I’m planning to learn and master them. Will my first startup be successful? May be not, but there is no reason to stop after the first failure, especially since I’ll have so much more experience after it.
I think people might be forgetting that we (or at least Eliezer) is already drawing a lot of publicity towards LW, in particular through HP:MoR. And, while I don’t know the numbers, I feel that it alone already attracted a lot of people, whose quality is… well, probably somewhat average. And we are okay.
Interest in enrolling in CS, AI, and ML degrees goes up 5-10x from start to end of 2023.
I’m willing to bet it will be less than 2x.
Wow, excellent advice all around. I’ve gone insane in exactly that way a few times, but later I learned that I have bipolar that gets triggered by stress and/or psychedelics. During the manic phase the mind runs away with whatever it’s thinking / obsessing about. Maybe that could potentially explain some of the other people too.
I just sent them an email, volunteering to do a presentation for Richwoods HS, which is the only school close enough to me. Let’s see what happens.