Hey there~ I’m Austin, currently building https://manifold.markets. Always happy to meet LessWrong people; reach out at akrolsmir@gmail.com, or find a time on https://calendly.com/austinchen/manifold !
Austin Chen
Karma: 1,346
Great post! One note:
Think in terms of language-to-language translators: to translate really well from language A to language B, you need be masterful at A (to understand all the subtleties of the meaning) and also at B (to convey that meaning while preserving those nuances). That’s why good translators (in both senses) are so rare.
Mastery of both A and B is great, obviously, but if you can choose only one, choose B.
I’ve spent a decent chunk of my life scanlating manga from Japanese to English, and my observation is that fluency in the target language (English, in this case) is much more important for a good translation than fluency in the source. I can overcome a misunderstanding in Japanese with copious amounts of research (Google Translate, JP dictionaries, etc); but the thing that my readers consume is a product in English, which is much harder to “fake”.
Two takeaways, continuing on the translation analogy:
If you want to get into cultural translation, start by writing for the audience you know really well, and then do research into the source culture. My bet is that Scott is more “fluent” in the analytical audience, not the social one.
Scanlation teams often have a JP to Eng translator, fluent in JP, and a second English editor who can clean up the script. Cultural translation may also benefit from two people from different cultures collaborating (SSC’s adversial collaboration comes to mind)
I liked how the epub strips out unnecessary UI from the glowfic site, but downloading and moving epubs around is a pain...
So I built a web reader on top of this code! Check it out here: https://share.streamlit.io/akrolsmir/glowflow/main
It’ll work for any Glowfic post actually, eg https://share.streamlit.io/akrolsmir/glowflow/main?post=5111 Would probably be simple to add a download button to get the epub file; source code here.
On the Manifund regranting program: we’ve received 60 requests for funding in the last month, and have commited $670k to date (or about 1/3rd of our initial budget of $1.9m). My rough guess is we could productively distribute another $1m immediately, or $10m total by the end of the year.
I’m not sure if the other tallies are as useful for us—in contrast to an open call, a regranting program scales up pretty easily; we have a backlog of both new regrantors to onboard and existing regrantors to increase budgets, and regrantors tend to generate opportunities based on the size of their budgets.
(With a few million in unrestricted funding, we’d also branch out beyond regranting and start experimenting with other programs such as impact certificates, retroactive funding, and peer bonuses in EA)
I took a couple hours and hacked together a very simple prototype, just to see how MetaPrompt would play out! Try it out here.
Doesn’t support multiple users yet, but it wouldn’t be that much harder to build out. Here’s the rough source code.
(And since your post led to an implementation of MetaPrompt, that would make your post a… MetaMetaPrompt)
Yeah fwiw I wanted to echo that Oli’s statement seems like an overreaction? My sense is that such NDAs are standard issue in tech (I’ve signed one before myself), and that having one at Wave is not evidence of a lapse in integrity; it’s the kind of thing that’s very easy to just defer to legal counsel on. Though the opposite (dropping the NDA) would be evidence of high integrity, imo!
This is a really powerful concept; I can immediately think of at least two fields this applies to:
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When you’re not sure how to build a software user interface, you might think “let’s run an A/B test on 1000 people and see which performs better”. But you’ll get 90 percent of the value just by showing it to one or two users and watching them use it, live.
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When you’re learning to cook, one of the first things they teach you is to sample your food throughout. The first sip or bite will immediately tell you how to adjust the recipe (eg add more salt, add something spicy, or a dash of vinegar)
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First off, I’d like to apologize; I wasn’t trying to gatekeep LessWrong or anything like that. This is part of what’s hard about giving advice online; my mental model of the audience is shaped by the few I know personally + myself, but it’s by no means comprehensive. Some people need to hear “this is specifically how you can save $20/month” and not “this is the general way to approach personal finance”!
That said—I still want to push back. When it comes to personal finance, it’s easy to focus on cutting costs and personal spending; it feels virtuous, and the benefits are visible. But the huge gains in personal finance come from a getting a handful of things very right, almost all of which are related to making more money rather than cutting your costs.In my head, these things are:
Earning a consistent high return on your cash (stock market’s ~10% rather than saving account’s ~0.5%)
Negotiating your salary
Working on your career capital and connections
One intuition for this is the amount of money you can earn is unbounded; no matter who you are, I’d guess you personally know someone making 2x as much, and know of someone who makes 10-100x as much. But the amount of expenses you can cut is hard capped at 100%, and most people would have a pretty difficult time dropping it by even 30%.
And again, it’s hard for me to speak to your financial situation, not knowing you personally; it’s possible your financial strategy matches well to your risk appetite and lifestyle, in which case, please ignore my musings!
I’ve been following the SMTM hypothesis with great interest; don’t have much to add on a technical level, but I’m happy to pay a $200 bounty in M$ to Natália in recognition of her excellent writeup here. Also—happy to match (in M$) any of the bounties that she outlined!
I already believed this, but I’m glad that this concept is now written up so I can point to it in the future!
Another frame: A lot of people seem to think “oh, Billy likes cookbooks, I’ll buy him a cookbook since he’ll probably like that”. But that’s exactly backwards! Billy has spent a lot of time figuring out which cookbooks are the best, which ones suit his tastes; it’s very unlikely that your money spent on a cookbook you picked more-or-less at random would be spent nearly as efficiently as if you just gave the money to Billy straight up. Conversely, you would have to spend a lot more effort to research the space of cookbooks to give even a passingly good gift.
Instead, just give him something where you have comparative advantage; something from a hobby you enjoy that is a bit foreign to the recipient. The best gift I ever got was a sketchbook and set of drawing pencils; I know nothing about art, but appreciated the gentle nudge from an experienced artist.
As a result, there is a very strong near-term possibility that hundreds of millions of people in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia will starve. Even where starvation does not kill directly, political unrest and food wars may do it.
Wait, is this like a 0.1%, 1%, 10%, or 50% possibility? Does this account for how international governments will likely respond to wheat export decreases? (I did a quick search on Metaculus, no results)
Taking this idea seriously, it’d be worth sitting down and figuring out what we can personally do to avert outcomes as bad as hundreds of millions starving.
This is a great list! However, I was almost immediately turned off because of
2. Some banks charge you $20 a month for an account, others charge you 0. If you’re with one of the former, have a good explanation for what those $20 are buying.
Because this point is nowhere near top of mind for “tips for better personal finance”. $240 per year should never make or break your life (among people who are reading these comments, anyways), so I’d suggest something more along the lines of:
Make sure you have 3 months of expenses in liquid cash
Store 90% of the rest of your money in an index fund
Experiment with the last 10% (stock picks, prediction markets, crypto, who knows)
The cash-on-time return for getting these basics right is much much higher than switching banks to save a measly $20/month (or e.g. worrying about interest rates on your savings accounts)
So, I love Scott, consider CM’s original article poorly written, and also think doxxing is quite rude, but with all the disclaimers out of the way: on the specific issue of revealing Scott’s last name, Cade Metz seems more right than Scott here? Scott was worried about a bunch of knock-off effects of having his last name published, but none of that bad stuff happened.[1]
I feel like at this point in the era of the internet, doxxing (at least, in the form of involuntary identity association) is much more of an imagined threat than a real harm. Beff Jezos’s more recent doxxing also comes to mind as something that was more controversial for the controversy, than for any factual harms done to Jezos as a result.
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Scott did take a bunch of ameliorating steps, such as leaving his past job—but my best guess is that none of that would have actually been necessary. AFAICT he’s actually in a much better financial position thanks to subsequent transition to Substack—though crediting Cade Metz for this is a bit like crediting Judas for starting Christianity.
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Inositol, I believe: https://www.facebook.com/100000020495165/posts/4855425464468089/?app=fbl
I definitely feel like “intentionally lying” is still a much much stronger norm violation than what happened here. There’s like a million decisions that you have to make as a CEO and you don’t typically want to spend your decisionmaking time/innovation budget on random minutiae like “what terms are included inside our severance agreements?” I would be a bit surprised if “should we include a NDA & non-disclosure” had even risen to the level of a conscious decision of Lincoln’s at any point throughout Wave’s history, as opposed to eg getting boilerplate legal contracts from their lawyers/an online form and then copying that for each severance agreement thereafter.
Haha thanks! This took me way too long to make:
I set up a Manifold market for this, for anyone who’d like to bet along: https://manifold.markets/Austin/will-an-ai-get-gold-on-any-internat
The concept of epistemic bits is quite interesting! In Manifold terms, that would be like comparing the total amount of M$ one has amassed (maybe in a specific community like the one for AI) and using them as weights for how seriously to take two commentators.I worked through an example just to prove the math to myself:
Eliezer and Paul both start with 1000 M$.
For Eliezer to end up with 2x the epistemic weight, Paul wagers 333 M$ (so the end result would be 1333:667 or ~2:1).
Taking 9:1 odds (roughly geometric mean between 8% and 16%), Eliezer puts up 37 M$.
So if Paul wins, he ends up at 1037:963, or ~1.08:1
Definitely agreed that the bottleneck is mostly having good questions! One way I often think about this is, a prediction market question conveys many bits of information about the world, while the answer tends to convey very few.
Part of the goal with Manifold is to encourage as many questions as possible, lowering the barrier to question creation by making it fast and easy and (basically) free. But sometimes this does lead to people asking questions that have wide appeal but are less useful (like the ones you identified above), whereas generating really good questions often requires deep subject-matter expertise. If you have eg a list of operationalized questions, we’re always more than happy to promote them to our forecasters!
I think feedback loops and OODA are really great; thanks for drawing attention to this concept! One thing that would have made this post more compelling: do you have any concrete examples of applying OODA in real life?
At the risk of being a misinterpreting idiot:
When I spell things out so clearly only an idiot could misinterpret my words, the comments get worse because idiots misinterpret my words.
Do you judge how successful a piece is by the quality of the comments it received? That strikes me as a strange metric to optimize for.
I could see this metric aligning with “discover”, if you permit bad comments to waste your time. But I think you get more “explain” by writing for a broad audience. Maybe not “dumb”, but at least “ignorant”.
Even math PHDs prefer simple English before differential equations. See Eliezer on “aim high, shoot low”: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2TPph4EGZ6trEbtku/explainers-shoot-high-aim-low
I desperately want to make this ecosystem exist, either as part of Manifold Markets, or separately. Some people call it “impact certificates” or “retroactive public goods funding”; I call it “equity for public goods”, or “Manifund” in the specific case.
If anyone is interested in:
a) Being a retroactive funder for good work (aka bounties, prizes)
b) Getting funding through this kind of mechanism (aka income share agreements, angel investment)
c) Working on this project full time (full-stack web dev, ops, community management)
Please get in touch! Reply here, or message austin@manifold.markets~