Programmer, rationalist, chess player, father, altruist.
cata
Karma: 1,756
There’s one piece here that I don’t understand. Why exactly do we expect doctors to prescribe this medication that doesn’t work, thereby wasting resources? Is it a situation where we expect patients and patient representatives to demand the medication, due to being scientifically illiterate (or because they are doing Hanson-esque signalling that they care) and then doctor-shopping until they can get it? Or is there some kind of pay-per-treatment incentive that will make doctors want to prescribe it? Or something else?
I’m surprised that you are making a connection between Nate’s new position and modern attitudes towards gender. To me, it’s just the opposite.
For me, “dolphins are fish because they swim and look fishy” is associated with a “common sense clusters” classification strategy, which also gives a traditional common-sense idea of who is a man and who is a woman.
Conversely, “dolphins are mammals because of their genetic lineage and specific mammalian traits” is associated with a kind of “cleverly selected clusters by some intellectuals” classification strategy, e.g. “people have a separate innate gender identity which determines their gender.”
It’s really hard to take seriously a thesis that is only presented in the form of a 3-hour YouTube hangout conversation, presumably because the participants are more interested in promoting their brand than communicating information to anyone.
If these guys give a shit maybe they should write down their opinions.
In areas with a lot of vaccine penetration, case counts mostly are just going to be very low anyway; combined with the vaccine effectiveness against infection (~80-90% for mRNA vaccines) the probability of being infected will be negligible. For example, in my local area and given my demographics, my current best estimate is that I incur around 10 microcovids if I spend an hour indoors breathing right on another random person. (And I am using conservative numbers.) If that’s not true in your area, it may well be true in a month or two.
The only way this is going to change is if a new variant comes around and mucks everything up (in which case the current studies won’t be very informative.)
So for myself, I don’t really care very much about answering this question right now.
If there are more than 1,010 “rack stolen” credits available at a price of $0.01 then you could buy all the “rack stolen” credits for $0.01 and then steal the rack yourself for $1,000.
Since this is true, it would be irrational for participants to sell the market down to $0.01. They should be taking into account the fact that the value of stealing the rack now includes the value of happening to have advance information about stealing the rack, so thieves should be more likely to steal it.
Ethereum is a working system that has been improving steadily with real-world feedback and a lot of invested labor for years, whereas Cardano is effectively vaporware. Outside view says that Cardano is not going to suddenly implement smart contracts and be a perfect diamond-like jewel. I believe that they may have “something” “soon”, but I don’t believe that they are going to catch up to Ethereum in any sense in the foreseeable future.
I think most of the value of Cardano and similar is a hedge on the event that smart contracts are a great idea but Ethereum experiences some catastrophic problem, like a major governance schism, or some giant disaster during the Ethereum 2.0 merge.
Probably if you are a programmer you will be spending thousands of hours SSHed into this or that over your life, so you had better be able to view and edit files there.
That study is exactly as useless as the totally implausible sounding result would lead you to think. It has no control group (so it’s counting the 10% of children who have problems like “headache” or “lack of concentration” months after infection as having a COVID symptom), the methodology of how children were selected is a total mystery (but 5% of them were hospitalized, so it’s clearly biased towards dramatically more severe cases than the general population) and the sample size is tiny.
I don’t know the best way to figure out how much kids are at risk but it doesn’t have anything to do with reading that.
This really doesn’t work at equilibrium though. Why would I pay in advance instead of free-riding? Why would the amount I’m willing to pay reflect the value I get? That only happens if I believe that my contribution is 100% responsible for bringing about the good, but it’s not clear to me how to ever get more than 1/N. The whole thing seems to rely on charity (which I do like, but for stuff that’s charitably supported you don’t need ads anyway).
I’m sure you’ve thought about it more than me, and I agree that it’s not clear this will work at mega-scale as a “literally everything that requires an initial investment runs on this” strategy. However, it also really looks to me like it can work for a lot of things. Some things working in its favor:
Humans have a lot of intuitively operating cooperation machinery. People understand the idea of pitching in. It makes them feel like they did a good deed.
People respond well to social prestige as a reward for pitching in, which these platforms are getting very good at providing, through mechanisms like special badges, public credits, and access to special preview content (technically this is a loss to not to provide to everyone, but it’s tiny compared to the usual model.)
Removing so much waste creates a huge amount of slack for people to defect and still get results of the quality they are accustomed to.
Pay-in-advance models typically make visible the option to price-discriminate upwards, allowing people with huge amounts of money or grantmakers to pay for more warm fuzzies, more prestige, and more choice over what gets funded. This seems to happen often enough to make a substantial difference—you can see examples of whales on Patreon if you look at higher tier rewards that have “N of M remaining” visible.
Your scheme is also interesting and is clearly in some sense a “less hacky” approach than trying to get people to altruistically do things which are economically irrational. (Although—sometimes it’s a lot easier to get humans to do things that seem like the socially acceptable thing to do than to get them to do the economically rational thing to do.) I would like to see that tried, too.
I don’t really see my POV represented in the comments here, so I will add my 2c.
I have two strong beliefs:
Ads are net bad for people watching the ads.
It’s really bad to create business models that involve creating a substantial marginal price for something that has little or no marginal cost, like models where you invest a bunch of money to build something and then charge people in money or attention to have it. Ads are just a different kind of price.
1 seems extremely obvious to me and I’m sort of confused why people think differently. It’s true that sometimes if I see an ad, it will communicate helpful information to me. However, this is obviously not even close to commensurate with the value of my time. If I have a problem, and I want to solve the problem, I will never, ever look for ads to help inform me about solutions to the problem, because there are much, much more efficient sources of information about solutions to all problems I ever have. This is a natural consequence of the fact that advertiser incentives are grossly misaligned with my preferences, and incidentally the fact that ads are produced by random marketing professionals who are usually not actually foremost experts on my problem. (This is also true if I want to just serendipitously learn unexpected new things.)
If the guy who writes the bottom line about the diamond in the box wants to tell you five minutes of crap about why the box has a diamond, why would you listen to him for five minutes, unless you are a masochist? That’s an insane way to try to learn true things. The world is filled with people who aren’t specifically trying to convince you of a particular self-interested bullshit conclusion. Why not spend your time listening to them, instead?
Regarding 2, if you create a business model like this, unless it’s perfect at price discrimination, it’s going to produce a deadweight loss in the form of people who are not willing to pay your price, and who then will not benefit from your product, even though you could give it to them for free. Since price discrimination is hard, this is usually a gigantic loss. In addition, with digital media, you have a huge enforcement problem, so tons of resources will be burned all over to try to extract the price from thieves, and then to work around the enforcers, and so on.
We should create coordinated investment systems where people who desire a product pay in advance in accordance to how much they desire it, and the product is then given away for free to anyone. Patreon (and clones) and Kickstarter (and clones) are clearly successful examples of this, and we should try to move more and more consumer spending into that model.
I am a pretty serious chess player and among other things, chess gave me a clearer perception of the direct cost in time and effort involved in succeeding at any given pursuit. You can look at any chess player’s tournament history and watch as they convert time spent into improved ability at an increasingly steep rate.
As a result, I can confidently think things like “I could possibly become a grandmaster, but I would have to dedicate my life to it for ten or twenty years as a full-time job, and that’s not worth it to me. On the other hand, I could probably become a national master with several more years of moderate work in evenings and weekends, and that sounds appealing.” and I now think of my skill in other fields in similar terms. As a result, I am less inclined to, e.g. randomly decide that I want to become a Linux kernel wizard, or learn a foreign language, or learn to draw really well, because I clearly perceive that those actions have a quite substantial cost.
Funny, but I think it would be funnier if it were less unsubtly rude. The concept is already inherently edgy enough that adding extra insults is like putting frosting on ice cream.
After hanging out in the Polymarket zone for a while, it became clear to me that there are at least two pretty distinct groups of people—the +EV veterans who have fun trying to beat the market and make money, and the gamblers who like to play the game of betting on their opinions and seeing who makes bank. The latter group doesn’t really like it when the +EV people find a “clever” edge like this because it makes the game less fun and fair-seeming.
There exists no third group that really wants an accurate up-to-date prediction of the CO2 level printed on the website as of the next day.
It seems to me that there are many different complaints being raised:
A) Experts in specific things were treated as general authorities.
A lot of what we get is adjacent expertise. So somebody who studies viruses, and maybe knows a lot about the protein structure of viruses, will opine about masks, right… They didn’t have expertise in those areas, and were in fact just on a par with me, or anybody else, right? But they had the, sometimes, arrogance that comes with believing you’re being asked about your area of expertise.
B) People have differing moral values about what is a good result.
We’re just talking about, what is a fair and reasonable way to prioritize different people over each other?
C) The arguments and decisions being made aren’t actually being made by the real experts, they are being made by pseudo-experts.
And I’m like, “Well, according to whom?” Right? Obviously in consequentialist terms, it’s good ethics. I happened to know the top expert in Kantian ethics, she thinks that’s a good idea. So, who the fuck are you?
I think these complaints are not incompatible with some people being experts at reasoning about ethics. It seems like what’s happening (I certainly have never observed “bioethics Twitter” so I am just guessing) is that random people are rationalizing their beliefs by appealing to random prestigious or powerful people and calling them the “experts” to whom you should defer all judgment, and then Julia and Matt are pushing back on that whole general dynamic.
You know, Polymarket really works and anyone can use it right now, including US citizens; the only really serious problem with it is that it costs a flat fee of about ~$50 to deposit and withdraw, and you have to be able to figure out how to send cryptocurrency.
Some comments:
As a random smart LW person, I actually rarely have interest in participating in a prediction market, because I have to work hard to have any edge on anything, and even if I have an edge I risk betting against someone who has true inside information. I would have to value my time less or enjoy modelling things more to be an active participant. It’s not like the stock market where you are incentivized to use it even if you don’t know anything special.
It’s hard to get people to participate in long-term markets, because the payoff just isn’t very good. I have zero desire to work hard on a model so that I can make an expected profit of 10% two years from now.
$25k is a joke—is that for real? That does not pay off someone for making a good model. It also doesn’t let smart money fix a wrong price even if they magically have a perfect model. You would have to organize some kind of fund with many traders working on many models who all shared info and went in on all of each others’ trades.
I think if you have a good system to predict prices, it doesn’t make sense to add this tweeting dynamic. If you do it, and it produces good predictions about the combination tweet+price system and makes money as a result, then what will probably happen is a ton of other people clone the idea and produce similar tweeters and/or predictors until it’s much harder to produce good predictions with consumer-grade models, whereas if you kept your system to yourself you could have gone on extracting money from your good predictions quietly for longer.
Naively, the system seems similar to “good predictor” human fund managers who advertise their services, where you can see the end state I’m describing: there are so many of them that most of them don’t make money anymore, and even if someone shows you good evidence of their good predictions in the past it’s no longer sufficient evidence to act on their advice in the present.
I agree—I think there are many communities which easily achieve a high degree of safety without “safetyism”, typically by being relatively homogeneous or having external sources of trust and goodwill among their participants. LW is an example.
The ultimate explanation for the low savings rate seems to be that people are myopic. In other words, people implicitly care more about having stuff now, rather than later. But that too can’t be the full picture.
What makes you think that this isn’t the full picture (or most of the full picture?)
I only skimmed the article you linked, but I don’t think I agree with your characterization of anonymity—it’s not on the axis of openness, but the axes of freedom and safety. If someone is already let in, they may choose to be anonymous if they think anonymity helps them express things that are outside the box of their existing reputation and identity, or if they think anonymity is a defense against hostile actors who would use their words and actions against them.
This is clearly false in the narrow sense of “rational” as meaning something like “acting logically to try to achieve goals” since it doesn’t encompass competence at doing so. To actually outcompete the other organizations, you need the most competent agents, who are almost certainly not the most selfless ones or the most narrowly rational ones.