DirectedEvolution

• DirectedEvolution 8 May 2026 23:34 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Ma­trice Ja­cobine’s Shortform

  I am confused why you are interpreting Jim to be making such a narrow claim?

  I’m responding to the literal content of Jim’s comment, specifically and in detail. What more do you want from me? To read his mind? I supply multiple links with historic context deep diving into Jim’s casual one liner, and somehow I’m the problematic one in this conversation?

  Separately, sure, if you are happy to bet at 20:1 odds, my $1k against your $20k, same resolution criteria as the Polymarket. It seems like you think the probability is much lower.

  I do think the probability is much lower. But I frankly just do not want to bet with you or others here. It legitimizes more of what I find disturbing, which is the use of betting and prediction markets as a prime source of epistemic authority. It also signs me up for spending time negotiating bet logistics and resolution criteria, both now and in 7 months. That seems unappealing. What I find particularly irritating is the notion that that once a bet is proposed, it obviates a facts-and-logic based argument and undermines the credibility of the person turning down the bet. And that is what turns my “no” into a “HELL NO.”

  What I would prefer is for you and others to consider the fact that a wide array of epidemiologists is currently in the news, saying, all with one voice, “this is not going to become a pandemic.” You can look into the personal history of the people making these claims. You can think about the difference between one expert making a claim that’s immediately contradicted by her peers vs. all the relevant experts in the media making the same statement, across a variety of institutions. You can read their scientific evidence and rationale. You can read what we know about Andes virus.

  All those actions would teach you more about this virus and enable you to make a facts and logic based argument on the subject and derive your own number, if you need one in order to help make decisions.

  If you feel like it, you can donate to a charity of your choice if it turns out that there’s no pandemic. If there’s a pandemic and I’m wrong, I’ll freely and openly confess to having been wildly overconfident.

• DirectedEvolution 8 May 2026 1:31 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Ma­trice Ja­cobine’s Shortform

  I have better economic opportunities, thanks.

• DirectedEvolution 7 May 2026 22:22 UTC

  −6 points

  −2

  in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Ma­trice Ja­cobine’s Shortform

  Here are links to ground this in historic context.

  How often do asymptomatic people spread the coronavirus? It’s unclear

  Are asymptomatic people spreading the coronavirus? A WHO official’s words spark confusion, debate

  Claim that asymptomatic transmission ‘very rare’ was misunderstanding, says WHO official – as it happened

  The specific statement you’re referring to:

  “It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits [the virus] onward,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead for the COVID-19 response, said. Public health officials should concentrate on finding and isolating people who do have symptoms in order to stop the pandemic, she said.

  Van Kerkhove walked back her comment in a news briefing the following day, saying that she had been referring to a small subset of studies that follow people who never show COVID-19 symptoms and their contacts. “We do know that some people who are asymptomatic can transmit the virus on,” she said in the June 9 briefing. “What we need to better understand is how many people in the population don’t have symptoms. And, separately, how many of those individuals go on to transmit [the virus] to others.”

  The WHO’s statement that asymptomatic transmission is rare “is not backed up by any data,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md. “We know that there is asymptomatic transmission…. What we do not know is the extent to which that occurs. So when we hear statements that this is very rare, we do not know that as a fact.”

  So in context, we had immediate, credible, clear pushback from multiple equally high-status figures in major media within 24 hours. That’s completely absent here as far as I can tell. And the Maria Van Kerkhove who made those statements at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic had a different level of experience with pandemic management from the Van Kerkhove who’s making those statements today.

  Your historic interpretation appears to be that because she made a misleading, probably just plain mistaken statement 6 years ago at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was immediatelly called out, that she’s permanently untrustworthy and now we need to prioritize metaculus. That seems like a deeply foolish epistemic stance to me. An alternative way to interpret it is she screwed up, was called out, and has probably learned from that mistake, especially given that we’re dealing with a relatively known quantity in the Andes virus.

  I 100% am sticking to my guns, metaculus is a wildly misleading source on this question and you all should be listening to the WHO.

• DirectedEvolution 7 May 2026 11:49 UTC

  −18 points

  −32

  in reply to: AprilSR’s comment on: Ma­trice Ja­cobine’s Shortform

  We already had the top epidemiologist at the WHO saying it was not going to be a pandemic. Wha is the prediction market adding here other than a wild overestimate by a few extremely online anonymous non-experts not even gambling with real money? Why can’t you just map the WHO’s statement to epsilon if you need a number to satisfy your anxiety and move on with your day?

  The idea that manifold markets of all things is becoming people’s go-to source rather than the WHO‘s top epidemiologist is a damning indictment of prediction markets.

  https://​​apnews.com/​​live/​​hantavirus-cruise-ship-updates-05-06-2026

• DirectedEvolution 6 May 2026 21:54 UTC

  14 points

  −2

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Ma­trice Ja­cobine’s Shortform

  Hard disagree. 8% is wildly overinflated and it’s at 4% now. If you don’t find yourself substantially revising your plans based on a 50% drop in pandemic probability, and if you didn’t get seriously concerned about an 8% chance of a 40% CFR pandemic, then even you aren’t taking them seriously. The main utility of this prediction market is driving internet chatter on how useful prediction markets are.

• DirectedEvolution 6 May 2026 21:51 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: jelly’s comment on: Ma­trice Ja­cobine’s Shortform

  4% now.

• DirectedEvolution 6 May 2026 21:50 UTC

  44 points

  1

  in reply to: Matrice Jacobine’s comment on: Ma­trice Ja­cobine’s Shortform

  I ran through my checklist. Looks low-risk to me. Basically a very deadly disease that nevertheless shows nil or inefficient human-to-human transmission and doesn’t show signs of regional or global growth. It depends heavily on specific South American rat species for transmission to humans. The original exposure was on or around April 1. There are no new concerning mutations (see below), and so far the flight attendant who had been feared to have picked it up on a flight has tested negative, though there’s an up to 6 week incubation period and she was exposed on April 25th, about 2 weeks ago. There were also 3 other plane passengers who had contact with an infected person on a plane and they’ve tested negative so far as well.

  The consensus public health position is that “person-to-person transmission is possible through close personal contact, such as between couples.” If it turns out that this is wrong and that it’s much more human-transmissible than previously believed, then the complete failure to quarantine passengers after the discovery of hantavirus on the Hondius cruise ship and first passenger death would completely alter my projection. But so far, there do not seem to be signs of that.

  Getting on a evolutionary biology level, if Andes virus were to become efficiently human-transmissible, the last place I’d expect to see it enter the human population is via tourists picking it up while bird watching in a garbage dump. That’s a setting where the human-rodent interface is minimal. In that setting, there’s little selection pressure on the virus to jump to humans and transmit efficiently. In a hypothetical Andes virus pandemic, I’d strongly have expected patient 0 to be a Chilean or Argentinian villager living in conditions that sadly expose them to routine contact with rats. I’d expect the outbreak to spread first in a local village, not on a luxury cruise ship.

  Instead, it looks to me like a couple of tourists made the risky and unusual decision to put themselves in a uniquely rodent-infested location without protection, where they likely had the misfortune to inhale a large quantity of virus-infested aerosolized rat droppings. Then they got into the close quarters of a cruise ship, which completely failed to execute the measures it should have taken to address their illness, including a failure to quarantine. This allowed limited spread to other close-quarters passengers, exactly as we have observed this virus to be capable of in the past. This, combined with the lack of new mutations, suggests we’re dealing with exposure to a known-quantity, transmission-inefficient virus in a demographic that doesn’t usually get exposed.

  The concern is due to the fact that those passengers had travelled internationally by the time quarantining and contact tracing was initiated, combined with the deadliness of the virus. But it takes a combination of spread in international populations and transmissibility and deadliness and lack of treatment to make a pandemic, and currently we only appear to have deadliness and lack of treatment. The only reason it even gets 4 points is probably because it’s so rare and such a disease of poverty that big pharma’s never invested in a vaccine or treatment. The main scary thing, like ebola, is the very high CFR. But that is not the grounds for a global pandemic. It’s just a tragedy for a few hundred people a year.

  THE CHECKLIST

  Version: 0.2.4

  Current score: 4/​14

  Last updated: 8 May 2026

  Transmissibility: efficiency, intra-community spread, inter-community spread, outside view

  • Is there an efficient transmission route, such as respiratory droplets, airborne transmission or via the bites of common jumping or flying insects?

  • • “Hantaviruses are transmitted mainly through aerosols and droplets that contain rodent excretions, as well as through contaminated food, bites, and scratches.”—Wikipedia.

    • Incubation time is up to 6 weeks.

    • Possibly. There are cases of human-to-human transmission, but this is contested. The Argentine government thinks the original two cruise ship cases contracted it while bird watching at a garbage dump, but several other passengers on the cruise ship were sickened.

    • Update 5/​8/​2026: flight attendant tests negative, but result inconclusive due to 6-week incubation period. No new concerning mutations. source

    • • “On Thursday evening, Tedros Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization, said in a message that the flight attendant, who has been reported to have symptoms, had tested negative on two tests.… Mr. Ghebreyesus did caution, however, that the virus can have a long incubation time.”

      • • For context, a Hondius cruise linear passenger, very sick with what turned out to be hantavirus, got on a plane. The passenger was handled on that plane by a flight attendant. The sick passenger was removed from the flight before takeoff due to her illness and later died. The flight attendant has been hospitalized and tested for hantavirus. I haven’t found a clear report of whether the flight attendant was sick or not. The flight attendant’s test results have been negative so far, but the incubation time is up to 6 weeks.

      • “Genetic sequencing of samples in South Africa suggests that the virus is nearly identical to the version seen in Argentina and has not mutated in ways that would make it a greater threat, according to Tulio de Oliveira, director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Dr. De Oliveira was not involved in the work but said the results had been presented to an expert group of which he is a member.”

    • Graded as a “no” as even if human-to-human transmission is possible, it currently appears to be inefficient and still heavily depend on rats.

  • Does it seem to spread rapidly within affected communities, going from a few cases to a major local emergency within a month? If R0 has been credibly estimated, is the mean of the range higher than 1?

  • • No. This appears to be a sporatic, locally contained, chronic issue. “More than a hundred cases of HPS caused by Andes virus occur each year, most of them in Argentina and Chile.”—Wikipedia

  • Has it achieved community spread in non-endemic countries on at least 3 continents, and in a set of countries comprising both 15% of world population and 15% of world GDP?

  • • No.

  • Is screening for the causative agent difficult due to test unavailability/​unreliability/​slowness, vector-based transmission, or transmissibility that is highest in early/​asymptomatic stages? If the causative agent is unknown, mark “unknown.”

  • • No. “ANDV infection is diagnosed based on observation of symptoms and testing for hantavirus nucleic acid, proteins, or hantavirus-specific antibodies.”—Wikipedia

  Danger: case fatality rates, overwhelm, economic impacts, treatment

  • If a credible case fatality rate has been estimated, is it 1% or higher? Alternatively, is the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases being reported at around 5% or higher in at least 3 countries with reliable data?

  • • Yes. The case fatality rate from infection is high, at about 40%.

  • Is there a concern about hospital overwhelm or medical supply shortages in industrialized nations?

  • • No.

  • Does the disease heavily affect career-age people (age 25-65), or frequently leave survivors with lasting disability?

  • • Yes (tentative)

  • Is there no clearly effective treatment?

  • • Yes, there is no clearly effective treatment. “Treatment is supportive in nature and includes supplementing oxygen during the cardiopulmonary phase.”

  Spread limitations: demographics, geography

  • If some non-age-related demographics are heavily affected and others are not, do the heavily affected demographics amount to 15% or more of the population? If almost the whole population is about equally affected, mark “yes.”

  • • Yes (tentative)

  • Is the disease potentially transmissible across most of the world population (i.e. does not work via a vector that has a geographically limited range)? If the causative agent is unknown, mark “unknown.”

  • • No. Reports of human-to-human transmission are rare and contested. It appears to heavily depend on the particular rat species that transmit it.

  Social effects: communications, shutdown, research, deaths

  • Has the disease made front page news on at least 3 different days in the New York Times, and also received the WHO designation “public health emergency of international concern” or the equivalent?

  • • No.

  • Has there been a quarantine of a city with over 1 million inhabitants? In a country comprising at least 5% of world population or GDP, has there been a cancellation of major public events, or travel restrictions on passengers arriving from or via this country?

  • • No.

  • Has the pharmaceutical industry begun a widespread research effort to produce a novel treatment or novel vaccine, and/​or has industry begun a major emergency effort to build physical infrastructure or equipment (hospitals, ventilators, etc)?

  • • No.

  • Have the death toll reached at least 2,000?

  • • No.

• DirectedEvolution 1 May 2026 18:31 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: AllAmer­i­canBreak­fast’s Shortform

  Gemini 3.1 Pro technique diary (5/​1/​2026):

  • AI hallucinates when it gets overwhelmed. Ask it one, focused question at a time.

  • Don’t ask broad questions, hoping it’ll magically hone in on the most important issue. Sometimes it will, but you have to check, and it may also miss things.

  • For systematic investigations, have a framework for sequencing your questions.

  • Avoid sourcing your inputs from the AI itself. For example, when I investigate stocks, I don’t ask the AI for which stocks to investigate. I use a list from finviz. The more external data you inject into the AI prompt, the less surface area for hallucination there is.

  • The impact of hallucinations accumulates if your sequence of questions depends on the accuracy of previous answers, so double check.

  • AI answers are always in authoritative language (using my system prompt), but treat them as as speculative hypotheses and argue with them. You can change the AI’s mind within that chat context through a logical rebuttal.

  • AI doesn’t just hallucinate empirical facts. It also conjectures broad, mechanistic frameworks for understanding topics under discussion that aren’t always appropriate.

  • What AI’s great at is surfacing hypotheses and frameworks over the empirical data you provide to it for you to consider. This is one of its best use cases for research. It’s often wrong and you need to use your judgment, but it lets you move much more quickly and with more confidence into new domains by supplying you with the professional common sense specialists in that area would apply to your questions.

• DirectedEvolution 29 Apr 2026 21:49 UTC

  14 points

  7

  on: Let Kids Keep More Pro­duc­tivity Gains

  This is great. Thanks for the writeup.

  I wish somebody would write a parenting advice book that’s a full-throated defense of applying the same kind of high-quality incentive structures we want as adults to our children. For some reason, it currently passes as “good parenting” to subject your kid to a system of rules, rewards and punishments you’d find highly demotivating or oppressive as an adult—not out of necessessity, but out of vague intuitions that kids should be intrinsically motivated and that it somehow degrades them to apply extrinsic motivations.

  But what does it teach kids if we don’t give them good economic incentives? I think it fails to teach them what good economic incentives are, and how they feel. That seems like a form of infantilization that’s on par with modeling poor conflict resolution styles, avoiding any demonstrations of affection, or helicopter parenting.

• DirectedEvolution 29 Apr 2026 18:55 UTC

  3 points

  1

  in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: Si­mon Ler­men’s Shortform

  I mean it harsh. At worst, it’s a cheap and surprisingly effective morale-degrading confusion tactic aimed directly at undermining people working on existential risk.

• DirectedEvolution 29 Apr 2026 16:53 UTC

  3 points

  1

  in reply to: Karl Krueger’s comment on: Yair Halber­stadt’s Shortform

  Among the parents I know, the issue isn’t that kids have a “duty” to get vaccinated. That would imply a critique of their own child that’s not all all implied when they talk about “bribery.”

  The word “bribe” in this context has two implications.

  1. They are acknowledging that using external incentives to extract compliance from their kids risks corrupting their intrinsic motivation. They call it a “bribe” to humorously emphasize to other parents that they’re aware of this issue, and that the “bribe” is the exception, not the rule.

  2. They are pointing out that shots are scary and painful, while the benefits are hard for a kid to understand. When you’re forcing your kid through that, it shows love and caring to boost their morale with a treat. This lets them be seen as a caring yet responsible parent, who cares both about their kid’s long-term health and their short term feelings.

  Bribe’s a convenient, one syllable word that’s become a widely understood shorthand among parents for precisely this combination of meanings. It lets people imply a deep philosophy of parenting while also seeming funny and with it among their parent friends. The fact that it’s an exaggeration and not literally apt is part of the charm.

• DirectedEvolution 29 Apr 2026 16:27 UTC

  −2 points

  −2

  in reply to: Simon Lermen’s comment on: Si­mon Ler­men’s Shortform

  If an AI doomer bets $100 to forecast that a moratorium will pass, then they’ve created two incentives:

  1. An incentive of $100 for themselves to make the moratorium pass.

  2. A bounty of $100 for anybody else to block the moratorium from passing.

  Notably, they’ve locked up their $100 of capital for the duration of the forecast, which is now unavailable to support their efforts.

  These “put your money where your mouth is” arguments are turning into an unbelievably stupid form of rhetoric. Fortunately, they’re so outlandish that they only register in extremely online aging libertarian land.

  AI slowdowns are popular and common sense policies among American voters.

  Don’t get caught up in debating the astroturfing pundits! They are not worth your time.

• DirectedEvolution 28 Apr 2026 17:39 UTC

  5 points

  4

  in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: Fore­cast­ing is Way Over­rated, and We Should Stop Fund­ing It

  DOJ arrests soldier who made $400,000 betting on Maduro’s removal

  Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who allegedly placed the bet, helped with Maduro’s capture.

  In general, there’s all kinds of insider trading apparently going on inside the Trump admin in prediction markets whose outcome is heavily determined by US gov actions.

  We also have of course the case of Emanuel Fabian, who’s been receiving death threats for accurately reporting on a missile attack in ways that unfavorable to one faction of polymarket gamblers.

  There’s an investigation into whether an airport thermometer used to resolve a polymarket bet waas tampered with.

  Obviously none of these are literal assassination markets, which is why I said “something approaching” rather than “precisely an assassination market.” The general principle is people are taking destructive actions (tampering, indirectly leaking classified information through their betting behavior, threatening journalists) or are betting on while being directly involved in violent actions (the soldier) that are attached to prediction markets. And on a deeper level, we have to ask whether the fraud opportunities that prediction markets present are then going to become a systemic generator of fraud.

  Big picture, the combination of prediction markets, crypto, and gambling becomes an unregulatable, permanent fraud coordination mechanism. It incentivizes a set of bad social roles:

  • People who can come up with situations that sound outlandish to one segment of the population, who like to gamble and who believe there’s another segment of the population that’s just dumb.

  • People who realize that they’re in a position to influence that outlandish situation into being. They’d never have done so if there wasn’t an easy opportunity to make money on it, but there is, so they do.

  What these markets point toward is a future in which the world just becomes more chaotic, because for any outlandish situation you might consider and create a market for, you’ve now incentivized people to make that situation happen (or not happen), just because you asked the question and got people’s attention. They become general bounty markets. Bet on “no” enough, and you incentivize somebody to bet against you and make “yes” happen. If you can believe in an AI singularity, you ought to be able to believe in this possibility as well!

  And the deeper issue here is that both the people attempting to manifest “no” and “yes” are now spending their effort not on some sort of economically productive task, but on forcing prediction market outcomes to happen.

  If the influence they can bring to bear on the situation is substantial, and the outcome is important, then it incentivizes people investing huge amounts of money into these markets in order to motivate sufficient effort toward the preferred outcome. There are of course serious free rider problems here. If an outcome is extremely important to a special interest group, then they may be willing to fund prediction markets-based bounties by betting heavily on the opposite outcome from the one they want. This creates a new mechanism for plausible deniability, which is how bribes operate these days—no quid pro quo, just an implied mutual understanding of game theory.

• DirectedEvolution 27 Apr 2026 22:21 UTC

  16 points

  1

  on: Cu­ri­ous cases of fi­nan­cial en­g­ineer­ing in biotech

  Biotech financial engineering is also making it hard for institutional investors to make intelligent investing decisions, making these markets even more irrational.

  Take Rocket Pharma (RCKT), which recently had KRESLADI, a cell therapy, recently approved for children with severe LAD-1 deficiency. RCKT’s stock price increased by about 70% in the 3 weeks leading up to FDA approval. I listened to the call with institional investors, who were surprised to learn that KRESLADI’s not a commercially viable drug. The unit economics are horrible and the TAM is miniscule. RCKT told them it is planning a “minimum viable rollout” to US patients only. The stock immediately fell back to its pre-runup baseline.

  According to RCKT management, the whole point of developing KRESLADI was for RCKT to gain experience taking a drug through FDA approval and get a PRV. The PRV sale will give them non-dilutive cash to see through their commercially viable gene therapy for Danon disease. Success in that indication will also substantially de-risk the rest of their pipeline, which is focused on using the same AAV delivery system for other monogenic heart diseases.

  But institutional investors appear not to really understand these critical details. They see “drug approval” and they think “commercialization,” not “PRV to extend runway for a different drug,” or “we already sold off most of the future value to fund the runway,” or “PRV, but we only own a fraction of the subsidiary, and they licensed out a substantial fraction of the PRV, and the subsidiary also has warrants that are going to get exercised on this news that will dilute the upside further.”

  It has similar issues to the 2008 financial crisis, except there aren’t even standardized metrics we can turn to in order to understand these arrangements. There’s no table of FICO scores. All these deals are boutique, with critical details often considered proprietary and not published (though sometimes they can be inferred).

  Take MaxCyte (MXCT). Their main product is a commercial-scale electroporation device, which punches holes in cells so that you can force them to take up large molecules, like a gene. Electroporation typically is harsh and low throughput, and using it would entail serious manufacturing risk. MXCT’s technology is so well established that they have an FDA master file, meaning that using it for your cell therapy de-risks that aspect of manufacturing. They’ve also just finished expanding it to discovery-scale devices that academic wet labs will put on their benches. This will enable them to scale up smoothly as they take leads on a commercialization journey.

  If you’re an investor in MXCT, however, their main business isn’t selling devices and disposables. It’s SPLs, which are royalties on cell therapies approved using their electroporation device. They have hundreds of SPLs, most of which will never pay off. The first sickle cell therapy (Casgevy) uses their device for electroporation, and is in the early stages of a commercial ramp up, with the number of patients on a trend of roughly doubling each quarter. Cool, but MXCT doesn’t actually publish what % of revenue they get on sales of these cell therapies. Also, several of their other late-stage SPLs are also for sickle cell, so there’s a huge amount of not only correlation but also race-to-the-bottom dynamics involved.

  Also, because these are rare diseases and cell therapies have horrible unit economics, there are huge challenges with getting them paid for. Even if in the long run, a cell or gene therapy pays for itself in lifetime healthcare costs, asking the insurance company the patient happens to be on when they receive the therapy to eat the entire large cost of the treatment doesn’t work well for the insurance company, which likely would have absorbed only a fraction of their lifetime health costs. It’s a natural choice to be government funded. Right now, there is a solid program for doing that through medicaid—it’s genuinely a really well designed govenrment program.

  However, as we see an explosion of cell and gene therapies coming online all at roughly the same time, we are likely to see a sudden massive increase in the cost of delivering these treatments through that program. If the government only funds a limited quantity of those therapies, every single company in MXCT’s portfolio becomes less valuable.

  I enjoy micro-cap biotech investing (I’m invested in both RCKT and MXCT), and I have the scientific and financial background to investigate these issues. I can sift through 300 such companies to find a basket of undervalued gems capable of absorbing as much of my investing capital as I want to put into them. It’s my money on the line, so I am directly incentivized to do a good job of vetting these picks.

  But most investors simply do not typically have the right mix of incentives, training, interest, and autonomy to invest in these companies. Their understanding of biology, healthcare, and the FDA are far too limited to accurately assess the prospects of a company’s pipeline. And I suspect that these financialization schemes are going to make investing even more complex, with more hidden pitfalls, degrading willingness to invest in the sector further, unless we can execute them in a way that makes the thing you’re buying more legible and composable, not less.

• DirectedEvolution 27 Apr 2026 4:48 UTC

  3 points

  1

  in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: Fore­cast­ing is Way Over­rated, and We Should Stop Fund­ing It

  Shankar’s original claim was that the 2016 election was BEFORE functional prediction markets, and that the bit of “raising the sanity waterline” in question happened between then and today.

  But this argument relies on an alternative history, like “functional modern high-volume prediction markets would have called the election better than Nate Silver, had they existed at that time.” But that’s an (implicit) assertion without evidence. The confident calls for Clinton weren’t by bloviating pundits making obviously wrong calls, they were by professional data-driven forecasters with methodological disagreements and oversights.

  If people want to argue that prediction markets have “raised the sanity waterline” by preventing disastrously bad forecasts about high stakes events, they need to point to examples of where functional modern prediction markets have directly competed with i.e. boutique models published by media outlets. Define the comparison!

  Now, that said, I can put forth a different reason they’ve raised the sanity waterline in specific areas. Taking hotbutton issues, breaking them down into empirically verifiable factors, and getting a money-backed continuously updating estimate on those factors is genuinely helpful when I’m specifically interested in a relevant issue. Even if I think the estimate is wildly wrong, it’s useful to see where the consensus lies. But I’ve read extensively on them, participated in them, and have a pretty deep knowledge of their mechanics, limitations, etc.

  But I also think there are some underappreciated dangers in prediction markets. Of course, we’re now seeing how they are being used for insider trading, providing a mechanism for information leaks, and are genuinely being used as something approaching an assassination market. They’re motivating harassment of journalists whose articles are being used to resolve the markets. That’s directly counterproductive to raising the sanity waterline.

  They also take some real sophistication to interpret—particularly understanding how to parse the volume, individual bet sizes (whale activity), participant selection effects, and resolution criteria. They’re optimized for betting, not informing the public, and because of that, there’s a real risk that if you go to them for informational rather than gambling purposes, you’ll misinterpret the number and become confidently wrong. I don’t know what a study on the actual impact of prediction markets on public epistemics would measure, though it would be interesting. But to me, the jury is still out, and it really doesn’t make sense to say they’ve “obviously raised the sanity waterline.”

• DirectedEvolution 26 Apr 2026 19:33 UTC

  2 points

  −3

  on: “Bad faith” means in­ten­tion­ally mis­rep­re­sent­ing your beliefs

  If there is a commonly understood meaning of the phrase “good faith,“ it’s nowhere near as clear as the distinction between a faux pas and a broken law.

  Also, I’m not clear Habryka’s definition is incompatible with the one you’re offering. Serious discussions, almost by definition, do have the pretense of being about mutual truth seeking. If serious discussions usually aren’t actually about that, then they’re not in good faith by your definition as well as Habryka’s.

• DirectedEvolution 26 Apr 2026 18:26 UTC

  9 points

  2

  on: Did any­one here used to hate ex­er­cise and learned to not hate it?

  Yes, running. I hated it and never did it. Then randomly one day, I got the idea of going for the slowest jog I could. Grandpa jogging is how I think of it. People talk about “zone 1,” but they also have pretty different perceptions of what constitutes “zone 1,” so I don’t find it a very helpful term.

  I go grandpa jogging over short enough distances that I don’t get cramps and don’t get exhausted. Then I feel accomplishment, which is nice. It gets me interested in how consistently I can jog and how far I can go without cramping up and getting exhausted.

  Unfortunately, my experience suggests you shouldn‘t expect widespread appreciation for this among athletes. My experience is that my approach is unusual among people who actually practice, even if there‘s some science backing it up from a healthy and motivation psychology perspective.

  The vibe of the athletes I know mostly seem to be people who are highly motivated by competition and accomplishment, even if they wouldn’t admit it explicitly. They enjoy being around people with the same energy, and they feel motivated by striving for personal bests and race preparation.

• DirectedEvolution 26 Apr 2026 18:09 UTC

  3 points

  3

  in reply to: Lukas Finnveden’s comment on: Fore­cast­ing is Way Over­rated, and We Should Stop Fund­ing It

  Either way, they were in the same ballpark as the other forecasts. Even if both were poor markets, that only strengthens the argument that they shouldn’t receive credit for “raising the sanity waterline” around the 2016 election.

• DirectedEvolution 26 Apr 2026 15:00 UTC

  68 points

  14

  in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Fore­cast­ing is Way Over­rated, and We Should Stop Fund­ing It

  In October, PredictIt and PredictWise had Clinton at 83 and 91 cents respectively.

  The night before the 2016 election, WCNC published the next-day forecasts by the NY Times, 538 (when Nate Silver was still running it) and the Huffington Post, which gave odds of Clinton winning of 84%, 68%, and 98% respectively.

  The Princeton Election Consortium‘s model developed by data scientist Sam Wang forecasted 99% for Clinton. Wang ate a cricket on live TV.

  Reuters/​Ipsos forecasted 90% Clinton.

  Overall, seems like prediction markets were in the same ballbark of wrongness as the media forecasts. Admittedly, the forecast dates here are not identical—a more rigorous breakdown would be welcome.

  But in this bunch, the best result was obtained by a professional data scientist, Nate Silver, not by a prediction market.

  There’s been a huge amount of discourse around the failed 2016 forecasts, and they all attribute it to failure to take correlated polling errors into account (which Silver did model, explaining his less wrong prediction). There might have been underlying partisan bias or conformity warping modeling decisions, but those biases also exist in prediction markets. Money and reputation is on the line for media outlets publishing high profile quantitative forecasts.

  So overall, I don’t think the 2016 presidential election forecast is a great example of PMs raising the sanity waterline.

• DirectedEvolution 24 Apr 2026 20:41 UTC

  10 points

  0

  in reply to: anaguma’s comment on: anaguma’s Shortform

  When you play, how do you show the game to the LLM and prompt it for its next move?