Do you have any reason to think those people succeeded in other areas as a result of the screen from forecasting success ? Did someone give them opportunities they wouldn’t have had without being a top forecaster?
My guess is this is just positive selection.
I was the same and settled on walking as well. Can listen to podcasts or music, get a good pair of noise cancelling earbuds.
Also good to walk with friends and talk.
Find a route that takes an hour to get back to starting point and walk daily if you can.
I was a defendant in a criminal trial and there were many personal attacks. They introduced many pieces of evidence that were irrelevant to whether a crime was committed. The rationale for most was it’s relevant to my “intent” but it was clear what they were trying to do.
(I was convicted and the judge overturned it partly for insufficient evidence. Appeal is ongoing so I don’t want to get into details. My case was somewhat unusual in that there was no dispute at to the main facts, but it was heavily disputed whether the facts made out the elements of the charges. There’s a lot of variance among cases and judges, I’m sure.)
I was also told many times by my lawyers that we had to stay on the judge’s good side and we shouldn’t make certain valid arguments or demand certain constitutional rights because we’d likely face retaliation from the government or judge. That’s a related way in which it’s not about the facts or the law.
Criminal trials work similarly.
Read press releases by prosecutors talking about new cases, or speaking indictments. They often try to character assassinate the defendant, and they try to build up the “victim” when possible.
When I tell my Claude that it’s British it gets it one shot. It doesn’t pick up on that otherwise.
My current guess after going back and forth with Opus is that you’re leaking location or language as British. If your friends are also British that could explain why that clue was enough. Once it’s picked out the rationalist cluster there’s not that many British so that could be enough. For me it’s always picking rationalist names, often mentioning LW or EA explicitly in thinking.
I don’t have custom instructions set up. I do have memory set up and I assume there’s something that carries over, not sure what.
Went to Opus 4.6 and it guessed Nate Soares. Not impressed tbh.
I tried your text in incognito although without changing my name, and it guessed Duncan Sabien, with Eliezer Yudkowsky and Sarah Constantin as the other two when guessing top three.
I tried a second time after changing name to Unknown Visitor, it at first refused to guess then gave top three as Sarah Constantin, Duncan Sabien, and Qiaochu Yuan.
This was Opus 4.7 adaptive thinking.
I strongly suspect there’s some part that leaks through even in incognito.
I got 2⁄5 human. I didn’t like several of the human ones. The war one I didn’t choose because it was out of context, talking about a judge without saying who the judge is, and I didn’t pick Sagan’s because I didn’t like the comparison he’s making. The instructions are to pick what you like better.
Can we stop saying that FDT says you should never give in to threats? The theory only actually says that when you’re dealing with sufficiently good simulators whose behavior depends on their simulation of you. That almost never applies.
Separately, the fictional version of decision theory from dath ilan found in planecrash says to never give in to threats. That is not FDT and is not fully explained.
The theoretical maximum per flip is doubling your money (if you had a way to just bet on fair coin flips)
You shouldn’t settle for 4%. You should be able to get to at least within 10% of optimal, certainly at low bet sizes.
Find an asset that is likely to either double or go to 0. For small amounts you can just pick sports games, learn which side will win then bet on kalshi or polymarket which won’t ban for winning every time. Plenty of 50c priced assets. That gets you to 7 figure size
Then you go to option spreads that expire soon at the money, although if you need to source a new bet every two hours that can take 7 figures in liquidity it gets complicated quickly. Probably best to only use it for doubling money once a day, and use the other flips for more helpful research. Once a day you can do something like “if I buy a 0dte call spread on SPY around the current price, it will end up profitable” and sell the call spread if not, if you do a narrow spread then it almost always ends up outside the bounds. You can roughly double 5 times a week this way, which should be enough for anyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology tree rings gets us 14k years
Two of us showed up, we’ll be hanging out in the back under the large square white tent if anyone else is looking
Maybe buying IPV4 addresses? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32416043 some discussion here.
Civilization has been trying to move to ipv6 for decades, but IPV4 is still widespread and commands a premium. With more internet growth this could blow up more.
Yeah, the version I liked was that someone else bribed a guard/guards into letting him kill himself but that’s basically the same.
It’s been hard keeping to it, but I do notice myself being more productive when I do. One thing that has stayed is not having an email tab always open. Hoping that over time I get better at following it strictly; it has such immediate positive effects that I’m not so worried I’ll gradually forget and stop, like happened with other productivity attempts (e.g. making to-do lists.)
Consider the shortest algorithm that simulates the universe perfectly.
Meaningless, on my metaphysics. Definition is circular—in order to define fundamental you have to already assume that the universe can be simulated “perfectly”, but to define a perfect simulation you’ll need to rely on concepts like “fundamental”, or “external reality”.
Assuming that the way the universe looks changes continuously with these constants, it seems strange to insist that if the changes are so small you can’t notice them they don’t exist.
The assumption is meaningless. It seems strange to me to insist that something “exists”, especially infinities, which are never observable. On our actual known physics we have strict limits on how much information can be contained in a finite amount of space, but even if we didn’t know that you can’t define these concepts in a noncircular manner.
On my metaphysics it’s not coherent to talk about “fundamental” constants, for multiple reasons. Try tabooing that and ask about what, if anything, is actually meant.
If you can’t measure any of these constants past a hundred significant digits, what does it mean to talk about the constant having any digits beyond that? And what does it mean for a constant to be fundamental?
No offense, but your example is using a track record in forecasting to get a job where you post forecasts. I asked about success in other areas.