knite

• knite 14 May 2019 22:56 UTC

  1 point

  on: Boo votes, Yay NPS

  What are your thoughts on *re-labeling* the voting UI so that it’s more clear to voters what the site norms are for the meaning of up- and downvotes?

• knite 18 Jan 2020 0:02 UTC

  12 points

  on: How to Es­cape From Im­moral Mazes

  You may be undervaluing, or at least under-emphasizing, the idea of strategically ejecting from a maze. If your LinkedIn profile is accurate, you currently make a living as a trader. Your ability to execute on that is likely heavily influenced by your time in (firm’s) maze, both in terms of knowledge capital and financial capital you extracted from the maze.

  It is plausible that spending a few years in a maze is +EV for a relevant fraction of people, and that “know what you’re signing up for and plan your exit strategy from day 0” is better advice than “avoid at all costs”.

• knite 11 May 2020 21:42 UTC

  1 point

  on: Set­ting up a new Mac

  For syncing dotfiles and config generally: https://​​github.com/​​lra/​​mackup

  For managing programming languages: https://​​github.com/​​asdf-vm/​​asdf

• knite 13 May 2020 17:21 UTC

  1 point

  on: Le­gends of Runeterra: Early Review

  Great review! Have you taken a look at Gwent? It’s currently scratching the Hearthstone itch for me.

• knite 18 May 2020 18:50 UTC

  2 points

  on: The EMH Aten’t Dead

  If the market regularly reacts to public statements of inefficiency (“stocks systematically rise on the third Thursday of each month but only under a waxing moon”) by eliminating it, then this is *refutation* of the efficient market hypothesis.

  Inefficiencies are priced in when they are: obvious, easy, and safe,. A non-obvious inefficiency is a true hidden edge. A non-easy inefficiency has a high barrier (capital, technical, physical, etc) to entry. A non-safe inefficiency has a high social barrier to entry.

  Because names have power, I dub this the Passive Market Hypothesis.

• knite 26 Jun 2020 3:19 UTC

  9 points

  on: Covid 6/​25: The Dam Breaks

  My real answer to what went wrong is that our civilization is profoundly inadequate. We have lost our ability to do things.

  Civilization is made of people, and people aren’t wired for scale. We haven’t lost our ability to do things, we never had it. We have only ever done things at scale by accident, or for short periods of time (mostly wars and the Space Race).

  When you live in a village of ~100 people, either you figure out norms for drought/​famine/​disease/​etc quickly, or >90% of your community dies and the rest scatter.

  In major cities, it’s fundamentally an issue of everyone-for-themselves. You walk down the street and see a bunch of strangers. You may wish they were wearing masks, but there’s no social norm. The norms are enforced at shops, waiting in line, entering with reduced capacity, wearing a mask (or not) in both cases.

  If not enough people care on average, your friendly neighborhood megalopolis is doomed.

• knite 4 Aug 2020 19:00 UTC

  11 points

  on: Tear­ing down the Ch­ester­ton’s Fence principle

  “Overall, Chesterton’s Fence needs context.”

  This is literally the point of Chesterton’s Fence.

• knite 4 Aug 2020 19:22 UTC

  10 points

  on: Unify­ing the Si­mu­lacra Definitions

  Thank you, Zvi, I’ve really enjoyed your simulacra posts and found them to be very insightful. As I read this post, I came up with my own formulation of the levels that feels useful:

  L1: I point at something.

  L2: I point at you.

  L3: I point at myself.

  L4: I point wherever I want.

• knite 5 Aug 2020 18:48 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: Unify­ing the Si­mu­lacra Definitions

  I think pointing at anything you want better conveys the nature of L4. You could describe L0 as “I don’t point”.

• knite 1 Sep 2020 16:41 UTC

  2 points

  on: Ob­jec­tive Dog Rat­ings: An In­tro­duc­tion & Explanation

  Have you seen https://​​www.informationisbeautiful.net/​​visualizations/​​best-in-show-whats-the-top-data-dog/​​ ?

• knite 25 Sep 2020 0:33 UTC

  3 points

  on: Covid 9/​24: Un­til Mo­rale Improves

  Thanks for posting these updates regularly! One quick formatting note: region ordering in the Positive Tests section is different from the earlier sections.

• knite 21 Oct 2020 0:31 UTC

  3 points

  on: Launch­ing Fore­cast, a com­mu­nity for crowd­sourced pre­dic­tions from Facebook

  I’ve been using Forecast since the beta and enjoy it! A few thoughts:

  • There isn’t enough incentive to bet on questions with long time horizons.

  • The 1K points/​day are rather inflationary overall, which leads to...

  • A question’s market can be moved rather significantly for just a few thousand points

  • Why is there a max of 10 shares per bet? Especially with the 1K daily point increase, any user who sticks around will have tens of thousands of points, and have a harder time allocating them

  • The leaderboard is opaque and varies wildly: I’m sometimes in the top 10, sometimes in the middle hundreds, and sometimes unranked, despite a consistent upward trajectory.

• knite 11 Nov 2020 4:38 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: River’s comment on: On­go­ing free money at PredictIt

  I am not a tax professional and have not yet filed taxes for my PredictIt gains. With that said, I am assuming that taxable gains are $93.57 - $85 = $8.75, not the $100 withdrawn.

• knite 11 Nov 2020 20:06 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: River’s comment on: On­go­ing free money at PredictIt

  Thanks for the link, it looks like you’re right about being taxed on the $100/​98.50/​93.57. However, the initial $85 can be deducted from your taxable income (if less than your winnings).

  So if you’re in, let’s say the 25% tax bracket, you have saved 25% * $85 = $21.25 in taxes, and have still made money on your bet. This becomes a bit murkier when considering standard deductions vs itemizing. Perhaps a more experienced bettor can chime in to step through the implications?

• knite 12 Nov 2020 2:04 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: River’s comment on: On­go­ing free money at PredictIt

  Entry fees count as “losses”.

• knite 21 Nov 2020 0:31 UTC

  3 points

  on: 2020 Elec­tion: Pre­dic­tion Mar­kets ver­sus Pol­ling/​Model­ing Assess­ment and Postmortem

  Would love to hear more about your specific bets, as well as your “multiple six figure wins” friends! Personally, after maxing several PredictIt markets for a total of low thousands bet, I didn’t feel like there was a good market place to bet larger size (tens of thousands USD or higher in crypto).

• knite 21 Nov 2020 0:33 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: 2020 Elec­tion: Pre­dic­tion Mar­kets ver­sus Pol­ling/​Model­ing Assess­ment and Postmortem

  What were (or are now) the best places for US persons interested in betting significant crypto sums?

• knite 5 Dec 2020 0:36 UTC

  1 point

  on: Eth2 Stak­ing ex­plained as a Fi­nan­cial Instrument

  As a holder of other crypto (primarily BTC), how interesting is this opportunity relative to riding current growth?

• knite 6 Dec 2020 20:01 UTC

  19 points

  on: The In­com­pre­hen­si­bil­ity Bluff

  Option 3: You have insufficient shared understanding/​facts/​terminology to comprehend each other’s opinions and even begin having a real conversation.

• knite 6 Dec 2020 23:12 UTC

  5 points

  on: Anti-EMH Ev­i­dence (and a plea for help)

  Two securities (symbols to come later as this is still being actively traded)

  Are you trading at a scale where this is relevant? The vast majority of symbols have volumes where a mere mortal’s bank account won’t move the market at all.

  Great post overall! There seems to be a lot of recent interest on LW around playing the markets well. I’d love to set up a Discord for ongoing discussion and brainstorming, if there’s interest.

  I’ve been sitting on a good nugget of crypto earnings for years and have had a lot of analysis paralysis about diversifying into the real markets and/​or arbitraging the highly volatile crypto options/​futures markets directly. If anyone reading this is interested in a serious discussion, please reach out!