knite

Karma: 201

[Question] Current guidance for COVID-19 self-care?

knite23 Aug 2020 2:10 UTC

20 points

10 comments1 min readLW link

knite 6 Dec 2020 20:01 UTC
20 points
0
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.

[Question] Where are the post-COVID complainers?

knite28 Dec 2020 18:36 UTC

15 points

16 comments1 min readLW link

Grading myself on SSC’s 2020 predictions

knite1 Mar 2021 19:55 UTC

15 points

8 comments1 min readLW link

Ongoing free money at PredictIt

knite11 Nov 2020 4:06 UTC

12 points

23 comments1 min readLW link

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 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.

San Francisco shares COVID data only when it’s too late

knite26 Dec 2021 20:12 UTC

10 points

5 comments1 min readLW link

knite 12 Aug 2021 16:50 UTC
10 points
on: Covid 8/12: The Worst Is Over
Something I’ve been wondering for a while: are organizations/journalists/individuals filing FOIA requests to get emails and other relevant documents about how the CDC and FDA made their COVID decisions?

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 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.

[Question] Maximizing impact at startup with high EA potential?

knite10 Jun 2020 6:25 UTC

8 points

2 comments1 min readLW link

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.

[Question] Which COVID-19 serology (antibody) test is best?

knite5 Aug 2020 18:54 UTC

5 points

0 comments1 min readLW link

Best of LessWrong: Jan 10 - Jan 17

knite19 Jan 2021 20:44 UTC

5 points

4 comments1 min readLW link

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!

knite 1 Apr 2024 4:04 UTC
4 points
0
on: D&D.Sci: The Mad Tyrant’s Pet Turtles
I did some initial exploration of the dataset and came to similar conclusions as others on the thread.

I then decided this was a good excuse to finally learn how to use LightGBM, one of the best-in-class tools for creating decision trees, and widely used in the data science industry. In other words, let’s make the computer do the fun part!

The goal was to output something like:
```
If color = blurple: weight is 1234
Else
  If segments > 42: weight is 2345
  Else weight is 3456
```
What I actually got:
```
Fangs: ~17 pounds
No fangs: a big tree that outputs in the range of 18-19.5 pounds
```
I used default settings, transformed color/fangs/nostrils into 0-N categorical variables and marked them accordingly, then basically did “give me a regression with a single tree and 15 leaves”.

As others have mentioned, all gray turtles have fangs and weigh noticeably less (4-7 pounds), so this is obvious nonsense.

This tool is supposedly the non-AI state-of-the-art. It confidently fails with out-of-the-box settings. I remain baffled as to how anyone in tech ever gets anything done, myself included.

knite 12 Jan 2022 21:48 UTC
4 points
0
on: Signaling isn’t about signaling, it’s about Goodhart
TLDR: Honesty is the best policy, and don’t be a try-hard.

knite 2 Mar 2021 22:22 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Bucky’s comment on: Grading myself on SSC’s 2020 predictions
Regarding ¹⁴⁄₁₅, I felt that we were probably under-reacting, but “general consensus” is tricky. We were in the home stretch of the Trump presidency so I figured the baseline odds of “consensus” on anything were extremely low.

I’m kicking myself on #16 - I don’t know enough about epidemiology to make such a strong guess.

knite 22 Feb 2021 20:29 UTC
3 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: The Kelly Criterion in 3D
Your explanation is fantastic!