For anyone interested, the keyword to read about things like this in the economics literature is “performativity”
Liam Donovan
I strongly prefer the “dying with dignity” mentality for 3 basic reasons:
as other people have mentioned, “playing to your outs” is too easy to misinterpret as conditioning on comfortable improbabilities no matter how much you try to draw the distinctions
relatedly, focusing on “playing to your outs” (especially if you do so for emotional reasons) may make it harder to stay grounded in accurate models of reality (that may mostly output “we will die soon”)
Operating under the mindset that death is likely when AGI is still some ways around the corner and easy to ignore seems like it ought to make it easier to stay emotionally resilient and ready to exploit miracle opportunities if/when AGI is looming and impossible to ignore
Of these, the 3rd feels the most important to me, partly because I’ve seen it discussed least. It seems like if Eliezer’s basic model is right, a significant portion of the good outcomes require some kind of miracle occuring at crunch time, which will presumably be easier to obtain if key players are emotionally prepared and not suddenly freaking out for the first time (on an emotional/subconscious level). I know basically nothing about psychology, but isn’t it a bad sign if you retreat to “oh death with dignity is unmotivating, let’s just focus on our outs” when AGI is less salient?
I’m not sure of the math OTTOMH but isn’t fractional Kelly equivalent to having some credence that your model is correct and some credence that the market is correct?
In your example, it seems like you’re assuming that the event has a 0% chance of occuring in the worlds where your model is wrong, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense—the worst case from a betting perspective is that the true odds are equal to the odds that the market assigns, because that means that any bet you make will be -EV.
Here’s an interesting case study for fractional Kelly in real world betting scenarios
Trump at 50% is quite far off IMO (I’d quote 25@35 for Trump). His approval ratings are terrible, he’s substantially behind in polls, the country is currently suffering from a pandemic that he substantially mismanaged, the economy is doing poorly, and there’s no particular reason to expect this to change by November.
What is going on here? Usually I assume the people buying Trump at 50% are either GOP partisans or people who don’t understand how betting works, but I seriously doubt Zvi falls into either category. I plan to be at least $8k net short Trump by November, FWIW (better places to bet money currently).
Boris at 80% is also surprisingly low; I’m pretty sure the base rate for prime ministers resigning early when their party has a majority is much lower than those odds imply, and there’s no particular reason for him to be unusually likely to leave. His approval ratings also aren’t unusually low (2 months ago I would have been worried about coronavirus, but he’s now immune).
There’s much more than a 10% chance of the race being undecided 24h after election night (especially if you think Trump has a 50% chance to win). For example, the results in the 2018 AZ senate race shifted roughly 3.5% from election night results to the final results, because AZ elections are largely conducted by mail. There’s probably a lot more vote by mail (VBM) this year (every potential swing state but texas has no excuse absentee voting by mail), and so many states are likely to count very slowly, just like AZ. If the election is within 2% in the tipping point state, then it seems pretty likely that the eventual winner will be under 95c on PredictIt 24h after the election. This is doubly true because many states are likely to be unprepared for the surge of absentee VBM ballots, and may take longer to process them.
I don’t really have anything to say about the others, but I spend a lot of time betting on politics and those seem pretty off.
(I’ll offer to bet with some people at much better odds than PredictIt on Trump losing, as a symbolic gesture against this really terrible conventional wisdom that he has a 50% chance. Not willing to bet on the others without doing more research)
reasonable expectation of negative outcomes if you lost your bankroll
One of the necessary conditions for the Kelly Criterion to be optimal is that losing your bankroll is infinitely bad, so a reasonable expectation of negative outcomes isn’t enough to deviate from Kelly.
This is extremely false; I know of multiple professional political bettors, and plenty more who make 5+ figures betting on election years. Also, PredictIt has $113m matched on the “Who will be the next president?” market alone, which is a lot of money by any reasonable standard…
The explanation for the mispricing is really simple: Trump supporters tend to think that the polls are rigged and he’ll win, and Biden supporters tend to think the polls are off/Trump will rig the election/voter suppression will cost them the election/ etc etc so 90% of the square money is on Trump and there’s not enough sharp money to balance it out. Elections are just too infrequent for biased bettors to lose money quickly enough that prices are efficient, and it doesn’t help that Trump unexpectedly won the 2016 election, transferring a lot of money to biased bettors.
- 19 Oct 2020 5:48 UTC; 2 points) 's comment on Bet On Biden by (
Minor curiosity: What was the context behind Asimov predicting in 1990 that permanent space cities would be built within 10 years? It seems like a much wilder leap than any of his other predictions.
I haven’t done much research on this, but from a naive perspective, spending 4 billion dollars to move up vaccine access by a few months sounds incredibly unlikely to be a good idea? Is the idea that it is more effective than standard global health interventions in terms of QALYs or a similar metric, or that there’s some other benefit that is incommensurable with other global health interventions? (This feels like asking the wrong question but maybe it will at least help me understand your perspective)
I’m happy to; no commission needed. If anyone else wants to get money from fiat into polymarket easily with no fee, just let me know
He’s been a pro political bettor for years, so if he was betting based on biased odds he’d have gone broke a long time ago. It’s just a fact that Trump is extremely overpriced, and his share price is being propped up by extremely -EV bettors; him using that as an excuse to attack Trump supporters doesn’t undermine the quality of his analysis.
Why don’t you consider this a bigger objection to your post? IMO it’s actually very important that a deep, liquid prediction market with millions of pounds of volume and low fees exists, and the prices are fairly similar to PredictIt. IMO this is strong evidence that, in this case, PI’s prices aren’t being distorted too much by the problems you list. I believe US-based bettors can get >1m USD on Trump or Biden at fairly close to Betfair odds with a little bit of time and patience as well through various means; I am aware of several people that have bet >$100k on the election and I think they could bet substantially more if they want to. (some examples of “various means”: crypto exchanges, finding e.g. poker players who want to bet a lot on the election, finding a friend in the UK to bet on betfair for you)
Just commenting to say this is a great post and I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more engagement (maybe it’s so good there’s nothing else to say)
For what it’s worth, 538′s final predictions have (narrowly) outperformed betting markets in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2018 (I haven’t looked at 2010 or 2014). Also, almost every consistently profitable politics bettor is putting massive bets on Biden this cycle, and my impression is that they either believe 538 is ~accurate or biased in favor of Trump. As an example, here’s the twitter account of one of the best professional politics bettors around; he believes Biden has a ~96% chance of winning.
What do you think are the strongest arguments in that list, and why are they weaker than a vague “oh maybe we’ll figure it out”?
FWIW it is totally legal for Americans to trade on polymarket via a VPN or similar; it’s just not legal for polymarket itself to offer services to people with US IP addresses
They are not legit at all; use bookmaker.eu instead. (also every bookie has insane rollover requirements for signup bonuses)
Would be very curious to hear thoughts from the people that voted “disagree” on this post
My uninformed impression is that an “adjuvant” is just something that stimulates increased immune response, which has historically been an additional chemical (such as an aluminum salt) added to vaccines. The mRNA vaccines do not contain these chemicals, but some people confusingly refer to the lipid nanoparticles that surround and protect the mRNA as adjuvants (because they also help increase immune response). I haven’t seen any evidence that these lipid nanoparticles are the kind of adjuvants that might mitigate OAS, but that doesn’t mean much because I’m a total nonexpert.
Hopefully it’s not too late to try to keep the focus on the fun puzzles, etc! There really does seem to be an alarming amount of craziness floating around LW, along with the constant weird attempts to explicitly model things that we evolved to understand instinctively (eg most aspects of social interaction). Reading that stuff slightly negatively affected my mental health despite thinking it was mostly silly—to the extent it’s taken seriously it seems like it could have more substantial negative effects.
Yep, I wanted to experiment with a central example of a comment that should be in the “downvote/agree” quadrant, since that seemed like the least likely to occur naturally. It’s nice to see the voting system is working as intended.