reallyeli

Are “su­perfore­cast­ers” a real phe­nomenon?

• reallyeli 9 Jan 2020 6:01 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Unnamed’s comment on: Are “su­perfore­cast­ers” a real phe­nomenon?

  Hmm, thanks for pointing that out about Brier scores. The Vox article cites https://​​www.vox.com/​​2015/​​8/​​20/​​9179657/​​tetlock-forecasting for its “power law” claim, but that piece says nothing about power laws. It does have a graph which depicts a wide gap between “superforecasters” and “top-team individuals” in years 2 and 3 of the project, and not in year 1. But my understanding is that this is because the superforecasters were put together on elite teams after the first year, so I think the graph is a bit misleading.

  (Citation: the paper https://​​stanford.edu/​​~knutson/​​nfc/​​mellers15.pdf)

  I do think there’s disagreement between the sources — when I read sentences like this from the Vox article

  Tetlock and his collaborators have run studies involving tens of thousands of participants and have discovered that prediction follows a power law distribution. That is, most people are pretty bad at it, but a few (Tetlock, in a Gladwellian twist, calls them “superforecasters”) appear to be systematically better than most at predicting world events … Tetlock even found that superforecasters — smart, well-informed, but basically normal people with no special information — outperformed CIA analysts by about 30 percent in forecasting world events.

  I definitely imagine looking at a graph of everyone’s performance on the predictions and noticing a cluster who are discontinuously much better than everyone else. I would be surprised if the authors of the piece didn’t imagine this as well. The article they link to does exactly what Scott warns against, saying “Tetlock’s team found out that some people were ‘superforecasters’.”

• reallyeli 9 Jan 2020 15:08 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Are “su­perfore­cast­ers” a real phe­nomenon?

  Thanks for your reply!

  It looks to me like we might be thinking about different questions. Basically I’m just concerned about the sentence “Philip Tetlock discovered that 2% of people are superforecasters.” When I read this sentence, it reads to me like “2% of people are superheroes” — they have performance that is way better than the rest of the population on these tasks. If you graphed “jump height” of the population and 2% of the population is Superman, there would be a clear discontinuity at the higher end. That’s what I imagine when I read the sentence, and that’s what I’m trying to get at above.

  It looks like you’re saying that this isn’t true?

  (It looks to me like you’re discussing the question of how innate “superforecasting” is. To continue the analogy, whether superforecasters have innate powers like Superman or are just normal humans who train hard like Batman. But I think this is orthogonal to what I’m talking about. I know the sentence “are superforecasters a ‘real’ phenomenon” has multiple operationalizations, which is why I specified one as what I was talking about.)

• reallyeli 9 Jan 2020 16:55 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: matthewp’s comment on: Are “su­perfore­cast­ers” a real phe­nomenon?

  Agree re: power law.

  The data is here https://​​dataverse.harvard.edu/​​dataverse/​​gjp?q=&types=files&sort=dateSort&order=desc&page=1 , so I could just find out. I posted here trying to save time, hoping someone else would already have done the analysis.

• reallyeli 10 Jan 2020 0:00 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: ESRogs’s comment on: Are “su­perfore­cast­ers” a real phe­nomenon?

  (I’ll back off the Superman analogy; I think it’s disanalogous b/​c of the discontinuity thing you point out.)

  Yeah I like the analogue “some basketball players are NBA players.” It makes it sound totally unsurprising, which it is.

  I don’t agree that Vox is right, because:

  - I can’t find any evidence for the claim that forecasting ability is power-law distributed, and it’s not clear what that would mean with Brier scores (as Unnamed points out).

  - Their use of the term “discovered.”

  I don’t think I’m just quibbling over semantics; I definitely had the wrong idea about superforecasters prior to thinking it through, it seems like Vox might have it too, and I’m concerned others who read the article will get the wrong idea as well.

• reallyeli 3 Apr 2020 3:22 UTC

  3 points

  on: Call for vol­un­teers: as­sess­ing Kurzweil, 2019

  I’m interested — 10 please.

• reallyeli 22 Apr 2020 2:38 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: What are good defense mechanisms against dan­ger­ous bul­let bit­ing?

  Can you give some examples?

  Like a belief that you’ve discovered a fantastic investment opportunity, perhaps?

• reallyeli 26 Jul 2020 3:11 UTC

  3 points

  on: Align­ment As A Bot­tle­neck To Use­ful­ness Of GPT-3

  (Not related to the overall point of your paper) I’m not so sure that GPT-3 “has the internal model to do addition,” depending on what you mean by that — nostalgebraist doesn’t seem to think so in this post, and a priori this seems like a surprising thing for a feedforward neural network to do.

• reallyeli 18 Jan 2021 8:05 UTC

  1 point

  on: Cog­ni­tive mis­takes I’ve made about COVID-19

  +1 to copper tape being difficult to get off.

• reallyeli 7 Mar 2021 7:52 UTC

  1 point

  on: A Semitech­ni­cal In­tro­duc­tory Dialogue on Solomonoff Induction

  In

  Okay. Though in the real world, it’s quite likely that an unknown frequency is exactly $0$, $1$, or $1/2$

  should the text read “unlikely” instead of “likely” ?

• reallyeli 6 Jun 2021 19:51 UTC

  14 points

  on: Al­co­hol, health, and the ruth­less logic of the Asian flush

  I had the “Europeans evolved to metabolize alcohol” belief that this post aims to destroy. Thanks!

  This post gave me the impression that the evolutionary explanation it gives is novel, but I don’t think that’s the case; here’s a paper (https://​​bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/​​articles/​​10.1186/​​1471-2148-10-15#Sec6) that mentions the same hypothesis.

• reallyeli 6 Jun 2021 19:57 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: orthogenesis’s comment on: Al­co­hol, health, and the ruth­less logic of the Asian flush

  I don’t think observing that folks in the Middle East drink much less, due to a religious prohibition, is evidence for or against this post’s hypothesis. It can simultaneously be the case that evolution discovered this way of preventing alcoholism, and also that religious prohibitions are a much more effective way of preventing alcoholism.

• [ ]

  [deleted]

• reallyeli 21 Nov 2021 18:55 UTC

  LW: 3 AF: 2

  AF

  on: The Ab­solute Self-Selec­tion Assumption

  Should

  serious problems with Boltzmann machines

  instead read

  serious problems with Boltzmann brains

  ?

• reallyeli 3 Nov 2022 7:13 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: chanamessinger’s comment on: All AGI Safety ques­tions wel­come (es­pe­cially ba­sic ones) [~monthly thread]

  I don’t think this is an important obstacle — you could use something like “and act such that your P(your actions over the next year lead to a massive disaster) < 10^-10.” I think Daniel’s point is the heart of the issue.

• reallyeli 18 Jan 2023 5:05 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: AI Could Defeat All Of Us Combined

  I don’t think that response makes sense. The classic instrumental convergence arguments are about a single agent; OP is asking why distinct AIs would coordinate with one another.

  I think the AIs may well have goals that conflict with one another, just as humans’ goals do, but it’s plausible that they would form a coalition and work against humans’ interests because they expect a shared benefit, as humans sometimes do.

• reallyeli 5 Mar 2023 22:21 UTC

  0 points

  0

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Mys­ter­ies of mode col­lapse due to RLHF

  What specific rhyme-related tasks are you saying ChatGPT can’t do? I tried it on some unusual words and it got a bunch of things right, made a few weird mistakes, but didn’t give me the impression that it was totally unable to rhyme unusual words.

  

• reallyeli 10 Mar 2023 7:53 UTC

  1 point

  1

  on: The hot mess the­ory of AI mis­al­ign­ment: More in­tel­li­gent agents be­have less coherently

  I think this is taking aim at Yudkowskian arguments that are not cruxy for AI takeover risk as I see it. The second species doesn’t need to be supercoherent in order to kill us or put us in a box; human levels of coherence will do fine for that.

• reallyeli 19 Mar 2023 7:49 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: A chess game against GPT-4

  Caleb Parikh and I were curious about GPT-4′s internal models of chess as a result of this post, so we asked it some questions about the state partway through this game:

  The following is a partial chess transcript in PGN. Please describe all legal moves that could come next. 1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5 4. Nc3 Be7 5. Bf4 O-O 6. Nb5 $2 Na6 $9

  It replied:

  The current position after 1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nf3 d5 4. Nc3 Be7 5. Bf4 O-O 6. Nb5 Na6 is as follows:

  8 r b q r p b p
  7 p p b n p p p
  6 n . . p . n .
  5 . N . . p . .
  4 . . P P . B .
  3 . . . . N . .
  2 P P . . . P P
  1 R . B Q K . R
   a b c d e f g h

  (and explained that lowercase letters were black pieces and uppercase letters were white pieces, which I didn’t know; I don’t play chess).

  This… is not an accurate picture of the game board (what are all those pawns doing on Black’s back row?) We also asked it for a list of legal moves that White could make next, and it described some accurately but some inaccurately (e.g. listed one as a capture even though it wasn’t).

• reallyeli 19 Mar 2023 8:14 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: A chess game against GPT-4

  This is pretty funny because the supposed board state has only 7 columns

  Hah, I didn’t even notice that.

  Also, I’ve never heard of using upper and lowercase to differentiate white and black, I think GPT-4 just made that up.

  XD