It’s all pretty great. Agreed that the additional versus are on point, but I didn’t want to go on too long.
Zvi
Karma: 10,439
Three on Two: Temur Walkers, Elk Blade, Goblin Blade and Dino Blade
Ban the London Mulligan
Artifact: What Went Wrong?
One weird implication is that if *enough* people do this and force the market back into line with 100% combined probability, you could then close out of your positions with no losses and only wins, and still make a profit. Quirky.
Basically you can deposit for free. You pay 5% to withdraw. Net winnings cost 10%. Capital lock up is max loss on a given market, bet limit is $850 liability on each contract regardless of what you have in other contracts. Market is always live. You always use limit orders, which you can cancel any time.
Rules for some contracts are kind of weird, so if it matters, read ’em.
I’ve edited this in the OP, mods are requested to re-input the post.
It would be really weird if they charged you 10% on your net winnings, and didn’t tie up the capital to pay that fee, but that is what the written rules imply. If that was true and the issue never corrected, you would pay back most of the cash. 112% would still technically be a win (and you get a full win if the field comes in, of course) but it’s quite the tiny profit.
The 5% is another issue if you plan to move things in and out frequently; I’ve been rolling wins. Rossry’s right that you don’t put money in to then sell 95s, win and withdraw it, but you can do lots of 95s in succession (and probably should from a pure maximizing perspective).
And I certainly haven’t been doing full arbitrage, in general, so there’s that.
All fits the basic hypothesis of ‘things need to be extremely wrong before they are worth fixing.’ I will edit to make sure people realize the fee issue properly.
I haven’t seen a documentation on this but I know that it does this, and it seems to base this on the right thing to do—which is that it ties up capital equal to max possible loss.
Free Money at PredictIt?
Agreed, this. Similar to how I was willing to play the Paperclipper clicker game based on knowing it had an endpoint, it was terribly distracting for a few days and then it was a good memory to look back upon. Whereas a real clicker that doesn’t end… shudder.
This game feels like it’s going to be very life-toxic for its 30 days, *but* then it’s fine, and it sounds like quite an experience. So it’s something worth doing if you can spend 30 days like that. I don’t think I can afford to check it out but sounds like it could be pretty cool.
Timer Toxicities
I am deeply confused how someone who is taking decision theory seriously can accept Guaranteed Payoffs as correct. I’m even more confused how it can seem so obvious that anyone violating it has a fatal problem.
Under certainty, this is assuming CDT is correct, when CDT seems to have many problems other than certainty. We can use Vaniver’s examples above, or use a reliable insurance agent to remove any uncertainty, or we also can use any number of classic problems without any uncertainty (or remove it), and see that such an agent loses—e.g. Parfit’s Hitchhiker in the case where he has 100% accuracy.
Exactly. This seems to be a popular model of design, where mostly nothing beyond checking back in periodically will ever be the long term limiting factor if you are playing in any reasonable way. The game that inspired this post does not make this mistake, but it does a similar thing where it offers rewards to everyone over time that dwarf anything a player can otherwise accomplish in their first few weeks—you still have to play to utilize what they give you, but mostly you’re stuck with their gifts until reasonably far in.
Eternal fails the third trade-off by using a Hearthstone economy—your cards can’t be traded. It does a good job with the other two. The most obnoxious thing it has is ‘win one game a day to get a pack’ which is not too bad. Contrast that with e.g. Villiam’s comment above.
Free-to-Play Games: Three Key Trade-Offs
In some sense that list is rather exhaustive because it includes “know anything” and “do anything” as goals that are helped, and that pretty much includes everything. But in that sense, the list is not useful. In the sense that the list is useful, it seems woefully incomplete. And it’s tricky to know what level to respond on. Most centrally, this seems like an example of the utilitarian failure mode of reducing the impact of a policy to the measured, proven direct impact of that policy, as a default (while still getting a result that is close to equal to ‘helps with everything, everywhere, that matters at all’).
“Increased ability to think” would be one potential fourth category. If truth is not being told because it’s not in one’s interest to do so, there is strong incentive to destroy one’s own ability to think. If one was looking to essentially accept the error of ‘only point to the measurable/observable directly caused effects.’
Part of me is screaming “do we really need a post explaining why it is good when people say that which is, when they believe that would be relevant or useful, and bad when they fail to do so, or say that which is not?”
Curious how that experiment ended and think this type of rule is healthy in general (e.g. rate limiting how often one checks and responds) and I’m doing my best to follow a similar one.
Special note for the LW copy of this post: This is obviously not written with LW in mind at all. If you want to respond in the full spirit of the post you may consider doing so at the original post instead ( https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/09/06/who-to-root-for-2019-college-football-edition/ ). If you have LW-style things to say on the topic or related topics, leaving them here would make more sense. I will strive to check back here every so often, but not too often.
At some point I will write a more fundamentals-level guide on sports. This isn’t it, it does not attempt to explain basic football stuff the sport needs you to know and mostly assumes you know. Encouraging that post and similar posts to exist raises the chances they do exist, without lowering (much) the chances of other posts happening.
Finally, I do have more LW-centric stuff in the pipeline. I’ll get there. I just don’t have the focus/time for it right now, whereas this type of thing can be done in a different mode and trades against entertainment time.
Anything this complicated is a non-starter. I do think its heart is in the right place, but needs to be kept simple.