LessWrong 2.0 Reader

It seems like the pro-Trump Polymarket whale may have had a real edge after all. Wall Street Journal reports (paywalled link, screenshot) that he’s a former professional trader, who commissioned his own polls from a major polling firm using an alternate methodology—the neighbor method, i.e. asking respondents who they expect their neighbors will vote for—he thought would be less biased by preference falsification.

I didn't bet against him, though I strongly considered it; feeling glad this morning that I didn't.

Without a clear definition of "winning,"

This is part of the problem we're pointing out in the post. We've encountered claims of this "winning" flavor that haven't been made precise, so we survey different things "winning" could mean more precisely, and argue that they're inadequate for figuring out which norms of rationality to adopt.

The former can be sufficient—e.g. there are good theoretical researchers who have never done empirical work themselves.

In hindsight I think "close conjunction" was too strong—it's more about picking up the ontologies and key insights from empirical work, which can be possible without following it very closely.

I think it would be better to form a big winner-take-all bloc [LW · GW]. With proportional voting, the number of electoral votes at stake will be only a small fraction of the total, so the per-voter influence of CA and TX would probably remain below the national average.

I don't see any reason to structure this agreement as an open-ended compact other states can join instead of a bilateral agreement between just California and Texas as proposed.

(The same reasoning applied to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would have its membership closed as soon as they reach a majority in electoral votes, and then completely disregard the votes of any state that didn't sign on, voting in whoever gets the most votes in member states.)

Proof that the quoted bookkeeping rule works, for the exact case:

• The original DAG $G$ asserts $P\left[X\right]={\prod }_{i}P\left[X_i|X_{p{a}^G\left(i\right)}\right]$
• If $G^{\prime }$ just adds an edge from $j$ to $k$, then $G^{\prime }$ says $P\left[X\right]=P[X_k|X_{p{a}^G\left(k\right)},X_j]{\prod }_{i\ne k}P\left[X_i|X_{p{a}^G\left(i\right)}\right]$
• The original DAG's assertion $P\left[X\right]={\prod }_{i}P\left[X_i|X_{p{a}^G\left(i\right)}\right]$ also implies $P[X_k|X_{p{a}^G\left(k\right)},X_j]=P\left[X_k|X_{p{a}^G\left(k\right)}\right]$, and therefore implies $G^{\prime }$'s assertion $P\left[X\right]=P[X_k|X_{p{a}^G\left(k\right)},X_j]{\prod }_{i\ne k}P\left[X_i|X_{p{a}^G\left(i\right)}\right]$.

The approximate case then follows by the new-and-improved Bookkeeping Theorem [LW(p) · GW(p)].

Not sure where the disconnect/confusion is.

You say solar is getting cheaper, but it is only the panels that are getting cheaper. They will continue to get even cheaper, but this is not relevant to retrofitting individual houses, where the cost is already dominated by labor. As the cost of labor dominates, economies of scale in labor will be more relevant.

To a first approximation, solar is legal for individual residences and illegal on a larger scale.

Maybe you could learn something by looking at the public filings, but you didn't look at them. By regulation, not by being public, it has to spend proportionate to its income, but whether it is spending on transmission or generation is a fiction dictated by the regulator. It may well be that its transmission operating costs are much lower than its price and that a change of prices would be viable without any improvement in efficiency. This is exactly what I would how I would expect the company to set prices if it controlled the regulator: to extract as much money as possible on transmission to minimize competition. I don't know how corrupt the regulator is, but that ignorance is exactly my point.

Depending on the posts I think you could argue they're comparable to one of thosebother source types I listed.