NYT on the Manifest forecasting conference
post by Austin Chen (austin-chen) · 2023-10-09T21:40:16.732Z · LW · GW · 14 commentsThis is a link post for https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/08/technology/prediction-markets-manifold-manifest.html
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comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2023-10-09T21:55:47.476Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Archive link that skips paywall and has all the images: https://archive.md/ooQoY
comment by DanielFilan · 2023-10-09T22:35:15.630Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I [Kevin Roose] had never before attended a business conference with a 28 percent chance of an orgy.
Do we know if this is actually true? He's been to South by Southwest (photographed there on his Wikipedia page) and has covered tech and finance, fields that seem to me like they contain orgy-enjoyers.
Replies from: Benito, quinn-dougherty↑ comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2023-10-09T23:11:59.148Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Perhaps he means precisely 28%. I think it's unlikely that he attended a conference with that precise probability.
Replies from: Nathan Young, Razied, DanielFilan↑ comment by Nathan Young · 2023-10-10T09:27:42.969Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I am confident he means he's never been to an event where there was a transparent signal that there was at least a 28% chance. If other events were higher he either didn't know or couldn't argue it credibly.
Replies from: Benito↑ comment by Ben Pace (Benito) · 2023-10-10T18:06:23.497Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I agree that your first sentence was likely his intention, but it's not what he wrote, and I suspect what he wrote is false.
↑ comment by Razied · 2023-10-09T23:17:07.846Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If he's ever attended an event which started out with less than a 28% chance of orgy, which then went on to have an orgy, then that statement is false by the Intermediate Value Theorem, since there would have been an instant in time where the probability of the event crossed 28%.
Replies from: gbear605↑ comment by gbear605 · 2023-10-10T00:08:48.450Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
That's only true if the probability is a continuous function - perhaps the probability instantaneously went from below 28% to above 28%.
Replies from: Razied↑ comment by Razied · 2023-10-10T01:55:40.091Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Oh, true! I was going to reply that since probability is just a function of a physical system, and the physical system is continuous, then probability is continuous... but if you change an integer variable in C from 35 to 5343 or whatever, there's no real sense in which the variable goes through all intermediate values, even if the laws of physics are continuous.
↑ comment by DanielFilan · 2023-10-10T03:35:00.846Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Razied's sibling argument isn't literally quite right, but the spirit is: he's probably been to several conferences, the chances of orgies happening have changed during them, etc.
Replies from: DanielFilan↑ comment by DanielFilan · 2023-10-10T03:36:09.835Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Also "precisely 28%" is a type error when talking about market prices with some transaction cost (and where the price is truncated to two significant digits) - you probably want to read it as "28% plus or minus a couple percentage points".
↑ comment by Quinn (quinn-dougherty) · 2023-10-09T22:47:20.879Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Maybe he meant that at South by Southwest the chance is higher than 28%?
comment by Nathan Young · 2023-10-10T09:37:50.960Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I cannot recall an article by the NYT and maybe most publications that is so relevant accurate and positive. Genuinely shocked.
Replies from: timothy-currie↑ comment by Tiuto (timothy-currie) · 2023-10-10T11:27:40.478Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Don't look at the comments of the article if you want to stay positive.
comment by mako yass (MakoYass) · 2023-10-11T02:36:30.098Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
But in recent years, prediction markets have caught the attention of a crowd of Silicon Valley empiricists
"empiricists"! What's that about?
We may have started to notice that "the distinction between rationalists and empricists was always fake" [LW(p) · GW(p)], I wonder if someone at manifest told the guy "rationalists? Well actually we identify as empiricists."