Well, I was learning together with the rest of our team. So there were a lot of conversations and an inflow of information from all sorts of places: books, blogs, Quora, advisors, internet research, etc... Honestly, it's all a little helpful to get you thinking along the right lines. So I can't recommend any specific resource, but I can recommend learning broadly.
Okay, one particular resource I'll recommend is: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-dLWl8etTtPSGdbbcYffGw
If you have things that you found helpful, please share them here too.
Depending on how complex your strategies are, may be something like this could work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_YmXyUsb9A
Hmm, that's a good question. I haven't looked into it too much, but I'd definitely try to leverage a 3rd party platform for hosting or at least use a 3rd party library to do the trading. https://enigma.co/catalyst/ was kind of decent when I used it for a while a year ago. By now, if they're still improving it, it's probably pretty good. One advantage there is that they have the data too. https://github.com/ccxt/ccxt is a wonderful API that generalizes how you interact with exchanges.
Hosting wise, AWS (what we use) or Google Cloud would both work. I personally like the latter a lot more.
This comment was written in response to you feeling confused about what strategies to explore. I might write a fuller post about it, but for now here're the thoughts off the top of my head:
Calling marking anti-inductive is correct, but it's not helpful when trying to find strategies (as you've just noticed). I'd break down the strategy research process steps into:
1) Can you find a strategy (algorithm + data) that historically has performed well?
2) Can you find this strategy in such a way so as not to find a ton of other strategies that worked by random chance?
3) What % of the market has figured out this strategy?
From Eliezer's post:
Let's say you see me flipping a coin. It is not necessarily a fair coin. It's a biased coin, and you don't know the bias. I flip the coin nine times, and the coin comes up "heads" each time. I flip the coin a tenth time. What is the probability that it comes up heads?
If you answered "ten-elevenths, by Laplace's Rule of Succession", you are a fine scientist in ordinary environments, but you will lose money in finance.
In finance the correct reply is, "Well... if everyone else also saw the coin coming up heads... then by now the odds are probably back to fifty-fifty."
Right. But if it's slightly more complicated than just looking at the coin, then suddenly we can have an edge:
1) May be not everyone can write the code to compute which way the coin is facing (algorithm). May be not everyone can see the coin (data).
2) May be other people are looking at the weather and the weather has been sunny nine days in a row.
3) May be not everyone can run their algorithm fast enough to make the trading decision in time. May be others figured out this strategy, but they're not confident in it enough to deploy a lot of money.
So once you find your strategy, you might be in a pretty small group of people who have discovered it. So you'll be fine in proportion to how much money is allocated to this strategy vs how much capacity it has.
And the lesson is: aim for a strategy complexity that's simple enough to pass 2), but complicated enough that most people haven't found it. And the bar for that is actually not that high (at least in crypto).
Crypto quant trading: Intro
2019-04-17T20:52:53.279Z · score: 58 (18 votes)Awesome! I’ve really enjoyed reading this. Quite a lot of ideas resonated in a surprising new way. I might actually read this book. Thanks for writing up the summary!
Reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/vl-44jDYDJQ
Ruby recently wrote this, which seems relevant: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k2KwBEq4ToXnvZSbz/on-the-nature-of-agency
I think overall I just appreciate that you guys did something for April 1st. It made the website / community feel a bit more alive.
Having studied and achieved stream entry (in the Vipassana tradition), I very much doubt many people have stumbled into it. Although for clarity, what % of the population are we taking about? Quick fermi: from what I’ve seen in the spiritual community about 1/1000 have achieved stream entry spontaneously / easily. Out of my bubble, I’d say 1/100 is spiritually inclined. Then I’d add another factor of at least 1/100 to control for my bubble being the Bay Area.
The reason why I doubt it is because most people will tell you (and have written) that it has take them (and people they know) many years and intense practice to get it.
I do think a lot of people have gotten A&P though.
Not long after Lantz made Bostrom’s ideas playable, a young filmmaker named Alberto Roldán followed a link to the game on Facebook and was entranced. He contacted Lantz about making Universal Paperclips into a feature-length film. Roldán is close to finishing a draft of the script, and he has already curried the interest of several producers. His version will be much more explicitly peopled than the game itself is. “It has to involve characters who feel like it’s their story,” he told me. “As you play, you keep getting these increasingly large multimillion dollar gifts to sort of placate your ostensible keepers. We know who these characters are in our modern world: hyper-rich tech titans who are not super interested in questioning the thing that has enriched them—with the justification that they are healing the world at large.”
One way I’ve experienced this was playing poker in a casino. I was pretty decent and could see a lot of the the mistakes other people were making. I thought that meant I should just be able to come in and win their money, but I was sorely mistaken. It was only after a full week of training and practice that I was able to get to that level. (A week sounds like not a lot of time, but it took me a few years of playing on and off to get to that level + realization,)
Yes! For me one area where it’s super clear is relationships. On first dates I’m 100% active curiosity. I’ll ask lots of questions, trying to get to the heart of who the person across the dinner table is. But after a while, once I’ve “accepted” them, I switch more to open curiosity. It feels more playful. I’m less interested in their version and more interested in exploring together. There’s trust.
Note that the post you linked by Johnicholas contains a mistake that the author admits invalidates his point.
[Link] OpenAI LP
2019-03-12T23:22:59.861Z · score: 15 (5 votes)Actually I take that last part back. I could see people who love to vibe about rationality. I think I actually do too, just at a certain level of depth / casually,
Yes, but also once you get good at vibing you want to go vibe with people on your favorite frequency / topic. Also I think some topics are more “vibable“ than others, and rationality is just not one of them.
Also I think this post gets at part of what you’re pointing at: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4QemtxDFaGXyGSrGD/other-people-are-wrong-vs-i-am-right
Camel: you have a piece of data, then someone asks if you’ve seen a camel, then you realize that fits with your data. Elephant: you have a piece of data and so you imagine what the “thing” might be. But nobody walked in and asked if someone has seen an elephant.
Why do you think you should be reading / learning more vs going and doing / making something?
Seems like it would throw a brick at you, because it wanted to throw a brick, not caring that in 2 seconds it’ll hit your face. (You can probably come up with a better example with a slightly longer timeframe.)
RAIN is easiest and most memorable.
I learned recently that some states used to offer an equivalent of "forever stamps" for education. Meaning you pay $X at any time and you've guaranteed your payment for a state university in the future. Obviously, they discontinued it, since the costs rose and they lost money. But if you wanted to short *education cost*, you'd basically want to sell these guarantees yourself.
I don’t think I’ve read this view before, or if I have, I’ve forgotten it. Thanks for writing this up!
I’ve been reading basically every post for the past few months. I don’t usually leave comments though, unless it’s to support and thank the author. (Thanks for writing this! Funny enough I also noticed recently how few comments there are, and it seemed worth bringing up.) I guess I feel like I just don’t have much to add to most posts.
“view them as a set of open-ended concepts that have yet to reach a satisfactory conclusion“ is a good description of how I feel about this post.
I call it “making an executive decision.” And I used that term before getting into startups.
Link: That Time a Guy Tried to Build a Utopia for Mice and it all Went to Hell
2019-01-23T06:27:05.219Z · score: 15 (6 votes)Thanks for writing your thoughts out loud. Curious to follow your progress.
Of course, truly effective tea plus a well-conveyed story about its great properties will generate more sales than effective tea or a good story alone.
Sometimes not, I think. It's almost like a measure of the efficiency / effectiveness of the given market. If the market is really good at recognizing reality, then you don't need to tell a story. (Basic software libraries are like that: do they give the compute the right thing? If yes, then it's good.) If the market is not at recognizing reality, then creating stories is often way cheaper than then doing the real thing. (And also transfers better across domains.)
Is there anything in the world that we know of that does alignment for something else? Can we say that humans are doing "coherent extrapolated volition" for evolution? Keeping in mind that under this view, evolution itself would evolve and change into something more complex and may be better.
I think there's a bias when we consider optimizing for X's values to consider only X without its environment. But the environment gave rise to X and actually much of X doesn't make sense without it. So I think to some extent we also would need to find ways to do alignment on the environment itself. And that means to some extent helping evolution.
First off, great thought experiment! I like it, and it was a nice way to view the problem.
The most obvious answer is: “Wow, we sure don’t know how to help. Let’s design a smarter intelligence that’ll know how to help better.”
At that point I think we’re running the risk of passing the buck forever. (Unless we can prove that process terminates.) So we should probably do at least something. Instead of trying to optimize, I’d focus on doing things that are most obvious. Like helping it not to die. And making sure it has food.
Just wanted to say I’ve been reading all your recent posts. And I really like all of them, the ideas you lay out, and how you talk about them. You really make LW worth coming to almost every day. Thank you! FWIW, if you continue down this path, I could see you having your own SSC-sized community.
I love that game too. Thanks for the write up, it’s been fun to read your take on it. I haven’t played it recently, so didn’t know they added the ending. I’ll come back and play it again.
This will take a long time to load, but it's comprehensive: https://arbital.com/explore/math/
I'm not sure when you tried. It works right now.
Hmm, I'm skeptical a barter system would work. I don't think I've seen a successful implementation of it anywhere, though I do hear about people trying.
Yes, we've considered paying people, but that's not scalable. (A good 3-5 page explanation might take 10 hours to write.)
It's not open sourced.
The pages might take a while to load (up to 30 seconds).
I can imagine a neural-activation-like effect coming out of that, where frequently co-active posts naturally rise to the top of each other's links and become threads or topics.
Not sure what you mean by this.
My guess for Wikipedia's success is that they were one of the first; and there was more of a sense of an online community back then. Also it's easier to create Wikipedia content than, say, a good explanation. StackOverflow succeeded because asking and answering questions is pretty easy, you get instant feedback, and they got community management right. (They solved exactly one problem well!) The founders were also really well known so it was easy for them to seed the platform.
I can't open-source the platform as long as I'm doing the for-profit venture, since the platforms are too similar. However, if at some point I have to stop, then I'll be happy to open source everything at that point.
I'm not into persuading people. :) If you want to write, go for it. I still think Arbital is a really good platform for writing up math explanations.
Not someone with sufficient authority, just the blog owner. That seems fair though. You can create you own blog and then you would be in charge of which comments to approve.
Yes, but that's not "invite-only".
How is it invite only? Are you talking about the comment section?
Originally the plan was to do exactly that if we couldn't figure how to build a "joyful maze": just throw open the doors and see what people do with it. Unfortunately there is still a significant amount of work left to do that well, and right now I'm more optimistic about the new platform than I am about scavenging the current version.
Here are like 5 pages explaining all the visions: https://arbital.com/p/more_about_arbital/
Basically what we tried is: "let's figure out how people are supposed to have truth-seeking conversations, build a platform that facilities that, and then grow it." Step 1 is very hard. Step 3 is made harder because your platform only attracts truth-seeking people.
New approach: "build a platform that facilities communication, grow it, then shape the ongoing discussion to be more truth-seeking." Step 1 is still hard, but not made harder. Step 3 sounds a lot more doable.
Don't use the outside view. Use your brain. If Arbital was confusing, but you didn't look closer at it, then you didn't use your brain. If MIRI seems confusing and you don't look closer at it, then you aren't using your brain. The whole concept of "smart people" whom you can trust with anything is just wrong. There are only niche experts.
My two cents: Arbital had very little to do with MIRI, aside from Arbital being Eliezer's idea. But this was definitely out of his realm of expertise. MIRI/AI stuff is not.
It's a complicated answer and also somewhat outside of the topic I want to discuss here (which is Arbital 1.0). For part of the answer see: http://lesswrong.com/lw/otq/whats_up_with_arbital/dqbc
- Currently it's not clear to anyone what Arbital is, what it can do, who it's for, etc.. It needs to solve a real problem and present itself as solving that clear problem.
- The tech we used is now somewhat obsolete. The codebase has accumulated a lot of unnecessary features. Also Google Material UI turned out to be too heavyweight and not as pleasant to design with as I thought initially. (These are all arguments for remaking the platform.)
- The blogging platform will be "as open and as inviting of contribution as possible."
Yes. There is already a pretty large demand for blogging platforms, and Arbital 2.0 will have features which will make it a much better option for some users. I'll also be personally reaching out to a lot of bloggers to interview them about their experience / wishes. I'll also be testing the key value propositions with a graphic that's being created right now.
But also sometimes you just have to go ahead and build the thing to really test it.
Yes, many students would benefit from a math explanation platform. But it was hard for us to find writers, and we weren't getting as much traction with them as we wanted. We reached out to some forums and to many individuals. That version of Arbital was also promoted by Eliezer on FB. When we switched away from math, it wasn't because we thought it was hopeless. We had a lot of ideas left to try out. But when it's not going well, you have to call it quits at some point, and so we did. There was also the consideration that if we built a platform for (math) explanations, it would be hard to eventually transition to a platform that solved debates (which always seemed like the more important part).
I think if someone wanted to give it a shot with another explanation platform and had a good strategy for getting writers, I'd feel pretty optimistic about their chance of success.
See this comment: http://lesswrong.com/lw/otq/whats_up_with_arbital/dq9h
I think we likely made a mistake with respect to openness, but it's not obvious when/how. Probably the biggest problem is that we couldn't settle on what we wanted the users to do once they were on the platform.
Noted, but I disagree.