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I have no idea how to begin evaluating “the amount I’d personally benefit if public good X received 1% more funding.”
To the extent this is meant to be a quick rule of thumb that shortcuts spending some time researching things, I don’t see it.
Any tips?
Right.
One of the most memorable gaming experiences for sure.
This post reminds me of this one: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jkvAYpzjk8DF5tszD/conflict-the-rules-of-engagement-and-professionalism And I agree with both pretty strongly.
I think one way to get deep criticism / feedback is to start a “success spiral” in that direction. That is, start with requesting and responding to small feedback that’s easy for the other person to give and for you to receive and implement.
I think 10,000 or so. Assuming the days are meaningfully different.
Hmm, so I'm realizing I can't write much about this without revealing / implying certain key information about how we view things at my hedge fund. :/
But I found this document, which is pretty sane and goes into some details on this and other basic topics: https://bigquant.com/community/uploads/default/original/3X/7/d/7d3a0a5a4f0f2fbfd87b2c6e70037dd3c8f48e2c.pdf
Wow, thank you so much for this! This makes me feel a lot more comfortable writing my own contracts for small things.
I watched this video recently and it made me think of your simulacra posts, Zvi. And now you posted another one, and it seems extra appropriate to bring it up, because: 1) the video is in part about Jews, and 2) it's framed in a lecture excerpt by Jordan Peterson who has done a long series on the first book of the Old Testament, reviewing it through the Level 1 lens, and 3) I think this is one of the clearest examples of Level 4 that I've seen. (Or perhaps targeted at Level 4.)
That’s funny I used to make games professionally and as a hobby too. If you want to send me your games I’d be happy to take a look.
My vision for this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kAgJJa3HLSZxsuSrf/arbital-postmortem#Chapter_5__Arbital_2_0 (Arbital 2.0 part)
Thanks for writing this up. Very down to earth.
Hmm, I find histograms pretty unhelpful if you're trying to eye them. Seems like it would be better to take your strategy and plot the cumulative returns (with fees and without).
Sure that could be an edge, but likely only if it doesn't happen too often. E.g. people are often averse to exiting their losing trades. I think in most markets an Intuitive trader wouldn't find an easy way to profit on that because Algorithmic traders already took care of that.
Great question! I think a lot about this too, although I don’t have an answer. Regarding EMH though see my other recent posts though.
Really good points all around. Rebalancing really should have been part of the post.
What do you mean by "numbers"?
Hmm, then can you be more specific what "people" and "institutions" you're referring to in "Why are people willing to hold so much government debts at zero percent interest rates? Why don't the institutions that hold so much debt instead buy index funds?" Are you talking about governments? Because almost all people and institutions don't have trillions lying around.
And most LWers are not writing financial posts.
I think many people here go outside of LW to source ideas and bring them back here to share. I agree that there are plenty of high level discussions happening outside of LW. But I don't understand why those same discussions shouldn't also happen here.
One part of the puzzle is that most institutions are limited in what kind of assets they can buy. They are further limited by what kind of risk/return profile their investors are looking for. If you're holding government debt, it's considered pretty safe and has very low volatility. You're not going to lose that much money in any given year (but you also won't make much). For an index fund you could lose or make +/- 20% in any given year. Some institutions just can't tolerate that risk in the sense that it's not their job to take on that much risk.
Yeah many people think along these lines too, which is why many people talk about AI helping humanity flourish, and anything short of that is a bit of a catastrophe.
There is a number of fundamental topics: shorting, different asset classes, leverage, volatility, futures/derivatives, liquidity, market making, arbitrage, hedge fund investment structure, momentum / mean reversion. It's true that for all of these you can go and read about them on Investopedia or something. But I know I personally read LW a lot and if someone explained the basics of some field I don't know much about here there's just a higher chance I'd read and trust them.
On the more advanced side: constructing trades based on your beliefs, public funds (e.g. SPY), options, finance history, most theory, macroeconomics. There are a lot more topics here for sure; it's hard to generate them on the spot.
I guess I'm also thinking that many people *do know* because they have heard some concepts being brought up a few times (not necessarily on LW) and it piqued their interest.
Oh nice, I can definitely write about this. This is basically what I do all day.
I've been running one of the world's largest crypto quant hedge funds for the past 3 years. We're still pretty small when you compare us to hedge funds outside of crypto, sure, but it's become less true every month.
There's a number of other authors on LW who have decent qualifications.
Yeah, that's actually a very good point. I just created this question: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EuEybxcSPEcoN8i6v/what-posts-on-finance-would-your-find-helpful-or-interesting
Btw, here's my post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wfed7zfm6ZyBXsrrp/the-holy-grail-of-portfolio-management I ended up writing two, since I had to explain the portfolio management before getting to individual strategies. :)
I don't think I can commit to reviewing drafts; I have a 3mo old baby which takes up a lot of my free time. But I hope you're not feeling too discouraged! Just continue writing and reading, and I'm sure you'll get better. (And FWIW I don't think I'm a particularly good at writing or explaining either. I do much better 1:1 as well.)
I think what I'll try to do, now that we've had this chat is to leave better comments on your future posts.
Would it help to include / link to definitions for financial terms?
Thanks for taking my criticism in stride. I do appreciate you writing and often it's better to get something out there than not at all. And after all, that's how we learn.
I wouldn't say I understand finance particularly super well, which I think is part of what makes reading your post frustrating. It's not aimed at a beginner because it's not explaining the basics and isn't focusing one one concrete concept at a time. It's not building up on one idea. I guess it might be trying to show an overview, like flying over an area. But as it stands, I don't have much to hang these concepts on, so they just slide right off. I guess I'll wait until the future parts to see how it caches out.
I'm actually writing a post on finance as well right now. Hope to have it posted tomorrow. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it, and in particular on how it does the explaining part.
I strongly downvoted this post and now came back to write a comment now to explain why. (I think it's a good policy to explain all my strong downvotes.)
Your first post in the series was all over the place. It felt like trying to check off all the rationality boxes; something like "I fit in here, let me say some stuff". Which is may be just my perception or may be you are just a wordy writer. Anyway, I just didn't vote on that post, but I think it's important for context here.
This post is about finance which is a pretty complicated topic. A lot of things that "just make sense" don't actually work out the way you'd think. (Or have worked so recently but not historically.) So I think you have to be especially careful in describing and analyzing most types of financial strategies. This post (and previous posts in this sequence) does the opposite. It lists a bunch of ideas rapidly with minimal explanation or analysis. It feels like a flag waving for doing finance in a better and cooler way.
(However I did like Wei_Dai's summary of your post and your response to it. I think those two comments alone could be expanded to fill a post, if not a whole sequence, if you want to do it "right".)
Strong downvote because the question feels a bit targeted / leading. May be OpenAI is decreasing AI xrisk. May be other organizations are also engaged in similar behaviors that increase AI xrisk. I think a better approach would be to break things down into:
1) What factors affect AI xrisk? (Or, since that's pretty broad, have specific questions like "Does X affect AI xrisk?") (E.g. "How does pushing the state of the art of capability research affect AI xrisk?")
2) Have specific questions about OpenAI actions / traits that can be relatively easily grounded. (E.g. "How would you rate the quality of the OpenAI safety team?")
It's easy enough for people to put #1 and #2 together, but it has the added benefit of people using answering #1 without targeting any specific company. Plus answers from #1 apply to other organizations.
I was learning a bit of piano last year too, and found it very motivational to try to write my own songs. Even as a completely beginner and basically through pure trial and error, it was very fun. Then when I learned bits of theory it was nice to view my songs through that lens and see what resonated. (E.g. "ah that's why this key sounds nice here: because it's following the major scale I'm in")
Oh, and I strongly second the "play the songs you want" approach. It's so much more fun than trying to learn what you "should".
My bar for a normal upvote is pretty low. Sometimes I even upvote somewhat low quality posts from new authors if I think they actually tried + seems like they could get better with some encouragement.
Strong upvote is for a post that hits most of: useful, interesting, well written, credible and surprising.
I wanted to write a post on this topic for a while, but couldn’t find the time. I’m glad I got to do the talk instead, since that helped me with narrowing down the scope.
I have more thoughts I can type up, if people are interested.
But getting the timing [on buying options] right seems tricky to me.
Decide on how much to spend per month and just buy longest available options. (I think the payout for this gets progressively better the closer you think we are to singularity.)
I'd consider adding exposure to specific company candidates most likely to participate / benefit from AGI, namely: Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, etc...
Also, since you're betting on a pretty drastic outcome, which is very likely not priced in correctly into the markets*, you should consider buying options instead of stocks. The cost to you is much cheaper, it's easier to get more leverage, and they payout is much bigger for the extreme cases (in your favor).
* I gave a talk that touches on this point recently. The transcript should be up in the next few weeks.
No the SSC article is about how you should pay attention to the distribution of aliens in different universes, and that in most of them you won’t find any, while the mean can still be pretty high.
Do you find the solutions to problems like this manually or are there tools out there that can help or completely solve it?
Yeah I’d love to hear more about it. Anything you can share. And that could be a good material for a post too,
Wow, that's very cool! This is actually the closest existing thing to Arbital I've heard about. I guess to Eliezer's point, it does sound like they built this system in one go, without doing much of MVP-kind of iteration. But also... damn! From the sound of it, there are a lot of complicated components, and a lot of manual work that went into the whole thing. If those are the minimum requirements to build something like that, then I'm not sure we ever had a chance.
But the good news is: if this really works, then I think Arbital is totally doable and would be just the online version of this. The remaining difficult part would be monetization, but in retrospect it's quite possible Arbital should have been a non-profit.
Are you doing homeschooling? How is that going? I’m just very curious because I’m thinking about it for my children too. What is forest school?
I feel like the obvious answer here is to look at the underlying intention.
This clip (from The Office) reminds me of when people suggest various patches to AI after it violates some safety concern / fails an experiment.
I have a one month old baby girl. I think the most important skill I can teach her is how to learn. There’s of course a bunch of sub-skills there: beginner’s mindset, paying attention, research, asking for help, checking, etc....
As you might imagine it’s a personal thing that does not translate very well. I do want to share it with people but I have not yet thought of a way to do it .. correctly.
Honestly it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. One month in and it’s getting a bit easier. She sleeps about 2-3 hours at a time.
I was walking along the same line of thought about 10 years ago. And a year ago it finally led me to a very very interesting update. Happy adventuring!
It’s a good question, and this scenario is something I’ve been thinking about as well. I don’t have a good answer. One obvious consideration is how easy is it to travel. By car you can go to Mexico or Canada. Otherwise you need to fly or take a boat.
I’m now a father of a 3 weeks old girl. So your parenting posts are extra useful and appreciated!
Would you / when would you recommend Brian Skyrms's Signals: Evolution, Learning, and Information?
Fermi paradox has a much simpler answer: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/03/ssc-journal-club-dissolving-the-fermi-paradox/
Very similar to : https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GaP3JK5kSABRa8GkK/the-mind-board-game-review
Can you convert the percents into the usd amounts. The percents are kind of meaningless since the budgets differ a lot.