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Regarding betting on inflation, TIPS already exist.
Is the idea to watch it when the event starts or to watch it beforehand?
But elections determine who appoints the judges and bureaucrats who make most policy. And some areas of policy, e.g. tax policy, are mostly decided by elected officials, not appointed judges or bureaucrats.
A remarkable empirical finding across many scientific fields, at many different scales and levels of abstraction, is that a small set of control variables usually suffices.
I'm skeptical that this is true for most things we care about. It's true in the scientific fields where we have the most accurate models, such as physics, but that's likely because there are so few relevant variables in those fields.
Most new drugs that go into clinical trials fail. Essentially, a pharmaceutical company identifies a variable that appears to be the mediator of a medical outcome, they create a drug that tweaks that variable, and then it turns out not to produce the outcome that they thought it would. There are too many other relevant variables that are poorly understood.
The other thing that makes me skeptical is the effectiveness of machine learning models that use a large number of inputs. It's possible that there's a simple underlying structure to what they're predicting that we just haven't figured out yet, but based on what exists now, it sure looks like there are a large number of relevant variables.
Near the end of the linked malaria article, it says:
Bucala and Geall have placed their vaccine in the hands of the Oxford University institution that facilitated the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. It is one of the only places in the world that is doing phase 1 studies in malaria, meaning researchers infect human volunteers with the disease after immunizing them.
So it sounds like maybe they are in act doing human challenge trials.
Do you have a link to a higher resolution copy of that poster? The text is too blurry for me to read.
Strong upvote even though this is kind of a meh update, because I want to encourage actually gathering the data and reporting on it.
Some people are willing to pay a premium for the ability to buy something legally.
I'm confused why your lab didn't know about sleep as memory post-processing. My high school psych class in 2005 taught that.
Consider a case where someone dies in an industrial accident , although all rules were followed: if you think the plant manager should be exonerated because he folowed the rules, you are siding with deontology, whereas if you think he should be punished because a death occurred under his supervision, you are siding with consequentialism.
That's not how consequentialism works. The consequentialist answer would be to punish the plant manager if and only if doing so would cause the world to become a better place.
In jurisdictions where there's an exam required to graduate high school, let students of any age take the exam, but have a sufficiently higher cut-off to graduate early. Anyone who graduates early is automatically admitted to a university (e.g. in the U.S. it might be to their choice of state university) and received a tuition subsidy at least equal to the amount it would have cost the public school system to keep them in high school.
A school where students spend much of their time in mostly-unsupervised independent work and/or socializing, and they are (individually or in small groups with similar ability) matched with tutors on specific topics. I think this would work much better than the one size fits all model we use now.
An elected office where there's a term limit, and some length of time after someone leaves office (e.g. in the following election), voters vote on how good a job they did, and the former office-holder receives a cash payout or pension based on the result of the vote.
The benefits of this system would be:
- Politicians would have an incentive to focus on how their performance in office will be judged on a longer time-horizon.
- If the payout is large enough, it would incentivize politicians not to take sinecures and "speaking fees" that would be seen as corrupt after leaving office (and thereby make them less useful as an inducement to corruption while they're in office)
- During an election, the question "how did it go last time this party was in charge?" would be top-of-mind, encouraging political parties to optimize more for the long term.
Equity markets for individual products. Essentially, a company with a design for a new product creates a Kickstarter-like campaign where you can back the product, but in addition to (or instead of) getting the product when it's released, you get royalties on each one sold (e.g. a company promises $5 in royalties per unit sold and sells that for $250k, and investors can buy fractions of that).
This would enable companies (and individual inventors?) to de-risk and apply wisdom of crowds to new product development.
Some way to publish a book as an excludable good. For example, you could have a movie theater, but instead of a movie screen, you have temporary access to a book. Someone watches to make sure you don't copy the book.
That sounds like Kindle.
One thing I'm curious about - what did the process of the border closing off look like, and what was going on in the weeks leading up to it? While I have no near term plans to emigrate, I often wonder what the warning signs are that it's time to start seriously looking, and what the warning signs are that it's time to GTFO.
It's not a good idea to rely too heavily on a single source, even a good one. Every source will have some errors, and ideally you want to follow multiple sources whose errors are relatively uncorrelated.
It's also worth looking into what possibilities exist for cashing out your stock. Markets exist for private company stock, though they're much less liquid than that of public companies, and your stock may come with restrictions on your ability to sell it.
We will be discussing http://hipcrimevocab.com/2020/08/01/the-reason-americans-dont-trust-experts-economists/.
Thanks everyone who voted!
Vote on which article to discuss by September 13.
Do these follow a regular schedule?
Thanks for the article suggestions. If you plan on coming, please vote here for which article to read.
Given a monopsony employer, setting a minimum wage equal to the competitive equilibrium wage is efficient because it removes the monopsony dead weight loss.
US taxes treat corporate debt financing more favorably than corporate equity financing, which may be distorting companies towards higher leverage.
IMO Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Elon Musk seem pretty similar. For example, they both have weird names. I'd predict a heightened chance of discontinuities on metrics his companies are working on. Maybe also a heightened chance of something really big being built. :)
Are there any major recent discontinuities in the cost, range, or number of electric cars, cost or energy density of batteries, or cost of putting stuff into orbit?
We don't have well-defined stats on how well people's prediction skills have improved over time. From my anecdotal observations, pretty much everyone (myself included) starts out vastly overconfident, and then after losing a lot of points in their first few predictions, reaches an appropriate level of confidence. I'm not sure if anyone goes from ok to great though.
There have been few times that we've been able to take actions based on the predictions, because that requires the following combination of factors that tends not to occur together:
- The answers are sufficiently clear-cut to make the prediction scorable
- There are specific actions that depend on those well-defined answers
- Enough people in our local community have enough insight to get some sort of wisdom of crowds.
The examples where the predictions led to decisions are:
- Scott Alexander visited Boston and we hosted a meetup that he came to, and we wanted to run a survey at the meetup. We took predictions on how many people would attend, along with a conditional prediction market on the survey response rate for paper vs for tablet. Based on this, we went with paper. Attendance was much higher than anticipated, and we ended up running out of forms (but were able to make copies, so it worked out ok).
- When our apartment had some maintenance issues and the landlord was giving us mixed signals about whether we'd be able to renew the lease, we took predictions on when/whether the issues would be resolved and whether the landlord would offer a renewal. Based on these, we decided not to look for a new place. The issue was in fact resolved and we were able to renew the lease.
- One of our housemates has moved away, with some ambiguity around whether it's temporary permanent, and we have predictions on whether they will return. TBD how this one will go.
For this month's meetup, in the interest of self-improvement, we will be making new year's resolutions, and in the interest of epistemics, we're going to be predicting how likely each other are to succeed at our resolutions.
Sharing new year's resolutions is strictly optional, and if you choose to share them, having people predict how likely you are to succeed is also optional.
There aren't any activities currently planned for that date range, but we're always eager to meet visiting rationalists so maybe you could stop by.
What if weight were capped at 1?
If you're in a conversation at a party and there is another conversation next to you, how does that affect...
... your ability to follow the conversation you're in
[pollid:1237]
... your enjoyment of the party
[pollid:1238]
How likely are you to switch conversations?
[pollid:1239]
No. The Ottoman Empire started in 1299. Islam, and various very powerful caliphates, had existed for centuries before that.
The Qur'an wasn't written down until a while after Muhammad's death, by which time there was an incentive for leaders to edit it for their own benefit.
See also Emperor Constantine I's efforts to quash dissent within the Christian community in order to make it more politically unified.
Because I think it would be useful to be able to weigh in explicitly on each option rather than just pick a favorite:
Matterlist[pollid:1202]
LumenList[pollid:1203]
PragmaPad[pollid:1204]
PragmaPlanner[pollid:1205]
Persisto[pollid:1206]
I'm curious - what have you outsourced to Fancy Hands? I know in theory that I should be outsourcing stuff to services like that, but I really don't know what stuff I can effectively outsource in practice.
This could also be a metaphor for politicians, or depending on your worldview, marketing-heavy businesses. Or religions.
I interpreted "fullscreened" to mean "maximized", though I'm not totally sure whether that was the intent.
Disclaimer: US-centric perspective
Elite colleges generally students who are "genuinely" (insert adjectives here), not yet another honor roll student with a boring essay about how their voluntourism trip to Africa changed their life. In a competitive field like that, you want to stand out, and you stand out a lot more by doing something that both clearly signals being good at things and is different from the signals that other students are sending.
Therefore, doing whatever other students of your socio-economic status do is a bad strategy. Much better to do something impressive and different.
Can we please bring back downvoting?
I don't think whether the group's average output increases or decreases is the right metric. What's important is whether the newly enlarged group's output is higher than what the group and its new members' total output would be if the groups weren't merged - do the immigrants become more productive by immigrating, and do they make the native population more or less productive?
Just because something is an easy thing doesn't mean you will know it's an easy thing.
That's pretty much why I made this thread: so that I (and others) could learn that something that we didn't realize are easy actually are.
Thank you for posting this.
I am not signed up for cryonics because I think the current preservation technology is nowhere near good enough work, but I very much appreciate having a concise summary of recent developments so that when the situation improves, I'll know it's time to reconsider.
If all votes required 100 karma, using sockpuppets for votes would get a lot harder.
If you have a gene that makes you help you siblings, your offspring are reasonably likely to get it too, which benefits their siblings (also your offspring).
Very good to know. Thanks for linking to that.
Flax and chia seeds are both very good sources of omega 3 (but flax seeds need to be ground for your body to absorb it, and once you grind them, you should store them cold), as are fish (especially salmon).
Maximizing expected log(wealth) is very different than maximizing expected wealth. A log utility function us much more risk averse.
The Wikipedia article on VNM Utility Theory explains the relationship between the utility function and risk aversion (in the Consequences section).
If someone else is subsidizing the insurance, that can make it worthwhile.
In the U.S. You can often find the amount of the employer subsidy footer am insurance policy if you read the details of it. Also you pay for employer based health insurance (I think including dental and vision) with pre-tax dollars, which is in effect a government subsidy.
I've been having a lot of anxiety lately, and this is exactly the sort of thing I needed to help me (my System 1) remember how silly it is. Thank you for writing it.
I took the survey.