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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.
Should we try to grow the community? How? How much?
How important is money?
- To have
- To earn
- To donate
Are EA causes bottlenecked on money or talent?
From the 2014 Survey:
Polyamory:
- 51.8% prefer monogamous, 15.1% prefer polyamorous (a lot uncertain)
- But only 5.3% have more than 1 partner
Children:
- 36.1% want more child(ren), 28.3% uncertain, 34.3% don't want more
Politics:
- 38.9% Social Democratic, 27.7% Liberal, 25.2% Libertarian
- Taxes: 3.14 +- 1.212 (1 = should be lower; 5 = should be higher)
- Minimum Wage: 3.21 +- 1.359 (1 = should be lower; 5 = should be higher)
- Social Justice: 3.15 +- 1.385 (1 = negative view; 5 = positive view)
Ethics:
- 60% accept or lean towards consequentialism
- Out of constructivism, error theory, non-cognitivism, subjectivism and substantive realism, none had more than a third
Cryo:
- 24% don't want to, 36.7% considering, 30.8% signed up or want to be
- Probability that a person frozen today will be revived: 22.3 +- 27.3% (median 10%)
Misc:
- p(many worlds) = 47.6% +- 30.1%
Good point. I'm not sure what the right threshold would be.
How difficult would it be to look up the percentage of votes that come from different karma levels?
What if we set a significantly higher karma threshold for voting? I think a threshold of 250 or so would make Eugene's sockpuppetry and mass-downvoting shenanigans prohibitively difficult.
I just finished Stanford's machine learning class on Coursera and I was thinking about starting Google's Udacity course.
I don't have much formal background in CS (2 classes in college and later a couple Coursera classes), but I've been working as a software engineer for a few years now.
I am in U.S. Eastern Time (UTC-4).
The Facebook group is closed. Should people here assume that they will be allowed to join?
Thanks for posting that!
The key stats: expected life extension: 4 months; optimal starting age: 24.
If things escalate to the point where nuclear weapons get used, that probably implies enough of a breakdown of order that it doesn't matter what any treaty says.
So does mine. The humidifier helps, but since I spend a lot of time in environments where I can't easily install one (eg work), I also use moisturizer.
Do you compartmentalize and pretend you're in control, or what?
I think the main takeaway is that you shouldn't worry too much about questions of free will. Basically, the fact that your free will is made of physics doesn't mean it makes sense to make poor choices or not take responsibility for yourself and then blame physics. Also, don't go looking for magical explanations of free will existing "outside of physics".
Supply of labor could decrease. This is a necessary consequence of any effort to help the poor. But since we already have a welfare system, it's just a question of which causes labor to decrease less.
For things like welfare (and almost certainly for UBI, though I doubt there's enough empirical evidence either way to be sure), yes.
Things like education subsides (assuming they subsidize professionally relevant education rather than just signaling, which admittedly is a somewhat dubious assumption) and the EITC (basically a negative income tax for the working poor in the US) could very well increase the labor supply.
When we tried Paranoid Debating at the Boston meetup a few years back, we often had the problem that the deceiver didn't know enough about the question to know which direction to mislead in. I think the game would work better if the deceiver were simply trying to bias the group in a particular direction rather than make the group wrong. I think that's also a closer approximation to real life - plenty of people want to sell you their product and don't know or care which option is best. Not many just want you to buy the wrong product.
Meta sub-thread
A's utility function also needs to be specified. How many utils is the first box worth? What's the penalty for additional boxes?
That's very useful info. Thanks for the link.
The claim that the market is good at predicting future earnings.
It probably is, but economics does not yet have the empirical grounding to give me high confidence in its theories (the way I would be for fields like physics or chemistry; I still think economic theory has a strongly positive correlation with reality).
Another interesting thing here is that the currency markets do not fall under EMH, both empirically (they are clearly not a random walk) and theoretically (the preconditions for EMH do not hold).
Can you please elaborate on that? Do you mean the prices themselves are not a random walk or do you mean the prices are not a random walk after adjusting for interest rate differences?
And what preconditions don't hold for currency markets?
Citation needed.
In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.
Ben Franklin
In the US at least, where the system it set up such that there can only be two parties that matter, I think the parties are too much of a "big tent" hodgepodge for that to work. Perhaps it would if they were based on the parties in a country where they have more of an incentive to be based around a consistent world view.
Any Germans want to weigh in?
My wife and I recently started using Habitica (formerly called HabitRPG). The extent to which each of us is engaging in good habits and doing tasks we plan on doing is now visible to each other in the form of character levels and hit points (but the specific items are not). This makes it possible for us to hold each other accountable for improving ourselves without having to nag.
Overall I've gone from making good use of ~10% of my free time to making good use of ~30%. I've still got quite a ways to go, but this is significant progress.
Moving from small talk to more interesting topics is a totally different skill set than general extroversion.
One thing that I have found helpful is when a thought like "I should really do [task]" comes to mind, I write it on a post-it note and stick it to the nearest available surface and then carry on with whatever I was doing. Then, when I finish what I was doing, I can actually do that task, put it onto a more durable to-do list, etc.
Only personal experience. I noticed that I was more focused and could get by on a lot less caffeine when I was taking it for a cold recently.