I did some initial exploration of the dataset and came to similar conclusions as others on the thread.

I then decided this was a good excuse to finally learn how to use LightGBM, one of the best-in-class tools for creating decision trees, and widely used in the data science industry. In other words, let's make the computer do the fun part!

The goal was to output something like:

If color = blurple: weight is 1234
Else
  If segments > 42: weight is 2345
  Else weight is 3456

What I actually got:

Fangs: ~17 pounds
No fangs: a big tree that outputs in the range of 18-19.5 pounds

TLDR: Honesty is the best policy, and don't be a try-hard.

I understand that data collection is difficult and empathize with the people responsible for doing the work.

The thing is, SF used to publish everything as soon as they could! We accepted that numbers could be revised up or down as data was fully coded. This 5 day lag is IMO far on the wrong side of timeliness vs correctness.

Obvious next step: if there's a lot of low hanging fruit like this, let's find it? Have you considered using your LW/Twitter/blog to publicly solicit obvious, simple, and high leverage solutions to other big problems?

In dath ilan, it is virtuous to write more stories about dath ilan.

I expect agave to be generally preferred over table sugar and HFCS due to having a significantly lower glycemic index. I'm unfamiliar with Karo.

Something I've been wondering for a while: are organizations/journalists/individuals filing FOIA requests to get emails and other relevant documents about how the CDC and FDA made their COVID decisions?

Potentially interested!

Big picture, if your friend wants a different blend of upside-to-work, perhaps they should consider hiring someone to work 15-20 hrs/wk, freeing them up to do <5 hrs/wk of supervision?

This post is a bit hard to parse - please consider replacing "a.test" with something like "test.com/a" or "a.test.com/page" to clarify whether the issue is per-page caching or per-domain caching.

I posted my answer a bit late but this was a ton of fun!

Two thoughts.

First, it wasn't immediately clear that you meant within a range of [-1, 1], perhaps adding that to the graphic would help?

Second, this sounds like it generalizes as "trust your own opinion on any topic sigmoidally, scaling with your personal knowledge of it" - in other words, actively notice and reject your initial bias, until you have enough background to be truly informed, at which point you should trust your own judgment.

If you're willing to write a data extraction script, and John Hopkins continues updating from a new source (that doesn't otherwise publish raw data), you can find the numbers on the embedded sub-pages:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/embed/testing/state-data/testing_per_state_New_York.html

Regarding 14/15, I felt that we were probably under-reacting, but "general consensus" is tricky. We were in the home stretch of the Trump presidency so I figured the baseline odds of "consensus" on anything were extremely low.

I'm kicking myself on #16 - I don't know enough about epidemiology to make such a strong guess.

Is the rule supposed to be symmetric around 50%? I used ln(p) - ln(.5) because Scott wrote:

"I scored these using a logarthmic scoring rule, adjusted so that guessing 50-50 always gave zero points."

However, this doesn't square with his second statement:

"Getting everything maximally right gives a score of about 14; guessing 50-50 for everything gives a score of 0, getting everything maximally wrong gives a score of negative infinity."

Do you know what the correct scoring rule is?

Your explanation is fantastic!

Zeroing out from Zvi's prediction, I am more optimistic and predict 4.3% national positivity rate.

I think that predictions are generally too pessimistic and that the rate of improvement will accelerate faster than the new strains matter and faster than the control systems kick in. I've been thinking this for a while and figure I should go on the record.

I agree! I would happily support these updates on Patreon, if that were an option. I understand that from Zvi's perspective that could be problematic for any number of reasons, including possibly reducing motivation.

Zvi - since "money is not in any way the reason I write these posts", how about favorite charities?

This seems worth a new post!

That being said, as I am an offensive person and wear that mantle publicly and without shame consider this your invitation to leave. You are responsible for what you choose to engage with. I am not responsible for your feelings and reactions. If you choose to stay then that's on you.

Sorry bud, this is my post, so consider this your invitation to leave.

Anyone with half a brain can see what a disaster that would be

This is rather rude.

Yup!

"All gatherings with members of other households are prohibited in the Region except as expressly permitted herein."

"Nothing in this Order prevents any number of persons from the same household from leaving their residence, lodging, or temporary accommodation, as long as they do not engage in any interaction with (or otherwise gather with) any number of persons from any other household, except as specifically permitted herein."

As far as I can see, the only exceptions are for "worship" and "political expression".

Ah, you've made me realize that I haven't thought through the variability between cities and states. As someone living in California, I currently cannot: eat in restaurants (indoors or outdoors), go to bars (ditto), gather in groups outside my "household", or get my hair cut.

I just watched this last night and planned to share it here as well!

Fantastic explanation of Bayesian reasoning. I was already well-familiar (or so I thought) familiar with the concepts, but this video helped firm things up!

So level 4 is...intention masking the absence of identity?

Then level 5 is nonsense words, masking the absence of intention.

For levels 6 and higher, please see [Cuil Theory](http://cuiltheory.wikidot.com/what-is-cuil-theory).

I'm interested in this and would also love to chat!

Two securities (symbols to come later as this is still being actively traded)

Are you trading at a scale where this is relevant? The vast majority of symbols have volumes where a mere mortal's bank account won't move the market at all.

Great post overall! There seems to be a lot of recent interest on LW around playing the markets well. I'd love to set up a Discord for ongoing discussion and brainstorming, if there's interest.

I've been sitting on a good nugget of crypto earnings for years and have had a lot of analysis paralysis about diversifying into the real markets and/or arbitraging the highly volatile crypto options/futures markets directly. If anyone reading this is interested in a serious discussion, please reach out!

Option 3:  You have insufficient shared understanding/facts/terminology to comprehend each other's opinions and even begin having a real conversation.

As a holder of other crypto (primarily BTC), how interesting is this opportunity relative to riding current growth?

What were (or are now) the best places for US persons interested in betting significant crypto sums?

Would love to hear more about your specific bets, as well as your "multiple six figure wins" friends! Personally, after maxing several PredictIt markets for a total of low thousands bet, I didn't feel like there was a good market place to bet larger size (tens of thousands USD or higher in crypto).

Entry fees count as "losses".

Thanks for the link, it looks like you're right about being taxed on the $100/98.50/93.57. However, the initial $85 can be deducted from your taxable income (if less than your winnings).

So if you're in, let's say the 25% tax bracket, you have saved 25% * $85 = $21.25 in taxes, and have still made money on your bet. This becomes a bit murkier when considering standard deductions vs itemizing. Perhaps a more experienced bettor can chime in to step through the implications?

I am not a tax professional and have not yet filed taxes for my PredictIt gains. With that said, I am assuming that taxable gains are $93.57 - $85 = $8.75, not the $100 withdrawn.

I can confirm that this arbitrage opportunity exists and works as described. At the time of this writing, the sum of all Nos for the EC market is $14.70, and running the loop up to 850 shares turned $1000 into $1078. Depending on which contract actually resolves Yes, there's an additional payout of a few bucks.

The way PredictIt calculates risk and payouts for multi-contract markets seems very confusing and is making my head hurt a bit. My Max Payout for the market is $850, but I have no idea how this number was calculated, and it doesn't make any sense - my understanding is that the real max payout is the largest potential payout across the market's contracts, which is a much smaller $13.

If anyone can explain how these multi-contract markets actually work, I'm all ears!

I've been using Forecast since the beta and enjoy it! A few thoughts:

• There isn't enough incentive to bet on questions with long time horizons.
• The 1K points/day are rather inflationary overall, which leads to...
• A question's market can be moved rather significantly for just a few thousand points
• Why is there a max of 10 shares per bet? Especially with the 1K daily point increase, any user who sticks around will have tens of thousands of points, and have a harder time allocating them
• The leaderboard is opaque and varies wildly: I'm sometimes in the top 10, sometimes in the middle hundreds, and sometimes unranked, despite a consistent upward trajectory.

Phew, this was hard! 50 is pretty hard, there's a lot of value in pushing yourself to do even 30. Another option for next time is to time limit instead: "you have 15 minutes, how many ways can you think of?"

Here are my 50:

That's a great catch, thanks! With that correction as a final step, I feel much better about my initial estimate!

How many miles of train tracks exist in the world?

How many metric tons of air freight cargo shipped globally in 2009, and in 2019 (either by commercial airlines or specialized freight companies)?

Thanks for posting these updates regularly! One quick formatting note: region ordering in the Positive Tests section is different from the earlier sections.

Have you seen https://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/best-in-show-whats-the-top-data-dog/ ?

I purchased zinc lozenges, high dose Vitamin C, and HCQ many months ago. I am trying to decide for action now, or as a pre-commit for later, on what is most appropriate to take.

For shopping, the internet exists!

I've loved Wirecutter's reviews for many years, but have occasionally been disappointed by their recommendations. It's hard to say whether their quality has actually gone down or if the success/miss ratio is constant.

Examples:

External hard drive (pre-2016): no mention whatsoever of RPM, which is widely regarded as critical information when choosing a non-SSD hard drive. They didn't even include a blurb saying that RPM doesn't matter.

Bath towels (2019): Pasting my own comment: "I ordered a set of Frontgate towels based on this recommendation. After fewer than five washes (cold normal cycle with standard detergent, line dry), the towels aren't plush at all. The towels arrived feeling luxurious and spa-like, but after only a few uses they feel drab and normal." They updated their towel recommendations a week ago and Frontgate remains their top choice. I feel like I wasted several hundred dollars on an extensive set of pretty average towels. If I'm washing them wrong, it would have been nice for them to reply and update their care instructions.

Broom (2020): It's...fine. Maybe my expectations were set too high, but I thought it would be the Best Broom, not just a broom.

I think pointing at anything you want better conveys the nature of L4. You could describe L0 as "I don't point".

Thank you, Zvi, I've really enjoyed your simulacra posts and found them to be very insightful. As I read this post, I came up with my own formulation of the levels that feels useful:

L1: I point at something.

L2: I point at you.

L3: I point at myself.

L4: I point wherever I want.

"Overall, Chesterton's Fence needs context."

This is literally the point of Chesterton's Fence.

My real answer to what went wrong is that our civilization is profoundly inadequate. We have lost our ability to do things.

Civilization is made of people, and people aren't wired for scale. We haven't lost our ability to do things, we never had it. We have only ever done things at scale by accident, or for short periods of time (mostly wars and the Space Race).

When you live in a village of ~100 people, either you figure out norms for drought/famine/disease/etc quickly, or >90% of your community dies and the rest scatter.

In major cities, it's fundamentally an issue of everyone-for-themselves. You walk down the street and see a bunch of strangers. You may wish they were wearing masks, but there's no social norm. The norms are enforced at shops, waiting in line, entering with reduced capacity, wearing a mask (or not) in both cases.

If not enough people care on average, your friendly neighborhood megalopolis is doomed.

If the market regularly reacts to public statements of inefficiency ("stocks systematically rise on the third Thursday of each month but only under a waxing moon") by eliminating it, then this is *refutation* of the efficient market hypothesis.

Inefficiencies are priced in when they are: obvious, easy, and safe,. A non-obvious inefficiency is a true hidden edge. A non-easy inefficiency has a high barrier (capital, technical, physical, etc) to entry. A non-safe inefficiency has a high social barrier to entry.

Because names have power, I dub this the Passive Market Hypothesis.

Great review! Have you taken a look at Gwent? It's currently scratching the Hearthstone itch for me.