ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1d ago
We have an indictment of a special forces soldier, who participated in the planning/execution of the Maduro raid, for making Polymarket bets on questions about Maduro and US involvement in Venezuela.
Specifically, Gannon Ken Van Dyke used USDC.e to trade on at least four markets: "Maduro out by ... January 31, 2026", "US forces in Venezuela by ... January 31, 2026", "Trump invokes War Powers against Venezuela by ... January 31, 2026", and "Will the US invade Venezuela by ... January 31, 2026?" The last of the four markets actually resolved to NO, but he sold his position at some point before he took losses.
He apparently didn't do a great job of hiding it. He transferred his winnings to "a foreign cryptocurrency 'vault' which advertises that it generates interest for depositors" and then a couple of weeks later, transferred them to his crypto exchange account. At some point after (the indictment doesn't say), he cashed it out and transferred it to a brand new Interactive Brokers account (which was presumably in his real name). The only steps they mention him taking to try to cover his tracks were asking Polymarket to delete his account (claiming that he had lost access to the associated email address) and changing the email address on his crypto exchange account. I think the implication in the indictment is that the original email account associated with his crypto exchange account was "subscribed to in his name".
To my knowledge, this is the first US prosecution of someone trading in 'war prediction markets' using classified insider information. Unsurprisingly, they throw in quite a few different counts, and I'm not qualified/would have to do more work to have a sense on whether some of them are unlikely to succeed (did he do a sort of "fraud" in some technical sense? somebody would probably have to know the case law of the particular statute).
Everyone has known that this sort of thing was possible; some have criticized prediction markets for even having specific markets that are vulnerable to this type of insider trading on sensitive national security matters. The buzz on military subreddits by soldiers is that they're confident civilian politicos have also made a bunch of money by trading on this stuff. Are they not getting prosecuted because they're connected to the powers that be, while lowly grunts have examples made out of them? Are others just better at hiding their tracks?
If I had one observation of my own to add, I would reflect on the nature of monetary incentives. They're potentially large; this guy allegedly made about $400k. I think back to the story of cyber crime generally. Some stylized accounts say that long ago, internet viruses or whatever were kind of a game that people sort of did for fun. Some people just liked causing damage or they just wanted to see what it was possible to do. There weren't super easy ways to make a bunch of money with it. It certainly wasn't non-existent, but there were genuine, significant frictions. Then, when crypto made it vastly easier to extort folks for real money from the other side of the world, it took off on industrial scales.
In some sense, I feel a bit of that here. People getting in trouble for bad use of their access to classified information obviously isn't a new problem. Folks have been doing it because of a girl they like or because they decided they now believe in some other government/social or political movement/whathaveyou more than their promises to their own government. Maybe some folks even just found it fun. There was at least the one guy who posted classified information in the forums of a video game, because he wanted the US tanks in the game to be stronger. Foreign governments have long been trying to monetize this, as well, paying handsomely for information provided by insiders. But that path to money is kind of hard and cumbersome. You have to find some legit way to contact some component of the foreign government, possibly build a relationship, etc. Now, there are big piles of money, just sitting there, ready to be taken, and my guess would be that it's probably easier for folks to think that they can figure out how to cover their tracks while they bank a bunch of money this way. Many of them might actually be wrong, be bad at covering their tracks, and get caught. Others might succeed, and I have no real sense for how much this phenomenon will grow.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
I think the one I'm remembering might have been a different one that came out later, but yeah, probably similar. There is, of course, a wide range of estimates, depending on model details.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
climate science itself is based on thousands of different interactions that are hard to model out with degree of accuracy
I actually kind of go the other way on this, depending on how strict one is about the "degree of accuracy". There's an at least plausible way that you can approximate the high-dimensional system with a low-dimensional representation with one primary input (carbon-equivalents). Of course, one needs to consider a range of possible time series inputs and acknowledge that it's a pretty noisy model, but you can do okay-ish, about as okay-ish as you can do with other noisy models. And of course, you have to acknowledge that your estimates are genuinely dependent on the chosen time series inputs (e.g., it took a long time and a lot of people saying, "RCP 8.5 probably isn't very likely," for folks to sort of grudgingly accept that it wasn't the most useful time series input; but maybe things could change and it becomes more likely! There's a genuine dependence on the time series input). But you can do alright.
It's when we glom on a coupled system, that operates in a vastly different timescale regime, that we run into serious theoretical problems.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
I appreciate that you've probably reviewed the literature more closely than I have. Maybe a month or so ago, I saved a review paper, and I was wanting to go digging through the cites, but I haven't had time yet (the motivating question was concerning which/how many papers dealt with effects specifically of gum/patches). Perhaps you could help me with a few specific questions:
(1) You say, "It's a shit nootropic". Is this because you think that the worthwhile effects are, indeed, minimal? Is it worse than, say, caffeine? Or is this judgment coupled significantly with the dependency risk?
(1a) Is any of the above possibly conflated by possible interactions with, say, ADHD meds or even caffeine alone?
(2) Is there any dependency risk data you can point me to for gum/patches? I think Zyn is likely to be closer to vaping/chew tobacco than gum/patches (I can accept that perhaps Gwern got this one wrong). I've seen plenty of statements like that FDA one; note that it calls out pouches. Is there anything in the literature specifically for gum/patches?
For disclosure, I have toyed around with gum on a few occasions. I would use it for specific parts of my day that I wanted a mild stimulant and perhaps some increased habit forming, like going to the gym. When I would, for example, go on trips where I wasn't expecting to have gym access, I never experienced any withdrawal or cravings. It's more of a pain for me to buy than, say, protein/creatine, so I've also just gone long stretches without having any without any difficulty. If anything, I feel like I feel more withdrawal effects from coffee or even caffeinated tea. This may be personal variation and apart from the data, which is why I would be interested in whether you've seen any data specifically for gum/patches.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Couldn’t some of the models just be…wrong? Bad? Maybe even dishonest?
Possibly? Of course, there's the "all models are wrong..." quote, so it would take additional caveats there. But they don't have to be bad/dishonest. They're just trying to do something that we can't do.
People have been smugly telling me that climate change isn’t real(ly a problem) for years. They had studies and everything. Why is this time different?
Because before, you had people actively arguing that climate change wasn't real(ly a problem), and there were tons of vibes/momentum to stamp that out. Now, it's come around to my position, and the vibes are more, "Yeah, you're probably right, we probably can't actually estimate damage." Maybe with some feel goods about how we can still do some things the author likes (e.g., batteries, public transit, methane, that are more or less economically viable). I think your comment is a good example of that. Similar to what I said to @quiet_NaN:
Back a decade ago, when I would give my position, the patterns were matched; the knives were out; I was classified as a "denier" who must be refuted. There's Nobel-winning work giving us estimates and everything!
I would have never gotten something so... tame... in response a decade ago at the old old old place. That's a pretty significant shift.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Humans make decisions under uncertainty all the time.
Sure, but usually they acknowledge when situations contain deep uncertainty. For a long time, many folks were acting like there wasn't any uncertainty with the human effects of climate change, or if there was, it was too minimal to matter in comparison to the known effect. Even shifting to, "Yeah, we probably can't estimate this and have very little clue, so we have to operate in a situation of deep uncertainty," is a pretty significant change.
I think your comment is a good example of the vibe shift. Back a decade ago, when I would give my position, the patterns were matched; the knives were out; I was classified as a "denier" who must be refuted. There's Nobel-winning work giving us estimates and everything! Now, when I say, "Yeah, we probably can't estimate that," the response seems more likely to be along the lines of, 'Sure, you're probably right that we probably can't estimate that. So what? We can still make decisions under uncertainty and maybe even do some things I prefer.'
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Sign - yes. It will be a net negative.
How do you know this? From what I see, you just sort of guesstimated some things on different sides and don't take the timescales of the coupled systems into account. For example, you say:
Unless birth rates see radical change, the north simply isn't a place with enough people
Isn't this one of those things that could plausibly change? There have been entire reports on possible migrations of people, and people can move, populations can grow/dwindle on much faster timescales than climate changes. How do you account for the timescale effects?
Magnitude and scaling characteristics - no.
This is likewise concerning. Reddit search is hopelessly broken, but a while back, I remember one of these "estimates of climate change economic effects" papers coming out, and while I've already said that I think the task is actually impossible, I took the claim at face value and compared it to a contemporary Krugman NYT column that talked about tariffs. His approximate estimate of the reduction in GDP due to tariffs was ~3%, and I don't recall exactly what the particular climate paper gave, but the number that sticks in my mind was like 0.7%; I'm pretty sure it was something less than 1%. If we have no clue whether it's more like 1% or 10%, why should one think that it's more like 1% than 0%... or -1%? Like, how do we actually estimate this with anything other than vibes?
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Didn't you go for vaping, whereas Gwern specifically distinguished between gum/patches and vaping, even in the abstract of the essay?
ControlsFreak
2d ago
But there will be an impact, that's for sure.
How do you have any idea what order of magnitude the impact will be? How do you have any idea what the sign of the impact will be?
ControlsFreak
3d ago
I think the vibes have fully shifted on climate change damage estimates. Tyler Cowen posted this morning with a terse:
The whole climate to gdp transmission thing does not seem to be working very well?
He's referring to this paper and this thread about it. They perform an empirical review of previous major estimates, focusing on replicating them and analyzing the methodology. One thing I found interesting is that they distinguished between damage estimates, themselves, and applications of damage estimates, like SCC. They say that the latter have already been show to be irreducibly uncertain, though even if the damage->SCC pathway was not irreducibly uncertain, they are arguing that since the damage estimates, themselves, are irreducibly uncertain, so too would be things like SCC.
They spell out multiple factors that create identification challenges and show how small changes to the inputs of prior models can result in huge changes in the outputs, in strange and unstable ways. They don't necessarily think prior authors did anything actively bad or malicious in their approach, just that the entire endeavor is probably doomed from the start:
Importantly, we don’t think these particular papers are uniquely flawed; our point is that they are attempting an impossible feat...
Their tweet thread has the typical disclaimer needed to get out in front of the typical objections one would immediately hear upon taking such a position:
Importantly: we are not claiming that climate change is economically harmless. We're arguing that the magnitude of damages is deeply and irreducibly uncertain, and trillion-dollar decisions need to stop being made as if it isn't.
I feel a bit vindicated by the vibe change, because I had been arguing something similar a full decade ago at the old old old place, pretty much on my lonesome. Obviously, I didn't have the exact set of empirical critiques that these authors present today, but I feel like it's a good example of where you can have very strong theoretical knowledge in a related/relevant area (timescale-separated dynamical systems) that leads to a correct intuition along the lines of, "I don't actually have to know the details of the methods they're using (though I did look at several back in the day); I can't imagine they could possibly accomplish what they're setting out to accomplish, just because of the nature of the type of system they're working with."
ControlsFreak
4d ago
There has, from time to time, been some discussion concerning doctor salaries. I don't personally care all that much about this. They're highly-trained professionals in an in-demand field, and doctor salaries probably aren't the main driver of overall healthcare costs.
Nevertheless, there's often some debate over what the numbers actually look like. I was just linked to this tweet in one of my econ link aggregators. (Yay, built-in browser translation!)
Their claim is that 84% of American physicians are in the top 10% of incomes, and 26% of American physicians are in the top 1%. Their paper makes comparisons to other countries. They also broke it down into primary care vs. specialists.
So, at least this is one snapshot view of the actual distribution of doctor salaries, which I hadn't really seen before in these discussions. Assuming, of course, that their methodology is sound, which I'm not qualified to assess.
This is sort of precisely where I think there is a simmering culture war, the clash between your comment and that of @JTarrou.
Scoping out a bit, the stylized story I might tell would be that back in ye olde days of Snowden/Assange, there was this sense of "information is meant to be free" and "sunlight is the best disinfectant". My sense is that at least some of those folks had a change of heart when their own ox was gored. But I think it's still a significant culture war.
Are soldiers supposed to keep secret military operations secret? Or is part of the point of things like prediction markets specifically to say something like "information is meant to be free", even governments shouldn't be able to keep even that sort of stuff secret, and it's good to build tools with the "whole point" being to prevent folks from being practically capable of keeping even stuff like that secret?
I certainly don't think this culture war has been won in either direction. It's just sitting there, menacingly, underneath a variety of these related debates.
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