PokerPirate
3d ago
I'm not claiming you are wrong or lying. I am claiming you are ineffective.
If you are correct, then a more effective communication style (i.e. more consistent/less inflammatory) will probably get you the results you want faster. At least with me and fellow mottizens if not the general public.
PokerPirate
3d ago
By definition it was an extrajudicial summary execution, as it was a killing that was not sanctioned by the court and he was killed without the benefit of a free and fair trial. He was killed while restrained by multiple government agents.
OP describes why it is not an execution by highlighting the difference between an execution and an accident. You claim it is a summary execution by describing what makes an execution "summary". You did not respond to OPs points at all, and this rhetorical tactic of ignoring what OP said makes you look weak.
You may very well be correct, but you are not arguing correctly.
PokerPirate
3d ago
The "one of us" post you link complains about the left using "lies" (your word for their exaggeration / selective reporting of facts). But then you go and say things like "we are in a civil war" which is so obviously not true. Maybe we're on the path towards one, but even that is super debatable (and regularly debated here).
I just want you to know that I can't take you seriously when you hypocritically call other people out for stupid-language-tactics and then do your own stupid-language-tactics. Again, I'm sure you have lots of justifications for this tactic (many of which are valid!), but as a tactic for achieving your goal of getting me on your side, your rhetoric is failing.
PokerPirate
5d ago
Father in law gave us a bidet for Christmas. Kids immediately learned how to turn it into a squirt gun. We had to return it.
PokerPirate
7d ago
Because if your goal is "live in a neighborhood without violent drug addicts", handing out free things to violent drug addicts directly undermines that. With allies like these, who needs enemies?
I think you will find that this is not in fact the goal of the poster you are replying to or any of the other related posters.
Your stated goal is easy to "paperclip optimize" away by, for example, killing all of your neighbors. After the massacre, you would clearly "live in a neighborhood without violent drug attics", but you would also be living in a much worse neighborhood.
To use proper RAT/utilitarian/machine learning terminology, I view Christian morals as a form of regularization on goals like the one you state. You already are applying a regularizer that prevents you from considering murdering all humans as the correct solution to your optimization. The Christian is applying a stronger regularization where the ultimate goal of "living in a neighborhood without violent drug addicts" is just as much about wanting to benefit the drug addicts as it is about wanting to benefit yourself.
PokerPirate
9d ago
Kids are playing luanti (an open source clone of Minecraft). They love it, and it saved me $200 on 6 licenses and their friends can also come over and play.
I'm sure they would have actually enjoyed Terraria more (because 2d easier than 3d) if it weren't for the Minecraft Movie and all their friends playing Minecraft.
PokerPirate
10d ago
Also if we're talking about UBI how hard can it be to get a robot to drive the buses and trains and cut down labour costs?
Ummm.... we've literally got private companies sinking billions of dollars into the much easier problem of self driving cars. (Buses are much harder to control than cars, there's much less training data available, and the driver does a lot of things besides drive like monitor fares and kick off druggies.) And while I like the self driving progress, it's still obviously not ready for production yet.
PokerPirate
12d ago
I have no idea what you mean. When Jesus says (Matt 4:21)
Would anyone light a lamp and then put it under a basket or under a bed? Of course not! A lamp is placed on a stand, where its light will shine.
this seems to be exactly him talking about "keeping" a light in a "place". I guess it's the passive so you could conceivably argue that he is not talking about "us", but come on...
PokerPirate
12d ago
I'm pretty sure that everyone who wants an ad-free internet also supports taxes funding public libraries (up to lizard-man's constant).
PokerPirate
14d ago
The ubiquity of credit card use allowed the companies to charge higher interchange fees, and since the fees were accounting for a share of revenue on par with interest payments, it made sense to try to attract these no-balance customers through reward enticements, which are paid for out of the fees.
This right here is how I think the poor are subsidizing the rich.
@Opt-out's claim is that market segmentization means that each category is profitable on their own. But your claim is that the high end market only exists because of the infrastructure provided by the low end market.
My hypothesis is that if credit cards never made any money via usury, then they would never have been in a position to make money off of interchange fees. And a slightly stronger hypothesis is that, if we limit their ability engage in usury, then we will see a drop in their ability to offer good rewards.
PokerPirate
16d ago
If you’re open to it, I’d actually be very interested in how you decide which NK-related variables are worth tracking at all—that feels like exactly the frontier Tetlock is gesturing at.
I don't track anything in any quantifiable way right now. I mostly just browse the .kp tld whenever I feel bored.
PokerPirate
16d ago
I turned 40 last month. For my midlife crisis a decided to get back into some of the things 20 year old me used to do. So I got a used unicycle and erg (a type of rowing machine). It's been a blast. But it almost wasn't... because I have one less testicle now than I did back then.
Both unicycling and erging are notorious ball crushers, and it's much worse when you've only got one bad boy dangling down there because it hangs right in the center where the seat is and it's constantly trying to get crushed. When you've got two, they hang just off to the side a bit and so you're much less likely to crush them. I've had to splurge and get special underwear so that I can do my unicycling/erging.
I lost the testicle when I was 29 to testicular cancer. One day I was straining a bit too hard on the toilet and heard a "pop" from my right dangler. Worst pain of my life by far. I was on the floor for the next 30 minutes unable to move, then I barfed a couple of times in the toilet, then I hobbled my way over to the ER where I got the diagnosis. Surgery was scheduled for about 1 month later.
The main thing to know about a cancer cell is that it wants to reproduce. This leads to exponential growth in tissue size, and my type of cancer cell had a reproduction rate of 3 days. So every 3 days, the size of the right little dude doubled. And soon he was not a little dude at all. By the time of the surgery he measured 4 inches in diameter.
The weirdest question I've ever been asked was the day before my surgery: "Do you want a prosthetic testicle?" The surgeon had a handful of models lined up on a shelf for me to pick from. The cheapest one looked like a rainbow colored bouncy ball and was $200. That was way more than I wanted to spend on something only my wife would ever see, and so I declined.
And so now---in the middle of my midlife crisis---whenever I ride my unicycle or sit down to exercise---I have to put on special underwear first.
PokerPirate
17d ago
My young kids have just gotten into minecraft, and this seems like something they'd love. We actually play luanti (an open source clone) so there's no chance of connecting to your server, but maybe I'll have to tinker around with something like this. There's been a lot of cool work in reinforcement learning with minecraft, but I never did anything with that since it sounds too compute intensive for me, but stuff with llms would be much easier/cheaper.
PokerPirate
17d ago
Maybe the only thing I really can ask is what you can do to help someone who's clearly overloaded, but can't stand it when something isn't done the way they would do it, and doesn't know how to explain what they want?
I had testicular cancer ~decade ago. I was the same way during chemo. I didn't like it when other people did "stuff" for me (don't like how they do it, don't want to be a burden, don't want other people's pitty, etc). But I very much appreciated a good game of chess. From other people I've talked to in similar situations, "fun" stuff is can be more well received than "help" stuff.
PokerPirate
17d ago
In what world are 2 tenured Stanford professors considered upper middle class ?
This world. Upper class is the people who have names on buildings, not the people who work in the buildings.
PokerPirate
17d ago
former math professor
upper class? hahahahahahaha
PokerPirate
17d ago
It’s ok to be bad at school because the only thing you need to do to have an OK life in America is to… not fuck up.
This is so well said. I should print it out and put it in my office for students to read.
I wonder how much of the culture war can be charitably phrased as: On the one side we have people striving to try to make themselves/America better and on the other side people worrying that this striving is going to fuck things up. (It's not too hard to find examples that work with both red/blue as either side.)
PokerPirate
17d ago
I will answer your questions with two questions of my own. (The questions are semi-rhetorical in that I think they shed light on the answers to your questions, but also I would genuinely really like answers and I haven't seen any good answers.)
Theoretical Q.
I overall like the forecasting trend in the rationalist community. I find the idea of quantifying bias and uncertainty to be a valuable exercise that I have benefited from personally. I have a theory-level concern, however, that I've never seen properly addressed.
I internally model forecasting as: there exists a probability distribution over all possible futures, and the job of the forecaster is to approximate this distribution. In practice, forecasters do this by assigning probabilities to a bunch of events and then scoring themselves based on what actually happens (like you describe in your OP).
So here's my question: How confident can we actually be that your scoring algorithms are stable and consistent? I'm using these words in the technical sense from statistics. To see an example of how everything can go bad: Let's say you're trying to predict the number of people who die in 2026. If the true distribution of deaths/year is gaussian, you can use standard formulas for computing the mean and get a good estimate with error bars. But if the true distribution is Cauchy, the mean is undefined, and there is provably no way to accurately estimate this mean because it doesn't exist. The Cauchy distribution looks essentially identical to the Gaussian distribution, and it is extremely difficult to determine whether you are actually sampling from one or the other in practice. In practice, people who work under the Gaussian assumption will look like they're doing very well by the metrics superforecasters use until suddenly they have a disaster (see e.g. the 2008 financial collapse). Similarly, a 40% return over 5 years is "trivial" to achieve if you allow yourself to have a very high risk of ruin. Just invest in the S&P500 with 5x leverage.
So what are the actual, philosophical and statistical assumptions about the universe that superforecasters are relying on?
Practical Q
I work professionally with North Korea. I put in a lot of time studying their culture, geopolitics, language, etc in order to make my professional work more effective. I've long thought about how to quantify this work both to make my work even more effective and to convince other people that I am an expert on this topic. How do I go about as a practical matter starting to forecast on a very niche topic like this?
My impression is that most forecasters work very generally and basically try to eek out an edge over the general populace by (like you mention) not being fooled by basic statistical fallacies. This lets forecasters make more level-headed judgements about a wide range of topics, most of which are well-established questions that normies also think about (who will win the election? will an epidemic cause a downturn in the economy? etc.)
But I am interested only in a very narrow domain where there are basically no established questions to ask. With regards to North Korea, the basic questions might be:
- Will Kim Jong Un die this year? (Almost certainly no; without looking it up, I'd guess the actuarial tables put him as <5% chance of death.)
- Will the North and South declare war? (Also almost certainly no; I'd put it <1%.)
- Will the North and South have a military skirmish? (Happens 1-2 times per decade, so let's say 20%)
But these are all super basic questions that anyone moderately politically aware could reasonably answer. There's no opportunity for me to develop my skill with questions like this, and there's not a "large enough n" for me to meaningfully test my skill. So I need to develop more detailed questions if I want to really improve my forecasting ability. But how? Some more detailed questions could be:
- Will the North develop a new fully domestic cell phone in 2026? (I'd say 75% probability since they've been developing them the past few years. But then what exactly counts as "new" and what exactly counts as "fully domestic"?)
- What will the price of rice be in Jan 2027? (It's currently 1 kilo/1800 won. I predict it will be <2200 in 1 year with 75% probability. Either a bad crop this year or more economic sanctions from the US could increase the price substantially, and I'll say that the union of those two events is about 25% probable.)
But how do I go about actually creating good questions like this? You especially want the questions to be correlated with the "basic"/important questions above, but it's not at all clear to me that the ability to predict food prices is at all related to the ability to predict whether and how large of a military conflict there will be.
One last aside: You don't mention the intelligence community at all. This is where calibrated predictions are rewarded more than narrative, and this is where people who actually want to work as superforecasters work. Some "fun" reading if you haven't already seen them are:
-
"Psychology of Intelligence Analysis"
-
"A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis"
-
"Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community"
These are all declassified CIA publications you can get from cia.gov. Most of my questions/frustrations expressed above are things that I've thought about from reading these works and talking to the people who use them professionally.
PokerPirate
19d ago
That's a crazy video. I can't believe that the cop kept his finger off the trigger (either for the taser or the pistol). I know all about trigger discipline, but I'm shocked that police would keep their finger off the trigger when a potentially armed suspect is digging through their pants like that. The extra couple hundred milliseconds to move the finger into the trigger guard could really make a difference.
PokerPirate
19d ago
I wrote a response to @sarker that also responds to your part A.
Not my problem. You're complaining about the existence of consumer credit.
Yes, I'm complaining about the existence of consumer credit (at least as it's practiced today). But even more so I'm also complaining about the "not my problem" attitude.
I do in fact care about the welfare of my fellow countrymen. I even care about the financially illiterate and irredeemably midwit among us. Every fancy financial scheme that exists makes these midwits feel like suckers for not taking advantage of it, and so they try to take advantage of it and get their lives wrecked because they're not equipped for it.
PokerPirate
19d ago
I disagree with Patrick McKenzie. I think are disagreement is probably at a philosophical level that I don't want to go into, so instead I'll share a personal story:
I teach a data science practicum course for economic majors where financial institutions "hire" our students. One of the projects our students were contracted for was literally optimizing the advertisement of credit card rewards programs to attract low income consumers who would not default on the loans but would carry a high interest balance. Another project was optimizing the fee schedule to extract the most money as possible from overdue payments on these cards from low income consumers.
I've sat at the table with the men and women who run these programs. I've asked them how they justify it to themselves. They fully acknowledged that some people were ruining their lives, but they did not have any moral qualms and said "everything we do is legal and fully regulated". So I think the folk that run these programs are every bit as evil as the worst communist propaganda would have you believe.
(I refused to work with these companies, but other professors chose to work with them.)
PokerPirate
19d ago
Except for all the people who get into massive credit card debt who these programs are actually trying to target and where the credit card companies make all their profit.
PokerPirate
20d ago
At least in a couple cases it would also be irresponsible for them to break up their extant lives in the U.S. to go over and maybe die for a regime change.
Just like it's irresponsible for the parents in the US military to disrupt their child's development to go on deployment.
PokerPirate
20d ago
they are pretty vehement that it'd be worth significant amounts of death to remove the existing regime
But notably not their death. If they actually thought this way---from a revealed preferences angle---they'd be out guerilla-ing.
I don't care about your opinion. I just want coherent rhetoric.
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