Scott, would you consider redacting my name from this article? I'm really tried of it being constantly brought up everywhere, and I don't need more of my acquaintances asking me about it. (I don't mind if you include a link for people who want to click through, I just don't want my name broadcast to every casual reader.) Especially considering the very negative spin you're putting on my actions, and the details you get wrong, like claiming that this was my life savings. Obviously my actions were public and I don't think there's any moral imperative that you don't talk about public actions, but I'd appreciate it.
To respond to some specific points and provide more context:
* $29,000 was not my life savings, just around 20% of them. I may make some bad bets, but I'm not a complete idiot. :)
* Manifold was well aware of the potential for gambling problems before this, as I had been trying to raise awareness of the possibility for months prior. They had chosen to take no action. See for example https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/by-2024-will-anyone-blame-manifold.
* Seems weird to call mana worthless and buying it a bad plan when it can be donated to effective charity.
Apologies if I'm coming off as frustrated, but it is indeed frustrating to put hundreds of hours into trying to meaningfully contribute to epistemics and forecasting, make the mistake of playing some games on the side for fun, and now that's all people know me for or want to talk about.
The bit about being aware of possibility of gambling issues seems to suggest a degree of blame. Do you mean that?
I mean, that feels a bit like saying the makers of knives were aware of the possibility they could be used for murder. Yes, if you can reduce that risk without other costs it's a good thing to do but, given that they believe their continued existence is a good thing and that excess mana can be donated to charity there are very much costs to any mitigation.
Indeed, it seems plausible to me that any harms from gambling are more than compensated for by the likely increased charitable donations from the mana injections (unless it causes bad PR).
I don't think Manifold did anything seriously wrong prior to WvM, no. I do think it was a bit naive of them to not take seriously the chance that someone would do something similar to what I did. (There had been a previous instance of similar behavior, where someone spent and lost about $6000 in another self-referential market.) I also question their decision to refund me, since that seems like it incentivizes similar risky plays in the future.
The PR concern seems real to me; I didn't expect WvM to go anywhere near as viral as it did, and it's a bad look for the site.
Oh, I'm realizing now that many people probably read your articles in the email preview that Substack provides, which you presumably can't edit, so maybe this is a pointless request anyway.
(Now I'm curious, anyone know how many people read Substack in their email vs. on the website?)
I always click through to the website. I know Scott often makes minor edits in response to early comments, and I'd rather get the more polished experience. :)
(I realise you were asking for data rather than anecdotes. I'm afraid I don't have data.)
Having him redact your name probably still makes sense (reduce google rank) but I don't think it's helping to make that request using your real name in the same comment you defend your actions since you probably want these to be deleted as well. I presume you planned to delete these comments but may I suggest sooner is better (say recomment using psuedonym or email scott) because I now remember your name only bc of this comment.
Vast majority of people won't read these comments. As I mentioned I don't care about the more "in the loop" people knowing, I just don't want a casual reader to notice my name, mention it to a bunch of my professional acquaintances, and cause me a further headache.
Fair, but I think you want to delete these comments as soon (I'd do it now) as Scott redacts.
LLM based web search is coming and probably smart enough to see this comment and infer that whatever initials Scott uses in main story is you and I bet you don't want this being a top result for your name for the rest of time. If you get lucky Scott redacts before it gets sucked up into any DB used for training etc..
Hmm, I'd bet against that. I doubt contemporary LLMs are that smart (they could probably figure it out if asked, but wouldn't realize it's relevant on their own), and while ACX is popular, it's not popular enough that I expect it to overwhelm everything else with my name on it. If someone's doing a deep background check on me I expect them to find this and that's fine.
Ahh, I dunno how famous you are. I don't have much web presence so I'm just keeping my webpage and academic papers above the Google rank of the sex offender with the same name.
(Just to head it off: yes we all thought of the response "maybe you should make less bets" to his comment so no need to assert it).
My name was mentioned in a past Mantic Mondays post, and it's not anywhere near the top Google search results. I'm not at all famous, but I have my own blog, twitter account, etc. and I think people overestimate how easily search engines will pick out a name from a single relatively low popularity article. (There's too much text on the internet to do an exhaustive search, so they have to choose what text seems "relevant", and often miss things.)
Funny how there's demand for retraction, suggesting this will get picked up, and then rejection of ways it might be picked up, suggesting not enough of a concern to draw attention in the exact way you're doing. Pick a lane! I say this charitably: the reaction reads like a humble brag of sorts, seeking the attention, while disowning it. Not suggesting that's your intent, just realize how it potentially comes across.
Sorry, I try pretty hard not to post things that are embarrassing to people, but I thought writing a common first name, without any last name, is pretty meaningless except to people who already know you. I've replaced it with the initial "I." to satisfy your preference.
I've tried to correct other errors. I don't think I called you not a serious user and I appreciate your work on other markets.
On first reading of the redacted version, I thought you were writing "I", in the first person, about yourself. I got it sorted eventually from context and reading further, but I'd suggest another pseudonym for better clarity.
Yeah, I realized you had just used my first name in your text, and my last name was only on the market itself, so I just edited my Manifold username for now and that's not as big a deal. I appreciate it.
> While serious people worked on increasingly sophisticated estimation mechanisms for world events, pranksters worked on increasingly convoluted jokes.
I understood this to be trying to cast shade on the self-referential and joke markets and the people who engage in them, any me in particular since I was mentioned as one of them in the next sentence. My apologies if I misinterpreted.
I was calling people who engage in the joke markets less serious qua their engagement in joke markets, which doesn't mean they can't be serious people otherwise.
For what it's worth, I had no idea who you were before someone in a different post mentioned the Whales versus Minnows, and I have no idea who you are now, apart from "guy who spent a lot of money on a prediction market and lost".
So as far as this casual member of the public is concerned, your anonymity remains intact.
I had a lot more sympathy for you before reading your comments here. First of all, you don't seem to be taking any responsibility for your actions. Whether Manifold was aware of the potential for gambling problems or not, it isn't Manifold's responsibility that you lost money; it's yours and yours alone. Manifold didn't hold a gun to your head and make you give up $29k. Second, if $29k is only 20% of your life savings and "I also question their decision to refund me, since that seems like it incentivizes similar risky plays in the future", why don't you give the money back?
Right? And then the whole "this could damage my reputation by being a top result for my name / otherwise spreading" changing to "this won't get widespread enough for these comments to matter", above — as if we're witnessing a knee-jerk reaction of complete denial re: any suggestion or even the mildest criticism — and the entire issue being about... first name "Isaac" and a Manifold username that can be and was changed anyway? Wtf.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but if the claim regarding long term forecasting is merely that experts can do better than random members of the public or than just looking at the base rate then why would anyone expect it could have been false? Surely the skeptics must have something less extreme in mind.
Surely it shouldn't be a surprise that you can improve prediction accuracy by obeying the probability axioms (I bet u can even prove some kind of domination result about this) which is one way experts did better. And even if we restrict our attention to assignments that obey probability axioms it would be crazy if the mere passage of time eliminated any effect of inside knowledge.
I doubt that even the most extreme skeptic of long term prediction would claim that there are no generalizations that hold beyond 25 years. For an extreme example, an expert might know that SR seems to forbid FTL travel and if non-experts didn't then you'd expect that expert to have an edge in predictions about interplanetary travel.
So one thing experts might do is say: hey I know that long range predictions are really hard so I'll just use base rates or other competitive method with the minor tweak that I'll insist my model obey probability axioms and give a very high probability to existing laws of physics remaining true. Surely that can't be enough to count as saying long term expert prediction works.
Many people have read Tetlock as making something like the skeptical claim.
Non-coherence shows that there is *a* probabilistically coherent set of predictions that is guaranteed to do better than you - but as long as you’re not too incoherent, it’s still not hard to do better than many probabilistic predictions.
Right, but I expect that something like the following is true. Given a distribution over a large set of probability judgements that violate the probability axioms with non-zero probability there is a uniformly given computable transformation of that distribution to one which only yields assignments that satisfy the axioms such that the expected accuracy of the later distribution is greater than that of the former with respect to the true probability distribution. At least given some reasonable assumptions about the initial distribution.
In other words, I bet there is a way to use coherence knowledge to touch up an existing distribution of guesses in a way that is expected to improve them even if you don't know what the true probability distribution is.
In fact, any accuracy measure implicitly defines a distance function, and you can show that the closest coherent probability distribution to any incoherent assignment has a better score in every possible world, which is even better than having higher expected accuracy.
This doesn’t quite translate to bets, but I think there’s a way to generate any proper scoring rule as the expected return of the bets one would make, given a probability distribution over gambles one might face. (I don’t know the details of this latter result.)
Yes, thanks that's exactly the kind of thing I was guessing existed,
And I'm guessing that there is a similar kind of thing you can do to adjust a probability distribution to obey other known constraints (eg via info provided from some extra knowledge of physics or whatever).
I feel like that makes the kind of superiority shown here relatively trivial.
I don't think it's trivial - these results don't give any good bound on the computational complexity of finding these improvements. And it sounded like the description said that these experts were making these predictions in a minute or two, which doesn't sound like they would have any chance to use this sort of computational tool to improve things. The fact that they improved on a baseline that is itself probabilistic also suggests that there's some sort of competence here.
Yes, they were responding quickly but on topics they were expert and and where they presumably had access to the info used for the competing predictions when they reached their conclusions about these issues.
I agree that they didn't literally use such a method. But my point is just that we already knew that experts have an advantage in short term and those theoretical results are suggestive that, even if this doesn't guarantee improvement, that if you take two people with the same initial info and then give one the time and incentives to make their views cohere it shouldn't be surprising for that to improve outcomes.
I mean, wouldn't it be pretty damn surprising if we *didn't* see that trying to obey prob axioms or use information about natural laws didn't improve predictions? Maybe not every time but if it didn't tend to then wouldn't that need explaining?
Let me try saying this differently. Even if intuitively most of this expertise was total bullshit but they insisted on following probabilistic axioms you'd expect them to outperform (tho not nec beyond margin of error) some random other method that they use as an input in their analysis (eg base rates) 50% of the time unless you think the expertise actively makes them worse. And if they face off against a non prob axiom obeying method you'd expect them to outperform it more than 50% of the time just because that's a crazy low bar.
I just think what people mean why they express skepticism about long range expert prediction can't really be this weak.
In other words, what I want to suggest is that if all you want to do is outperform some competing method that doesn't always obey the probability axioms I bet you can just touch up it's guesses in a way that ensures you are expected to outscore them.
If so, then merely showing you can outscore a non-probability axiom obeying method would only prove you can perform the right touch ups and have access to your competion's guesses (or dist of them).
Yeah, the post is pretty vague about what kind of "experts" these are. The interesting question would be whether domain experts can outperform generalist forecasting experts on long term forecasts. If you're comparing domain experts to some random Joe off the street, then sure, the international relations scholars probably have a better grasp of probability theory as well as of specific patterns and causal factors. The idea that none of forecasting "works" on long range forecasts is silly. It's all the same fundamental skills as short term forecasting.
* The experts outperformed another set of coherent predictions, which can't be so "touched up" as you've proposed.
* Not every probabilistically-coherent set of predictions will outscore every incoherent set, so unless the experts here explicitly had access to an incoherent set of predictions and deployed a strategy such that if they otherwise had no idea they would set forth a "fixed" version as their own predictions, I wouldn't expect that non-coherence has much relevance here.
In other words, you outline *a* way they could outscore *a* sort of bad competitor, but that's not what happened here, and so is of questionable import to my mind.
First re: other logically coherent predictions. That basically stands or falls with tjr later claim since knowledge of long term regularities like physical laws governing nuclear physics and chemistry are going to function like the logical constraints. In that if they are true and the experts know them to be true they impose constraints on the probability distributions.
re: incoherent alternatives
But how surprising should that be? Even if they aren't touching up the incoherent predictions unless you think the experts have some other disadvantage their competitor lacks surely, in general, we'd expect attention to coherence to improve predictions not make them worse.
Sure, that won't hold all the time (though amazingly can with the touching up version but leave that aside) but it's less surprising than the opposite.
I'm not trying to suggest they somehow did touch anything up. Just using that as a hueristic to argue that we should expect that other things being equal caring about coherence should help accuracy.
Yes, in principle it can make it worse but the experts had every advantage and piece of info that the other strategies had and tried to make their results coherent. The fact that trying to be coherent tends (in our actual world even if not provably) to be accuracy increasing should be the least controversial claim on a rationality forum.
If you don't believe that then wtf are we even doing having a debate where we try to formulate coherent claims?
Regarding Balaji, what's any more puzzling about his behavior than that of anyone else saying wrong/incoherent things on Twitter?
I suspect we tend to see large monetary losses and think: damn you'd have to be really confident/careful/whatever to risk that kind of amount.
But given how rich he is and the rapidly diminishing returns of money to utility Balaji is probably being less irrational in wasting that money than I am in wasting my time with this comment.
Same with Musk. Losing billions on Twitter might seem crazy to you and I but is it really than irrational for the very rich to try and turn money into social status/feeling of pwning someone on Twitter like the rest of us do with time (also sometimes refusing to back down after saying dumb shit)?
The thing is they both failed to earn any social status. Probably lost it, actually. Also they had reputations for being brilliant in their own area(although I don't share the crypto people's sentiment for Balaji).
Sure, but I have a pretty decent academic reputation and yet here I am making this argument. So, either I'm correct or I'm wrong and then I'm proving the very claim at issue: even smart people will say dumb shit online and invest time into doing so and not backing down. Only difference here is that a rich person is willing to spend money where the rest of us only spend time.
Ok, sorry, I just really wanted to make the self-referential argument. All I'm really saying is: doesn't seem any different than some smart prof getting into a dumb argument on Twitter and not backing down.
Maybe. But doesn't that make the cult of personality around Musk and (presumably, I don't know because I don't involve myself with crypto) Balaji that much more absurd? Isn't their entire reputation based around the idea that they _don't_ do stupid shit, that they're visionary geniuses etc etc?
Pretty sure Musk's reputation is based on the fact that he does get carried away, up to doing stupid shit. It's just that sometimes he gets carried toward getting people do something that is a unique technology-scaling breakthrough.
… and sometimes he just says stupid things and doesn't back down and there is no technological breakthough to get done. Be it about absurd insults to rescue workers, or buying Twitter.
Post twitter purchase, for sure, but I think there's a lot of hindsight bias or revisionism or whatever going on here. For many years, he was widely hailed as tech daddy jesus who was going to save the world and colonize mars and such. I didn't use the phrase "cult of personality" lightly. The unhinged, chaotic neutral (optimistically) reputation is a relatively recent development as more and more people are exposed directly to the stupid side.
And realistically speaking, even the revised version is overstating things. He's not designing new battery technology, he's not doing rocket science, he's not personally making any of the technological breakthroughs his reputation credits him; He just used his PayPal money to buy the relevant companies. If there's any genius to be celebrated, it _would_ be business genius, but then he goes and does something thunderously stupid like buy twitter and you're left wondering if all the genius stuff was all just a fluke and slick marketing.
What actually happens is that after buying people a ton of people who do not care about actual-technology impact at all are suddenly exposed to his mass-market-customer-relations antics (these were always bad).
SpaceX fans are still there more or less as it was (you can sooner cool them down with the Flight Termination System blunder during the Starship test flight than with whatever is done to Twitter), it's just that before they were the majority of those who cared.
He explains the rocket engineering done times and times again coherently and eagerly, enough that the only reasonable explanation for why he bothers is that he actually does the technical risk calls at SpaceX and probably Tesla. I.e. «do we try to fix it or work around this or just risk trying it and seeing how things go». That might have significant value, not in the sense of his being better at estimating the outcomes, but in the sense of there being a relatively consistent «buck stops here» with risk decision making.
What's unique about him and actually lead to the formation of the fan club, is that he's basically played straight in the 21st century what is told about the capitalists of 18th century: he actually bet _all_ the Paypal money on SpaceX and Tesla, and «all» vs «half» was relevant at some point. He is a real deal of a megalomaniac, not just pretending.
I did think badly before all the Twitter stuff about, say, the Thanksgiving letter at SpaceX (calling people back a couple days early due to circumstances that were clearly playing out at a scale of many months, both before and after that moment? is it the best Musk can do at management? unfortunately, yes). Or about some of the remote-force-reconfiguration stories in Teslas. And even after all the Twitter stuff I do believe that without Musk doubling down on some of the SpaceX bets, the zeitgeist for the other rocket companies to raise money for doing things differently would not be there.
"he's not personally making any of the technological breakthroughs his reputation credits him; He just used his PayPal money to buy the relevant companies."
I don't think this is accurate at all. It's not like he's a fat-cat capitalist just raking in Tesla profits while he sits at home tweeting and eating Cheetos. The guy was working 140 hr weeks or whatever preventing Tesla from going bankrupt at one point. If he died the stock price of his companies would plummet. He's doing something important.
This isn't accurate. He founded SpaceX and became an investor/board member at Tesla when it only had three employees and hadn't built or developed any viable products or technology:
Looking at his track record I don't see how anyone can seriously doubt his genius (perhaps luck as well). It seems very disingenuous and motivated by the fact that people don't like his personality/ideology.
There are tons of investors with money to throw around, nobody wins and actually carries shit through like he does
Not even "a unique technology-scaling breakthrough", but just improving society. Of course, he often get that wrong, too...hardly surprising as that's not what his goal is.
The Tesla is a great example. I wouldn't want to buy one, but they really pushed things in a socially desirable directions. Similarly with SpaceX, though I'm less sure about the LEO internet. That's got costs that haven't really been measured yet. Perhaps they outweigh the benefits.
OTOH, I really wouldn't want to work for him. He sounds a lot worse than Steve Jobs.
«Just improving society» without qualification in which sense is wishy washy and always arguable. «Bringing into society an (undeniable) technological capacity» is 100% there. And Boring and Neuralink haven't even played out yet.
I think he is very different from Steve Jobs, and better in some pretty important things even for those working for him. On the other hand, yeaaaaah, a lot of bad things.
As David Leonhardt says, "For as long as there has been money, people have been doing stupid things with it." And there is a large tendency of people who have been successful at one thing to think they are geniuses who can be successful at anything.
True, but also consider that Musk's success wasn't just one incident, he pulled of SpaceX, Tesla, ... and it didn't seem too strange for him to solve yet another problem for humanity. Admittedly all those were in the realm of Engineering+Business, which is a bit different from "balancing free speech with moderation against misinformation", but still, I actually kinda hoped that Musk would have some brilliant idea with at least some chance of neatly resolving this entire issue. Turned out you were right, but only in retrospective in my opinion.
My hope was that he would kill off Twitter without harming Tesla or SpaceX.
OTOH, I'm an old fogey. I don't like either Twitter or YouTube (or basically anything that requires allowing JavaScript to be active. I don't even trust AJAX.)
Balaji strikes me as conflating several different predictions that, while not independent, have their own drivers and probabilities.
Hyperinflation needs to occur. People need to see BTC as a viable inflation hedge and purchase it in response to hyperinflation. The level of hyperinflation and the price impact on BTC needs to drive the price up about 30 - 50x.
Feels like the prediction market questions you describe above are a bit less contingent on a series of probabilities.
I don't think people necessarily need to buy BTC en masse in order for its USD price to rise 40x during USD hyperinflation. Can't the "value" of Bitcoin just stay the same while the value of USD falls? (Though in this situation you may equally well hedge by just buying JPY. Then again, USD hyperinflation is such an unlikely event that I'm having trouble visualizing what else will be true in a world where it actually happened for real – maybe all currencies in the world must be in trouble then.)
The price of gold, BTC, or other items does not automatically go up when the value of a dollar goes down. You need to keep in mind that nobody is sitting around keeping track of "the value of a dollar" in a vacuum. The value is based on what people are willing to pay for things with dollars. Specifically, if someone is buying BTC with dollars, the first ones purchased will be approximately normal prices. Then, as there are fewer BTC available for that price, only those purchased at higher amounts will be sold. Individuals can still sell BTC for less than the going price, but anything sold very low would get bought quickly if people are willing to buy for much higher amounts. This continues for as long as demand exists at continuously higher rates. If the dollar is considered worthless (hyperinflation concerns) then the amount of dollars someone is willing to spend on BTC could be very high. So long as BTC is seen as a hedge against inflation.
If no one buys BTC above baseline rates, the value of dollars to BTC doesn't change. We see this often with other goods when the price of a particular item goes up significantly (think of oil/gas) but prices for other items stays approximately the same.
What the USD hyperinflating means is the end of the US as a dominant world trading currency. Probably the end of the US as a dominant world power. While quite unpleasant, it would probably be LESS unpleasant that the way transfers of power have often happened (i.e. large-scale war).
Why won’t people buy euro, or pesos, or sterling, or anything that isn’t hyperinflating. Or are we expecting a worldwide hyperinflation. When has that happened?
I think it is hard to make a good question about the moat claims. I'm pretty sure the memo assumes Google and OpenAI have an advantage to train models at GPT-4 scale if advantage is measured by GPT-4 rules. And the threatening open-source models won't need to be nominally better than GPT-3.5 at GPT-3.5 things… the question is whether a slightly weakened GPT3-level thing compressed into a smartphone-local reduced version and given interfaces with a radically different structure would be much more useful.
… and to whom! Maybe polish and UI work will still be a moat for selling to corporations, it's just the stuff for doing novel information processing work that will depend on wrangling the infinitely forked open-source systems. (Like with OSes: no real troubling selling Windows even if new sofftware ends up clientt-server with web servers running Linux or maaaybe FreeBSD and web browsers being fine on whatever)
- Isaac had a big reveal where he had hundreds of NO bettor accounts sell out of their position and thus flip the advantage to the YES side. (Before succumbing to an influx of new minnows from Reddit.)
- A council of top Manifold users formed to help govern the resolution decision to make sure it was fair. They agreed to resolve the market at a random time — when next bitcoin block was mined with a hash ending in "00".
All this speaks of a very passionate community including at least a thousand people directly participating for fun. Many of our users are also learning the mechanics of prediction markets in the meantime – for example, understanding how the price of shares relates to the probability, or creating their first limit order.
I think Manifold was able to learn from this market too and implement a mana-purchasing limit to prevent future problems like this one. It's also worth mentioning that we've been operating for a year and a half and this is a pretty unique event.
Aside from all that, we do still have exciting plans to make prediction markets better and more useful for real-world forecasting!
We've also identified a clear path to monetization that is better than relying on users dropping $29k to participate in meme markets.
We have seen that prediction markets produce valuable information that answers users' questions.
So, what if you could spend mana to get the wisdom of the crowd to work for you? You would be buying knowledge from other users.
Now you can do just that! We just launched a feature a few weeks ago to pay mana to "boost" your market in other users' feeds, which prods them to bet in your market and make the forecast more accurate.
In addition, we are planning a new feature that would go even further along these lines based on my hackathon project a couple weeks ago: https://manifold.markets/q-and-a
You can ask any question and post a mana bounty for the answer. This is the simplest mechanism for directly buying information. As a side-effect for getting the answer, you are also publishing it publicly for others to learn from. Just like public prediction markets, bountied questions are a public good!
All this ties into our vision of finding as many uses for mana as possible to build a strong information economy.
Austin has said that mana is the currency for attention. In an increasingly online and super-intelligent world, what could be more valuable?
I'm still not sure why anyone would be motivated to research and answer a question for mana — at least, not any more so than e.g. karma on Reddit...
...so while I first thought "wow, how cool, I'm gonna use the hell out of that bounty feature!", I'm a little worried it still won't *really* let you directly purchase high-quality info/answers... Can't we also put a real money bounty on it?! I mean, that's not gambling, right?
"There’s a lesson in this. I don’t know what the lesson is, but I am sure it exists."
The lesson is pretty obvious, indoor outdoor cats are the dominant lifeform on this planet, and when the AI generates superintelligent robot cat superbeings we will not be enslaved to them because we will yield ourselves in servitude to them voluntarily.
Addicts often have to abstain and this can cause social difficulties. Say, avoiding alcohol in a culture where social interactions are centered around drinking -- this might even cause career difficulties.
But I think if the "prediction markets" dream comes to fruition, gambling addicts would face this kind of problem in an especially strong way.
Imagine the world where having a good public betting track record is a de facto requirement to get hired for a large number of desirable "normal" jobs. (Right now this is only true, maybe, in a tiny number of jobs in finance.) Or internal prediction markets ala Hanson take off, and now normal corporate middle managers are expected to be making bets all the time within their companies.
We are very far from this, but it is the dream of some proponents of prediction markets. In this world, if a gambling addict wants to completely abstain from placing bets, they'd be cut off from jobs that required placing bets, which might be large numbers of white-collar jobs. (And, if "futarchy" took off, completely cut off from participating in much of civic life).
I think "medium-large" success of prediction markets would be great and useful for society. But I hope they never become central to society, so that people can always opt out and have a completely normal life.
(Note: while the behavior described on Manifold at the beginning of the post definitely would seem to count as an instance of "problem gambling", I have no idea if there's a pattern of other behavior, so I do not want to imply that this person is a "gambling addict".)
Sounds like a problem that workaholics already have. (Avoiding work may cause career difficulties.)
Perhaps there could be limits for the gambling addicts, how much money they can bet each week? It would cost them a good opportunity now and then, but probably save them a lot of money in long term.
I don't think there is anyone who actually is addicted to work such that surviving/having a decent life depends on completely abstaining from work of any kind. But this is reasonably common with gambling as well as drugs.
Setting limits would definitely be a partial solution for some cases. But if, say, putting small bets on election markets ultimately cues someone to drive over to the casino, it wouldn't completely solve the problem.
There are absolutely people who cut decades off their life from an inability to avoid overwork, it's just that society sees them as 'useful' rather than 'degenerate' and so there's minimal stigma. Cf. how caffeine addiction is totally fine and normal while other drugs are stigmatised.
I note that most countries in the world do explicitly limit permitted overtime, too, which would be analogous to monetary limits on gambling.
How serious is caffeine addiction? My personal experience is that I normally drink two cups of coffee a day, and, on days when this is inconvenient and I skip it, I can't detect any craving at all and I have to strain to detect any change in energy or anything else.
"Or internal prediction markets ala Hanson take off, and now normal corporate middle managers are expected to be making bets all the time within their companies."
Which would be a great way to crash your company into the ground. Organisations which introduced internal competition markets (e.g. you can't just ring the IT guys to come fix the computers, you have to submit bids and tenders within the internal market for services) made a royal mess of things because it turns out competition is not automatically always the best thing.
Making it mandatory for managers to bet against each other is going to result in people doing each other down in order to win and wrecking any functionality.
The usual examples I hear mentioned are Enron and Sears, which moved to internal markets and that was blamed for greatly exacerbating conflict between groups, sabotage and negative-sum games, etc. As both were pathological and in death-spirals for other reasons, it's hard to say more than 'sometimes it seems like a good idea, sometimes it seems bad'.
"But it was still a challenge the idea that it’s possible to run any kind of gambling-adjacent institution ethically, no matter how careful you try to be."
What exactly is unethical about giving adult fools an opportunity to part with their money, if there's no deceit involved? (Also, the quoted sentence misses "to".)
While this doesn’t mesh with a 100% consent-based left-libertarian ethos, in the rest of the common-sense world it’s considered morally repugnant to be in the business of offering people things that are known to ruin their lives, especially the sort of person who is known to have little self-control for that particular temptation.
You would not, e.g., knowingly offer an alcoholic a drink. People who deal in drugs are considered lowlifes. Prostitutes and pimps no less than johns are held in contempt.
Of course many people will say this is a vestige of an old-fashioned morality. It is certainly old-fashioned to some but surely not so much that we pretend we don’t know it still exists and we don’t understand what it is.
Yes, a small minority that has made little headway in changing laws and attitudes despite being quite loud. The exception proves the rule, doesn’t it? Most people don’t want prostitutes working in their neighborhoods and think that johns are at best pathetic undesirables, and they’ve orchestrated society to push these people underground and to the fringes.
"You would not, e.g., knowingly offer an alcoholic a drink."
I wouldn't, but the supermarket happily would, without its suppliers and employees being seen as lowlifes. When offering one drink is a tragedy and a million is a statistic, it seems fair to conclude that society doesn't actually see it as unethical.
Let’s assume you’re right for a moment and that what is currently legal corresponds perfectly to what people view as morally correct.
That gives you one or two examples of a heavily regulated addictive experience (alcohol, nicotine) which are still legal to sell in the USA and plenty of examples of outright bans or regulating to the point of ban (casinos and gambling, drugs of all kinds). Since as you have posited this reflects moral views of society in perfectly, we must assume that society considers these industries dangerous and open for exploitation and desires them to be either seriously curtailed or stopped completely.
But this view is naive. The existence of hypocrisy or dedicated moneyed purveyors of vice doesn’t mean that people approve of vice, it just means that evil people exist and that sometimes they are actually in control of what happens. People are not relentless moral crusaders against vice-purveying, normally: they won’t fight wars over it. But they do disapprove, and your suggestion otherwise is a failure to see the obvious.
No, I just disagree that any of this is obvious. Given that hypocrisy and scope insensitivity are rampant and taken for granted, actually working ethics of society are clearly different from what is being proclaimed from various soapboxes. Of course, just because something isn't unethical it doesn't mean that it's safe from a soapbox attack, which is what matters when it comes to introduction of new tech and services.
Well, regulators in the US are trying to keep these kinds of markets from being gambling sites by not letting US residents bet on them, not letting real money be used, etc. and people are trying to find ways around that and loopholes and hoping to persuade the regulators to permit real money betting.
There's only so much you can do to protect people from themselves, especially smart people who think they have all the angles covered and this obvious thing to happen will surely never, ever happen because that's not what we intended.
...There's only so much you *should* do to protect people from themselves...
You can always lock people up in cages, or just shoot them. Then they won't misbehave. But that leads to a very unpleasant society. So the question is (as nearly always) "Where should you draw the line?"
And where the line should be drawn is a very difficult question. Consider sugar. Nobody needs sugar, and just about everybody likes it. Given access, people will reliably eat more of it than is good for them. Should you forbid it? Excess consumption predictably leads to many health problems.
FWIW, I have more problems with sugar than with alcohol. My solution is to just avoid it, but this causes numerous social problems. If other people would just avoid it too, those problems would go away...
"I have more problems with sugar than with alcohol." Same here! (nitpick: I'm taking us both to mean ethanol when we say "alcohol". Technically, from an organic chemist's point of view, alcohols are a broad class which include sugars, since they have hydroxyl groups on carbons.)
I think this kind of tax will end up as one of the Budget "old reliables" - taxes on alcohol and cigarettes which are supposed to reduce consumption, but which form a large part of revenue since people don't give up their vices.
I think if governments restrict online betting, which includes prediction markets, that's about as much as they can do. As you say, they can't lock people up in cages for being gamblers.
"in the rest of the common-sense world it’s considered morally repugnant to be in the business of offering people things that are known to ruin their lives, especially the sort of person who is known to have little self-control for that particular temptation."
Dumb question: As technology stands today, is it feasible or infeasible to determine who is at risk for various such temptations (prior to the person getting deeply enmeshed in them)? Could one have e.g. a requirement for a personality test of some sort before e.g. participating in a prediction market?
If you open up any kind of market where money is made from betting (and predictions are bets), then people will try and make money out of it. They're not interested in "Is X better than Y?" for the sake of finding out which is better, they're interested in getting a return on their money.
And even if it's play money, the hit of "yay, I won!" is just as real. When/if real money gets involved, be prepared for people to use your lovely little rational decision-making process as the equivalent of "will United or City win the league?" Professional sports bettors don't prefer one over the other, they bet on whichever they think will win. Genuine fans will bet on United (or City) regardless of the true odds of them winning.
You're not going to get a model to make "wisdom of crowds" policy decisions, you'll get the McElwees who get their high off the risk, so go for the riskiest bet, and/or bet three ways at once in order to maximise their chances of winning ("all those suckers voting for Yes when I have inside info that tells me vote No").
>Professional sports bettors don't prefer one over the other, they bet on whichever they think will win.
Hm, the thrust of your post seems to be against prediction markets, but this point is pretty much the main argument in favor of them. Given that the most profitable strategy is to bet on what you actually believe would happen, professionals would in the long run win money and betting power, while genuine fans would lose money, which accordingly diminishes their ability to distort the market. Nobody has yet proven that this would in fact robustly happen, but, conversely, nobody has proven that it wouldn't.
The thing is, prediction markets are being sold as "we can find out the best solution to a problem by getting hundreds/thousands/lots of people to wage money on it, and the winner will clearly be the best answer!"
If I'm betting for profit, I don't care if the winner is the best answer or the true answer or will cure blind three-legged puppies with leukemia, I care about "will this make me money?"
And if the dumbest answer makes me money, then I pick that one. Maybe other people see the money moving to "the dumbest answer" and they decide to bet on it too because hey, if everyone is picking this, it must be right?
So the winning answer could be a terrible decision, and if we're making policy based on "who won?" then we'll be making awful policies.
But more broadly, if there is money to be made, then the market will shift over time to "making money" and not "finding the best answer for the problem". I don't mind treating it like a horse race, but I would mind if genuine social policy decisions were being made based on which horse came in first at Punchestown in the 3:30.
>And if the dumbest answer makes me money, then I pick that one.
This would only happen if the system is so dysfunctional that dumb money can outbid smart money, but real-world outcomes are still being based on the result of the bet. I don't see how this can plausibly come to pass. Either prediction markets would first prove themselves beyond reasonable doubt before they become a load-bearing part of any consequential decision-making, or they would prove to be hopelessly unreliable and be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Sports betting provides a good example here. No matter how many dumb fans a team might have, betting in line with them generally isn't a good decision (unless the other team is dirty and in on the bet and you know it, but then the bet isn't actually dumb).
"if the system is so dysfunctional that dumb money can outbid smart money"
My friend, on this very site we have long arguments over "Okay, so you're telling me that there's a chance AI could blow up the world and you want us to slow down or even stop working on it - but if we do that, our competitors will get there first and they'll make all the money (before the world blows up) so why would we do that?".
Oh, I certainly don't claim that smart as a rule overcomes dumb. But seeing that everything is dysfunctional already, like you say, it would be impressive if prediction markets would manage to make things worse, considering that they contain a truth-tracking incentive for a change, unlike the usual monkey politics. It's not like there's an abundance of other promising proposals, is there?
>Professional sports bettors don't prefer one over the other, they bet on whichever they think will win.
Slight correction, they will bet on whichever one has positive expected value given the odds laid by the bookie. If a bookie is offering +400 on a team I think has a 22% chance to win I'll bet it for sure but if you asked me "which side do you think will win?" I'll still think the other side
>>I don’t want to exaggerate how worried to be about this. People lose way more money on sports betting and poker every hour.
Yes, because sports betting is an international industry adjacent to some of the most popular, mainstream, and celebrated cultural and recreational pastimes, and poker is the most popular card game around. By comparison, prediction markets are the hobby horse of a relatively small handful of nerds who say things like "raise the sanity waterline" (No offense intended).
Isn't it possible that prediction markets are actually no better than sports betting or poker, except for in the ways in which their relatively miniscule size limits the damage they can cause? Isn't it probable that the damage would scale as (and if) prediction markets become more popular, up to the point where they cause as much harm as sports betting?
>A site that produces lots of great information,
Does it?
>raises the sanity waterline
Does it?
>and once a year or so causes someone to lose $29,000 which management immediately gives back because they feel bad
For someone who writes so extensively about slippery slopes and slur cascades, you sure seem very convinced that _this time_ this is as bad as things will ever be.
>is hardly the face of problem gambling in America.
In the same way that Fentanyl is the face of opioid addiction in America, and so heroin must be relatively okay?
--------
Do you remember when the FTX thing happened, and you were very distraught, Scott? You were caught completely off guard, who could have seen this coming, etc? This is one of those warning signs, happening before your eyes. Update your priors accordingly. Then again your solution to the FTX debacle was to lean even harder into the gambling markets, so I probably shouldn't hold my breath.
Manifold conditional market on S&P drop/debt default is formulated as "will the S&P 500 at any point in 2023 drop at least 20% from its 2023 highs in 2023?" Since S&P500 is now close to year-high, conditionally on default, it triggers if the maximum drawdown of S&P over the remaining 7 months is more than 20%. But this event is pretty likely even in a world where the default has not impact on equity markets whatsoever. Back of an envelope and with current parameters, I would guess that the expected value of the drawdown is close to 15% with standard deviation of 5%, so a 20% drawdown is pretty likely (30%-40%?) without conditioning on any dramatic event. It is not 55% likely, so the market is saying that default would have some impact on S&P, but nothing dramatic, just equivalent to a return to 2022 levels of market volatility.
> There’s a lesson in this. I don’t know what the lesson is, but I am sure it exists.
The lesson is "ladbrokes.com", which I am currently monitoring for the odds of the upcoming US presidential election. It's clear that the bulk of the utility (as measured by the humans who do it) of prediction markets is the thrill of gambling, not the intellectual curiosity of eggheads trying to get a better fix on the future of humanity. I think a prediction market could be built to serve the latter but not the former, but only by explicitly policing it that way, and there's not much evidence that it would attract enough participation to be useful -- after all, the first sort of utility accrues to the person participating in the market, and the second sort is externalized.
I think that the Wale vs Minnows thing is not really gambling, but adjacent.
Traditional gambling is fueled by the possibility to make money: without stakes, roulette is a very dull game. This feels more like loot boxes or predatory mobile games, where you spend real money to get in-game benefits. (Of course, with such games, this is by design. From my understanding, the people who spend thousands a month are basically funding these games.)
In general, I also think wagering on real world outcomes is more of an addiction risk than wagering on pure games of chance: it takes a certain amount of stupid to convince oneself on can get an edge in roulette. By contrast, convincing oneself that one can beat a constrained market in e.g. election (or sport) predictions or something is not prima farcie absurd, IIRC our host claimed as much. It takes exceptional epistemic hygiene to account for overconfidence biases.
I would also challenge the assumption that there is no way to convert back "mana" to real money. Like life, the market finds a way. The obvious approach would be for two parties to arrange for the cash transfer offsite and transfer the play currency using highly specific bets ("Will the date between A and B go well" is not likely to attract any bets from the general public, and if neither party disputes the resolution, I do not see how Manifold could investigate the outcome (or even existence of A and B) independently.) Look for smallish accounts making money in big, cash-rich, tribal-coded markets (where the predictor has an edge) only to lose that money in niche markets with just a few participants.
I suspect that many zero-sum games can be implemented using prediction markets. For games of chance, just bet on the least significant bits of some stock index. For self-referential markets, weird stuff may happen. (I think one could implement a zero-sum variant of the dollar auction by asking "which of these options will trade highest at $date". I am unsure if the emulation capabilities extend if one allows the markets to refer to other markets as well.) Even if there is not a way to resolve a question fractionally ("answer a pays out 0.5$, answers b and c pay out 0.25$, answer d pays out nothing"), this could be emulated by using a random source to decide on any single outcome in the end.
At time of writing the post about the S&P and defaulting has 7 traders. Scott, how much predictive value do you think a market like that has? I would think very little, and if so I think deserves a caveat or something if mentioned. But I’m very curious how you think about low volume predictions!
"Congress is debating raising the debt ceiling. If they can’t compromise, the US will default on its debt, with potentially severe economic repercussions."
The use of the word "will" in your sentence is debatable. The Federal Government has not run out of cash. It receives more than $250 billion every month. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MTSR133FMS
The Federal government will not be forced to suspend interest payments on the debt. Principal payments are not a problem because they reduce the outstanding debt which increases the amount of borrowing that is permissible.
The FG would have to suspend or delay other payments such as employee salaries. But, that is not a default.
The FG should not be forced to miss payments of social security pensions because those involve reducing the outstanding debt (remember the trust fund?)
Further, the FG has defaulted in the past. In 1933, the FG refused payment of bonds in the form of the gold coins that had been borrowed and were owed and paid only in depreciated paper dollars. SCOTUS declared the action unconstitutional and then did a somersault with a double twist to avoid payment of damages. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/294/330
Do not ever believe the Federal Courts will protect you from the Federal Government when they decide to trample on your rights.
"Team Minnow started cheating first. They rounded up their friends and asked them to register Manifold accounts and join the market. This might have been semi-fair to start, but then they started paying people, in real money, to do it."
How is this cheating? Does Manifold have an express rule about it and who can sign up? I tried logging in to read the original post about the Whales and Minnows and had to join, and Manifold were delighted to throw some of their play money at me to start a market of my own even though the only thing I wanted to do was read the article.
So it doesn't seem like they're any too fussy about who signs up, and if you're relying on "gentleman's agreements" or a sense of honour about not getting people on your side by paying them to be on your side, that boat has long since set sail. Honour is for the birds, the only thing that matters is winning (see all the debates about academic cheating and those willing to defend the proposition that it's okay, everyone is doing it, and the university is supposed to hand over the piece of paper in return for your money anyway so exams are just archaic nonsense, you can Google everything you need to know on the job).
Re: Sean McElwee, I got to this part and couldn't help but laugh:
"A bunch of guys sat around a table: a spokesman for Facebook, a head of an organization attempting to end the filibuster, a former top aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid, a senior reporter who covered the Senate for MSNBC, and Gabe Bankman‐Fried, the brother and political confidant of the crypto billionaire Sam Bankman‐Fried.
...Gabe Bankman-Fried, whose role involved helping his big brother figure out how to spend his money here in town, showed up semi-regularly to these poker nights. Gabe’s organization, Guarding Against Pandemics, was becoming a powerhouse in Washington, and Sean had been doing some work for them that involved hyping their work at every opportunity."
The Bankman-Fried name just keeps popping up, doesn't it?
And in light of the recent survey on here, this part also made me laugh:
"“All of the Zoomers that work for me are bisexual, and all of them have long covid,” he said. “I’ll believe long covid is real when someone who is not bisexual has it.” (This was a joke. He later told a fact checker he didn’t even know the sexuality of his staff.)"
I get the impression McElwee is a bit of a dick, but he does sound funny (if you're not too sensitive). But also do not follow his advice on gambling.
"I cannot begin to predict the name of the US President in 2050"
Sure you can! You can't tell me it'll definitely be John, but I bet you can rank the following names by likelihood: Michael, Jessica, Sang-hoon, Stardust.
I still think this is some evidence we are in a comedic simulation.
The first black man elected president was named Barack Hussein Obama at a time when the leader we most recently demonized was named Hussein and our public enemy number 1 had the name "Osama".
It just doesn't match the generally low quality of other decision making that happens.
I also was fairly early on corona and big into bitcoin; I think he's just bearish on the current civilization. I cant speak for why Id believe that bitcoin offer was a good idea, but for a model of bearish on civilization takes, imagine a dying man with several organ failures and several airborne illnesses and cancers, you don't know how he's going to die but the systems maintaining the status quo seem corrupted and destroyed.
I don't follow the news like I used to, but maybe something spooked him hard and when ask "will the dying man who just vomited blood die soon" he said yes.
This article has two different people setting their money on fire to either actually (or subsequently rationalize as) promote awareness, Balaji's 1m about hyperinflation and Isaac's 4k about manifold. Balaji's 1m seems to have gotten him some press but little else, while Isaac's 4k got him some press and many manifold policy changes which are purportedly exactly what he wanted to begin with.
Well he gave a good estimation on what would happen if corona was to be a deadly pandemic, all of which was pretty easy to predict as far as I can see. Some of it was happening outside the US as he predicted it. Others were standard procedure.
Yeah, I don't follow him but I feel like I've heard forever that he nailed COVID early. Is this the best evidence of that? Him saying "what if this happens?" I agree it's better than the condescending articles saying it's racist to worry about coronavirus, and it's certainly more than I cared on Feb 1, 2020, but it's not exactly a bold prediction.
Yeah IDK it doesn't seem like that wild a prediction. At the time I was sure it would spread through the US, I just didn't think the impact would be that serious, it would take longer to get going, but then also it would be over in a few months.
I did think there would be big short term economic consequences, and sold everything (that was perfect).
But as soon as there were outbreaks in Italy/Spain/a few random cases in US it seemed the cat was out of the bag. And that was right in the late JAN - early FEB window.
Fuck I took a trip to the Caribbean in mid JAN and was the tiniest bit worried it would need to be cancelled. By early FEB it was clear there was no containment.
re: the likelihood of the US govt being late on a payment, note that there is a betting market that I believe has $5-10bn bet on it, which is 1yr credit default swaps on the US govt. If a default is declared, the person betting on a default gets about 40% of the notional bet, just because there happens to be a $60 US Treasury bond (because it was issued when interest rates were a lot lower).
Right now that price of that is about 170 bps, so the implied probability of there being a declared default under this contract is about .017 / .4 = about 4%
But also note that there's likely (the contract isn't clear) a 3 business day grace period before a default is declared, and there's also the likelihood that a committee made up of mostly US banks won't want to declare an event of default if they get a call from Treasury saying they'd prefer not to see that. So e.g. if you think that there's a 75% chance that a delayed payment either is cured within 3 days, *or* for whatever reason the committee doesn't declare a default, then this is consistent with a ~15% chance of a late payment.
(btw the normal objection to "why would anyone bet on US govt default because there will be noone left to pay them if the US govt is bankrupt" I mostly don't think applies in the case of what everyone agrees is very unlikely to be a permanent default but rather "just" a delay)
The markets on timeline of debt ceiling resolution and probability of default aren’t consistent. Consensus estimate for the X date put it prior to June 15 quarterly tax receipts--so to have only 80% chance of resolution by July 1 but 6% chance of default implies a 70% chance that the X date is actually into July (yes there could be a more subtle joint distribution of the two but still strikes me as off)
"And at the time he made the bet, he didn’t really sound like someone trying to communicate that he only thought there was a 10% risk of a near-term crisis:"
A 10% chance of a severe crisis is not good odds at all. You should definitely be worrying about a severe crisis if there's only a 90% chance of it not happening.
This is true, but if you are trying to communicate "the chance of crisis is low enough that it probably won't happen, but high enough that we should be very worried" then it's very important to communicate that clearly up front and differentiate it from the claim "the crisis will probably happen," for exactly the reason we're discussing now: If you don't, then when the crisis doesn't happen, you look like you were crying wolf and lose credibility.
Balaji did attempt to communicate this in that 4/28 tweet that Scott embedded, but not in any of his earlier communications.
What makes you think Scott has this attitude? From what I can see, Scott's post is criticizing Balaji for tweeting "the sky is falling" and then backpedaling after the fact to say "actually I meant there was a 10% chance of the sky falling, and since the sky falling would be really bad, that was worth worrying about" when that's not what he said originally.
This is behavior worth criticizing whether or not there was actually a 10% chance of the sky falling, and whether or not a 10% chance of the sky falling is actually worth worrying about.
Defaulting on a bond is different from "defaulting" on payment for goods and services.
Defaulting on a bond means when the bond is due the government says "we're not going to pay you the full face value". It's pretty cut and dried. This is generally disastrous for the rate the government has to offer for any future bonds it issues. If a lot of the bonds are owned by a different government with an army this can be really bad, as in "We're going to invade and take stuff in kind for repayment."
"Defaulting" on goods and services usually means "we're going to stretch out the payment schedule." This is a process of negotiations. Businesses do this stuff all the time; almost everything is "net 30" or "net 90" or something to that effect. Not paying all the bills by the end of that "net" period is bad for the business's credit rating but usually doesn't result in the business going bankrupt. This would be unusual only because the American federal government hasn't done this in a long time (probably the Civil War was the previous time). But cities do it (see New York in the 70s, or for that matter I'm pretty sure that Detroit is having problems now) and states have I think done it as well.
> If a lot of the bonds are owned by a different government with an army this can be really bad, as in "We're going to invade and take stuff in kind for repayment."
II think foreign investors would try arbitration first. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor%E2%80%93state_dispute_settlement ). The US either would have to pay damages to foreign investors (which will not play well with the local population) or violate international foreign investment treaties, which will devastate their ability to negotiate treaties in the future and might invite the retaliatory seizing of oversea assets of US companies?
I think "country X defaulted on us" makes a rather poor justification for a war. OTOH, the threat of cutting off country X from international trade and investment is probably plenty incentive to make them play nice.
(An interesting point is if an administration should be able to negotiate treaties lasting longer than their term. On one hand, any decision a government might make will affect the future to some degree. On the other hand, allowing arbitrary agreements allows the current generation of citizens to mess up things for future generations pretty hard.
For foreign investment protection agreements specifically, I think a fair compromise would be to make any administration promising such protections for new investments buy 'commie insurance' with a one-time payment. If future generations decide to nationalize that oil company, or that they want to ban gold mining in their rain forest or whatever, the brunt of the damages due would be covered by the insurance. That way, costs for decisions which turn out to be unpopular in the long run would be covered by the generation which voted for the administration making the original decision instead of by whatever generation will have to revert them down the line. I am not holding my breath with regard to anyone adopting such a policy, though.)
Well pretty much everyone tries talking first. The question is whether the parties think it will do any good.
Arbitration with who as the arbitrator? Arbitration works within a country because everyone abides by the same code of law. International commercial contracts generally specify how arbitration will work. US government bonds as far as I know don't have that.
Cutting off countries from trade *is* often war - see blockade. There is a spectrum of tactics here, and often what a tactic is called depends on the relative power of the parties involved.
"if an administration should be able to negotiate treaties lasting longer than their term". As far as I know, that's why the process for signing a treaty with the Americans is in their constitution. It's fairly involved (both the Senate and the President have to agree to it), so there's some hope that they will follow it (at least to the extent that countries abide by treaties anyway).
I don't think you'll find an insurance company (other than maybe Lloyd's) that will cover your 'commie insurance'. I'm not a lawyer but pretty much all insurance contracts disclaim 'force majeure', which covers what you're talking about. I think it's because of difficulty pricing the risk and also the difficulty in diversifying sufficiently not to be wiped out if it happens. Countries don't generally just nationalize one company, they tend to do it wholesale.
Is it possible to improve your own predictive accuracy by trying to guess the answer to “what would the average of a large number of people’s estimates of this be?” rather than “what do I estimate this to be?”?
Possibly? I’ve also tried predicting on Metaculus, and have a setting where I don’t see the community prediction on any question until I’ve predicted it myself. If my prediction turns out to be within the green stripe, I move on; if not, I start worrying that I’ve been thinking about the question and the background info all wrong (and often I immediately re-adjust to a rough average of my previous prediction and the community prediction).
Re: Book review contest; it doesn't look like Cities got a big boost? The currently-leading one in the linked market is The Educated Mind (unless I'm misreading).
Re brinksmanship: I dislike watching Congress and Biden playing games of "chicken" with the debt ceiling, but, at least, unlike Putin, there are no nuclear warheads involved.
( One nit, partially covered in your post: If an agreement _isn't_ reached, there are a couple of never-before-tried alternatives that might evade the debt ceiling that have been discussed this time around: the trillion dollar coin, declaring the debt ceiling law unconstitutional, and I think one or two more. I don't know if they make the overall situation better or worse... )
Is that just related to lowering their metabolism? I (think I) know severe calorie restriction (to a point) extends mice lifespans. Would an anoxic environment lower their metabolism?
I don't think that tweeting "what if this is a pandemic" on Jan 30th is especially "prescient" when The Economist had a cover story on the same day saying "Will the Wuhan virus become a pandemic? Probably.".
Scott, would you consider redacting my name from this article? I'm really tried of it being constantly brought up everywhere, and I don't need more of my acquaintances asking me about it. (I don't mind if you include a link for people who want to click through, I just don't want my name broadcast to every casual reader.) Especially considering the very negative spin you're putting on my actions, and the details you get wrong, like claiming that this was my life savings. Obviously my actions were public and I don't think there's any moral imperative that you don't talk about public actions, but I'd appreciate it.
To respond to some specific points and provide more context:
* $29,000 was not my life savings, just around 20% of them. I may make some bad bets, but I'm not a complete idiot. :)
* Manifold was well aware of the potential for gambling problems before this, as I had been trying to raise awareness of the possibility for months prior. They had chosen to take no action. See for example https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/by-2024-will-anyone-blame-manifold.
* Seems weird to call mana worthless and buying it a bad plan when it can be donated to effective charity.
* Seems weird to call me not a "serious user" when the vast majority of my markets and effort spent on the site were on useful topics, many of which are some of the most popular markets on the site, such as https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/did-covid19-come-from-a-laboratory, https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-gallups-poll-on-americas-most, the one you cited in a previous Mantic Mondays post https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/by-the-end-of-2023-will-substantial, and many others. Not to mention all the ones on how to improve Manifold as a useful prediction platform that can further EA causes.
Apologies if I'm coming off as frustrated, but it is indeed frustrating to put hundreds of hours into trying to meaningfully contribute to epistemics and forecasting, make the mistake of playing some games on the side for fun, and now that's all people know me for or want to talk about.
The bit about being aware of possibility of gambling issues seems to suggest a degree of blame. Do you mean that?
I mean, that feels a bit like saying the makers of knives were aware of the possibility they could be used for murder. Yes, if you can reduce that risk without other costs it's a good thing to do but, given that they believe their continued existence is a good thing and that excess mana can be donated to charity there are very much costs to any mitigation.
Indeed, it seems plausible to me that any harms from gambling are more than compensated for by the likely increased charitable donations from the mana injections (unless it causes bad PR).
I don't think Manifold did anything seriously wrong prior to WvM, no. I do think it was a bit naive of them to not take seriously the chance that someone would do something similar to what I did. (There had been a previous instance of similar behavior, where someone spent and lost about $6000 in another self-referential market.) I also question their decision to refund me, since that seems like it incentivizes similar risky plays in the future.
The PR concern seems real to me; I didn't expect WvM to go anywhere near as viral as it did, and it's a bad look for the site.
20% seems like complete idiot land or adjacent, but maybe that's just me.
I feel you, mate.
Oh, I'm realizing now that many people probably read your articles in the email preview that Substack provides, which you presumably can't edit, so maybe this is a pointless request anyway.
(Now I'm curious, anyone know how many people read Substack in their email vs. on the website?)
Hmm, you didn't mention my last name in the article text, and I can just edit my username on Manifold temporarily. That's probably good enough.
I always click through to the website. I know Scott often makes minor edits in response to early comments, and I'd rather get the more polished experience. :)
(I realise you were asking for data rather than anecdotes. I'm afraid I don't have data.)
Having him redact your name probably still makes sense (reduce google rank) but I don't think it's helping to make that request using your real name in the same comment you defend your actions since you probably want these to be deleted as well. I presume you planned to delete these comments but may I suggest sooner is better (say recomment using psuedonym or email scott) because I now remember your name only bc of this comment.
Vast majority of people won't read these comments. As I mentioned I don't care about the more "in the loop" people knowing, I just don't want a casual reader to notice my name, mention it to a bunch of my professional acquaintances, and cause me a further headache.
Fair, but I think you want to delete these comments as soon (I'd do it now) as Scott redacts.
LLM based web search is coming and probably smart enough to see this comment and infer that whatever initials Scott uses in main story is you and I bet you don't want this being a top result for your name for the rest of time. If you get lucky Scott redacts before it gets sucked up into any DB used for training etc..
Hmm, I'd bet against that. I doubt contemporary LLMs are that smart (they could probably figure it out if asked, but wouldn't realize it's relevant on their own), and while ACX is popular, it's not popular enough that I expect it to overwhelm everything else with my name on it. If someone's doing a deep background check on me I expect them to find this and that's fine.
Ahh, I dunno how famous you are. I don't have much web presence so I'm just keeping my webpage and academic papers above the Google rank of the sex offender with the same name.
(Just to head it off: yes we all thought of the response "maybe you should make less bets" to his comment so no need to assert it).
My name was mentioned in a past Mantic Mondays post, and it's not anywhere near the top Google search results. I'm not at all famous, but I have my own blog, twitter account, etc. and I think people overestimate how easily search engines will pick out a name from a single relatively low popularity article. (There's too much text on the internet to do an exhaustive search, so they have to choose what text seems "relevant", and often miss things.)
"the sex offender with the same name."
?
Okay, now I *have* to go look that one up!
I know a third Peter Gerdes who is neither you nor the sex offender. Wonder where he ranks.
Funny how there's demand for retraction, suggesting this will get picked up, and then rejection of ways it might be picked up, suggesting not enough of a concern to draw attention in the exact way you're doing. Pick a lane! I say this charitably: the reaction reads like a humble brag of sorts, seeking the attention, while disowning it. Not suggesting that's your intent, just realize how it potentially comes across.
Sorry, I try pretty hard not to post things that are embarrassing to people, but I thought writing a common first name, without any last name, is pretty meaningless except to people who already know you. I've replaced it with the initial "I." to satisfy your preference.
I've tried to correct other errors. I don't think I called you not a serious user and I appreciate your work on other markets.
On first reading of the redacted version, I thought you were writing "I", in the first person, about yourself. I got it sorted eventually from context and reading further, but I'd suggest another pseudonym for better clarity.
The name is still visible in the screenshot of the market. (And also in this comment thread, I guess.)
Yeah, I realized you had just used my first name in your text, and my last name was only on the market itself, so I just edited my Manifold username for now and that's not as big a deal. I appreciate it.
> While serious people worked on increasingly sophisticated estimation mechanisms for world events, pranksters worked on increasingly convoluted jokes.
I understood this to be trying to cast shade on the self-referential and joke markets and the people who engage in them, any me in particular since I was mentioned as one of them in the next sentence. My apologies if I misinterpreted.
I was calling people who engage in the joke markets less serious qua their engagement in joke markets, which doesn't mean they can't be serious people otherwise.
You are a legend in your buffoonery - you may as well just celebrate it. What else have you got to show for the $4,000? It's a fun anecdote.
For what it's worth, I had no idea who you were before someone in a different post mentioned the Whales versus Minnows, and I have no idea who you are now, apart from "guy who spent a lot of money on a prediction market and lost".
So as far as this casual member of the public is concerned, your anonymity remains intact.
I had a lot more sympathy for you before reading your comments here. First of all, you don't seem to be taking any responsibility for your actions. Whether Manifold was aware of the potential for gambling problems or not, it isn't Manifold's responsibility that you lost money; it's yours and yours alone. Manifold didn't hold a gun to your head and make you give up $29k. Second, if $29k is only 20% of your life savings and "I also question their decision to refund me, since that seems like it incentivizes similar risky plays in the future", why don't you give the money back?
Right? And then the whole "this could damage my reputation by being a top result for my name / otherwise spreading" changing to "this won't get widespread enough for these comments to matter", above — as if we're witnessing a knee-jerk reaction of complete denial re: any suggestion or even the mildest criticism — and the entire issue being about... first name "Isaac" and a Manifold username that can be and was changed anyway? Wtf.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but if the claim regarding long term forecasting is merely that experts can do better than random members of the public or than just looking at the base rate then why would anyone expect it could have been false? Surely the skeptics must have something less extreme in mind.
Surely it shouldn't be a surprise that you can improve prediction accuracy by obeying the probability axioms (I bet u can even prove some kind of domination result about this) which is one way experts did better. And even if we restrict our attention to assignments that obey probability axioms it would be crazy if the mere passage of time eliminated any effect of inside knowledge.
I doubt that even the most extreme skeptic of long term prediction would claim that there are no generalizations that hold beyond 25 years. For an extreme example, an expert might know that SR seems to forbid FTL travel and if non-experts didn't then you'd expect that expert to have an edge in predictions about interplanetary travel.
So one thing experts might do is say: hey I know that long range predictions are really hard so I'll just use base rates or other competitive method with the minor tweak that I'll insist my model obey probability axioms and give a very high probability to existing laws of physics remaining true. Surely that can't be enough to count as saying long term expert prediction works.
Many people have read Tetlock as making something like the skeptical claim.
Non-coherence shows that there is *a* probabilistically coherent set of predictions that is guaranteed to do better than you - but as long as you’re not too incoherent, it’s still not hard to do better than many probabilistic predictions.
Right, but I expect that something like the following is true. Given a distribution over a large set of probability judgements that violate the probability axioms with non-zero probability there is a uniformly given computable transformation of that distribution to one which only yields assignments that satisfy the axioms such that the expected accuracy of the later distribution is greater than that of the former with respect to the true probability distribution. At least given some reasonable assumptions about the initial distribution.
In other words, I bet there is a way to use coherence knowledge to touch up an existing distribution of guesses in a way that is expected to improve them even if you don't know what the true probability distribution is.
In fact, any accuracy measure implicitly defines a distance function, and you can show that the closest coherent probability distribution to any incoherent assignment has a better score in every possible world, which is even better than having higher expected accuracy.
This doesn’t quite translate to bets, but I think there’s a way to generate any proper scoring rule as the expected return of the bets one would make, given a probability distribution over gambles one might face. (I don’t know the details of this latter result.)
Yes, thanks that's exactly the kind of thing I was guessing existed,
And I'm guessing that there is a similar kind of thing you can do to adjust a probability distribution to obey other known constraints (eg via info provided from some extra knowledge of physics or whatever).
I feel like that makes the kind of superiority shown here relatively trivial.
I don't think it's trivial - these results don't give any good bound on the computational complexity of finding these improvements. And it sounded like the description said that these experts were making these predictions in a minute or two, which doesn't sound like they would have any chance to use this sort of computational tool to improve things. The fact that they improved on a baseline that is itself probabilistic also suggests that there's some sort of competence here.
Yes, they were responding quickly but on topics they were expert and and where they presumably had access to the info used for the competing predictions when they reached their conclusions about these issues.
I agree that they didn't literally use such a method. But my point is just that we already knew that experts have an advantage in short term and those theoretical results are suggestive that, even if this doesn't guarantee improvement, that if you take two people with the same initial info and then give one the time and incentives to make their views cohere it shouldn't be surprising for that to improve outcomes.
I mean, wouldn't it be pretty damn surprising if we *didn't* see that trying to obey prob axioms or use information about natural laws didn't improve predictions? Maybe not every time but if it didn't tend to then wouldn't that need explaining?
Let me try saying this differently. Even if intuitively most of this expertise was total bullshit but they insisted on following probabilistic axioms you'd expect them to outperform (tho not nec beyond margin of error) some random other method that they use as an input in their analysis (eg base rates) 50% of the time unless you think the expertise actively makes them worse. And if they face off against a non prob axiom obeying method you'd expect them to outperform it more than 50% of the time just because that's a crazy low bar.
I just think what people mean why they express skepticism about long range expert prediction can't really be this weak.
In other words, what I want to suggest is that if all you want to do is outperform some competing method that doesn't always obey the probability axioms I bet you can just touch up it's guesses in a way that ensures you are expected to outscore them.
If so, then merely showing you can outscore a non-probability axiom obeying method would only prove you can perform the right touch ups and have access to your competion's guesses (or dist of them).
Yeah, the post is pretty vague about what kind of "experts" these are. The interesting question would be whether domain experts can outperform generalist forecasting experts on long term forecasts. If you're comparing domain experts to some random Joe off the street, then sure, the international relations scholars probably have a better grasp of probability theory as well as of specific patterns and causal factors. The idea that none of forecasting "works" on long range forecasts is silly. It's all the same fundamental skills as short term forecasting.
I don't think that's what this shows.
* The experts outperformed another set of coherent predictions, which can't be so "touched up" as you've proposed.
* Not every probabilistically-coherent set of predictions will outscore every incoherent set, so unless the experts here explicitly had access to an incoherent set of predictions and deployed a strategy such that if they otherwise had no idea they would set forth a "fixed" version as their own predictions, I wouldn't expect that non-coherence has much relevance here.
In other words, you outline *a* way they could outscore *a* sort of bad competitor, but that's not what happened here, and so is of questionable import to my mind.
First re: other logically coherent predictions. That basically stands or falls with tjr later claim since knowledge of long term regularities like physical laws governing nuclear physics and chemistry are going to function like the logical constraints. In that if they are true and the experts know them to be true they impose constraints on the probability distributions.
re: incoherent alternatives
But how surprising should that be? Even if they aren't touching up the incoherent predictions unless you think the experts have some other disadvantage their competitor lacks surely, in general, we'd expect attention to coherence to improve predictions not make them worse.
Sure, that won't hold all the time (though amazingly can with the touching up version but leave that aside) but it's less surprising than the opposite.
I'm not trying to suggest they somehow did touch anything up. Just using that as a hueristic to argue that we should expect that other things being equal caring about coherence should help accuracy.
Yes, in principle it can make it worse but the experts had every advantage and piece of info that the other strategies had and tried to make their results coherent. The fact that trying to be coherent tends (in our actual world even if not provably) to be accuracy increasing should be the least controversial claim on a rationality forum.
If you don't believe that then wtf are we even doing having a debate where we try to formulate coherent claims?
Regarding Balaji, what's any more puzzling about his behavior than that of anyone else saying wrong/incoherent things on Twitter?
I suspect we tend to see large monetary losses and think: damn you'd have to be really confident/careful/whatever to risk that kind of amount.
But given how rich he is and the rapidly diminishing returns of money to utility Balaji is probably being less irrational in wasting that money than I am in wasting my time with this comment.
Same with Musk. Losing billions on Twitter might seem crazy to you and I but is it really than irrational for the very rich to try and turn money into social status/feeling of pwning someone on Twitter like the rest of us do with time (also sometimes refusing to back down after saying dumb shit)?
The thing is they both failed to earn any social status. Probably lost it, actually. Also they had reputations for being brilliant in their own area(although I don't share the crypto people's sentiment for Balaji).
Sure, but I have a pretty decent academic reputation and yet here I am making this argument. So, either I'm correct or I'm wrong and then I'm proving the very claim at issue: even smart people will say dumb shit online and invest time into doing so and not backing down. Only difference here is that a rich person is willing to spend money where the rest of us only spend time.
Ok, sorry, I just really wanted to make the self-referential argument. All I'm really saying is: doesn't seem any different than some smart prof getting into a dumb argument on Twitter and not backing down.
"The rich are just like us!"
Maybe. But doesn't that make the cult of personality around Musk and (presumably, I don't know because I don't involve myself with crypto) Balaji that much more absurd? Isn't their entire reputation based around the idea that they _don't_ do stupid shit, that they're visionary geniuses etc etc?
Pretty sure Musk's reputation is based on the fact that he does get carried away, up to doing stupid shit. It's just that sometimes he gets carried toward getting people do something that is a unique technology-scaling breakthrough.
… and sometimes he just says stupid things and doesn't back down and there is no technological breakthough to get done. Be it about absurd insults to rescue workers, or buying Twitter.
Post twitter purchase, for sure, but I think there's a lot of hindsight bias or revisionism or whatever going on here. For many years, he was widely hailed as tech daddy jesus who was going to save the world and colonize mars and such. I didn't use the phrase "cult of personality" lightly. The unhinged, chaotic neutral (optimistically) reputation is a relatively recent development as more and more people are exposed directly to the stupid side.
And realistically speaking, even the revised version is overstating things. He's not designing new battery technology, he's not doing rocket science, he's not personally making any of the technological breakthroughs his reputation credits him; He just used his PayPal money to buy the relevant companies. If there's any genius to be celebrated, it _would_ be business genius, but then he goes and does something thunderously stupid like buy twitter and you're left wondering if all the genius stuff was all just a fluke and slick marketing.
What actually happens is that after buying people a ton of people who do not care about actual-technology impact at all are suddenly exposed to his mass-market-customer-relations antics (these were always bad).
SpaceX fans are still there more or less as it was (you can sooner cool them down with the Flight Termination System blunder during the Starship test flight than with whatever is done to Twitter), it's just that before they were the majority of those who cared.
He explains the rocket engineering done times and times again coherently and eagerly, enough that the only reasonable explanation for why he bothers is that he actually does the technical risk calls at SpaceX and probably Tesla. I.e. «do we try to fix it or work around this or just risk trying it and seeing how things go». That might have significant value, not in the sense of his being better at estimating the outcomes, but in the sense of there being a relatively consistent «buck stops here» with risk decision making.
What's unique about him and actually lead to the formation of the fan club, is that he's basically played straight in the 21st century what is told about the capitalists of 18th century: he actually bet _all_ the Paypal money on SpaceX and Tesla, and «all» vs «half» was relevant at some point. He is a real deal of a megalomaniac, not just pretending.
I did think badly before all the Twitter stuff about, say, the Thanksgiving letter at SpaceX (calling people back a couple days early due to circumstances that were clearly playing out at a scale of many months, both before and after that moment? is it the best Musk can do at management? unfortunately, yes). Or about some of the remote-force-reconfiguration stories in Teslas. And even after all the Twitter stuff I do believe that without Musk doubling down on some of the SpaceX bets, the zeitgeist for the other rocket companies to raise money for doing things differently would not be there.
"he's not personally making any of the technological breakthroughs his reputation credits him; He just used his PayPal money to buy the relevant companies."
I don't think this is accurate at all. It's not like he's a fat-cat capitalist just raking in Tesla profits while he sits at home tweeting and eating Cheetos. The guy was working 140 hr weeks or whatever preventing Tesla from going bankrupt at one point. If he died the stock price of his companies would plummet. He's doing something important.
This isn't accurate. He founded SpaceX and became an investor/board member at Tesla when it only had three employees and hadn't built or developed any viable products or technology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.
Looking at his track record I don't see how anyone can seriously doubt his genius (perhaps luck as well). It seems very disingenuous and motivated by the fact that people don't like his personality/ideology.
There are tons of investors with money to throw around, nobody wins and actually carries shit through like he does
Not even "a unique technology-scaling breakthrough", but just improving society. Of course, he often get that wrong, too...hardly surprising as that's not what his goal is.
The Tesla is a great example. I wouldn't want to buy one, but they really pushed things in a socially desirable directions. Similarly with SpaceX, though I'm less sure about the LEO internet. That's got costs that haven't really been measured yet. Perhaps they outweigh the benefits.
OTOH, I really wouldn't want to work for him. He sounds a lot worse than Steve Jobs.
«Just improving society» without qualification in which sense is wishy washy and always arguable. «Bringing into society an (undeniable) technological capacity» is 100% there. And Boring and Neuralink haven't even played out yet.
I think he is very different from Steve Jobs, and better in some pretty important things even for those working for him. On the other hand, yeaaaaah, a lot of bad things.
As David Leonhardt says, "For as long as there has been money, people have been doing stupid things with it." And there is a large tendency of people who have been successful at one thing to think they are geniuses who can be successful at anything.
True, but also consider that Musk's success wasn't just one incident, he pulled of SpaceX, Tesla, ... and it didn't seem too strange for him to solve yet another problem for humanity. Admittedly all those were in the realm of Engineering+Business, which is a bit different from "balancing free speech with moderation against misinformation", but still, I actually kinda hoped that Musk would have some brilliant idea with at least some chance of neatly resolving this entire issue. Turned out you were right, but only in retrospective in my opinion.
My hope was that he would kill off Twitter without harming Tesla or SpaceX.
OTOH, I'm an old fogey. I don't like either Twitter or YouTube (or basically anything that requires allowing JavaScript to be active. I don't even trust AJAX.)
🤷♀️ It's his money, he can play ducks and drakes with it if he likes.
I've bet against people saying stupid things on twitter. They usually don't pay up.
https://twitter.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1655012516055990272
https://twitter.com/TeaGeeGeePea/status/1655012127793463298
Balaji strikes me as conflating several different predictions that, while not independent, have their own drivers and probabilities.
Hyperinflation needs to occur. People need to see BTC as a viable inflation hedge and purchase it in response to hyperinflation. The level of hyperinflation and the price impact on BTC needs to drive the price up about 30 - 50x.
Feels like the prediction market questions you describe above are a bit less contingent on a series of probabilities.
I don't think people necessarily need to buy BTC en masse in order for its USD price to rise 40x during USD hyperinflation. Can't the "value" of Bitcoin just stay the same while the value of USD falls? (Though in this situation you may equally well hedge by just buying JPY. Then again, USD hyperinflation is such an unlikely event that I'm having trouble visualizing what else will be true in a world where it actually happened for real – maybe all currencies in the world must be in trouble then.)
>maybe all currencies in the world must be in trouble then
Maybe the anti-capitalists are onto something.
The price of gold, BTC, or other items does not automatically go up when the value of a dollar goes down. You need to keep in mind that nobody is sitting around keeping track of "the value of a dollar" in a vacuum. The value is based on what people are willing to pay for things with dollars. Specifically, if someone is buying BTC with dollars, the first ones purchased will be approximately normal prices. Then, as there are fewer BTC available for that price, only those purchased at higher amounts will be sold. Individuals can still sell BTC for less than the going price, but anything sold very low would get bought quickly if people are willing to buy for much higher amounts. This continues for as long as demand exists at continuously higher rates. If the dollar is considered worthless (hyperinflation concerns) then the amount of dollars someone is willing to spend on BTC could be very high. So long as BTC is seen as a hedge against inflation.
If no one buys BTC above baseline rates, the value of dollars to BTC doesn't change. We see this often with other goods when the price of a particular item goes up significantly (think of oil/gas) but prices for other items stays approximately the same.
What the USD hyperinflating means is the end of the US as a dominant world trading currency. Probably the end of the US as a dominant world power. While quite unpleasant, it would probably be LESS unpleasant that the way transfers of power have often happened (i.e. large-scale war).
Why won’t people buy euro, or pesos, or sterling, or anything that isn’t hyperinflating. Or are we expecting a worldwide hyperinflation. When has that happened?
I think it is hard to make a good question about the moat claims. I'm pretty sure the memo assumes Google and OpenAI have an advantage to train models at GPT-4 scale if advantage is measured by GPT-4 rules. And the threatening open-source models won't need to be nominally better than GPT-3.5 at GPT-3.5 things… the question is whether a slightly weakened GPT3-level thing compressed into a smartphone-local reduced version and given interfaces with a radically different structure would be much more useful.
… and to whom! Maybe polish and UI work will still be a moat for selling to corporations, it's just the stuff for doing novel information processing work that will depend on wrangling the infinitely forked open-source systems. (Like with OSes: no real troubling selling Windows even if new sofftware ends up clientt-server with web servers running Linux or maaaybe FreeBSD and web browsers being fine on whatever)
Hello there, I'm a cofounder of Manifold!
The Whales vs. Minnows market was originally quite a fun and creative battle, despite the way it ended.
- More than a hundred derivative markets were created: https://manifold.markets/group/whales-vs-minnows
- A user used AI to compose an epic saga telling the Whales vs Minnows story, voiced by David Attenborough, which is brilliant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV3bgODqIBc
- Isaac had a big reveal where he had hundreds of NO bettor accounts sell out of their position and thus flip the advantage to the YES side. (Before succumbing to an influx of new minnows from Reddit.)
- A council of top Manifold users formed to help govern the resolution decision to make sure it was fair. They agreed to resolve the market at a random time — when next bitcoin block was mined with a hash ending in "00".
All this speaks of a very passionate community including at least a thousand people directly participating for fun. Many of our users are also learning the mechanics of prediction markets in the meantime – for example, understanding how the price of shares relates to the probability, or creating their first limit order.
I think Manifold was able to learn from this market too and implement a mana-purchasing limit to prevent future problems like this one. It's also worth mentioning that we've been operating for a year and a half and this is a pretty unique event.
Aside from all that, we do still have exciting plans to make prediction markets better and more useful for real-world forecasting!
For example, just today we asked if a cool new mechanism we are working on will be the most impactful feature we build in 2023 and it's currently at 54%! https://manifold.markets/Austin/will-multi-binary-be-the-most-impac
We've also identified a clear path to monetization that is better than relying on users dropping $29k to participate in meme markets.
We have seen that prediction markets produce valuable information that answers users' questions.
So, what if you could spend mana to get the wisdom of the crowd to work for you? You would be buying knowledge from other users.
Now you can do just that! We just launched a feature a few weeks ago to pay mana to "boost" your market in other users' feeds, which prods them to bet in your market and make the forecast more accurate.
In addition, we are planning a new feature that would go even further along these lines based on my hackathon project a couple weeks ago: https://manifold.markets/q-and-a
You can ask any question and post a mana bounty for the answer. This is the simplest mechanism for directly buying information. As a side-effect for getting the answer, you are also publishing it publicly for others to learn from. Just like public prediction markets, bountied questions are a public good!
All this ties into our vision of finding as many uses for mana as possible to build a strong information economy.
Austin has said that mana is the currency for attention. In an increasingly online and super-intelligent world, what could be more valuable?
Cheers!
>confounder
hmmmmm...
Oops, fixed!
"Isaac had a big reveal where he had hundreds of NO bettor accounts sell out of their position and thus flip the advantage to the YES side."
If it was cheating for the Minnows to 'pay to play', isn't this cheating also? Though I suppose if everyone is cheating it all cancels out.
It's cheating now because we made a rule against it haha. It wasn't cheating then!
Again, I feel people are reaching to put a negative spin on what was mostly seen as interesting, creative, and fun at the time.
Oh, gacha games are great fun - until you get your credit card bill.
I'm still not sure why anyone would be motivated to research and answer a question for mana — at least, not any more so than e.g. karma on Reddit...
...so while I first thought "wow, how cool, I'm gonna use the hell out of that bounty feature!", I'm a little worried it still won't *really* let you directly purchase high-quality info/answers... Can't we also put a real money bounty on it?! I mean, that's not gambling, right?
"There’s a lesson in this. I don’t know what the lesson is, but I am sure it exists."
The lesson is pretty obvious, indoor outdoor cats are the dominant lifeform on this planet, and when the AI generates superintelligent robot cat superbeings we will not be enslaved to them because we will yield ourselves in servitude to them voluntarily.
I hope that they don't decide to play with us in typical feline fashion...
Oh, no, they will
and we'll tell ourselves that we're ok with it ....
Ouch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UijhbHvxWrA
XD
DX
Addicts often have to abstain and this can cause social difficulties. Say, avoiding alcohol in a culture where social interactions are centered around drinking -- this might even cause career difficulties.
But I think if the "prediction markets" dream comes to fruition, gambling addicts would face this kind of problem in an especially strong way.
Imagine the world where having a good public betting track record is a de facto requirement to get hired for a large number of desirable "normal" jobs. (Right now this is only true, maybe, in a tiny number of jobs in finance.) Or internal prediction markets ala Hanson take off, and now normal corporate middle managers are expected to be making bets all the time within their companies.
We are very far from this, but it is the dream of some proponents of prediction markets. In this world, if a gambling addict wants to completely abstain from placing bets, they'd be cut off from jobs that required placing bets, which might be large numbers of white-collar jobs. (And, if "futarchy" took off, completely cut off from participating in much of civic life).
I think "medium-large" success of prediction markets would be great and useful for society. But I hope they never become central to society, so that people can always opt out and have a completely normal life.
(Note: while the behavior described on Manifold at the beginning of the post definitely would seem to count as an instance of "problem gambling", I have no idea if there's a pattern of other behavior, so I do not want to imply that this person is a "gambling addict".)
Sounds like a problem that workaholics already have. (Avoiding work may cause career difficulties.)
Perhaps there could be limits for the gambling addicts, how much money they can bet each week? It would cost them a good opportunity now and then, but probably save them a lot of money in long term.
I don't think there is anyone who actually is addicted to work such that surviving/having a decent life depends on completely abstaining from work of any kind. But this is reasonably common with gambling as well as drugs.
Setting limits would definitely be a partial solution for some cases. But if, say, putting small bets on election markets ultimately cues someone to drive over to the casino, it wouldn't completely solve the problem.
There are absolutely people who cut decades off their life from an inability to avoid overwork, it's just that society sees them as 'useful' rather than 'degenerate' and so there's minimal stigma. Cf. how caffeine addiction is totally fine and normal while other drugs are stigmatised.
I note that most countries in the world do explicitly limit permitted overtime, too, which would be analogous to monetary limits on gambling.
How serious is caffeine addiction? My personal experience is that I normally drink two cups of coffee a day, and, on days when this is inconvenient and I skip it, I can't detect any craving at all and I have to strain to detect any change in energy or anything else.
"Or internal prediction markets ala Hanson take off, and now normal corporate middle managers are expected to be making bets all the time within their companies."
Which would be a great way to crash your company into the ground. Organisations which introduced internal competition markets (e.g. you can't just ring the IT guys to come fix the computers, you have to submit bids and tenders within the internal market for services) made a royal mess of things because it turns out competition is not automatically always the best thing.
Making it mandatory for managers to bet against each other is going to result in people doing each other down in order to win and wrecking any functionality.
I'm super interested. Do you have any concrete examples of an organization introducing an internal competitive market that caused a royal mess?
The closest I can think of is when food banks moved to a market-based system and the results were (afaict) largely positive: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.31.4.145?ref=thediff.co
The usual examples I hear mentioned are Enron and Sears, which moved to internal markets and that was blamed for greatly exacerbating conflict between groups, sabotage and negative-sum games, etc. As both were pathological and in death-spirals for other reasons, it's hard to say more than 'sometimes it seems like a good idea, sometimes it seems bad'.
"But it was still a challenge the idea that it’s possible to run any kind of gambling-adjacent institution ethically, no matter how careful you try to be."
What exactly is unethical about giving adult fools an opportunity to part with their money, if there's no deceit involved? (Also, the quoted sentence misses "to".)
While this doesn’t mesh with a 100% consent-based left-libertarian ethos, in the rest of the common-sense world it’s considered morally repugnant to be in the business of offering people things that are known to ruin their lives, especially the sort of person who is known to have little self-control for that particular temptation.
You would not, e.g., knowingly offer an alcoholic a drink. People who deal in drugs are considered lowlifes. Prostitutes and pimps no less than johns are held in contempt.
Of course many people will say this is a vestige of an old-fashioned morality. It is certainly old-fashioned to some but surely not so much that we pretend we don’t know it still exists and we don’t understand what it is.
Yes, a small minority that has made little headway in changing laws and attitudes despite being quite loud. The exception proves the rule, doesn’t it? Most people don’t want prostitutes working in their neighborhoods and think that johns are at best pathetic undesirables, and they’ve orchestrated society to push these people underground and to the fringes.
"You would not, e.g., knowingly offer an alcoholic a drink."
I wouldn't, but the supermarket happily would, without its suppliers and employees being seen as lowlifes. When offering one drink is a tragedy and a million is a statistic, it seems fair to conclude that society doesn't actually see it as unethical.
Let’s assume you’re right for a moment and that what is currently legal corresponds perfectly to what people view as morally correct.
That gives you one or two examples of a heavily regulated addictive experience (alcohol, nicotine) which are still legal to sell in the USA and plenty of examples of outright bans or regulating to the point of ban (casinos and gambling, drugs of all kinds). Since as you have posited this reflects moral views of society in perfectly, we must assume that society considers these industries dangerous and open for exploitation and desires them to be either seriously curtailed or stopped completely.
But this view is naive. The existence of hypocrisy or dedicated moneyed purveyors of vice doesn’t mean that people approve of vice, it just means that evil people exist and that sometimes they are actually in control of what happens. People are not relentless moral crusaders against vice-purveying, normally: they won’t fight wars over it. But they do disapprove, and your suggestion otherwise is a failure to see the obvious.
No, I just disagree that any of this is obvious. Given that hypocrisy and scope insensitivity are rampant and taken for granted, actually working ethics of society are clearly different from what is being proclaimed from various soapboxes. Of course, just because something isn't unethical it doesn't mean that it's safe from a soapbox attack, which is what matters when it comes to introduction of new tech and services.
Well, regulators in the US are trying to keep these kinds of markets from being gambling sites by not letting US residents bet on them, not letting real money be used, etc. and people are trying to find ways around that and loopholes and hoping to persuade the regulators to permit real money betting.
There's only so much you can do to protect people from themselves, especially smart people who think they have all the angles covered and this obvious thing to happen will surely never, ever happen because that's not what we intended.
Correction:
...There's only so much you *should* do to protect people from themselves...
You can always lock people up in cages, or just shoot them. Then they won't misbehave. But that leads to a very unpleasant society. So the question is (as nearly always) "Where should you draw the line?"
And where the line should be drawn is a very difficult question. Consider sugar. Nobody needs sugar, and just about everybody likes it. Given access, people will reliably eat more of it than is good for them. Should you forbid it? Excess consumption predictably leads to many health problems.
FWIW, I have more problems with sugar than with alcohol. My solution is to just avoid it, but this causes numerous social problems. If other people would just avoid it too, those problems would go away...
"I have more problems with sugar than with alcohol." Same here! (nitpick: I'm taking us both to mean ethanol when we say "alcohol". Technically, from an organic chemist's point of view, alcohols are a broad class which include sugars, since they have hydroxyl groups on carbons.)
Carbs are indeed my downfall, and I would need for all bread to be banned in order to get around it.
But indeed this is what is happening with the "obesity epidemic" - there *is* a sugar tax on fizzy drinks, for instance.
https://www.revenue.ie/en/companies-and-charities/excise-and-licences/sugar-sweetened-drinks-tax/index.aspx
I think this kind of tax will end up as one of the Budget "old reliables" - taxes on alcohol and cigarettes which are supposed to reduce consumption, but which form a large part of revenue since people don't give up their vices.
I think if governments restrict online betting, which includes prediction markets, that's about as much as they can do. As you say, they can't lock people up in cages for being gamblers.
"in the rest of the common-sense world it’s considered morally repugnant to be in the business of offering people things that are known to ruin their lives, especially the sort of person who is known to have little self-control for that particular temptation."
Dumb question: As technology stands today, is it feasible or infeasible to determine who is at risk for various such temptations (prior to the person getting deeply enmeshed in them)? Could one have e.g. a requirement for a personality test of some sort before e.g. participating in a prediction market?
If you open up any kind of market where money is made from betting (and predictions are bets), then people will try and make money out of it. They're not interested in "Is X better than Y?" for the sake of finding out which is better, they're interested in getting a return on their money.
And even if it's play money, the hit of "yay, I won!" is just as real. When/if real money gets involved, be prepared for people to use your lovely little rational decision-making process as the equivalent of "will United or City win the league?" Professional sports bettors don't prefer one over the other, they bet on whichever they think will win. Genuine fans will bet on United (or City) regardless of the true odds of them winning.
You're not going to get a model to make "wisdom of crowds" policy decisions, you'll get the McElwees who get their high off the risk, so go for the riskiest bet, and/or bet three ways at once in order to maximise their chances of winning ("all those suckers voting for Yes when I have inside info that tells me vote No").
>Professional sports bettors don't prefer one over the other, they bet on whichever they think will win.
Hm, the thrust of your post seems to be against prediction markets, but this point is pretty much the main argument in favor of them. Given that the most profitable strategy is to bet on what you actually believe would happen, professionals would in the long run win money and betting power, while genuine fans would lose money, which accordingly diminishes their ability to distort the market. Nobody has yet proven that this would in fact robustly happen, but, conversely, nobody has proven that it wouldn't.
The thing is, prediction markets are being sold as "we can find out the best solution to a problem by getting hundreds/thousands/lots of people to wage money on it, and the winner will clearly be the best answer!"
If I'm betting for profit, I don't care if the winner is the best answer or the true answer or will cure blind three-legged puppies with leukemia, I care about "will this make me money?"
And if the dumbest answer makes me money, then I pick that one. Maybe other people see the money moving to "the dumbest answer" and they decide to bet on it too because hey, if everyone is picking this, it must be right?
So the winning answer could be a terrible decision, and if we're making policy based on "who won?" then we'll be making awful policies.
But more broadly, if there is money to be made, then the market will shift over time to "making money" and not "finding the best answer for the problem". I don't mind treating it like a horse race, but I would mind if genuine social policy decisions were being made based on which horse came in first at Punchestown in the 3:30.
>And if the dumbest answer makes me money, then I pick that one.
This would only happen if the system is so dysfunctional that dumb money can outbid smart money, but real-world outcomes are still being based on the result of the bet. I don't see how this can plausibly come to pass. Either prediction markets would first prove themselves beyond reasonable doubt before they become a load-bearing part of any consequential decision-making, or they would prove to be hopelessly unreliable and be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Sports betting provides a good example here. No matter how many dumb fans a team might have, betting in line with them generally isn't a good decision (unless the other team is dirty and in on the bet and you know it, but then the bet isn't actually dumb).
"if the system is so dysfunctional that dumb money can outbid smart money"
My friend, on this very site we have long arguments over "Okay, so you're telling me that there's a chance AI could blow up the world and you want us to slow down or even stop working on it - but if we do that, our competitors will get there first and they'll make all the money (before the world blows up) so why would we do that?".
Tell me again about dumb versus smart money?
Oh, I certainly don't claim that smart as a rule overcomes dumb. But seeing that everything is dysfunctional already, like you say, it would be impressive if prediction markets would manage to make things worse, considering that they contain a truth-tracking incentive for a change, unlike the usual monkey politics. It's not like there's an abundance of other promising proposals, is there?
Shorter: Boaty McBoatface for the win!
>Professional sports bettors don't prefer one over the other, they bet on whichever they think will win.
Slight correction, they will bet on whichever one has positive expected value given the odds laid by the bookie. If a bookie is offering +400 on a team I think has a 22% chance to win I'll bet it for sure but if you asked me "which side do you think will win?" I'll still think the other side
Those adult fools sometimes have minors who depend on them.
>>I don’t want to exaggerate how worried to be about this. People lose way more money on sports betting and poker every hour.
Yes, because sports betting is an international industry adjacent to some of the most popular, mainstream, and celebrated cultural and recreational pastimes, and poker is the most popular card game around. By comparison, prediction markets are the hobby horse of a relatively small handful of nerds who say things like "raise the sanity waterline" (No offense intended).
Isn't it possible that prediction markets are actually no better than sports betting or poker, except for in the ways in which their relatively miniscule size limits the damage they can cause? Isn't it probable that the damage would scale as (and if) prediction markets become more popular, up to the point where they cause as much harm as sports betting?
>A site that produces lots of great information,
Does it?
>raises the sanity waterline
Does it?
>and once a year or so causes someone to lose $29,000 which management immediately gives back because they feel bad
For someone who writes so extensively about slippery slopes and slur cascades, you sure seem very convinced that _this time_ this is as bad as things will ever be.
>is hardly the face of problem gambling in America.
In the same way that Fentanyl is the face of opioid addiction in America, and so heroin must be relatively okay?
--------
Do you remember when the FTX thing happened, and you were very distraught, Scott? You were caught completely off guard, who could have seen this coming, etc? This is one of those warning signs, happening before your eyes. Update your priors accordingly. Then again your solution to the FTX debacle was to lean even harder into the gambling markets, so I probably shouldn't hold my breath.
>Isn't it possible that prediction markets are actually no better than sports betting or poker
I agree, they're no better because all 3 are 0% bad.
Manifold conditional market on S&P drop/debt default is formulated as "will the S&P 500 at any point in 2023 drop at least 20% from its 2023 highs in 2023?" Since S&P500 is now close to year-high, conditionally on default, it triggers if the maximum drawdown of S&P over the remaining 7 months is more than 20%. But this event is pretty likely even in a world where the default has not impact on equity markets whatsoever. Back of an envelope and with current parameters, I would guess that the expected value of the drawdown is close to 15% with standard deviation of 5%, so a 20% drawdown is pretty likely (30%-40%?) without conditioning on any dramatic event. It is not 55% likely, so the market is saying that default would have some impact on S&P, but nothing dramatic, just equivalent to a return to 2022 levels of market volatility.
> There’s a lesson in this. I don’t know what the lesson is, but I am sure it exists.
The lesson is "ladbrokes.com", which I am currently monitoring for the odds of the upcoming US presidential election. It's clear that the bulk of the utility (as measured by the humans who do it) of prediction markets is the thrill of gambling, not the intellectual curiosity of eggheads trying to get a better fix on the future of humanity. I think a prediction market could be built to serve the latter but not the former, but only by explicitly policing it that way, and there's not much evidence that it would attract enough participation to be useful -- after all, the first sort of utility accrues to the person participating in the market, and the second sort is externalized.
Only here to say that my mantis ootheca just hatched and I am the proud father of 400-600 baby mantises
That’s a lot of diapers.
I think that the Wale vs Minnows thing is not really gambling, but adjacent.
Traditional gambling is fueled by the possibility to make money: without stakes, roulette is a very dull game. This feels more like loot boxes or predatory mobile games, where you spend real money to get in-game benefits. (Of course, with such games, this is by design. From my understanding, the people who spend thousands a month are basically funding these games.)
In general, I also think wagering on real world outcomes is more of an addiction risk than wagering on pure games of chance: it takes a certain amount of stupid to convince oneself on can get an edge in roulette. By contrast, convincing oneself that one can beat a constrained market in e.g. election (or sport) predictions or something is not prima farcie absurd, IIRC our host claimed as much. It takes exceptional epistemic hygiene to account for overconfidence biases.
I would also challenge the assumption that there is no way to convert back "mana" to real money. Like life, the market finds a way. The obvious approach would be for two parties to arrange for the cash transfer offsite and transfer the play currency using highly specific bets ("Will the date between A and B go well" is not likely to attract any bets from the general public, and if neither party disputes the resolution, I do not see how Manifold could investigate the outcome (or even existence of A and B) independently.) Look for smallish accounts making money in big, cash-rich, tribal-coded markets (where the predictor has an edge) only to lose that money in niche markets with just a few participants.
I suspect that many zero-sum games can be implemented using prediction markets. For games of chance, just bet on the least significant bits of some stock index. For self-referential markets, weird stuff may happen. (I think one could implement a zero-sum variant of the dollar auction by asking "which of these options will trade highest at $date". I am unsure if the emulation capabilities extend if one allows the markets to refer to other markets as well.) Even if there is not a way to resolve a question fractionally ("answer a pays out 0.5$, answers b and c pay out 0.25$, answer d pays out nothing"), this could be emulated by using a random source to decide on any single outcome in the end.
Dw, Medlock knows the moral of the story: https://twitter.com/jdcmedlock/status/1653552007385616385
The moral of the story is he doesn't understand how personal decision making impacts poverty?
At time of writing the post about the S&P and defaulting has 7 traders. Scott, how much predictive value do you think a market like that has? I would think very little, and if so I think deserves a caveat or something if mentioned. But I’m very curious how you think about low volume predictions!
"Congress is debating raising the debt ceiling. If they can’t compromise, the US will default on its debt, with potentially severe economic repercussions."
The use of the word "will" in your sentence is debatable. The Federal Government has not run out of cash. It receives more than $250 billion every month. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MTSR133FMS
Annual net interest payments this FY are projected to be $640 billion. I.e. ~$55 billion per month. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58946#_idTextAnchor004
The Federal government will not be forced to suspend interest payments on the debt. Principal payments are not a problem because they reduce the outstanding debt which increases the amount of borrowing that is permissible.
The FG would have to suspend or delay other payments such as employee salaries. But, that is not a default.
The FG should not be forced to miss payments of social security pensions because those involve reducing the outstanding debt (remember the trust fund?)
My argument in more detail: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-phony-debt-ceiling-calamity-x-date-default-social-security-roll-over-treasury-ac939d83
Further, the FG has defaulted in the past. In 1933, the FG refused payment of bonds in the form of the gold coins that had been borrowed and were owed and paid only in depreciated paper dollars. SCOTUS declared the action unconstitutional and then did a somersault with a double twist to avoid payment of damages. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/294/330
Do not ever believe the Federal Courts will protect you from the Federal Government when they decide to trample on your rights.
"Team Minnow started cheating first. They rounded up their friends and asked them to register Manifold accounts and join the market. This might have been semi-fair to start, but then they started paying people, in real money, to do it."
How is this cheating? Does Manifold have an express rule about it and who can sign up? I tried logging in to read the original post about the Whales and Minnows and had to join, and Manifold were delighted to throw some of their play money at me to start a market of my own even though the only thing I wanted to do was read the article.
So it doesn't seem like they're any too fussy about who signs up, and if you're relying on "gentleman's agreements" or a sense of honour about not getting people on your side by paying them to be on your side, that boat has long since set sail. Honour is for the birds, the only thing that matters is winning (see all the debates about academic cheating and those willing to defend the proposition that it's okay, everyone is doing it, and the university is supposed to hand over the piece of paper in return for your money anyway so exams are just archaic nonsense, you can Google everything you need to know on the job).
Re: Sean McElwee, I got to this part and couldn't help but laugh:
"A bunch of guys sat around a table: a spokesman for Facebook, a head of an organization attempting to end the filibuster, a former top aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid, a senior reporter who covered the Senate for MSNBC, and Gabe Bankman‐Fried, the brother and political confidant of the crypto billionaire Sam Bankman‐Fried.
...Gabe Bankman-Fried, whose role involved helping his big brother figure out how to spend his money here in town, showed up semi-regularly to these poker nights. Gabe’s organization, Guarding Against Pandemics, was becoming a powerhouse in Washington, and Sean had been doing some work for them that involved hyping their work at every opportunity."
The Bankman-Fried name just keeps popping up, doesn't it?
And in light of the recent survey on here, this part also made me laugh:
"“All of the Zoomers that work for me are bisexual, and all of them have long covid,” he said. “I’ll believe long covid is real when someone who is not bisexual has it.” (This was a joke. He later told a fact checker he didn’t even know the sexuality of his staff.)"
I get the impression McElwee is a bit of a dick, but he does sound funny (if you're not too sensitive). But also do not follow his advice on gambling.
"I cannot begin to predict the name of the US President in 2050"
Sure you can! You can't tell me it'll definitely be John, but I bet you can rank the following names by likelihood: Michael, Jessica, Sang-hoon, Stardust.
That's it, I'm putting 50 quid on Stardust (but only if you can assure me that xe is a trans poly Wiccan of colour).
John is unlikely post 2030 unless John is alternatively Joan on every second day. And maybe Stardust on Friday.
Barack Hussein Obama would like a word.
I still think this is some evidence we are in a comedic simulation.
The first black man elected president was named Barack Hussein Obama at a time when the leader we most recently demonized was named Hussein and our public enemy number 1 had the name "Osama".
It just doesn't match the generally low quality of other decision making that happens.
I am curious on what the odds are that it is human... (if there is a US in 2050...)
By any chance is the inclusion of "Stardust" a reference to the actual libertarian politician, Starchild?
https://www.kalw.org/show/crosscurrents/2016-11-01/starchild-star-of-the-san-francisco-libertarian-party
Not consciously, though "Stardust" must have ended up filed in my brain under "example hippie name" somehow.
Wait, Stardust is not from Ziggy Stardust?
> he predicted corona
> he then offered a 1m future on bitcoin
> wtf
I also was fairly early on corona and big into bitcoin; I think he's just bearish on the current civilization. I cant speak for why Id believe that bitcoin offer was a good idea, but for a model of bearish on civilization takes, imagine a dying man with several organ failures and several airborne illnesses and cancers, you don't know how he's going to die but the systems maintaining the status quo seem corrupted and destroyed.
I don't follow the news like I used to, but maybe something spooked him hard and when ask "will the dying man who just vomited blood die soon" he said yes.
Two big bets failed in 2 predictable ways, wish you could bet on those bets at the time
This article has two different people setting their money on fire to either actually (or subsequently rationalize as) promote awareness, Balaji's 1m about hyperinflation and Isaac's 4k about manifold. Balaji's 1m seems to have gotten him some press but little else, while Isaac's 4k got him some press and many manifold policy changes which are purportedly exactly what he wanted to begin with.
By that comparison I think Isaac did pretty well
> he predicted corona
Well he gave a good estimation on what would happen if corona was to be a deadly pandemic, all of which was pretty easy to predict as far as I can see. Some of it was happening outside the US as he predicted it. Others were standard procedure.
Yes, "predicting" the logical consequences of an event is very different from predicting the occurrence of an event.
Yeah, I don't follow him but I feel like I've heard forever that he nailed COVID early. Is this the best evidence of that? Him saying "what if this happens?" I agree it's better than the condescending articles saying it's racist to worry about coronavirus, and it's certainly more than I cared on Feb 1, 2020, but it's not exactly a bold prediction.
Yeah IDK it doesn't seem like that wild a prediction. At the time I was sure it would spread through the US, I just didn't think the impact would be that serious, it would take longer to get going, but then also it would be over in a few months.
I did think there would be big short term economic consequences, and sold everything (that was perfect).
But as soon as there were outbreaks in Italy/Spain/a few random cases in US it seemed the cat was out of the bag. And that was right in the late JAN - early FEB window.
Fuck I took a trip to the Caribbean in mid JAN and was the tiniest bit worried it would need to be cancelled. By early FEB it was clear there was no containment.
re: the likelihood of the US govt being late on a payment, note that there is a betting market that I believe has $5-10bn bet on it, which is 1yr credit default swaps on the US govt. If a default is declared, the person betting on a default gets about 40% of the notional bet, just because there happens to be a $60 US Treasury bond (because it was issued when interest rates were a lot lower).
Right now that price of that is about 170 bps, so the implied probability of there being a declared default under this contract is about .017 / .4 = about 4%
But also note that there's likely (the contract isn't clear) a 3 business day grace period before a default is declared, and there's also the likelihood that a committee made up of mostly US banks won't want to declare an event of default if they get a call from Treasury saying they'd prefer not to see that. So e.g. if you think that there's a 75% chance that a delayed payment either is cured within 3 days, *or* for whatever reason the committee doesn't declare a default, then this is consistent with a ~15% chance of a late payment.
(btw the normal objection to "why would anyone bet on US govt default because there will be noone left to pay them if the US govt is bankrupt" I mostly don't think applies in the case of what everyone agrees is very unlikely to be a permanent default but rather "just" a delay)
The markets on timeline of debt ceiling resolution and probability of default aren’t consistent. Consensus estimate for the X date put it prior to June 15 quarterly tax receipts--so to have only 80% chance of resolution by July 1 but 6% chance of default implies a 70% chance that the X date is actually into July (yes there could be a more subtle joint distribution of the two but still strikes me as off)
"And at the time he made the bet, he didn’t really sound like someone trying to communicate that he only thought there was a 10% risk of a near-term crisis:"
A 10% chance of a severe crisis is not good odds at all. You should definitely be worrying about a severe crisis if there's only a 90% chance of it not happening.
This is true, but if you are trying to communicate "the chance of crisis is low enough that it probably won't happen, but high enough that we should be very worried" then it's very important to communicate that clearly up front and differentiate it from the claim "the crisis will probably happen," for exactly the reason we're discussing now: If you don't, then when the crisis doesn't happen, you look like you were crying wolf and lose credibility.
Balaji did attempt to communicate this in that 4/28 tweet that Scott embedded, but not in any of his earlier communications.
Oh, I agree with you there. I just take issue with Scott's apparent attitude that a 10% chance is nothing to worry about.
What makes you think Scott has this attitude? From what I can see, Scott's post is criticizing Balaji for tweeting "the sky is falling" and then backpedaling after the fact to say "actually I meant there was a 10% chance of the sky falling, and since the sky falling would be really bad, that was worth worrying about" when that's not what he said originally.
This is behavior worth criticizing whether or not there was actually a 10% chance of the sky falling, and whether or not a 10% chance of the sky falling is actually worth worrying about.
Defaulting on a bond is different from "defaulting" on payment for goods and services.
Defaulting on a bond means when the bond is due the government says "we're not going to pay you the full face value". It's pretty cut and dried. This is generally disastrous for the rate the government has to offer for any future bonds it issues. If a lot of the bonds are owned by a different government with an army this can be really bad, as in "We're going to invade and take stuff in kind for repayment."
"Defaulting" on goods and services usually means "we're going to stretch out the payment schedule." This is a process of negotiations. Businesses do this stuff all the time; almost everything is "net 30" or "net 90" or something to that effect. Not paying all the bills by the end of that "net" period is bad for the business's credit rating but usually doesn't result in the business going bankrupt. This would be unusual only because the American federal government hasn't done this in a long time (probably the Civil War was the previous time). But cities do it (see New York in the 70s, or for that matter I'm pretty sure that Detroit is having problems now) and states have I think done it as well.
> If a lot of the bonds are owned by a different government with an army this can be really bad, as in "We're going to invade and take stuff in kind for repayment."
II think foreign investors would try arbitration first. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor%E2%80%93state_dispute_settlement ). The US either would have to pay damages to foreign investors (which will not play well with the local population) or violate international foreign investment treaties, which will devastate their ability to negotiate treaties in the future and might invite the retaliatory seizing of oversea assets of US companies?
I think "country X defaulted on us" makes a rather poor justification for a war. OTOH, the threat of cutting off country X from international trade and investment is probably plenty incentive to make them play nice.
(An interesting point is if an administration should be able to negotiate treaties lasting longer than their term. On one hand, any decision a government might make will affect the future to some degree. On the other hand, allowing arbitrary agreements allows the current generation of citizens to mess up things for future generations pretty hard.
For foreign investment protection agreements specifically, I think a fair compromise would be to make any administration promising such protections for new investments buy 'commie insurance' with a one-time payment. If future generations decide to nationalize that oil company, or that they want to ban gold mining in their rain forest or whatever, the brunt of the damages due would be covered by the insurance. That way, costs for decisions which turn out to be unpopular in the long run would be covered by the generation which voted for the administration making the original decision instead of by whatever generation will have to revert them down the line. I am not holding my breath with regard to anyone adopting such a policy, though.)
Well pretty much everyone tries talking first. The question is whether the parties think it will do any good.
Arbitration with who as the arbitrator? Arbitration works within a country because everyone abides by the same code of law. International commercial contracts generally specify how arbitration will work. US government bonds as far as I know don't have that.
Cutting off countries from trade *is* often war - see blockade. There is a spectrum of tactics here, and often what a tactic is called depends on the relative power of the parties involved.
"if an administration should be able to negotiate treaties lasting longer than their term". As far as I know, that's why the process for signing a treaty with the Americans is in their constitution. It's fairly involved (both the Senate and the President have to agree to it), so there's some hope that they will follow it (at least to the extent that countries abide by treaties anyway).
I don't think you'll find an insurance company (other than maybe Lloyd's) that will cover your 'commie insurance'. I'm not a lawyer but pretty much all insurance contracts disclaim 'force majeure', which covers what you're talking about. I think it's because of difficulty pricing the risk and also the difficulty in diversifying sufficiently not to be wiped out if it happens. Countries don't generally just nationalize one company, they tend to do it wholesale.
Is it possible to improve your own predictive accuracy by trying to guess the answer to “what would the average of a large number of people’s estimates of this be?” rather than “what do I estimate this to be?”?
Has anyone tried this?
I think Keynes summed that principle up.
Possibly? I’ve also tried predicting on Metaculus, and have a setting where I don’t see the community prediction on any question until I’ve predicted it myself. If my prediction turns out to be within the green stripe, I move on; if not, I start worrying that I’ve been thinking about the question and the background info all wrong (and often I immediately re-adjust to a rough average of my previous prediction and the community prediction).
Take a look at "the within-person wisdom-of-crowd effect", which is analogous to self-distillation/ensembling in ML.
> But it was still a challenge the idea
should be "to the idea" I think :)
Re: Book review contest; it doesn't look like Cities got a big boost? The currently-leading one in the linked market is The Educated Mind (unless I'm misreading).
Re brinksmanship: I dislike watching Congress and Biden playing games of "chicken" with the debt ceiling, but, at least, unlike Putin, there are no nuclear warheads involved.
( One nit, partially covered in your post: If an agreement _isn't_ reached, there are a couple of never-before-tried alternatives that might evade the debt ceiling that have been discussed this time around: the trillion dollar coin, declaring the debt ceiling law unconstitutional, and I think one or two more. I don't know if they make the overall situation better or worse... )
Behold! Please include this technique in your next silicon valley party
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/13q2bds/mice_breathing_only_11_oxygen_equivalent_to_the/?utm_source=share
Aren't oxygen bars a thing? Though I don't know if it's a fad that has passed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_bar
Is that just related to lowering their metabolism? I (think I) know severe calorie restriction (to a point) extends mice lifespans. Would an anoxic environment lower their metabolism?
I don't think that tweeting "what if this is a pandemic" on Jan 30th is especially "prescient" when The Economist had a cover story on the same day saying "Will the Wuhan virus become a pandemic? Probably.".
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/01/30/will-the-wuhan-virus-become-a-pandemic