NunoSempere
No bio...
User ID: 1101
NunoSempere
7d ago
The DRC had 2,662 cases over the past week, 25 of them fatal. Of cases this year, 58% occurred in children younger than 15,
From: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/mpox/mpox-escalates-africa-officials-launch-response-plan
NunoSempere
7d ago
Ehhh...
It's in some spectrum between Ebola and smallpox. Largest than the largest Ebola outbreak, much smaller than smallpox.
NunoSempere
7d ago
Geopolitical Alpha by Marko Papic
Thanks!
NunoSempere
8d ago
Yes, the overwhelmingly most likely case is as a test.
Monkeypox is currently mostly an STD, especially between men, right?
Nope, this was the previous strain. This one seems to be spread by close contact as well, e.g., in families, corpses, etc.
Exporting technological and social innovation is another factor I care about. E.g., the Germans experimented with tanks in the Spanish civil war, and this affected the next war; similarly, I'm thinking about how much to care about Ukranian advances, or about conflicts in Africa developing strategies that are then exported to other conflicts.
NunoSempere
8d ago
Do people have any thoughts, questions on forecasting stuff?
Some things I'd love to have some back and forths about:
- How to model the chance that North Korea will detonate a nuclear bomb by end of year?
- Chance that monkeypox will spread to the West? Distribution of expected deaths?
- How to model the spread of conflict? How to model which states matter in the world?
- What will happen with Bangladesh?
- Some states are three families in a trenchcoat. What's up with that? Particularly in the case of Pakistan: it's a nuclear state, but it also just has a lot of difficulty projecting power into rural areas...
NunoSempere
26d ago
Very neat. But, might you give a worked example of how to use an equivalent measure to solve Allais' Paradox?
NunoSempere
1mo ago
I'm on Twitter, @NunoSempere!
I'm very unsure about what would rock your boat, here are three clusters:
- @TylerAlterman, @visakanv, @KeturahAbigail, @shagbark_hick
- @alexandrosM, @zackmdavis, @EgeErdil2, @Domahhhh
- @dick_nickson, @rsalame7926, @wagieeacc, @real_lord_miles
NunoSempere
1mo ago
Thanks! I mean, there is definitely a problem of talking too much, but talk does allow people to coordinate better as well.
NunoSempere
1mo ago
Congrats! I'm intrigued. Where are you from originally? Whats' your startup about? Do you have funding?
NunoSempere
1mo ago
it would be illegal to charge women more than men, but not the reverse
This is not clear to me. My sense is that you could construct a scheme where you can do this. For instance, by a) not using corporate structures, b) using your own money supply, which you mint and control. And worse comes to worse, c) using a different jurisdiction.
...but then you could still be charged with something like racketeering or creating some sort of conspiracy? I don't know.
NunoSempere
3mo ago
I agree that $100k is expensive compared to other things in daily life, but... even if you're earning $30k/year, three years worth of wages for a second kid seems in the range of reasonable? It seems like less than what you would spend on a kid over a lifetime, for some people it adds a huge amount of meaning to life, etc.
As an aside, it's not distributed over 20 years, which does make it much more difficult. I wonder if you're a stable couple, whether a bank would give you a loan for this, or whether IVF clinics have payment plans? Even if not, this seems like the kind of thing some people could ask friends and family to borrow to do.
Like, in general $100k is a lot, but it seems like it can correspond to the strength of desire and will to have a kid.
That said, I'm viewing this from an odd, detached angle as a pretty young guy, so I'm probably missing a lot of the complexity a couple faces when making that decision for real; sorry.
NunoSempere
3mo ago
Surrogacy would solve problems related to giving birth, but would add additional complications, and it's also expensive. Still, maybe worth thinking about.
I have no horse in this race, but: as a small case study, the Effective Altruism forum has been impoverished over the last few years by not being lenient with valuable contributors when they had a bad day.
In a few cases, I later learnt that some longstanding user had a mental health breakdown/psychotic break/bipolar something or other. To some extent this is an arbitrary category, and you can interpret going outside normality through the lens of mental health, or through the lens of "this person chose to behave inappropriately". Still, my sense is that leniency would have been a better move when people go off the rails.
In particular, the best move seems to me a combination of:
- In the short term, when a valued member is behaving uncharacteristically badly, stop them from posting
- Followup a week or a few weeks later to see how the person is doing
Two factors here are:
- There is going to be some overlap in that people with propensity for some mental health disorders might be more creative, better able to see things from weird angles, better able to make conceptual connections.
- In a longstanding online community, people grow to care about others. If a friend goes of the rails, there is the question of how to stop them from causing harm to others, but there is also the question of how to help them be ok, and the second one can just dominate sometimes.
NunoSempere
4mo ago
Here is a link to coverage of this topic on Linux Weekly News: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/970824/8002d283c35edf86/
Incidentally one of the few publications I pay for subscribing, because coverage is generally thoughtful and informative
NunoSempere
4mo ago
Our biographies sound eerily similar, I also took the IB, gave up on college, built a career partly out of programming. I tried harder in highschool though, and IT isn't quite what I do.
NunoSempere
4mo ago
Cheers, backed it up here: https://git.nunosempere.com/NunoSempere/fussy-suitor/src/branch/master/code.R
I'm not sure if there is a way to publish pseudonymously on Github. You could create a separate account (e.g., on Codeberg or on Gitlab) though
NunoSempere
4mo ago
Augur had a seemingly solid system
This is not what I recall. Invalid markets resolved to 50/50, so you had users, chiefly someone who went by the moniker of Poyo, create markets that appeared to be legit but e.g., had the wrong date, so that people would bet & he'd win money when they resolved 50/50
NunoSempere
4mo ago
Thanks a lot for this. Do you have a pointer to your code, or could you put it up on Github/Codeberg?
NunoSempere
4mo ago
The last one is: I agree that sometimes predictions influence what happens. A few cases people have studied is alarmist Ebola predictions making Ebola spread less because people invested more early on, and optimistic predictions about Hillary Clinton leading to lower turnout.
You can solve these problems in various ways. For the Ebola one, instead of giving one probability, you could give a probability for every "level of effort" to prevent it early on. For the Hillary Clinton one, you could find the fixed point, the probability which takes into account that it lowers turnout a little bit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_point_(mathematics)).
NunoSempere
4mo ago
Do people trust that whatever entity is reporting the final results is doing so accurately
- Scoring rules exist
- Deceivers outcompete nondeceivers
- But yeah, you can't use a prediction marketplace to decide on something that's more valuable than the value of the whole prediction marketplace. That's one of the issues with Robin Hanson's futarchy.
doubt we'll ever reach 99.9% confidence in prediction markets
I mean, in practice you don't need 99.9, you need better than alternatives in at least some cases.
NunoSempere
4mo ago
Thanks for the comment. Some points:
actual large stakes betting
To quantify this, there are some markets in which you can bet >100k, particularly around US elections. Kalshi is also trying to change this in the US. But yeah.
actual financial, governmental and business markets
Different niche, though. One important difference is that in normal markets "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". Not so in prediction markets/forecasting questions: there is a definite date.
how would one extract any value from it
Not all goods are rival, not all games are zero sum. E.g., people can and do get value from weather forecasting.
alter the very things it is trying to predict
Sure. You do have fixed point problems. You can also make predictions conditional on a level of investment. It's still a consideration, though.
NunoSempere
6mo ago
hard-to-evaluate work at any large organization... learn to play the game
You can also be on the lookout for different games to play.
You seem to think it would be better if powerful EAs spent more time responding to comments on EA forum
I think this is too much of a simplification. I am making the argument that EA is structured such that leaders don't really aggregate the knowledge of their followers.
Can you give an example of any multi-billion dollar movement or organization that displays "blistering, white-hot competence"?
Some which could come to mind: Catholic Church in Spain 1910 to early 2000s, Apple, Amazon, SpaceX, Manhattan project, Israeli nuclear weapons project, Peter Thiel's general machinations, Linus Torvald's stewardship of the Linux project, competent Hollywood directors, Marcus Aurelius, Bismark's unification of Germany and his web of alliances, Chicago school, MIT's JPAL (endowment size uncertain though), the Jesuits, the World Central Kitchen.
provided concrete evidence that interventions are less effective than claimed
I discussed a previous one on the Motte here, here is a more recent one: CEA spends ~$1-2M/year to host the equivalent of a medium subreddit, or a forum with probably less discussion than The Motte itself.
offered concrete alternatives to this target audience.
Here are some blue-sky alternatives, Auftragstaktik is one particular thing I'd want to see more of.
NunoSempere
6mo ago
For future reference, to replicate something like the above footnotes, write in normal markdown, and then compile to html with discount markdown, and then pasting the html into the Motte. There is also pandoc, which might have bindings The Motte itself could use.
The markdown syntax for footnotes is:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit[^footnote], sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
[^footnote]: content of the footnote.
Text continues as normal, but footnotes will show up at the bottom. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
I've now figured out how to copy over the footnotes. Still, I'd been too lazy for half an hour of editing for the Motte. I'm torn; I see the point of having a costly signal, but at the same time, the signal would have been too costly for me. I guess in some sense I might be some marginal case, so it's for the Motte to decide. At the same time my sense is that half an hour to show the Motte something you are excited about is too high a bar.
Write a million words.
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