site banner
NunoSempere  2yr ago (forecasting.substack.com)   Edited 2yr ago   1359 thread views

Forecasting Newsletter August 2022

forecasting.substack.com

Highlights

I'd prefer comments or questions here on account of themotte.org site being pretty young. Long live The Motte!

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I regret to say, my only view on the PredictIt situation is that they couldn't have been very good forecasters if they didn't see that one coming 😀

$25k tournament by Richard Hanania on Manifold Markets.

A lot of stuff in the 30-60% range which means few have any idea. I think predicting political stuff is hopeless . I have yet to see anyone who can do it well

A lot of stuff in the 30-60% range which means few have any idea

the "steelman" here is that it's evidence of some form that either it's up to chance or it's hard to predict.

They'll also claim that a 30% and a 70% really are different, and that's useful

afaict forecasting sucks because the reasons for believing things are complicated, and those reasons and understanding the complexities involved is much more worthwhile than trading for numbers. A SSC post >> a forecast! Forecasters aren't gonna succeed at guessing 'will the big image generation models be based on diffusion models or VAE or GAN' (and will fail much worse at 'what architecture will image generation models be using in 5 years' five years ago, or even at caring about image generation) because ... well, the people working on it didn't know either. Essentially making good predictions is as hard as understanding the thing being predicted, so sticking a layer of 'vote for number' on top of it gets you essentially nothing versus 'talking to smart people or people involved' or 'reading and writing papers' or 'doing research'

which means few have any idea

...which means that questions were selected for being uncertaint

I have yet to see anyone who can do it well

maybe you're not hanging out in the right places

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats