domain:forecasting.substack.com
netstack
Texas is freedom land
27m ago
Anthropic principle?
Or related terms like the self-indicating assumption.
Grant_us_eyes
31m ago
I hate how my brain works.
Alright Motte, here's your odd question for the day;
There's a term that I've apparently forgotten, that refers to the idea that 'a single random sample from a data set is likely neither unique nor uncommon'.
I first recall hearing the term and phrase when reading about arguments for the likelihood of life on other planets and solar systems, utilizing Earth as the lynchpin of said argument.
So... does anyone have any idea as to what term I've apparently forgotten?
yofuckreddit
40m ago
My assumption is that these are all extremely low. <10%.
When was the last time a western democracy executed any meaningful deportations? These are huge percentages of people to ship back, and the propaganda machine already has been preparing bullshit about how it's impossible for 2 months (much like the wall, but I digress).
yofuckreddit
44m ago
I finally finished The Culture series, ending on The Hydrogen Sonata. @roystgnr asked to hear what I thought of it when I was done:
I heard that Banks didn't want this to be the last culture novel, but I do think it fits in a way. The focus on Subliming (definitely the most hand-waved, mystical part of the series) was arguably a great topic to wrap up on. I think he did a good job peeling back the curtain just enough, but any more books about it afterward would have been too much.
There were elements of it that felt a bit disjointed and unrealistic.
In any case, I've moved on to other books. I discussed being recommended "Normal People" from a woman I have a bit of a complicated relationship with. I discussed it in the Friday Fun thread. To be frank, I don't think it will tickle the fancy of many people here. It's a modern romance novel with a little bit of woke dashed in. Great sex scenes, and refreshing in terms of how it treated an intense relationship. I haven't read a romance in many years. Many commit the sin making what's supposed to be a great love just... not very good. I much prefer the type of book that reminds me of what it felt like the few times it's happened.
I've also started on Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion. The title is hilariously "standard" for a history book, but I'm very into it so far. At one time as a child, I had an abject fascination with the California gold rush after getting a basic book about it from my San Franciscan cousins. Anyone living in the Bay Area probably considers it played out, but for a guy in the Southeast, it was exciting stuff. Reading about it with the level of fidelity a book like this provides (just in the first 25 superdense pages) is a treat. I'll wait to recommend it, but so far, it's been good.
hanikrummihundursvin
46m ago
No, you care about race because you made a choice to care about race.
Race correlates with behavior. This is a fact. You can ignore it and make bad decisions or take it into account and make better ones.
And again, how has that been working out for them? and how has it been working out for those institutions?
They've been in charge for the last 60 years and have been solidifying an underclass to secure their existence into the future... Pretty good, I would say. Most of them have ballooned in size, with the people in charge becoming richer and more powerful. At the same time they have increased their influence. Not just in America but globally.
Mine is not the "cucked liberalism" of 30 years ago, mine is the cucked liberalism of 200 years ago.
Your anti-race position says otherwise. There is no reason for a classical liberal to hold any reservations about race as a relevant metric. Which is why actual classical liberals who had to make decisions took it into account.
Define black, define poor, define violent.
Is this a joke?
I understand that you will likely disagree but i would contend that a reduction in social status is a small price to pay for clean streets and relative peace.
I don't understand your point. For instance, Jacksonville has a very high violent crime rate. Not a surprise given its sizeable black population. Compared to San Francisco, with a relatively small black population, but a big Asian population, it has a comparatively and relatively low violent crime rate. I don't understand why you are comparing these cities as if I would like one over another. There are areas in both that are safe and not safe. The most predictive variable when looking at crime is how black the city is.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
47m ago
Sure, but that just belabors the point — you think those Biblical "complaints" are a valid historical account, but plenty of people question the historical accuracy of, well, practically every part of the Bible, and those who argue the other side would dismiss these stories of Carthaginian infant sacrifice as being just as much false anti-Carthaginian libel as the Roman ones. So again, how do you decide? Here, the archeology helps, but without that, is it really just "pick a side and agree with their claims" like @hydroacetylene says?
DirtyWaterHotDog
50m ago
Nate did nothing wrong. He is in the profession of polling, and must therefore believe that polls are directionally correct with some margin for error. He's then spent this entire life creating better priors, correlational models and ensembles to reduce that 'margin for error'.
A doctor doesn't question if germs exist. A mechanical engineer doesn't question Newton's laws. Similarly, Nate is incapable of questioning if polls contain any signal what-so-ever. Modern polling is in it's 2008 CDOs phase. You can't take 100 bad loans and roll them up into a AAA financial vehicle by citing diversification. Similarly, you can't ensemble broken polling data into any information of value.
Polls are useless for 2 reasons:
- When the margins are narrow (2020, 2024), polls are too noisy to get anything of value
- When the margins are large (2008, 1996), no one needs polls. The vibes are obvious
In a year with a wild card ex-president, incumbent president withdrawing, a VP who has never fought a competitive race, an assassination attempt, a fresh war in Israel, a lumbering war in Ukraine and a technically strong economy with terrible optics (lingering inflation from 2020-2021) ............ all your priors go into the dumps.
Even when polling does work (not often), it assumes a 'normal' year. In a "normal" setup, 3 things would have gone differently:
- No assassination attempt (at least not an unsuccessful one)
- Biden never runs and Dems choose candidate in open primary. Likely choosing a Middle-America candidate with better speaking chops than Kamala.
- 7th October didn't happen. (splintered the Dems. The actual war & muslim votes don't matter. But white progressives do, and they broke rank)
If these 3 hadn't happened, Trump would've still won. But, the Dem candidate could totally have flipped AZ, NV, Wisc & Mi. Still 2 short and PA was going Trump either way. However, in this world, Nate's predictions would have been a good proxy for the real results.
Alas, that never came to be.
Nate's 2023 victory dance is revealing. [1]
You may have heard the phrase the plural of anecdote is not data. It turns out that this is a misquote. The original aphorism, by the political scientist Ray Wolfinger, was just the opposite: The plural of anecdote is data.
Wolfinger’s formulation makes sense: Data does not have a virgin birth. It comes to us from somewhere. Someone set up a procedure to collect and record it. Sometimes this person is a scientist, but she also could be a journalist. -Nate Silver.
In writing this paragraph, Nate Silver fails to understand why the quote : "The plural of anecdote is not data" took off, and dooms his predictions for good.
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-the-fox-knows/
I'll leave you with my favorite stats quotes:
Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital -Aaron Levenstein
There are 3 kind of lies : Lies, Damn lies and Statistics - Mark Twain (maybe)
The plural of anecdote is not data - Not Ray Wolfinger
yofuckreddit
53m ago
"Normal People" by Sally Rooney
DiscourseMagnus
56m ago
It obviously isn't why leftists are offended, but I do think it's why pro-lifers aren't jumping up to defend him. As for the leftists' offense - that's obviously the intent; it's an act of trolling, but more specifically, it's playacting as the cartoon villain that abortionists want. It's the equivalent of "celebrating" a breakthrough against affirmative action by cackling evilly and going "now we can finally keep the black man down forever".
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Yes. Subsistence farming hung on in America surprisingly late; LBJ famously grew up on a subsistence farm in the Texas hill country- some of the worst grain growing land of its climate anywhere. And of course the Deep South had lots of the population living as subsistence farmers until Jim Crow- my great-grandfather recounted them as a major presence after WWII.
I think it’s accurate to call into question how wealthy it’s possible to be and stay a subsistence farmer- Little House on the Prairie is about a family’s transition to commercial production to take advantage of greater access to markets before it becomes a romance novel, but it’s quite clear that the Ingallses are farming because the alternative to growing enough food is not eating in the early books, and later on after buying a mechanical reaper they eagerly take advantage of markets.
Felagund
1hr ago
I'm inclined to believe the Carthaginian infant sacrifice stories, as we see it complained about in the bible, and Tyre and Sidon etc. were right by Israel.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
A big problem is how you measure intelligence.
Any human can count the number of r's in strawberry but most would be hard-pressed to translate Chinese to English or do anything at all in python or other programming languages. Intelligence is multi-domain, possibly the most complicated thing we can try to measure.
Even within domains, how do you rate intelligence? Sometimes it would be worth spending 10x more to get a marginally better programming AI because 'marginally better' is like a 0 to 1 increase in that it provides genuinely useful input that a human can use to get a good answer and speed up their work.
A new brutally hard question set dropped a few days ago. I have no idea what any of this gibberish means, it's well beyond me.
https://epochai.org/frontiermath
The two toned-down o1 models get 1%, along with GPT-4. Claude 3.5 and Gemini Pro get 2%. Does it follow that Claude 3.5 new is smarter than I am since I would get 0 and that therefore AGI has been achieved? Probably not, Sonnet 3.5 makes all kinds of order of magnitude mistakes that I can eyeball as wrong. But it is pretty damn smart and noticeably smarter than its older incarnation, it has certain new tendencies in writing that qualitatively improve it.
GPT-2 would get 0 on nearly all benchmarks because it just babbles. GPT-3 would also get 0 because it just babbles (albeit more interestingly), remember these are the base models that might just answer your question with more questions. GPT-3.5 was the inflection point where AI became useful for a bunch of things, for consumer use. The old GPT-4 (as of March 2023) opened up coding. Opus 3 was thought to be the first really creative writer, it can maintain an engaging twitter persona. Sonnet 3.5 is on a whole new level in coding, opening up Cursor. The newest Sonnet, o1 and Gemini can start to barely grapple with these advanced mathematical questions.
From the perspective of 'can it answer Frontier Math', there have been no advances in AI before the last 6 months or so. Intelligence is so complex, what looks like a slowdown in one domain can just be the start of something new in another domain.
AvocadoPanic
1hr ago
Like Springtime for Hitler?
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1hr ago
If the audience is composed of midwits does it matter, and also, many people really do unironically like her--just not enough to win an election. No one is expecting her to lecture about physics.
Nick did tweet it multiple times, and it's a type of trolling where it's hard to know if it's trolling or not, because it's credibly something he could mean. It could mean a return to the patriarchy. Or as mentioned above a sexual joke. Or just for lolz. All this does is play into the hand of the opposing side's worst possible framing, yet for memetic value it wins.
This is why Nick is so smart. He waited until after the election, knowing nothing could be done; making one's own team look bad with sexism is not a concern anymore. He was originally skeptical of Trump and hated Vance, so he's hedging his bets, and then after Trump wins, instead of looking dumb or a traitor by not voting for him, he one-ups everyone else by being MORE extreme so his supporters forget that he didn't vote for Trump. had Trump lost he could have just blamed Trump being a Zionist shill. So both bases covered.
Lewis2
1hr ago
Can you clarify what group you mean when you talk about American subsistence farmers? Where most of my ancestors came from in Europe, the average peasant farm was IIRC around 3 acres, and they paid high taxes to the local lord and the various higher levels of government. When they came to America, the smallest farm any of them had was either 40 or 80 acres, plus they had a vastly lower tax bill. Even though they were initially hard up, I don’t think it would be accurate to call any of them subsistence farmers after the first few years.
Were there actually long-term subsistence farmers out further south and west, where the land is less fertile?
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1hr ago
Stock market hits record high
It's easy to hit a record high when the last prior high was the day of the election. I believe though that Trump will make the world safer by acting as a deterrent by being perceived as less of a pushover compared to the Democrats. Trump introduces uncertainty into the diplomatic calculus. With Harris you know what you will get; less so with Trump.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1hr ago
Celeb endorsements also are about building a coalition of supporters. Winning is secondary. Even if young people are unreliable voters or cannot vote, they still will grow up and enter society and affect it in many ways.
ThenElection
1hr ago
Howard is a solid guess. Throw in a book deal, lucrative speaking engagements with audiences who don't really care what she has to say, maybe some corporate board. She'll be well taken care of. Not for any particular affection anyone has toward her, but to signify to others that they'll be well taken care of.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1hr ago
It's like saying that word processor spreadsheets can replace doing it by hand. It does not solve the spreadsheet problem, only makes it more efficient. Maybe the problem is me, but I am not seeing a big difference. I think the closest thing to truly transformational technology with direct, tangible real-world applications is printed buildings ( those cheap amazon.com homes that can be erected quickly), but this is not directly AI.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
True, on reflection there's a lot of flexibility with these things. The US used to only focus on the Americas as its sphere of uncontested influence - that changed into a global crusade.
China used to be principally concerned with mainland Asia and its immediate neighbours, acting in Korea, Vietnam and India. But even in the Maoist era they had a global foreign policy, propping up Albania against the USSR. Today they're still most interested in immediate neighbours but they do have global interests in resources, investments, infrastructure and so on. Australia is competing to out-influence China in the Solomon islands, well beyond the Nine Dash Line.
They're a big power and I think they have big ambitions. They're feeling the same seductive rush of power that saw America head out into the world all those years ago.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2hr ago
The big problem with medicine has always been testing. Human trials will always be expensive and time consuming
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
2hr ago
The TSLA call options so expensive though. I like the 2x leveraged TSLA ETF instead. if TSLA doubles the ETF in theory will gain 3.5-4x, maybe offset decay by selling a long-dated ATM put + call
TequilaMockingbird
2hr ago
But surely corroboration from across the mediterranean should be treated as evidence?
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