If anyone would have a way of knowing, that kind of methodology would have made us mega-rich long ago by investing, shorting etc.
Sort of if you don’t see millions of dollars suddenly going to effective altruism and MIRI then LW is probably not that much better at figuring it out as anyone else :)
That’s not really true. You need to make correct predictions many times on many different things to get significant returns from your initial seed investment. There are also a lot of details like finding someone to take your short, and getting it at just the right time before the market crashes.
The big surprise has been the support for the unabashedly elitist “super-forecaster” hypothesis. The top 2% of forecasters in Year 1 showed that there is more than luck at play. If it were just luck, the “supers” would regress to the mean: yesterday’s champs would be today’s chumps. But they actually got better. When we randomly assigned “supers” into elite teams, they blew the lid off IARPA’s performance goals. They beat the unweighted average (wisdom-of-overall-crowd) by 65%; beat the best algorithms of four competitor institutions by 35-60%; and beat two prediction markets by 20-35%.
There is also this guy. I remember him from the book Automate This, that he was supposedly able to predict exactly how Iran would act back when they were developing nuclear weapons. His method, as best I understand it, is to simply list everyone involved that has influence, and predict they will do exactly what benefits them individually the most.
You need to make correct predictions many times on many different things to get significant returns from your initial seed investment.
That is not true and entirely depends on what your investment is. For example, in late 2012 in a move that was heavily telegraphed yen dropped from about 80 yen/dollar to about 100 yen/dollar. That’s a 20% return over a few months and given that FX trades are heavily leveraged (typically at 50:1 or so) you could have made multiples of your initial investment.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the study that was performed, but from the articles it seems that this study has only been going on for 3 years now? In which case, any one sitting at the top of the heap is still pretty likely to have gotten there largely through luck. With a large sample size it’s entirely possible for at least a couple of people to ‘beat the odds’ and get a number of questions correct again and again, without necessarily being any better than those who did poorly.
Even with a fairly significant number of questions being asked and rated, it does not appear to be a long enough study to start suggesting those at the top have better skills as opposed to better luck.
They took the best of one year, and the next year everyone in that group still did very good. They didn’t regress to the mean. And the reported effect size seems very large.
This is too strong given that predictions have probability estimates associated with them, and some predictions are better than others. For example, a prediction of a 1% chance of a Greek civil war is better than predicting a 50% chance of one.
My wild uninformed guess is that the “troika” institutions will accept some property of the Greek state in return for writing off a big part of the debt. The Greek state has things to sell, like its majority stake in Greece’s biggest electric power company, and this would help the lenders get something for those bad debts in order to save face towards their voters.
I don’t know how strong is the sense of nationalism in Greece, but I suspect if it is even moderate-strong, there will be a lot of resistance to that. Selling state assets to foreigners, especially if it is an asset that provides an important service to locals, especially if it is “gunpoint sale”, could really rub people’s nationalistic sentiments the wrong way.
If anyone would have a way of knowing, that kind of methodology would have made us mega-rich long ago by investing, shorting etc.
Sort of if you don’t see millions of dollars suddenly going to effective altruism and MIRI then LW is probably not that much better at figuring it out as anyone else :)
That’s not really true. You need to make correct predictions many times on many different things to get significant returns from your initial seed investment. There are also a lot of details like finding someone to take your short, and getting it at just the right time before the market crashes.
There also is such a methodology to make really good predictions. Train a bunch of people through practice to be good at forecasting the future and learn from their mistakes, and take the top performers from that group: http://www.economist.com/news/21589145-how-sort-best-rest-whos-good-forecasts
They even beat CIA analysts: http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so-you-think-youre-smarter-than-a-cia-agent
There is also this guy. I remember him from the book Automate This, that he was supposedly able to predict exactly how Iran would act back when they were developing nuclear weapons. His method, as best I understand it, is to simply list everyone involved that has influence, and predict they will do exactly what benefits them individually the most.
That is not true and entirely depends on what your investment is. For example, in late 2012 in a move that was heavily telegraphed yen dropped from about 80 yen/dollar to about 100 yen/dollar. That’s a 20% return over a few months and given that FX trades are heavily leveraged (typically at 50:1 or so) you could have made multiples of your initial investment.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the study that was performed, but from the articles it seems that this study has only been going on for 3 years now? In which case, any one sitting at the top of the heap is still pretty likely to have gotten there largely through luck. With a large sample size it’s entirely possible for at least a couple of people to ‘beat the odds’ and get a number of questions correct again and again, without necessarily being any better than those who did poorly.
Even with a fairly significant number of questions being asked and rated, it does not appear to be a long enough study to start suggesting those at the top have better skills as opposed to better luck.
They took the best of one year, and the next year everyone in that group still did very good. They didn’t regress to the mean. And the reported effect size seems very large.
I’ve read half of his book. He details (sorta) his algorithm (which is a specific algorithm, he doesn’t do that by his own intuition).
This is too strong given that predictions have probability estimates associated with them, and some predictions are better than others. For example, a prediction of a 1% chance of a Greek civil war is better than predicting a 50% chance of one.
My wild uninformed guess is that the “troika” institutions will accept some property of the Greek state in return for writing off a big part of the debt. The Greek state has things to sell, like its majority stake in Greece’s biggest electric power company, and this would help the lenders get something for those bad debts in order to save face towards their voters.
I don’t know how strong is the sense of nationalism in Greece, but I suspect if it is even moderate-strong, there will be a lot of resistance to that. Selling state assets to foreigners, especially if it is an asset that provides an important service to locals, especially if it is “gunpoint sale”, could really rub people’s nationalistic sentiments the wrong way.