Leaves the euro which causes an economic collapse which causes a political collapse and the emergence of a new government which makes nice with Germany and gets lots of money from the EU. (25% likely)
Gets a big loan from Russia that prevents an economic collapse (20% likely)
Comes to an agreement that locks in its bad but not horrible economic situation for another decade. (35% likely)
Gets a big loan from Russia that prevents an economic collapse (20% likely)
I’ll give 10:1 odds against this happening. Russia has its own economic problems now with the drop in the price of oil and Ukrainian conflict, and other issues… China might be more likely, though IMO both Russia and China are a scare ploy by the Greeks.
A somewhat likely possibility is: Greece leaves the EU, triggering an economic collapse, possibly followed by a political collapse. Then spends many, many years trying to sort out itself and wishing it had stayed.
(Possibly stupid) off-topic question: Doesn’t the colon notation p:q stand for p/q, so odds of 10⁄1 would contradict the unitary assumption about our universe, or is this just a hyperbole?
While the words “odds” and “probability” are often used interchangeably in everyday speech, they are different scales. The definition of odds is odds=p/(1-p). To go from odds to probabilities, you just reverse that so that p = odds/(1+odds)
While probabilities are bounded by zero and 1, odds are bounded by zero and positive infinity. Odds of 10 would be a perfectly legitimate way to express a probability of 10/(10+1) = 0.909
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.
I was thinking of visiting the Greek islands this September. Is this looking unwise? I would have booked already if not for the crisis. I’ve no problem taking enough cash with me for the whole trip, but what will the state of the infrastructure and public order be in two months?
I wouldn’t be too worried. Look up Argentine’s defaults, it was hard for locals with bank accounts frozen but not so difficult otherwise. People will not go Mad Max on the streets although the chance of muggings will definitely increase. As for infrastructure, if you plan a typical beach holiday and drink bottled water you probably don’t really need a lot of it. You need a way to get around and I bet a lot of unemployed guys with cars will operate unlicenced taxis for that, just don’t get mugged by them. Ideally, it would be best to travel as a group of 2-3 bigger male friends, you should be safe that way.
I was thinking of visiting the Greek islands this September. Is this looking unwise?
Public order will probably be fine, but the infrastructure might get problematic. Fuel could get scarce, hotels / shops / boat lines might go out of business, etc. If you spend your time in one place, it will be easier, but if you intend to move around a lot, there might be issues.
The most important fork is whether Greece will stay in the Euro zone (we’re not talking about EU, but about the zone of the shared currency, the euro) or will leave it and go back to drachmas.
Keep in mind that leaving euro and introducing drachmas is not a single action, but a process that takes at least a few months. Arguably, Greece has already started on this way.
I am pretty sure we will see Greek government IOUs (scrip) in circulation soon.
The Tsipras government doesn’t look to be either willing or able to come to an agreement with the Troika. The interesting question is whether it will be kicked out of power before the conversion to drachmas becomes irreversible (in the medium term). Keep in mind that there are valid economic reasons for Greece to prefer having its own currency.
What’s next for Greece and the rest of EU? What are your predictions?
Leaves the euro which causes an economic collapse which causes a political collapse and the emergence of a new government which makes nice with Germany and gets lots of money from the EU. (25% likely)
Gets a big loan from Russia that prevents an economic collapse (20% likely)
Comes to an agreement that locks in its bad but not horrible economic situation for another decade. (35% likely)
I’ll give 10:1 odds against this happening. Russia has its own economic problems now with the drop in the price of oil and Ukrainian conflict, and other issues… China might be more likely, though IMO both Russia and China are a scare ploy by the Greeks.
A somewhat likely possibility is: Greece leaves the EU, triggering an economic collapse, possibly followed by a political collapse. Then spends many, many years trying to sort out itself and wishing it had stayed.
For Greece to leave the EU, as opposed to just the Euro, it would really have to anger the other members.
(Possibly stupid) off-topic question: Doesn’t the colon notation p:q stand for p/q, so odds of 10⁄1 would contradict the unitary assumption about our universe, or is this just a hyperbole?
While the words “odds” and “probability” are often used interchangeably in everyday speech, they are different scales. The definition of odds is odds=p/(1-p). To go from odds to probabilities, you just reverse that so that p = odds/(1+odds)
While probabilities are bounded by zero and 1, odds are bounded by zero and positive infinity. Odds of 10 would be a perfectly legitimate way to express a probability of 10/(10+1) = 0.909
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.
Greece fiats debt, kicked out of EU, economic problems not as severe as expected. Other small nations are emboldened to cancel their debts.
I was thinking of visiting the Greek islands this September. Is this looking unwise? I would have booked already if not for the crisis. I’ve no problem taking enough cash with me for the whole trip, but what will the state of the infrastructure and public order be in two months?
I wouldn’t be too worried. Look up Argentine’s defaults, it was hard for locals with bank accounts frozen but not so difficult otherwise. People will not go Mad Max on the streets although the chance of muggings will definitely increase. As for infrastructure, if you plan a typical beach holiday and drink bottled water you probably don’t really need a lot of it. You need a way to get around and I bet a lot of unemployed guys with cars will operate unlicenced taxis for that, just don’t get mugged by them. Ideally, it would be best to travel as a group of 2-3 bigger male friends, you should be safe that way.
Public order will probably be fine, but the infrastructure might get problematic. Fuel could get scarce, hotels / shops / boat lines might go out of business, etc. If you spend your time in one place, it will be easier, but if you intend to move around a lot, there might be issues.
The most important fork is whether Greece will stay in the Euro zone (we’re not talking about EU, but about the zone of the shared currency, the euro) or will leave it and go back to drachmas.
Keep in mind that leaving euro and introducing drachmas is not a single action, but a process that takes at least a few months. Arguably, Greece has already started on this way.
I am pretty sure we will see Greek government IOUs (scrip) in circulation soon.
The Tsipras government doesn’t look to be either willing or able to come to an agreement with the Troika. The interesting question is whether it will be kicked out of power before the conversion to drachmas becomes irreversible (in the medium term). Keep in mind that there are valid economic reasons for Greece to prefer having its own currency.