Okay, so my three core rationality tools are the intellectual turing test, making bets, and fermi estimates / fermi modelling (and also something like ‘get curious’ but I’ve not made my thinking there totally explicit yet).
Let’s go with making bets (aka ‘the tool that helps you update on evidence’):
Make more multi-year bets
Similarly, outline the core assumptions that my long term plans are based on, and then offer people public bets on them
This feels similar to me to Elon Musk’s payment plan at Tesla, where he gets paid only if he hits ambitious targets
Find some way to massively reduce the overhead cost of making bets—I’ve made dozens of bets where I forgot to follow up
Make a bet per day
Post my odds on things regularly (daily), and design an interface where people can claim bets against me
Find some low-effort way to then get the important stats about my calibration (e.g. brier score, brier score over different time periods)
I feel that many of the times I explicitly make bets, it gets in the way of doing good model sharing to find where exactly we should make a bet—or whether we can in fact just converge before making the bet (that would most test the cruxes of our disagreement).
Maybe bets should be the norm for the end of a conversation, not the beginning or middle.
e.g. “Okay, let’s set a five minute timer to figure out our odds on X, then we’ll make the bet and move on to discussing something else”
Have betting parties where people do this lots and lots of times
Have a normalised amount of money you bet (e.g. five dollars)
Another issue is that many of my bets take ages for us to agree on an operationalisation. This is the point, but maybe I would improve on some skills if I practiced making bets in a domain where the operationalisation was easy (e.g. economics, stocks, sports).
Making bets is one of those things that sounds good in principle but I haven’t gotten around to doing (sort of like this list 10 applications exercise). I feel like my time horizons are simply too short right now to keep track of multi-year bets, which seem to be all the interesting ones that people want to take. Any tips?
You can play betting games where the bets resolve instantly because you can look up the answers, e.g. trading a contract with a friend worth the base-10 logarithm of the mass of the sun, in dollars. Basically competitive Fermi estimates. You can do this any time you want to look something up, right before looking it up.
Find some small area of your life where you can keep making bets with a friend. For example, if you go to the shops once a week with a partner, you can bet each week on whether a particular product will be sold out, or whether a certain product will have a reduced price. Two guys who live in my house play Smash Bros regularly, and they make bets about how games will go when e.g. a new friend plays with them.
What do you do regularly with friends that you could make bets about?
Okay, so my three core rationality tools are the intellectual turing test, making bets, and fermi estimates / fermi modelling (and also something like ‘get curious’ but I’ve not made my thinking there totally explicit yet).
Let’s go with making bets (aka ‘the tool that helps you update on evidence’):
Make more multi-year bets
Similarly, outline the core assumptions that my long term plans are based on, and then offer people public bets on them
This feels similar to me to Elon Musk’s payment plan at Tesla, where he gets paid only if he hits ambitious targets
Find some way to massively reduce the overhead cost of making bets—I’ve made dozens of bets where I forgot to follow up
Make a bet per day
Post my odds on things regularly (daily), and design an interface where people can claim bets against me
Find some low-effort way to then get the important stats about my calibration (e.g. brier score, brier score over different time periods)
I feel that many of the times I explicitly make bets, it gets in the way of doing good model sharing to find where exactly we should make a bet—or whether we can in fact just converge before making the bet (that would most test the cruxes of our disagreement).
Maybe bets should be the norm for the end of a conversation, not the beginning or middle.
e.g. “Okay, let’s set a five minute timer to figure out our odds on X, then we’ll make the bet and move on to discussing something else”
Have betting parties where people do this lots and lots of times
Have a normalised amount of money you bet (e.g. five dollars)
Another issue is that many of my bets take ages for us to agree on an operationalisation. This is the point, but maybe I would improve on some skills if I practiced making bets in a domain where the operationalisation was easy (e.g. economics, stocks, sports).
Making bets is one of those things that sounds good in principle but I haven’t gotten around to doing (sort of like this list 10 applications exercise). I feel like my time horizons are simply too short right now to keep track of multi-year bets, which seem to be all the interesting ones that people want to take. Any tips?
You can play betting games where the bets resolve instantly because you can look up the answers, e.g. trading a contract with a friend worth the base-10 logarithm of the mass of the sun, in dollars. Basically competitive Fermi estimates. You can do this any time you want to look something up, right before looking it up.
Find some small area of your life where you can keep making bets with a friend. For example, if you go to the shops once a week with a partner, you can bet each week on whether a particular product will be sold out, or whether a certain product will have a reduced price. Two guys who live in my house play Smash Bros regularly, and they make bets about how games will go when e.g. a new friend plays with them.
What do you do regularly with friends that you could make bets about?