You’re right that volatility is an additional category of reasons that him not giving his actual distribution makes it less informative.
It’s interesting to me that in his comment, he states:
I do admit, it’s not a good look that I once again understate my position by so much compared to what the reality turns out to be, especially after having made that mistake a few times before.
He sees it as significant evidence that his position wasn’t extreme enough. But he didn’t even clearly given his position, and “the reality” is a thing that is determined by the specific question resolution when that day comes. Instead of that actual reality, and because of how abruptly the community ended up shifting, Eliezer seems to be interpreting that to mean that his position about that reality is not extreme enough. Those 2 things are somewhat related but pretty weakly, so it seems like rationalizing for him to frame it as showing his forecast isn’t extreme enough.
I don’t expect him to spend time engaging with me, but for what it’s worth, to me the comment he wrote here doesn’t address anything I brought up, it’s essentially just him restating that he interprets this as a nice addition to his “forecasting track record”. He certainly could have made it part of a meaningful track record! It was a tantalizing candidate for such a thing, but he doesn’t want to, but expects people to just interpret it the same, which doesn’t make sense.
You’re right that volatility is an additional category of reasons that him not giving his actual distribution makes it less informative.
It’s interesting to me that in his comment, he states:
He sees it as significant evidence that his position wasn’t extreme enough. But he didn’t even clearly given his position, and “the reality” is a thing that is determined by the specific question resolution when that day comes. Instead of that actual reality, and because of how abruptly the community ended up shifting, Eliezer seems to be interpreting that to mean that his position about that reality is not extreme enough. Those 2 things are somewhat related but pretty weakly, so it seems like rationalizing for him to frame it as showing his forecast isn’t extreme enough.
I don’t expect him to spend time engaging with me, but for what it’s worth, to me the comment he wrote here doesn’t address anything I brought up, it’s essentially just him restating that he interprets this as a nice addition to his “forecasting track record”. He certainly could have made it part of a meaningful track record! It was a tantalizing candidate for such a thing, but he doesn’t want to, but expects people to just interpret it the same, which doesn’t make sense.