I also am not sure they’re scams in the traditional sense.
If there is nothing fishy, why do they contact people via private messages instead of posting in the forum?
Typically the reason for contacting people individually, when the public announcement would be the natural way, is to prevent the contacted people from seeing each other’s reactions.
If there is nothing fishy, why do they contact people via private messages instead of posting in the forum?
For the first, one may want to not have a public record of attempting to subvert systems; for the second, one may only want to discuss it with specific people instead of anyone who expresses interest.
Note also that our anti-spam measures means that, as far as I’m aware, a new account can only start out posting about this sort of thing in the Open Thread, which may be non-obvious to someone who spends little time on LW.
There is a chance that you are right. I feel like it’s about 10% though. I apologize in advance if I am wrong. But I acted on the chance that I’m right and that I may save some naive altruistic student’s money.
theres a 10% chance hes right after hes to some extent verified my identity? i didnt wish to post my message very publicly cause it embarrassing and awkwardly like i was bragging when i wished to be honest, and hopefully show that im competent. how could my message of offering free education even be scammy? as i said i can prove it to vaniver and he can relay the information. im just looking for a smart person with the right priorities to educate on this so i can justify taking a break, and limit workload in general. i havent taken a single day off since i started aside from the very few days where there generally hasnt been any of the esport games that i focus on.
the other message was from my “associate” who i asked to look into ways to maximize value, dont like seeing money go to waste if avoidable
I apologize if I wronged you, but if you are honest, please act publicly, especially when it includes asking members to participate in financial transactions.
Money is no taboo here. MIRI asks for money publicly by posting an article (December 2015, August 2015, …). Members post articles with financial advice (Twenty basic rules for intelligent money management, Financial Effectiveness Repository, A Guide to Rational Investing, and many debates in the regular Open Threads). According to our recent survey, 71 members work in “Finance/Economics” and 38 work in “Law”; and although some of them specialize in things irrelevant to your proposal, most likely a few could provide a valuable feedback, maybe even a warning of what could possibly go wrong.
It is your insisting to work behind the courtains that seems fishy to me. You try to make the recipients of your messages feel special, yet you and your associate copy/paste the same messages to multiple people. If your goal is to provide free education, you could have posted the first lesson publicly. If you don’t want to be public with your name or with the name of your company, just create a pseudonymous account called e.g. “JumpingSquirrel2016” and refer to your company as e.g. “CompanyX”. Even if your goal is to find two or three people to cooperate with privately in the future, you can still advertise your skills by posting one free lesson publicly. People who are experts in some area don’t have to keep all their knowledge secret; there is usually at least 90% of the information known to enough people, sometimes even taught at universities.
For now, it seems like your priority is to send money through someone else, because reasons (“accelerating the value created”). Everything else seems like a cover story to make people cooperate. I suspect that the promised free education is also supposed to only happen after the person participated in the transaction.
If you are fake, your likely next step would be to send someone a fake check or fake “payment confirmation”, and then use social engineering and time pressure to make them send a part of the money back to you before they can verify that they actually received the money. Which is much easier to do in private, even with dozen people in parallel. Would be more difficult to achieve when communicating with all people publicly, especially if they were warned about this option in advance.
So my advice, if you are serious, is to post a message in an Open Thread (it could be strategical to wait two days until someone creates “Open Thread March 7 - March 13, 2016” in the “Discussion” section) describing why exactly do you need to send money through someone else, and describe the specific steps in this transaction. Specifically, promising to never ask people to send you back the money (either all or a part) and not to use time pressure until they have fully verified that they have actually received the money. For the sake of transparency, you should publish the names of specific users and the amount of money sent through them, and they should verify it using their own accounts.
Meanwhile, feel free to publish any free education in the current Open Thread or in the next one.
You try to make the recipients of your messages feel special, yet you and your associate copy/paste the same messages to multiple people.
His first message to me involved asking where he could find his previous sent messages to copy-paste it to me also.
If your goal is to provide free education, you could have posted the first lesson publicly. If you don’t want to be public with your name or with the name of your company, just create a pseudonymous account called e.g. “JumpingSquirrel2016” and refer to your company as e.g. “CompanyX”. Even if your goal is to find two or three people to cooperate with privately in the future, you can still advertise your skills by posting one free lesson publicly.
Agreed that this is generally a good approach. Not sure if it applies to financial topics specifically, because 1) they’re anti-inductive and 2) it’s dangerous for people to be half-informed. Telling someone that there’s money to be made exploiting inefficiencies in the penny stock market, but not what those inefficiencies are, could possibly lead to them losing a bunch of their money by making dumb bets that they think are smart.
So, Vaniver, are you personally going to cooperate with this guy in the “donating to MIRI through you” project? Could you please promise in advance to write an article about it when the financial transaction is over?
So, Vaniver, are you personally going to cooperate with this guy in the “donating to MIRI through you” project?
No, as detailed in the ancestral comment:
Whether or not this is within the letter of a match policy depends on the specific policy, but it’s typically against the spirit and recommended against by Double the Donation. So even if there is no lurking chargeback, I would caution against this as burning the commons for short-term gain.
I did encourage him to reach out to MIRI and figure out what their fundraising plans are, and whether or not he can pledge matching funds for that. (It seems like MIRI is likely to continue their open-ended fundraisers, but we’ll see.)
I am talking with him about his eSports gambling methodology, and trying to help him find an EA to work with on that. I would be happy to write an article about the results once there’s enough info to do a retrospective.
“act publicly, especially when it includes asking members to participate in financial transactions.”
why should i ask publicly when asking personal questions about personal decisions?
“It is your insisting to work behind the courtains that seems fishy to me. You try to make the recipients of your messages feel special, yet you and your associate copy/paste the same messages to multiple people.”
im insisting to work behind the curtains? when did i insist, and why should i ask publicly? so i could copy my message and try to find some suitable person that way?
how do i try to make the recipients feel special? why would i change a message that i wrote as perfectly as i could? does the other people know i copypasted it? and would they then feel worse about it because of that? would there even be a logical reason to eel worse?
″ If your goal is to provide free education, you could have posted the first lesson publicly.”
its my goal to provide free education to as smart a person as possible with as good priorities as possible to get as much money into as vauemaximizing things as possible. i dont know if i have “lessons” ready and i doubt it would be good to post them publicly. this is a fake name too.
“For now, it seems like your priority is to send money through someone else, because reasons (“accelerating the value created”). Everything else seems like a cover story to make people cooperate. I suspect that the promised free education is also supposed to only happen after the person participated in the transaction.”
my priorities are to as fast as possible get someone intelligent with the right priorities educated as well as donate current money the most effecient way possible. and if one can freaking double the money donated then it feels like a disaster to donate normally, so i asked that guy to look into how doable this is.
feels like a cover story to make people cooperate? so my plan is to get people free education then donate through them?
“I suspect that the promised free education is also supposed to only happen after the person participated in the transaction.”″
and then i can rob them you mean? as i said, i can prove everything i said to vaniver, i can prove donations ive made to miri, but my grand plan is this elaborate heist of a rationalist forum that are among the smartest groups on the internet?
“describing why exactly do you need to send money through someone else, and describe the specific steps in this transaction.”
shouldnt it be obvious to anyone? how do people keep repeating these things? its all there in two words- donation matching. the question should be, why would i donate the normal way if there were ways to DOUBLE value created? have you read the astronomical waste paper? the amount of value a donation match would do. then of course one would have to ponder the cost of that, the likelihood of companies withdrawing their service and value lost that way or the odds of hitting a bad person that steals the monies. i asked my helper to look into it at least.
so its realistic to do this publicly on the forum?
why would i want to spread this knowledge? i just want to find someone intelligent with the right priorities with some amount o time to spare on it that can take advantage of the market
im failing to show im competent in esport betting by talking about other things not related to esports etting?
i wished to be honest and offered to show proof and thus hopefully show that im competent.
No, you’re failing at general competency. For example, you screwed up your introduction to LessWrong.
Competency at esports betting is a hard thing to demonstrate. It’s like proving you’re a good trader in financial markets: a string of successes is not a proof.
yo responded to my line “hopyfully show that im competent at esport betting” saying i failed at that. then i asked how i would fail to show that im competent at it by not even mentioning the subject because the topic was other things in the post at hand. now you try to cover up what you just did and claim you are talking about general competency. which doesnt even have anything to do with what im trying to do with this whole thing which is minimising existential risk by getting more money into the cause that i currently think is the best suited.
id say youre the one whos failing at at wherever the hell this thing is going.
do you have source for how hard it is to demonstrate that im good at whatever it is i do as you dont know any details? as i said i aim to show everything i can to hopefully show that im competent. a kindergardener know s that a string of success isnt proof
yo responded to my line “hopyfully show that im competent at esport betting” saying i failed at that.
Not quite. Look at your original comment:
when i wished to be honest, and hopefully show that im competent.
See? There is a full stop at the end. Nothing about esports.
now you try to cover up what you just did and claim you are talking about general competency. which doesnt even have anything to do with what im trying to do with this whole thing which is minimising existential risk by getting more money into the cause that i currently think is the best suited.
LOL. General competency does have much to do with “this whole thing”. You are not helping your cause at the moment.
I think talking to this guy has gone past the point where it was amusing.
I propose to from now on, adhere to a fully general Against-People-Who-Don’t-Use-Letter-Case policy: ignore any post that contain’s only majuscules or only minuscules.
I propose to from now on, adhere to a fully general Against-People-Who-Don’t-Use-Letter-Case policy: ignore any post that contain’s only majuscules or only minuscules.
One of the startups I briefly worked at experimented with having the receptionist answer some of the founder’s email. (He was a popular and busy guy, but a lot of the emails he got could be responded to simply.)
People noticed because she capitalized words, which he never bothered to do.
i mean you people keep going on and on despite me having proved everything ive claimed and just want to minimise existential risk, while theres just a whole lot of whining about grammar and whatnot from you guys.
its not my main language, ive not spent any time trying to improve it, and i may very well have some mental issues in regards to quite a few things
“Not quite. Look at your original comment:”
where the topic was esports betting. no, i did not attempt to show that im competent in whatever it is you think i was trying attempt to show to be competent in by specifically showing my results in betting.
“LOL. General competency does have much to do with “this whole thing”. You are not helping your cause at the moment.”
what does general competency have to do with this? at the core, the value a person provides is the effect he has on existential risk reduction, and the by far best current way seems to be ai safety research, which is what im trying to do.
what does me not typing in ucking capital letters have to do with anything, or how does it even show lack of competency? the only way i can imagine it would do that is if the observers in question truely honestly believed that i does not know better, which we both of course know isnt the case.
im not helping my cause in what manner?
If there is nothing fishy, why do they contact people via private messages instead of posting in the forum?
Typically the reason for contacting people individually, when the public announcement would be the natural way, is to prevent the contacted people from seeing each other’s reactions.
For the first, one may want to not have a public record of attempting to subvert systems; for the second, one may only want to discuss it with specific people instead of anyone who expresses interest.
Note also that our anti-spam measures means that, as far as I’m aware, a new account can only start out posting about this sort of thing in the Open Thread, which may be non-obvious to someone who spends little time on LW.
There is a chance that you are right. I feel like it’s about 10% though. I apologize in advance if I am wrong. But I acted on the chance that I’m right and that I may save some naive altruistic student’s money.
theres a 10% chance hes right after hes to some extent verified my identity? i didnt wish to post my message very publicly cause it embarrassing and awkwardly like i was bragging when i wished to be honest, and hopefully show that im competent. how could my message of offering free education even be scammy? as i said i can prove it to vaniver and he can relay the information. im just looking for a smart person with the right priorities to educate on this so i can justify taking a break, and limit workload in general. i havent taken a single day off since i started aside from the very few days where there generally hasnt been any of the esport games that i focus on. the other message was from my “associate” who i asked to look into ways to maximize value, dont like seeing money go to waste if avoidable
I apologize if I wronged you, but if you are honest, please act publicly, especially when it includes asking members to participate in financial transactions.
Money is no taboo here. MIRI asks for money publicly by posting an article (December 2015, August 2015, …). Members post articles with financial advice (Twenty basic rules for intelligent money management, Financial Effectiveness Repository, A Guide to Rational Investing, and many debates in the regular Open Threads). According to our recent survey, 71 members work in “Finance/Economics” and 38 work in “Law”; and although some of them specialize in things irrelevant to your proposal, most likely a few could provide a valuable feedback, maybe even a warning of what could possibly go wrong.
It is your insisting to work behind the courtains that seems fishy to me. You try to make the recipients of your messages feel special, yet you and your associate copy/paste the same messages to multiple people. If your goal is to provide free education, you could have posted the first lesson publicly. If you don’t want to be public with your name or with the name of your company, just create a pseudonymous account called e.g. “JumpingSquirrel2016” and refer to your company as e.g. “CompanyX”. Even if your goal is to find two or three people to cooperate with privately in the future, you can still advertise your skills by posting one free lesson publicly. People who are experts in some area don’t have to keep all their knowledge secret; there is usually at least 90% of the information known to enough people, sometimes even taught at universities.
For now, it seems like your priority is to send money through someone else, because reasons (“accelerating the value created”). Everything else seems like a cover story to make people cooperate. I suspect that the promised free education is also supposed to only happen after the person participated in the transaction.
If you are fake, your likely next step would be to send someone a fake check or fake “payment confirmation”, and then use social engineering and time pressure to make them send a part of the money back to you before they can verify that they actually received the money. Which is much easier to do in private, even with dozen people in parallel. Would be more difficult to achieve when communicating with all people publicly, especially if they were warned about this option in advance.
So my advice, if you are serious, is to post a message in an Open Thread (it could be strategical to wait two days until someone creates “Open Thread March 7 - March 13, 2016” in the “Discussion” section) describing why exactly do you need to send money through someone else, and describe the specific steps in this transaction. Specifically, promising to never ask people to send you back the money (either all or a part) and not to use time pressure until they have fully verified that they have actually received the money. For the sake of transparency, you should publish the names of specific users and the amount of money sent through them, and they should verify it using their own accounts.
Meanwhile, feel free to publish any free education in the current Open Thread or in the next one.
His first message to me involved asking where he could find his previous sent messages to copy-paste it to me also.
Agreed that this is generally a good approach. Not sure if it applies to financial topics specifically, because 1) they’re anti-inductive and 2) it’s dangerous for people to be half-informed. Telling someone that there’s money to be made exploiting inefficiencies in the penny stock market, but not what those inefficiencies are, could possibly lead to them losing a bunch of their money by making dumb bets that they think are smart.
So, Vaniver, are you personally going to cooperate with this guy in the “donating to MIRI through you” project? Could you please promise in advance to write an article about it when the financial transaction is over?
No, as detailed in the ancestral comment:
I did encourage him to reach out to MIRI and figure out what their fundraising plans are, and whether or not he can pledge matching funds for that. (It seems like MIRI is likely to continue their open-ended fundraisers, but we’ll see.)
I am talking with him about his eSports gambling methodology, and trying to help him find an EA to work with on that. I would be happy to write an article about the results once there’s enough info to do a retrospective.
“act publicly, especially when it includes asking members to participate in financial transactions.” why should i ask publicly when asking personal questions about personal decisions?
“It is your insisting to work behind the courtains that seems fishy to me. You try to make the recipients of your messages feel special, yet you and your associate copy/paste the same messages to multiple people.” im insisting to work behind the curtains? when did i insist, and why should i ask publicly? so i could copy my message and try to find some suitable person that way? how do i try to make the recipients feel special? why would i change a message that i wrote as perfectly as i could? does the other people know i copypasted it? and would they then feel worse about it because of that? would there even be a logical reason to eel worse?
″ If your goal is to provide free education, you could have posted the first lesson publicly.” its my goal to provide free education to as smart a person as possible with as good priorities as possible to get as much money into as vauemaximizing things as possible. i dont know if i have “lessons” ready and i doubt it would be good to post them publicly. this is a fake name too.
“For now, it seems like your priority is to send money through someone else, because reasons (“accelerating the value created”). Everything else seems like a cover story to make people cooperate. I suspect that the promised free education is also supposed to only happen after the person participated in the transaction.” my priorities are to as fast as possible get someone intelligent with the right priorities educated as well as donate current money the most effecient way possible. and if one can freaking double the money donated then it feels like a disaster to donate normally, so i asked that guy to look into how doable this is. feels like a cover story to make people cooperate? so my plan is to get people free education then donate through them? “I suspect that the promised free education is also supposed to only happen after the person participated in the transaction.”″ and then i can rob them you mean? as i said, i can prove everything i said to vaniver, i can prove donations ive made to miri, but my grand plan is this elaborate heist of a rationalist forum that are among the smartest groups on the internet?
“describing why exactly do you need to send money through someone else, and describe the specific steps in this transaction.” shouldnt it be obvious to anyone? how do people keep repeating these things? its all there in two words- donation matching. the question should be, why would i donate the normal way if there were ways to DOUBLE value created? have you read the astronomical waste paper? the amount of value a donation match would do. then of course one would have to ponder the cost of that, the likelihood of companies withdrawing their service and value lost that way or the odds of hitting a bad person that steals the monies. i asked my helper to look into it at least. so its realistic to do this publicly on the forum?
If you think you have worthwhile knowledge about how to bet that you could teach other people, write an article detailing your betting philosophy.
why would i want to spread this knowledge? i just want to find someone intelligent with the right priorities with some amount o time to spare on it that can take advantage of the market
You’re kinda failing at that at the moment :-/
im failing to show im competent in esport betting by talking about other things not related to esports etting? i wished to be honest and offered to show proof and thus hopefully show that im competent.
No, you’re failing at general competency. For example, you screwed up your introduction to LessWrong.
Competency at esports betting is a hard thing to demonstrate. It’s like proving you’re a good trader in financial markets: a string of successes is not a proof.
yo responded to my line “hopyfully show that im competent at esport betting” saying i failed at that. then i asked how i would fail to show that im competent at it by not even mentioning the subject because the topic was other things in the post at hand. now you try to cover up what you just did and claim you are talking about general competency. which doesnt even have anything to do with what im trying to do with this whole thing which is minimising existential risk by getting more money into the cause that i currently think is the best suited. id say youre the one whos failing at at wherever the hell this thing is going.
do you have source for how hard it is to demonstrate that im good at whatever it is i do as you dont know any details? as i said i aim to show everything i can to hopefully show that im competent. a kindergardener know s that a string of success isnt proof
Not quite. Look at your original comment:
See? There is a full stop at the end. Nothing about esports.
LOL. General competency does have much to do with “this whole thing”. You are not helping your cause at the moment.
I think talking to this guy has gone past the point where it was amusing.
I propose to from now on, adhere to a fully general Against-People-Who-Don’t-Use-Letter-Case policy: ignore any post that contain’s only majuscules or only minuscules.
That should do well enough.
One of the startups I briefly worked at experimented with having the receptionist answer some of the founder’s email. (He was a popular and busy guy, but a lot of the emails he got could be responded to simply.)
People noticed because she capitalized words, which he never bothered to do.
sOUNDS LIKE A GOOD IDEA. lET’S DO IT. bUT ARE YOU SURE IT’S ENOUGH?
ClearlyWeNeedASixVolumeManualOfStyleTransgressionsAgainstWhichShallBePunished
i mean you people keep going on and on despite me having proved everything ive claimed and just want to minimise existential risk, while theres just a whole lot of whining about grammar and whatnot from you guys. its not my main language, ive not spent any time trying to improve it, and i may very well have some mental issues in regards to quite a few things
“Not quite. Look at your original comment:” where the topic was esports betting. no, i did not attempt to show that im competent in whatever it is you think i was trying attempt to show to be competent in by specifically showing my results in betting.
“LOL. General competency does have much to do with “this whole thing”. You are not helping your cause at the moment.” what does general competency have to do with this? at the core, the value a person provides is the effect he has on existential risk reduction, and the by far best current way seems to be ai safety research, which is what im trying to do. what does me not typing in ucking capital letters have to do with anything, or how does it even show lack of competency? the only way i can imagine it would do that is if the observers in question truely honestly believed that i does not know better, which we both of course know isnt the case. im not helping my cause in what manner?