I have written what I think is a really cool post: Announcing that I will be using prediction markets in practice in useful ways, and asking for a little bit of help with that (mainly people betting on the markets). But apparently the internet/LessWrong doesn’t feel that way. (Compare to this comment of mine which got ~4.5 times the upvotes, and is basically a gimmick—in general I’m really confused about what’ll get upvoted here and what will be ignored/downvoted, even after half a decade on this site).
I’m not, like, complaining about this, but I’d like to understand why this wasn’t better received. Is it:
The post is confusingly written, with too much exposition in the beginning (starts with a long quote)
The post promises to do something without having done it, so people judge it as a pipedream
The idea isn’t actually that interesting: We’ve had replication markets, and the idea of using prediction markets to select experiments was proposed at leastin 2013, and the idea is straightforward, as is the execution
The title makes it sound like just another proposal and nothing that will actually be executed in practice
Stuff like this doesn’t matter because TAI soon
I disagree with some of these, but that’s not the point, the point is why my prediction of the reception of the post was wrong. So: Why isn’t this kinda cool and worth participating in?
Feedback from me: I started reading the post, but it had a bunch of huge blockquotes and I couldn’t really figure out what the post was about from the title, so I navigated back to the frontpage without engaging. In-particular I didn’t understand the opening quote, which didn’t have a source, or how it was related to the rest of the post (in like the 10 seconds I spent on the page).
An opening paragraph that states a clear thesis or makes an interesting point or generally welcomes me into what’s going on would have helped a lot.
Okay, thanks for the feedback! So a more informative title would be better. I’ve been using quotes to denote abstracts (or opening paragraph), but maybe that’s a bit confusing.
I’ve changed the title now, and changed the abstract from a quote to bolded.
The actual quote was also too long that I would have stopped reading if I wasn’t trying to analyse your post.
The quote is also out of context, in that I am very confused about what the author was trying to say from the first paragraph. Because I was skimming, I didn’t really understand the quote until the market section.
Fortunately, there’s a good (and well-known) alternative alternative to what?, which is to randomize decisions sometimes, at random yeah that makes sense, but how does randomization relate to prediction markets?. You tell people: “I will roll a 20-sided die. If it comes up 1-19, everyone gets their money back and I do what I want what is I do what I want. If it comes up 20, the bets activate and I decide what to do using a coinflip. ok so this is about a bet, but then why coin flip??”
Okay, lesson learned: Don’t start a blogpost with a long-ass quote from another post out of context. Put it later after the reader is in flow (apparently the abstract isn’t enough). Don’t do what’s done here.
To be clear, I totally didn’t parse the opening blockquote as an abstract. I parsed it as a quote from a different post, I just couldn’t figure out from where.
FWIW I was going to start betting on Manifold, but I have no idea how to deal with meditative absorption as an end-state.
Like there are worlds where—for instance—Vit D maybe helps this, or Vit D maybe hurts, and it might depend on you, or it depends on what kind of meditation really works for you. So it takes what is already pretty hard bet for me—just calling whether nicotine is actually likely to help in some way—and makes it harder—is nicotine going to help meditation. Just have no idea.
It’s good to use prediction markets in practice but most people who read the post likely don’t get that much value from reading the post.
Larry McEnerney is good at explaining that good writing isn’t writing that’s cool or interesting but simply writing that provides value to the reader.
As far as the actual execution goes, it might have been better to create fewer markets and focus on fewer experiments, so that each one gets one attention.
Why isn’t this kinda cool and worth participating in?
I wrote two comments about why people don’t read your post, but as I was betting I realized another two problems about the markets:
(Not your fault) The Manifold betting integration kind of sucks. Clicking “See 2 more answers” does nothing, and the options are ordered by percentage.
There isn’t enough liquidity in your markets. It makes betting difficult because the even M5 increments changes too much. idk, maybe buy some mana to subsidize your markets? It would also make people seeing your market from Manifold more interested to bet as they will have more to gain for the prediction.
The title doesn’t set a good expectation of the contents. If I am a person interested in “Please Bet On My Quantified Self Decision Markets”, I want to bet. I won’t expect to (and shouldn’t be expected to) read all your lengthy experimental details. It took a while for me to find the markets.
That’s funny, I’ve already changed the title from “Using Prediction Platforms To Select Quantified Self Experiments”. I guess the problem is really the block quote, which I’ll move somewhere later in the post.
I looked at your post and bounced off the first time. To give a concrete reason, there were a few terms I wasn’t familiar with (e.g. L-Theanine, CBD Oil, L-Phenylalanine, Bupropion, THC oil), but I think it was overall some “there’s an inferential distance here which makes the post heavy for me”. What also made the post heavy was that there were lots of markets—which I understand makes conceptual sense, but makes it heavy nevertheless.
I did later come back to the post and did trade on most of the markets, as I am a big fan of prediction markets and also appreciate people doing self-experiments. I wouldn’t have normally done that, as I don’t think I know basically anything about what to expect there—e.g. my understanding of Cohen’s d is just “it’s effect size, 1 d basically meaning one standard deviation”, and I haven’t even played with real numerical examples.
(I have had this “this assumes a bit too much statistics for me / is heavy”problem when quickly looking at your self-experiment posts. And I do have a mathematical background, though not from statistics.)
I’d guess that you believe that the statistics part is really important, and I don’t disagree with that. For exposition I think it would still be better to start with something lighter. And if one could have a reasonable prediction market on something more understandable (to laypeople), I’d guess that would result in more attention and still possibly useful information. (It is unfortunate that attention is very dependent on the “attractiveness” of the market instead of “quality of operationalization”.)
I guess I should’ve just said “effect size”, and clarify in a footnote that I mean Cohen’s d.
And if the nootropics post was too statistics-heavy for someone with a math background, I probably need to tone it down/move it to an appendix. I think I can have quality of operationalization if I’m willing to be sloppy in the general presentation (as people probably don’t care as much whether I use Cohen’s d or Hedge’s g or whatever).
The opening was off-putting to me. I think a shorter post with the details placed in a linked separate post marked as appendix would get more engagement.
Also, bold and caps text is off-putting.
But as of the time I checked it had 32 upvotes, which is pretty good. I usually think of less than 10 meaning nobody cares, but 10 − 20 is ok, and more than 20 is pretty good. Only really popular posts are above 50 generally.
Yeah, maybe I’ll amend my comment above—after some help from the Manifold team I’ve gotten enough interest/engagement on my markets that I’m not as worried anymore—except maybe the LSD microdosing one, which is honestly a steal. (At the time my markets were pretty barren in terms of engagement, which was my main optimization target).
I dunno about the upvote count though, twoposts about the results of self-experiments have been pretty popular (if anyone wants a way to farm LW karma, that’d be a way to do it…)
I think this endeavour is much cooler than ~most of my past posts, and not particularly complicated (I understand why the posts in this sequence aren’t very upvoted, since people justifiedly just want to upvote what they’ve read and evaluated), so I was confused.
At this moment, the post has 25 karma, which is not bad.
From my perspective, positive karma is good, negative karma is bad, but 4x higher karma doesn’t necessarily mean 4x better—it could also mean that more people noticed it, more people were interested, it was short to read so more people voted, etc.
So I think that partially you are overthinking it, and partially you could have made the introduction shorter (basically to reduce the number of lines someone must read before they decide that they like it).
The off-putting part about betting to me was the non-objective measure of meditative engagement. Gwern’s n-back test was better for being objective and precise.
Hm, interesting. I think there’s more α in investigating meditative performance, and thought it’d be not as bad through subjectivity because I randomize & blind. But I get why one would be skeptical of that.
I do test for a bunch of other stuff though, e.g. flashcard performance (more objective I think?), which was surprisingly unmoved in my past two experiments. But I don’t resolve the markets based on that. I very briefly considered putting up markets on every affected variable and every combination of substance, but then decided that nobody was going to forecast that.
I notice I am confused.
I have written what I think is a really cool post: Announcing that I will be using prediction markets in practice in useful ways, and asking for a little bit of help with that (mainly people betting on the markets). But apparently the internet/LessWrong doesn’t feel that way. (Compare to this comment of mine which got ~4.5 times the upvotes, and is basically a gimmick—in general I’m really confused about what’ll get upvoted here and what will be ignored/downvoted, even after half a decade on this site).
I’m not, like, complaining about this, but I’d like to understand why this wasn’t better received. Is it:
The post is confusingly written, with too much exposition in the beginning (starts with a long quote)
The post promises to do something without having done it, so people judge it as a pipedream
The idea isn’t actually that interesting: We’ve had replication markets, and the idea of using prediction markets to select experiments was proposed at least in 2013, and the idea is straightforward, as is the execution
The title makes it sound like just another proposal and nothing that will actually be executed in practice
Stuff like this doesn’t matter because TAI soon
I disagree with some of these, but that’s not the point, the point is why my prediction of the reception of the post was wrong. So: Why isn’t this kinda cool and worth participating in?
Feedback from me: I started reading the post, but it had a bunch of huge blockquotes and I couldn’t really figure out what the post was about from the title, so I navigated back to the frontpage without engaging. In-particular I didn’t understand the opening quote, which didn’t have a source, or how it was related to the rest of the post (in like the 10 seconds I spent on the page).
An opening paragraph that states a clear thesis or makes an interesting point or generally welcomes me into what’s going on would have helped a lot.
Okay, thanks for the feedback! So a more informative title would be better. I’ve been using quotes to denote abstracts (or opening paragraph), but maybe that’s a bit confusing.
I’ve changed the title now, and changed the abstract from a quote to bolded.
The actual quote was also too long that I would have stopped reading if I wasn’t trying to analyse your post.
The quote is also out of context, in that I am very confused about what the author was trying to say from the first paragraph. Because I was skimming, I didn’t really understand the quote until the market section.
Okay, lesson learned: Don’t start a blogpost with a long-ass quote from another post out of context. Put it later after the reader is in flow (apparently the abstract isn’t enough). Don’t do what’s done here.
To be clear, I totally didn’t parse the opening blockquote as an abstract. I parsed it as a quote from a different post, I just couldn’t figure out from where.
FWIW I was going to start betting on Manifold, but I have no idea how to deal with meditative absorption as an end-state.
Like there are worlds where—for instance—Vit D maybe helps this, or Vit D maybe hurts, and it might depend on you, or it depends on what kind of meditation really works for you. So it takes what is already pretty hard bet for me—just calling whether nicotine is actually likely to help in some way—and makes it harder—is nicotine going to help meditation. Just have no idea.
Yeah, that makes sense. (I think I saw you bet on one of the markets! (And then maybe sell your stake?))
Thanks for trying anyway. Maybe the non-meditation related markets are easier to predict?
I’d like to encourage best-guess-betting, but I understand that there are better opportunities out there.
It’s good to use prediction markets in practice but most people who read the post likely don’t get that much value from reading the post.
Larry McEnerney is good at explaining that good writing isn’t writing that’s cool or interesting but simply writing that provides value to the reader.
As far as the actual execution goes, it might have been better to create fewer markets and focus on fewer experiments, so that each one gets one attention.
I wrote two comments about why people don’t read your post, but as I was betting I realized another two problems about the markets:
(Not your fault) The Manifold betting integration kind of sucks. Clicking “See 2 more answers” does nothing, and the options are ordered by percentage.
There isn’t enough liquidity in your markets. It makes betting difficult because the even M5 increments changes too much. idk, maybe buy some mana to subsidize your markets? It would also make people seeing your market from Manifold more interested to bet as they will have more to gain for the prediction.
Both make sense. I spent ~all my mana on creating the markets, and as more Mana rolls in from other bets I am subsidizing them.
The title doesn’t set a good expectation of the contents. If I am a person interested in “Please Bet On My Quantified Self Decision Markets”, I want to bet. I won’t expect to (and shouldn’t be expected to) read all your lengthy experimental details. It took a while for me to find the markets.
That’s funny, I’ve already changed the title from “Using Prediction Platforms To Select Quantified Self Experiments”. I guess the problem is really the block quote, which I’ll move somewhere later in the post.
I looked at your post and bounced off the first time. To give a concrete reason, there were a few terms I wasn’t familiar with (e.g. L-Theanine, CBD Oil, L-Phenylalanine, Bupropion, THC oil), but I think it was overall some “there’s an inferential distance here which makes the post heavy for me”. What also made the post heavy was that there were lots of markets—which I understand makes conceptual sense, but makes it heavy nevertheless.
I did later come back to the post and did trade on most of the markets, as I am a big fan of prediction markets and also appreciate people doing self-experiments. I wouldn’t have normally done that, as I don’t think I know basically anything about what to expect there—e.g. my understanding of Cohen’s d is just “it’s effect size, 1 d basically meaning one standard deviation”, and I haven’t even played with real numerical examples.
(I have had this “this assumes a bit too much statistics for me / is heavy”problem when quickly looking at your self-experiment posts. And I do have a mathematical background, though not from statistics.)
I’d guess that you believe that the statistics part is really important, and I don’t disagree with that. For exposition I think it would still be better to start with something lighter. And if one could have a reasonable prediction market on something more understandable (to laypeople), I’d guess that would result in more attention and still possibly useful information. (It is unfortunate that attention is very dependent on the “attractiveness” of the market instead of “quality of operationalization”.)
Thank you so much for trading on the markets!
I guess I should’ve just said “effect size”, and clarify in a footnote that I mean Cohen’s d.
And if the nootropics post was too statistics-heavy for someone with a math background, I probably need to tone it down/move it to an appendix. I think I can have quality of operationalization if I’m willing to be sloppy in the general presentation (as people probably don’t care as much whether I use Cohen’s d or Hedge’s g or whatever).
The opening was off-putting to me. I think a shorter post with the details placed in a linked separate post marked as appendix would get more engagement. Also, bold and caps text is off-putting. But as of the time I checked it had 32 upvotes, which is pretty good. I usually think of less than 10 meaning nobody cares, but 10 − 20 is ok, and more than 20 is pretty good. Only really popular posts are above 50 generally.
Yeah, maybe I’ll amend my comment above—after some help from the Manifold team I’ve gotten enough interest/engagement on my markets that I’m not as worried anymore—except maybe the LSD microdosing one, which is honestly a steal. (At the time my markets were pretty barren in terms of engagement, which was my main optimization target).
I dunno about the upvote count though, two posts about the results of self-experiments have been pretty popular (if anyone wants a way to farm LW karma, that’d be a way to do it…)
I think this endeavour is much cooler than ~most of my past posts, and not particularly complicated (I understand why the posts in this sequence aren’t very upvoted, since people justifiedly just want to upvote what they’ve read and evaluated), so I was confused.
At this moment, the post has 25 karma, which is not bad.
From my perspective, positive karma is good, negative karma is bad, but 4x higher karma doesn’t necessarily mean 4x better—it could also mean that more people noticed it, more people were interested, it was short to read so more people voted, etc.
So I think that partially you are overthinking it, and partially you could have made the introduction shorter (basically to reduce the number of lines someone must read before they decide that they like it).
Yeah, when I posted the first comment in here, I think it had 14?
I was maybe just overly optimistic about the amount of trading that’d happen on the markets.
The off-putting part about betting to me was the non-objective measure of meditative engagement. Gwern’s n-back test was better for being objective and precise.
Hm, interesting. I think there’s more α in investigating meditative performance, and thought it’d be not as bad through subjectivity because I randomize & blind. But I get why one would be skeptical of that.
I do test for a bunch of other stuff though, e.g. flashcard performance (more objective I think?), which was surprisingly unmoved in my past two experiments. But I don’t resolve the markets based on that. I very briefly considered putting up markets on every affected variable and every combination of substance, but then decided that nobody was going to forecast that.