… my god…
Ben Goldhaber
Karma: 1,061
Solving Math Problems by Relay
Thanks for posting this. Why did you invest in those three startups in particular? Was it the market, the founders, personal connections? And was it a systematic search for startups to invest in, or more of an “opportunity-arose” situation?
I know Ozzie has been thinking about this, because we were chatting about how to use an Alfred workflow to post to it. Which I think would be great!
I’ve spent a fair bit of time in the forecasting space playing w/ different tools, and I never found one that I could reliably use for personal prediction tracking.
Ultimately for me it comes down to:
1.) Friction: the predictions I’m most interested in tracking are “5-second-level” predictions—“do I think this person is right”, “is the fact that I have a cough and am tired a sign that I’m getting sick” etc. - and I need to be able to jot that down quickly.
2.) “Routine”: There are certain sites that are toothbrush sites, aka I use them everyday. I’m much more likely to adopt a digital habit if I can use one of those sites to fulfill the function.
So my current workflow for private predictions is to use a textexpander snippet w/ Roam.
- [[Predictions]]
- {percentage}%
- [[operationalized]]:
- [[{date}]]
- {{[[TODO]]}} [[outcome]]:
It doesn’t have graphs, but I can get a pretty good sense of how calibrated I am, and if I want I could quickly export the markdown and evaluate it.Of course I want to mention foretold.io as another good site—if you want to distributions that’s definitely the way to go.
The commerce clause gives the federal government broad powers to regulate interstate commerce, and in particular the the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services can exercise it to institute quarantine. https://cdc.gov/quarantine/aboutlawsregulationsquarantineisolation.html
Depression as a concept doesn’t make sense to me. Why on earth would it be fitness enhancing to have a state of withdrawal, retreat, collapse where a lack of energy prevents you from trying new things? I’ve brainstormed a number of explanations:
depression as chemical imbalance: a hardware level failure has occurred, maybe randomly maybe because of an “overload” of sensation
depression as signaling: withdrawal and retreat from the world indicates a credible signal that I need help
depression as retreat: the environment has become dangerous and bad and I should withdraw from it until it changes.
I’m partial to the explanation offered by the Predictive Processing Model, that depression is an extreme form of low confidence. As SSC write:
imagine the world’s most unsuccessful entrepreneur. Every company they make flounders and dies. Every stock they pick crashes the next day. Their vacations always get rained-out, their dates always end up with the other person leaving halfway through and sticking them with the bill.
What if your job is advising this guy? If they’re thinking of starting a new company, your advice is “Be really careful – you should know it’ll probably go badly”.
if sadness were a way of saying “Things are going pretty badly, maybe be less confidence and don’t start any new projects”, that would be useful...
Depression isn’t normal sadness. But if normal sadness lowers neural confidence a little, maybe depression is the pathological result of biological processes that lower neural confidence.
But I still don’t understand why the behaviors we often see with depression—isolation, lack of energy—are ‘longterm adaptive’. If a particular policy isn’t working, I’d expect to see more energy going into experimentation.
[TK. Unfinished because I accidentally clicked submit and haven’t finished editing the full comment]
I rarely share ideas online (I’m working on that); when I do the ideas tend to be “small” observations or models, the type I can write out quickly and send. ~10mins − 1 day after I have it.
I’ve heard that Talking Heads song dozens of times and have never watched the video. I was missing out!
Post-mortem on the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity forecasts
neat hadn’t seen that thanks
NeurIPS best paper awards will likely contain good leads.
I expect understanding something more explicitly—such as yours and another persons boundaries—w/o some type of underlying concept of acceptance of that boundary can increase exploitability. I recently wrote a shortform post on the topic of legibility that describes some patterns I’ve noticed here.
I don’t think on average Circling makes one more exploitable, but I expect it increases variance, making some people significantly more exploitable than they were before because previously invisible boundaries are now visible, and can thus be attacked (by others but more often by a different part of the same person).
And yeah it does seem similar to the valley of bad rationality; the valley of bad circling, where when you’re in the valley you’re focusing on a naive form of connection without discernment of the boundaries.
Yes And is an improv technique where you keep the energy in a scene alive by going w/ the other persons suggestion and adding more to it. “A: Wow is that your pet monkey? B: Yes and he’s also my doctor!”
Yes And is generative (creates a lot of output), as opposed to Hmm No which is critical (distills output)
A lot of the Sequences is Hmm No
It’s not that Hmm No is wrong, it’s that it cuts off future paths down the Yes And thought-stream.
If there’s a critical error at the beginning of a thought that will undermine everything else then it makes sense to Hmm No (we don’t want to spend a bunch of energy on something that will be fundamentally unsound). But if the later parts of the thought stream are not closely dependent on the beginning, or if it’s only part of the stream that gets cut off, then you’ve lost a lot of potential value that could’ve been generated by the Yes And.
In conversation yes and is much more fun, which might be why the Sequences are important as a corrective (yeah look it’s not fun to remember about biases, but they exist and you should model/include them)
Write drunk, edit sober. Yes And drunk, Hmm No in the morning.
IMO the term “amplification” fits if the scheme results in a 1.) clear efficiency gain and 2.) it’s scalable. This looks like (delivering equivalent results but at a lower cost OR providing better results for an equivalent cost. (cost == $$ & time)), AND (~ O(n) scaling costs).
For example if there was a group of people who could emulate [Researcher’s] fact checking of 100 claims but do it at 10x speed, then that’s an efficiency gain as we’re doing the same work in less time. If we pump the number to 1000 claims and the fact checkers could still do it at 10x speed without additional overheard complexity, then it’s also scalable. Contrast that with the standard method of hiring additional junior researchers to do the fact checking—I expect it to not be as scalable (“huh we’ve got all these employees now I guess we need an HR department and perf reviews and...:)
It does seem like a fuzzy distinction to me, and I am mildly concerned about overloading a term that already has an association w/ IDA.
Is there not a distillation phase in forecasting? One model of the forecasting process is person A builds up there model, distills a complicated question into a high information/highly compressed datum, which can then be used by others. In my mind its:
Model → Distill - > “amplify” (not sure if that’s actually the right word)
I prefer the term scalable instead of proliferation for “can this group do it cost-effectively” as it’s a similar concept to that in CS.
Thanks for including that link—seems right, and reminded me of Scott’s old post Epistemic Learned Helplessness
The only difference between their presentation and mine is that I’m saying that for 99% of people, 99% of the time, taking ideas seriously is the wrong strategy
I kinda think this is true, and it’s not clear to me from the outset whether you should “go down the path” of getting access to level 3 magic given the negatives.
Probably good heuristics are proceeding with caution when encountering new/out there ideas, remembering you always have the right to say no, finding trustworthy guides, etc.
Why do I not always have conscious access to my inner parts? Why, when speaking with authority figures, might I have a sudden sense of blankness.
Recently I’ve been thinking about this reaction in the frame of ‘legibility’, ala Seeing like a State. State’s would impose organizational structures on societies that were easy to see and control—they made the society more legible—to the actors who ran the state, but these organizational structure were bad for the people in the society.
For example, census data, standardized weights and measures, and uniform languages make it easier to tax and control the population. [Wikipedia]
I’m toying with applying this concept across the stack.
If you have an existing model of people being made up of parts [Kaj’s articles], I think there’s a similar thing happening. I notice I’m angry but can’t quite tell why or get a conceptual handle on it—if it were fully legible and accessible to conscious mind, then it would be much easier to apply pressure and control that ‘part’, regardless if the control I am exerting is good. So instead, it remains illegible.
A level up, in a small group conversation, I notice I feel missed, like I’m not being heard in fullness, but someone else directly asks me about my model and I draw a blank, like I can’t access this model or share it. If my model were legible, someone else would get more access to it and be able to control it/point out its flaws. That might be good or it might be bad, but if it’s illegible it can’t be “coerced”/”mistaken” by others.
One more level up, I initially went down this track of thinking for a few reasons, one of which was wondering why prediction forecasting systems are so hard to adopt within organizations. Operationalization of terms is difficult and it’s hard to get a precise enough question that everyone can agree on, but it’s very ‘unfun’ to have uncertain terms (people are much more likely to not predict then predict with huge uncertainty). I think the legibility concept comes into play—I am reluctant to put a term out that is part of my model of the world and attach real points/weight to it because now there’s this “legible leverage point” on me.
I hold this pretty loosely, but there’s something here that rings true and is similar to an observation Robin Hanson made around why people seem to trust human decision makers more than hard standards.
This concept of personal legibility seems associated with the concept of bucket errors, in that theoretically sharing a model and acting on the model are distinct actions, except I expect often legibility concerns are highly warranted (things might be out to get you)
Thanks, rewrote and tried to clarify. In essence the researchers were testing transmission of “strategies” for using a tool, where an individual was limited in what they could transmit to the next user, akin to this relay experiment.
In fact they found that trying to convey causal theories could undermine the next person’s performance; they speculate that it reduced experimentation prematurely.