Freelance Software Engineer at day, Rationalist and Effective Altruist at night
Currently, under contract @ METR.
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Milli | Martin
Karma: 117
Their research is done on the population level, and they consider adverse selection effects somewhat (people with increased risk are more likely to insure against that risk), but it’s far from perfect. I’ve worked in insurance and profited from insurance financially in cases where I expected the insurance to be positive EV beforehand.
Professional experience (Germany):
Some insurance products run at an (accepted) deficit, as they acquire customers who then buy more (money making) insurance products. Examples: Personal Liability Insurance, Motor vehicle liability
There is significant friction between the different departments within an insurance and with the insurance agents, causing mispricing from a risk-perspective (some parties care more about raw sales volume).
Nobody really knows what they are doing.
Personal experience:
Personal Liability insurance is dirt cheap in Germany and makes money off people who don’t report their damages (e.g. will pay for a friend’s phone or camera they dropped themselves).
Insurance for bikes in Berlin. 3 of my bikes were stolen within 3 years and the insurance costing <€100/yr covered all of them.
Nice article! I’m practice you can get positive expected value insurance though, since you know more about your risk (in some cases) than the insurance does. The other way around in some cases the insurance is better at estimating your risk and might “rip you off” if they (correctly) assume you overestimate your risk.
Thanks for the lovely meetup, everyone!
You can contact me about anything here or at https://t.me/truemilli. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have criticism or had a bad experience.
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Update: We’ll be joining forces with the Qualia Research Institute, who are in Berlin this week: https://qualiacomputing.com/2024/05/17/qri-in-germany/
I think we’ll get along great and there’s a big overlap. Scott:
The Qualia Research Institute is doing absolutely picture-perfect mad science.
Just an info, nothing actually changes!
Note: Most RSVPs (29 as of now) are on Meetup.
Long survey is long.
ChatGPT is using Whisper for speech to text, which is open source and available through OpenAIs APIs.
I personally tried to use more text to speech on my phone, but was annoyed by it and went back to typing.
I’ve heard Whisper is a definite step-up, especially when mixing English and German.
https://openai.com/research/whisper
https://github.com/openai/whisper
https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/whisper€: This used to say text to speech.
Hey everyone, I’m amazed with how many people showed up and the atmosphere. I hope you had fun and interesting conversations as well. If you want to be connected to the Berlin Rationality or EA communities, just contact me! Contact: acx-meetups@martinmilbradt.de, t.me/truemilli or @Milli | Martin.
PS.: “My” monthly workshop is happening tomorrow evening, happy to have you: The Art of Difficult Conversations—Workshop.
Quick heads up: Most of the RSVPs are on Meetup.com (26 atm).
EA Germany has an “Employer of Record” program. Your funding gets put into their account, and they pay your salary from it, formally becoming your employer.
This is probably what you want to google or mention to an organization in the UK. :)
Details (EAD): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EePELRNTrZGHgeJa3oeRdF_rDsN7LesYppQah_zE7g4
Be wary of survivorship bias! Of course, everything that is licensed and proven to work was not at some point. But so is everything that was tried out and ineffective / harmful, and (hopefully) still not licensed.
But things that work, accumulate evidence that they do, and good chances get licensed. That’s the way science works.
I don’t blame anyone for trying things out, in fact we need people who do to figure out what actually works. But it’s also perfectly reasonable not to want to do that.
PSA: If you’re like me, you want to subscribe to the Open Threads Tag, to not miss these: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/open-threads
Useful to keep in mind, especially the point of getting an introduction to the next person.
But I want to point out that it’s also easy to undershoot. Many people hesitate to ask questions or contact new people. It makes me sad when people waste hours on something that I can answer / fix in minutes.
Another thing is to keep time spent / saved in mind. A well crafted message, that’s easy to understand and only requires a short answer, is much harder to write than going back and forth a few times.
If you spend 100x the time you save the other person, it’s probably not worth it in most non-Paul-Christiano-cases.
Thanks for the post, it’s useful to be reminded of every now and then. The first time I thought about it was when thinking about the statement by doctors that “somebodies life expectancy is 6 months”. This also actually means that there is a high chance to die very soon, but if that doesn’t happen they’ll probably live on for many years.
Planning as if they would live for +/- 6 months is useless in that case.
Here’s a form to give the Lightcone team anonymous feedback about this decision (or anything).
The link seems to be missing.
Also: Looking forward to the postmortem.
LessWrong open thread, I love it. I hope they become as lively as the ACX Open Threads (if they have the same intention).
I’m reading the sequences this year (1/day, motivated by this post) and am enjoying it so far. Lmk if I’m wasting my time by not “just” reading the highlights.
PS: In case you or someone you know is looking for a software engineer, here’s my profile: https://cv.martinmilbradt.de/. Preferably freelance, but I’m open to employment if the project is impactful or innovative.
Dang I seem to have not participated.
Can you give the percentiles for people with >130, 140 and 160 IQ (self reported) to determine that the 150 IQ cutoff is not cherry-picked? Does it work like that?
I’m doing it for years already but have not done analysis. My dentist empathized also brushing my gums. GPT has arguments in favor of that when prompted directly.
Has GPT suggested anything unexpected yet?
I don’t know how to make Meditations on Moloch into a video. But it has shaped me deeply and I feel it contains a lot of important lessons that could make or break the future.
Closing paragraph:
He always and everywhere offers the same deal: throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you power.
As long as the offer’s open, it will be irresistible. So we need to close the offer. Only another god can kill Moloch. We have one on our side, but he needs our help. We should give it to him.
Ginsberg’s poem famously begins “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”. I am luckier than Ginsberg. I got to see the best minds of my generation identify a problem and get to work.
Great initiative. I’m also surprised at times how many people program without utilizing the full potential of debuggers.
Depending on the line of work, parallelization / performance through matrix multiplication might not matter, though.
The last line says it’s free, but you mention it’s an ad repeatedly. Maybe clarify if you demand / expect / appreciate payment in the beginning.