Does it make sense to apply the Kelly Criterion to Hanson’s LMSR? It seems to intuitively, but my math skills are too weak.
Slackson
Karma: 482
Thanks.
So I’ve kind of formulated a possible way to use markets to predict quantiles. It seems quite flawed looking back on it two and a half weeks later, but I still think it might be an interesting line of inquiry.
This doesn’t always apply. It can, for example, leave you with an hour to kill at a train station, because you decided it would be really embarrassing to show up late for your ride to a CFAR workshop because of the planning fallacy.
Yep.
Shorter posts when you’re starting is a step in the right direction.
What could you do to make reading alone more pleasant, without a trade-off in productivity?
System 1 is the intuitive one, system 2 is the formal reasoning.
“If it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down.”
This is one of the first things I remember learning, growing up with tank water.
I’m not sure I can visualize that very well?
I’ve started a blog, and I’m kind of unreasonably shy about it. Especially given that it’s, you know, a blog.
I’m looking for a simple an aesthetic symbol for humanism and humanity, from our ancestors looking at the stars and wondering why, and telling each other stories, and caring for each other in the distant past, to the invention of agriculture, democracy, civilization, the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, the improvement in the human condition, technology and knowledge and truth.
I think some of you know what I mean. Humanism Pt. 3 style chills.
Ideas I’ve thought of: hands, sails, brains, seeds, eyes, sprouts, flames. I was looking at getting symbols of both Apollo and Dionysus, but Dionysus in particular doesn’t have anything particularly minimalist. An outline of human isn’t connected strongly enough to the ideal I want to symbolize. The typical Happy Human is ugly. The “h+” thing is too narrow, and not visual enough.
EDIT:
The most appealing idea for me currently is a small sprout with a candle flame in between two or four leaves, inspired by the image and story here, maybe with the roots somehow obviously analogs of neurons. What do you all think of that?
Perhaps digests of the most-upvoted posts in a particular time period? Top from week x, top from month y, top from whichever time period? People can archive-binge to the degree that they find most comfortable.
Stuff I learned at the Melbourne CFAR workshop. Class name was offline habit training, i.e. actually performing your habit multiple times in a row, in response to the trigger. Salient examples: Practicing getting out of bed in response to your alarm, practice walking in the door and putting your keys where they belong, practice putting your hands on your lap when about to bite nails, practice straightening your neck when you notice you’re hunched. These are all examples I’ve implemented, and I have had good results.
Adding associations is a key part, too. For these examples, I imagine the alarm as an air raid siren and my house getting bombed if I don’t get out of bed on time. I imagine Butch being shot by Vincent in an alternate version of Pulp Fiction if his father’s watch wasn’t on the little kangaroo and he had to hunt around for it. For biting my nails, I imagine Mia Wallace being stabbed in the heart . The connection here is biting nails can make you sick. The vividness and intensity makes up for how tenuous that is. For posture, I imagine Gandalf the Grey compared to Gandalf the White (plus triumphant LoTR music).
Since I made that comment, I got about a third of the way through Moonwalking With Einstein, and practiced the Memory Palace/method of loci a couple of times. I’ve lived in a bunch of different houses, so that works pretty well for me. Some of the stuff that was mentioned sounds a lot like spacing techniques. “”[...] if you revisit the journey through your memory palace later this evening, and again tomorrow afternoon, and perhaps again a week from now, this list will leave a truly lasting impression.”
This is another bit of evidence suggesting that spaced repetition would be powerful in combination with mnemonics. What Anki provides, which is far more important than the flashcard thing, is testing. I’ve been thinking about applying some of the ideas from test-driven development to self-programming, and Anki cards would be a core part of that.
Sorry, I realize most of that isn’t relevant, but I hope the parts that were are useful.
Anki is very extensible. I think writing easy-to-use Anki plugins would be a great way to practice coding and get some useful stuff out there. In fact, I’m adding that to my list of things to look into.
Anki is good for trigger → response sorts of memorization, but requires a bit of hacking for other things. Combining mnemonics with spaced repetition, I’ve heard, is ridiculously powerful. I’ve got a card with three sides, Trigger, Association, and Response, to try and strengthen the trigger → response bond. I’ve set it up so I’ve got Trigger → Response, Association → Response, Trigger → Association and Trigger → Association and Response cards. If anyone wants me to share this format, I’m happy to do so.
ETA: Combining this with habit-training techniques is, I predict, potentially powerful.
How well does operant conditioning work where there’s a perceived causal link compared to when there is not?
I have a Big List of Things To Try, or BLoTTT, because everything I do has to have a tacky self-helpy name even if I make it up myself. Lately I’ve just been, you know, trying them. It seems obvious, but it’s easy to make this list and not do anything with it because you’re always too busy or focused on something else or whatever. But really, it took two minutes to install f.lux and f.lux is awesome.
So is:
Boomerang
Anki
Evernote
Pomodoro
Sunlight
IFTTT
Not so awesome (for me):
Rails
Napping
Large amounts of caffeine
But I learned!
The Rails tutorial I started introduced me to TDD. TDD is great, so I’m learning to apply it to Django.
Easier to appreciate proper sleep now.
Low doses of caffeine are also great, and as yet it’s nowhere near as addictive for me as it seems to be for other people. Still on a 1 day on, 2 days off cycle, to be safe.
Sorry, should’ve been more clear.
I’ve started work on a rudimentary play money binary prediction market using LMSR in django (still very much incomplete, PM me for a link if you’d like), and my present interface is one of buying and selling shares, which isn’t very user friendly.
With a “changing the price” interface that Hanson details in his paper, accurate participants can easily lose all their wealth on predictions that they’re moderately confident in, depending on their starting wealth. If I have it so agents can always bet, then the wealth accumulation in accurate predictors won’t happen and the market won’t actually learn which agents are more accurate.
With an automated Kelly interface, it seems that participants should be able to input only their probability estimates, and either change the price to what they believe it to be if the cost is less than Kelly, or it would find a price which matches the Kelly criterion, so that agents with poorer predictive ability can keep playing and learn to do better, and agents with better predictive ability accumulate more wealth and contribute more to the predictions.
However, I’m uncertain as to whether a) the markets would be as accurate as if I used a conventional “changing the price” interface (due to the fact that it seems we’re doing log utility twice), and b) whether I can find find the Kelly criterion for this, with a probability estimate being the only user input and the rest calculated from data about the market, the user’s balance, etc.