I work at the Alignment Research Center (ARC). I write a blog on stuff I’m interested in (such as math, philosophy, puzzles, statistics, and elections): https://ericneyman.wordpress.com/
Eric Neyman
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Let’s test this! I made a Twitter poll.
Oh, that’s a good point. Here’s a freehand map of the US I drew last year (just the borders, not the outline). I feel like I must have been using my mind’s eye to draw it.
I think very few people have a very high-fidelity mind’s eye. I think the reason that I can’t draw a bicycle is that my mind’s eye isn’t powerful/detailed enough to be able to correctly picture a bicycle. But there’s definitely a sense in which I can “picture” a bicycle, and the picture is engaging something sort of like my ability to see things, rather than just being an abstract representation of a bicycle.
(But like, it’s not quite literally a picture, in that I’m not, like, hallucinating a bicycle. Like it’s not literally in my field of vision.)
Huh! For me, physical and emotional pain are two super different clusters of qualia.
My understanding of Sarah’s comment was that the feeling is literally pain. At least for me, the cringe feeling doesn’t literally hurt.
[Question] Which things were you surprised to learn are not metaphors?
I don’t really know, sorry. My memory is that 2023 already pretty bad for incumbent parties (e.g. the right-wing ruling party in Poland lost power), but I’m not sure.
Fair enough, I guess? For context, I wrote this for my own blog and then decided I might as well cross-post to LW. In doing so, I actually softened the language of that section a little bit. But maybe I should’ve softened it more, I’m not sure.
[Edit: in response to your comment, I’ve further softened the language.]
Yeah, if you were to use the neighbor method, the correct way to do so would involve post-processing, like you said. My guess, though, is that you would get essentially no value from it even if you did that, and that the information you get from normal polls would prrtty much screen off any information you’d get from the neighbor method.
I think this just comes down to me having a narrower definition of a city.
If you ask people who their neighbors are voting for, they will make their best guess about who their neighbors are voting for. Occasionally their best guess will be to assume that their neighbors will vote the same way that they’re voting, but usually not. Trump voters in blue areas will mostly answer “Harris” to this question, and Harris voters in red areas will mostly answer “Trump”.
Ah, I think I see. Would it be fair to rephrase your question as: if we “re-rolled the dice” a week before the election, how likely was Trump to win?
My answer is probably between 90% and 95%. Basically the way Trump loses is to lose some of his supporters or have way more late deciders decide on Harris. That probably happens if Trump says something egregiously stupid or offensive (on the level of the Access Hollywood tape), or if some really bad news story about him comes out, but not otherwise.
It’s a little hard to know what you mean by that. Do you mean something like: given the information known at the time, but allowing myself the hindsight of noticing facts about that information that I may have missed, what should I have thought the probability was?
If so, I think my answer isn’t too different from what I believed before the election (essentially 50⁄50). Though I welcome takes to the contrary.
I’m not sure (see footnote 7), but I think it’s quite likely, basically because:
It’s a simpler explanation than the one you give (so the bar for evidence should probably be lower).
We know from polling data that Hispanic voters—who are disproportionately foreign-born—shifted a lot toward Trump.
The biggest shifts happened in places like Queens, NY, which has many immigrants but (I think?) not very much anti-immigrant sentiment.
That said, I’m not that confident and I wouldn’t be shocked if your explanation is correct. Here are some thoughts on how you could try to differentiate between them:
You could look on the precinct-level rather than the county-level. Some precincts will be very high-% foreign-born (above 50%). If those precincts shifted more than surrounding precincts, that would be evidence in favor of my hypothesis. If they shifted less, that would be evidence in favor of yours.
If someone did a poll with the questions “How did you vote in 2020”, “How did you vote in 2024″, and “Were you born in the U.S.”, that could more directly answer the question.
Seven lessons I didn’t learn from election day
An interesting thing about this proposal is that it would make every state besides CA, TX, OK, and LA pretty much irrelevant for the outcome of the presidential election. E.g. in this election, whichever candidate won CATXOKLA would have enough electoral votes to win the election, even if the other candidate won every swing state.
...which of course would be unfair to the non-CATXOKLA states, but like, not any more unfair than the current system?
Yeah, that’s right—see this section for the full statements.
Research update: Towards a Law of Iterated Expectations for Heuristic Estimators
Since no one is giving answers, I’ll give my super uninformed take. If anyone replies with a disagreement, you should presume that they are right.
During a recession, countries want to spend their money on economic stimulus programs that create jobs and get their citizens to spend more. China seems to be doing this.
Is spending on AI development good for these goals? I’m tempted to say no. One exception is building power plants, which China would maybe need to eventually do in order to build sufficiently large models.
At the same time, China seems to have a pretty big debt problem. Its debt-to-GDP ratio was 288% in 2023 (I think this number accounts not only for national debt but also for local government debt and maybe personal debt, which I think China has a lot of compared to other countries like the United States). This might in practice constrain how much it can spend.
So China is in a position of wanting to spend, but not spend too much, and AI probably isn’t a great place for it to spend in order to accomplish its immediate goals.
In other words, I think the recession makes AGI development a lower priority for the Chinese government. It seems quite plausible to me that the recession might delay the creation of a large government project for building AGI by a few years.
(Again, I don’t know stuff about this. Maybe someone will reply saying “Actually, China has already created a giant government project for building AGI” with a link.)
It took until I was today years old to realize that reading a book and watching a movie are visually similar experiences for some people!