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Comment by andrepd

5 days ago

Context? Who are these people and what are these numbers and why shouldn't I assume they're pulled from thin air?

8 comments

andrepd

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Voloskaya  5 days ago

> why shouldn't I assume they're pulled from thin air?

You definitely should assume they are. They are rationalists, the modus operandi is to pull stuff out of thin air and slap a single digit precision percentage prediction in front to make it seems grounded in science and well thought out.

c1ccccc1  4 days ago

You should basically assume they are pulled from thin air. (Or more precisely, from the brain and world model of the people making the prediction.)

The point of giving such estimates is mostly an exercise in getting better at understanding the world, and a way to keep yourself honest by making predictions in advance. If someone else consistently gives higher probabilities to events that ended up happening than you did, then that's an indication that there's space for you to improve your prediction ability. (The quantitative way to compare these things is to see who has lower log loss [1].)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-entropy

  • jancsika  4 days ago

    > If someone else consistently gives higher probabilities to events that ended up happening than you did, then that's an indication that there's space for you to improve your prediction ability.

    Your inference seems ripe for scams.

    For example-- if I find out that a critical mass of participants aren't measuring how many participants are expected to outrank them by random chance, I can organize a simplistic service to charge losers for access to the ostensible "mentors."

    I think this happened with the stock market-- you predict how many mutual fund managers would beat the market by random chance for a given period. Then you find that same (small) number of mutual fund managers who beat the market and switched to a more lucrative career of giving speeches about how to beat the market. :)

  • lucianbr  4 days ago

    Is there some database where you can see predictions of different people and the results? Or are we supposed to rely on them keeping track and keeping themselves honest? Because that is not something humans do generally, and I have no reason to trust any of these 'rationalists'.

    This sounds like a circular argument. You started explaining why them giving percentage predictions should make them more trustworthy, but when looking into the details, I seem to come back to 'just trust them'.

    • c1ccccc1  4 days ago

      Yes, there is: https://manifold.markets/

      People's bets are publicly viewable. The website is very popular with these "rationality-ists" you refer to.

      I wasn't in fact arguing that giving a prediction should make people more trustworthy, please explain how you got that from my comment? I said that the main benefit to making such predictions is as practice for the predictor themselves. If there's a benefit for readers, it is just that they could come along and say "eh, I think the chance is higher than that". Then they also get practice and can compare how they did when the outcome is known.

ohdeargodno  4 days ago

>Who are these people

Clowns, mostly. Yudkowski in particular, whose only job today seems to be making awful predictions and letting lesswrong eat it up when one out of a hundred ends up coming true, solidifying his position as AI-will-destroy-the-world messiah. They make money from these outlandish takes, and more money when you keep talking about them.

It's kind of like listening to the local drunkard at the bar that once in a while ends up predicting which team is going to win in football inbetween drunken and nonsensical rants, except that for some reason posting the predictions on the internet makes him a celebrity, instead of just a drunk curiosity.