TechTakes

Turns out sneerclub is the superpredictor. 10/10 on going 'this is a bad idea'.

Are prediction markets not actually useful? No, it is the reality who is wrong.

Also I want to rant once again about the stupid way these people evade the insider trading problem, because there's a particular failure at play that I keep finding expressed in new and interesting ways.

So the argument goes that while insider trading may be bad for a financial market it actually just allows insiders to add their information to increase the predictive power of the market. Which would be true enough if we assume nothing else changes, but the same would also be true for price discovery in a normal asset market. Clearly we're missing something.

So why is it insider trading bad? Because it turns people without insider info into the dumb money you can take advantage of. And people, very reasonably, aren't going to participate in a system where their main role is being taken advantage of. Their departure means that the insiders don't have access to a pool of dumb money to take so they stop interacting with the system, and the market itself breaks down.

Now if you assume that the majority of people are "NPCs" or aren't very "agentic" or whatever then they're not going to act in systemically meaningful ways no matter how obvious the incentives to do so. You could also cast it as a version of the libertarian-as-housecat notion that markets simply exist as a natural system, rather than being pieces of economic infrastructure that require a lot of management and work to keep functioning at all, even before we get to the question of whether they operate to the public's benefit. So many of the problems with these ideologies spring from this belief that only some people actually matter in a systemic sense by dictating rules and Building Things and being big men, rather than systems being constantly created and shaped by all the people who interact with them through those interactions.

Even Scott's fantasy dream scenario for what prediction markets could be like and what questions they could answer feels... ...deliberately naive? ...like libertarian brainrot? ...disconnected from reality?

Ask yourself: what are the big future-prediction questions that important disagreements pivot around? When I try this exercise, I get things like:

Will the AI bubble pop? Will scaling get us all the way to AGI? Will AI be misaligned?

Huge amounts of money are being dumped into a bubble based on hype, so to hope a predict market would or could make better predictions than the existing business-idiot VCs funding this bubble feels hopelessly naive in a libertarian kind of way. There is already a method of aggregating the wisdom of the crowd and it is failing to incredibly lazy hype and PR.

Will Trump turn America into a dictatorship? Make it great again? Somewhere in between?

Again, there is already a mechanism for aggregating wisdom of the crowds, its called an election, and its also failed to get a answer predicated on reality or truth, so again, it seems incredibly naive to expect prediction markets to do better!

Will YIMBY policies lower rents? How much?

I mean, the councils and communities making these decision already ignore or overlook longer-term broader predictions of economic impact in favor of immediate home-owner value, I don't see why Scott would expect prediction markets to help decision making go better here.

Overall, it feels like Scott is overlooking the way decision making often already ignores science and experts. Society doesn't have a problem making decent predictions compared to the problems it has communicating expert opinions to the public effectively and crafting policy aligned with the public interest.

He was also perplexed that a prediction-market bet on "did COVID-19 come from a lab?" has declined from 85% yes in 2023 to 27% yes. If you click through you see its a bet on Manifold so bettors are rats and fellow travellers. Rationalists have spent $46,714 of real US dollars buying play money to bet on this.

There's a whole good commencement speech hidden there where the "AI ReVoLuTiOn" is likened to the industrial revolution. How it is all about turbocharging the exploitation of workers and the planet; how its promise is to make a few immensely rich and give them the power to oppress everyone; and how we need educated, empathetic young people -- and especially the liberal arts -- to express themselves creatively and push against the system and mainstream narratives, because the only way workers win this "revolution" is the same as always: by song and poem and book and painting that fuels movements and protests.

But what the fuck do I know, I'm not the Vice President of Strategic Alliances for Tavistock Development Company, a real estate firm. I would never be invited to do a commencement speech.

they want your data and freshwater

it's not approval they're after, it's reaffirmation of faith

>box labeled "agentic AI revolution automation realignment innovation acceleration opportunity"

>looks inside

>layoffs

"we're taking our primary product, a piece of tech used for collaborative development of software, and shitting some AI over it. You are all fired. Please clap."

So in highschool, I was one of those annoying kids that went "why do we have to learn how to analyze poems? We're never gonna need this in real life" in English (well... German, but doesn't matter) class.

I'm deeply grateful for my teachers back then to patiently get me to do these things anyways, because there came a point in my life years later where I suddenly understood that those "useless" lessons and hours "wasted" analyzing Goethe and Borchert and Fitzgerald handed me the tools to understand media (and not just literature!) instead of just consuming it.

I hope it's clear how that relates to the screenshot. More than that though, I sometimes feel like the slew of shit media over the past decade is at least in part to blame on writers/studios/... now assuming people do in fact merely consume. But that's a rant that's completely off-topic here, so I'll shut up now.

You know, I kept expecting both this racist and the racist he was arguing with to start making the very obvious argument for why the racism is not only evil but also dumb. And instead they just kept being racist.

To summarize and spare anyone else curious, the argument is about immigration. Racist 1 argues that since some people are objectively better than others [citation desperately needed but not wanted] we should have free migration so that our superior quality of life can attract all the best people so that we can be the best place. He (correctly) notes the absurdity of Racist 2 arguing that although some people are objectively better than others we need to protect ourselves from all foreigners even if they are the best people because their foreignness would hurt our "magic dirt." I'm pretty sure I've seen this criticism elsewhere and from a better and less obviously racist writer elsewhere because the phrase "magic dirt" sounds real familiar.

Also, because I am trying everything back to my particular bugbear today, I have to note that the fundamental and wrong argument that some traits being heritable makes some people objectively better than others is yet another manifestation and justification of what I'm going to start calling the Great Man Theory of Everything. If you start from the position that history, politics, economics, and basically all forms of human activity are fundamentally driven by the actions and decisions of a few people who are for one reason or another destined for power and greatness, you can derive an impressive amount of the libertarian/Rationalist worldview, and if you additionally accept that those people are disproportionately rich white dudes and we shouldn't think too hard about that fact you can get most of the rest of the way there.

How the fuck do you get to the point of writing a line like "Some white nationalists ... have, to their credit" without your own intestine leaping up to throttle your brain?

I'm not going to start a punch-up with a dev team or maintainer who believes that AI tools can help good programmers do good work or whatever, but time and again we see that, just like crypto before it, you aren't inviting good programmers to work with you. You're inviting the bros. AI bros and crypto bros are a specific type of Guy. I'm sure there were dotcom bros in the 90s. This is not a new problem, even if the current economic circumstances makes being this type of Guy more viable than ever, apparently.

It's not just that the tech is bad (though it is bad), it's that it's uniquely privileged by culture and economics to empower the worst assortment of morons and grifters outside of Wall Street (and also inside of Wall Street, because of fucking course it does).

Upvoted but disliked

A quick glance at segfaults reactions seem to me like he operates on 'if I just explain it enough to people they will agree with my side, and if they dont they have not properly heard all the facts', and he (the dox people dropped seems to imply male pronouns) seems to really begrudge friends/people he knows irl for disagreeing with him. Which doesnt seem to be the most healthy place to be in in a conflict like this.

What a shitshow, always sad to see somebody have an online episode like that. (As an outsider I obv have no idea what is going on, and im not going to dig into all that).

He probably paid a rationalist date coach good money to tell him to do that.

Isn't this completely hypothetical though? As in having the various LLMs respond to a story prompt and calling it an experiment, AI safety research style?

It is this continuing slippage of standards that makes me appreciate a hard line against any and all genAI that place like awful.systems have. You concede one small usage and the boosters will keep pushing for more.