Here are some scattered comments about the 2024 elections.
I was glad to have Manifold Markets and Election Betting Odds to watch the results. I want numbers, not encumbered by the storytellers and emotions of the news media. I also watched the odds that Nate Silver tried to update, but that was a total flop.
I see many weak hints that the polarization of the US has subsided compared to 2020.
Continue ReadingI see widespread dismissal of AI capabilities. This slows down the productivity gains from AI, and is a major contributor to disagreements about the risks of AI.
It reminds me of prejudice against various types of biological minds.
Continue ReadingBook review: On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, by Nate Silver.
Nate Silver’s latest work straddles the line between journalistic inquiry and subject matter expertise.
“On the Edge” offers a valuable lens through which to understand analytical risk-takers.
Silver divides the interesting parts of the world into two tribes.
On his side, we have “The River” – a collection of eccentrics typified by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and professional gamblers, who tend to be analytical, abstract, decoupling, competitive, critical, independent-minded (contrarian), and risk-tolerant.
Continue ReadingBook review: Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World, by Tom Chivers.
Many have attempted to persuade the world to embrace a Bayesian worldview, but none have succeeded in reaching a broad audience.
Continue ReadingI participated last summer in Tetlock’s Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament (755(!) page paper here).
Superforecasters and “subject matter experts” engaged in a hybrid between a prediction market and debates, to predict catastrophic and existential risks this century.
Continue ReadingOpenAI has told us in some detail what they’ve done to make GPT-4 safe.
This post will complain about some misguided aspects of OpenAI’s goals.
Continue ReadingBook review: How Social Science Got Better: Overcoming Bias with More Evidence, Diversity, and Self-Reflection, by Matt Grossmann.
It’s easy for me to become disenchanted with social science when so much of what I read about it is selected from the most pessimistic and controversial reports.
With this book, Grossmann helped me to correct my biased view of the field. While plenty of valid criticisms have been made about social science, many of the complaints lobbed against it are little more than straw men.
Grossmann offers a sweeping overview of the progress that the field has made over the past few decades. His tone is optimistic and hearkens back to Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of our Nature, while maintaining a rigorous (but dry) style akin to the less controversial sections of Robin Hanson’s Age of Em. Throughout the book, Grossmann aims to outdo even Wikipedia in his use of a neutral point of view.
Continue ReadingBook review: Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein.
Doctors are more willing to order a test for patients they see in the morning than for those they see late in the day.
Asylum applicants chances of prevailing may be as low as 5% or as high as 88% purely due to which judge hears their case.
Clouds Make Nerds Look Good, in the sense that university admissions officers give higher weight to academic attributes on cloudy days.
These are examples of what the authors describe as an important and neglected problem.
A more precise description of the book’s topic is variations in judgment, with judgment defined as “measurement in which the instrument is a human mind”.
Continue ReadingIt’s been a decade since I blogged about the benefits of avoiding news.
In that time I mostly followed the advice I gave. I kicked my addiction to The Daily Show in late 2016 after it switched from ridiculing Trump to portraying him as scary (probably part of a general trend for the show to be less funny). I got more free time, and only missed the news a little bit.
Then the pandemic hit.
I suddenly needed lots of new information. Corporate earnings releases were too slow.
Wikipedia, Our World in Data, Metaculus, and some newly created COVID-specific web sites partly filled that gap. But I still needed more, and I mostly didn’t manage to find anything that was faster or more informative than the news media storyteller industry.
That at least correlated with higher than normal stress. I suspect that paying attention to the storytellers partly caused the stress.
Continue ReadingHere are a bunch of loosely organized ideas that didn’t have a natural place in my review of WEIRDest People.
WEIRDest People is almost as important for understanding human biases as is Thinking Fast and Slow.
Continue Reading