Reddit reviews Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
We found 13 Reddit comments about Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Crown Publishing Group NY
This is the message I just sent to the admins
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I remember when /u/Spez came back and did his big AMA, one of the big questions was about moderators abusing power. Then /u/Spez just did another AMA and the two biggest questions were in regard to moderators being abusive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/4megfw/ama_about_my_darkest_secrets/d3uu949
Now we have a huge mass shooting. And the mods at /r/news are silencing discussion and conversation about it. It's absurd.
I actually woke up, 830 CT, checked Reddit, saw nothing out of the ordinary, started cooking breakfast. My girlfriend woke up, checked CNN and told me about the shooting. I re-opened the Reddit app and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled. Went to /r/News finally and saw that nuked thread. Went to /r/all and of all the god damn subs on Reddit, it's /r/the_donald leading the charge in reporting news.
Is this what you imagined Reddit to be? I certainly never thought it would come to this. For the last 5 years, I've always come to Reddit when events like this happen, because Reddit gave me the best perspective. Locals, professionals, lay people who are smart as hell: all gathered together, bringing their knowledge to bear on a situation. Reddit embodies one of the key lessons in the book Superforcasting—groups are smarter than individuals. Reddit live threads and megathreads have been amazing. /r/news and /r/worldnews have been, in the past, places that left mainstream media in the dust.
But today was an ugly day. Today was Reddit at its worst. Corrupted.
I hope you all take this seriously and send a message that moderation like this won't be tolerated. I recommend you remove every single one of the /r/news and /r/worldnews mods. Start fresh. That may take more work, but it's the healthiest choice you can make. Mods like this are legitimately a cancer. If you leave them alone, they will fester and continue to wreak havoc on the body "in toto".
Whether you all like it or not, Reddit has become a political tool. It's become a business tool. It's become a marketing tool. You've created something amazing that helps shape the world. But it's also shaped by the world. And, just like a gun, there are people who would use Reddit in evil ways. It's time to stop ignoring the issues with moderators and moderation. People with selfish interests have, overtime, worked their way into key moderation positions in reddit. Mod abuse is real. And mod abuse is something that will wreck your site, that will leave Reddit a hollow shell of what it began is, what it was, and what it could have been.
Please, do something. You're our only hope.
Quote from Superforecasting about a superforecaster named Doug:
>Doug knows that when people read for pleasure they naturally gravitate to the like-minded. So he created a database containing hundreds of information sources—from the New York Times to obscure blogs—that are tagged by their ideological orientation, subject matter, and geographical origin, then wrote a program that selects what he should read next using criteria that emphasize diversity. Thanks to Doug’s simple invention, he is sure to constantly encounter different perspectives.
Someone emailed Doug to see if he'd be willing to make his software public. If I recall correctly, Doug said that his software was a pile of kludges and would need to be redone if it was going to be used by anyone else.
However, I don't think the program described would be difficult for you to independently replicate at all. Even better, make it in to a discussion website. Something like reddit, but without any upvoting or downvoting, just links that are a representative sample of perspectives from all across the political spectrum.
Reddit is basically a confirmation bias nightmare, with view-specific subreddits where one point of view gets upvotes and opposing points of view get downvotes. Similar "filter bubble" issues exist on other social websites. Creating an online community version of Doug's program could be an ideal way to build a platform where people of different political views engaged each other without any single perspective coming to rule the entire community.
Another idea: I've heard that Tumblr is full of bugs. Since it's owned by Yahoo, it probably won't get much better. But it's heavily used in the rationality community. What if you created a competitor for Tumblr, but targeted at the community, with fewer bugs, and with better conversational dynamics? I honestly wonder whether Tumblr's lousy conversational dynamics are an existential threat to Effective Altruism and the rationality movement. (Note: I think theunitofcaring was involved in a project like this at one point, but it got abandoned? I suggest talking to her and trying to get her to advise you.)
> I keep mentioning a surprise to the upside, but no one wants to listen because apparently only 3 sigmas can happen to the downside (to an asset class with a historical tilt very much to the upside).
Is it POSSIBLE? Yes. Is it PROBABLE? No. It comes across as wishful thinking more than anything. That's not an investment strategy.
> But to me, there's just as much risk in being underweight equities right now, leaving purchasing power on the table
All (Western) sovereign bond yields for as far as the eye can see point to deflation, not inflation, so the purchasing power argument is moot, unless you're going to claim greater insight than the bond market.
> and perhaps missing a financial goal or two, as there is involved for anyone "expecting" somewhat similar historical risk-adjusted returns.
I'm not sure if FOMO is a legitimate argument for being fully invested. I think you underestimate the sophistication of both the models and posters advocating low forward returns. This isn't the 1960s where we still think the Phillips curve will hold, there HAS been substantial progress in econometrics and forecasting over the past 70 years.
Hmm.. The only other two I can think of is:
**edit: Ah! Looks like you figured it out! :)
I think keeping up with events in a meaningful way is quite a laborious undertaking.
Like, it is difficult to understand the significance of the recent killings in Jerusalem without being aware of the rising tensions over the past few months, the current political climate in Israel, the history of Palestinian uprisings, the relationship between Israel, the Palestinian people, and neighbouring states, the deep connection between Jewish identity in the diaspora and the Israeli state, and so on.
Even with a lot of historical context, significant developments in world affairs, national politics, or what have you typically require a lot of thought to sort out--especially when there are many contrary narratives on offer. Trying to maintain such a grasp on a wide array of events constitutes a major time investment.
A headline-level awareness of, say, Russia's recent intervention in the Ukraine is hardly better than no sense of that conflict at all. Grand events are endlessly complicated, their implications are multifaceted and prohibitively difficult to predict--let alone to usefully apply to one's life.
(Total aside, Philip Tetlock's book on professional forecasting was really good and you would probably like it.)
> Even if it doesn't affect my life right now, the fact it might affect my life in 5 or 10 years means I am better off keeping up with it.
Most developments you'd read about in the news? Probably not outside of your ability to discuss them. (Granted, that ability is in and of itself important in many social circles.)
I get that. I guess it all depends on the context, your environment and chosen career path. I look at this from an entrepreneurial and/or high powered corporate point of view (i'm in sales, probably the worst job for an INTP) because that's the context I find myself in. If you feel that you want to stick more to your true self find something that encourages low risk, weighing all the pros and cons by all means go for it.
Recently I've read an interesting book that helped me wrap my head around being indecisive and speaking more openly about things I'm not certain of - Superforecasting. On the whole it's a meh book, but one thing that it taught me that everything can be handled by talking in probabilities. Instead of thinking in certainties you talk about probabilities of 70%-80% (there's a scene in Zero Dark Thirty showing exactly this). I found that this helped me to make decisions faster and act faster.
> I can't seem to find them, but there's been studies showing police officers and judges (people who professionally have to evaluate whether someone is lying) are actually slightly worse than average at detecting lies.
I seem to remember that particular tale popping up as an example in Superforecasting (read it if you haven't already!), attributed in part to a lack of reliable immediate feedback as to whether or not their assessments were correct.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock.
Your rules link doesn't work.
Read: http://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Prediction-Philip-E-Tetlock/dp/0804136696/
if you want some helpful insight into making accurate forecasts
Recent psychology research is showing some people can make accurate predictions about the future--though, the research discussed concerns predictions on a <10 year timescale. Still a good place to start though.
People dis Kurzweil, but on Less Wrong a bunch of volunteers went through a ton of his old predictions and the result is that maybe 30% of them were accurate. Not super impressive, but it's a lot better than it could be given that the predictions were made 10 years in advance.
Superforecasting has been on my "get to soon" list since I got it last Christmas. It just got a nice nod in the latest CAS magazine.
Along the probability/math lines, other books I've enjoyed are:
Unless recidivism accounts for the difference between CHLs and the rest of Texans, the conclusion remains unchanged, and that study remains a case of lying with statistics. If you want to imply that recidivism invalidates the raw trends, then that's on you to prove. There's data on recidivism from nij.gov and bjs.gov.
But if that were true, we would have seen the early data (1996-2000 or so) showing CHLs convicted at an equal or greater rate compared to the Texas population. That didn't happen.
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What I'm implying is that conclusions like the ones found in that study:
>Our results imply that expanding the settings in which concealed carry is permitted may increase the risk of specific types of crimes, some quite serious in those settings. These increased risks may be relatively small. Nonetheless, policymakers should consider these risks when contemplating reducing the scope of gun-free zones.
Are flatly contradicted by the data when it's presented in the standard "crime rates between groups" way, rather than a convoluted "let's compare proportions of crime within groups" way. They would be totally right if the CHL murder rate per 100k population was higher than the Texas rate, but it never has been in recorded history.
Many people like to paint all CHLs with a broad, monster-shaped brush, as though they are far more likely to cause harm than the average population. If age factored into that fear, then those people would be far more terrified of teenagers and the demographic groups that do actually account for disproportionately more violent crime relative to their population size. Yet that's not the case.
And I don't see how sociopaths factor in here; they exist in both population groups. Sociopaths have been found to make up for 25-35% of prison populations [1], [2]. If more sociopaths were drawn to becoming a CHL than normal, that would be reflected in higher convictions for CHLs. So either they aren't actually drawn in, or the system is keeping them out, as intended.
Ultimately it comes down to this: Imagine you took two random Texans, and were told that one was a CHL. Right now many people assume that the CHL is going to be more likely to be violent than the non-CHL, and fear the CHL for it. Yet the evidence shows that by the end of the year, the CHL is 14x less likely to end up convicted of any crime, 14x less likely to end up convicted of a violent crime, and is overall less likely to end up convicted of a murder.
I'm implying that widespread fear and bigotry towards CHLs is wrong. The available data does not support it.
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If this doesn't make sense, I suggest you check out Superforecasting. It covers a predictions tournament on world events and how a group civilians went head to head against CIA analysts armed with classified info. The civilians trounced them, and it tells how they did it. Here's a review and excerpts. There's also a Freakonomics podcast episode on the book.
We're all trying to do the best we can in this crazy place called crypto.
As to your comment, that's why there is no DCF or dividend discount model or the like in my post. Scenario analysis is a start of something and it gives context. It leans on assumptions and guesses and it's weak for it. But it gives better context than just rolling the dice or guessing without going through the rigor of breaking it down. Have you read Superforecasters? I highly recommend it.
Another framework to use that might be of some use would just to look at comparable cryptos. LTC/BTC relationship, estimated of TX/day and number of users and value, etc.