Current takeaways from the 2024 US election <> forecasting community. First section in Forecasting newsletter: US elections, posting here because it has some overlap with EA. 1. Polymarket beat legacy institutions at processing information, in real time and in general. It was just much faster at calling states, and more confident earlier on the correct outcome. 2. The OG prediction markets community, the community which has been betting on politics and increasing their bankroll since PredictIt, was on the wrong side of 50%—1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It was the democratic, open-to-all nature of it, the Frenchman who was convinced that mainstream polls were pretty tortured and bet ~$45M, what moved Polymarket to the right side of 50/50. 3. Polls seem like a garbage in garbage out kind of situation these days. How do you get a representative sample? The answer is maybe that you don't. 4. Polymarket will live. They were useful to the Trump campaign, which has a much warmer perspective on crypto. The federal government isn't going to prosecute them, nor bettors. Regulatory agencies, like the CFTC and the SEC, which have taken such a prominent role in recent editions of this newsletter, don't really matter now, as they will be aligned with financial innovation rather than opposed to it. 5. NYT/Siena really fucked up with their last poll and the coverage of it. So did Ann Selzer. Some prediction market bettors might have thought that you could do the bounded distrust, but in hindsight it turns out that you can't. Looking back, to the extent you trust these institutions, they can ratchet their deceptiveness (from misleading headlines, incomplete stories, incomplete quotes out of context, not reporting on important stories, etc.) for clicks and hopium, to shape the information landscape for a managerial class that... will no longer be in power in America. 6. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel look like geniuses. In contrast Dustin Moskovitz couldn't get SB 1047 passed despite being the s

The value of switching non-EA funding to EA orgs might still be under-appreciated. While we obsess over (rightly so) where EA funding should be going, shifting money from one EA cause to another "better" ne might often only make an incremental difference, while moving money from a non-EA pool to fund cost-effective interventions might make an order of magnitude difference. There's nothing new to see here. High impact foundations are being cultivated to shift donor funding to effective causes, the “Center for effective aid policy”  was set up (then shut down) to shift governement money to more effective causes, and many great EAs work in public service jobs partly to redirect money. The Lead exposure action fund spearheaded by OpenPhil is hopefully re-directing millions to a fantastic cause as we speak. I would love to see an analysis (might have missed it) which estimates the “cost-effectiveness” of redirecting a dollar into a 10x or 100x more cost-effective intervention, How much money/time would it be worth spending to redirect money this way? Also I'd like to get my head around how much might the working "cost-effectiveness" of an org improve if its budget shifted from 10% non-EA funding to 90% non- EA funding. There are obviously costs to roping in non-EA funding. From my own experience it often takes huge time and energy. One thing I’ve appreciated about my 2 attempts applying for EA adjacent funding is just how straightforward It has been – probably an order of magnitude less work than other applications.  Here’s a few practical ideas to how we could further redirect funds 1. EA orgs could put more effort into helping each other access non-EA money. This is already happening through the AIM cluster, but I feel the scope could be widened to other orgs, and co-ordination could be improved a lot without too much effort. I’m sure pools of money are getting missed all the time. For example I sure hope we're doing whatever we can through our networks to help E

Celebrating your users - this just popped into my inbox celebrating my double digit meetings using the Calendly tool.  It highlights a great practice of understanding your users' journey and celebrating the key moments that matter.  Onboarding and offboarding are key moments, but so are points that can transition them to a power user.  From forum stalker to contributor.  This allows me to reflect on how good an experience I've had that I keep using this tool (make sure it is good), and as a next step suggests tips on how I can use the tool more pervasively to get more embedded in the ecosystem.  So think about how you can celebrate your users when community building.  

I'm pretty confident that Marketing is in the top 1-3 skill bases for aspiring Community / Movement Builders. When I say Marketing, I mean it in the broad sense it used to mean. In recent years "Marketing" = "Advertising", but I use the classic Four P's of Marketing to describe it. The best places to get such a skill base is at FMCG / mass marketing organisations such as the below. Second best would be consulting firms (McKinsey & Company): * Procter & Gamble (P&G) * Unilever * Coca-Cola * Amazon 1. Product - What you're selling (goods or services) - Features and benefits - Quality, design, packaging - Brand name and reputation - Customer service and support 2. Price - Retail/wholesale pricing - Discounts and promotions - Payment terms - Pricing strategy (premium, economy, etc.) - Price comparison with competitors 3. Place (Distribution) - Sales channels - Physical/online locations - Market coverage - Inventory management - Transportation and logistics - Accessibility to customers 4. Promotion - Advertising - Public relations - Sales promotions - Direct marketing - Digital marketing - Personal selling

I just learned that Lawrence Lessig, the lawyer who is/was representing Daniel Kokateljo and other OpenAI employees, supported and encouraged electors to be faithless and vote against Trump in 2016. He wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post (archived) and offered free legal support. The faithless elector story was covered by Politico, and was also supported by Mark Ruffalo (the actor who recently supported SB-1047). I think this was clearly an attempt to steal an election and would discourage anyone from working with him. I expect someone to eventually sue AGI companies for endangering humanity, and I hope that Lessig won't be involved.