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Did any of the boosters of real-money prediction markets correctly predict that prediction market platforms would be quickly dominated by thinly disguised sports gambling?
(I mean this question literally and earnestly, not as a snide takedown of prediction markets or their proponents)
I have been a firm believer in predictions markets since first learning about them over a decade ago (still am). I certainly did not predict this would happen, nor would have I seen it as a plausible outcome had you asked me.
I don't know of anyone else who did either, neither in the for or against camp. The counterarguments were always:
Assassination markets
Insider trading
Something something unduly influencing results of elections
I don't remember seeing any list of counter arguments which included: "will be optimised to prey on people with weak impulse control".
As a (not super confident) non-believer in real-money prediction markets, curious if you have a best steelman link/post you like or if you want to tell me why you disagree with me (basically the exact 3 reasons you listed plus some more context)?
seems to me we could get a huge chunk of the benefits with play money markets + the existing binary event contracts the cme already allowed.
Yeah I've been interested in prediction markets for years (and usually played the "against" role in discussions) and don't think I've ever came across a serious sports gambling objection before it seemed inevitable.
To be clear I don't think it's a major defeater to prediction markets; sports gambling is evil (especially the Current Year implementations with algorithmic optimization of Dark Patterns) but the net contribution of prediction markets to sports gambling success is probably pretty minimal.
I also don't think it's a defeater for prediction markets in general. However:
the net contribution of prediction markets to sports gambling success is probably pretty minimal.
I'm actually pretty unsure about this. One issue is that by having CFTC-regulated sports betting
"prediction markets", federal preemption causes sports betting to expand into states that would otherwise prohibit it.
Also, I don't think the right question is "have prediction markets contributed to the success of sports gambling?" Rather, it's "has have the harms from sports gambling on prediction markets outweighed their benefits?" I don't have a strong view on this, but it seems plausible so far.
I think the biggest impact, though, is that now prediction markets are becoming strongly associated with sports betting, in a way that threatens their political viability as a project.
I wonder how much value there would be in a company that principally doesn't engage in sports betting. From my understanding, lots of people that bet on these markets like betting on non-sports claims but just hate the sports market component.
I can understand that prediction markets trending towards sports gambling was overlooked by the sort of people who (i) were arguing about the creation of new markets for stuff that didn't already have an abundance of well-marketed gambling options and (ii) generally weren't personally interested in betting on sports.
But lack of debate at the time about preying on people with weak impulse control surprises me, given that prediction markets are by design zero-sum games (like binary options trades, which have long been dominated by boiler room outfits preying on people with weak impulse control, and are regulated equivalently to sports gambling in many jurisdictions) rather than trades between entities with different liquidity needs or risk tolerance. Even if (or especially if) some of the market participants are superforecasters whose data-driven approach makes their assessments worth paying attention to, they still need punters to win money off and most bets offered simply aren't a good hedge for anything.
At Manifold we talked a lot about what kinds of markets/verticals to focus on and were always aware that sports gambling is a big demographic, while mostly choosing to stay out, partly for ideological reasons (not interesting to us), partly because we weren't positioned for it.
I don't think we registered a specific concrete prediction to this effect, but eg in our 2022 seed round memo (~4 months after we were founded) we called out Betfair and Draftkings as the largest available markets.
I think there was one certain failure mode of "prediction markets will somehow both be legal, and also more legal than regular sports gambling, in the US".
This combination of scenarios seemed very unlikely to me 4-6 years ago! I think this was seen universally as a tough combination, you can see this in the market prices / valuations of the related companies.
That said, there was an understanding a while back that US public prediction markets would likely be sleazy/predatory in ways similar to sports gambling. This is one reason I preferred prediction tournaments like Metaculus over financial prediction markets like Kalshi.
I'd also flag that there was, and still is, potential for real-money prediction markets to get adapted by large experienced financial authorities for more serious purposes like hedging. There are overall professionalized and useful ways to use these sorts of tools, though it is the case that much of the current market is quite miserable.
In the US it's contingent on some quirks of gambling law. Dedicated online sports gambling was broadly legalized in most states a few years before sports came to prediction markets (during the early days of prediction market discourse, online sports betting was mostly banned anyway by a federal law struck down by SCOTUS in 2018). But prediction markets are less regulated than the sportsbooks, e.g. they have an minimum age of 18 while sportsbooks are 21 in most states. Otherwise sports markets on prediction platforms would presumably mostly just displace gambling elsewhere.
Both Sam and Dario saying that they now believe they know how to build AGI seems like an underrated development to me. To my knowledge, they only started saying this recently. I suspect they are overconfident, but still seems like a more significant indicator than many people seem to be tracking.
Longtermist shower thought: what if we had a campaign to install Far-UVC in poultry farms? Seems like it could:
Reduce a bunch of diseases in the birds, which is good for: a. the birds’ welfare; b. the workers’ welfare; c. Therefore maybe the farmers’ bottom line?; d. Preventing/suppressing human pandemics (eg avian flu)
Would hopefully drive down the cost curve of Far-UVC
May also generate safety data in chickens, which could be helpful for derisking it for humans
Insofar as one of the main obstacles is humans' concerns for health effects, this would at least only raise these for a small group of workers.
I think 1 unfortunately ends up not being true in the intensive farming case. Lots of things are spread by close enough contact that even intense uvc wouldn't do much (and it would be really expensive)
I had a similar thought a (few) year (s) ago and emailed a couple of people to sanity check the idea - all the experts I asked seemed to think this wouldn't be an effective thing to do (which is why I didn't do any more work on it). I think Alex's points are true (mostly the cost part - I think you could get high enough intensity for it to be effective).
Wouldn't lots of infections even for flu happen through e.g. faeces or such? If the birds are densely packed it might be hard to achieve much with UVC from the ceiling.
Also, about the idea of this being eventually transferable to humans, I wonder if birds have different sensitivity to it (due to being covered in feathers).
Good shower thought! A few people have come to this idea independently for swine CAFOs.
There are a fair number of important "production-limiting diseases" in swine that are primarily spread via respiratory transmission, so this seems to me like a plausible win-win-win (as you've described).
This is all very "shower thought" level on my side as well, and I'd be keen for someone to think this through in more depth. Very happy to talk it through with anyone considering a more thorough investigation!
(Note my understanding is influenza is primarily a gastrointestinal illness in poultry, so I don't think this intervention is as promising in that context.)
Pretty wild discussion in this podcast about how aggressively the USSR cut corners on safety in their space program in order to stay ahead of the US. In the author's telling of the history, this was in large part because Khrushchev wanted to rack up as many "firsts" (e.g., first satellite, first woman in space) as possible. This seems like it was most proximately for prestige and propaganda rather than any immediate strategic or technological benefit (though of course the space program did eventually produce such bigger benefits).
Evidence of the following claim for AI: people may not need a reason to cut corners on safety because the material benefits are so high. They may do so just because of the prestige and glory of being first.
I'd find anecdotes about cutting corners in bioweapons or nuclear (both weapons development and power) more convincing, partially because it's more directly analogous and partially because I don't think Khrushchev is completely heartless.
Example: They crammed three cosmonauts into a capsule initially designed for one person. But due to the size constraints, the cosmonauts couldn't wear proper spacesuits; they had to wear leisure suits!
Biology. We will see an AWS moment where instead of you having to be a biotech firm that opens your own wet lab or moves into Alexandria Real Estate, which is you know, specializes in hosting biotech companies, in in all these different regions approximate to academic research centers. You will be able to just take your experiment and upload it to the cloud where there are cloud-based robotic labs. We funded some of these. There's one company called Stratios.
There's a ton that are gonna come on wave, and this is exciting because you can be a scientist on the beach in the Bahamas, pull up your iPad, run an experiment. The robots are performing 90% of the activity of Pouring something from a beaker into another, running a centrifuge, and then the data that comes off of that.
And this is the really cool part. Then the robot and the machines will actually say to you, “Hey, do you want to run this experiment but change these 4 parameters or these variables?” And you just click a button “yes” as though it's reverse prompting you, and then you run another experiment. So the implication here is that the boost in productivity for science, for generation of truth, of new information, of new knowledge, That to me is the most exciting thing. And the companies that capture that, forget about the societal dividend, I think are gonna make a lot of money.
People sometimes worry that the decrease in companies going public (arguably due to greater securities regulations) will drive down the expected return for public investors as compared to private ones. But it seems like public investors can still get decent exposure to private markets through publicly traded private equity and BDCs.
Maybe an actionable takeaway is to overweight those companies in one's portfolio, to account for the private returns you don't have access to.
Really interesting. There are diversified private equity ETFs (also for BDCs). This has outperformed the market slightly (4.4% annualized return vs. 3.8% for their benchmark S&P index), but I guess because you're then doing active investing as you move away from the global market portfolio and taking higher risk. Seems to violate the efficient market hypothesis that there should be a free lunch here. I guess the difference to buying other ETFs (like a tech ETF) is that is diversified across industries and in a way it's own asset class. In other words, depending on your level of risk aversion you can skew your portfolio towards bonds, stocks, and private equity, and now also with the advent of crypto ETFs, that connect the crypto 'asset class' to the stock market, you can determine your level of risk, through skewing it more towards the latter categories.
Just came across this article that suggests that there's some movement in this direction generally, with Vanguard offering private equity as an investment class.
I guess because you're then doing active investing as you move away from the global market portfolio and taking higher risk.
Couldn't you argue that you're actually moving towards the "true" global market portfolio, which would include many non-publicly-traded assets? (Similar for real estate: seems plausible that people should overweight REITs in their portfolios.)
Seems to violate the efficient market hypothesis that there should be a free lunch here.
Couldn't you argue that you're actually moving towards the "true" global market portfolio, which would include many non-publicly-traded assets? (Similar for real estate: seems plausible that people should overweight REITs in their portfolios.)
Because the companies included in the private equity ETF are also already represented in the global market portfolio, the percentage of the market cap / total market cap is already includes what the market believes to be the discounted future profits of all non-publicly-traded assets that the private equity (e.g. Blackstone) invested in.
Not sure this is true if the risk is also higher.
Yes, beta (and risk) are higher and so alpha and the expected returns are higher, but that's the trade-off so there's no free lunch. It's similar to foregoing bonds and only investing in stocks in one's portfolio, but even riskier.
I think we’re talking past each other a bit. The claim isn’t that it’s directly valuable to overweight publicly traded private equity companies in one’s portfolio. Rather, the claim is that:
The true global portfolio contains much more private equity than the publicly traded market. This estimates that PE is about 3.6% of the global portfolio.
So ideally one’s portfolio (if you’re trying to mimic the global market portfolio) would be about 3.6% PE.
But just buying an equities index fund will underwight PE as an asset class because most PE isn’t public.
You can simulate the true global market portfolio by overweighting public PE if you think public PE should perform similarly to PE broadly.
Oh I see- thanks for clarifying! This is a very interesting idea, but somehow it still seems counterintuitive... by the same logic, wouldn't you also want to overexpose yourself to e.g. publicly traded real estate because most of it isn't public?
If true, and if most passive (institutional) investors aren't sufficiently exposed to PE (or real estate), wouldn't that suggest that the market undervalues this asset class and you can beat the market by investing in it? Honest question, I haven't thought this through very well, but something still feels counterintuitive that you could create a better passive global market portfolio...
if you think public PE should perform similarly to PE broadly.
I think this might be another big if... though also one should be surprised if there'd be a big discontinuous jump in returns when going from non-traded to traded.
by the same logic, wouldn't you also want to overexpose yourself to e.g. publicly traded real estate because most of it isn't public?
Yes, I think that is true as well!
If true, and if most passive (institutional) investors aren't sufficiently exposed to PE (or real estate), wouldn't that suggest that the market undervalues this asset class and you can beat the market by investing in it?
Honest question, I haven't thought this through very well, but something still feels counterintuitive that you could create a better passive global market portfolio...
Hm, very possible I am thinking about this wrong, but it's pretty intuitive to me. After all, isn't the "true" global market all investable assets, not just publicly traded assets? It's the same reason why the Nasdaq Composite is a poor stand-in for the global stock market: for a variety of reasons, it only has a certain subset of publicly traded equities, and other baskets of equities have different risk-return profiles.
I'm beginning to think that we should generally taboo "free speech" when discussing all speech regulation decisions by non-governmental actors. In my experience, people mean very different things by this, ranging from "intellectual openness should weigh heavily in private speech regulation" to "private speech regulators should mirror First Amendment principles." These have very different implications and possible justifications.
Should EAs prepare to start stockpiling N95s when the pandemic is over? There will presumably be a lot of excess capacity, so later this year it may be easier than usual to buy up a ton on N95s and store them for the next few years.
Random, time-sensitive charity idea: start a pledge drive for people who have received their COVID vaccine to contribute the cost of at least one vaccine to the COVAX facility. Unfortunately, Americans can’t directly donate to COVAX, but people from the UK can.
Somewhat incongruously, at the same time that private standardization was both promoting economic globalization and becoming more global, social activists concerned with the impact of globalization on the environment, on workers, and on human rights began to look to ISO's experience with management system standards as a model of how to prevent a globalization-led race to the bottom. For the activists, ISO 9000 provided a governance model for organizations concerned with social and environmental sustainability, one that actually promised their continuous improvement across the global economy. The relevant feature of the model had also helped make ISO 9000 certification such a successful business: as part of the "continuous improve-ment" that the standards demanded, ISO 9000-certified companies were expected increasingly to buy their supplies from companies that also had quality management systems in place. Adherence to this principle helped the standard spread.37 British historian Deborah Cadbury points to a precedent for this hoped-for contagious spread of higher standards in the unusual success of nineteenth-century British and American Quaker manufacturers.
They followed the highest social standards of the day in their own firms, demanded similar standards of their distributors and global suppliers, and were held accountable by an active popular press eager to point out any hypocrisy on the part of these "austere men of God" who influenced "the course of the Industrial Revolution and the [pre-Thatcher-era] commercial world."
JoAnne Yates & Craig N. Murphy, Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880 (2019) (citing Deborah Cadbury, Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers at xii (2010)).
According to the book Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History, some early Christians sold themselves into slavery so they could donate the proceeds to the poor. Super interesting example of extreme and early ETG.
(I'm listening on audiobook so I don't have the precise page for this claim.)
(To avoid bad-faith misinterpretation: I obviously think that nobody should do the same.)
The situation is this: Customer incurs a debt and does not pay. Creditor hires Bill Collector to dun Customer for the money. Bill Collector puts a machine on the job and repeatedly calls Cell Number, at which Customer had agreed to receive phone calls by giving his number to Creditor. The machine, called a predictive dialer, works autonomously until a human voice comes on the line. If that happens, an employee in Bill Collector's call center will join the call. But Customer no longer subscribes to Cell Number, which has been reassigned to Bystander. A human being who called Cell Number would realize that Customer was no longer the subscriber. But predictive dialers lack human intelligence and, like the buckets enchanted by the Sorcerer's Apprentice, continue until stopped by their true master.
Did any of the boosters of real-money prediction markets correctly predict that prediction market platforms would be quickly dominated by thinly disguised sports gambling?
(I mean this question literally and earnestly, not as a snide takedown of prediction markets or their proponents)
I have been a firm believer in predictions markets since first learning about them over a decade ago (still am). I certainly did not predict this would happen, nor would have I seen it as a plausible outcome had you asked me.
I don't know of anyone else who did either, neither in the for or against camp. The counterarguments were always:
I don't remember seeing any list of counter arguments which included: "will be optimised to prey on people with weak impulse control".
As a (not super confident) non-believer in real-money prediction markets, curious if you have a best steelman link/post you like or if you want to tell me why you disagree with me (basically the exact 3 reasons you listed plus some more context)?
seems to me we could get a huge chunk of the benefits with play money markets + the existing binary event contracts the cme already allowed.
Yeah I've been interested in prediction markets for years (and usually played the "against" role in discussions) and don't think I've ever came across a serious sports gambling objection before it seemed inevitable.
To be clear I don't think it's a major defeater to prediction markets; sports gambling is evil (especially the Current Year implementations with algorithmic optimization of Dark Patterns) but the net contribution of prediction markets to sports gambling success is probably pretty minimal.
I also don't think it's a defeater for prediction markets in general. However:
I'm actually pretty unsure about this. One issue is that by having CFTC-regulated sports betting "prediction markets", federal preemption causes sports betting to expand into states that would otherwise prohibit it.
Also, I don't think the right question is "have prediction markets contributed to the success of sports gambling?" Rather, it's "has have the harms from sports gambling on prediction markets outweighed their benefits?" I don't have a strong view on this, but it seems plausible so far.
I think the biggest impact, though, is that now prediction markets are becoming strongly associated with sports betting, in a way that threatens their political viability as a project.
I wonder how much value there would be in a company that principally doesn't engage in sports betting. From my understanding, lots of people that bet on these markets like betting on non-sports claims but just hate the sports market component.
I can understand that prediction markets trending towards sports gambling was overlooked by the sort of people who (i) were arguing about the creation of new markets for stuff that didn't already have an abundance of well-marketed gambling options and (ii) generally weren't personally interested in betting on sports.
But lack of debate at the time about preying on people with weak impulse control surprises me, given that prediction markets are by design zero-sum games (like binary options trades, which have long been dominated by boiler room outfits preying on people with weak impulse control, and are regulated equivalently to sports gambling in many jurisdictions) rather than trades between entities with different liquidity needs or risk tolerance. Even if (or especially if) some of the market participants are superforecasters whose data-driven approach makes their assessments worth paying attention to, they still need punters to win money off and most bets offered simply aren't a good hedge for anything.
At Manifold we talked a lot about what kinds of markets/verticals to focus on and were always aware that sports gambling is a big demographic, while mostly choosing to stay out, partly for ideological reasons (not interesting to us), partly because we weren't positioned for it.
I don't think we registered a specific concrete prediction to this effect, but eg in our 2022 seed round memo (~4 months after we were founded) we called out Betfair and Draftkings as the largest available markets.
I think there was one certain failure mode of "prediction markets will somehow both be legal, and also more legal than regular sports gambling, in the US".
This combination of scenarios seemed very unlikely to me 4-6 years ago! I think this was seen universally as a tough combination, you can see this in the market prices / valuations of the related companies.
That said, there was an understanding a while back that US public prediction markets would likely be sleazy/predatory in ways similar to sports gambling. This is one reason I preferred prediction tournaments like Metaculus over financial prediction markets like Kalshi.
I'd also flag that there was, and still is, potential for real-money prediction markets to get adapted by large experienced financial authorities for more serious purposes like hedging. There are overall professionalized and useful ways to use these sorts of tools, though it is the case that much of the current market is quite miserable.
Also interested in this question! CC @Nathan Young who might know
In the US it's contingent on some quirks of gambling law. Dedicated online sports gambling was broadly legalized in most states a few years before sports came to prediction markets (during the early days of prediction market discourse, online sports betting was mostly banned anyway by a federal law struck down by SCOTUS in 2018). But prediction markets are less regulated than the sportsbooks, e.g. they have an minimum age of 18 while sportsbooks are 21 in most states. Otherwise sports markets on prediction platforms would presumably mostly just displace gambling elsewhere.
I am not under any non-disparagement obligations to OpenAI.
It is important to me that people know this, so that they can trust any future policy analysis or opinions I offer.
I have no further comments at this time.
Both Sam and Dario saying that they now believe they know how to build AGI seems like an underrated development to me. To my knowledge, they only started saying this recently. I suspect they are overconfident, but still seems like a more significant indicator than many people seem to be tracking.
Maybe once Sam says it, Dario kinda has to say it to stay competitive for funding?
In the last 48 hours Dario said 3-5 years until AGI!
Longtermist shower thought: what if we had a campaign to install Far-UVC in poultry farms? Seems like it could:
Insofar as one of the main obstacles is humans' concerns for health effects, this would at least only raise these for a small group of workers.
I think 1 unfortunately ends up not being true in the intensive farming case. Lots of things are spread by close enough contact that even intense uvc wouldn't do much (and it would be really expensive)
I had a similar thought a (few) year (s) ago and emailed a couple of people to sanity check the idea - all the experts I asked seemed to think this wouldn't be an effective thing to do (which is why I didn't do any more work on it). I think Alex's points are true (mostly the cost part - I think you could get high enough intensity for it to be effective).
Wouldn't lots of infections even for flu happen through e.g. faeces or such? If the birds are densely packed it might be hard to achieve much with UVC from the ceiling.
Also, about the idea of this being eventually transferable to humans, I wonder if birds have different sensitivity to it (due to being covered in feathers).
Good shower thought! A few people have come to this idea independently for swine CAFOs.
There are a fair number of important "production-limiting diseases" in swine that are primarily spread via respiratory transmission, so this seems to me like a plausible win-win-win (as you've described).
This is all very "shower thought" level on my side as well, and I'd be keen for someone to think this through in more depth. Very happy to talk it through with anyone considering a more thorough investigation!
(Note my understanding is influenza is primarily a gastrointestinal illness in poultry, so I don't think this intervention is as promising in that context.)
Pretty wild discussion in this podcast about how aggressively the USSR cut corners on safety in their space program in order to stay ahead of the US. In the author's telling of the history, this was in large part because Khrushchev wanted to rack up as many "firsts" (e.g., first satellite, first woman in space) as possible. This seems like it was most proximately for prestige and propaganda rather than any immediate strategic or technological benefit (though of course the space program did eventually produce such bigger benefits).
Evidence of the following claim for AI: people may not need a reason to cut corners on safety because the material benefits are so high. They may do so just because of the prestige and glory of being first.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/chatter--the-harrowing-history-of-the-soviet-space-program-with-john-strausbaugh
Though the costs are also low, from the perspective of Khrushchev. (A few cosmonauts' lives is presumably not that important to him)
Yeah fair, should have considered that more duh
I'm glad I was helpful! :P
I'd find anecdotes about cutting corners in bioweapons or nuclear (both weapons development and power) more convincing, partially because it's more directly analogous and partially because I don't think Khrushchev is completely heartless.
Example: They crammed three cosmonauts into a capsule initially designed for one person. But due to the size constraints, the cosmonauts couldn't wear proper spacesuits; they had to wear leisure suits!
Quote from VC Josh Wolfe:
https://overcast.fm/+5AWO95pnw/46:15
I realize that the idea of cloud labs is not new. I just think that this particular quote is so obviously scary that it could be rhetorically useful.
People sometimes worry that the decrease in companies going public (arguably due to greater securities regulations) will drive down the expected return for public investors as compared to private ones. But it seems like public investors can still get decent exposure to private markets through publicly traded private equity and BDCs.
Maybe an actionable takeaway is to overweight those companies in one's portfolio, to account for the private returns you don't have access to.
Really interesting. There are diversified private equity ETFs (also for BDCs). This has outperformed the market slightly (4.4% annualized return vs. 3.8% for their benchmark S&P index), but I guess because you're then doing active investing as you move away from the global market portfolio and taking higher risk. Seems to violate the efficient market hypothesis that there should be a free lunch here. I guess the difference to buying other ETFs (like a tech ETF) is that is diversified across industries and in a way it's own asset class. In other words, depending on your level of risk aversion you can skew your portfolio towards bonds, stocks, and private equity, and now also with the advent of crypto ETFs, that connect the crypto 'asset class' to the stock market, you can determine your level of risk, through skewing it more towards the latter categories.
Just came across this article that suggests that there's some movement in this direction generally, with Vanguard offering private equity as an investment class.
Couldn't you argue that you're actually moving towards the "true" global market portfolio, which would include many non-publicly-traded assets? (Similar for real estate: seems plausible that people should overweight REITs in their portfolios.)
Not sure this is true if the risk is also higher.
Because the companies included in the private equity ETF are also already represented in the global market portfolio, the percentage of the market cap / total market cap is already includes what the market believes to be the discounted future profits of all non-publicly-traded assets that the private equity (e.g. Blackstone) invested in.
Yes, beta (and risk) are higher and so alpha and the expected returns are higher, but that's the trade-off so there's no free lunch. It's similar to foregoing bonds and only investing in stocks in one's portfolio, but even riskier.
I think we’re talking past each other a bit. The claim isn’t that it’s directly valuable to overweight publicly traded private equity companies in one’s portfolio. Rather, the claim is that:
Oh I see- thanks for clarifying! This is a very interesting idea, but somehow it still seems counterintuitive... by the same logic, wouldn't you also want to overexpose yourself to e.g. publicly traded real estate because most of it isn't public?
If true, and if most passive (institutional) investors aren't sufficiently exposed to PE (or real estate), wouldn't that suggest that the market undervalues this asset class and you can beat the market by investing in it? Honest question, I haven't thought this through very well, but something still feels counterintuitive that you could create a better passive global market portfolio...
I think this might be another big if... though also one should be surprised if there'd be a big discontinuous jump in returns when going from non-traded to traded.
Yes, I think that is true as well!
This is what I was getting at by noting that PE should also be higher beta, so the risk-adjusted returns should not be higher!
Hm, very possible I am thinking about this wrong, but it's pretty intuitive to me. After all, isn't the "true" global market all investable assets, not just publicly traded assets? It's the same reason why the Nasdaq Composite is a poor stand-in for the global stock market: for a variety of reasons, it only has a certain subset of publicly traded equities, and other baskets of equities have different risk-return profiles.
I'm beginning to think that we should generally taboo "free speech" when discussing all speech regulation decisions by non-governmental actors. In my experience, people mean very different things by this, ranging from "intellectual openness should weigh heavily in private speech regulation" to "private speech regulators should mirror First Amendment principles." These have very different implications and possible justifications.
Should EAs prepare to start stockpiling N95s when the pandemic is over? There will presumably be a lot of excess capacity, so later this year it may be easier than usual to buy up a ton on N95s and store them for the next few years.
Random, time-sensitive charity idea: start a pledge drive for people who have received their COVID vaccine to contribute the cost of at least one vaccine to the COVAX facility. Unfortunately, Americans can’t directly donate to COVAX, but people from the UK can.
Such a thing now exists: https://gogiveone.org/
Although I've seen some people say they feel like EA is in a bit of an intellectual slump right now, I think the number of new, promising EA startups may be higher than ever. I'm thinking of some of the recent Charity Entrepreneurship incubated programs and some new animal welfare orgs like the Fish Welfare Initiative.
Interesting excerpt from a book I’m reading:
JoAnne Yates & Craig N. Murphy, Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880 (2019) (citing Deborah Cadbury, Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers at xii (2010)).
According to the book Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History, some early Christians sold themselves into slavery so they could donate the proceeds to the poor. Super interesting example of extreme and early ETG.
(I'm listening on audiobook so I don't have the precise page for this claim.)
(To avoid bad-faith misinterpretation: I obviously think that nobody should do the same.)
The venerable Judge Easterbrook appears to understand harms from unaligned AI. In this excerpt, he invokes a favorite fictional example among the AI risk community:
Soppet v. Enhanced Recovery Co., LLC, 679 F.3d 637, 638–39 (7th Cir. 2012).