Matrice Jacobine🔸🏳️⚧️
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Technoprogressive, biocosmist, rationalist, defensive accelerationist, longtermist
Posts 52
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Topic contributions1
One area where we can see that the Lindy effect is empirically false is stock prices. If it were true, you could buy a portfolio of the 100 stocks that have gone up the most over the last 3 years, hold them for 3 years, and beat the S&P 500. But that doesn’t work.
... your link straightforwardly show the opposite? Momentum investing is moderately profitable in the first years before reverting to the mean as the momentum subside.
Similarly, you can find plenty work on the subject on the wiki page for the Lindy effect, notably connections with Zipf's law and the Pareto distribution. (The term "Lindy effect" itself was coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.)
Equity research analysts and institutional investors don’t approach financial modelling or earning estimates through blind extrapolation, or by applying a rule of thumb like the Lindy effect. They think causally, often in great detail, about companies’ future performance. And, even then, accurate forecasting is really hard.
True and neither Scott nor I said otherwise. You should have a broad prior distribution and after gaining more evidence about the gears level you should update. On the other hand it is also, uh, not true that quants can ever afford to be always strictly rigorous and not using rules of thumbs of similar caliber.
As Scott notes, the maximum-entropy heuristic if you make no hypothesis about the explanation for a statistical trend is Lindy's law, the trend continuing for as long as it continued so far. So you might expect both the Anthropic and the Jersey Mike's trend to continue until ~2028, but not until 2050.
Previous discussion on this forum about Vassar by @fenneko:
- Bryk, the rationalist-adjacent writer, says a prominent rationalist once told her condescendingly that she was a “5-year-old in a hot 20-year-old’s body.”
- Joseph says he also argued that it was normal for a 12-year-old girl to have sexual relationships with adult men and that such relationships were a noble way of transferring knowledge to a younger generation. Then, she says, he followed her home and insisted on staying over. She says he slept on the floor of her living room and that she felt unsafe until he left in the morning.
- This was also Michael Vassar.
- I know this because of a line from the TIME article:
- "Another woman, who dated the same man [the one who talked about pedophilia with Joseph] several years earlier in a polyamorous relationship, alleges that he had once attempted to put his penis in her mouth while she was sleeping."
- And "the same man" was, of course, Michael Vassar.
- Jax talks about other people in public threads, but I think Vassar is the only one whose alleged behavior was illegal physical abuse rather than rudeness or weird vibes.
- On the extreme end, five women, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, say men in the community committed sexual assault or misconduct against them [...] Women who reported sexual abuse, either to the police or community mediators, say they were branded as trouble and ostracized while the men were protected.
- At least one of these is Vassar (possibly multiple, given how consistent he seems to be).
- Vassar has been banned from EA events for many years, and SlateStarCodex meetups for at least a few years.
DoJ files showing Vassar successfully requested to visit Epstein's private island in 2015: 1, 2, 3
It seems unfortunately plausible that despite technological progress toward alternatives to meat, humans have a revealed terminal preference for animal suffering, which mean that short of extinction we are on a default trajectory to astronomical suffering.
... who are those leaders of Unitarian Universalism that UUs are deferring a lot more than EAs defer to Moskovitz, Karnofsky, MacAskill, Ord?