With Gavin Leech, I run Arb, an EA consultancy.
With Eli Lifland and Aaron Ho, I am working on Sage, a forecasting org.
With Nuño Sempere, Eli Lifland and others, I forecast a lot as part of Samotsvety, a forecasting team.
Hm, is it just through calories or maybe through micronutrients as well: potatoes are high in potassium, vitamin C, B6, and K1 compared to other staple foods? Footnote 6 tends to suggest that it's mostly about calories.
Thanks for clarifying! I think our misunderstanding comes from different framings: EA meta/infrastructure v. global health; within global health, MH v. disease/poverty alleviation. I agree with you and calebp on the former.
That's fairly dismissive. You could have written:
If imposter syndrome and other easily preventable/treatable debilitating mental issues were common among EAs, I'd guess that should be a much higher priority to address than poor "physical" health among EAs.
Isn't it in the end about what's more cost-effective? I can interpret you as pointing to "if ~depression was more cost-effective to address than ~smallpox, it would have been addressed first in the developed nations," this might be a good heuristic but a well-thought cost-effectiveness estimate is more convincing to me. Seems like criticizing MichaelPlant's cost-effectiveness estimates could have been more productive here. (TBC: I myself haven't engaged with HLI's work/methal health charities much).
And mental health being comparatively cost-effective doesn't sound ridiculous to me. StrongMinds attracted some donations from EAs in the past including GiveWell staff.
(I sorta feel that this comment and 23 upvotes / 7 votes support OP's observation that people seem to be dismissive about mental health as global health and development intervention.)
Yes, thank you; that makes sense and is very helpful!
Is any forecaster or organizer willing to bet with me on "Will Russia place any nuclear weapons in Belarus before 2023?" at 3:7 odds (with me on "no")?
re: 1 — agree, MM is nicer than Poly. And I view UX as a very important issue for adoption (think of Robinhood).
re: 2 — would be great if you'd work that out!
re: 3 — I think just using the proper scoring rules (like log or Brier) is good enough; what are the problems with these? Smart aggregation (based on track-record and some other info) would allow leveraging non-superforecasters (likely through putting weight on prospective superforecasters). I think another way to participate in prediction pools and markets is to bring new information and considerations, this can be rewarded through Reddit's karma, r/changemyview deltas, or with StackOverflow upvotes (one interesting challenge is to figure that out).
Austin replied to the earlier version of the comment (my bad), which is similar in substance on the relevant market: https://manifold.markets/Austin/will-the-ftx-future-fund-decide-to
Thanks for your comment, Misha (and congrats on the FF grant)! I've been a huge fan of your work, especially your report on Prediction Markets in the Corporate Setting https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dQhjwHA7LhfE8YpYF/prediction-markets-in-the-corporate-setting
Agreed that the marginal dollar moved between different weird altruistic donors is less impactful than winning a bet on Polymarket; but there are a host of usability issues in Polymarket (crypto onboarding, market availability, UX design) that we think we solve much better in Manifold. Over time, the long-term vision of this would be to draw in more charitable dollars from outside the EA community as well.
The externalities of demanding constant vigilance are a good point, and something we do take seriously; I'd like to work out an interface/design a mechanism that allows a trader to input a true probability and be rewarded, without needing to check in on their position constantly. Maybe this just is being a prediction pool!
I think prediction pools are quite promising, though I'm not sure if a good (easy-to-use, incentive-aligned) mechanism has been worked out; do you have any pointers to setups/implementations/designs of prediction pools that you think are good? I'm especially curious if these are framed in a way that allow a normal person (aka not superforecaster) to understand the system and meaningfully contribute.
Would love to chat more; happy to discuss in this thread, or feel free to find a time on https://calendly.com/austinchen/manifold !
(I am out of funds to reply to them there :P, this should be seen as foot voting for their platform as a whole.)
I am skeptical.
The market will mainly attract altruistic traders as you can only make altruistic gains. Further, prediction markets are for unusual people[1]. So we will end up with unusual altruistic donors.
I see two motivations for such donors: contributing to the information generating system and distributing money to grantmakers with better judgment.
Re: infogain. I am fairly skeptical about low-volume prediction markets being competitive to similar (in the number of participants) prediction pools. See https://bit.ly/arb-prediction-markets-vs-opinion-pools. But I am excited to try it and compare forecasts to predictions pools on other platforms?[2]
Re: allocation. For unusual altruistic donors, the upside feels small: the system reallocates the money of other unusual donors, so donated earnings are not fully contafactual. While money goes to people with better judgment, it's unclear that their returns/earnings would be higher than on other platforms like Polymarket, where money is non-altruistic.[3]
Lastly, I think the externalities are quite big for prediction markets (as opposed to prediction pools): markets require constant vigilance as with every update, you win/lose. Active traders will spend a lot of attention on their trades. This is especially bad given that traders are altruistically minded.[4]
(At the same time, I am fairly excited to see more experiments in the space.)
(I have/had a CoI as I applied/received a FF grant for work on epistemic institutions.)
Even donor lotteries do not attract broad participation despite a strong case for using them. ↩︎
Happy to collaborate message me here or preferably at mike.yagudin@gmail.com ↩︎
This is another issue; even on fairly liquid Polymarket, a lot of things seem mispriced to me. Nuño and I bet there, so hopefully, these are not empty words. ↩︎
Cf. donor lotteries. One of their aims is to cut research costs for donors. These costs are highest for donors with good judgment as their opportunity costs are the highest. ↩︎
Yes, I intend to but like everything, it might rod. What are your other needs here?
Yes, they did, see e.g. https://twitter.com/ApolloSurveys/status/1527362513200787469