Nathan Young

Product Management @ Forecasting Consultancy
14760 karmaJoined May 2019Working (0-5 years)London, UK

Bio

Participation
4

Create prediction markets and forecasting questions on AI risk and biorisk. I also work part-time at a prediction market.

Use my connections on Twitter to raise the profile of these predictions and increase the chance that decision-makers discuss these issues.

How others can help me

Talking to those in forecasting to improve my forecasting question generation tool

Writing forecasting questions on EA topics.

Meeting EAs I become lifelong friends with.

How I can help others

Connecting them to other EAs.

Writing forecasting questions on metaculus.

Talking to them about forecasting.

Sequences
1

Moving In Step With One Another

Comments
2217

Topic contributions
19

Interesting take. I don't like it. 

Perhaps because I like saying overrated/underrated.

But also because overrated/underrated is a quick way to provide information. "Forecasting is underrated by the population at large" is much easier to think of than "forecasting is probably rated 4/10 by the population at large and should be rated 6/10"

Over/underrated requires about 3 mental queries, "Is it better or worse than my ingroup thinks" "Is it better or worse than my ingroup thinks?" "Am I gonna have to be clear about what I mean?"

Scoring the current and desired status of something requires about 20 queries "Is 4 fair?" "Is 5 fair" "What axis am I rating on?" "Popularity?" "If I score it a 4 will people think I'm crazy?"...

Like in some sense your right that % forecasts are more useful than "More likely/less likely" and sizes are better than "bigger smaller" but when dealing with intangibles like status I think it's pretty costly to calculate some status number, so I do the cheaper thing.

 

Also would you prefer people used over/underrated less or would you prefer the people who use over/underrated spoke less? Because I would guess that some chunk of those 50ish karma are from people who don't like the vibe rather than some epistemic thing. And if that's the case, I think we should have a different discussion.

I guess I think that might come from a frustration around jargon or rationalists in general. And I'm pretty happy to try and broaden my answer from over/underrated - just as I would if someone asked me how big a star was and I said "bigger than an elephant". But it's worth noting it's a bandwidth thing and often used because giving exact sizes in status is hard. Perhaps we shouldn't have numbers and words for it, but we don't.

Yeah more broadly I try to only share criticism if it has points that someone thinks are valuable. I don't think it's defensible to say "oh I thought people might want to read it". I should take responsibility - "why am I putting it in front of people".

I have a piece I'm writing with some similar notes to this, may I send it to you when I'm done?

Okay, this should be a personal blog then I think

Yeah that seems right. Not sure what options one can click on crossposting to point that out. (I think the forum has a personal blog option, but I'm not sure that's so appropriate on LessWrong)

  • How could it have better signalled it wasn't a puff piece?
  • It sort of is a bit of a puff piece. I tried to talk about some negatives but I don't know that it's particularly even handed.
  • I tend to get quite a lot of downvotes in general, so some is probably that.
  • Beyond that, the title is quite provocative - I just used the title on my blog, but I guess I could have chosen something more neutral 

Though sometimes denouncement posts are net positive right? Like probably not the nonlinear one, but I guess more denouncement of SBF prior would have been good. 

I agree it's sort of a red flag, but it seems relevant whether this is a puff piece, right? 

If I were to do another, what should it be about?

It's very easy to use for personal forecasts.

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