Astral Codex Ten

SG

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SG

Article

SG is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 23, 2021 and August 28, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “Contact: SG, sgord512[at]gmail[dot]com”; “NinthCause and SG are Manifold co-founders”. It most often appears alongside Robert, United States, 1002 N St. NW, Washington DC, 20001.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: August 23, 2021
  • Last seen: August 28, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
PASADENA, CA (RSVP) Contact: SG, sgord512[at]gmail[dot]com Time: 3:00 PM, Sunday, August 29 Location: Central Park in Pasadena; we'll be in the southeast corner and there will be a sign that says ACX on it. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/piper.calculating.harp
Inline links: RSVP, https://w3w.co/piper.calculating.harp
23
August 28, 2023 · Original source
NinthCause and SG are Manifold co-founders. Jack, Marcus Abramovich, and Michael Wheatly are Manifold leaderboard record holders. Peter Wildeford is a superforecaster who came near the top in the ACX forecasting contest. Matthew Barnett works in AI forecasting. You all know Eliezer and Zvi. As far as I can tell nobody high up on the YES side is similarly illustrious. But prediction markets are supposed to ensure you don’t have to resort to name-dropping, so how did this go wrong? I was tempted to blame Manifold-specific factors, like the ability to get starting mana instead of putting skin in the game. But real-money markets Polymarket and Kalshi got approximately the same results: Polymarket: https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor-real Kalshi: https://kalshi.com/markets/supercon/roomtemp-superconductor-reported Both reached the 40s to 50s! I think there just wasn’t enough smart money to drown out the people who wanted to bet on an exciting thing being true, or who were unduly influenced by a social media environment optimized to keep their attention by convincing them that an exciting thing was true. I have never claimed prediction markets are always good. All I wrote in the Prediction Market FAQ was that either a prediction market will be good, or you could make lots of free money. In this case, it was the second one. I regret I only made $30. I do hope this situation will improve over time, as over-eager forecasters get burned and dollars flow from dumb money to smarter. [EDIT: I should have included something about Metaculus here, but it’s confusing. I think the most popular Metaculus market was lower because it had stricter resolution criteria (the first replication had to be positive, instead of any replication) but that otherwise Metaculus raw probabilities mirrored everyone else’s. We don’t know how their algorithmically processed probabilities did yet and I’ll report on that information when I get it.] Salem/CSPI Tournament Winners The Salem Center and the Center For The Study Of Partisanship And Ideology, two think tanks associated with right-wing intellectual Richard Hanania, sponsored a prediction market tournament last year. Participants got $1000 in play money to bet on selected markets about current events; winners would be interviewed for a well-paying academic sinecure at one of the think tanks. Now the tournament is over. Winners have yet to be announced, but unofficially, everyone knows who they are: First place out of 999 participants is zubbybadger. Zubby is a prediction market veteran who was featured in a Washington Monthly article last year for his great track record in political betting (he’s made > $150,000 on PredictIt). Now he works as a “community manager” for Kalshi (I don’t know what this entails). Second place was Robert from Considerations On Codecrafting. He’s written a detailed reflection on his experience (part one, part two) which is my main source for this section and highly recommended. He describes himself as “having absolutely no experience with prediction markets”. Third place was Johnny Ten-Numbers, about whom I can find no further information. You can see the rest of the top 20 at the very bottom of this post. Reading Robert’s story of his experience, I’m struck by how little of the competition at the top was about predictive accuracy. Everyone in the top 20 was a very accurate predictor (Exactly equally accurate? Hard to tell.) What separated 1st place from 20th, aside from luck, was things like: Ability to move fast - both in responding to news, and in taking the other side of bad bets. Several top performers programmed bots to give them an edge here.
Inline links: https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor-real, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PMh_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1143f4c9-a7f7-4aee-a006-12b1a28bd923_654x389.png, Prediction Market FAQ, selected markets about current events, zubbybadger, featured in a Washington Monthly article last year, Robert, part one, part two, Johnny Ten-Numbers