Astral Codex Ten

Vitalik Buterin

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Vitalik Buterin

Article

Vitalik Buterin is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between February 23, 2021 and February 20, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Vitalik Buterin talks about”; “Vitalik Buterin talks about his adventures winning $50,000 betting against Trump”; “quadratic funding (an innovative budgeting mechanism pushed by Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin”. It most often appears alongside Metaculus, Honduras, Prospera.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 10
  • Issue count: 10
  • First seen: February 23, 2021
  • Last seen: February 20, 2024

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.

Mantic Monday: Judging April COVID Predictions
February 23, 2021 · Original source
2: Vitalik Buterin talks about his adventures winning $50,000 betting against Trump on Ethereum prediction market Augur. It took a pretty complicated chain of crypto contracts to make it work, and I look forward to the time when people will be able to use this technology fluidly without having to literally be Vitalik Buterin. He concludes (like many people) that prediction markets were kind of dumb this past election but there are reasons to think they can get smarter fast:
Inline links: talks about his adventures
21
August 02, 2021 · Original source
Or maybe it’s exactly cute enough that it needs to be its own city, who knows? Mariposa seems to be proposing some really interesting things, including quadratic funding (an innovative budgeting mechanism pushed by Glen Weyl and Vitalik Buterin, among others) and dominant assurance contracts (a really neat consensus-building mechanism proposed by Alex Tabarrok). Their form-based walkable city code thing also seems pretty neat. And I’m not a midwife so for all I know ecstatic birthing is also some kind of super-great idea. Honestly this random husband-and-wife team seems to have put more thought into genuinely good governance than 99.9% of the existing countries in the world, and I hope things work out for them.
Inline links: quadratic funding, dominant assurance contracts, form-based walkable city code
Book Review: The Scout Mindset
September 29, 2021 · Original source
Galef says not necessarily. Did you know that Jeff Bezos said outright he started off with a 30% chance Amazon would succeed, even going so far as to tell investors “I think there’s a 70% chance you’re going to lose all your money”? Or that Elon Musk said the odds of SpaceX working were “less than 10%”? Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said he’s “never had 100% confidence in cryptocurrency as a sector…I’m consistent in my uncertainty”. And since the book came out, I stumbled on this profile of billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, which says he believed his chances of success “were only 20% to 25%”.
Inline links: this profile
21
November 01, 2021 · Original source
I’d previously missed this 2018 post by Vitalik Buterin proposing prediction markets as a social media moderation plan.
Inline links: this 2018 post by Vitalik Buterin
Merge the system with a prediction market. An upvote invests $1 (Vitalik says 1 ETH, but the post is from 2018 and maybe he didn’t expect that to be worth $4325) in a prediction of “Scott won’t ban this”. A downvote invests $1 in a prediction of “Scott will ban this”. A certain randomly-selected subset of posts with high downvotes come to my attention, I ban/don’t ban them, and everyone collects their winnings/cedes their losses. If the prediction market fits the usual conditions for accurate pricing, it should mimic my judgment as closely as humanly possible - and so I could just have any sufficiently downvoted post get auto-banned. You could have one guy moderating a site the size of Reddit (not a specific subreddit, the whole site) and still have it work pretty well. No more moderator drama!
Vitalik didn’t end with “and we should also replace all lower courts with prediction markets about what the Supreme Court would think”, but I’m not sure why not.
21
December 06, 2021 · Original source
Vitalik Buterin on the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies. He recommends they “start with self-contained experiments, and take things slowly on moves that are truly irreversible”, which is a weird way of saying “what we crypto leaders really want is a city at the base of a volcano, shaped like a giant Bitcoin”.
Inline links: the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies
ACX Grants Results
December 28, 2021 · Original source
But I was also able to get another $1.3 million (!) from extremely generous outside funders, of whom only two would let me reveal their names: Vitalik Buterin and Misha Gurevich. Thank you Vitalik, Misha, and other anonymous people!
Lewis Carroll Invented Retroactive Public Goods Funding In 1894
January 04, 2022 · Original source
I know of at least five independent inventions under five different names: “social impact bonds” by a New Zealand economist in 1988, “certificates of impact” by Paul Christiano in 2014, “retroactive public goods funding” by Vitalik Buterin a few years ago, “EA loans” by a blogger who prefers to remain anonymous, and “venture grants” by Mako Yass. These aren’t all exactly the same idea. Some are slightly better framed than others and probably I’m being terribly disrespectful to the better ones by saying they’re the same as the worse ones. But I think they all share a basic core: some structure that lets profit-seeking venture capitalist types invest in altruistic causes, in the hopes that altruists will pay them back later once they’ve been shown to work.
Inline links: “social impact bonds”, “certificates of impact”, “retroactive public goods funding”, “venture grants”
The Low-Hanging Fruit Argument: Models And Predictions
April 01, 2022 · Original source
I can’t tell. When I look at people who won the top ML prizes, they seem to be older people who had a long and distinguished career in proto-ML, eg people who pioneered the theory of reinforcement learning in the 1990s. I could try to get around this, but it would feel kind of post hoc. I’d be interested in someone comparing the average age of authors on the most cited papers in various fields over time, but I’m worried that social effects would dominate: eg many of the most innovative crypto people (eg Vitalik Buterin) seem young, but that could just be a “crypto is cool among young people” thing.
Impact Markets: The Annoying Details
July 15, 2022 · Original source
This is how I’ve always explained it before - and you can read other explanations like Paul Christiano’s or Vitalik Buterin’s. This post isn’t about the theory. It’s about the annoying implementation details. It may not be very interesting to people who are neither effective altruists nor institution design wonks, sorry.
Inline links: Paul Christiano’s, Vitalik Buterin’s
Vitalik Buterin’s idea. A final oracular funder states that they value the project at (let’s say) $5 million, and as long as they continue to do so, they will buy any share in the project for $5 million/percent of the project.
24
February 20, 2024 · Original source
How many residents will live in Prospera, a new special economic zone in Honduras, on Jan 1, 2026? Answer: 600 (80% confidence interval 100-2,000) This seems like a good guess (except that my confidence interval would have included zero because there’s a 20%+ chance that it gets shut down). So overall its forecasts seem pretty impressive. But I was concerned by its reasoning even in some of the questions it got “right”. For example, the Nikki Haley question tried to get a base rate by asking what percent of elections Haley had won before, and found she had won 71% of them - these were mostly elections for South Carolina governor. You can see what the AI is trying to do - but it’s not going to work. Then it got confused and read a lot of news stories about how she’s currently losing the 2024 presidential election, and seemed to think they were about 2028. So either the AI only got a reasonable probability by coincidence, or it was testing many different strategies, throwing out the useless ones, and updating only on the useful ones, in a way that was kind of opaque to the casual reader. Still, if the company says it beats most human forecasters, this doesn’t seem totally impossible based on what I’ve seen. And that would be exciting! An AI that can generate probabilistic forecasts for any question seems like in some way a culmination of the rationalist project. And if you can make something like this work, it doesn’t sound too outlandish that you could apply the same AI to conditional forecasts, or to questions about the past and present (eg whether COVID was a lab leak). I would be most excited if at some point this graduated from its geopolitical focus and was able to answer questions on any topic (eg “what is the chance that Astral Codex Ten gains paid subscribers this year?”), maybe if the questioner gives it links or feeds it some of the appropriate information. FutureSearch is run by a team formerly from Metaculus, including former Metaculus CTO (and Google internal prediction market veteran) Dan Schwarz. They’re looking for potential clients and/or investors; if you’re interested, email hello@futuresearch.ai. Vitalik On AI Prediction Markets Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum-founder-turned-cryptocurrency-public-intellectual, has a blog post on The Promise And Challenge Of Crypto + AI Applications. One of them is a prediction market. He writes: Prediction markets have been a holy grail of epistemics technology for a long time; I was excited about using prediction markets as an input for governance ("futarchy") back in 2014, and played around with them extensively in the last election as well as more recently. But so far prediction markets have not taken off too much in practice, and there is a series of commonly given reasons why: the largest participants are often irrational, people with the right knowledge are not willing to take the time and bet unless a lot of money is involved, markets are often thin, etc. One response to this is to point to ongoing UX improvements in Polymarket or other new prediction markets, and hope that they will succeed where previous iterations have failed. After all, the story goes, people are willing to bet tens of billions on sports, so why wouldn't people throw in enough money betting on US elections or LK99 that it starts to make sense for the serious players to start coming in? But this argument must contend with the fact that, well, previous iterations have failed to get to this level of scale (at least compared to their proponents' dreams), and so it seems like you need something new to make prediction markets succeed. And so a different response is to point to one specific feature of prediction market ecosystems that we can expect to see in the 2020s that we did not see in the 2010s: the possibility of ubiquitous participation by AIs. AIs are willing to work for less than $1 per hour, and have the knowledge of an encyclopedia - and if that's not enough, they can even be integrated with real-time web search capability. If you make a market, and put up a liquidity subsidy of $50, humans will not care enough to bid, but thousands of AIs will easily swarm all over the question and make the best guess they can. The incentive to do a good job on any one question may be tiny, but the incentive to make an AI that makes good predictions in general may be in the millions. Note that potentially, you don't even need the humans to adjudicate most questions: you can use a multi-round dispute system similar to Augur or Kleros, where AIs would also be the ones participating in earlier rounds. Humans would only need to respond in those few cases where a series of escalations have taken place and large amounts of money have been committed by both sides. This is a powerful primitive, because once a "prediction market" can be made to work on such a microscopic scale, you can reuse the "prediction market" primitive for many other kinds of questions: Is this social media post acceptable under [terms of use]?
Inline links: FutureSearch, hello@futuresearch.ai, The Promise And Challenge Of Crypto + AI Applications, back in 2014, played around with them extensively, more recently, Polymarket, tens of billions on sports, LK99, Augur
And as Vitalik mentions, it doesn’t have to be about the future. It can be about any question you’re not sure about, as long as there’s eventually some way to resolve it.