Ukraine

Article

Ukraine is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 65 times across 65 issues between March 23, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “no risk of Poland and Ukraine scuffling over borders”; ""Kiev Province (Ukraine)""; “Ukraine and Romania had incredibly fertile soil”. It most often appears alongside Russia, US, Trump.

Metadata

Category: Places
Mention count: 65
Issue count: 65
First seen: March 23, 2021
Last seen: April 01, 2026

Appears In

- Russia (42 shared issues)
- US (28 shared issues)
- Trump (24 shared issues)
- Metaculus (23 shared issues)
- Twitter (20 shared issues)
- China (19 shared issues)
- United States (18 shared issues)
- Polymarket (17 shared issues)
- Putin (17 shared issues)
- Elon Musk (16 shared issues)
- France (15 shared issues)
- Israel (15 shared issues)

External Links

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.

Book Review: Antifragile

March 23, 2021 · Original source

This is one reason (among many) Taleb disagrees so strongly with Steven Pinker's contention that war is declining. Pinker's data shows far fewer small wars, but does show that World Wars I and II were very large; he interprets the World Wars as outliers, and notes that since WWII the trend has been excellent. Taleb interprets the constant small wars that used to happen as "controlled burns", and the various institutions set up to prevent those wars - the Concert of Europe, multilateral alliances, the UN - as the same sort of dangerous volatility-buffering you get from a corporate job or a government bailout. It ensures fewer small wars - until the system gets overwhelmed, and you get a giant one. As long as NATO is intact, there's no risk of some dumb war between France and Britain over fishing rights; and as long as the Warsaw Pact is in place, there's no risk of Poland and Ukraine scuffling over borders. The cost is the risk of World War III between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration

June 14, 2021 · Original source

Lest accounts by Ravage and other memoirists be dismissed as suspect late reconstructions, it is instructive to compare very similar accounts reported in real-time proximity to the events by disinterested sources, which tend to corroborate memoiristic accounts. One such example occurs in a 1905 study conducted by Emily Greene Balch, the American ethnographer, who did fieldwork in the Slovakian area of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Balch noted that the first Jew to emigrate from a town she visited was a Jewish cloth merchant who had gone bankrupt. Likewise, in a social survey of a shtetl in the Kiev Province (Ukraine), we read of an elderly storekeeper, once quite well off, reduced to a hole-in-the-wall shop, selling goods on consignment for a larger firm. Apart from two spinster daughters who helped out by sewing linens, all this man's children and their families (twenty-five people in all) had left for America within the space of six years.

Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works"

July 01, 2021 · Original source

Secondly, he completely ignores the many times land reform failed. East Asia is not unique in its attempts at land reform. It was fairly common in Africa, Eastern Europe, etc. Ukraine and Romania had incredibly fertile soil and it's hard to think of regimes that eliminated their landlords harder. Yet they haven't really seen similar effects.

Book Review: The Revolt Of The Public

September 17, 2021 · Original source

[Egyptian dictator Abdel] al-Sisi aspired to the presidency, and his fate will provide a powerful signal with regard to the claims I have made in this book. If he can repress his way into a stable and long-lasting dynasty in the mode of Nasser and Mubarak, my analysis will be falsified. This isn't an impossible outcome. The future...is unknown. But as I observe, from afar, recent events in Egypt - and in Ukraine, Venezuela, Thailand, Turkey - I confess to many misgivings about the future of democracy, [but] far fewer doubts about the restlessness of the public or the crisis of authority.

Highlights From The Comments On Orban

November 11, 2021 · Original source

2) Why admire Orban? Here I think @slatestarcodex misses some important stuff, perhaps because his biographies miss it. Yes, Orban was incompetent in the 90s. So were MOST immediate post-Soviet leaders! And while Orban may have been corrupt, you can compare the personal wealth of the Fidesz clique to the cliques that looted Russia or Ukraine and realize that Hungary got a better class of corrupt leaders than much of eastern Europe. Moreover, Hungary actually had competitive elections with changes of power and leaders who *respected* those results! Maybe they were dirty but, like, it happened! This wasn't universally true!

Inline links: @slatestarcodex

Mantic Monday: Dogs In Wizard Hats

December 27, 2021 · Original source

(source) Will Russia invade Ukraine within a year? This is one of those “all depends on the resolution criteria” questions, since Russia already has troops in what most countries would consider Ukrainian territory, and these sorts of tense standoffs involve a lot of limit testing. Metaculus has gone with “either Russia or two other Security Council member countries state that Russia has invaded Ukraine”, which seems fine.

Inline links: source

Will Russia invade Ukraine within a year? This is one of those “all depends on the resolution criteria” questions, since Russia already has troops in what most countries would consider Ukrainian territory, and these sorts of tense standoffs involve a lot of limit testing. Metaculus has gone with “either Russia or two other Security Council member countries state that Russia has invaded Ukraine”, which seems fine.

Maybe this means forecasters don’t expect a potential Ukraine-Russia war to involve the US directly?

Predictions For 2022

February 01, 2022 · Original source

US/WORLD 1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than fifty percent: 40% 2. At least $250 million in damage from a single round of mass protests in US: 10% 3. PredictIt thinks Joe Biden is most likely 2024 Dem nominee: 80% 4: …thinks Donald Trump is most likely 2024 GOP nominee: 60% 5. Beijing Olympics happen successfully on schedule: 99% 6. Major flare-up (worse than past 5 years) in Russia/Ukraine conflict: 50% 7. Major flare-up (worse past 10 years) in Israel/Palestine conflict: 5% 8. Major flare-up (worse than in past 50 years) in China/Taiwan conflict: 5% 9. Honduran ZEDEs legally crippled to the point where no reasonable person would invest in them further: 5% 10. New ZEDE approved in Honduras: 30%

YGLESIAS PREDICTIONS 1. Democrats lose both houses of Congress (90%) HOLD 2. Democrats lose at least two Senate seats (80%) HOLD 3. Democrats lose fewer than six Senate seats (80%) HOLD 4. Nancy Pelosi announces retirement plans (70%) HOLD 5. Stephen Breyer does not retire (60%) N/A 6. Some version of Build Back Better passes (60%) HOLD 7. Joe Biden is still president (90%) HOLD 8. At least one Biden cabinet-rank official resigns (70%) HOLD 9. No military conflict between the PRC and Taiwan (a worryingly low 90%) HOLD 10. New U.S. sanctions on Russia (70%) HOLD 11. Saudi Arabia and Israel establish diplomatic relations (60%) SELL to 50% 12. Fewer U.S. Covid deaths in 2022 than in 2021 (80%) BUY to 90% 13. Emmanuel Macron re-elected (60%) HOLD 14. Traffic light coalition exploits loopholes to get around the constitutional debt brake (70%) HOLD 15. No recession in 2021 (90%) SELL to 80% 16. Liz Cheney loses primary (80%) HOLD 17. Some version of USICA passes Congress (70%) HOLD 18. Lula elected president of Brazil (60%) SELL to 50% 19. China officially abandons Covid Zero (70%) HOLD 20. Fewer U.S. Covid-19 deaths in 2022 than in 2020 (80%) BUY to 90% 21. Additional booster shots of mRNA vaccines authorized for seniors (80%) HOLD 22. November 2022 year-on-year CPI growth is below 6% (70%) BUY to 80% 23. November 2022 year-on-year CPI growth is above 4% (70%) SELL to 50% 24. The Fed ends up doing more than its currently forecast three interest rate hikes (60%) HOLD 25. Russia does not invade Ukraine (60%) HOLD 26. Viktor Orbán loses power in Hungary (60%) HOLD 27. Sinn Fein becomes the largest party in the Northern Ireland assembly (60%) HOLD 28. The U.S. and Canada reach an agreement on softwood lumber (70%) HOLD 29. Democrats go down at least one governor on net (60%) HOLD 30. The unemployment rate stays between 4 and 5% (70%) SELL to 60% if you mean 12/22, to 40% if you mean it never gets outside that range at all

Mantic Monday: Ukraine Cube Manifold

February 14, 2022 · Original source

Not actually in order This is a semi-randomly selected sample of Manifold markets, but let’s go through them one by one. The Ukraine market is the biggest on Manifold. It’s also deeply out of step with every other prediction market and the top non-prediction-market authorities - who are all giving numbers in the 50s and 60s. I don’t understand how this is so low - yes, play money < real money, but mostly because play money doesn’t get enough people betting. Here lots of people are betting - it’s the biggest market on the site, and since you only start with $1000 either twenty people have bet everything or more people have bet a fraction - but it’s still wrong. I tried to spend some play money to correct it and it snapped back to just as wrong as it was before. I have no explanation. Midnight The Stray Cat is the second biggest market on Manifold, just after Ukraine. I guess the Internet really liking cats shouldn’t be a surprise at this point. In case you need to do research first I’m told this is the cat in question: Props to Manifold for a bunch of markets like the third one on there, where they eat their own dog food by using their market to predict how their business decisions are going to go. ACX Bot has copy-pasted all of my predictions from 2022. At some point they should be able to compare their results with Zvi (ie a single very smart person), with the contest many of you entered (ie an average of formless crowdsourced predictions), and Metaculus (ie a non-monetary forecasting tournament). I’m looking forward to it! Most of you already know Lars Doucet, who’s written some great ACX posts on Georgism. I don’t know what possessed him to make a Joe Rogan Georgism interviewee market, unless he’s gunning for the position. Valinor is a group house on my street, with ~a dozen people living in and around it. We’ve been talking about fixing the backyard for a while. Now we can bet about whether it will happen. Having a number for this actually affects some of my decisions a little. Connor is hijacking the prediction market to make a poll, which is pretty cute. Dwayne Johnson does not have a 15% chance of winning the election. Manifold is suffering from the usual play money problem, where if you only start out with $1000 in play money, nobody wants to lock it up for three years to make a 15% profit. Vivek’s market, “Will I believe that 13177 is a prime number”, is pretty unusual. I’m interpreting it as a test/demonstration of prediction markets’ information-gathering ability. If you don’t know something and it’s hard to Google, you can make a prediction market about whether you’ll believe it in the future, and people who are able to figure out the answer will bet on it. Based on the 97% YES rate, I’m guessing 13177 is in fact a prime number. What else can you do this with? TANSTAAFL’s “Will I Be Convinced That Justin Trudeau Is Not Fidel Castro’s Son?” market is maybe pushing the limit of this methodology. Anyway, there are lots of me-too prediction markets but this is something genuinely new under the sun. Maybe it will be awesome itself, but I’m also hoping it helps bigger players realize how much more is possible. This Week In Metaculus A few new questions on intelligence enhancement, eg: The question explicitly allows embryo selection, but says it must raise IQ ten points and be available for <25% median income to count. Trivial improvements to existing embryo selection will top out around 9 points, so this seems to be predicting something more interesting, maybe iterated embryo selection at the very least. I’m probably slightly bearish on this one; I believe if it existed someone would find a way to get it, but I think the regulatory climate might be able to prevent the relevant research indefinitely. Improving adult IQ is really hard. This is a bold thing to speculate about! Atmospheric CO2 was 300ish for most of pre-industrial history, 400ish now, and rising. This question predicts 600 in 2100, which sounds like what happens if global warming gets a bit worse but eventually stabilizes. I’m less sure. I think if we make it to 2100, we’ll have so much technology that atmospheric CO2 can be whatever we want it to be. But maybe we’ll want it to stay where it is; once there’s been a lot of global warming and people have moved / shifted lifestyles, it could be equally disruptive to cool the planet back down. Right now it’s 5%, the official government prediction is 10% by 2030, but this market says 17.6%. But look at that probability distribution! It’s a lot of people saying 10%ish, plus a very long tail of very big numbers. I think people are disagreeing about how exponential this change is going to be. Shorts Metaculus is holding an essay contest for people who want to use their AI-related prediction markets to argue the future of AI. $6500 available in prizes.

Inline links: predictions from 2022, ACX posts on Georgism, Will I Be Convinced That Justin Trudeau Is Not Fidel Castro’s Son?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!V2bV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca419ec2-7b91-44cd-80b0-2aad1baa4c2f_766x166.png, The question, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ah6n!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1ff4f28d-1901-45f2-85bc-8f1c2120ecd1_770x187.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zSK8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F80e3383c-6f68-412a-ac90-ca63236bdb10_769x167.png, This, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!frCz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F976d1b66-daee-43d1-948a-500e77ac5a2f_764x164.png, this market, holding an essay contest

These run from about 48% to 60%, but I think the differences are justified by the slightly different wordings of the question and definitions of “invasion”. You see a big jump last Friday when the US government increased the urgency of their own warnings. I ignored this on Friday because I couldn’t figure out what their evidence was, but it looks like the smart money updated a lot on it. A few smaller markets that Clay didn’t include: Manifold is only at 36% despite several dozen traders. I think they’re just wrong - but I’m not going to use any more of my limited supply of play money to correct it, thus fully explaining the wrongness. Futuur is at 47%, but also thinks there’s an 18% chance Russia invades Lithuania, so I’m going to count this as not really mature. Insight Prediction, a very new site I’ve never seen before, claims to have $93,000 invested and a probability of 22%, which is utterly bizarre; I’m too suspicious and confused to invest, and maybe everyone else is too. (PredictIt, Polymarket, and Kalshi all avoid this question. I think PredictIt has a regulatory agreement that limits them to politics. Polymarket and Kalshi might just not be interested, or they might be too PR-sensitive to want to look like they’re speculating on wars where thousands of people could die.) What happens afterwards? Clay beats me again: For context: So it looks like forecasters expect that, conditional upon Russia invading at all, there’s an 80% chance they’ll take Mariupol in the east, a 66% chance they’ll take Kharkiv (also eastern, but only a third ethnic Russian and currently aligned with the central government), and only about a 30% chance they take Kyiv or Odessa. See also this thread full of speculation in the subreddit. As for me, I’m going all in on “yes” after seeing this tweet: Alexander Cube Last week I speculated that to truly realize the potential of prediction markets, we’d need one that was real money, easy to use, and easy to create markets on. Gustavo Lacerda and Nuno Sempere very kindly drew this picture and named it after me: Nobody has reached the promised land at the furthest point. But all three connected vertices are occupied. Augur is real-money and lets people create their own markets, (but it’s impossible to use - it’s made of complicated crypto contracts that nobody’s made a workable front end for yet). Polymarket is real money and easy to use (but doesn’t let people create their own markets; apparently they’re nervous about resolution disputes). Manifold is easy to use and lets people create their own market, but it’s not real money (they’re American and centralized, so they have to follow anti-gambling regulations). Manifold Markets Speaking of which, they’re open! As the cube suggests, Manifold is a site where anyone can create their own (play money) prediction market. They set the question and they decide when and how it resolves (with everyone else just out of luck if they decide to fake it or rug-pull). It’s a bold strategy, but boy oh boy are people liking it so far: Not actually in order This is a semi-randomly selected sample of Manifold markets, but let’s go through them one by one. The Ukraine market is the biggest on Manifold. It’s also deeply out of step with every other prediction market and the top non-prediction-market authorities - who are all giving numbers in the 50s and 60s. I don’t understand how this is so low - yes, play money < real money, but mostly because play money doesn’t get enough people betting. Here lots of people are betting - it’s the biggest market on the site, and since you only start with $1000 either twenty people have bet everything or more people have bet a fraction - but it’s still wrong. I tried to spend some play money to correct it and it snapped back to just as wrong as it was before. I have no explanation. Midnight The Stray Cat is the second biggest market on Manifold, just after Ukraine. I guess the Internet really liking cats shouldn’t be a surprise at this point. In case you need to do research first I’m told this is the cat in question: Props to Manifold for a bunch of markets like the third one on there, where they eat their own dog food by using their market to predict how their business decisions are going to go. ACX Bot has copy-pasted all of my predictions from 2022. At some point they should be able to compare their results with Zvi (ie a single very smart person), with the contest many of you entered (ie an average of formless crowdsourced predictions), and Metaculus (ie a non-monetary forecasting tournament). I’m looking forward to it! Most of you already know Lars Doucet, who’s written some great ACX posts on Georgism. I don’t know what possessed him to make a Joe Rogan Georgism interviewee market, unless he’s gunning for the position. Valinor is a group house on my street, with ~a dozen people living in and around it. We’ve been talking about fixing the backyard for a while. Now we can bet about whether it will happen. Having a number for this actually affects some of my decisions a little. Connor is hijacking the prediction market to make a poll, which is pretty cute. Dwayne Johnson does not have a 15% chance of winning the election. Manifold is suffering from the usual play money problem, where if you only start out with $1000 in play money, nobody wants to lock it up for three years to make a 15% profit. Vivek’s market, “Will I believe that 13177 is a prime number”, is pretty unusual. I’m interpreting it as a test/demonstration of prediction markets’ information-gathering ability. If you don’t know something and it’s hard to Google, you can make a prediction market about whether you’ll believe it in the future, and people who are able to figure out the answer will bet on it. Based on the 97% YES rate, I’m guessing 13177 is in fact a prime number. What else can you do this with? TANSTAAFL’s “Will I Be Convinced That Justin Trudeau Is Not Fidel Castro’s Son?” market is maybe pushing the limit of this methodology. Anyway, there are lots of me-too prediction markets but this is something genuinely new under the sun. Maybe it will be awesome itself, but I’m also hoping it helps bigger players realize how much more is possible. This Week In Metaculus A few new questions on intelligence enhancement, eg: The question explicitly allows embryo selection, but says it must raise IQ ten points and be available for <25% median income to count. Trivial improvements to existing embryo selection will top out around 9 points, so this seems to be predicting something more interesting, maybe iterated embryo selection at the very least. I’m probably slightly bearish on this one; I believe if it existed someone would find a way to get it, but I think the regulatory climate might be able to prevent the relevant research indefinitely. Improving adult IQ is really hard. This is a bold thing to speculate about! Atmospheric CO2 was 300ish for most of pre-industrial history, 400ish now, and rising. This question predicts 600 in 2100, which sounds like what happens if global warming gets a bit worse but eventually stabilizes. I’m less sure. I think if we make it to 2100, we’ll have so much technology that atmospheric CO2 can be whatever we want it to be. But maybe we’ll want it to stay where it is; once there’s been a lot of global warming and people have moved / shifted lifestyles, it could be equally disruptive to cool the planet back down. Right now it’s 5%, the official government prediction is 10% by 2030, but this market says 17.6%. But look at that probability distribution! It’s a lot of people saying 10%ish, plus a very long tail of very big numbers. I think people are disagreeing about how exponential this change is going to be. Shorts Metaculus is holding an essay contest for people who want to use their AI-related prediction markets to argue the future of AI. $6500 available in prizes.

So it looks like forecasters expect that, conditional upon Russia invading at all, there’s an 80% chance they’ll take Mariupol in the east, a 66% chance they’ll take Kharkiv (also eastern, but only a third ethnic Russian and currently aligned with the central government), and only about a 30% chance they take Kyiv or Odessa. See also this thread full of speculation in the subreddit. As for me, I’m going all in on “yes” after seeing this tweet: Alexander Cube Last week I speculated that to truly realize the potential of prediction markets, we’d need one that was real money, easy to use, and easy to create markets on. Gustavo Lacerda and Nuno Sempere very kindly drew this picture and named it after me: Nobody has reached the promised land at the furthest point. But all three connected vertices are occupied. Augur is real-money and lets people create their own markets, (but it’s impossible to use - it’s made of complicated crypto contracts that nobody’s made a workable front end for yet). Polymarket is real money and easy to use (but doesn’t let people create their own markets; apparently they’re nervous about resolution disputes). Manifold is easy to use and lets people create their own market, but it’s not real money (they’re American and centralized, so they have to follow anti-gambling regulations). Manifold Markets Speaking of which, they’re open! As the cube suggests, Manifold is a site where anyone can create their own (play money) prediction market. They set the question and they decide when and how it resolves (with everyone else just out of luck if they decide to fake it or rug-pull). It’s a bold strategy, but boy oh boy are people liking it so far: Not actually in order This is a semi-randomly selected sample of Manifold markets, but let’s go through them one by one. The Ukraine market is the biggest on Manifold. It’s also deeply out of step with every other prediction market and the top non-prediction-market authorities - who are all giving numbers in the 50s and 60s. I don’t understand how this is so low - yes, play money < real money, but mostly because play money doesn’t get enough people betting. Here lots of people are betting - it’s the biggest market on the site, and since you only start with $1000 either twenty people have bet everything or more people have bet a fraction - but it’s still wrong. I tried to spend some play money to correct it and it snapped back to just as wrong as it was before. I have no explanation. Midnight The Stray Cat is the second biggest market on Manifold, just after Ukraine. I guess the Internet really liking cats shouldn’t be a surprise at this point. In case you need to do research first I’m told this is the cat in question: Props to Manifold for a bunch of markets like the third one on there, where they eat their own dog food by using their market to predict how their business decisions are going to go. ACX Bot has copy-pasted all of my predictions from 2022. At some point they should be able to compare their results with Zvi (ie a single very smart person), with the contest many of you entered (ie an average of formless crowdsourced predictions), and Metaculus (ie a non-monetary forecasting tournament). I’m looking forward to it! Most of you already know Lars Doucet, who’s written some great ACX posts on Georgism. I don’t know what possessed him to make a Joe Rogan Georgism interviewee market, unless he’s gunning for the position. Valinor is a group house on my street, with ~a dozen people living in and around it. We’ve been talking about fixing the backyard for a while. Now we can bet about whether it will happen. Having a number for this actually affects some of my decisions a little. Connor is hijacking the prediction market to make a poll, which is pretty cute. Dwayne Johnson does not have a 15% chance of winning the election. Manifold is suffering from the usual play money problem, where if you only start out with $1000 in play money, nobody wants to lock it up for three years to make a 15% profit. Vivek’s market, “Will I believe that 13177 is a prime number”, is pretty unusual. I’m interpreting it as a test/demonstration of prediction markets’ information-gathering ability. If you don’t know something and it’s hard to Google, you can make a prediction market about whether you’ll believe it in the future, and people who are able to figure out the answer will bet on it. Based on the 97% YES rate, I’m guessing 13177 is in fact a prime number. What else can you do this with? TANSTAAFL’s “Will I Be Convinced That Justin Trudeau Is Not Fidel Castro’s Son?” market is maybe pushing the limit of this methodology. Anyway, there are lots of me-too prediction markets but this is something genuinely new under the sun. Maybe it will be awesome itself, but I’m also hoping it helps bigger players realize how much more is possible. This Week In Metaculus A few new questions on intelligence enhancement, eg: The question explicitly allows embryo selection, but says it must raise IQ ten points and be available for <25% median income to count. Trivial improvements to existing embryo selection will top out around 9 points, so this seems to be predicting something more interesting, maybe iterated embryo selection at the very least. I’m probably slightly bearish on this one; I believe if it existed someone would find a way to get it, but I think the regulatory climate might be able to prevent the relevant research indefinitely. Improving adult IQ is really hard. This is a bold thing to speculate about! Atmospheric CO2 was 300ish for most of pre-industrial history, 400ish now, and rising. This question predicts 600 in 2100, which sounds like what happens if global warming gets a bit worse but eventually stabilizes. I’m less sure. I think if we make it to 2100, we’ll have so much technology that atmospheric CO2 can be whatever we want it to be. But maybe we’ll want it to stay where it is; once there’s been a lot of global warming and people have moved / shifted lifestyles, it could be equally disruptive to cool the planet back down. Right now it’s 5%, the official government prediction is 10% by 2030, but this market says 17.6%. But look at that probability distribution! It’s a lot of people saying 10%ish, plus a very long tail of very big numbers. I think people are disagreeing about how exponential this change is going to be. Shorts Metaculus is holding an essay contest for people who want to use their AI-related prediction markets to argue the future of AI. $6500 available in prizes.

Inline links: this thread full of speculation in the subreddit, Gustavo Lacerda, Nuno Sempere, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ukFP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F851b95c2-a103-43fc-8e6f-339468fa1469_485x320.png, Augur, Polymarket, Manifold, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!j26W!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcba2cb25-7980-446d-8050-499c35c4e56f_919x1017.png, predictions from 2022, ACX posts on Georgism, Will I Be Convinced That Justin Trudeau Is Not Fidel Castro’s Son?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!V2bV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fca419ec2-7b91-44cd-80b0-2aad1baa4c2f_766x166.png, The question, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ah6n!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1ff4f28d-1901-45f2-85bc-8f1c2120ecd1_770x187.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zSK8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F80e3383c-6f68-412a-ac90-ca63236bdb10_769x167.png, This, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!frCz!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F976d1b66-daee-43d1-948a-500e77ac5a2f_764x164.png, this market, holding an essay contest

Play Money And Reputation Systems

February 21, 2022 · Original source

Positive-sum means that the house always loses; on average, you make money every time you bet. Metaculus is infamous for this; see eg this question on Ukraine:

If Russia invades Ukraine, this person will win +58 points; if it doesn’t, they will win +32 points. Why does Metaculus allow this? They want to incentivize people to forecast. If it’s zero-sum, you’re as likely to lose points by forecasting a question as gain them. In fact, if you’re not the smart money, you’re more likely to lose, much as normal people should try to avoid competing against Wall Street traders when picking stocks. Since Metaculus wants to harness the wisdom of crowds, and you need lots of people to make a crowd, they incentivize you with a better than 50-50 chance (sometimes a guaranteed chance) of getting points.

In a positive-sum system, in the hour it takes Susan to produce one brilliant forecast, Randy has clicked on 360 different questions. Who ends up with more points? It depends on whether your system rewards a brilliant answer 360x more than the baseline it rewards any answer at all. The above Ukraine question on Metaculus rewards a maximally correct answer 4x more than a lazy answer intended to most efficiently reap the free points - ~50 vs. ~200. So assuming an unlimited number of questions and both people investing the same amount of time, Randy would end up with about a 90x higher reputation than Susan.

Links For February

February 22, 2022 · Original source

29: Russian nationalist blogger Anatoly Karlin on why Putin wants to invade Ukraine. Short version: partly emotional nationalism, but partly rational calculation that as Russia tries to leave the Western way of life and go it alone in some kind of cultural/economic sense, it will have better odds of self-sufficiency with an extra 35 million people in its sphere of influence. Related, and excellent: how Russia thought about the recent protests in Kazakhstan.

Inline links: why Putin wants to invade Ukraine, how Russia thought about the recent protests in Kazakhstan

Ukraine Warcasting

March 01, 2022 · Original source

This is the guy who wrote Coup D’Etat, a handbook for attempting coups. He is a famous international relations and geopolitics theorist, has served in the IDF, speaks six languages, and has written a book on the military strategy of the late Roman Empire. I read his coup handbook a while ago and was very impressed by him. Luttwak correctly predicted that Russia would have a hard time invading Ukraine with its current troop numbers, but incorrectly predicted that, because “Putin is not a fool”, they wouldn’t try. When everyone else expected Russia to win instantly, Luttwak was the only person I saw arguing (again and again) that conquering Ukraine would actually be very hard and Putin might fail. He deserves honor and glory for that strong, public, and accurate prediction.

See his Lessons From Forecasting The Ukraine War.

Inline links: Lessons From Forecasting The Ukraine War

I’ll need to reflect more on the implications of this outcome. All I can promise you is transparency, honesty, and a willingness to correct for any blindspots. One potential blindspot here was placing too much emphasis on the repeated and vehement criticism by actual Ukrainian officials of what they decried as alarmist US rhetoric. Just last week, I interviewed a sitting member of the Ukraine parliament who straight-up told me that externally-generated “panic” was a far greater threat to Ukraine’s security than any forthcoming Russian invasion. Ukraine’s president, over and over again, was even more searing in his own repudiations of US government and media behavior. I don’t have a great explanation for this dynamic yet, but it’s possible what they were telling me tracked too closely with my pre-existing disdain for official US claims vis-a-vis Russia — which in the very recent past have been wildly wrong and destructive. As you’ll remember if you lived through Russiagate.

Inline links: interviewed, searing

Ukraine Thoughts And Links

March 08, 2022 · Original source

But that’s how it’s been interpreted, so fine. Maybe nothing will ever happen. I don’t think the Ukraine War is necessarily a counterexample. Fukuyama wrote in 1992, so he knew that eg the Gulf War could happen. Is this conflict bigger than the Gulf War?

The next time a big country wants to invade a little one, we want it to remember how much misery everyone inflicted on Russia for the Ukraine conflict and think “no thank you”. That involves inflicting lots of misery on Russia right now, whether or not it wins the current war.

a. Metaculus Alerts is a Twitter bot that alerts you when a Metaculus prediction on the Ukraine war has changed drastically in a short time. For example, “the chance of Russia taking Kiev by April has decreased 10% in the past 24 hours”. I find this a good substitute to refreshing the news every minute to see if something interesting has happened.

Inline links: Metaculus Alerts

March 14, 2022 · Original source

Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post February 28:

Inline links: my last post

Will Zelinskyy no longer be President of Ukraine on 4/22?: 63% —→20%

Inline links: Will Zelinskyy no longer be President of Ukraine on 4/22

Numbers 1 and 7 are impressive changes! (it’s interesting how similarly they’ve evolved, even though they’re superficially about different things and the questions were on different prediction markets). Early in the war, prediction markets didn’t like Ukraine’s odds; now they’re much more sanguine.

March 21, 2022 · Original source

The upshot of all of this is that Insight is one of the leading platforms for predicting the Ukraine War right now:

Inline links: predicting the Ukraine War

Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post March 14:

Inline links: my last post

Will Zelinskyy no longer be President of Ukraine on 4/22?: 20% —→15%

Inline links: Will Zelinskyy no longer be President of Ukraine on 4/22

Open Thread 217

March 27, 2022 · Original source

Metaculus currently has him at 40% to win the primary and 29% to win the general. I’m closer to 60/45. Although he’s getting support from some big funders, campaign finance privileges small-to-medium-sized donations from ordinary people. If you want to support him, you can see a list of possible options here - including donations. You can donate max $2900 for the primary, plus another $2900 for the general that will be refunded if he doesn’t make it. If you do donate, it would be extra helpful if the money came in before a key reporting deadline March 31. 3: Every year in autumn I hold a big Meetups Everywhere event, and every time people tell me I should do it more often than once a year. So this time we’ll hold a mini-Meetups-Everywhere this April. It won’t be any different from your usual meetup schedule except that it’ll be the Schelling time for everyone who only wants to come once every few months to come. If you’re a meetups organizer (or want to become one), please fill in this form with the date of a meetup April 11th or later. Next Sunday I’ll put the results on the Open Thread for people to see. 4: Speaking of meetups, the rationalist/EA establishment is trying to promote local meetups. If you’re a local ACX/LW meetups organizer, you’re potentially invited to attend an all-expenses paid retreat in California in July with our meetups czar Mingyuan. Please read more here, then fill in this form to get on her radar. 5: And speaking of Mingyuan, she is going to inspect - sorry, enjoy the hospitality of - the East Coast meetup groups. She’ll be in DC: 4/11–4/13 Baltimore: 4/14 Philadelphia: 4/15–4/16 NYC: 4/17–4/21 Yale: 4/22–4/23 Northampton: 4/24–4/25 Boston: 4/26–5/1. The local groups have already taken care of having meetups at the right time, but she’s looking for people who could host her and drive her between cities . Email meetupsmingyuan@gmail.com if you can help. 6: Last week I tried to figure out the needs of community members in Russia and Ukraine. There are some great resources on the thread, but issues that still need solving: Seven Ukrainian refugees looking for remote work

Inline links: here, donations., fill in this form, here, this form, on the thread, Seven Ukrainian refugees looking for remote work

Ukrainian senior infra engineer normally at a FAANG but now stranded in Ukraine looking for Rust/C++ short/mid-term work/contract

Inline links: Ukrainian senior infra engineer normally at a FAANG but now stranded in Ukraine looking for Rust/C++ short/mid-term work/contract

Paramedic in Ternopol, Ukraine, collecting money for medical supplies

Inline links: Paramedic in Ternopol, Ukraine, collecting money for medical supplies

Who Gets Self-Determination?

March 30, 2022 · Original source

The notion that Ukraine is not a country in its own right, but a historical part of Russia, appears to be deeply ingrained in the minds of many in the Russian leadership. Already long before the Ukraine crisis, at an April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that “Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but a[nother] part, a considerable one, was a gift from us!” In his March 18, 2014 speech marking the annexation of Crimea, Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus’ is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” Since then, Putin has repeated similar claims on many occasions. As recently as February 2020, he once again stated in an interview that Ukrainians and Russians “are one and the same people”, and he insinuated that Ukrainian national identity had emerged as a product of foreign interference. Similarly, Russia’s then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told a perplexed apparatchik in April 2016 that there has been “no state” in Ukraine, neither before nor after the 2014 crisis.

Inline links: Ukraine is not even a state!, Putin declared, stated, Medvedev told

What exactly makes the Ukraine a nation? To just about everyone outside of Ukraine itself, no one can figure out what distinguishes Ukrainians from Russians. I’m not a Slavic language speaker, but I frequently hear about Ukrainian simply being a dialect of Russian or at least mutually intelligible. It should also be pointed out that English-language transliterations of Ukrainian words consistently look much worse than their Russian equivalents, and this is now ruining maps all over the world. Just from the standpoint of not wanting to ever see the cringe term “Kyiv” again one should avoid supporting the Ukrainians.

So at the end of the day the Ukraine is fighting for the right to be objectively wrong, whereas Russia might be fighting to (re)establish a distinct civilizational space.

Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination

April 06, 2022 · Original source

Every oblast in Ukraine, including Crimea, voted for independence. Support ranged from over 95 percent in western Ukraine and the Kiev region to 54 percent in Crimea, where ethnic Russians form a substantial majority of the population.

I feel the whole assumption there is some list of features that grant a group of people the right to self-determination is kind of a category mistake. Sometimes it will make the world better to let a group of people form a separate country sometimes it won't. The difference between Ukraine and the confederacy is as simple as: the world was better off not letting the confederacy self-determine and worse if Russia stops Ukraine from doing so. It even plausibly depends on who the occupier is and how they treat them (if the Basque region was in China not Spain no question it would be better to allow self-determination...as of now unclear to me as it imposes costs on both sides).

I disagree that letting whatever nontrivially-sized place secede is good, because states getting smaller and more numerous makes coordination problems on large scales worse (I'm aware there are plenty of arguments for the reverse, but I'm not going to expand on this issue for now). And a norm that every group gets a right to self-determination in the future if and only if they already have it now offers a lot of advantages in terms of stability; not redrawing borders at all can cut down on warfare. But neither of these heuristics seem like good reasons not to have taken away Serbia's ability to genocide Kosovar Albanians. Russia taking Crimea from Ukraine doesn't change how many different countries need to be involved in large-scale coordination challenges, and that particular operation didn't even involve any bloodshed, so you could make a case that that undercuts my argument that border changes are bad because war is bad. But this won't stop me from opposing Russia's annexation of Crimea, because Russia agreed not to do that without Ukraine's consent as part of an agreement for Ukraine to give up nuclear weapons, and undermining incentives for states to give up nuclear weapons is bad.

April 18, 2022 · Original source

Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post March 21:

Inline links: my last post

May 10, 2022 · Original source

Changes in Ukraine prediction markets since my last post April 18:

Inline links: my last post

Peace or cease-fire before 2023?: 65% → 52%

Inline links: Peace or cease-fire before 2023?:

Will Russia formally declare war on Ukraine before August?: (new) → 19%

Inline links: Will Russia formally declare war on Ukraine before August?

June 13, 2022 · Original source

90% chance of fewer than 400,000 cases. 95% chance of fewer than 2.2 million cases. 98% chance of fewer than 500 million cases. This is encouraging, but a 2% chance of >500 million cases (there have been about 500 million recorded COVID infections total) is still very bad. Does Metaculus say this because it’s true, or because there will always be a few crazy people entering very large numbers without modeling anything carefully? I’m not sure. How would you test that? Warcasting The war in Ukraine has shifted into a new phase, with Russia concentrating in Donetsk and Luhansk, and finally beginning to make good use of its artillery advantage. I’m going to stop following the old Kiev-centric set of questions and replace them with more appropriate ones: Notice that this continues to rise, from 16% a month ago to 22% today. See Eikonal’s comment here for some discussion of how this might happen and what territories these might be (and note that we switched from Ukrainian control in the last question to Russian control in this one). I’m keeping this one in here, but it never changes. Meanwhile, on Insight Prediction: $2000 in liquidity and still 14% off from Metaculus, weird. Musk Vs. Marcus Elon Musk recently said he thought we might have AGI before 2029, and Gary Marcus said we wouldn’t and offered to bet on it. It’s an important tradition of AGI discussions that nobody can ever agree on a definition of it and it has to be re-invented every time the topic comes up. Marcus proposed five different things he thought an AI couldn’t do before 2029, such that if it does them, he admits he was wrong and Musk wins the bet (which purely hypothetical at this point; Musk hasn’t responded). The AI would have to do at least three of: Read a novel and answer complicated questions about eg the themes (existing language models can do this with pre-digested novels, eg LAMDA talking about Les Miserables here - I think Marcus means you have to give it a new novel that it has no corpus of humans ever having discussed before, and make it do the work itself).

Inline links: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10738/ukraine-controls-dnrlnr-on-jan-1-2024/, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10745/russian-control-of-new-territory-2024-01-01/, Eikonal’s comment here, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10050/bilateral-ceasefire-between-russia--ukraine/, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10002/presidency-of-vladimir-putin-on-feb-1-2023/, https://insightprediction.com/m/206/will-russia-conquer-the-donbass-by-the-end-of-july-2022, https://insightprediction.com/m/1282/will-russia-conquer-luhansk-by-july-15th, https://insightprediction.com/m/232/when-will-the-russia-ukraine-war-end, said we wouldn’t, here

Your Book Review: The Future Of Fusion Energy

June 17, 2022 · Original source

Uragan-2 (Ukraine, 2006)

Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy

June 24, 2022 · Original source

It’s all a competition to see who can signal “I hate Putin” the most, but Germany was still shutting down all its nuclear power plants to rely on Russian gas despite warnings from every other EU state (Russia accounts for 40% of Europe’s gas imports) — so much for grand strategy. That is not to excuse Putin’s invasion (he is, after all, the aggressor) and no, Ukraine is not “the West’s fault” as Mearsheimer has claimed in his viral lecture, but “NATO’s door remains open” for me and “we're going to start WW3 because you're in my sphere of influence” for thee is no grand strategy at all. Indeed, the irrational Western response is not predictable by the unitary actor model, but by the public choice model. Hanania writes: If you were going to cut Russia off from SWIFT, for example, why wouldn’t you announce it beforehand? The whole point of a punishment like that is supposed to be its deterrent effect, but if you don’t communicate that a specific action will happen, then it can’t influence behaviour. The answer here seems to be a lack of grand strategy, with leaders responding to events according to emotion and public relations more than anything. Cutting off SWIFT, or even threatening to do so, seems extreme before an invasion occurs, but not after it has begun. The West cannot rely on sanctions to make Russia abandon its core national security interests, which at the very least include a no-NATO commitment, the acceptance of the secession of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the recognition of the annexation of Crimea. Sanctions will also push Putin closer to Beijing, and the US will continue down the self-defeating path of alienating both of the other two superpowers — so much for American grand strategy. Hanania writes: Even if Putin has maximalist aims at this point, that doesn’t mean sanctions are worth doing. Their costs are high and they may have major consequences for the global economy. One has to consider the possibility that they make Russia more repressive at home and more brutal in its persecution of the war. Putin is getting sanctioned, but ordinary Russians are getting cancelled. The Metropolitan Opera of New York has announced it will no longer stage performers who have supported Russian President Vladimir Putin. Carnegie Hall has done the same, and the Royal Opera House in London is cancelling a planned Bolshoi Ballet residency (one of the oldest and most prestigious ballet companies in the world). Eurovision banned Russia. Tchaikovsky is cancelled. As Tyler Cowen writes, cancel culture against Russians is the new McCarthyism. The culture war has morphed into a hyperreal form on the Internet. Just as COVID is the first pandemic in the Age of Twitter, so the Ukraine invasion is, in some sense, the first war in the Age of Twitter. As it unfolds, we are seeing many disturbing parallels to the events of early 2020. People are rapidly normalising once-fringe ideas like a NATO-enforced no-fly zone (while completely oblivious to the fact that it means shooting down Russian planes and causing WW3), direct US conflict with Russia, regime change in Moscow, and even, incredibly, the use of nuclear weapons. The overnight flips on German defence spending and SWIFT are like the overturning of conventional public health policies on masking and lockdowns. We have entered the age of shitpost diplomacy, as coined by Tanner Green, in which the official Twitter account of the US Embassy in Kiev literally posts memes to spite Putin: A Russian sixth-grader could explain why celebrating the glories of Kievan Rus does not subvert Putin’s claims about the history of the Russian nation so much as reinforce them. Just like Hong Kong’s protests, Ukraine has won the meme war with utterly lopsided propaganda and unanimous international support on the Internet. As Yoshimi writes: Floating ghostlike above it is our war, the myth of the ‘Ghost of Kyiv’, ace MIG-29 pilot who has apparently shot down six Russian planes, or the legend of the Ukrainian soldiers defending an island outpost who replied “Russian warship go fuck yourselves” to a surrender offer and may or may not have died heroically, or two Russian II-76 transport aircraft that maybe were shot down near Kiev, or videos of air strikes or dead bodies which variously are Russian or Ukrainian until they turn out to be from Gaza six years ago, or the viral video of an old Ukrainian woman telling off a Russian soldier by offering him sunflower seeds so when he dies, sunflowers (Ukraine’s national flowers) will sprout from the soil. We’re raising funds for the Ukrainian army on crowdfunding apps and giving advice to the civilians being handed assault weapons about how to disable tanks, sharing weird homophobic pictures of Putin as a gay icon and spamming Russian government posts. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has made the decision to stay and fight rather than flee like most would-be leaders who go all in for American foreign policy, and now is being deified by us as “badass”, “a true leader”, etc. etc., alongside his people, whose resistance to authoritarianism we are told is unparalleled in the modern world. After all, so it goes, who could be next? And like in Hong Kong, despite winning the culture war in hyperreality, the actual war in reality is won by the side with overwhelming military might, not morality. The real war is where Ukrainians are experiencing the genuine life-shattering effects of military conflict. It matters because this is the first time Western response is driven by Twitter outcry, and it will not be the last. A New EA Cause? Besides Hanania’s recommendations in the last section (which he admits are more or less impossible in an excellent interview with Caplan), a worthy EA priority might be to somehow turn the public tide on sanctions, which literally kill more people than Putin. Americans should be appalled by the atrocity committed in their names. The banality of the incompetence of foreign policy elites does not excuse their evil. With how entrenched the special interests are, I have no idea if it’s even worth trying, but at the very least the sheer amount of suffering and death from sanctions should be made common knowledge. Nuclear security is one of the top priorities in Effective Altruism, per 80,000 Hours, Future of Life Institute, and Our World In Data. Toby Orb, who wrote the definitive book on existential risk, The Precipice, estimates x-risk from nuclear war to be ~1 in 1000 in the next century. Luisa Rodriguez estimates a 1.1% chance of nuclear war each year and that the chances of a US-Russia nuclear war may be in the ballpark of 0.38% per year; summarised by Max Roser as: Nuclear risk is neglected by the public because of Pax Americana since the collapse of the USSR, and is not discussed as often in EA as it’s thought to be relatively well-funded and mainstream, but in fact major donors like the MacArthur Foundation have been withdrawing funding. As Joan Rohling details in an 80,000 Hours podcast there is much to be done, especially when Ukraine gave up their nuclear arsenal in 1994 in exchange for Russia’s promise to never threaten or use military force against them. A worthwhile adjacent cause area might be de-escalation of public outcry to reduce x-risk from nuclear war beyond just regular anti-proliferation efforts — even a Russian specialist from the RAND Corporation is surprised by how much public outrage is driving policy: Even just the pace of the sanctions: we went to 11 out of 10 in like two days — farther than many expected we’d ever get in short order. And I think the same is true about these military assistance initiatives. We’re just trying to do something because there’s a public demand for action. So that’s what worries me, that the sort of public outrage that’s being channeled in Western democracies through political systems could result in decisions that prove ultimately unwise. Despite how odd it is that some wars are “legal” while others aren’t, we should be glad UNSC exists as much as everyone laughs at how useless the rest of the UN is. All is fair in love and war, but international norms is all that stands between us and nuclear annihilation. It is hard to emphasise just how delusional it is for the public to fixate on no-fly zones — I, like Scott, am surprised we’re still capable of jingoism. 80,000 Hours has updated their top career recommendations to include China specialist to improve China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risk, which seems more important after reading how irrational and captured the American foreign policy apparatus is. As Hanania writes, “great power competition” is an anachronism. If Ukraine is the first war warped by hyperreality, it won’t be the last. Now that US foreign policy elites have driven Putin into the arms of China, let’s hope IR specialists can imbibe the public choice model instead of antagonising yet another nuclear rival. Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy is an important work because it raises the sanity waterline, which at the least should make us stop killing millions for no reason, and at the most should make the human race more knowledgeable of how to prevent total extinction from nuclear armageddon. Pax Americana is dead, but a multipolar world will be more humane. Endnotes In the fiscal year 2018, the top five government contractors were all weapons manufacturers, with Lockheed Martin in first place at $40.6 billion. The Department of Defence spent $358 billion on contracting, ten times higher than second place Department of Energy. Collective action problems that stop a bunch of smaller companies from effectively influencing policy are no hindrance for companies like Lockheed Martin.

Inline links: not, viral lecture, NATO’s door remains open, we're going to start WW3 because you're in my sphere of influence, writes, writes, cancelled, banned, cancelled, writes,, German defence spending, shitpost diplomacy, posts, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!j4gR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c5db00c-e420-4b54-b826-b85d9ddf186d_900x647.png, writes, interview, 80,000 Hours, Future of Life Institute, Our World In Data, The Precipice, ~1 in 1000, estimates, summarised, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PRc2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe90b1bb5-d84b-45dc-b9fa-2edddbf6b9fa_1600x1006.png, Pax Americana, MacArthur Foundation, details, gave up, surprised, Scott, jingoism, China specialist, captured, writes, the sanity waterline, a multipolar world will be more humane

The War in Afghanistan (2001-2021): a series of UN Resolutions justified, out of self-defence, the US invasion of Afghanistan, overthrow of the Taliban government, and targeting of al-Qaeda, in spite of the failure of nation building when the Taliban returned to Kabul in the midst of the final American withdrawal Similarly, the Soviet Union did not violate the sovereignty of states when it invaded Afghanistan at the invitation of its government in 1979, and similarly in Syria in 2015. When Russia violated international law, most notably Georgia in 2014 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the goal was occupation rather than removing their governments, killing their leaders, or fundamentally remaking their societies (the book was published before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine). The US is truly singular in violating international law: Grenada Intervention (1983): Reagan ordered an invasion, not out of self-defence nor with UNSC approval (in fact voted against by UN general assembly 108 to 9), of the small island off the coast of Venezuela where its communist military junta came into power

The press should include Tetlock’s superforecasting/prediction markets when reporting the forecasts by the military and national security bureaucracy at public interviews, official reports, and congressional testimony 7. Conclusion And Further Readings Gordon Tullock, one of the founding fathers of public choice theory who coined “rent-seeking”, has always wished for a book like this, and now it exists. It is clear to me that Hanania’s public choice model should usurp the conventional unitary actor model, and any scholar who insists on American grand strategy is deluding themselves. The book hasn’t been reviewed by mainstream outlets (which probably only reviews “pop” nonfiction), but have been unanimously praised by scholars in adjacent fields: Steven Pinker praised it as “cynical but probably accurate”; Robin Hanson was “quite impressed”, Byran Caplan, whose work The Myth of the Rational Voter was cited extensively by Hanania, praised it as “eye-opening”; Tyler Cowen praised the book as impressive in spite of finding Hanania’s view to be more sceptical than his own — a sentiment I share after reading about the East Asian economic miracle (the greatest anti-poverty program in history) facilitated by American intervention in How Asia Works (another contrarian economics-related work I’ve reviewed). Russian Invasion of Ukraine At the time of writing, Russia is invading Ukraine, so it is interesting to see how well the public choice model’s predictions fit. Indeed, the unitary actor model can describe autocratic states to some degree — to understand Russia we only have to get into the head of Putin (the model still falls short in accounting for the oligarchs who run the mafia state). Ukraine is central to Putin’s ideology and subjectively important to Russian society, and the desire to obliterate and absorb the nation of Ukraine far predates the history of NATO (see also Adam Tooze’s excellent essay on understanding Russia as a strategic petrostate). As Hanania writes on his Substack (worthy of your subscription, by the way)4: We know what the Russians want. They have made clear, openly and consistently, that they do not want NATO to keep expanding. When it became apparent in December that an invasion was on the table, the US started a diplomatic process that has involved trying to work out concessions on other things, while refusing to take NATO membership for Ukraine off the table. Putin has become Satan in liberal imagination, and when it comes to the culture war, the emotional response is overwhelming. Hanania writes: Brexit, Trump, and the rise of Orban and other right-wing populists in Europe have helped solidify a narrative in which Russian hackers and influence operations are behind everything liberal elites find distasteful, from opposition to Syrian refugees to bans on Critical Race Theory. Here’s a website laying out all the things Russia has been accused of “weaponizing” in the media, including dolphins, federalism, and the weather. The details of debates surrounding the wisdom of NATO expansion and whether Ukraine actually matters to the United States are lost in the larger story, as emotional denunciations of Putin as the source of all anti-democratic activity drives attitudes and policies. Inconvenient facts are ignored because it’s not really about “democracy,” “international law,” or any of the other words they use to obscure the fact that it’s culture wars all the way down. And the Western response is driven by extreme public outcry to an unprecedented extent: It’s all a competition to see who can signal “I hate Putin” the most, but Germany was still shutting down all its nuclear power plants to rely on Russian gas despite warnings from every other EU state (Russia accounts for 40% of Europe’s gas imports) — so much for grand strategy. That is not to excuse Putin’s invasion (he is, after all, the aggressor) and no, Ukraine is not “the West’s fault” as Mearsheimer has claimed in his viral lecture, but “NATO’s door remains open” for me and “we're going to start WW3 because you're in my sphere of influence” for thee is no grand strategy at all. Indeed, the irrational Western response is not predictable by the unitary actor model, but by the public choice model. Hanania writes: If you were going to cut Russia off from SWIFT, for example, why wouldn’t you announce it beforehand? The whole point of a punishment like that is supposed to be its deterrent effect, but if you don’t communicate that a specific action will happen, then it can’t influence behaviour. The answer here seems to be a lack of grand strategy, with leaders responding to events according to emotion and public relations more than anything. Cutting off SWIFT, or even threatening to do so, seems extreme before an invasion occurs, but not after it has begun. The West cannot rely on sanctions to make Russia abandon its core national security interests, which at the very least include a no-NATO commitment, the acceptance of the secession of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the recognition of the annexation of Crimea. Sanctions will also push Putin closer to Beijing, and the US will continue down the self-defeating path of alienating both of the other two superpowers — so much for American grand strategy. Hanania writes: Even if Putin has maximalist aims at this point, that doesn’t mean sanctions are worth doing. Their costs are high and they may have major consequences for the global economy. One has to consider the possibility that they make Russia more repressive at home and more brutal in its persecution of the war. Putin is getting sanctioned, but ordinary Russians are getting cancelled. The Metropolitan Opera of New York has announced it will no longer stage performers who have supported Russian President Vladimir Putin. Carnegie Hall has done the same, and the Royal Opera House in London is cancelling a planned Bolshoi Ballet residency (one of the oldest and most prestigious ballet companies in the world). Eurovision banned Russia. Tchaikovsky is cancelled. As Tyler Cowen writes, cancel culture against Russians is the new McCarthyism. The culture war has morphed into a hyperreal form on the Internet. Just as COVID is the first pandemic in the Age of Twitter, so the Ukraine invasion is, in some sense, the first war in the Age of Twitter. As it unfolds, we are seeing many disturbing parallels to the events of early 2020. People are rapidly normalising once-fringe ideas like a NATO-enforced no-fly zone (while completely oblivious to the fact that it means shooting down Russian planes and causing WW3), direct US conflict with Russia, regime change in Moscow, and even, incredibly, the use of nuclear weapons. The overnight flips on German defence spending and SWIFT are like the overturning of conventional public health policies on masking and lockdowns. We have entered the age of shitpost diplomacy, as coined by Tanner Green, in which the official Twitter account of the US Embassy in Kiev literally posts memes to spite Putin: A Russian sixth-grader could explain why celebrating the glories of Kievan Rus does not subvert Putin’s claims about the history of the Russian nation so much as reinforce them. Just like Hong Kong’s protests, Ukraine has won the meme war with utterly lopsided propaganda and unanimous international support on the Internet. As Yoshimi writes: Floating ghostlike above it is our war, the myth of the ‘Ghost of Kyiv’, ace MIG-29 pilot who has apparently shot down six Russian planes, or the legend of the Ukrainian soldiers defending an island outpost who replied “Russian warship go fuck yourselves” to a surrender offer and may or may not have died heroically, or two Russian II-76 transport aircraft that maybe were shot down near Kiev, or videos of air strikes or dead bodies which variously are Russian or Ukrainian until they turn out to be from Gaza six years ago, or the viral video of an old Ukrainian woman telling off a Russian soldier by offering him sunflower seeds so when he dies, sunflowers (Ukraine’s national flowers) will sprout from the soil. We’re raising funds for the Ukrainian army on crowdfunding apps and giving advice to the civilians being handed assault weapons about how to disable tanks, sharing weird homophobic pictures of Putin as a gay icon and spamming Russian government posts. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has made the decision to stay and fight rather than flee like most would-be leaders who go all in for American foreign policy, and now is being deified by us as “badass”, “a true leader”, etc. etc., alongside his people, whose resistance to authoritarianism we are told is unparalleled in the modern world. After all, so it goes, who could be next? And like in Hong Kong, despite winning the culture war in hyperreality, the actual war in reality is won by the side with overwhelming military might, not morality. The real war is where Ukrainians are experiencing the genuine life-shattering effects of military conflict. It matters because this is the first time Western response is driven by Twitter outcry, and it will not be the last. A New EA Cause? Besides Hanania’s recommendations in the last section (which he admits are more or less impossible in an excellent interview with Caplan), a worthy EA priority might be to somehow turn the public tide on sanctions, which literally kill more people than Putin. Americans should be appalled by the atrocity committed in their names. The banality of the incompetence of foreign policy elites does not excuse their evil. With how entrenched the special interests are, I have no idea if it’s even worth trying, but at the very least the sheer amount of suffering and death from sanctions should be made common knowledge. Nuclear security is one of the top priorities in Effective Altruism, per 80,000 Hours, Future of Life Institute, and Our World In Data. Toby Orb, who wrote the definitive book on existential risk, The Precipice, estimates x-risk from nuclear war to be ~1 in 1000 in the next century. Luisa Rodriguez estimates a 1.1% chance of nuclear war each year and that the chances of a US-Russia nuclear war may be in the ballpark of 0.38% per year; summarised by Max Roser as: Nuclear risk is neglected by the public because of Pax Americana since the collapse of the USSR, and is not discussed as often in EA as it’s thought to be relatively well-funded and mainstream, but in fact major donors like the MacArthur Foundation have been withdrawing funding. As Joan Rohling details in an 80,000 Hours podcast there is much to be done, especially when Ukraine gave up their nuclear arsenal in 1994 in exchange for Russia’s promise to never threaten or use military force against them. A worthwhile adjacent cause area might be de-escalation of public outcry to reduce x-risk from nuclear war beyond just regular anti-proliferation efforts — even a Russian specialist from the RAND Corporation is surprised by how much public outrage is driving policy: Even just the pace of the sanctions: we went to 11 out of 10 in like two days — farther than many expected we’d ever get in short order. And I think the same is true about these military assistance initiatives. We’re just trying to do something because there’s a public demand for action. So that’s what worries me, that the sort of public outrage that’s being channeled in Western democracies through political systems could result in decisions that prove ultimately unwise. Despite how odd it is that some wars are “legal” while others aren’t, we should be glad UNSC exists as much as everyone laughs at how useless the rest of the UN is. All is fair in love and war, but international norms is all that stands between us and nuclear annihilation. It is hard to emphasise just how delusional it is for the public to fixate on no-fly zones — I, like Scott, am surprised we’re still capable of jingoism. 80,000 Hours has updated their top career recommendations to include China specialist to improve China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risk, which seems more important after reading how irrational and captured the American foreign policy apparatus is. As Hanania writes, “great power competition” is an anachronism. If Ukraine is the first war warped by hyperreality, it won’t be the last. Now that US foreign policy elites have driven Putin into the arms of China, let’s hope IR specialists can imbibe the public choice model instead of antagonising yet another nuclear rival. Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy is an important work because it raises the sanity waterline, which at the least should make us stop killing millions for no reason, and at the most should make the human race more knowledgeable of how to prevent total extinction from nuclear armageddon. Pax Americana is dead, but a multipolar world will be more humane. Endnotes In the fiscal year 2018, the top five government contractors were all weapons manufacturers, with Lockheed Martin in first place at $40.6 billion. The Department of Defence spent $358 billion on contracting, ten times higher than second place Department of Energy. Collective action problems that stop a bunch of smaller companies from effectively influencing policy are no hindrance for companies like Lockheed Martin.

Inline links: Gordon Tullock, cynical but probably accurate, Robin Hanson, The Myth of the Rational Voter, eye-opening, impressive, reviewed, predates, essay, writes, website, public outcry, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!R3g3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F693f0593-7460-4fb0-bc4a-e185cf6f0e06_964x506.png, not, viral lecture, NATO’s door remains open, we're going to start WW3 because you're in my sphere of influence, writes, writes, cancelled, banned, cancelled, writes,, German defence spending, shitpost diplomacy, posts, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!j4gR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c5db00c-e420-4b54-b826-b85d9ddf186d_900x647.png, writes, interview, 80,000 Hours, Future of Life Institute, Our World In Data, The Precipice, ~1 in 1000, estimates, summarised, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PRc2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe90b1bb5-d84b-45dc-b9fa-2edddbf6b9fa_1600x1006.png, Pax Americana, MacArthur Foundation, details, gave up, surprised, Scott, jingoism, China specialist, captured, writes, the sanity waterline, a multipolar world will be more humane

Your Book Review: The Internationalists

July 01, 2022 · Original source

The implicit belief that our current expectations of war are the only possible expectations of war is widespread, even among rationalists. Not to pick on him, but Zvi wrote the common version of it recently:

Inline links: Zvi wrote the common version of it

"One school of thought is that Putin will consider himself entitled to keep any gains won on the battlefield, or at least any that it would make sense to keep. Whereas Ukraine most definitely can’t agree to that any time soon. It also is highly contrary to the kind of history that Putin used to justify his invasion. You very much do not get to keep whatever you happen to occupy when there is a formal peace settlement, that has never been how this works. For a guy who lectures us for hours about events from Europa Universalis this would be a very poor understanding of war score and formal borders." (emphasis added)

Our book explains why this skeptical reaction [that outlawing war is preposterous], while reasonable, is wrong. Outlawing war only seems ridiculous to us because ours is a world in which war has already been outlawed. (Introduction) Ukraine Let’s compare this to the current topic of concern, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The global outcry against Russia, the massive and continued use of sanctions to try to isolate and punish Russia, and the supplying of arms to Ukraine to help them fight off Russia -- all of these are aspects of a set of expectations about the legal status of war that we have inherited from the Peace Pact, a set of expectations that H&S name the New World Order. None of this would have been allowed under the Old World Order.

July 12, 2022 · Original source

So far they have two reports, one on monkeypox and one on Ukraine. I’ll try to review this in more detail some other Monday.

Inline links: monkeypox, Ukraine

Book Review: The Man From The Future

July 13, 2022 · Original source

That still leaves one mystery: why Hungary? There were Jews all over Europe. Although most of the weird overachievement comes from Ashkenazi Jews in particular - those from Eastern Europe - there were Ashkenazim in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, the Baltics, etc. So why Hungary?

Lest accounts by Ravage and other memoirists be dismissed as suspect late reconstructions, it is instructive to compare very similar accounts reported in real-time proximity to the events by disinterested sources, which tend to corroborate memoiristic accounts. One such example occurs in a 1905 study conducted by Emily Greene Balch, the American ethnographer, who did fieldwork in the Slovakian area of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Balch noted that the first Jew to emigrate from a town she visited was a Jewish cloth merchant who had gone bankrupt. Likewise, in a social survey of a shtetl in the Kiev Province (Ukraine), we read of an elderly storekeeper, once quite well off, reduced to a hole-in-the-wall shop, selling goods on consignment for a larger firm. Apart from two spinster daughters who helped out by sewing linens, all this man's children and their families (twenty-five people in all) had left for America within the space of six years.

Your Book Review: The Society Of The Spectacle

July 22, 2022 · Original source

This is not a fantasy - this is your news feed. The U.S. is predicting a false-flag attack by Russia in the Ukraine. Russia accused the UK of a false-flag attack in Syria. The U.S. accuses China of genocide. China and Iran claimed COVID was a U.S. bio-attack.

Inline links: a false-flag attack, accused, accuses, claimed

Another major theme is the emergence of the Eternal Present. Pseudoevents [10] come and go in rapid succession, everywhere and then nowhere at all. Social media has only accelerated the turnover. The news cycle generates nonstop whiplash. Yesterday it was Covid, today it’s Ukraine; tomorrow both will be memory-holed. Last year’s news has already vanished without a trace. Whither Kazakhstan? Afghanistan? Who knows and who cares?

Inline links: Pseudoevents, Afghanistan

For that matter, why are we up in arms about Ukraine and not, say, Yemen? There are clear reasons why - they just have nothing to do with democracy, sovereignty, war crimes, or human rights. I don't mean to say that nobody cares about those things. We all do, at least in a vague and abstract way. But that collective concern only becomes acute when the spectacle brings it into focus. The spectacle's gaze roves and lingers according to its whims. Without that constant reminder to care, awareness dissipates.

Inline links: Yemen

Links For July

July 29, 2022 · Original source

8: After decades of decline, world hunger is rising again, hopefully this is just temporary due to COVID and Ukraine.

Inline links: world hunger is rising again

Open Thread 244

October 02, 2022 · Original source

No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.

Highlights From The Comments On Columbus Day

October 10, 2022 · Original source

Also, I have just read on Wikipedia that in Ukraine there is a movement to change the focus from New Year to Christmas again, because New Year is associated with the Soviet past. I don't have any personal evidence on whether this is true, however.

October 18, 2022 · Original source

Several additional plaintiffs I can’t find good information about You can find the complaint here. The plaintiffs write: The [CFTC’s action], without explanation or other indication of reasoned decisionmaking, without “written notice of the facts or conduct which may warrant” the Revocation, and without providing anyone “an opportunity to demonstrate or achieve compliance” with the terms of No-Action Relief or other requirements, violates the Administrative Procedure Act. 5 U.S.C. §§ 558, 706. Among other things, the Revocation is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, [and/or] otherwise not in accordance with law” and occurred “without observance of procedure required by law.” The Court should “hold unlawful and set aside” the Revocation, including its command that contracts that would otherwise turn on events occurring after February 2023 be prematurely liquidated. 5 U.S.C. § 706. The Court also should enter a preliminary and then permanent injunction against the prescriptions in the Revocation requiring the liquidation of contracts by February 2023, including contracts that concern the 2024 elections, well before they would ordinarily mature. I am not a lawyer, but it sounds kind of like they’re saying “the decision was bad, and the Administrative Procedure Act says regulators shouldn’t do bad things”. I am split between the part of me which hates government regulators doing bad things, and the part of me which feels like this is how you get a cover-your-ass-ocracy that never does anything at all without fifteen layers of paperwork and ten trillion dollars per action. Whatever. At least this time it’s in my favor. Of course there are prediction markets about it: Source: Insight Prediction Nuclear Warcasting, Part 2 Samotsvety Forecasting is a team made of top prediction market players and tournament winners, vaguely affiliated with effective altruism, who make predictions in the public interest. Earlier this year, they got attention for forecasting the risk of nuclear war - in particular, they said there was an a 0.01% per month chance of London getting nuked this spring. Since then, most of the fear has crystallized into a specific scenario. Suppose Russia is losing very badly in Ukraine. Putin, fearing a coup or revolution at home if he gives up, decides to use a tactical nuclear weapon, ie a “small” nuke more suited to winning battles than destroying cities. He nukes a Ukrainian battlefield position. The West is enraged at this violation of the nuclear taboo and feels like it needs to respond decisively - maybe by nuking something on Russia’s side, or through some other act of extreme escalation. Then Russia feels like they need to respond, and eventually it escalates to strikes on major cities and global nuclear war. There are reasons for doubt. Tactical nukes wouldn’t really be useful in Ukraine; the battle lines are too spread out and there’s no single place where a nuclear explosion could take out a substantial portion of Ukraine’s forces. In the past, nuclear powers have accepted lost wars gracefully rather than turning to nukes. And the Russians deny it, and saying this is all just Western propaganda intended to scare people. Amid this uncertainty, Samotsvety has published an update: now they are at 16% chance that “Russia uses any type of nuclear weapon in Ukraine in the next year”, and 0.02% per month of a strike on London. Although they didn’t mention it this time, they previously said the risk of a strike on San Francisco was a little over half that of London; I don’t know if that’s changed. See also Dan Keys’ comment here for some skepticism of Samotsvety’s process. Swift Centre is a lot like Samotsvety; they’re a collection of top forecasters brought together by EA to make important predictions. They also took a swing at the nuclear question, and said 9.1% chance of a hostile nuclear detonation in Europe in the next six months. They didn’t calculate the risk that this would spread to global war, but they did discuss how different scenarios would bring the risk up or down: One of my hopes for forecasting is that it eventually becomes so well-validated that decision-makers can take these kinds of considerations into account: “Should we sent ATACMS missiles to Ukraine? It would have such-and-such benefits, but also increase the risk of nuclear escalation by 3.6%, is it worth it?” We can’t directly compare Samotsvety and Swift because they’re predicting over different time periods. But assuming that there’s more risk in the next six months than in the six months after that, I think Samotsvety is a little higher but they’re not embarrassingly far off. Metaculus is a bit more optimistic than either, believing there’s only a 4% chance of detonation in Ukraine in 2023 and a 7% chance of any use in the next ~year. Max Tegmark is going much higher than anyone else and says 16% chance of global nuclear war. Kalshi Applies For Election Markets Kalshi is a regulated and fully-legal prediction market with good lobbyists and a compliance team. This means the CFTC probably won’t randomly shut them down one day. But it also means they can only create new markets with CFTC permission. In July, Kalshi asked the CFTC for permission to make midterm election prediction markets - specifically, which party will win control of the House and Senate. The CFTC has said they will make a decision by October 28 (which doesn’t leave much time for predicting to happen before the November 8 election, but I guess it sets a precedent). September was the Request For Comment period, when the CFTC solicited comments from stakeholders about what they should do. Kalshi tried really hard to get lots of people to send in positive assessments - I know this because of how many people asked me “why is the CEO of Kalshi emailing me about this thing?” Their strategy seems to have worked; among the people who wrote to the CFTC in support were: A managing director at JP Morgan

Inline links: additional plaintiffs, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LaYa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0aaec309-35d6-430d-aeaa-b7cab022f4d6_548x215.png, Insight Prediction, Samotsvety Forecasting, Earlier this year, accepted lost wars gracefully, published an update, comment here, Swift Centre, They also took a swing at the nuclear question, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TczM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F702c1236-47d9-4c60-9b99-ab9b2ca320e7_737x377.png, a 4% chance, a 7% chance, 16% chance, In July, they will make a decision by October 28, A managing director at JP Morgan

One of my hopes for forecasting is that it eventually becomes so well-validated that decision-makers can take these kinds of considerations into account: “Should we sent ATACMS missiles to Ukraine? It would have such-and-such benefits, but also increase the risk of nuclear escalation by 3.6%, is it worth it?” We can’t directly compare Samotsvety and Swift because they’re predicting over different time periods. But assuming that there’s more risk in the next six months than in the six months after that, I think Samotsvety is a little higher but they’re not embarrassingly far off. Metaculus is a bit more optimistic than either, believing there’s only a 4% chance of detonation in Ukraine in 2023 and a 7% chance of any use in the next ~year. Max Tegmark is going much higher than anyone else and says 16% chance of global nuclear war. Kalshi Applies For Election Markets Kalshi is a regulated and fully-legal prediction market with good lobbyists and a compliance team. This means the CFTC probably won’t randomly shut them down one day. But it also means they can only create new markets with CFTC permission. In July, Kalshi asked the CFTC for permission to make midterm election prediction markets - specifically, which party will win control of the House and Senate. The CFTC has said they will make a decision by October 28 (which doesn’t leave much time for predicting to happen before the November 8 election, but I guess it sets a precedent). September was the Request For Comment period, when the CFTC solicited comments from stakeholders about what they should do. Kalshi tried really hard to get lots of people to send in positive assessments - I know this because of how many people asked me “why is the CEO of Kalshi emailing me about this thing?” Their strategy seems to have worked; among the people who wrote to the CFTC in support were: A managing director at JP Morgan

Inline links: a 4% chance, a 7% chance, 16% chance, In July, they will make a decision by October 28, A managing director at JP Morgan

Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency

December 08, 2022 · Original source

Do Vietnamese people love trading monkey gifs? Are Ukrainians especially susceptible to Ponzi schemes? Is Venezuela laden with techbros? Vietnam uses crypto because it’s terrible at banks. 69% of Vietnamese have no bank access, the second highest in the world. I’m not sure why; articles play up rural poverty, but many nations have more rural poor than Vietnam. There’s a history of the government forcing banks to make terrible loans, and then those banks collapsing; maybe this destroyed public trust? In any case, between banklessness and remittances (eg from Vietnamese-Americans), Vietnam leads the world in crypto use. Ukraine has always been among the top crypto countries: in 2021, NYT called it “the crypto capital of the world”. Again, this owes a lot to its terrible banking system. NYT describes its banks as “so sclerotic that sending or receiving even small amounts of money from another country requires an exasperating obstacle course of paperwork”, and this guy says that if you deposit more than $100,000 in a Ukrainian bank, “the chance that you get it back is very slim”. When Russia invaded, the Ukrainian government doubled down on crypto as a way for friendly Westerners to donate to the war effort - $70 million as of March. It proved so helpful that during the first month of the war, in between dodging Russian artillery shells President Zelenskyy found time to pass a law legalizing crypto and strengthening its regulatory framework. Venezuela’s economy has been in slow motion collapse for the past decade. Inflation is currently in the triple digits (remember, people worried the Democrats would lose the midterms because of a US inflation rate of 8%). If your country has a triple-digit inflation rate, you might prefer to use an alternative currency, which Venezuela’s authoritarian government tries to prevent people from doing. Cryptocurrency provides a hard-to-ban alternative which has caught on among Venezuelan hustlers and small businessmen. I personally contributed in a small way to Russia’s cryptocurrency use. I’ve been trying to help Russian ACX readers escape to other countries to avoid conscription or arrest. Of my two successes so far, both involved sending cryptocurrency to help them afford a ticket out and living expenses while they searched for a job in their new country. I’m pretty proud of this and I don’t think it would have been possible without crypto. I think a lot of Westerners want to think of developing-world uses as a boring sideshow, and highlight Westerners trading monkey gifs as the only part of crypto worth talking about. But about 66% of crypto users live in the developing world. More people own cryptocurrency in Africa than in North America. Of course a technology centered around avoiding governance and banking failures will be centered in the countries with the most governance and banking failures! Big Crypto Projects Are Very Rarely Scams I realize this is a bold sentence to use as a section header in 2022. But I recently tried to figure out the exact scam rate, and it seemed low. I searched for articles called things like The Top Crypto Projects Of 20XX, and then I checked how many of those projects, years later, had turned out to be scams.I tried my best not to cherry-pick, and to focus on the first article that Google fed me for each of various relevant search terms. I ended up using four articles for this experiment: Most Promising Crypto Projects Of 2015

Inline links: 69% of Vietnamese, a history, remittances, “the crypto capital of the world”, this guy, $70 million as of March, pass a law, More people own cryptocurrency in Africa than in North America, Most Promising Crypto Projects Of 2015

Prediction Market FAQ

December 20, 2022 · Original source

If you have no special expertise or skills, I expect you would mostly lose money on prediction markets, and I would rather this be play money than real money. 7.1: …if I’m an expert in some unrelated field, like biology or physics You can still try playing on Manifold, but I would also recommend you get an account on Metaculus and try out questions in your area of expertise. Metaculus aims to be policy-relevant, and the more experts it has forecasting scientific questions, the more likely it is to get them right. You should also feel free to try Metaculus even if you’re not an expert - their algorithm will see how often you’re right, and upweight or downweight your guesses accordingly. 7.2: …if I’m a hotshot financial trader? Consider betting on real money prediction markets. If you’re outside the US, your best bet is probably Polymarket (some Americans have found ways to use VPNs and crypto to trade on Polymarket despite the ban on US citizens; I don’t know how safe or recommended this is). If you’re inside the US, your best bet is probably Kalshi. I think the sort of person who can make money day trading stocks or crypto can also make some money playing prediction markets, probably with more social utility. As with any investment, please be sure you’re actually a hotshot financial trader, and don’t bet more than you can afford to lose. 7.3: …if I’m a blogger or journalist? You should consider including or citing prediction markets in your articles. Instead of saying “two polls say that the Democrats have a slight lead in the election, versus one poll that says the Republicans have a big lead”, you can say “Prediction markets say the Democrats have a 64% chance of winning the election”. Instead of saying “given their new logistical problems, experts are increasingly skeptical that Ukraine can retake Donetsk by winter,” you could say “Prediction markets say there is only a 12% chance Ukraine will take Donetsk by winter, which is down by 9% since the logistical problems started”. I recently had to read many articles on Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which all repeated that “rumors said” Twitter was about to go down because of his mass firing. Meanwhile, there were several prediction markets on whether this would happen, and they were all around 40%. If some journalist had thought to check the prediction markets and cite them in their article, they could have not only provided more value (a clear percent chance instead of just “there are some rumors saying this”), but also been right when everyone else was wrong. Here are some examples of journalists talking about prediction markets: Bloomberg: Election Prediction Markets Show Kenosha Is Helping Trump

Inline links: get an account on Metaculus, Polymarket, Kalshi, Election Prediction Markets Show Kenosha Is Helping Trump

Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying

December 29, 2022 · Original source

March 2022: https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-running-out-precision-munitions-ukraine-war-pentagon-official-2022-03-25/

Inline links: https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-running-out-precision-munitions-ukraine-war-pentagon-official-2022-03-25/

December 2022: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-15/russia-is-running-out-of-missiles-ukraine-security-chief-says

Inline links: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-15/russia-is-running-out-of-missiles-ukraine-security-chief-says

The first article is titled Russia Running Out Of Precision Munitions In Ukraine War - Pentagon Official. It states that Undersecretary of Defense Policy Colin Kahl claimed Russia was running out of precision munitions. I have no doubt that Undersecretary of Defense Policy Colin Kahl did in fact claim that, so the media isn’t lying.

Inline links: Russia Running Out Of Precision Munitions In Ukraine War - Pentagon Official

Who Predicted 2022?

January 24, 2023 · Original source

Last year saw surging inflation, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a surprise victory for Democrats in the US Senate. Pundits, politicians, and economists were caught flat-footed by these developments. Did anyone get them right?

I know this because last January, along with amateur statisticians Sam Marks and Eric Neyman, I solicited predictions from 508 people. This wasn’t a very creative or free-form exercise - contest participants assigned percentage chances to 71 yes-or-no questions, like “Will Russia invade Ukraine?” or “Will the Dow end the year above 35000?” The whole thing was a bit hokey and constrained - Nassim Taleb wouldn’t be amused - but it had the great advantage of allowing objective scoring.

Sam, Eric and I are running a repeat version of the contest for 2023. We have about 3500 entries so far, answering questions like “Will there be a lasting cease-fire in Ukraine?” I’ve peeked at the submissions, and - spoiler - everyone disagrees.

2023

January 31, 2023 · Original source

This was a helpful reminder that Metaculus is a real organization, not just a site I go to sometimes to check the probabilities of things. The company is run remotely; catching nine of them in a room together was a happy coincidence. Although I think it still relies heavily on grants, Metaculus’ theoretical business model is to create forecasts on important topics for organizations that want them (“partners”) - so far including universities, tech companies, and charities. A typical example is this recent forecasting tournament on the spread of COVID in Virginia, run in partnership with the Virginia Department of Health and the University of Virginia Biocomplexity Institute (this year’s version here). The main bottleneck is interest from policy-makers, which they’re trying to solve both through product improvement and public education. In December, Metaculus’ Director of Nuclear Risk, Peter Scoblic, published an article in Foreign Affairs magazine about forecasting’s “struggle for legitimacy” in the foreign policy world. It’s paywalled, but quoting liberally: Organizational change is difficult under the best of circumstances and is close to impossible when powerful insiders actively resist it. National security experts with decades of experience and access to classified information see little reason for deferring to the upstart winners of forecasting tournaments, contests that allow the public to compete at putting realistic odds on future events. Perhaps they are concerned that as forecasters get better at geopolitical analysis, they will threaten the notion of expertise and the professional identities of those who supply it. But forecasting should be seen as a complement to expert analysis, not a substitute for it. The same situation obtains among the corps of foreign-policy columnists, think tank fellows, and former government officials who wield more influence for the confidence of their convictions than for the precision of their predictions. There is little incentive for such analysts to ask when they have been wrong and why—questions that top forecasters must constantly confront if they are to maintain their place in the accuracy hierarchy. Instead, the “thought leader” ecosystem insulates the careers of people who would have washed out of any geopolitical forecasting tournament. It concludes: All this suggests that to make forecasting a resource that policymakers use, the quality of both supply and demand needs to improve. The former requires giving subject-matter experts a role in producing forecasts—in formulating questions (because they know which indicators are most germane) and in vetting the rationales that inform forecasts (because they can gut-check causal claims and fact-check evidence). The latter requires making the national security establishment more numerate or at least more open to quantitative appraisals of the future. These are challenging tasks, but forecasting scholars are already testing methods for not only measuring the best forecasts but also judging the most persuasive rationales for those forecasts. For example: What story best conveys that there is a 10–15 percent chance of between one and three million people dying in the Ukraine war by the end of 2024? Where forecasters provide probability, subject-matter experts can provide plausibility, making well-calibrated quantitative future estimates more convincing and palatable to policymakers—and therefore making their decisions a little less wrong. And in national security, being a little less wrong can be a lot less dangerous. These are the kinds of questions Metaculus-the-organization is thinking about, and the kinds of problems it’s trying to solve. They’ve also got some exciting ideas for making their product more policy-relevant. For example, they’re working on causal modeling, where forecasters not only predict the chance of (eg) a Russian nuclear strike, but also all of the inputs into their decision. For example, there’s a 10% chance of a strike, which comes from a 15% chance if the war in Ukraine continues vs. a 5% chance if it doesn’t. And they think there’s a 50% chance the war will continue, which comes from a 60% chance if the US stops arms shipments and a 33% chance if it doesn’t - and so on. Policymakers can play around with the causal graph, investigate which factors make a strike more vs. less likely, and check how their preferred policy would affect things they care about. For more on the intersection of forecasting and policy, see this EA Forum post. To learn more about Metaculus, follow them on Twitter or Facebook. And here’s to many millions more predictions! Taking Stock Prediction market users really want stocks. “Stock” in this sense means an instrument that measures the status of a person, group, or idea. When their status goes up, the stock goes up. When their status goes down, the stock goes down. It feels like a natural way to bet on things like “I’m bearish on Elon Musk and think everyone else is overestimating him.” It’s hard to turn this vague idea into a real financial instrument. You could try tying it to their Twitter follower count, or Google search trends, or net worth, but none of these exactly track “status”. If Musk commits murder in broad daylight, his search volume will go up, his Twitter follower count will stay about the same, his net worth might not be affected, but his status will have gone way down. The current solution is to make no effort whatsoever to moor stocks to the real world and just hope they work out. This could work! It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme or crypto token. Some big influencer endorses MoonCoin, and MoonCoin goes up, because MoonCoin has gained status, which means more people will want to buy it, because it’s even more likely that more people will want to buy it later. Crypto tokens keep a fig leaf of “and maybe in the cyberpunk future when all transactions everywhere have switched to crypto this will really pay off”, but over time that fig leaf became increasingly threadbare, and a fun low-stakes instrument like Manifold stocks might do fine without it. But the 0% to 100% prediction scale is a bad match for stocks. If Elon started at 50% in 2000, then when Tesla made it big he surely should have doubled. And that brings him up to 100% and leaves nowhere for him to go. Also, people who bet on Elon Musk in 2000 might be miffed that their prescient choice only doubled their money. Probably the solution is some kind of cardinal number. But which one, and at what scale? Again, the lesson from crypto is that maybe it doesn’t matter. Just start at 10 or something or something and see where it ends up. Manifold leadership isn’t totally resigned yet to having stocks be meaningless Ponzi schemes. If you have a better idea for how to run stocks, leave it in the comments here and they’ll probably see it. CFTC vs. PredictIt Update So far it’s not clear if this means indefinite normal operation, or if they’ll spend the extra time trying to wind existing markets down. The overall chance of them winning their lawsuit remains unchanged at around 25%. PredictIt has gotten some sympathetic news coverage, including from the Washington Post. In the process, the Post tried to get some clarity on what terms of the no-action letter PredictIt violated, apparently without success: @CFTC why they're shutting PredictIt down. They give no real answer, just as in the original withdrawal letter. Closest thing we have to an answer is that they don't want other prediction markets. But why? No sense here at all. washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023… ","username":"RichardHanania","name":"Richard Hanania","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Jan 24 18:12:59 +0000 2023","photos":[{"img_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/media/FnQbawZaYAAKRws.jpg","link_url":"https://t.co/zeKhe8sjnT","alt_text":null}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":8,"like_count":39,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> @StephenPiment I'm flat appalled the CFTC said \"you violated terms\", but won't tell anyone, @PredictIt included, which ones, and then has big enough balls to try to get the judge to dismiss PI's \"shotgun\" defense. Um, with no info what other case COULD they make?\n","username":"kmett","name":"Edward Kmett","profile_image_url":"","date":"Sun Nov 27 19:01:29 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":8,"like_count":21,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://www.bonus.com/news/cftc-predictit-hearings-coming/","image":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8d5a1d5e-49ee-4294-84cd-eb5a4259bbc3_1200x800.jpeg","title":"Hearings Coming Soon in PredictIt Lawsuit, CFTC Asks to Dismiss","description":"The CFTC is seeking to have the PredictIt lawsuit dismissed, while the plaintiffs want the case fast-tracked due to the shutdown deadline.","domain":"bonus.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> I guess they’ll have to give some kind of explanation during the hearing, right? Related: Richard Hanania has an article on How To Legalize Prediction Markets. The actual advice isn’t very surprising, and mostly boils down to “write letters to the government officials in charge of this”, but like other people I learned something new from the details: In the United States, prediction markets are, with a few minor exceptions, against the law. If you don’t have a legal background, you might think that means that Congress at some point considered the issue, decided people shouldn’t be able to bet on real world events, and passed a law to that effect, which was then signed by the president. But this is not what happened. As with most things, Congress has never directly considered the matter. Rather, prediction markets are illegal due to the discretion of a government agency called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Why does it have this right? And on what basis has it made prediction markets illegal? […] In 1936, Congress passed and FDR signed the Commodity Exchange Act. In 1974, Congress created the CFTC to enforce the original law, which has been amended on multiple occasions over the years. The CFTC has authority to regulate what are called “derivatives markets.” A derivatives contract derives its value from some kind of underlying asset or benchmark in the real world. The thing to understand about derivatives is that the baseline is that they’re legal. That’s why you can “bet” on the price of oil through a futures contract. The CFTC wasn’t created to ban derivative markets, but to regulate them, though this can involve prohibiting certain kinds of markets altogether. Current law includes the following provision on event contracts, [banning]: activity that is unlawful under any Federal or State law;

Inline links: this recent forecasting tournament, here, paywalled, this EA Forum post, Twitter, Facebook, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11236/-of-predictions-on-metaculus-by-eoy-2023/, remains unchanged at around 25%, Washington Post, How To Legalize Prediction Markets, can involve

The CFTC says that prediction markets are a kind of gaming, and therefore the default is that they’re banned. Read the full article if you want to learn more, or hear about how you should contact your representative to change this. From The Department Of “Probably Not A Superforecaster” One goal of forecasting technology is to incentivize good predictions and create accountability for bad ones. Meanwhile, here’s former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev: I don’t think he’s being completely serious, but if it’s a joke then I don’t get it. None Dare Call It . . . CONSPIRACY! We’ve previously talked about prediction markets as solutions to misinformation and conspiracy theories. What happens if you skip all the intermediate deconfusion steps and just try to predict if misinformation is true? I guess you get this. It’s pretty limited, since it can only predict the chance the conspiracy will be discovered; a conspiracy theorist might agree that there’s only a 3% chance we will get proof of this in the next few years. When I first looked into this a few weeks ago, a few conspiracy-related prediction markets gave pretty high predictions, because people weren’t sure if the market creators would resolve them honestly, which naturally pushes the price towards 50. I can see this going badly if someone who doesn’t know this failure mode posts one of them on social media as “proof” that prediction markets support their conspiracy theory. But right now the worst example I can find is still only 11%. Also a good sign: the lizardman prediction market is within 1 pp of the Lizardman Constant. My 2022 Calibration Most of my 2022 predictions got folded into the 2022 contest, but not all of them, so I still need to score the remainder. Of my 50% predictions, 5 were right and 5 wrong, for a score of 50% Of my 60% predictions, 17 were right and 11 wrong, for a score of 61% Of my 70% predictions, 17 were right and 10 wrong, for a score of 63% Of my 80% predictions, 26 were right and 9 wrong, for a score of 74% Of my 90% predictions, 11 were right and 4 wrong, for a score of 73% Of my 95% predictions, 10 were right and 0 wrong, for a score of 100% Of my 99% predictions, 4 were right and 0 wrong, for a score of 100% Some real overconfidence this year, especially at 90. Nothing like that last year, so it might be coincidence. I’ll try to average these all out sometime for a better read. Scandal Markets Revisited In November, just after the FTX collapse, we talked about scandal markets - markets that might predict whether some person or group was secretly doing something terrible. With such a market in place, people could either avoid associating with them (if it was high) or prove that they were blameless and couldn’t possibly have known (if it was low). Since then, several things have happened that have made me less optimistic about these: A (as far as I know) good person who is not involved in any scandals asked to have their scandal market taken down, because people were citing the existence of the market as evidence that they were suspected of wrongdoing.

Inline links: is still only 11%, the lizardman prediction market, Lizardman Constant, my 2022 predictions, the 2022 contest, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dnCM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3823a22b-5fa6-4351-b75e-113ba430b285_479x344.png, scandal markets

Crowds Are Wise (And One's A Crowd)

February 06, 2023 · Original source

Last month, we found that wisdom of crowds works in forecasting: the aggregate of 500 forecasters scored better than 84% of individuals; the aggregate of superforecasters scored better than individual superforecasters. This is close to a real-world example of wisdom of crowds working - but it won’t be all the way there until people use forecasting in the real world. The crowd did a better job predicting whether Russia would invade Ukraine than individual forecasters did, and I can imagine presidents and generals finding this useful - but mostly they have yet to bite.

Grading My 2018 Predictions For 2023

February 20, 2023 · Original source

I think these were boring cowardly nothing-ever-happens predictions that mostly came true. Various feared EU crises did not materialize. There was no African migrant crisis, but I predicted that might come after 2023 anyway. Unsurprisingly I missed the biggest geopolitical story of this period, the Ukraine war.

Artificial biocatastrophe (worse than COVID): 5% INTERNATIONAL: IDK, I don't expect a Taiwan invasion. Generally bearish on China for the usual reasons: I just think they've built up too much debt (literal and metaphorical), have a demographic time bomb, it's always hard to come down from the high of fast growth, and even though their mixed centralized-ish model worked well before, I think Xi is a significant change towards traditional dictatorship which doesn't work as well. I don't expect this to produce any obvious explosion or disaster for them before 2028 though. I expect Ukraine and Russia to figure out some unsatisfying stalemate before 2028, followed by massive growth in Ukraine (usually happens post-war, they'll probably get favorable terms from lots of other countries including an EU admission deal, they're overdue for a Poland-style post-communist boom). Ukraine war cease-fire: 80%

Ukraine war cease-fire: 80%

The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again

March 29, 2023 · Original source

If you want, you can submit a comment to the DEA here (use the green box on the top right, act before March 31). I don’t think it will particularly help. There are already 20,702 comments. I haven’t read all of them, but I’ve read a few dozen; as far as I can tell, they are all negative. Each one is a unique story of woe, someone explaining why their particular edge case means this rule would be devastating for them. I have no faith that the DEA will care. Commenting seems almost pathetically innocent, like writing a letter to Vladimir Putin saying “please stop invading Ukraine” and hoping he will listen. Still, you can do it if you want.

Inline links: here

Your Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning

June 10, 2023 · Original source

This winter a friend of mine, an American living in Europe, went to Ukraine with a humanitarian mission. (Here’s a twist for you, dear reader.) He visited Lviv, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Irpin, Kherson. He was shelled a few times; he now can recommend a hotel in Kyiv with “the best bomb shelter in town”. His reasons for going there in the first place were dark. The results, however, were miraculous and heart-warming, and align very well with everything said above. His story could have been a nice coda to this review. However, his story is also much bigger than this review, and it is also his, so I will not elaborate more than I already have. He will tell it in his own time and in his own way. And for now, if there are any darling buds of trust sprouting between us, dear reader, you’ll just have to trust me on this. Because for an actual coda I chose something much more grim.

Kirill has no realistic prospects other than those of his father. He has no hobbies, no interests, no ambitions. He lives in a town of ~100,000 people. Two of his friends are heroin addicts; one of them is dying of AIDS contracted through the needle. They all hang around and drink, and discuss sports or politics, predominantly foreign, Ukraine or Europe or the US, mostly guided by rumors or rubbish websites or what they heard on TV. Kirill’s elder brother is about to return from prison, where he spent five years for assault with a deadly weapon, after a fight broke down at a party. This is another of Kirill’s realistic destinations in life. Kirill’s girlfriend is a few years younger and already had several abortions. She thinks Kirill is cool, but wishes he’d go to prison already to get extra street cred. Kirill could love her, if he knew what it means and if he ever got it from his parents.

Kirill gets drafted in September 2022, and is sent to Ukraine after three days of training. Before getting on a bus he marries his girlfriend, so when he dies she would be entitled to a widow’s pension. Kirill gets shot in his second week in Ukraine, but he is written down as “missing”, so his family doesn’t get a notification, and his new wife doesn’t get the money. And nobody cares. His mom continues to support anything the Russian government does, because the Russian government pays her salary. His brother gets sent back to prison, where he is drafted into one of the PMCs. Kirill’s wife marries another, happy that she doesn't have a “trailer”, a common Russian term for a single woman’s child. Life in Kirill’s town goes on.

Highlights From The Comments On British Economic Decline

July 20, 2023 · Original source

As I see it, Britain's bet is that being a junior partner of the United States will both give them more success than chaining themselves to Europe and give them more freedom (since the US has no interest in British domestic politics in the way the EU does). To this end, it's aligning itself with other "individual" US allies like Japan or Thailand and attempting to take a leading role in things like Ukraine or Pacific defense.

23: Room Temperature Superforecaster

August 01, 2023 · Original source

Some evidence that Russia’s position in Ukraine is looking better than expected earlier this year

Dictator Book Club: Putin

August 03, 2023 · Original source

And thank goodness. I tried to stick to the facts and the interesting story beats, but the meat of Man Without A Face is a sense of total despair. Vladimir Putin killed hundreds of his people in false flag bombings, destroyed Chechnya, and murdered hundreds of journalists who tried to sound the warning about these misdeeds. He’s stolen $40 billion of Russian money for his personal fortune, driven out those Russians with the means to emigrate, and made an entire country live in fear. Now he is committing similar crimes against Ukraine. I’m glad the Ukrainians are resisting and glad that most of the world has avoided his particular style of thuggish despotism, but can’t help feeling heartbreak for everyone still stuck in Russia.

Reading this has made me seek out concerns about the FBI more, which led me to articles like Why We Can’t Trust The FBI and FBI Helps Ukraine Censor Twitter Users. I absolutely believe the FBI is spreading fear of terrorism for their own gain, often crosses the line between monitoring extremists and entrapping/provoking them, and is part of the general censorship apparatus. But even their enemies don’t accuse them of the tiniest fraction of what Putin and his security services were doing. I’ve also been trying to pay more attention to ways that the administration uses the courts and Justice Department to go after their enemies; although this is a time-honored dictatorship tactic, I think the allegations against Trump are mostly fair and there aren’t a lot of other, unfair ones I know about. I do think it’s a valid question whether, even if the allegations against Trump are fair, we ought not to make them, as part of a norm of making it hard to investigate enemies of the regime. But I’m not sure there has ever been such a norm - the investigations of Nixon and Clinton went further, on less serious charges.

Inline links: Why We Can’t Trust The FBI, FBI Helps Ukraine Censor Twitter Users

Highlights From The Comments On Putin

August 11, 2023 · Original source

Actually, the amount of reforms that Putin conducted in the 2000s s quite remarkable (e.g. there is private property for agricultural land in Russia; there is none in Ukraine for that matter).

Hardball Questions For The Next Debate

November 07, 2023 · Original source

MODERATOR: Our first question is for Chris Christie, and remember, Chris, your Forbidden Letter is still “V”. As President, how would you resolve the war in Ukraine?

CHRISTIE: Um. Hmmm. What’s going on in Ukraine is a . . . global Chrisis. [long pause] Like all Americans, I’m horrified by the news about Russian forces’ massaChris of innocent people. Ukraine should get not just our continuing support, but an inChris in military aid. [upbeat, finding his stride]. And I want to call out the hypoChrisy of Donald Trump on this issue. He says he wants to keep America strong, but he proChristinates on helping one of our most important allies.

MODERATOR: Donald has figured out Ron’s secret Second Round Constraint and so gets the remainder of his time. Donald, since Chris Christie accused you of hypoChrisy - sorry, hypocrisy - on Ukraine, I’ll give you a chance to respond. Tell us your thoughts about the situation there. And remember, your Forbidden Letters are still A, E, and I.

What Ever Happened To Neoreaction?

December 07, 2023 · Original source

But Putin’s invasion of Ukraine shattered the story of his competence, showed that western democratic countries can make hard choices and stand up for themselves when they have to, and reminded everyone that sometimes dictators do random stupid things that kill hundreds of thousands of people. Xi Jinping did the same in China, both with the Uighur genocide and his (relative) mismanagement of the economy. Dubai hasn’t built anything else Burj Khalifa-sized recently, the mistreatment of Indian laborers there has become more salient, and MbS next door is another anti-advertisement for the totalitarian project.

January 30, 2024 · Original source

Why? All the things voters might blame Biden for - inflation, Ukraine, Gaza - happened either well before or well after the early-2023 period when his numbers began to decline. So I’m not sure. Maybe people just got fed up?

That recent spike comes from Musk’s claim three hours ago that the first Neuralink has been implanted into a human being. It looks like things have gone downhill for Ukraine since about October. Related:

Inline links: Musk’s claim three hours ago, https://manifold.markets/marktwse/how-will-the-ukrainerussia-border-l

It looks like things have gone downhill for Ukraine since about October. Related:

February 20, 2024 · Original source

Most of these bots are boring. They’re bots programmed to automatically buy some market once the price gets low enough, or to arbitrage basically-identical markets, or do some other technical finance maneuver. But you could imagine more interesting bots. Ones that forecasts the same way humans forecast. You could imagine a bot based on ChatGPT that asks “What is the probability of a cease-fire in Ukraine this year?” and bets on ChatGPT’s answer. And by “you could imagine” I mean “there’s now a Humans Vs. Bots tournament on Manifold with an ℳ250,000 prize” Let’s see how they’re doing: All of these bots seem to be making small profits, with GPT in the lead. But what’s this? The Nermit bot is based on FutureSearch.ai, a new company trying to build an AI-based forecaster. Based on their own internal calculations, they claim success: But see foonote 1 How is this1 possible? Some studies of superforecasters converge on the same technique: figure out a base rate for some event, then alter it based on the current situation. For example, if you wanted to know the chance of a cease-fire in Ukraine over the next year, you might start by plotting the distribution of war lengths over the past century, then check how many wars that had lasted at least two years had a cease-fire in the third. Then you might adjust a little bit down for factors like “there haven’t been any promising peace talks yet” and “the two sides seem equally balanced”. FutureSearch’s AI tries to do something similar. It prompts itself with questions like “What would be a good reference class for this question?”

Inline links: Humans Vs. Bots tournament, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r04t!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd8006d5d-af52-4870-90a7-c63a84497670_827x110.webp, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WvxC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5db0765c-69c6-4362-ada4-9a7210701bff_962x510.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DOia!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F516f9622-aa25-45d2-958a-077c6840d65f_947x505.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kcLW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F21afa244-9cfb-4714-841d-c963d5d2e125_955x517.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!V4Vp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1b9dd4ab-0fa2-4421-984b-07c66a220080_958x529.png, FutureSearch.ai, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!MjV7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc584dabc-477f-4096-a3f1-c4a929b6cded_411x372.png, 1

But see foonote 1 How is this1 possible? Some studies of superforecasters converge on the same technique: figure out a base rate for some event, then alter it based on the current situation. For example, if you wanted to know the chance of a cease-fire in Ukraine over the next year, you might start by plotting the distribution of war lengths over the past century, then check how many wars that had lasted at least two years had a cease-fire in the third. Then you might adjust a little bit down for factors like “there haven’t been any promising peace talks yet” and “the two sides seem equally balanced”. FutureSearch’s AI tries to do something similar. It prompts itself with questions like “What would be a good reference class for this question?”

Inline links: 1

Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024

March 30, 2024 · Original source

SHEFFIELD, ENGLAND, UK Contact: Colin Z. Robertson Contact Info: czr[at]rtnl[dot]org[dot]uk Time: Saturday, April 27th, 3:00 PM Location: 200 Degrees, 25 Division St, Sheffield S1 4GE. I'll have a piece of paper on the table with ACX written on it. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M Ukraine KYIV Contact: Artem Batogovsky (or Forux) Contact Info: https://t[dot]me/forux Time: Friday, April 5th, 7:00 PM Location: Ziferblat Cafe (Циферблат кафе) Group Link: https://t.me/lwkyiv Notes: The meetup has been moved to online due to the situation in Ukraine. Use the group link.

Inline links: https://plus.codes/9C5W9GJG+2M, https://t.me/lwkyiv

KYIV Contact: Artem Batogovsky (or Forux) Contact Info: https://t[dot]me/forux Time: Friday, April 5th, 7:00 PM Location: Ziferblat Cafe (Циферблат кафе) Group Link: https://t.me/lwkyiv Notes: The meetup has been moved to online due to the situation in Ukraine. Use the group link.

Inline links: https://t.me/lwkyiv

May 13, 2024 · Original source

There are already hundreds of groups that care deeply about the outcome of elections. Some have billions of dollars on the line, like defense contractors, fossil fuel companies, real estate developers, and investment banks. Others care for non-financial reasons: transgender people, Christians, gun owners, the population of Ukraine, people who think we’ll all die from climate change, people who think the country will become a dictatorship, all Democrats, all Republicans, etc. The idea that adding one more group - “people who have a few thousand dollars staked on Kalshi” - will be the difference between a safe and secure election, and one that’s hacked by motivated parties, is pretty crazy.

Here’s an embarrassing screwup from Metaculus. This question was about when there would be a “Great Power war”, with Great Powers defined as any country in the top ten of military spending. But surprise surprise, Ukraine getting invaded made them spend a lot of money on their military that year, so they rose to #8 in the world in military spending in 2023. Since Russia is also in the top ten, this qualifies as a “Great Power war” by the technical definition, and the question resolves positive. Moral of the story: resolution criteria are hard!

Links for July 2024

July 24, 2024 · Original source

40: “Z-poetry” is the new genre of poetry supporting the Russian side in the Ukraine war. Konstantin Asimonov tells the story of a group of pro-Ukrainian dissidents who create and boost a fake Z-poet to make a point.

Inline links: tells the story of

Your Book Review: Real Raw News

July 26, 2024 · Original source

Vladimir Putin launched the war in Ukraine to hunt down a network of child-trafficking pedophiles. The Deep State has some kind of weird plan to merge America with Ukraine.

Inline links: hunt down

The lack of evidence that all this is happening is entirely explained through coordinated media silence as well as the widespread use of body doubles and clones. The heart of Real Raw News, and the source of most of its entertainment value, is its accounts of the supposed secret military tribunals occurring at America’s Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, better known as Gitmo2. For more than three years, the site has produced one article after another describing the arrest, trial, and execution of dozens of major and not-so-major figures in American life. Hillary Clinton? Arrested, tried, executed. Bill Gates? Arrested, tried, executed. Dick Cheney? Fled the country via a secret underground tunnel to a CIA airfield, but then returned to America on vacation for some reason3, arrested, tried, executed. George W. Bush, Hunter Biden, Anthony Fauci, Gavin Newsom, Mark Milley, Victoria Nuland, Tom Hanks (?), Brian Stelter (???) – All arrested and executed, in turn4. Almost all defendants are hanged, which actually is not the method prescribed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but has the advantage of being far more cinematic. It would be easy for all of this to get old, but like with variations in classical music, subtle differences to each iteration enrich the whole. Some defendants desperately try to deny responsibility for their crimes. Some arrogantly taunt the tribunal, assuming until the very end that they are untouchable. Some literally scream as though demon-possessed. Some fake senility or amnesia. But crucially, all of them face justice, one way or another. An entry published just before this contest’s deadline is a lovely example: Representing himself, [Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott] McAfee in opening remarks talked himself into an early verdict. He said no one and nothing, not even imprisonment, would prevent him from destroying the Trump family. Handcuffed at the defense table, he glared at the panel and said he would topple the Trump empire, building by building, brick by brick, and wouldn’t rest until every Trump supporter was behind bars or dead. “Then I’ll take care of the people here and this place,” McAfee said. “Mr. McAfee, I’m told you are of sound mind and know where you are, right?” Admiral Stephens asked5. “I’m in a Kangaroo court in the Banana Republic of Trump, staring at a guy who couldn’t hack it in the real world, couldn’t run a private practice, get a partnership, or sit on a real bench, so he went into the military,” McAfee said. “Have you ever heard of Trump Derangement Syndrome, Mr. McAfee?” the Admiral asked. “Because you have the worst case I’ve seen, and I’ve seen several.” “Trump is finished. He’ll be in jail soon, and when he is, your house of cards collapses,” McAfee said. “It might seem that way, but it only seems that way,” the Admiral said. “You might as well find me guilty. I’ll never stop hating Trump and I’ll never stop working to demolish everything he stole. He was born guilty, and he’ll be guilty until the day he dies. That’ll be the only word on his gravestone: GUILTY!” McAfee shouted. The lead panelist, a Marine Corps major, politely interrupted: “Admiral, sir, we don’t have to hear any more. McAfee mocks this court, and we find him guilty of the treason charge. Additionally, we are in agreement he should hang for his crimes.” Admiral Stephens nodded contemplatively. “I side with these fine officers. Mr. McAfee, you are hereby sentenced to hang for treason against the United States of America.” His execution is scheduled for May 15. Yes, this is the judge of Trump’s criminal case in Fulton County. In the Real Raw News world, Trump’s various legal adventures are both real and fake at the same time. Apparently, Trump could completely ignore these proceedings, and the military in fact begs him to do so, but he chooses to place himself in danger from some unseen, Christ-like self-sacrificial motive. That motive, it appears, is getting evil judges to expose their bias by ruling against him, so that they can be arrested and executed for treason. The site often offers an alternative narrative regarding events in the official, Deep State-backed news narrative. When Colin Powell died, RRN was there to explain that he actually committed suicide, fearing arrest by the military. When former Tom Hanks co-star Peter Scolari died of cancer, RRN swooped in to attribute his demise to an unexpected military tribunal6. This pattern is one of the chief reasons fans cite for believing the site: Isn’t it incredible, they say, how some of the same people RRN reports the executions of just happen to have recently died or been hospitalized in the mainstream press? What are the odds? Perhaps surprisingly, the star figure in Real Raw News’s tapestry of blood is not Donald Trump; like Gandalf or Dumbledore, he is a heroic but distant and largely off-screen figure. Instead, the primary hero is Rear Admiral Darse Crandall, who dispenses lethal justice with shocking efficiency while always being ready with a good quip: Admiral Crandall ordered [Arizona Governor Katie] Hobbs not to intimidate the witness. “You lack decorum, detainee Hobbs, and your insouciance ends here. We revoke your right to further question this witness and ask the panel to render a verdict on the charges against you.” The admiral dismissed Jane Doe, and the panel unanimously found Hobbs guilty, recommending she hang to death. “I won’t let you do this to me,” Hobbs screeched. “It’s already done,” said Admiral Crandall. “And have a Merry Christmas—in whatever afterlife you wind up in.” He scheduled her execution for December 22. Adm. Crandall is in fact a real person, currently serving as Judge Advocate General of the Navy. Admiral Crandall seems like a nice and professional fellow, and I badly want to know what he makes of his alternate persona. I like to hope that he enjoys it; maybe he jokingly warns his subordinates to do their jobs right or else they’ll be arrested and executed. If anybody knows otherwise, please do not disabuse me of this fantasy. Lesser fake news auteurs will puke out lame one-and-done articles about the moon landing or JFK or whatever, with zero internal consistency. Baxter is better. His military tribunals are reported out in detail. Even the most minor figures receive dedicated articles for their arrest, their trial, and their demise, but the biggest names receive genuine weeks-long productions. Hillary Clinton’s tribunal spans five days, until damning testimony from her former aide (and lover) Huma Abedin sends her to the gallows. Former president Bush’s arrest and tribunal is a ten-part epic lasting nearly two months, and includes details that are eccentric even by 9/11 truther standards: Supposedly, the real death toll of 9/11 (which Bush orchestrated) was 7,000, but Bush deemed this number too high to win reelection, so the real number was suppressed and 4,000 families were silenced with enormous bribes that also served to stimulate the economy. Good thing all the plotting was caught on tape, or he might have gotten away with it. Baxter never rushes things. Remember how the Colorado Supreme Court tried to kick Trump off the primary ballot in late 2023? Lesser fake newsers might have had the entire 4-vote anti-Trump majority arrested at once, but Baxter is cannier. In his reporting, one justice was arrested immediately, but the other three went on the run , and took months to capture. As of this writing we’re still waiting for their tribunal. I hope it’s a barn-burner! Baxter knows that while crass wish fulfillment is easy, truly great stories need formidable villains. Amidst the many arrests and hangings of Baxter’s saga are cinematic setbacks. Sometimes, the Marines don’t get their man: [Biden White House Covid-19 response coordinator Ashish] Jha was five feet away from his vehicle when two Marines with an arrest warrant approached him, informing him that he was being placed under arrest on charges of mass murder. Jha erupted in laughter, saying, “You don’t even know who we are.” He exploded in a crimson fireball that blew his and the Marines’ bodies to bits throughout the parking lot. […] The Marines brought what remains they could to Fort Bragg, where medical examiners deduced that Jha was not Jha, but a clone in which someone had planted a subdermal detonator connected to HMX explosives. And then, there is the looming presence of RRN’s chief villain: Former U.S. President Barack Obama. Members of the deep state make a warped pledge of allegiance to “The United States of Ukraine” and to “one world under Obama.” Other arms of the deep state might be taken down, but Obama himself always lurks in the shadows, controlling and commanding. The occasional attempt to take him down runs into the kind of problems you’d expect: “Why?” Obama gurgled and died. Inexplicably, the body spontaneously combusted, starting at both hands and spreading to the arms and chest. Special Forces tried extinguishing the flames with sand and water, but their efforts were in vain—the flames were rapidly charring burnt flesh. “Check his feet,” the Special Forces lead, who had been trained to spot body doubles and clones, called out. They swiftly yanked off Obama’s socks and sneakers and saw he had flat feet, and that his sneakers had been augmented to fit people with fallen arches. They pulled down his pants; Obama had no genitals, a telltale indicator of cloning. The body became too hot to touch and was soon consumed by fire. Like Bob Ross, Michael Baxter has no mistakes, only happy little accidents. In late 2021, RRN reported on the conviction of the late Chelsea Clinton’s husband, Marc Mezvinsky. Being only a lackey in the Clintons’ plot to abduct children and sell them on the black market, Mezvinsky received a comparatively lenient life sentence. But wait! Two months later, Gitmo’s chaplain mentioned in passing that he had attended Mezvinsky’s execution. Eagle-eyed readers saw the discrepancy and cried foul. But Baxter didn’t miss a beat. When Baxter reported on the arrest of former Obama adviser David Axelrod, only to publish no follow-up, he had a ready explanation a year later: Axelrod had been executed without trial by being thrown out of an airplane, and it took months for Baxter to learn the truth. I’ll admit, I find Baxter’s efforts to maintain narrative integrity incredibly charming, given how they clash with the latent absurdity of the whole endeavor. Like most fictional universes, the Real Raw Newsiverse crumbles if you think about it too hard. If there are White Hat and Black Hat partitions of the military, how does military procurement work? How do newly-enlisted personnel know which faction they are joining? Do the two factions have separate recruiters? And when literally everyone carries a basic video camera in their pocket, and social media access is universal, how are major battles being fought on American soil with zero video evidence anywhere? At the meta level, the entire construct gets even sillier. The conceit of the site is that Trump has secretly left power to entrap his foes…yet then his allies go and blab the entire “real” story to an online blog. The cover for this is that the masses simply don’t believe it, but you know who would definitely know whether the blog is accurate? The Deep State! Yet despite this, in RRN lore sinister actors from Andrew Cuomo to Oprah are always caught off guard when Delta Force7 smashes down their door and zip-ties their hands for a one-way trip to Cuba. Okay, But So What? You might be tempted to think this is all irrelevant rambling into the void. But if you think that, you’re mistaken. The thing is, Real Raw News is popular. Really popular. It got more than 2 million page visits in January. It’s a lot more popular than this blog and even outdraws some established publications like The Nation. “Okay, views are views, but does anyone really believe this?” you may ask, perhaps derisively. Well, it falls to me to say that yes, yes they do. The typical RRN article gets hundreds upon hundreds of comments. And sure, a lot of them are “My mother is being paid $2,000/day working from home” spam, but most of them are not. Hundreds upon hundreds of comments are from readers grateful to Baxter for sharing the “truth.” Even more unsettling are comments from people who spot a problem with the occasional story, but still trust Baxter overall. Baxter has a donation page on Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. It has raised more than $210,000 and donations continue to pour in on a daily basis. Sure, some donation messages clearly indicate people who are in on the joke…but many more do not. But I don’t just need to guess based on comments and donation messages. In this realm, I can appeal to personal experience. I work in the broader world of American right-of-center politics, and we encounter Real Raw News believers constantly. We get emails from people who confidently insist the public-facing news of the day is fake, and the truth about the events at Gitmo will soon be revealed. At public Q&A events, we’ve fielded questions from genuinely nervous and worried people, who complain about their friends losing hope and being blackpilled by the news, and want to know why there hasn’t been more effort to share what’s “really” going on. A friend of mine who served in the Trump administration has described attending parties where, when he mentioned looking for a post-admin job, he received knowing looks and wink-wink-nudge-nudge remarks from people signaling they knew what was “really” going on. Somehow and someway, a lot of people believe or half-believe or badly want to believe this stuff. And where a lot of people do anything, there are takeaways to be found! In my three-plus years of reading all news that is both real and raw, here is what I’ve found. Conspiracies Evolve Like Comic Book Lore In his review of the Alexander Romance, Scott remarked that figures like Alexander the Great or Hercules were, essentially, the pre-modern versions of Batman: Stories about them are a genre, with countless different variations and stylistic choices that evolve over time, with just a few set principles guiding all of them. The Real Raw Newsiverse, and other modern conspiracy theories, also function like comic book lore. Just like Batman, and just like Hercules, “Donald Trump” has become a genre. Fake news stories about him and his Deep State enemies have a few core premises (adrenochrome, pedophile cabals, there is a Plan and we should Trust It) but endless room for variation past that point. Fans of comic books, soap operas, or The Simpsons might be familiar with something TVTropes calls “comic book time.” Certain facets of a fictional reality are locked in place, and with the passage of time everything else is gradually retconned to maintain the status quo. In season 2 of the Simpsons, Homer and Marge started dating in 1974, in Season 3 Marge becomes pregnant with Bart in 1980 (after a date watching The Empire Strikes Back), and in season 4 it’s revealed that Homer missed the Moon Landing to listen to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” Tragically, though, The Simpsons kept going past season 10, and if Homer was 18 in 1974 that would make him eligible for a full Social Security benefit today. So in 2008, the continuity changed so that Homer was in a Nineties grunge band just before marrying Marge8. The Simpsons writers have avoided rejiggering the canon since, but if they do, they’ll have to confront the fact that 30-something Homer and Marge are now millennials, and in a decade they’ll be members of Gen Z. You may live to see a Simpsons flashback episode about Homer and Marge living as hipsters in Brooklyn during the 2010s (truly, we live in cursed times.) But the same phenomenon exists in the world of conspiracies. Instead of a consistent, elaborate canon, what we have is a few story beats with a lot of customization and the occasional retcon. When Baxter first began posting his stories, a core part of the narrative was that Donald Trump still secretly had all the powers of the presidency and was still in command of the entire U.S. military command. Early articles promised that Trump’s apparent loss of office was only a temporary ruse, necessary to expose the worst elements of the Deep State, but that Trump’s triumphal return to power would take place by July 4, 2021. The national media might have put on a song and dance suggesting otherwise, but behind the scenes, loyal military forces were the real ones in control. This control even extended to the military helpfully house-sitting the White House and not letting Biden use it. Despite his illegitimate victory, Biden met an unwelcome surprise when he arrived at the White House on January 20. Instead of getting a ceremonial greeting, he and Kamala Harris were stopped by National Guard and U.S. Marines at the barbwire fence encircling the White House. The Marines informed them that the military had assumed control of the Executive Branch and instructed them to vacate the area. When Harris belligerently said, “Move aside, we’re president now,” the Marines locked the gate. […] To avoid shame and maintain an illusion of power, Biden’s people concocted a ruse, supported by his media allies, to deceive the American public into believing he had won a fair election and had moved into the White House on schedule. Inside Actor/Producer Tyler Perry’s 300-acre Atlanta estate sits a three-story stucco replica of the commander-in-chief’s residence, which he originally built as a set piece for a television show. […] Although the replicant White House is built to 80% scale, on television and in images it’s indistinguishable from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Biden and Harris have been using the facsimile to feign leadership and impose despotic rule on the nation. Of course, July 4 came and went, with Trump’s return nowhere to be seen, so the canon simply updated: In the new narrative, the military had been conducting a year-long election fraud audit on Trump’s behalf, the results were nearly ready for public release, and Trump’s return would simply be “swift.” But no swift return has transpired, and so as the 2024 election has approached, the lore has evolved in the direction of Trump authentically running in this election and simply reclaiming power by winning it. As time has passed, more subtle changes have had to pile up. Early on, RRN reported that Joe Biden was a brain dead semi-corpse being held at Walter Reed, and any public appearances by “Biden” were one of several actors. But after four years of Let’s Go Brandon, Biden himself has become a more popular villain, and so quietly references to his brain-dead status have disappeared. In the early days of RRN, the military was firmly behind Trump and any implication that Biden held the powers of commander-in-chief was a media-fueled sham. But as time has passed, Trump being the “real” commander-in-chief over a loyal military has evolved into a reality where there are two American militaries, a “White Hat” faction loyal to Trump and “Black Hats” loyal to Biden. Early stories implied the White Hats were more numerous, but recent stories have implied the opposite, with the White Hats an elite force that often wins battles decisively while badly outnumbered. A secret purge has gradually become a secret civil war, specifically one with frequent war crimes: White Hat forces in Maui have eradicated or repelled all but a handful of the felonious FEMA agents who began terrorizing the tropical paradise in the aftermath of the inexplicable blaze that razed Lahaina and surrounding towns in early August, a source in General Eric M. Smith’s office told Real Raw News. Since mid-August, United States Marines have fought with FEMA patrols in Lahaina, Kaanapali, Wailuku, Maalaea, and Pukalani, and the skirmishes resulted in the deaths of approximately 475 federal goons and, alas, 34 valiant Marines. The Marines died upholding the Constitution of the United States; the feds died trying to defend the criminal Biden regime. […] “The Marines died valorously,” our source said. “We ain’t taking FEMA prisoners from the rank and file, only the key players. General Smith made it clear it’s weapons-free. Those bastards know damn well they’re following unlawful orders, and they’ll pay the price.” I think the ever-evolving nature of conspiracies is actually pretty important to psychologically grasping their appeal. I have a friend who is a big believer in 9/11 Trutherism. He once compelled me to watch the documentary “The New Pearl Harbor,” an exhausting 5-hour film promoting 9/11 conspiracies. If one actually watches, one quickly discovers that a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theories are mutually exclusive, or at least don’t mesh well together: One conspiracy argues that fighter jets were intentionally diverted the wrong direction to keep them from shooting down the hijacked jets approaching New York, while another conspiracy suggests that United 93 was shot down, and it was all covered up. In some versions, the planes didn’t hit the Twin Towers at all. Sometimes Bush did it, and sometimes Israel did it, and so on. Similarly, in my career I’ve worked adjacent to people who, like RRN, were very hostile to Covid-19 shots. That hostility made them sequentially endorse wildly different assertions about how the vaccines worked. Sometimes, the vaccines contain heavy metals. Sometimes, they contain hydra DNA to turn recipients into partially non-human chimeras. Sometimes, the vaccines are a depopulation agent. Sometimes, they’re a mind-control agent, or a killswitch that can be activated by self-assembling nanomachinery. One viral documentary in 2022 claimed that Covid was caused by snake venom in the water supply, and that Covid vaccines were an additional dose of snake venom to keep people sick (all this, of course, because the snake is Satan’s animal). What stands out isn’t the silliness of these particular theories, but that I saw them sequentially endorsed by the same people. Some of these people are smart enough to notice inconsistencies, at least when they’re pointed out, so why don’t they bother them? To some extent, I think it’s for the same reason people don’t care that every Batman story doesn’t perfectly line up. Consistency isn’t the point! What actually matters is enjoying individual stories and the wider genre they fit into. Covid vaccine haters don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, they’re driven by a core impulse of “distrust the new vaccine that people I distrust are promoting,” and every conceivably story or tale that feeds that genre of thought is, for them, worthwhile. Similarly, Real Raw News fans don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, I think their core impulse is, ironically, profound disappointment in how the Trump administration failed to deliver. Trump shook up the American political landscape more than anyone in living memory, and promised sweeping changes to every level of American government, yet his actual administration proved rather disorderly, changed far less than was promised, and then lost power after one term. For many, this simply prompted a revision in how they saw Trump. But for others, the preferred response is to embrace a fantasy reality where Trump is a superhero. I actually think the reverse side of this explains things like the durability of Russiagate: If you’re a normal American liberal, everything Trump says is offensive and piggish, but to justify their level of disdain for them, many needed to elevate his evil to the level of treason, even if that never really made any sense. It can't just be that Trump is an egotistical jerk or a narcissist or whatever. He's got to be a traitor who's going to end American democracy. People Crave Extreme, Over-the-Top, and Underhanded Solutions. At the height of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety pushed through the Law of 22 Prairial. The law simplified the procedures of the country’s Revolutionary Tribunal by: Defining a whole heap of activities as criminal treason, including “creating scarcity,” disparaging the National Convention, “inspiring discouragement,” and spreading fake news.

Inline links: 2, Arrested, tried, executed, Arrested, tried, executed, secret underground tunnel, for some reason, 3, tried, executed, George W. Bush, Hunter Biden, Anthony Fauci, Gavin Newsom, Mark Milley, Victoria Nuland, Tom Hanks, Brian Stelter, 4, variations, entry, 5, committed suicide, 6, real person, Supposedly, arrested immediately, months, Sometimes, warped pledge, kind of problems, conviction, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5uuY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcc5e8197-f02d-4221-9186-4bcc4f165c72_759x723.png, arrest, thrown out of an airplane, 7, more than 2 million page visits, this blog, The Nation., https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EJFm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F66137a9b-260a-4cfa-adf3-c02c069dabd9_712x351.png, donation page, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AVfs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F16499732-4a26-43a0-8cd2-9dc38d5c6ac5_971x306.png, review, “comic book time.”, in 1974, listen to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.”, in a Nineties grunge band, 8, take place by July 4, 2021, house-sitting the White House, “swift.”, civil war, snake venom in the water supply, Law of 22 Prairial

Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman

July 30, 2024 · Original source

Human nature is not so bad that collectivist and egalitarian ideologies are always going to be prevalent among the masses. They simply need to be protected from cancerous ideas that make them a threat to progress, which come from both the right and left. Somewhat paradoxically, democracy does a pretty good job of this relative to other systems. Okay, so right-wing guy claims to be Nietzschean, why am I saying this disproves something about partisan politics? Hanania is terrible at being right-wing. He’s pro-choice, pro-immigration, pro-euthanasia, pro-vaccine, pro-globalism, pro-Ukraine, atheist, and supports the recent guilty verdict on Trump. As with Donald Trump, he’s living proof that right-wingers will welcome anyone sufficiently offensive without caring about their policy positions. My impression of Hanania is that his Nietzscheanism is incredibly deep, principled, and heartfelt, while his right-wing-ness is at best an alliance of convenience. This adequately explains most of his positions: He’s pro-immigration because he’s obsessed with excellent/talented people and wants them to come to the US and use their talents more effectively.

Inline links: pro-choice, pro-immigration, pro-euthanasia, pro-vaccine, pro-globalism, pro-Ukraine, atheist, supports the recent guilty verdict on Trump, https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1803558199867724014

He started out as pro-Russia because he thought Russia was stronger and more vigorous than the West. When Russia failed in its initial invasion, and Ukraine outperformed everyone’s expectations, Hanania flipped to Ukraine’s side, because he realized that Russia was incompetent, Ukraine was courageous, and the West’s cultural package made it more powerful and impressive than its autocratic competitors. Also, I’d expect he was disgusted by Putin’s policy of sidelining/arresting talented people in his government to prevent them from threatening his power, and was anxious to switch to the side that does less of that sort of thing.

Altruism And Vitalism As Fellow Travelers

August 06, 2024 · Original source

Is this an unfair comparison, since America has 8x Iraq’s population? No more so than Welles’ is (Italy has 8x the population of Switzerland). But beyond the specifics, I think it’s useful for shocking us into Near Mode. War isn’t actually that great for science, art, or the economy. I’m not expecting Russia or Ukraine to leapfrog the rest of the world any time soon. I’m expecting them to fall further and further behind until the war ends, at which point maybe they’ll get a chance to catch up.

Links For September 2024

September 12, 2024 · Original source

14: Why did Egyptian pharaohs so often marry their sisters? David Roman explains that it actually made sense by the logic of the time. Pharaohs didn’t necessarily consummate their marriages, and their heirs would usually be born from unrelated concubines, so the risk of inbreeding was low. What they really wanted was to avoid having to marry royal-line women off to anyone else - who could then create their own branches of the royal dynasty with competing claims to the throne. 15: The ominously named “cerebrolysin” has a positive reputation in the nootropics community, but Greg Fitzgerald and Dan Elton do a deep dive and find that its manufacturing process is so poor that it ends up being mostly random amino acids - ie it can’t possibly work the way its proponents suggest. Interestingly, cerebrolysin performed about the same as some definitely-real chemicals (eg melatonin, nicotine) on my old nootropics survey, re-emphasizing that most of what the survey measures is placebo effects. 16: Why is the Ukraine war a horrible grinding war of attrition like World War I, instead of resembling more dynamic modern conflicts? I asked this on an Open Thread and got some good answers: PolymorphicWetware says that the Soviets focused on artillery, so the post-Soviet armies of both Russia and Ukraine are both artillery-heavy. Artillery is better at defending your lines than breaking your enemies’, so both sides are great at pushing back enemy troops but bad at pushing forward themselves.

Inline links: David Roman explains that it actually made sense by the logic of the time, Greg Fitzgerald and Dan Elton do a deep dive, my old nootropics survey, PolymorphicWetware

PolymorphicWetware says that the Soviets focused on artillery, so the post-Soviet armies of both Russia and Ukraine are both artillery-heavy. Artillery is better at defending your lines than breaking your enemies’, so both sides are great at pushing back enemy troops but bad at pushing forward themselves.

Inline links: PolymorphicWetware

John Schilling says that neither side in Ukraine has established air superiority - Ukraine because it barely has an air force, Russia because the West gave Ukraine cutting-edge anti-air defenses. This is almost unique among major modern wars, and the lack of air power pushes ground conflicts back towards the World War I equilibrium.

Inline links: John Schilling

Your Book Review: Nine Lives

September 13, 2024 · Original source

In fact, this was the original reason I started reading this book. Two years ago, soon after the Ukraine invasion, I tried to figure out what happened in the 1999 apartment bombings that are widely considered a false flag operation. For example, Scott writes in his book review on Putin: “The standard position in the West is now that Putin orchestrated the apartment bombings himself - killing 300 Russians - as a justification for escalating the war on Chechnya and to make himself look good after he framed some perpetrators.” However, there was a throwaway line on Wikipedia about a British informant claiming the opposite. Later, this line was removed from Wikipedia for reasons that are unclear to me, and I found no other source mentioning this, so I tracked down the original book that was referenced. That was Aimen Dean’s memoir.

Inline links: 1999 apartment bombings, book review

Preliminary Milei Report Card

October 01, 2024 · Original source

The IMF says Argentina’s economy this year is among the worst in the world, exceeded only by places like Sudan and Yemen in the midst of civil wars. Even Ukraine and Russia are doing better! (also, what’s happening in Estonia?) According to classical economics, this kind of “shock therapy” is supposed to be temporarily bad, but long-run good. So although it probably doesn’t feel this way to Argentines, things are potentially still going according to plan. But economics doesn’t have a clear prediction for how bad things will get, or how long it will take before they are good again, and I haven’t seen any analysis of whether the current recession is consistent with predictions or whether people should start worrying.

Inline links: The IMF

Mantic Monday: Judgment Day

November 05, 2024 · Original source

Russian prospects in Ukraine better under Trump (75%) than Harris (40%)

Against The Generalized Anti-Caution Argument

November 22, 2024 · Original source

Suppose something important will happen at a certain unknown point. As someone approaches that point, you might be tempted to warn that the thing will happen. If you’re being appropriately cautious, you’ll warn about it before it happens. Then your warning will be wrong. As things continue to progress, you may continue your warnings, and you’ll be wrong each time. Then people will laugh at you and dismiss your predictions, since you were always wrong before. Then the thing will happen and they’ll be unprepared. Toy example: suppose you’re a doctor. Your patient wants to try a new experimental drug, 100 mg. You say “Don’t do it, we don’t know if it’s safe”. They do it anyway and it’s fine. You say “I guess 100 mg was safe, but don’t go above that.” They try 250 mg and it’s fine. You say “I guess 250 mg was safe, but don’t go above that.” They try 500 mg and it’s fine. You say “I guess 500 mg was safe, but don’t go above that.” They say “Haha, as if I would listen to you! First you said it might not be safe at all, but you were wrong. Then you said it might not be safe at 250 mg, but you were wrong. Then you said it might not be safe at 500 mg, but you were wrong. At this point I know you’re a fraud! Stop lecturing me!” Then they try 1000 mg and they die. The lesson is: “maybe this thing that will happen eventually will happen now” doesn’t count as a failed prediction. I’ve noticed this in a few places recently. First, in discussion of the Ukraine War, some people have worried that Putin will escalate (to tactical nukes? to WWIII?) if the US gives Ukraine too many new weapons. Lately there’s a genre of commentary (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) that says “Well, Putin didn’t start WWIII when we gave Ukraine HIMARS. They didn’t start WWIII when we gave Ukraine ATACMS. He didn’t start WWIII when we gave Ukraine F-16s. So the people who believe Putin might start WWIII have been proven wrong, and we should escalate as much as possible.” There’s obviously some level of escalation that would start WWIII (example: nuking Moscow). So we’re just debating where the line is. Since nobody (except Putin?) knows where the line is, it’s always reasonable to be cautious. I don’t actually know anything about Ukraine, but a warning about HIMARS causing WWIII seems less like “this will definitely be what does it” and more like “there’s a 2% chance this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back”. Suppose we have two theories, Escalatory-Putin and Non-Escalatory-Putin. EP says that for each new weapon we give, there’s a 2% chance Putin launches a tactical nuke. NEP says there’s a 0% chance. If we start out with even odds on both theories, after three new weapons with no nukes, our odds should only go down to 48.5% - 51.5%. (yes, this is another version of the generalized argument against updating on dramatic events) Second, I talked before about getting Biden’s dementia wrong. My internal argument against him being demented was something like “They said he was demented in 2020, but he had a good debate and proved them wrong. They said he was demented in 2022, but he gave a good State Of The Union and proved them wrong. Now they’re saying he’s demented in 2024, but they’ve already discredited themselves, so who cares?” I think this was broadly right about the Republican political machine, who was just throwing the same allegation out every election and seeing if it would stick. But regardless of the Republicans’ personal virtue, the odds of an old guy becoming newly demented each year is about 4% per year. If it had been two years since I last paid attention to this question, there was an 8% chance it had happened while I wasn’t looking. Like the other examples, dementia is something that happens eventually (this isn’t strictly true - some people reach their 100s without dementia - but I think it’s a fair idealized assumption that if someone survives long enough, then eventually their risk of cognitive decline becomes very high). It is reasonable to be worried about the President of the United States being demented - so reasonable that people will start raising the alarm about it being a possibility long before it happens. Even if some Republicans had ulterior motives for harping on it, plenty of smart, well-meaning people were also raising the alarm. Here I failed by letting the multiple false alarms lull me into a false sense of security, where I figured the non-demented side had “won” the “argument”, rather than it being a constant problem we needed to stay vigilant for. Third, this is obviously what’s going on with AI right now. The SB1047 AI safety bill tried to monitor that any AI bigger than 10^25 FLOPs (ie a little bigger than the biggest existing AIs) had to be exhaustively tested for safety. Some people argued - the AI safety folks freaked out about how AIs of 10^23 FLOPs might be unsafe, but they turned out to be safe. Then they freaked out about how AIs of 10^24 FLOPs might be unsafe, but they turned out to be safe. Now they’re freaking out about AIs of 10^25 FLOPs! Haven’t we already figured out that they’re dumb and oversensitive? No. I think of this as equivalent to the doctor who says “We haven’t confirmed that 100 mg of the experimental drug is safe”, then “I guess your foolhardy decision to ingest it anyway confirms 100 mg is safe, but we haven’t confirmed that 250 mg is safe, so don’t take that dose,” and so on up to the dose that kills the patient. It would be surprising if AI never became dangerous - if, in 2500 AD, AI still can’t hack important systems, or help terrorists commit attacks or anything like that. So we’re arguing about when we reach that threshold. It’s true and important to say “well, we don’t know, so it might be worth checking whether the answer is right now.” It probably won’t be right now the first few times we check! But that doesn’t make caution retroactively stupid and unjustified, or mean it’s not worth checking the tenth time. Can we take this insight too far? Suppose Penny Panic says “If you elect the Republicans, they’ll cancel elections and rule as dictators!” Then they elect Republicans and it doesn’t happen. The next election cycle: “If you elect the Republicans, they’ll cancel elections and rule as dictators!” Then they elect Republicans again and it still doesn’t happen. After her saying this every election cycle, and being wrong every election cycle, shouldn’t we stop treating her words as meaningful? I think we have to be careful to distinguish this from the useful cases above. It’s not true that, each election, the chance of Republicans becoming dictators increases, until eventually it’s certain. This is different from our examples above: Eventually at some age, Castro has to die, and the chance gets higher the older he gets.

Inline links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, generalized argument against updating on dramatic events, I talked before about getting Biden’s dementia wrong, about 4% per year

Sorry, I Still Think MR Is Wrong About USAID

May 29, 2025 · Original source

Which of these are the “accretions”? If “Health” and “Humanitarian” are what Cowen is calling “very good public health programs”, and the Ukraine aid is probably controversial but everyone can understand why we’re doing it, what’s left?

“Humanitarian” is things like giving food to starving people. “Governance” is mostly grants to the government of Ukraine, which apparently “allowed the government to sustain its operations, helping pay state workers salaries and provide state services…[as the] economy shrank and budgets were redirected to the country’s defense”. The other categories should be self-evident.

Inline links: which apparently

Your Review: Alpha School

June 27, 2025 · Original source

Same state curriculum, same worksheets, same pace. The school philosophy was “no acceleration—just go deep.” We knew this was the philosophy going in. The pitch was that instead of accelerating through the state curriculum the teachers would take their time with the kids and allow them to fully explore and master the content of each grade. When we asked for examples of what that meant in practice we were told things like: “Instead of reading more advanced vocabulary, the students will learn to read out loud and use emotion and character impressions. They will learn how to vary the timing of their reading like where and when to pause to create emotion in the listener”. That sounded reasonable! It sounded like more learning, but just different learning than what the state had mandated. In practice that was not what happened. In practice “deep” just meant “un‑measured.” Smart kids + small classes ≠ accountability. The kids had time to do music, lego building, theatre and Friday ski trips because they were all really bright. They didn’t need 6+ hours a day to learn the limited math required by the state, and since the school did not feel the need to advance faster than the state, there was no pressure to push learning at all – on anything really. There was no overall school curriculum. Every teacher did their own thing. While one first grade class had weekly spelling bees, the teacher in the other classroom did not believe in learning spelling at all. But it didn’t matter. The metrics they measured the kids on in both classes advanced “enough” that no one was concerned. Most time wasn’t spent on math or language anyway. Beyond the brochure activities like skiing and theater and the four hours of foreign language per week they split between Spanish and Mandarin (which was really a great opportunity for the kids who already spoke Spanish and Mandarin to have their egos flattered. I did not see any learning in either language class. I don’t see how you can teach a language a couple of hours a week to a group of 18 kids with skill levels from zero to fluency and expect to have any impact), a lot of time was spent on DEI. DEI was pitched as helping kids handle the emotions that often come from being sensitive gifted children (they called it “Synapse”). In practice my oldest daughter got four years of learning about the basic ideas of Martin Luther King Junior and Rosa Parks, a rough understanding that some people are non-binary, and a great deal of anxiety every time I left the water running while I was brushing my teeth. The talent drain In Spring 2024 the “intermediate-school” head resigned, as did the 40+ year veteran science teacher we had been looking forward to our daughter having, the beloved tech teacher who had built a her own proprietary “learn to type” software, plus half the lower‑school faculty. Our oldest was going to be entering fourth grade; her incoming roster read like a rebuilding year for a professional sports team. It was possible we could get her into a middle school that would feed into a top tier high school, but those did not start until 5th grade. Our best option looked like “suck it up and accept whatever we had for at least a year”. One option was to do something radical. We considered taking a GAP year and traveling the world with an organization called “Boundless” but decided the timing wasn’t right. Earlier in the year we had started exploring moving to the charter city of Prospera. There is a Montessori school there that seemed like it might be alright. And we could surround the kids with an interesting group of people (and live on the beach!). But by the spring we had ruled it out. There did not seem to be many families as part of the community and we were not comfortable with the risk profile based on what was happening with the conflict between Honduras and their charter cities. Then I stumbled across Alpha: Two‑hour mornings, life‑skills afternoons, claims of 2x learning. Marketing copy is cheap; still, the promise was different enough to warrant due diligence. The initial plan was to fly some of the kids to Austin for an Alpha summer camp for a week in June – just to try it out. But once we started exploring more my wife asked me: “Could we actually move to Austin and try it for a year? Based on what is happening at the kids' school, this might be the year to try it.” So over eight weeks we flew to Austin five times – conversations with admissions and school heads, real estate searches, kids doing shadow‑days. Every parent we spoke to was very impressed with the school. Their kids really were advancing at 2x+ speed – and no one believed it was just a “selection effect”. And every guide I spoke to was extremely impressive themselves. They reminded me of the staff you run into when visiting Disney World. They all seemed “full faced” and fully-engaged. When I asked the head of admissions how they found such good staff he told me their compensation was fully transparent. “Associate Guides” were paid $60,000/year (vs the $40,000 average for Austin teachers), “Full Guides” made $100,000 and the five “Head Guides” in the school each made $150,000. They were able to both poach the best teachers from other schools, but also bring exceptional people into teaching that would not have considered it otherwise. It also let them have very high expectations for teachers once they were hired. We pulled the trigger in July. New house. Admissions letter signed. Moving truck (plus car-mover) scheduled for October. Worst case, it would be a one‑year sabbatical from stagnation. The hypothesis I carried south Elite private school attendance buys you smaller classes, brighter kids, and fancier field trips – not academic acceleration. If Alpha was real, we’d see that differential, measurable impact by Christmas – that was when we would need to decide if we would cut bait and re-apply to schools back home (and sign the kids up for more IQ-tests. The school would not accept old ones). That prior—show me velocity, not polish—is the lens through which the rest of this review should be read. Part Two: A History of Alpha Note: This is my best attempt at piecing together the history of the school based on conversations with co‑founder MacKenzie Price, high school head Chris Locke, Alpha staff, and Alpha parents; All dates are estimates and I am SURE I have gotten some details wrong. I will come back after the fact in the comments and make corrections as I hear from the people involved with corrections. 2013 – 2017 | Garage‑School to “Alpha” MacKenzie Price, then a mortgage broker in Austin, wasn’t impressed by the city’s gifted programs. She invited a small number of neighbourhood kids (including her two) into a makeshift microschool that ran two intense, teacher‑led academic “sprints” each morning, then “life‑skills” projects after lunch. Joe Liemandt — Founder of Trinity Technology, ESW Capital billionaire and family friend (MacKenzie’s husband worked for him) — kept his own children in conventional private school until he saw the qualitative improvement in the life skills of MacKenzie’s kids. He decided he wanted his kids to join MacKenzie’s but he wanted to take the project to the next level. Sometime around 2014-2017 he joined MacKenzie as a co-founder and started writing checks. Alpha recruited more students and guides and the operation jumped from location-to-location looking for a larger permanent home. 2017 – 2020 | K-8 Expansion and 2-hour focus Alpha grew to roughly 90 students from K‑8 and stabilized. Morning “core blocks” were still teacher‑driven (20‑minute bursts, 5‑minute breaks, rinse, repeat), but focused on students engaged in exercises with rapid feedback (not lectures). Afternoon workshops covered “life skills” like how to give and receive feedback or public speaking. I have not seen academic data from this time period, but when I spoke to Chris Locke, head of Alpha’s high school (which launched around 2020), he told me the kids coming into his 9th grade program were “fine,” academically – it was their life skills, confidence, and ability to engage with adults and their peers were exceptional. At this stage no AI, no dashboard, no 2x learning, no portal — just better ratios and focused pacing and the result was well balanced kids who were enjoying their education experience (even if they were unexceptional academically). 2020 – 2022 | Platform Era Begins Somewhere along the way Liemandt hired a small engineering team to stitch together edtech learning tools. Many schools use tools like iXL, Beast Academy and Amira. Those tools fit in well with the 2-hour structured approach Alpha was using. The “platform” Liemandt’s team built was meant as a tool to free up guide time so that students could be more self-directed. The dev team stitched together the preferred off‑the‑shelf apps behind a single login, and built out tracking and dashboards so guides (and students) could easily see how they were progressing. This also gave the curriculum team (there was a curriculum team now) data to understand where students were spending their time, what tools were working, and which weren’t as effective. The Alpha Portal was born. Not only did it increase efficiency, it provided data to iterate with. Chris Locke saw the curve change incrementally: each new cohort of ninth‑graders under the new tech-enabled learning platform came in a little stronger academically. The “life skills” were now being matched by the “academic skills”. 2022 | Expansion and Iteration By having access to Alpha kids post-graduation in the high school, Locke could send feedback back to the elementary school.The kids coming out of the new program were now killing it academically on Math, Language, and Science, but they were still weak on things like History and Geography. He fed that type of information back to the curriculum designers, who iterated and improved the program. Soon, in addition to the core platform that directed students to third-party tools, the tech team was building proprietary “Alpha” tools themselves. The flagship of the in-house tools was “AlphaReads”. AlphaReads requires students to read progressively more complicated passages, followed by answering reading comprehension questions. In addition to helping the kids improve reading skills, Alpha uses it to push types of content. Instead of classes in history, geography, economics and political science, some of the reading passages will cover that material (in addition to learning how to read and understand Shakespeare and Proust). The success of the 2-hour learning platform was giving the Alpha founders confidence. Liemandt in particular wanted to see if the program had legs beyond the elite group of students being educated in Austin. Alpha’s first external test in August 2022 in Brownsville, TX – a small community on the Mexico border with less than half the per capita income of Austin. SpaceX had recently launched Starbase in Brownsville in 2014 and the employees there were not happy with the existing school options. Someone at SpaceX approached Alpha and asked if they could launch a new campus for their employees. It is unclear if any money changed hands, but when Alpha launched their Brownsville campus (available to SpaceX employees and any other locals who are interested) tuition was only $10,000 (vs $40,000 at the main Austin campus); incoming students trailed national academic standards by over a year. But after nine months on the Alpha program the first cohort of students had caught up and surpassed the national average, and they kept accelerating, achieving an average learning velocity of ~2× the national average (see section four for what that means). Brownsville was Alpha’s attempt to show that their model wasn’t just rich‑kid selection effects. Spring 2024 | Field Pilots & Ukraine Trip Alpha tuition is high for the Austin area ($40,000 vs average private school ~$10,000-$15,000), but unlike most private schools tuition is all-inclusive. There are no extra fees for computers or field trips. There are no silent auctions or appeals for donations. This “no extra fees” allows the school to do some pretty ridiculous things. In the first half of 2024 Alpha sent a group of students to Poland to help launch a 2-hour learning pilot among Ukrainian refugees. Students did not pay to go on the trip. But students also did not have a “right” to go on the trip. They had to earn it. In addition to being on top of academic and non-academic expectations, students who wanted to participate had to learn basic Ukrainian so they could interact with the students in Poland they were meant to be helping. By not linking the opportunity to payment, the school could instead link it to behavior and achievement. This year a group of kids who learned to sail during the school year are going on a sailing trip through the Caribbean – for no additional fees to the parents. I also heard that around this time Alpha began testing the 2-hour learning platform at a facility for juvenile delinquents in Florida. I heard that from one individual who was not directly involved and I have not found any written documentation on it, so unclear if it worked, it was a one off, or if it even happened. But it fits into the pattern of Alpha at this stage: “We know this program works for a specific type of kid. Let’s find out how broadly it is applicable. Can it work for everyone? Is it the solution for learning and education for the world?” Fall 2024 | “Pick‑Your‑Afternoon” Specialist Schools MacKenzie told me that there was consensus among the current parents of Alpha that the 2-hour learning program was exceptional and was making a huge difference with their kids. Their kids were all learning at breathtaking speed in a very condensed period of time. But there was NOT consensus about what the kids should be doing in the other 22-hours of the day. Some parents wanted to utilize the platform’s capabilities to go even faster. Some wanted their kids to just chill out and enjoy the rest of their day – let kids be kids. Others wanted their kids to use the freed up time to do sports, or study music. It was clear to her that “learn more faster in a short period of time” was a universal desire. But beyond that it was unclear what the “right” solution for the rest of her program was. You can make the morning ultra-personalized, but if the goal of the afternoon is socialization that you are missing in the morning, you need to have some sort of alignment on how to spend that afternoon. That challenge led to Alpha’s 2024 expansion into specialty schools. Three micro‑campuses opened August 2024: GT School (Georgetown, TX) — Alpha’s “Gifted and Talented” School. Higher admissions bar; higher academic expectations; Afternoon programming focused on excelling in “academic competitions” like chess, go, debate, public speaking, robotics, programming and Quiz Bowl.

Inline links: Boundless, Prospera, MacKenzie Price, Joe Liemandt, GT School

Low single mother rate He summarizes that as a place of “economic connectedness” – where adults are connected to each other and to the broader community. A lack of those five elements are not bad per se, but they are correlated with a community where people are not interacting with each other as much as they are in communities where the metrics are reversed. Chetty frames it that kids are influenced by the other adults in the area they live in. But I have another hypothesis. Rather than: Other parents → Your kids Perhaps the causation runs from: Other parents → You → Your kids Maybe it’s not other parents' style of parenting that is influencing your kids (how?) but rather when you spend time around other parents their parenting style rubs off on you and how you parent your kids. Influence like that will not get picked up in Caplan’s adoption studies (which focus almost on how parent characteristics get passed on to genetic vs adopted children’s characteristics), but it is a potential signal that maybe parenting choices do matter. Maybe we were just looking at the wrong data. Pre-registered Genius Experiment We now have two data sets that don’t contradict directly, but do point to opposing conclusions. It would be great if we could test this with a pre-registered randomized control trial. That is not going to happen in our current culture. But enter Laszlo Polgár, who volunteered his own children as the test subjects. (Scott’s 2017 review of Polgar’s book here) Before his children were born Polgár publicly announced he would raise them to be geniuses. He initially considered training them to be genius artists, writers or mathematicians, but decided those fields were not objective enough. It would be too easy for critics to dismiss his future children’s achievements and “not genius” no matter what they accomplished in those fields. So he chose a field that was considered both “driven by intelligence” that had clear, objective measures: chess. Then he called his shot. By 1989 all three girls received their first “GM norms” (a GM norm is finishing a tournament with a elo score of at least 2600; 27 norms are needed to make grandmaster). Two went on to become grandmasters - the 3rd and 4th women to ever achieve that title. One ranked in the top 100 (all genders) at age 12 – she peaked at #8 in the world. The other became the top-rated woman in the world at age 15. Polgar showed that you could take kids, at least kids with “good enough genes”, and turn them into world champions through the right education methods. One might think this would be “case closed”, but even as the Polgar sisters were achieving these feats people were saying that these girls must have been “naturally gifted”. They clearly had bright parents, but does anyone think that if they had been adopted into a random middle class American household they would have still become chess geniuses? Or world class in anything at all? When Polgar was challenged on exactly that, he wanted to repeat the experiment by adopting a “black child” and doing it again. Unfortunately his wife talked him out of it. Even if he had adopted a child and turned him into a genius, that would just be one data point – it would not show up in Caplan’s adoption studies. It would be a case of the anecdote and the data disagreeing. Which do you choose to believe? Aristocratic Tutoring It would be great if we could find more examples of Polgar’s model. While I could not find any other “called shots”, one could go back and look at the childhoods of geniuses to see if there is anything to find. That is what Erik Hoel did in his series of posts on “Why we stopped making Einsteins” (post 1, post 2, post 3; Scott’s response). Hoel argues persuasively that, when biographies of their childhoods exist, the geniuses of the past were almost all given 1:1 tutoring. There must have been many aristocrats in the past that were given 1:1 tutoring who never amounted to world-class genius, and many world-class geniuses who got there without 1:1 tutoring, but it does seem to put the thumb on the scale. Benjamin Bloom would agree. Benjamin Bloom quantified Polgar’s hunch in 1984, just eight years after Polgar’s last daughter was born. He ran a RCT where some students were taught normally and others given 1:1 tutoring. He found that the average tutored child improved by two standard deviations over the control: “The average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class” and “about 90% of the tutored students ... attained the level reached by only the highest 20% [of the control]”. He called his finding the “Bloom’s 2 sigma problem” Why would this discovery of the secret sauce that could turn the average student into a genius be a problem? Because Bloom saw no way to scale it. Clearly we can’t give every kid in the world a personal 1:1 tutor. We had the solution that would revolutionize everything, but it was just too expensive. Where does that leave us? Caplan showed that, within the normal range, nothing you do in education or parenting matters. …But Chetty showed that how (or at least where) your kids are raised can matter. …Polgar showed that intense 1:1 tutoring from a young age can create world-class geniuses …And Bloom showed that 1:1 tutoring can work for almost everyone, improving performance, if not to world-class levels, still two standard deviations above the alternative. Caplan is still mostly right—if you hover in the complacent middle of American schooling. But Chetty hints that context nudges outcomes, Polgár proves that deliberate, early, personalised instruction can manufacture prodigies, and Bloom tells us it lifts the average child by two sigmas. Alpha’s claim is that software‑mediated, 5:1 tutoring narrows that two‑sigma gap for a price mere mortals can (barely) contemplate. Whether that vision survives contact with budgets, regulators, and human nature is the question for section seven. Part Seven: Scaling Weird A month into our experiment in Austin we were at a neighbor’s backyard pool party (a fringe benefit of moving to Austin: there were backyard pool parties in early November). I was in conversation with a couple that I had just been introduced to. He asked why we moved to Austin, “Was it for your job?” “No. Actually we moved for a school for the kids.” Their faces expressed a combination of confusion and shock. It wasn’t the first nor the last time. Everyone is confused at why we would move across the country to send our kids to a new school, “They don’t have good schools where you come from? How much does this school cost?” Those two questions frame Alpha’s biggest risks when it comes to scaling. Their biggest challenges going forward are not going to be pedagogical. They are going to be sociological and economic. The Economic Problem Alpha is much cheaper than a Victorian Governess, but it’s not cheap. As mentioned in this review more than a few times, Alpha’s flagship campus charges $40,000 a year— roughly 3-4× what the other top-tier private elementary schools in Austin ask. Yes, that figure is all‑in: every Chromebook, every afternoon workshop, even the spring junket to Poland to beta‑test the platform with Ukrainian refugees is baked into tuition. There are no gala auctions or booster fees waiting in tall grass. Still, $40k is a hard swallow when the local Christian school will take your child for eleven. Worse, the number almost certainly fails to cover costs. Recall that guides start at $60k, rise to $100k on promotion, and the five “head guides” each earn $150k. At the five‑to‑one student‑to‑teacher ratio Alpha runs, those salaries alone suck in half the revenue from a twenty‑kid cohort before you’ve paid the rent, the head of school, the company executives, the curriculum designers, the engineers that are building the 2-hour platform and AlphaRead, the workshop costs (or the trip to Ukraine) or the marketing expenses (MacKenzie has a very well produced podcast, and I see a lot of ads for the school on Facebook now that we live locally). Compared with aristocratic one‑to‑one tutoring, forty grand is a steal. But $40,000 is still Lamborghini kindergarten – and even at those prices it is still burning through Joe Liemandt’s cash pile. Alpha’s answer to eventually solving the economics seems to be two fold: (1) Get enough scale that the fixed costs (like the learning platform) become a rounding error on overall costs, and (2) pull out the “non-essentials” at many of the campuses to get the marginal cost well below $10,000 per student. Whether they will be successful is still in early innings. The homeschool product beta is limping along with 1x learning, and the Arizona Charter doesn’t open until autumn 2025. Whether Alpha retains its magic without $150,000/year guides with 5:1 teacher:student ratios and generous bribe incentives programs, remains to be seen. The Weirdness Problem When Bryan Caplan writes about the signaling theory of education, he lists three signals that schools send to employers: Our students are smart

Inline links: He summarizes that as a place of “economic connectedness”, Laszlo Polgár, Scott’s 2017 review of Polgar’s book here, post 1, post 2, post 3, Scott’s response, Benjamin Bloom

Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)

July 26, 2025 · Original source

The volume of ‘Trump’ comments is absolutely massive - around 11% of all comments were about Trump in January 2017, which is greater than comments about Russia during their invasion of Ukraine (10%) and comments about COVID during the first few months of the pandemic (7%). Even a topic like SJWs, which the Commentariat really liked talking about, could only manage a peak of around 1.2% (although eg ‘gender’ peaks at 5.5% and ‘feminis*’ peaks at 3.7%). Concepts like ‘Harambe’ and ‘Wikileaks’ barely register on this scale, at 0.3% and 0.5% peaks respectively. So even though the shape of the two curves looks similar when you normalise them, it is reasonable to believe Trump could have had a significant enough impact on the comments section to dislodge forum norms, in a way Harambe did not.

Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places

August 29, 2025 · Original source

Contact: Ozge Contact Info: ozgeco[a t]yahoo[period]com Time: Saturday, October 4th, 3:00 PM Location: Kadıkoy Yeni Iskele Kahve Dunyası ( the ferry pier building that we take ferries from Kadıkoy to Eminonu or Karakoy. Second floor, upstairs bookstore and cafe) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VF+45 Notes: ACX readers, old friends, new friends welcome for an easy afternoon coffee. Please contact me at ozgeco@yahoo.com for any help request. Looking forward to seeing you soon. Ukraine KYIV Contact: Anton Contact Info: antonx451[a t]gmail[period]com | antonx451 on Telegram Time: Saturday, September 20th, 05:00 PM Location: Franyk Podil Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G2GFG78+W6

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VF+45, https://plus.codes/9G2GFG78+W6

Contact: Rudra Contact Info: [plus]380930375255 Time: Saturday, October 18, 10:00 AM Location: skif stadium ,tsetnerivka street , lviv , lviv oblast , ukraine . I will be wearing white cap Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GX6R3M6+QMH

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GX6R3M6+QMH

Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls

January 13, 2026 · Original source

If America nation-builds Venezuela, for whatever definition of nation-build, will that work well, or backfire? Some of these are long-horizon, some are conditional, and some are hard to resolve. There are potential solutions to all these problems. But why worry about them when you can go to the moon on sports bets? Annals of The Rulescucks The new era of prediction markets has provided charming additions to the language, including “rulescuck” - someone who loses an otherwise-prescient bet based on technicalities of the resolution criteria. Resolution criteria are the small print explaining what counts as the prediction market topic “happening'“. For example, in the Khameini example above, Khameini qualifies as being “out of power” if: …he resigns, is detained, or otherwise loses his position or is prevented from fulfilling his duties as Supreme Leader of Iran within this market's timeframe. The primary resolution source for this market will be a consensus of credible reporting. You can imagine ways this definition departs from an exact common-sensical concept of “out of power” - for example, if Khameini gets stuck in an elevator for half an hour and misses a key meeting, does this count as him being “prevented from fulfilling his duties”? With thousands of markets getting resolved per month, chances are high that at least one will hinge upon one of these edge cases. Kalshi resolves markets by having a staff member with good judgment decide whether or not the situation satisfies the resolution criteria. Polymarket resolves markets by . . . oh man, how long do you have? There’s a cryptocurrency called UMA. UMA owners can stake it to vote on Polymarket resolutions in an associated contract called the UMA Oracle. Voters on the losing side get their cryptocurrency confiscated and given to the winners. This creates a Keynesian beauty contest, ie a situation where everyone tries to vote for the winning side. The most natural Schelling point is the side which is actually correct. If someone tries to attack the oracle by buying lots of UMA and voting for the wrong side, this incentivizes bystanders to come in and defend the oracle by voting for the right side, since (conditional on there being common knowledge that everyone will do this) that means they get free money at the attackers’ expense. But also, the UMA currency goes up in value if people trust the oracle and plan to use it more often, and it goes down if people think the oracle is useless and may soon get replaced by other systems. So regardless of their other incentives, everyone who owns the currency has an incentive to vote for the true answer so that people keep trusting the oracle. This system works most of the time, but tends towards so-called “oracle drama” where seemingly prosaic resolutions might lie at the end of a thrilling story of attacks, counterattacks, and escalations. Here are some of the most interesting alleged rulescuckings of 2026: Mr Ozi: Will Zelensky wear a suit? Ivan Cryptoslav calls this “the most infamous example in Polymarket history”. Ukraine’s president dresses mostly in military fatigues, vowing never to wear a suit until the war is over. As his sartorial notoriety spread, Polymarket traders bet over $100 million on the question of whether he would crack in any given month. At the Pope’s funeral, Zelensky showed up in a respectful-looking jacket which might or might not count. Most media organizations refused to describe it as a “suit”, so the decentralized oracle ruled against. But over the next few months, Zelensky continued to straddle the border of suithood, and the media eventually started using the word “suit” in their articles. This presented a quandary for the oracle, which was supposed to respect both the precedent of its past rulings, and the consensus of media organizations. Voters switched sides several times until finally settling on NO; true suit believers were unsatisfied with this decision. For what it’s worth, the Twitter menswear guy told Wired that “It meets the technical definition, [but] I would also recognize that most people would not think of that as a suit.” Domer: Will Ukraine agree to the US mineral deal? AFAICT, this is the only case where the oracle genuinely broke down (as opposed to a legitimate disagreement). In February, it looked like both America and Ukraine had agreed to a mineral deal, but the oracle considered the question and decided this didn’t count as a full agreement (and indeed, the apparent agreement then fell apart). In March, a cabal of YES holders tried again. They waited for a time when all Polymarket employees would be out of the office, and when not too many people would be voting on the decentralized resolution oracle, then spammed it with calls to resolve to YES based on an argument that the February agreement had qualified after all. The YES holders and not-particularly-plugged-in oracle voters pushed the vote towards YES. Then, with two minutes to spare, a Polymarket employee showed up and said that Polymarket’s opinion was that it should be NO. This was technically framed as a recommendation to oracle voters, but it is so effective in establishing the Schelling point that it’s practically always followed. However, in this case, there were only two minutes left, which wasn’t enough time for the voters to change their mind. Seeing that the resolution was trending towards yes, the Polymarket representatives, not wanting to break their streak of always establishing the Schelling point, changed their own opinion to YES, and the final vote was YES 99%. Domer: How many people watched the Oscars on 3/5/25?: Kalshi’s resolution criteria for this market said they would resolve it when a major news source published Oscar viewership numbers. A few minutes after the Oscars, NYT published preliminary viewership numbers, without any caveats saying they were preliminary. The next day, they published another article saying that actually, the real viewership numbers were higher. Kalshi decided that the letter of the resolution criteria was met when NYT published its first article, and that NYT changing its opinion didn’t imply that Kalshi should change the resolution. Traders who bet on the later (ie correct) numbers were unsatisfied with this decision. NYPost: Will America invade Venezuela? On January 3, the US bombed Venezuela, sent in a Special Forces team that successfully captured President Maduro, and announced that they would thenceforward “run the country” (a claim they later walked back). Does this qualify as an “invasion”? Polymarket’s resolution criteria defined “invasion” as “a military offensive intended to establish control over any portion of Venezuela”. It didn’t seem like the US was trying to establish control over Venezuelan territory, exactly, so they resolved NO. Traders who bet on YES were unsatisfied with this decision. With one exception, these aren’t outright oracle failures. They’re honest cases of ambiguous rules. Most of the links end with pleas for Polymarket to get better at clarifying rules. My perspective is that the few times I’ve talked to Polymarket people, I’ve begged them to implement various cool features, and they’ve always said “Nope, sorry, too busy figuring out ways to make rules clearer”. Prediction market people obsess over maximally finicky resolution criteria, but somehow it’s never enough - you just can’t specify every possible state of the world beforehand. The most interesting proposal I’ve seen in this space is to make LLMs do it; you can train them on good rulesets, and they’re tolerant enough of tedium to print out pages and pages of every possible edge case without going crazy. It’ll be fun the first time one of them hallucinates, though. …And Miscellaneous N’er-Do-Wells I include this section under protest. The media likes engaging with prediction markets through dramatic stories about insider trading and market manipulation. This is as useful as engaging with Waymo through stories about cats being run over. It doesn’t matter whether you can find one lurid example of something going wrong. What matters is the base rates, the consequences, and the alternatives. Polymarket resolves about a thousand markets a month, and Kalshi closer to five thousand. It’s no surprise that a few go wrong; it’s even less surprise that there are false accusations of a few going wrong. Still, I would be remiss to not mention this at all, so here are some of the more interesting stories: Fhantombets: Who will win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize? Twelve hours before the announcement, someone placed a large Polymarket bet on Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, bringing her probability from 4% to 73%. When Machado later won, observers suspected insider trading. But an account named fhantombets claims to have interviewed the winning trader; although he did not reveal his exact strategy, the interview better matches a story where he was good at navigating WordPress directories, and found that the Nobel team put a draft of the announcement up early in a nonpublic part of their WordPress site. He won about $70,000. LuishXYZ: Will the Russians capture Myrnohrad? This is a small town in Ukraine that the Russians obviously were not going to capture; the Polymarket price trended toward zero. The resolution criteria named maps by the well-regarded Institute For The Study of War as canon. A few hours before resolution, ISW updated their maps to show the the town captured by Russia, which was definitely false. Polymarket resolved to YES, and the fictional Russian advance disappeared. The Institute then issued a statement saying the map update was “unapproved”, and fired one of its staffers who had presumably been involved. The cheater’s exact winnings are unknown, but based on the size of the market are probably mid-6-digits. TechCrunch: What words will be used in Coinbase’s earnings call? Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong delivered the company’s “earnings call”, ie a speech to investors about its recent progress. At the end, he said “I've been tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call, and I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call”. Armstrong is worth $10 billion and doesn’t need to manipulate a $50,000 market for the money - he later described his comments as “trolling”. Other crypto executives condemned the move, with one saying that “you need your head examined if you think it’s cute or clever or savvy that the CEO of the biggest company in this industry openly manipulated a market.” I might need my head examined, because I think it’s at least kind of funny. Forbes: Who will rank highest on Google Search volume this year? A trader called AlphaRaccoon got 22/23 of these Polymarket questions right, and has a history of implausibly good performance on Google-related questions. They basically have to be a Google insider, but (since all of this is done through crypto) nobody has a good way to figure out who. They made $1 million. NPR: Will Maduro be captured? Just before the secret operation that captured Maduro, someone placed a mysterious $32,000 wager on YES. Was this insider trading by someone in the administration or military? Nobody knows, since the profits go to an anonymous crypto wallet. But the article mentions that the crypto wallet appears to be cashing out through regulated KYC-compliant US exchanges, which suggests they’re not very worried about their identity getting discovered. Maybe they just got lucky after all. AlanMCole: How long will Karoline Leavitt speak at the White House briefing? Karoline Leavitt is Trump’s press secretary. On January 7, she held an ordinary press briefing. Kalshi had its usual market about how long the briefing would last, divided into bins of greater than vs. less than 65 minutes. At the 64:24 mark, Leavitt ended the conference in what appeared to be a sudden manner, and the “less than 65 minutes” bin shot from 2% to 100%. A viral tweet convinced many people that Leavitt must have been insider trading, but Cole counterargued that Leavitt could only have won about $4,000 from the market, which probably isn’t enough to risk one’s job as White House Press Secretary. Sometimes people just end press conferences at weird times. Cole concluded: Now, some opinions and generalizations, as someone who looks at prediction markets plenty (I’ll probably write something about my own experience with them at some point.) 1. This market, like many of them, is pretty stupid. I like substantive markets; this isn’t substantive. 2. The major prediction markets have a wildly undisciplined comms strategy where any attention is good attention, and they love implying all sorts of crazy wild west stuff is going on to get attention. 3. People do bet on things potentially subject to manipulation or insider trading. But usually the markets like that (such as duration of press conference, or stupid “what will be mentioned” markets) are small, especially relative to the wealth of key decisionmakers. 4. Losers in markets are huge whiners, and the more frivolous and tiny their bets, the more likely they are to whine. Sometimes in sports it’s pretty egregious. They’ll get mad at a team for running out the clock when ahead but under some spread they bet on. 5. Lower-quality financial news often doesn’t pay much attention to quantity. (For example, dumb stories about how a decisionmaker has a conflict of interest because they’re invested in an index fund which is 3 percent comprised of some company.) 6. Given the platforms’ undisciplined social media strategy of “promote prediction market chatter no matter what kind of chatter it is,” I don’t think this tweet rises even to the status of “lower-quality financial news.” Kalshi’s team, whatever their faults, are extraordinarily efficient at getting batched approvals of many near-identical markets with slight parameter variation; I’ve seen Tarek speak about this on Odd Lots. The result is they’ve got TONS of them, for better or worse. You’re gonna see 1-in-100 upsets on tiny Kalshi markets for as long as this regulatory equilibrium holds, even if nothing unusual is going on, simply because they’re publishing hundreds (thousands?) of markets per day. There’s a saying that you can’t con an honest man. This isn’t exactly true. But it’s easier to con people who are playing in a “what words will Brian Armstrong say today” market than people who are trying to do something useful, and I have trouble feeling sorry for these people when Brian Armstrong says silly words. Conditional Markets: A Modest Proposal Conditional markets (“decision markets”) are the strongest case for prediction markets potentially being revolutionary. The idea is - you may want to base a decision (like which candidate to elect) on an outcome (like how they’ll affect the economy). So you make two markets: If the Democrat gets elected, will the economy be good four years later?

Inline links: UMA Oracle, Keynesian beauty contest, Will Zelensky wear a suit?, calls this, told Wired, Will Ukraine agree to the US mineral deal?, How many people watched the Oscars on 3/5/25?, another article, Will America invade Venezuela?, stories about cats, Who will win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize?, claims, Will the Russians capture Myrnohrad?, a statement, What words will be used in Coinbase’s earnings call?, described, Who will rank highest on Google Search volume this year?, Will Maduro be captured?, How long will Karoline Leavitt speak at the White House briefing?

"All Lawful Use": Much More Than You Wanted To Know

March 01, 2026 · Original source

Everyone (including Anthropic) agrees that some form of autonomous weapons will be necessary to win the wars of the future - indeed, autonomous weapons are already being used on the battlefield in Ukraine. But there’s a wide spectrum from humans-entirely-in-the-loop to humans-partly-in-the-loop to humans-totally-unrelated-to-the-loop, and we might want humans involved somewhere for at least two reasons.

Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places

April 01, 2026 · Original source

Contact: Ozge Contact Info: ozgeco[@]yahoo[.]com Time: Saturday, April 11th, 3:00 PM Location: Kaffe Schütz in Beşiktaş. This is a large cafe with few floors upstairs. I will be either on the entrance floor or upstairs, depending on the availability of seats. Please look for the ACX MEETUP sign on the table. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GHF22V4+9F Notes: Old friends, new friends: everyone welcomed to meet likeminded people residing in and visiting Istanbul Ukraine KYIV Contact: Lex (NaUKMA) is organizing a Kyiv (downtown) Meetup Contact Info: randale9999[@]gmail[.]com Time: Friday, May 15th, 5:00 PM Location: Khoryva St, 15/8, Kyiv, 04071. Look for the ACX Sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G2GFG87+7P Group Link: LessWrong UA, invites via telegram or email

Inline links: https://plus.codes/8GHF22V4+9F, https://plus.codes/9G2GFG87+7P

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