Resolving January’s Manifold market
I made a Manifold market on which blog post written in January I’d like the most. I required submissions to be from a given list of blogs.
I put in a subsidy of 1000 Manifold mana (play money).
Results:
Let’s go through them:
1. Fantastic Anachronism: The Best and Worst Books I Read in 2022
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2023/01/23/the-best-and-worst-books-i-read-in-2022/
The second novel is a series of conversations between Bobby’s sister Alicia and her psychiatrist, a short time before she commits suicide. It’s mostly a companion piece, and many times it feels like Alicia is McCarthy’s mouthpiece. It’s about mathematics and giving up mathematics and the foundation of mathematics, about language, about meaning in a godless world, about the inability to experience the world directly and the effects of various intermediation mechanisms (including language), about love and longing, about the burden of knowledge, about intelligence, evolution and evolutionary psychology, physics and the bomb and the sins of the father. Both books try their damnest to tackle Gnosticism.
One of the best works in many years, I can’t wait to go back to it.
My first thought is, “Wow, we have very different taste in books”.
I guess this post saves me from reading books I won’t like.
Quotes like these are fun:
David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
An unstructured mishmash of warmed-over pop science and a cavalcade of bad arguments around abduction, philosophy of science, intelligence, infinity, qualia, etc.
While on Fantastic Anachronism, I happened to click on a post about Homer I hadn’t read before, and it was pretty cool.
2. Overcoming Bias: Are Financial Markets Too Short-Term?
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2023/01/fin-mkt-too-short-term.html
I think Robin Hanson is saying that because quants gain career success by making short-term trades, they (and hence all financial markets) don’t think about long-term trends as much?
He has some other point about how “long duration info apparently comes in larger chunks”, but I don’t understand it. Perhaps that’s my bad.
But if markets were wrong about long-term things, couldn’t you make money off of that? To which my counterargument is “It’s not worth making money off of it because of discounting rates”. But then why do we need to propose a theory involving what looks good on a quant’s CV, when we can just appeal to discounting rates?
3. Cold takes: How we could stumble into AI catastrophe
https://www.cold-takes.com/how-we-could-stumble-into-ai-catastrophe/
I agree with the points this post is making. I think AI is important and scary, and I hope to spend lots of time working on AI safety.
But I’ve read a lot of articles on “here’s a plausible-sounding scenario in which AI screws up our future”, and I didn’t really learn anything new from this post.
I’d be more interested in reading some of these followup posts, if they contained ideas I hadn’t heard of already:
In future pieces, I’ll get more concrete about what specific people and organizations can do today to improve the odds of factors like these going well, and overall to raise the odds of a good outcome.
4. Marginal Revolution: Indoor Air Quality and Learning
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/01/indoor-air-quality-and-learning.html
Dynomight first introduced me to the idea that air quality might have an effect on my life. (And Dynomight’s air quality article would have won this contest if it qualified.) So I don’t think I learned much on the margin from the Marginal Revolution article.
Side note: ACX dissents on whether higher-than-usual-but-not-toxic levels of CO₂ are bad for cognition:
I personally am skeptical, partly because the effect is so big I would expect someone to have noticed, but also because submarines, spaceships, etc have orders of magnitude more carbon dioxide than any civilian environment, but people still seem to do pretty hard work in them pretty effectively.
So right now I am more concerned about PM₂.₅ rather than CO₂.
5. Faultlore: Rust’s Unsafe Pointer Types Need An Overhaul
https://faultlore.com/blah/fix-rust-pointers/
This gets disqualified because it wasn’t one of the blogs listed and the post isn’t from January. I appreciate Th3W0tcher’s goodwill in recommending this, but I have to follow the rules I set, otherwise people might avoid my market if they think I’m untrustworthy (i.e. I could resolve this market to Subsidy and take all the bettors’ fake money).
I did not understand most of the article, but I felt pleased that I don’t think about pointers or unsafe Rust, since the bugs sound horrible.
I giggled at this:
let mut x = 0;
let mut y = 1;
// Wouldn't it be fucked up if this could modify y?
x = 2;
println!("{}", y);
I’m glad to have learned of this blog.
6. FemmePharma: 5 Tips To Help Your Mother Through Menopause
https://femmepharma.com/menopause-blog/5-tips-to-help-your-mother-through-menopause/
Maybe Th3W0tcher is trolling me.
Also not one of the required blogs, also not from January.
FemmePharma likes exclamation points:
Celebrate menopause like a milestone!
So you have hit another big phase of life, why does that have to be anything bad? Send her a gift package, or for a surprise spa, breakfast in bed – anything that makes her feel special and loved! FemmePharma is also here to help! Our products are a must-have for women at this stage.
Say Thank You to your mom (or the special woman in your life) this May with FemmePharma!
I wish the article was more informative. I have always assumed menopause happens because cavewomen never survived until their 40s, so there was no evolutionary advantage to being fertile at that age. But then why do men stay fertile (albeit with shoddier sperm) into their 70s? Does this happen in other animals too? Probably there’s an evolutionary biology textbook that explains this.
7. Conclusion
I think in a year I would look back most fondly on the Faultlore post.
But I have to follow the rules I set. I award the 1000 Manifold dollars to the Fantastic Anachronism article, since there’s a slim chance it saves me from reading a bad book.
For next month, I’ll adjust the rules to allow more types of posts.
Next month's market is at