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Comment by NunoSempere | Hacker News Reader

Thanks!

Out of interest - why don't you guys do way more of this for financial markets?

Presumably you don’t publish your strats there.

I'm not sure it's quite the same thing though. It's not a strat, it's a judgement call. And, they can put a bet on at time t and then publish at time t + 1 min. This is done by hedge funds, they do publish/pitch their ideas sometimes.

Yeah, good question. A few years ago the answer may have been that we thought we could influence more money than we could make.

Fwiw, when I've tried it, it has tended to suck in a whole lot of my time.

For me, other projects seem more meaningful. E.g., right now I'm setting up this: https://alert-team.org, another member is behind https://theaidigest.org/progress-and-dangers, a third works at https://forecastingresearch.org/, etc. Maybe we're an idealistic bunch, but also maybe we're making a bad judgment call, and still yet it's possible we couldn't cut it.

> Maybe we're an idealistic bunch

I mean, it makes me quite happy that y'all apparently use your skills for wholesome, humanitarian things instead of just focusing on making $$$.

Aren't you just itching to see if you can do it against the hottest competition on the planet? Ie, and I mean this with respect - financial markets are the major leagues of prediction - it feels a little bit like you are playing in the minor leagues. And it's not just a chest beating exercise - you guys appear genuine and to want to push forward the science/art of prediction. But if you can't beat the current best, you aren't state of the art, let alone able to push things forward. You might be pushing things backwards.

fwiw, it appears you'd have a decent chance. You guys seem to have an extreme level of objectivity and rationality. There is a lot of domain knowledge required to bet on say, healthcare stocks or whatever, but maybe too much domain knowledge harms rather than hurts.

this

Naively, if any of the predictions could be made +EV accounting for time preference, the boffins' predictions should have been mirrored into the market to someone's profit.

I remain unconvinced that they're not merely very lucky, the same way that some hedge fund operators or day traders are lucky.

Has your group made predictions on nuclear fusion timelines, or mean temperature rise due to climate change?

Eh, the second part to me seems like a less useful forecasting. Generally it seems fore asting is focused on human/political events that obviously don't already have useful modelling.

For climate change, there's already a lot of existing models out there calculated by much more rigorous metrics than "the Laplace rule" or just naively adding together averages.

Climate models just give us scenarios. Conceptually they give us the function f(emissions) = warming + error. But we don't know the probability distribution of emissions, so we don't know the probability distribution of f. Coming up with a reliable probability distribution requires considering things like politics, world events, economic growth, technology breakthoughs, etc. IPCC etc make attempts to model the distribution of future emissions, but it's less rigorous and scientific than the actual underlying climate model.

> the probability distribution of emissions

We know that every species consumes all available resources until an external force, whether it's predators or environmental collapse checks its growth. Humans are no different - any time a poor person uses a paper straw, a rich one will fly their private jet. Muh backyard arguments on nuclear means we will continue to burn coal and gas as fast as possible, even while renewables help drive up more demand.

So I think it's safe to assume that emissions will continue growing.

I'm hoping for a rigorous analysis. For example, X := "arrival time of fusion with a cost lower than natural gas in $ per kWh" is a random variable with a distribution. Our assumptions about the distribution of X will impact our estimated distribution of emissions, and hence impact our estimated distribution of f(emissions). There's lots of these questions that contribute, both technological and behavioral in nature.

Yes there's a lot of existing models, and a lot of the existing models have been wrong in the past. Climate science has always been very politicized. I for one would welcome predictions from people who have a track record of predicting things correctly. Climate science has a mixed track record [0].

[0]: https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...

FWIW, I'm very much NOT endorsing cei.org, nor saying climate change is not a big problem. Just saying that the track record of climate scientists is not great. Climate change is important enough to warrant the attention of people who can actually predict things.

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