Quick Takes

My 6 years as a trader / active investor The Dilbert Afterlife by Scott Alexander, Jan 16, 2026: The EMH Aten't Dead by Richard Meadows, May 15, 2020: Yesterday was the 6-year anniversary of my entry into the "beautiful" trade referenced above. On 2/10/2020 I cashed out ~10% of my investment portfolio and put it into S&P 500 April puts, a little more than a week before markets started crashing from COVID-19. The position first lost ~40% due to the market continuing to go up during that week, then went up to a peak of 30-50x (going by memory) before going to 0, with a final return of ~10x (due to partial exits along the way). After that, I dove into the markets and essentially traded full time for a couple of years, then ramped down my time/effort when the markets became seemingly more efficient over time (perhaps due to COVID stimulus money being lost / used up by retail traders), and as my portfolio outgrew smaller opportunities. (In other words, it became too hard to buy or sell enough stock/options in smaller companies without affecting its price. It seems underappreciated or not much talked about how much harder outperforming the market becomes as one's assets under management grows. Also this was almost entirely equities and options. I stayed away from trading bonds, crypto, or forex.) Starting with no experience in active trading/investing (I was previously 100% in index funds), my portfolio has returned a total of ~9x over these 6 years. (So ~4.5x or ~350% after the initial doubling, vs 127% for S&P 500. Also this is a very rough estimate since my trades were scattered over many accounts and it's hard to back out the effects of other incomes and expenses, e.g. taxes.) Of course without providing or analyzing the trade log (to show how much risk I was taking) it's still hard to rule out luck. And if it was skill I'm not sure how to explain it, except to say that I was doing a lot of trial and error (looking for apparent mispricings around various markets,

Hi, I am Joanna. I did a design work trial for Lesswrong that ends tonight! As part of that, I designed a new profile page. If you don't like it, I won't be around to fix it unless they hire me. But, the team would surely care if you have comments! (And I would too.)

I've heard many say that "neuralese" is superior to CoT and will inevitably supplant it. The usual justification is that the bandwidth of neuralese is going to be higher, which will make it better. But (1) bandwidth might not be better in this case; it isn't in all cases and (2) there are other factors that could theoretically operate against this, even if this is true. Has anyone cleanly made the case for why neuralese is better or asymptotically technically inevitable, at length / clearly?

FYI, if anyone read my post The nature of LLM algorithmic progress last week, it’s now a heavily-revised version 2.

Model to track: You get 80% of the current max value LLMs could provide you from standard-issue chat models and any decent out-of-the-box coding agent, both prompted the obvious way. Trying to get the remaining 20% that are locked behind figuring out agent swarms, optimizing your prompts, setting up ad-hoc continuous-memory setups, doing comparative analyses of different frontier models' performance on your tasks, inventing new galaxy-brained workflows, writing custom software, et cetera, would not be worth it: it would take too long for too little payoff. There is an "LLMs for productivity!" memeplex that is trying to turn people into its hosts by fostering FOMO in those who are not investing tons of their time into tinkering with LLMs. You should ignore it. At best it would waste your time; at worst it would corrupt your priorities, convincing you that you should reorient your life around "optimizing your Claude Code setup" or writing productivity apps for yourself. LW regulars may be especially vulnerable to it: we know that AI is going to become absurdly powerful sooner or later, so it takes relatively little to sell to us the idea that it already is absurdly powerful – which may or may not be currently being exploited by analogues of crypto grifters. (Not to say you mustn't be tinkering with LLMs and vibe-coding custom software, especially if you're having fun! But you should perhaps approach it in the spirit of a hobby, rather than the thing you should be doing.) Well, at least, that's my takeaway from watching the current ideatic ecosystem around LLMs and trying that stuff for myself (one, two, three). I do have tons of ideas about custom software that perhaps could 1.1x my productivity... but it's too complex for the LLMs of today to vibe-code in a truly hands-off manner, and is not worth the time otherwise. Maybe in six more months. Obviously "reverse any advice you hear" and "Thane has terminal skill issues and this post is sour grapes" may or may not

Zachary Robinson and Kanika Bahl are no longer on the Anthropic LTBT. Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar has been added. The Anthropic Company page is out of date, but as far as I can tell the LTBT is: Neil Buddy Shah (chair), Richard Fontaine, and Cuéllar.

I'm working on a piece for Asterisk magazine on how biohackers (broadly defined) think about risk. Are you interested in being interviewed? Do you know someone who is? I'm taking a very broad definition of biohacker (self-medicating to save money counts), but some people I'm especially interested in talking to are those who: * biohack for its own sake- no one needs magnets in their fingernails, but you want them. * receive treatment within the standard medical system, but playing an active role in personalizing it (e.g. trans people adjusting their HRT, diabetics figuring out their insulin dosing) * strongly prefer herbal to allopathic medicine * the aforementioned driven-to-self-medication by financial constraints * people who chronic mystery illnesses * Use peptides besides GLP-1s (love you guys but GLP-1 users were by far the easiest to find) relevant past work of mine: * Church Planting: When Venture Capital Finds Jesus * Luck based medicine: my resentful story of becoming a medical miracle   pseudonymity is fine, happy to answer other questions. You can reach me by email at elizabeth@acesounderglass.com