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aphyer
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I am Andrew Hyer, currently living in New Jersey and working in New York (in the finance industry).

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An epistemic advantage of working as a moderate
aphyer2d1915

You can be a moderate by believing only moderate things.  Or you can be a moderate by adopting moderate strategies.  These are not necessarily the same thing. 

This piece seems to be mostly advocating for the benefits of moderate strategies.

Your reply seems to mostly be criticizing moderate beliefs.

(My political beliefs are a ridiculous assortment of things, many of them outside the Overton window.  If someone tells me their political beliefs are all moderate, I suspect them of being a sheep.

But my political strategies are moderate: I have voted for various parties' candidates at various times, depending on who seems worse lately.  This seems...strategically correct to me?)

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Should you make stone tools?
aphyer16d91

If you ever do it, please be sure to try to confuse archaeologists as much as possible.  Find some cave, leave all your flint tools there, and carve images of space aliens onto the wall.

Reply1
johnswentworth's Shortform
aphyer1mo40

This might be a cultural/region-based thing.  Stop by a bar in Alabama, or even just somewhere rural, and I think there might be more use of bars as matchmaking.

Reply
English writes numbers backwards
aphyer1mo3421

Here is a list of numbers.  Which two of these numbers are closest together?

815

187

733

812

142

312

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A brief perspective from an IMO coordinator
aphyer1mo20

I think the obvious approach is comparably neat until you get to the point of proving 

that k=2 won't work

at which point it's a mess.  The Google approach manages to prove that part in a much nicer way as a side effect of its general result.

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A brief perspective from an IMO coordinator
aphyer1mo40

I looked at the Q1/4/5 answers[1].  I think they would indeed most likely all get 7s: there's quite a bit of verbosity, and in particular OpenAI's Q4 answer spends a lot of time talking its way around in circles, but I believe there's a valid proof in all of them.

Most interesting is Q1, where OpenAI produces what I think is a very human answer (the same approach I took, and the one I'd expect most human solvers to take) while Google takes a less intuitive approach but one that ends up much neater.  This makes me a little bit suspicious about whether some functionally-identical problem showed up somewhere in Google's training, but if it didn't that is extra impressive.

  1. ^

    IMO Q3 and Q6 are generally much harder: the AI didn't solve Q6, and I haven't gone through the Q3 answers.  Q2 was a geometry one, which is weirder to look through and which I find very unpleasant.

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A brief perspective from an IMO coordinator
aphyer1mo40

(Credentials: was an IMO team reserve, did some similar competitions)

Have the actual answers AI produced been posted?   Because I could see this mattering a lot, or not at all, depending on the exact quality of the answers.

If you give a clean, accurate answer that lines up with the expected proof, grading is quite quick and very easy.  But if your proof is messy and non-standard, coordinators need to go through it and determine its validity: or if you missed out part of the proof, there needs to be a standardized answer to 'how big a gap is this, and how much partial credit do you get?'

(Also, have the exact prompts used been posted?  Because it would be very very easy to add small amounts of text or examples that make these problems much easier.  If the prompt used for Q4 contains the number '6' at any point in it, for example, I would basically just instantly call that 'cheating').

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the jackpot age
aphyer2mo*110

Not in general.  As you say, GM requires positive numbers, but there's a reason for this: imagine GM as log-scaling everything and then performing AM on the results.

So to get the GM of 10 and 1000: 

  • Realize that 10 = 10^1, 1000 = 10^3
  • Then average 1 and 3 to get 2.
  • So your result is 10^2=100.

But now notice that:

  • 0.01 is 10^-2
  • 0.00001 is 10^-5
  • 0.0000000001 is 10^-10
  • 0 is 10^[negative infinity]?
  • -1 is...uh...

and so the GM of 1 million and 0.00000000000000000000000001 is 0.00000000000001, and the GM of 1 billion and 0 is 0.  This won't really lend itself to calculating a GM of a list including a negative number.

One thing you can do, though, which makes sense if you are e.g. calculating your utility as log(your net worth) in various situations, is calculate the GM of [your current net worth + this value].

For instance, if you are considering a gamble that has a 50% chance of gaining you $2000 and a 50% chance of losing you $1000:

  • If your net worth is $1000, this replaces $1000 with a 50% chance of $3000 and a 50% change of $0.  Since GM(3000, 0) = 0, this is worse than just staying with the $1000 .
  • If your net worth is $2000, this replaces $2000 with a 50% chance of $4000 and a 50% chance of $1000.  Since GM(4000, 1000) = 2000, you are indifferent.
  • If your net worth is $4000, this replaces $4000 with a 50% chance of $6000 and a 50% chance of $3000.  Since GM(6000, 3000) ~= 4242, this is better than staying with the $4000.
Reply
Don't Eat Honey
aphyer2mo157

Strongly seconded.

Suppose that two dozen bees sting a human, and the human dies of anaphylaxis.  Is the majority of the tragedy in this scenario the deaths of the bees?

I could be convinced that I have an overly-rosy view of honey production.  I have no real information on it besides random internet memes, which give me an impression like 'bees are free to be elsewhere, but stay in a hive where some honey sometimes gets taken because it's a fair trade for a high-quality artificial hive and an indestructible protector.'  That might be propaganda by Big Bee.  That might be an accurate summary of small-scale beekeepers but not of large-scale honey production.  I am not sure, but I could be convinced on this point.

But the general epistemics on display here do not encourage me to view this as a more trustworthy source than internet memes.

Reply2
No, Futarchy Doesn’t Have This EDT Flaw
aphyer2mo1417

Given that prediction markets currently don't really have enough liquidity, saying 'you need 1000x more liquidity to try to entice traders into putting work into something that can only pay off 0.1% of the time' does in fact sound like something of a flaw.

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42D&D.Sci Alchemy: Archmage Anachronos and the Supply Chain Issues
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