Also, on the Petrov day market, let's suppose the question had been "What % of Petrov Day will elapse before someone uses the big red button to take down Less Wrong's frontpage for the rest of the day?" ("for the rest of the day" is the only change.) I would consider this reasonably unambiguous - if LW decides to bring the page back up because it was a "mistake" then it shouldn't resolve yet. But I suspect that people would have bet on that nearly the same as the actual question, and your hypothetical user who saw the site was down at 10% would also have been burned. It's still better to... (read more)
I agree that ambiguity is bad, and most Manifold markets are probably too imprecise and ambiguous. My usual style is trying to be fairly precise in the forecasting questions I write, and I definitely second your recommendations!
However, I want to point out that the problem isn't just ambiguity, but really complexity. The more you try to nail down the resolution criteria, the more likely it becomes for there to be a serious mismatch between the top-line summary of the question (the question that you are actually interested in answering) and the detailed decision tree used to resolve it.
Here's a great example with a real-money, CFTC-regulated prediction market "Will student loan debt be... (read more)
I've made several updates to my guide to incorporate your input. I'll be trying the 7500 and 2291s next. Thanks again!
Thanks! I didn't realize that Zoro was owned by Grainger, that makes me feel much better about them. I also had a decent experience buying from them, it was still much slower than Amazon but not too bad. I'll add a recommended link to them.
And to add to my last comment, just to explain why I wrote things the way I did, I think the more important thing in terms of recommendations to a general audience is that in my personal experience, most people I've talked to have indeed upgraded to an N95, but extremely few people I've talked to have actually ended up wearing a P100 elastomeric. They have a ton of advantages, but most people simply don't want to use them. So in my mask article I explain the advantages, but in my general advice article I feel like it's more useful to simply say upgrade to a N95 or P100.
I agree with most of your points, especially about poor seal for typical N95s, but in my personal experience, I am often wearing a mask intermittently, not wearing it for the whole day, and in that context I typically prefer to use a N95 which I can fold and put in my pocket - that convenience is very important for me. I definitely do recommend an elastomeric P100 for long-duration wear where the convenience factor is not an issue. And I found it basically impossible to make myself audible in a loud crowded environment, although it's fine in quieter environments.
I have not done a lot of detailed research into different P100 filters,... (read more)
I mostly agree with you and go into that in detail on https://firstsigma.github.io/masks but I think the "average" reader (especially one who is still wearing cloth/surgical) is better served by a recommendation to upgrade to N95 first. I find that P100s are great for many situations, but they do have their downsides.
[Crossposted from https://firstsigma.substack.com/p/omicron with a few small updates to the estimates from the last couple days]
My thoughts on how Omicron affects Covid risk and what we should do about it. In particular, I wanted to address some common questions I've seen along the lines of "since it's less severe shouldn't I worry less?" and "is it so transmissible that everyone's going to get it, and if so is there any point in trying to avoid it?"
tl;dr: it's worse than Delta and not as bad as during the 2020 surges (since that was before vaccines). Your risk of getting infected and hospitalized has likely gone up by over 5x since before the surge... (read 2656 more words →)
I don't think it's the worst idea but I have a couple reasons I am actively avoiding getting Omicron this month:
Note that it says "the degree of uncertainty remaining is insufficient to render the market interesting" AND <5% or >95%.
This seems reasonable to me. Note that degree varies by market - an absolute probability by itself wouldn't be a good rule. If it was already very unlikely (e.g. "Will a nuclear bomb be detonated in NYC this year"), then for the degree of uncertainty to become uninteresting it has to become much more unlikely in a way that rules out most of the previous probability space.
I've thought about this type of case a decent amount, and I think a perfectly reasonable approach is to resove early when the uncertainty is almost entirely... (read more)