I made a poll of statements from the manifold comment section to try and understand our specific disagreements. Feel free to add your own. Takes about 2 minutes to fill in,

https://viewpoints.xyz/polls/ai-forecasting 

I read @TracingWoodgrains piece on Nonlinear and have further updated that the original post by @Ben Pace was likely an error. 

I have bet accordingly here. 

I am really annoyed by the Twitter thread about this paper. I doubt it will hold up and it's been seen 450k times. Hendryks had ample opportunity after initial skepticism to remove it, but chose not to. I expect this to have reputational costs to him and to AI safety in general. If people think he (and by association some of us) are charlatan's for saying one thing and doing anohter in terms of being careful with the truth, I will have some sympathy with their position.

This market is now both very liquid by manifold standards and confident that there are flaws in the paper. 

https://manifold.markets/NathanpmYoung/will-there-be-substantive-issues-wi?r=TmF0aGFucG1Zb3VuZw (I thought manifold embed worked?)

I think the post moved me in your direction, so I think it was fine. 

Communication question. 

How do I talk about low probability events in a sensical way? 

eg "RFK Jr is very unlikely to win the presidency (0.001%)" This statement is ambiguous. Does it mean he's almost certain not to win or that the statement is almost certainly not true?

I know this sounds wonkish, but it's a question I come to quite often when writing. I like to use words but also include numbers in brackets or footnotes. But if there are several forecasts in one sentence with different directions it can be hard to understand. 

"Kamala is a slight favourite in the election (54%), but some things are clearer. She'll probably win Virginia (83%) and probably loses North Carolina (43%)" 

Something about the North Carolina subclause rubs me the wrong way. It requires several cycles to think "does the 43% mean the win or the loss". Options:
 

• As is 
• "probably loses North Carolina (43% win chance)" - this takes up quite a lot of space while reading. I don't like things that break the flow 

As for voids, they can create weak points; I think they were the reason the cybertruck hitch broke off in this test.

Though as I understand it that test was after a load of other tests. Perhaps relevant. 

What do you think P(doom from corporations) is. I've never heard much worry about current non-AI corps?

Sure, but still experts could not agree that AI is quite risky, and they do. This is important evidence in favour, especially to the extent they aren't your ingroup.

I'm not saying people should consider it a top argument, but I'm surprised how it falls on the ranking.

I made that market. Some thoughts

1.Seems kind of inaccurate to not put in Matt's tweet particularly if you're gonna call it "objective sounding".

 

Matt himself calls says "seriously but not literally". So he agrees with you, I think. 

2.Regarding fees on conditional markets, I don't know.

3.

all but a very few markets are pure popularity contests, dominated by those who don't mind locking up their mana for a month for a guaranteed 1% loss.

I don't know that this is as big a problem as it seems. A popularity contest where it costs something to vote is a better kind than we usually see. Overall I agree that conditional markets aren't to be taken too seriously. But I think the tone of this is probably too negative to this audience. This one went fine.

4.

Out of epistemic cooperativeness as well as annoyance, I spent small amounts of mana on the markets where it was cheap to reset implausible odds closer to Harris' overall odds of victory.

Thanks. I did the same. Overall I thought the markets seemed to say pretty sensible things.