LW - Monthly Roundup #20: July 2024 by Zvi

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Monthly Roundup #20: July 2024, published by Zvi on July 24, 2024 on LessWrong.
It is monthly roundup time.
I invite readers who want to hang out and get lunch in NYC later this week to come on Thursday at Bhatti Indian Grill (27th and Lexington) at noon.
I plan to cover the UBI study in its own post soon.
I cover Nate Silver's evisceration of the 538 presidential election model, because we cover probabilistic modeling and prediction markets here, but excluding any AI discussions I will continue to do my best to stay out of the actual politics.
Bad News
Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin files comment suggesting SpaceX Starship launches be capped due to 'impact on local environment.' This is a rather shameful thing for them to be doing, and not for the first time.
Alexey Guzey reverses course, realizes at 26 that he was a naive idiot at 20 and finds everything he wrote cringe and everything he did incompetent and Obama was too young. Except, no? None of that? Young Alexey did indeed, as he notes, successfully fund a bunch of science and inspire good thoughts and he stands by most of his work.
Alas, now he is insufficiently confident to keep doing it and is in his words 'terrified of old people.' I think Alexey's success came exactly because he saw people acting stupid and crazy and systems not working and did not then think 'oh these old people must have their reasons,' he instead said that's stupid and crazy. Or he didn't even notice that things were so stupid and crazy and tried to just… do stuff.
When I look back on the things I did when I was young and foolish and did not know any better, yeah, some huge mistakes, but also tons that would never have worked if I had known better.
Also, frankly, Alexey is failing to understand (as he is still only 26) how much cognitive and physical decline hits you, and how early. Your experience and wisdom and increased efficiency is fighting your decreasing clock speed and endurance and physical strength and an increasing set of problems. I could not, back then, have done what I am doing now. But I also could not, now, do what I did then, even if I lacked my current responsibilities.
For example, by the end of the first day of a Magic tournament I am now completely wiped.
Google short urls are going to stop working. Patrick McKenzie suggests prediction markets on whether various Google services will survive. I'd do it if I was less lazy.
Silver Bullet
This is moot in some ways now that Biden has dropped out, but being wrong on the internet is always relevant when it impacts our epistemics and future models.
Nate Silver, who now writes Silver Bulletin and runs what used to be the old actually good 538 model, eviscerates the new 538 election model. The 'new 538' model had Biden projected to do better in Wisconsin and Ohio than either the fundamentals or his polls, which makes zero sense. It places very little weight on polls, which makes no sense. It has moved towards Biden recently, which makes even less sense.
Texas is their third most likely tipping point state, it happens 9.8% of the time, wait what?
At best, Kelsey Piper's description here is accurate.
Kelsey Piper: Nate Silver is slightly too polite to say it but my takeaway from his thoughtful post is that the 538 model is not usefully distinguishable from a rock with "incumbents win reelection more often than not" painted on it.
Gil: worse, I think Elliott's modelling approach is probably something like max_(dem_chance) [incumbency advantage, polls, various other approaches].
Elliott's model in 2020 was more bullish on Biden's chances than Nate and in that case Trump was the incumbent and down in the polls.
Nate Silver (on Twitter): Sure, the Titanic might seem like it's capsizing, but what you don't understand is that the White Star Line has an extremely good track re...