Forecasting newsletter draft

ea/ForecastingNewsletter/May2020.md

@@ -185,12 +185,13 @@ The Center for Security and Emerging Technology is looking for forecasters to pr
   - How does including information on new developments affect my problem/issue?
   - What are the ways this situation could play out?
   - How do we get from here to there? and/or What should I be looking out for?
+
   > "We do not claim our assessments are infallible. Instead, we assert that we offer our most deeply and objectively based and carefully considered estimates."
 - [How to Measure Anything](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ybYBCK9D7MZCcdArB/how-to-measure-anything), a review. 
 - The World Meteorological organization, on their mandate to guarantee that [no one is surprised by a flood](https://public.wmo.int/en/our-mandate/water/no-one-is-surprised-by-a-flood). Browsing the webpage it seems that the organization is either a Key Organization Safeguarding the Vital Interests of the World or Just Another of the Many Bureaucracies Already in Existence, but it's unclear how to differentiate between the two.
 - [95%-ile isn't that good](https://danluu.com/p95-skill/): "Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do."
 - [The Backwards Arrow of Time of the Coherently Bayesian Statistical Mechanic](https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0410063): Identifying thermodinamic entropy with the Bayesian uncertainty of an ideal observer leads to a contradiction, because as the observer observes more about the system, they update on this information, which reduces uncertainty, and thus entropy. 
-	+ This might be interesting to students in the tradition of E.T. Jaynes: for example, the paper directly conflicts with this LessWrong post: [The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QkX2bAkwG2EpGvNug/the-second-law-of-thermodynamics-and-engines-of-cognition), part of *Rationality, From AI to Zombies*. The way out might be to postulate that actually, the Bayesian updating process itself would increase entropy, in the form of e.g., the work needed to update bits on a computer. Any applications to Christian lore are left as an excercise for the reader. Otherwise, seeing two bright people being cogently convinced of different perspectives does something funny to my probabilities: it pushes them towards 50%, but also increases the expected time I'd have to spend on the topic to move them away from 50%.
+  - This might be interesting to students in the tradition of E.T. Jaynes: for example, the paper directly conflicts with this LessWrong post: [The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QkX2bAkwG2EpGvNug/the-second-law-of-thermodynamics-and-engines-of-cognition), part of *Rationality, From AI to Zombies*. The way out might be to postulate that actually, the Bayesian updating process itself would increase entropy, in the form of e.g., the work needed to update bits on a computer. Any applications to Christian lore are left as an excercise for the reader. Otherwise, seeing two bright people being cogently convinced of different perspectives does something funny to my probabilities: it pushes them towards 50%, but also increases the expected time I'd have to spend on the topic to move them away from 50%.
 - [Behavioral Problems of Adhering to a Decision Policy](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7a79/28d5f133e4a274dcaec4d0a207daecde8068.pdf)
 > Our judges in this study were eight individuals, carefully selected for their expertise as
 handicappers. Each judge was presented with a list of 88 variables culled from the past performance charts. He was asked to indicate which five variables out of the 88 he would wish to use when handicapping a race, if all he could have was five variables. He was then asked to indicate which 10, which 20, and which 40 he would use if 10, 20, or 40 were available to him.  
@@ -199,12 +200,11 @@ handicappers. Each judge was presented with a list of 88 variables culled from t
 
 The study contains other nuggets, such as:
 
-    - An experiment on trying to predict the outcome of a given equation. When the feedback has a margin of error, this confuses respondents. 
-    - "However, the results indicated that subjects often chose one gamble, yet stated a higher selling price for the other gamble"
-    - "We figured that a comparison between two students along the same dimension should be easier, cognitively, than a 13 comparison between different dimensions, and this ease of use should lead to greater reliance on the common dimension. The data strongly confirmed this hypothesis. Dimensions were weighted more heavily when common than when they were unique attributes. Interrogation of the subjects after the experiment indicated that most did not wish to change their policies by giving more weight to common dimensions and they were unaware that they had done so."
-    - "The message in these experiments is that the amalgamation of different types of information and different types of values into an overall judgment is a difficult cognitive process. In our attempts to ease the strain of processing information, we often resort to judgmental strategies that do an injustice to the underlying values and policies that we’re trying implement."
-    - "A major problem that a decision maker faces in his attempt to be faithful to his policy is the fact that his insight into his own behavior may be inaccurate. He may not be aware of the fact that he is employing a different policy than he thinks he’s using. This problem is illustrated by a study that Dan Fleissner, Scott Bauman, and I did, in which 13 stockbrokers and five graduate students served as subjects. Each subject evaluated the potential capital appreciation of 64 securities. [...] A mathematical model was then constructed to predict each subject's judgments. One output from the model was an index of the relative importance of each of the eight information items in determining each subject’s judgments [...] Examination
-of Table 4 shows that the broker’s perceived weights did not relate closely to the weights derived from their actual judgments. 
+  - An experiment on trying to predict the outcome of a given equation. When the feedback has a margin of error, this confuses respondents. 
+  - "However, the results indicated that subjects often chose one gamble, yet stated a higher selling price for the other gamble"
+  - "We figured that a comparison between two students along the same dimension should be easier, cognitively, than a 13 comparison between different dimensions, and this ease of use should lead to greater reliance on the common dimension. The data strongly confirmed this hypothesis. Dimensions were weighted more heavily when common than when they were unique attributes. Interrogation of the subjects after the experiment indicated that most did not wish to change their policies by giving more weight to common dimensions and they were unaware that they had done so."
+  - "The message in these experiments is that the amalgamation of different types of information and different types of values into an overall judgment is a difficult cognitive process. In our attempts to ease the strain of processing information, we often resort to judgmental strategies that do an injustice to the underlying values and policies that we’re trying implement."
+  - "A major problem that a decision maker faces in his attempt to be faithful to his policy is the fact that his insight into his own behavior may be inaccurate. He may not be aware of the fact that he is employing a different policy than he thinks he’s using. This problem is illustrated by a study that Dan Fleissner, Scott Bauman, and I did, in which 13 stockbrokers and five graduate students served as subjects. Each subject evaluated the potential capital appreciation of 64 securities. [...] A mathematical model was then constructed to predict each subject's judgments. One output from the model was an index of the relative importance of each of the eight information items in determining each subject’s judgments [...] Examination of Table 4 shows that the broker’s perceived weights did not relate closely to the weights derived from their actual judgments. 
 
 As remedies they suggest to create a model by elliciting the expert, either by having the expert make a large number of judgements and distillating a model, or by asking the expert what they think the most important factors are. A third alternative suggested is computer assistance, so that the experiment participants become aware of which factors influence their judgment. 
 - [Immanuel Kant, on Betting](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/07/kant_on_betting.html)