The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Is there a history of how the cult of prediction markets spread to Silicon Valley? Its an old idea but since the 1990s is especially popular with Libertarians and hard neoliberals like Robin Hanson. When did it get on LessWrong? By 2013 or so, rationalists were telling strangers at social events that the only way to know if a healthcare system worked was to bet on it, and not just, you know, risk your life and health on it.
Well I think the history is just how LW started, with Hanson’s blog and LW being intertwined. They are largely the same space. See also how Hanson spawned the great filter idea.
I think a major influence was “Wisdom of the Crowds” which was discussed in the SF / Berkeley tech community quite a bit back then. At some point that got combined with gambling. There’s an old reference here dated 2007: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/how_and_when_tohtml
There was the Cathedral and Bazaar stuff too, although that was less about markets and more about collective wisdom. Early FOSS culture was anticapitalist so the Libertarians had to frame things carefully.
CFAR was also in to prediction markets by 2014. https://rationality.org/resources/updates/2014/in-the-game-of-markets-you-win-or-you-lie
Cyberlibertarianism covers it relatively well.
Robin Hanson seems like the incredibly obvious primary suspect, you mean where he got the idea in the first place?
RW also says 2013 was when he first published as papers all his prediction market stuff.
The futarchy paper is funny because Hanson had the idea in 2000 but took 13 years to publish it. That is a good sign that he kept getting a desk reject or “revise and resubmit.” But were people reading his blog, a mix of Libertarian fringe writing, or specifically something by Yudkowsky or SlateScott?
Phil Tetlock started his career and the Expert Political Judgement project at the University of California Berkeley although he moved to PA in 1995 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock
Once upon a time it would take just one piece of art and a hashtag to completely derail the meaning of this
I am sure Robin Hanson knows about Japanese hermaphrodites because he hates women and hangs out with bad crowds online. He is just a bit more discreet than Yud.
I can’t find much about prediction markets on SlatStarCodex except a 2016 review of Superforecasters which takes the view that :
So maybe it was Hanson > Yud > Rationalist / EA culture, but Hanson likes to take credit for ideas much older than him. And we know the Rats rely on pop science and podcasts much more than research literature.