basil.halperin
Sorry, I stand by my comment 110%.
If you already knew that belief in AGI soon was a very contrarian position (including amongst the most wealthy, smart, and influential people), I don’t think you should update at all on the fact that the market doesn’t expect AGI.
I want to maximally push back on views like this. The economic logic for the informational efficiency of markets has nothing to do with consensus or ‘non-contrarianness’. Markets are informationally efficient because of the incentive for those who are most informed to trade.
The argument here emphatically cannot be merely summarized as “AGI soon [is] a very contrarian position [and market prices are another indication of this]”.
^This is an extremely, extremely important point!
Market prices are not a democracy. The logic for the efficiency of markets is emphatically NOT ‘wisdom of the crowds’. It’s that the most knowledgeable traders have the most to gain from trading, and so do so, and determine the price. (I have a riff on this here)
Thanks for this—I think you put really nicely the interpretation that we also are pushing for.
If you don’t like the OpenAI example, consider the possibility that other non-public companies could develop AGI...!
The appendix 3 has a review of some related papers, FWIW!
(And: thanks!)
Pasting some of my replies to this from twitter FWIW:
That’s just not correct, unless I’m misunderstanding—
if you short rates, and next day the market decides you are right, then real rates spike and you make money. Simple as that
So I don’t follow your claim ¯\_(ツ)_/¯Sovereign debt markets are the some of the most well-functioning financial markets ever created by man—this is literal orders of magnitude off. This is just not tether
FWIW—eventually wrote up some more thoughts on this here.
Will subforum posts feature on the main RSS feed? Thanks!
^seconding this question 😊
One crude metric: the number of forecasters has gone up 25% in the last month, from n=284 to n=354
It would be interesting if it were possible to disambiguate:
1. Previous forecasters moved up their forecasts to shorter timelines
vs.
2. New forecasters, who have shorter timelines, offered forecasts for the question when they hadn’t forecasted previously
Both are informative, and in a real-money prediction market both are equally informative. But with a forecasting platform, this could “just” be a composition bias?
Cascading, systemic and GCRs typically aren’t priced into asset prices
I’m not sure that this is important to your arguments, but—do you have any evidence that this is actually the case?
For diaphragmatic breathing, where are you getting the 27.05% number from? I didn’t see it in the Hamasaki (2020) lit review you linked to.
Also, looking at that paper:
It seems like most of the RCTs are run on people with underlying conditions: asthma, cancer, etc. Of course this is of interest, but is not of general interest to generally healthy populations
In section 3.2.4 on RCTs involving healthy subjects, I only see studies on
The effect on motion sickness
Smokers
The effect on “forced vital capacity” when done in conjunction with upper body work
The effect on breathing in adolescent runners
But I don’t see any RCTs on the effect of diaphragmatic breathing in healthy populations on stress. Did I miss something? (Quite possible since I’m not sure where you’re getting the 27.05% number from.)
I like this writeup a lot, but I would say to anyone who’s actually reading this should ignore the advice to not go into academia.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably selected (!) to be someone who is atypical and has a decent shot at succeeding in academia. (See also: SSC on ‘reversing all advice you hear’.) i.e.: if you’re someone who’s taking the time out of your day to read this, you’re probably (probably!) similar to “Anita” here.
Agreed re: “mispricing = restatement that this is a contrarian position”—but to push back on your “lack of feedback” point:
If the market can’t price 30-year cashflows, it can’t price anything, since for any infinitely-lived asset (eg stocks!), most of the present-discounted value of future cash flows is far in the future.
See eg this Ralph Koijen thread and linked paper, “the first 10 years of dividends only make up ~20% of the value of the stock market. 80% is due to value of cash flows beyond 10 years”
(I wonder how big EMH proponents like Hanson and Yudkowsky explain the dissonance.)
Personally I agree with the economic forecasts and approximate timelines here, but I haven’t seen a way of reconciling the “accelerating growth” prediction with the efficient market hypothesis.
Low 30-year government bond rates in the US (and 50- or 100-year rates in some other countries!) imply the market expects low growth over this time horizon, not ever-accelerating economic growth rates.
If growth goes up and interest rates rise, these are massively overvalued. It’s possible, but, we’d have to tell some some more elaborate stories (AI-led growth is not broad-based? It’s all captured by one firm...? It FOOMs?) if we want to be consistent with EMH.
This smells like a composition effect. Have you checked that this is not just due to e.g. aging of the population; or driven by the rise in immigration?
This is great—thank you for doing this.
When you write it like that, it seems obvious :)
Thanks.
1. We would welcome engagement from you regarding our argument that stock prices are not useful for forecasting timelines (the sign is ambiguous and effect noisy).
2. You offer what is effectively a full general argument against market prices ever being swayed by anything—a bit more on this point here. Price changes do not need to be driven by volume! (cf the no-trade theorem, for the conceptual idea)
3. I’m not sure if this is exactly your point about prediction markets (or if you really want to talk about total capital, on which see again #2), but:
Sovereign debt markets are orders of magnitude larger than PredictIt or other political prediction markets. These are not markets where individual traders are capped to $600 max positions and shorting is limited (or whatever the precise regulations are)! Finding easy trades in these markets is …not easy.