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this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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So today I learned there are people who call themselves superforcasters®. Neat!
The superforecasters® have had a melding of the minds and determined that covid-19 was 75% likely to not be a lab leak. Nifty! This is useless to me!
Looking at the website of these people with good enough judgement to call themselves "Good Judgement", you can learn that 100% of superforecasters® agree that there will be less than 100 deaths from H5N1 this year. I don't know much about H5N1 but I guess that makes sense given that it's been around since 1996 and would need a mutation to be contagious among humans.
I found one of the superforecaster®-trainee discussion topics where they reveal some of the secrets to their (super)forecasting(®)-trainee instincts
Riveting!
Let's go next to find out how to give up our individuality and become a certified superforecaster® hive brain.
Fans of certain shonen anime may recognize this technique as Kodoku -- a deadly poison created by putting a bunch of insects in a jar until only one remains:
"But what's the catch Saturn"? I can hear you say. "Surely this is somehow a grift nerds find or a way to fleece money out of governments".
Nonono you've got the completely wrong idea. Good Judgement offers a 100$ Superforecasting Fundamentals course out of the goodness of their heart I'm sure! I mean after all if they spread Superforecasting to the world then their Hari-Seldon-Esque hivemind would lose it's competitive edge so they must not be profit motivated.
Anyway if you work for the UK they want to hear from you:
Maybe they have superforecasted the fall of the british empire.
And to end this, because I can never resist web design sneer.
Dear programmers: if you apply the CSS
word-break: break-all;
to the string "Privacy Policy" it may end up rendered as "Pr[newline]ivacy Policy" which unfortunately looks pretty unprofessional :(I understood this reference. I know it as Gu poison, which is listed in the wikipedia article you linked!
When I was a kid I read a vignette of a guy trying to scam people into thinking he was amazing at predicting things. He chose 1024 stockbrokers, picked one stock, and in 512 envelopes he said the stock would be up by the end of the month, and in the other 512 he said it would go down. You can see where this story is going, i.e. he would be left with one person thinking he predicted 10 things in a row correctly and was therefore a superforecaster. This vignette was great at illustrating to child me that predicting things correctly isn't necessarily some display of great intelligence or insight. Unfortunately what I didn't know is that it was setting me up for great disappointment when after that point and forevermore, I would see time and time again that people would fall for this shit so easily.
(For some reason when I try to think of where I read that vignette, vonnegut comes to mind. I doubt it was him.)
@swlabr @sailor_sega_saturn
"He chose 1024 stockbrokers, picked one stock, and in 512 envelopes he said the stock would be up by the end of the month, and in the other 512 he said it would go down."
1024 stamps?
This guy is clearly already made of money so why is he even bothering.
/s
Stocks and stamps, 2 tastes that have gone great together since Charles Ponzi.