Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
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20 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“As thought experiments, they can be helpful and fine, but I think if you ignore the 1 percent of edge cases .”
02 / evaluation
“I think the Math Olympiad, in part because maybe the answers are somewhere latent in the training data, but even if they’re not, if you try to solve, what’s a Lucas critique?”
03 / evaluation
“I think if you hyper-optimize for every parameter in your day-to-day life, then you probably wind up being fairly miserable.”
04 / evaluation
“The example I think I use in the book is Ezekiel Emanuel, telling people you shouldn’t go to restaurants because we still have some COVIDs like now, in 2022, 2023, right?”
05 / evaluation
“Economics is amazing in the sense that it predicts human behavior, I think, fairly well when you have repeated trials and people that have good feedback and incentive to be optimal.”
06 / evaluation
“I think there is not a substitute for how it correlates to real-world scenarios, because it’s so contextual and semantic.”
07 / evaluation
“I worry, with the Math Olympiad stuff — there’s a little bit of teaching to the test where, because you set this as the goal that a large language model should have, that therefore there’s a lot of prestige when you meet that goal, potentially —”
08 / evaluation
“Everyone assumed that because he has such prestigious coattails, that he’s hanging out with Anna Wintour and hanging out with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and he has his name up on a basketball arena in Miami, and he’s getting his praises sung by everybody in Sequoia Capital, and things like that.”
09 / evaluation
“” Now, they don’t even try to advertise it as a skill game anymore, which in some ways is a mistake because the appeal to the male ego is a huge way to get new customers for sports betting and things like that.”
10 / evaluation
“Also, the incentives in the NBA — and if you try to model out what the true discount rate is for sports general managers, they have some absurdly high discount rate, like 30 percent or something like that, or 50 percent, because their jobs last for five years on average.”
11 / evaluation
“It’s contextual because I think we’ve gotten to the point now where offensive rebounding has gotten underrated, actually.”
12 / evaluation
“When you’re playing a poker tournament, everything is contingent because the tournament could last five more days or five more minutes.”
13 / evaluation
“You might get fired if someone finds out, but the retail books are like, “Yes, we can put bets up that a knowledgeable person could make money on because we won’t let the knowledgeable people bet in the first place.”
14 / evaluation
“A lot of people — like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, for example — they had childhood trauma but not so traumatic, and they had enough privilege in different ways that they were able to still have people take their phone calls and things like that. But it’s often people where something, I think, went a little bit haywire, and they’re not necessarily strictly rational in some sense.”
15 / evaluation
“Yes, uniquely in basketball, because it’s five players in a lineup at any given time, and a good player can control half the offense or more, literally — a Luka-type player or a Steph Curry-type player.”
16 / evaluation
“Tiger Stadium is a park conducive to low batting averages to begin with, a little high home run totals. It’s not obvious to me that it was the best move, but it is interesting that, all of a sudden, baseball teams and football teams become, in general, more strategically correct when they have more on the line.”
17 / evaluation
“When underdogs win, they tend to win narrowly, and if Clinton wins some of the races she should have won or should have lost — because superdelegates turn a narrow Bernie win by a field goal into, “Oh, after further review, we’re going to have an overtime quarter.”
18 / evaluation
“In the very high-end restaurants of New York, it’s like so competitive that I think your rule about, order the weirdest thing on the menu, I think there are parts of New York where that probably isn’t true, because it’s so hyper competitive that the menu couldn’t afford to lead people astray.”
19 / evaluation
“Basketball is less noisy, I will grant you, but in general, I think the Spurs are fairly analytics friendly, and the Rockets and the Warriors.”
20 / evaluation
“It’s really hard to improve your lot in New York, at least at the neighborhood level. But I don’t know, it’s hard to find good hole-in-the-wall places to eat in the — although there’s some ramen shops that are getting better.”