🏅 Top traders

Thanks to everyone for participating and submitting your statements! Honestly, I think basically all of you would make for good judges.

I was impressed by @cash's and @jacksonpolack's statements in particular and @MarcusAbramovitch's work as a charity evaluator (ie judge) for Manifund.

I'll be reaching out to you soon regarding the next steps.

@SG The tentative plan is to have a panel of judges for one of the streamed Debatecon debates (probably one featuring Destiny) to test out the judging format before we host our own irl debate (which will probably happen in mid November or December).

@SG A quick glance at @jacksonpolack portfolio makes it immediately clear he is a big Destiny fan with thousands invested in memestiny stocks and questions he created about "will I watch Destiny video today" and similar. Strange choice to have judge a Destiny debate...

@BTE I will admit to doing no further diligence than reading the statements posted here...

My stock investments are exclusively 'buy low, sell high' lol. I came here from the rationalist community, not the Destiny one. I made the destiny markets because I thought people (destiny fans) would bet on them.

I do think Destiny is an intelligent and capable person, and have watched some of his content. I don't expect that to bias my judgement though. I have many object-level disagreements with him. There are many public intellectuals/figures I've been influenced much more by.

Most of all I just enjoy the process of evaluating individual claims and arguments and how they fit together!

Funnily enough, Destiny makes a big deal about how he cares more about people taking away "having a good and independent thought process" from him than any individual policy views.

@BTE Thanks for making my case

@Akzzz123 You have ignored everything I have said and are just trolling. But it doesn’t matter because neutrality is not necessary to be a good judge. In fact, anyone who is truly unbiased is probably also completely uninformed and perhaps not ideal to detect the relative quality of one argument from another. But you know that because you have made your opinions very clear.

Surprised to see @firstuserhere in the top 3 for so long. I submitted myself to act as a Lizardman constant as I have spoken many times about being as politically ignorant as one can be. But then again, maybe shouldn't be that surprising.

I feel like maybe I should be more specifically advertising what I have to offer. Like before I was trying to write a comment about how I fit the requirement, but 1) describing my track record that way is kind of inconvenient, and 2) it's not as optimized for informativeness as it could be. Instead, here's some commitments I offer and limitations I have; up to you whether you buy that I can follow them, as well as whether these are attractive to you.

1. I have never really judged a political debate before, and I don't really follow standardized debates, so I don't know much about what it involves. I imagine that it requires similar skills to facilitating and moderating debates to be more productive (e.g. paying attention to what people are saying and trying to say, which pieces are missing, being fair to both sides, caring about valid argument, etc.), and I can be good at that when I am trying to do it. (That said, you can probably also find cases where I take on a role like that but don't try to do it very well.)

2. Since I don't know much about judging debates, I am open to receiving a wide variety of instructions about how to judge the debate. If I disagree with the instructions, I may decline to moderate and ask you to pick someone else, or might give out some parallel non-official opinion that doesn't follow the instructions, but at the very least if I participate as a judge I'll follow the instructions for my official judgement whether I agree with them or not.

3. I think as a judge I'm just supposed to focus on the validity of what the participants are arguing, rather than doing my own research to figure out who is actually right? But if doing my own research is encouraged, then I might also do that; can't promise anything though.

4. I want to say that I usually try to be "nonconformist but accountable"? I am willing to take opinions that strongly contradict the norm, but I will generally be able to write in-depth explanations of why, and I will generally be very interested in discussing whether I should change my mind. The main limitation I've noticed with this strategy is that typically for weird obscure questions, there won't be interested in-depth-informed people around to correct my opinions, but I hope that problem would disappear in debates as then hopefully onlookers, other judges, participants, and whoever else would be interested in changing my opinion.

5. I am a strong believer in Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization. I am interested in gears, models, and in-depth explanations, rather than quick patches, heuristics and status-based arguments. I prefer "universally observable evidence", e.g. quantitative datasets with standardized methods, surveyable experiences, publicly observed history, to "individual evidence", e.g. decontextualized numbers, anecdotes, indescribable experiences, uncertain history. However I also prefer "informative evidence", e.g. stories, massive-dimensional quantitative data, etc., rather than "sparse evidence", e.g. brief vibes, low-dimensional quantitative data.

6. I am biased in favor of Bayesian decision theory, weird and/or consequential ideas, and disagreeing. I am biased against people who don't want to explain what they're doing.

7. I am an autistic introvert (bordering on schizoid) who started out anti-SJ anti-religion pro-technology, pro-biodeterminism early in my life. Through getting involved in rationalism I got better epistemics, and through getting involved in trans stuff, I got better at psychology research, which I think also lead to way better epistemics, but also lead to me becoming anti-anti-SJ, anti-anti-religion, anti-pro-technology, and anti-pro-biodeterminism. I can't exactly say that I am pro-SJ, pro-religion, anti-technology, anti-biodeterminism, because I keep a lot of the information I had from these things, just reframed in a way that makes me reinterpret various things. I don't expect the above explanation to make much sense to anyone but me, but I think an appropriate takeaway is "tailcalled is a weirdo eccentric who doesn't know standard stuff but does know a lot of nonstandard stuff" is appropriate.

My political life started one morning in October 2000 when I was detained by Wilmette police for borrowing Bush/Gore signs out of yards to get extra credit in AP Poly Sci. I was only 17 in 2000 so couldn't vote yet, but I went on to earn a BA in Political Science and was President of the College Republicans. My first job out of college was interning for Speaker of the House Denny Hastert. My first vote for a Democrat was in 2012 for Obama because (1) he had earned it in his first four years considering what he was handed in 2008 and (2) Mitt Romney made his fortune off of other people's suffering and 401k trickery and is the true source of the GOPs tip into moral turpitude. I think you all know by now how I feel about Trump and the MAGAts. I am a true independent, approaching each issue or candidate with my own first principles, and as such will be the ideal candidate to judge a political debate.

@BTE

Multiple policies followed, statements made by the Trump administration which were ridiculed back then now seem right in hindsight and some even being followed by the Democrats

• European independence from Russian gas

• DHS under Biden administration has restarted constructions on the wall on the Mexican border

• Abraham accords: getting the Saudis and Israelis towards a peace deal

• Sars2 came from the lab in Wuhan

• Decoupling from China

• Distinction of being the first President after a long time to start no new forever wars

Thus, BTE's self-professed negative feelings for Trump should be disqualifying for judging such a debate especially when one factors in a history of impulsive decisions.

@Akzzz123 Why did you not just ask me my opinions about the issues instead of assuming them? I know you don’t like me but I would appreciate being able to have my own opinions.

I think we should be building a gas pipeline to Europe through Canada.

I never understood why anyone opposes the border wall, but you will note that while running for president in 2008 Obama supported the wall too.

I am highly skeptical of MBS and find him to be an untrustworthy actor.

I think the only possible source of COVID is a lab.

I think we should ban TikTok and any other Chinese company that competes with US companies that are banned in China.

Also, which forever war did Obama start? I can’t recall one.

@Akzzz123 You need to learn to get over things that don’t go your way. Holding a grudge and attacking those you perceive to have wronged you is probably satisfying or whatever but you look no better than Matt Gaetz. I will concede to being impulsive, but I am not intransigent or unwilling to admit when I was wrong and take ownership by making it good. Check out my managram tab for evidence to support this claim.

@BTE I am not saying you are disagreeing with those points. I am saying that your irrational dislike for Trump (despite Trump administration's policies being better than average) coupled with a history of impulsive decisions should be disqualifying for judging a political debate.

Regarding Obama's war:

https://www.cato.org/commentary/obama-administration-wrecked-libya-generation

@Akzzz123 There is nothing irrational about hating Trump. The man is not his policies, obviously. Character is as big a factor if not more than policy in our current highly partisan and predictable environment. I just explained my position on the policies you raised and I will go further to say Trump may have been right about some of those but he was tactically pathetic. For example , tariffs are paid by American importers not Chinese exporters so they may help when you have domestic production of the same goods but in the case of China we largely do not so it’s Americans who lose. I could go on but I have wasted enough time on this already.

@BTE I am not sure what point you are trying to make but this is verbatim from your managram.

you're annoyingly hyperpartisan bro tone it down

I cannot stop you from taking my points personally but I am only voicing my opinion because of what I think would be right for this event.

@Akzzz123 @JonathanRay i believe I responded to this. I can’t help the fact that people draw conclusions without knowing me but typically once they do they don’t continue to mischaracterize me.

I think they have two excellent choices worth locking in immediately with Marcus and Cash volunteering. They already trust Marcus to judge Manifund and he's the top trader on the site, and Cash's resume seems like the ideal debate judge made in a lab. I think the rest of us would do a great job but my mana is on these two.

@Joshua Can’t have two judges dude. Need a tie breaker. I just realized I haven’t written by statement in support of myself yet…

@Joshua Who is cash? Are they money?

Will the judges be allowed to talk with each other/with advisors/with bettors?

My biggest epistemic weakness for this sort of thing might be that I might get an eccentric idea that I can't correct myself and nobody cares enough about to discuss and help me work out. This problem would be reduced if there are motivated people who I'm allowed to bounce off ideas with.

I'd be very surprised if judges weren't allowed to discuss things with each other

Yeah I'm here for the fun of the discord watch party

Political beliefs: I've got things that seem leftish (e.g. concerned about climate change, inequality, trans rights, feminism) and rightish (e.g. concerned about stagnation due to climate change, ignorance of people being superior/inferior, trans politics overreach, feminist overreach). Kind of hard to summarize my views into a coherent picture.

I try to seek an effective tradeoff between being quick to change my mind with being critical of sources and rationales. I have changed my mind about major positions, e.g. behavior genetics/differential psychology, signalling models, gender politics, etc.

Realistically I might not be a great option because often with political debates I end up feeling like people don't go enough in depth with explaining their models and interrogating their sources of information and so on. The best-case scenario would be if I go do novel research to figure out more about the validity of their cited information but more realistically I'm probably just gonna go " 🤨 seems overconfident" a lot.

I've read some of tailcalled's stuff and think they would be a great judge!