It’s like the birthday problem, but goth-themed.

Why be condescending now?

You already fucked up the point you were making. By all means, insult people’s intelligence at the start of the conversation, before you fuck up. Doing it at the same time as fucking up looks bad… but insults after you fuck up looks even worse.

Similar: having characteristics in common.

Looking similar does mean that two things are similar. You could have tried to make your point in a variety of ways, but you chose the way that can be countered by simply understanding English.

0/10

Do you know the Secretary Problem?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

Your father’s been using computers for some number of years. It’s possible he’s been using computers for longer than he will continue using computers. From his perspective, the current edition of Windows is better than anything that’s come before it, so it’s the rational choice to stick with it until the end.

To get around this, you would basically need to set up a second machine with Zorin so that he can get some context before making a decision. That way, in the very realistic scenario where he decides it’s not for him, he hasn’t lost anything.

But China isn’t going to sell my data to Uncle Sam to help deport my family (who are legal citizens). So there’s that.

9th amendment.

It’s the best amendment, despite being, legally, the most useless.

I would argue that it was meant to cover the kind of situation where a private company is given government permission to gather surveillance data from the citizenry, in exchange for access to said data.

OK, let’s see the evidence for that assertion.

Using prediction markets to estimate the reproducibility of scientific research - PMC

There’s one.

But obviously it’s not a guarantee if you don’t know what you’re doing. We also have documentation on where these methods fall short, such as when it’s based on exponential growth, rare events, or something else that humans are bad at understanding. Infectious Disease Forecasting.

But again, good statisticians are prepared to address those things.

And you have no idea of the mechanisms that shape that market.

That’s even better. If I don’t understand the mechanisms shaping the market, I won’t be able to correctly identify predictive variables for my model. In that case, I would be better off trusting the prediction market.

Obviously it would be better if the person building the model understood the mechanisms… but that takes time and money. If you’re managing 30 models, that might not be worth it.

If the contract isn’t something that meets the criteria for an efficient market, then yeah, it’s not something that can be used to give reasonable probabilities.

But for something like, winner of the democratic presidential primary, or the proce of gold in a month… then it’s genuinely a better predictive model than what a statistician would be able to come up with.

It doesn’t provide anything beneficial to anyone but its owners.

For statistics purposes, it gives me something incredibly beneficial. Simply by knowing the price of a contract, I can know with decent accuracy how likely something is to happen.

If you’re not in the field, you wouldn’t necessarily appreciate how valuable that is.

Well, it’s the aggregated opinion of people who use the site. Kalshi doesn’t set the price; people making the bets set the price based on the odds others are willing to accept.

There’s a sampling bias for sure, but since the odds given for this bet are based on how much people are willing to pay for that bet, this gives a very good approximation for how people actually feel about something.

It actually ends up being more reliable than most opinion polls in that way.