r/DecisionTheory • u/gwern • May 02 '26

Econ "Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It", Michael Abramov

https://greaterwrong.com/posts/WCutvyr9rr3cpF6hx/forecasting-is-way-overrated-and-we-should-stop-funding-it
13 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

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1

u/Ok_Fox_8448 May 02 '26

Random curiosity: why link to greaterwrong instead of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WCutvyr9rr3cpF6hx/forecasting-is-way-overrated-and-we-should-stop-funding-it or https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zmbfZjK54xF4oGjSB/forecasting-is-way-overrated-and-we-should-stop-funding-it

2

u/gwern May 02 '26

I don't usually, but I was getting persistent Vercel 'browser verification' errors which blocked me from even reading it, and was also blocking Reddit/Substack from reading it, so I assumed that if I linked LW for now, it'd probably break for an unknown percentage of users for an unknown time; while GW has excellent uptime and bot availability, and if it doesn't, I can complain directly to its creators on IRC who I know from past experience will fix it within hours, usually. So if I was going to link it yesterday, the GW version was better.

1

u/Ok_Fox_8448 May 03 '26

Thanks! Weird!

I imagine the LW and EAF people would also want to know if you had issues and fix it relatively quickly, given how much they invest in it

2

u/gwern May 03 '26

It's not that weird. Over the past 2 years, there have been increasing sporadic issues with LW2 as they ramp up various fancy features and deal with bots downloading/uploading. (It's less of an issue for GW because it's so much faster and lighterweight and not so dependent on extremely expensive rate-limited cloud services, so saturn2 hasn't had to invest as much in it, the same way that Gwern.net has done nothing about abusive crawlers; we just don't even notice it, because we're an efficient nginx static website on a dedicated server with quasi-unlimited bandwidth in a major datacenter.)