Kittens and altruism

I saw a kitten when I was coming out of the grocery store. She seemed friendly so I picked her up. I couldn't believe what I was touching, her skin was covered in dried mud and her spine was horribly protruding.

I looked around and didn't find a mother or any person for that matter. I took her to the sidewalk so cars won't hit her and left.

I got into my car, and as I was getting out of parking, I found her in the middle of the street. As I was getting out of the car a man also got out of his own car. We looked at each other, he murmured something and suggested I take the cat to an empty lot. I picked the kitten up, put her in my car, and drove away.

I couldn't stop thinking about how if the man wasn't there, or if the cat didn't block me, I would have left her to die. Social motives are surprisingly strong.

She better now.

UPDATE: She died 3 days later.

Gaming Metaculus

 On Jan 19 2021, I joined Metaculus and made my first predictions. I was prompted after successfully forecasting how long my brother will stand in a queue (my median was 55 minutes, he took 53), and then after going to the website, they had a bright mode that was easy on the eyes.

One of my first predictions was that the inauguration of Biden would be on the 20th of Jan. I looked up Wikipedia and in the last 20 inaugurations almost all were on that date, and the edge cases didn't seem to apply. I thought 95% was a good estimate.

The community forecast was also 95%, but before choosing it I saw it came with +50 and -150. That was too high of a loss so I played with the numbers for a while

A 99% confidence came with +55 and a massive -323. 

Going to 90% decreased my gains to +44, and reduced the potential loss to -70. 

I choose 90%

I realized that what I was doing was making decisions based on Karma, rather than what I thought about the world. I heard that before I thought, and then I remembered it was Goodhart's Law I was thinking about. I continued doing this for a few questions, I went to questions that were resolving soon and choose forecasts that provided good Karma. (less than -5 and more than +15).

I calculated that if I answer ~50 questions I would get 1000 points easily and get ranked. 

I thought that was a bad thing, mainly for two reasons.

1. Because of honesty/integrity stuff.

2. Because I liked forecasting as a concept and I wouldn't want one of the major hubs filled with blind-karma optimizers. 

I'm not sure if the existence of blind-karma optimizers would distort the forecasts, they might create too much noise or something, but I'm very unsure what the effects are.

I'm not sure what could be done, but if anyone can easily get many points by sliding a scale, it seems that something should be done.