Numerai – A hedge fund built by a global community of anonymous data scientists

It doesn't make it "more predictable". You're simple achieving better fit to the sample data distribution.

I guess another way of saying it is that your mess is starting to look more like their mess.

Anything that deals with the future is inherently non-predictable. Using chaos theory as a framework, we say it is unpredictable because we are unable (and will always be unable) to model the currently system completely. There will always be data that was not captured hiding between the data that was captured. Follow the arrow-of-time far enough out into the future and that non-captured data will manifest itself in the captured data, thereby (usually) creating a deviation from the modeled future.

To get around this we use statistics and probability. We rely on the law of large numbers and regression to the mean. In other words, we hope that the future won't get too weird and will be similar enough to the past, within some confidence interval.

So, we're not really predicting a specific outcome, we're predicting that the outcome will be some point within some confidence interval.

The reason we can get better at this, is as we capture more data we can better guess the inputs and assumptions we use to create the model. We throw out stuff that didn't happen to be relevant. We discover stuff that we should have considered relevant. If we're lucky the model closely follows the physical laws of our reality and we can apply the frameworks so arduously worked out by chemists, physicists, biologists, etc. If we're not so lucky we're dealing with sentiment, conjecture, or any of the other human inputs of the financial markets, and we are forced to make up formulas that work until they fail spectacularly.

>to push the website live __ The website has been live since like December 2015. There's a new tournament weekly. (I think it used to be every second week)... New tournament, new data -- always encrypted. Just look at the leaderboard; look at some of the participants' submission history

>any serious data scientist __ - I mean, any human - data scientist or not - would see at least that the website wasn't just pushed live; or at least have noticed the film is from like August... ^are you a serious data scientist? If you are (which I assume you are - just also an eager beaver to download the datasets without learning about the company sufficiently) -- then you'd do well to join the tournament and have a real go before you [attempt] to knock it as you have here -- and then come back and give some real feedback -- I'm sure everyone would appreciate to hear the 'after' report from you -- since you're so kind as already to dish out benefits of doubt :) Looking forward to catching you above controlling capital!

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Avoid speculating on such things when you clearly have no background in them. You will accomplish nothing but spreading misinformation.

http://www.investmentreview.com/files/2010/07/The-value-of-l...

https://fp7.portals.mbs.ac.uk/Portals/59/docs/Finger,%20Mark...

http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/pdfiles/papers/liquidit...

https://www.macquarie.com.au/dafiles/Internet/mgl/au/mfg/mim...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_crisis

The stock market is absolutely connected to "real value" (which doesn't make sense as a concept in the way you're trying to use it). Besides allowing companies to raise capital for future endeavors, it also allows the market to communicate price information, which is critical for reducing the risk associated with a given transaction.

> at best any benefits just benefit rich investors buying stocks.

It benefits everyone; investors risk their capital by selling it to companies in exchange for partial ownership, which allows the company to grow, and if the investment pays off the person who risked their money is rewarded. Without the stock market, companies would have to get loans for growth, which is risky and too expensive to be practical.

> It certainly doesn't increase production.

Yes, it very much does, for the reasons I outlined above. This is like Econ 101; why are you commenting so strongly when you clearly do not have any background here?

> but instead drained away doing this garbage.

A small efficiency increase expressed over 100 trillion dollars of trades every year is a huge productivity increase for society.

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No. First off, "reward" is not just about the money[0]. The job presented on this site, on the other hand, due to the encryption, is motivated purely and entirely by monetary reward. Everything else is shielded.

In fact I'd say this job is quite uniquely, extremely, only about the money. Even when compared to other kinds sweet/lucrative, perhaps "stupid lucky" jobs you may find, that may require 60 hours mindlessly pushing papers, yet paid extremely well. I'd be hard-pressed to come up with any hypothetical kind of job could be more sharply, singularly focussed on the "do extremely-intelligent-monkey-dance, receive ample bio-survival-tickets" to the exclusion of any other meaning or fulfilment than this Encrypted Machine Lottery/Learning/Sudoku.

Second, I could be wrong (or too optimistic) but I'd hope that most "very intelligent" people demand more nourishing reward than just money to regularly put in more than 40h/wk. You can do this for research and advancement of science, or maybe because one considers the work itself a net positive to society, or maybe you chose to sacrifice those hours of your life to support loved ones, maybe there's some deep personal reward in it, or maybe it's temporary and you're saving for something rewarding. But to pretend just money is enough to waste your life on, hey it's a choice, but I'm going to have to see you turn in your "very intelligent"-card.

On the other hand, there will be exceptions. Some people don't care, just want to maximize $$$ for the least amount of effort/hours of one's life, regardless of side-effects. This website does not fill a niche for these people. If you are extremely intelligent, just want money and don't care about moral aspects, there's always been plenty "business opportunities" to fulfil these particular needs.

Finally, if one would argue, but this job isn't quite explicitly "badwrong" like those others. I'd suggest to think it through: On the one hand, a (possibly) well-paying job that is designed from the bottom up to have no way of determining whether it has a net positive or negative external effect besides the money it pays you. On the other hand, literally anything else you could do with your time.

I can see people trying this for a short time, as a funny puzzle, at most.

[0] I don't mean this one, but because I still think it's funny, I'll point out the way-too-easy retort here: this says something (not terribly good) about you. (j/k)