Yeah I think he was satirizing people like Kamil Galeev predicting the imminent breakup of Russia, or predictions that Russia's economy or army were about to suffer a sharp collapse.
I am not sure he believes it, but lots of people around him will believe Bizarre Russian propaganda about the rise of the Nazis and secret Polish plots to invade Ukraine. He has a bad information diet and is biased by the fact he was part of secret plot to invade Ukraine.
Yeah well I'm sure Alfred Jodl had some droll remarks about how amusingly the Polish peasants twitched when the Stukas strafed them in September 1939. We'll see if he's just as witty when the rope goes around his neck at wherever this generation's Nuremberg turns out to be.
I assumed it was just wishful thinking. Thus the part about how the UK will join the EU(to stick it to the Brexiters) and then the EU will collapse.(since he doesn't like them either)
This is a scammer/bot pretending to be the blog by starting a new account with the blog name, DO NOT give it any personal information. Hopefully Scott (who comments a 'Scott Alexander' with a tick and a pen-nib symbol indicating the writer of the blog) deletes it soon.
In "My 2020 Calibration", the graph is wrong. Your x-axis has 95 inserted between 90 and 100, but the spacing for these gaps of 5 is the same as the spacing for gaps of 10 elsewhere in the graph, making the axis abruptly nonlinear.. Your black line going "straight" from (50, 50) to (100, 100) therefore does not pass through (60, 60) or (70, 70) etc.; in order to do that, it would need to bend sharply at (90, 90) when the x-axis suddenly stretches out.
Also, in the text above the graph, you said "Of my 50%..." over and over, instead of changing the number.
Medvedev seems to be making a bid for the role of the court jester, which was long held by a certain Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who died last year. He'd been decently popular due to his absurd antics (and ultra-nationalist rhetoric), one of the more notable ones was "predicting" in 2002 that elite Iraqi soldiers would rip Bush's army to shreds.
I always found political prediction markets interesting. Suppose you were a generic Republican. Why not ask yourself how much you will need to be ambivalent about Dems winning the next election and put money on them? Either way, you seem to win.
Assuming you manage to correctly calibrate your ambivalence point, won't you always "break even" with this approach? That is: either you're disappointed by the election result but happy with your money or disappointed with your money but happy with the election result.
I think your expected value is the same whether you go for this approach or not, but I could very easily be mistaken. I certainly find it attractive on a gut level...
"Stock" status of 0%-100% could work if you conceptualize each person as having good and bad status points. If Elon Musk was sitting at 50% pre-Tesla, I could imagine him post-Tesla with 10x as many good points and 1/2 as many bad points, which by my math would put him at 95%. Someone with no status quanta either way would be undefined, which seems reasonable.
But once Elon is at 95%, if you think he's going to become even more successful (e.g. become President as Medvedev suggested), are you able to make any money betting on that? If not, nobody will want those stocks.
Still doesn't work unless the person in question agrees to honor the results, but it could be interesting. I don't see why public figures wouldn't want to sell at least a few hours of their time to the highest bidder, provided it's something convenient like a video call.
The "status points" idea makes me think of a sort of NFT type thing, a trade-able badge that you could put on your Manifold profile. So basically you're making bets about whether people will want to be seen as affiliating with Musk on their Manifold profile.
I still think my sentiment analysis idea downthread is better.
Agree. Also politicians are often rated via “favorability” or the difference between those favoring them and those not. So this a rating system bounded between 100 (everyone likes them) and zero (everyone hates them). It’s pretty close to a “stock” concept and seems to work ok. You could validate the market for “stock” via periodic opinion polls with a binary question such as “do you have overall taking into account all their actions a positive view of this person or not?” removing the no opinions.
I would think a good concrete thing for billionaires would be an instrument that pays out a percentage of their future net worth. Then just track that instrument's value overtime.
Legality of prediction markets. CFTC won't let a commodities market engage in gaming, but, sports betting has leaked out an been legalized pretty much everywhere in the country as is evidenced by the advertisements on NFL games this season. This all occurred because of a Supreme Court overturning a federal ban on sports betting https://www.espn.com/chalk/story/_/id/23501236/supreme-court-strikes-federal-law-prohibiting-sports-gambling
The states responded by enacting legal frameworks for sports betting with the approval and connivance of the major professional sports leagues.
Given the size of that hole in the bans, I would guess that we will see British style omnibus bookmaking in the US in the next few years. Election bets will be a very important product. Could prediction markets be far behind.
Can you describe the essentials of “British style omnibus bookmaking”? I’m not clear on what you are predicting. (I realize this might sound like some kind of meta joke, but it’s not.)
Don't be shocked by the CFTC's behavior. It is pretty typical of the alphabet agencies that I had the displeasure of dealing with when I was active in those fields before retirement.
It is a violation of their charters and of administrative law, but they know that it is extraordinarily expensive and time consuming to hold them to account in the Federal courts.
I'm not sure at all about Hanania's complaints. The CFTC's objections are pretty clear, "We're OK with betting markets as long as the total amount of money involved is small enough, but PredictIt has been growing, and there are a lot of people who want to enter the market and if we treated everybody equally to where PredictIt already is, the market would be too big." Though the CFTC doesn't say it, the default is that they don't want to put in the effort it would take to properly regulate a horde of new, small companies in a protean new type of financial market.
"Fintech business model #5. Assuming that the regulators will be more inclined to listen to your whining than to the incumbents'
"Usually a bad idea in financial services. Regulators basically don't like small financial services companies. There are severe diseconomies of small scale in supervising them, they are more prone to blowing up and they don't do very much for your career. And financial services is an intrinsically regulated industry where consumer protection is often very rigorous for a good reason."
What is the chance the Department of Justice will enforce the national mandatory training of police in appropriate ways of handling criminal suspects?
1. Police can't be exempt from prosecution for crimes. James Bond is fiction; no one has a license to kill.
2. Police can't be exempt from prosecution for violating a criminal suspect's civil rights.
If the feds hold individual departments' feet to the fire, and the training they've provided is truly rigorous, departments should support officers following humane and appropriate treatment of criminal suspects, even when they're sued.
If the officers do not follow their DOJ-directed training and handle criminal suspects humanely, the department should have no responsibility to defend them.
It would be much easier for more and more cities to switch to private security companies that have substantial sompetition and don't have unions, than for those sorts of reforms to come from super-duper watchmen watching the watchmen.
>Police can't be exempt from prosecution for crimes. James Bond is fiction; no one has a license to kill.
They mostly are not? So many reasonable sounding police reforms are in fact so reasonable sounding that they are already the law/policy. That is what makes it a hard issue. In this latest outrage the police are being charged. Police are regularly found guilty of crimes, particularly egregious killings. Maybe not as often as they should be, but your question framing is spurious.
Cops are regularly tasked with enFORCING the law against a group of people (potential criminals) that includes a hugely disproportionate amount of liars and violent armed people. This is going to lead to beliefs/behaviors in them that are unacceptable when dealing with "regular" citizens. There is not a simple way out of this problem.
You can say "hey officer treat every single situation unique and don't bring any baggage to your calls". And maybe even a decent percentage of them can do that. But 1) they aren't our "best and brightest". And 2) once they are on the 17th domestic violence dispute where guns are being waved around at the same housing complex that year, they very easily might overstep some mundane non gun involving domestic dispute at a neighboring building.
That isn't to say there cannot be improvements, but everyone loves to act like it is a much simpler problem than it is. You got a million people running around with guns and tasers enFORCING hundreds of millions of violations many of them by people also with guns. Shit is going to happen, yes even totally innocent people getting killed in totally unreasonable ways.
Another problem is that major reform bills tend to get bogged down with pretty radical suggestions along with the reasonable ones, so they fail to pass.
> You got a million people running around with guns and tasers enFORCING hundreds of millions of violations many of them by people also with guns. Shit is going to happen, yes even totally innocent people getting killed in totally unreasonable ways.
Which seems to beg for an easy solution, watching from the Eastern shore of the Atlantic: Reduce weapons in the general population ...
" Police are regularly found guilty of crimes, particularly egregious killings. Maybe not as often as they should be, but your question framing is spurious."
Kelly Thomas would say "hi" had he not been beaten to death. On video. By a cop who calmly put on his suspect-beating gloves and said "see these fists? These fists are going to fuck you up." On video. And was acquitted. The fact that the courtroom was filled with uniformed police officers who openly intimidated the jurors had nothing to do with that though.
And then compounding it with the lie that they are "regularly found guilty" though I suppose "in a tiny fraction of cases" could be considered "regularly" if you picked your time scales appropriately.
"Police can't be exempt from prosecution for crimes." is the claim.
And they are in fact mostly not exempt. That is literally true. Officers who commit crimes are generally not exempt from prosecution.
Now you might argue they are functionally exempt, though in a large portion of prosecution worthy cases they are tried. Here in Minnesota where police killings are a VERY hot button issue, if you go down the list of them, the breakdown of which ones lead to charges vs which didn't more or less breaks down right along where a reasonable person might want.
You see this claim ALL the time,, "police are never held accountable". yet in Minneapolis literally the last two controversial police killings resulted in convictions. And there were charges in the one before that, but no conviction.
Maybe you would want 20-30% more convictions, but there certainly is NO grounds for claiming they are "exempt from prosecution".
You say "a tiny fraction of cases", but what is your reference class? All killings? Because I hate to break it to you, but the VAST majority of police killings are justified and not crimes.
In terms of the contentious killings, maybe it is 50/50, 30/70 in terms of how many convictions you would want versus how many you get. But that seems pretty normal and reasonable when you have the law enforcement apparatus investigating itself. Officers have the ability to plant evidence etc. and some amount of covering for each other is both good and natural. Police are simply just not be held to as high a standard by the very nature of the beast, hate to break it to you.
Keep in mind that some places (Portland comes to mind) are already short of police officers. Raising the stakes for them will exacerbate this problem, resulting in higher costs.
It is possible to solve this problem just by raising police wages enough, of course.
In general there's been a cultural shift over the past 30-50 years, from valorizing police officers (as in various TV shows back then) to demonizing them (ACAB, etc.), and this makes it more difficult to find people willing to do the job. Indeed it's arguably a bit of a vicious cycle, since it may well disproportionately discourage the kind of people you'd *want* to pursue this line of work from pursuing it.
I remember a while ago in Canada there was a scandal about police in Saskatoon who dropped a repeat offender outside the city in the cold. I thought about my reaction at the time that it didn't make sense to reflexively take the side of police as much as I did. I never would have imagined people literally defunding police departments. The instinct to conserve was based on real social dynamics whether or not it was incorrectly applied to that particular case
National standardization and training of police is an idea so incredibly bad and dangerous it is explicitly forbidden in the Constitution. it is a serious and real bright line that if crossed requires armed resistance.
The fact that police powers are local, at the city and county level, is fundamental to the entire essence of a Republic. In the US, the highest level of law enforcement even contemplated is a U.S.State, and state-level police powers like National Guard are only ever imagined in major emergencies like natural disasters.
Local control can and will lead to locally horrible outcomes, hopefully not often but there will certainly be abuses. And those problems must be solved by people and government processes within that city or state. Information, reporting, media attention and national outrage (personal outrage, including citizen protests and media) can force local politicians to act, and locals to be ashamed of their culture. All of these things have happened throughout US history,, and generally the grass-roots movements for Civil Rights, Sufferage, Abolitionism, and even Temperance, have moved opinion and society to improvement.
The Federal Government already has far too much influence over local police departments...
Suggestion of an official and permanant Federal role in training and standards and policy for law enforcement nationwide, would be immediately spotted as exactly what it is: A direct path to military dictatorship, prison camps, and mass murder.
I am not exaggerating, Nationalization of Police is one of the "Emergency!" scenarios that all firearms owners understand were the basic reasons for the 2nd Amendment. Any serious moves in that direction are acts of war against the Citizens.
Request to have the 2023 contest results post out before the 2024 contest deadline - being able to learn from my mistakes in last year's contest would be helpful for the next contest, but as is I have to wait a year for that.
(I understand that writing the results post is probably the kind of surprisingly large amount of work post that's hard to write to a short deadline so this may be hard or impractical)
The part about scandal markets reminds me of Robin Hanson's arguments for the legalization of blackmail, as well as some arguments against such a position. "The median scandal is extremely stupid, but can still ruin someone’s life.", I think this is very much true and not said enough, but I'm not sure about how to solve the general problem, that is even without scandal markets, this and other related issues surrounding false allegations and such, are already such a perverse problem. And I don't think its reasonable to expect the general public to raise their epistemic standards especially on such issues. There is also the cost not just to the person who has been accused, but also to people who haven't been accused modifying their behaviour to reduce the chance of being accused.
I don't think Medvedev's joking, I think he's coming up with pleasant stories of what the future holds because anything more realistic is unpleasant for him to think about. "Of course, the EU will collapse and we will come out victorious". It's just desperation.
To understand the context, we would probably need to watch Russian mainstream television. I strongly suspect that some of his predictions resemble, or are a parody of, the propaganda of Putin's regime.
I think the average person in Russia believes that these days people in Europe are starving and freezing in darkness, because everyone is utterly dependent on Russian exports of oil and grain. Which of course means that the collapse of the West is imminent, and the victory in Ukraine is near.
Medvedev is probably just translating the wildest predictions to English so that we can enjoy them, too.
A stock could evaluate to the result of a large survey. "Do you like Elon Musk? Y/N." Then in the same way futures expire quarterly, the stock could expire quarterly by fielding the survey once-per-quarter.
I don't think "percent of people who like" is what we're getting at here. I think it's plausible that more people like [random child actor] than Elon Musk, but [random child actor]'s stock shouldn't be higher. Or to give another example, intuitively Donald Trump's stock should be higher when he was President than when he was running The Apprentice, but plausibly a smaller percent of the population liked him.
Yes, I agree, this is probably the wrong question. But the broader point is that we could use survey data for the expiry value of a future. Designing the questions would be hard. Sadly the stock price would never capture exactly what you want it to because it would necessarily have to reflect any "irrelevant" idiosyncrasies of your question and survey practice.
Did anyone here use Metaculus Prediction Updates for Ukraine, if not, why not (given that you're interested in the topic at all)? If you used it, how, and why ... and how satisfied are you with what you got?
I've gone through phases of: useful, what's going on?, probably not working at all, it's back?, to name some major ones. My previous exposure to PM was limited, and I'd appreciate your thoughts on this.
I basically woke up with this question this morning (not really, but almost), and planned to post it on the next OT, but that just fits too well. :) Congrats to Metaculus.
I've noticed in manifold that when a market is surely going to resolve YES the percentage gets to something like 90~95% then stops getting better, and then maybe gets to 99+% when it's about to close and resolve. This happens because people have limited mana and would rather put it to use on other markets that would pay better. What I'm saying is very obvious, I realize, but I'm pointing it out as a problem for markets like the one about Coinbase going bankrupt. It could mean 10% is a good estimate, but it could also mean people are not interested in putting their mana in a market that closes in late 2024 for some measly gains. And the closer to the max/min value, the worse it gets.
Going from my own experience and what I've seen, the loan system is great for keeping users engaged and does a decent job in encouraging people to invest in longer term markets, but it does not fix this particular problem. Users will rather spend their mana loans in markets that give them better returns.
It's an even more significant factor in the Salem competition, where everyone starts with a fixed $1000 and there are no loans. It's common to see near-sure bets at 10, even 20%.
I kinda dislike the metac.'s "example" - oops it was Scott's ... err, - I still dislike the nuclear strike take here, not that it is wrong, but it's far too short: "a 10% chance of a strike, which comes from a 15% chance if the war in Ukraine continues vs. a 5% chance if it doesn’t. And they think there’s a 50% chance the war will continue, which comes from a 60% chance if the US stops arms shipments and a 33% chance if it doesn’t - and so on." This sounds too much like: we can substantially reduce the chance of a strike if we stop to send arms. - I see the logic, but one might mention the probability that the US/West will be seen as insincere and weak then - with massive rise of risk of worse conflicts in other places, incl. those who might go nuclear + that much bigger chunks Ukraine will be under Russian rule, that decades of unrest in the region will follow, that Putin and his clone (or is it clown) Medvedev will continue their aggressions in other areas of the former CCCP. Even an average-acx-forecaster (as me) might see that "no arms for Ukraine" goes "less peace". - So, not a good example to pick. Sorry, but I am prickly about Ukraine, esp with public support so fickle. Btw: Excellent forecasting by Scott, it was a hard year to forecast.
Cutting off Ukraine would reduce the risk of nuclear war in 2023, while increasing it in 2024-2033. But this prediction market doesn't pay a cent for your accurate estimate of the latter.
You're right, my bad - I re-frame my critique of Scott's example: It manages to be over-complex and under-complex at the same time. Under-complex as decisions of this category have to take a lots and lots of other variables into account - incl. the infamous "known and unknown unknowns". Whether Putin may or may not like to use a tactical nuclear weapon - better call Xi. And over-complex: can one imagine Trump or Biden or ... to study a chart of 50+ interdependent probabilities and do their Bayesian calculations? "some exciting idea(s) for making their product more policy-relevant", indeed. Not holding my breath.
Even restricted scandal markets seem terrible. "Will John Doe be found to have committed fraud?" strengthens the "John Doe <-> fraud" link in people's minds (including subconsciously), in search engines, and in future AIs' training data. It will also contribute to a "no smoke without fire" effect among normies and indeed anyone who stumbles across John Doe's fraud-scandal market in isolation without knowing the broader context.
> Current law includes the following provision on event contracts, [banning]:
I think this is a slightly bad / misleading summary. The whole point of that section is that the current law does *not* ban these things, but merely that it gives the CFTC the power discretion / authority to ban contracts which involve these.
With the current summary, the follow-up sentence after the list, namely "So the CFTC may ban certain prohibited categories.", makes little sense.
>If you have a better idea for how to run stocks, leave it in the comments here and they’ll probably see it.
How about sentiment analysis using a hard-to-manipulate source like Google News coverage, highly viewed social media, Wikipedia, etc.?
You could define a "sentiment index" equal to, say, log(sum([content.views * content.sentiment for content in pieces_of_content]))
You could also impute an index by randomly polling users on which things they like better than other things, then backsolve numbers which fit with the rank orderings that users give.
Once you've identified a method to create an index for any person/thing/etc. then you'd need a method to bring its price in line with reality while also allowing speculation. Perpetual futures are one approach. Or overlapping quarterly/annual futures.
Or, idea I just had -- make it so every day, there's an 0.1% chance that the asset gets a 24-hour "liquidity event" where people are allowed to buy/sell an unlimited amount of the person's stock, at their current sentiment index (as computed by an algorithm). Of course, people should be able to set up buy/sell orders in advance to take advantage of liquidity events, so they don't need to log into Manifold every day. You could configure the % daily chance of a liquidity event based on the rough timescale that you'd like to be forecasting on.
BTW, if the Manifold team is reading this -- I actually think that giving people a way to bet on memes could be a way to drive a huge amount of user growth.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MemeEconomy/ has 1.7 million users, and it's not even an actual meme economy, just a joke subreddit. The demand is clearly there.
Basically what you'll want is a way for users to generate arbitrary data pipelines which pull search results from social media/Google News/etc. and compute some sort of index out of it. Or pageview counts from relevant pages on Wikipedia/Know Your Meme/whatever else you can think of.
For meme templates like Socially Awkward Penguin or whatever, the "index value" of the asset could be equal to the log of the cumulative pageviews on, say, Know Your Meme. Since the "index value" only ever goes up, you could make it so people can always sell at the current index value. Then the asset price could be determined by minting and auctioning fresh stock on an ongoing basis. To incentivize the creation of new assets (and build virality into the platform), you could make it so that the person who creates the market gets the proceeds from the auction. (In order to avoid having your site being overwhelmed with assets, maybe they'd have to pay a small fee as a setup cost.)
BTW, Google says the fantasy sports market is valued at over $20 billion, so that's another interesting area that you could potentially expand into.
Actually for memes like Socially Awkward Penguin, I might remove the "log" part and have a different currency that people use to play with memes. Then expect that currency to experience rapid inflation. That's more fun, for people to win really huge when they correctly bet on an obscure meme that manages to gain traction.
To prevent the first big winner from monopolizing all the meme auctions going forwards, you could make it so every user gets to choose a fixed number of freebie memes from the meme auctions on a weekly basis.
Haha thanks for the ideas! r/MemeEconomy is cool -- I have wanted to trade before on my personal sense of what memes are up and coming, or just discover what's trending today in a more legible way.
Fantasy sports is probably a less good fit for us (lots of competition, not in our areas of interest, and doesn't add much value to the world)
You're probably right about fantasy sports, but it could still be a useful case study to look at. I just searched on google for "fantasy sports market intelligence" and found a few reports which might be worth buying. I think this kind of info could be critical for positioning Manifold to grow to a $1B+ valuation -- my understanding is that the most important tip to succeed in business is to be in a rapidly growing industry. So if you can recreate fantasy sports for some other area like music say, you could make it so forecasting reaches a huge new audience and influences a bunch more people. Just brainstorming here.
Eventually the market gets something right, then you can reach out to journalists and say "hey you know that big hit show the entire internet is talking about? traders on our site predicted it would be a sleeper hit way back in March. here's a link to the shows that traders on our site are betting on currently, tell readers to click if they want to try a show that's obscure and potentially underrated"
If you get big enough, you could sell services to movie execs trying to figure out whether a show should be funded based on a script or pilot episode. The entire business of hollywood is gambling on (heavy-tailed?) entertainment concepts, a 10% improvement in forecasting accuracy has the potential to deliver enormous value, in theory at least.
Lots of hits for on Google for site:overcomingbias.com hollywood stock exchange
This post suggests that the markets should only be for concepts that haven't been funded yet, or the movie studios will dislike you: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/11/zitzewitz-the-wise.html Maybe the move is to annoy them initially to get their attention, then strike a deal where you pivot to focus on helping them forecast unfunded concepts. I'll bet lots of people would find it fun to play movie exec in their spare time, watching low-budget trailers for hypothetical movies and predicting which ones could be big.
>When I first looked into this a few weeks ago, a few conspiracy-related prediction markets gave pretty high predictions, because people weren’t sure if the market creators would resolve them honestly, which naturally pushes the price towards 50.
Maybe Manifold should add an option so that when you create a market, you can nominate one or more other users to be the resolvers for that market.
At the beginning of your post you mention hostility to prediction markets from communities that handle classified nuclear information. Perhaps germane to this, a (now deceased) friend was a physicist who worked at a government research establishment that handled highly-classified information. He once told me that the quality of the science done in the unclassified part of the institution was FAR higher than that in the classified part, a phenomenon he attributed to the lack of open critique and review.
What does Scott mean by alpha? He's used it in the Bay Area posts a few times as well, but my attempts to get Google to answer this question just get me links about alpha males, which I don't think is relevant.
The 'What percentage of US electricity will be produced by solar power in 2030' is slightly misleading. It's something that segues into 'What percentage of US energy.....' in many people's minds.
But instead of solar power being four percent of US energy, it is currently nearer one percent.
Solar enthusiasts aren't keen on the distinction, though I think it's important to realise that solar is unlikely to produce more than two percent (of US energy) by 2030. A wild success would be three percent, so its impact will remain trivial, at least for a few decades.
You also sometimes get elisions of the distinction between nameplate capacity -- what the installation could in theory provide, assuming everything works perfectly, the sun is shining all day at the summer solstice -- and what it actually provides, which is typically 20-30% of nameplate capacity for solar. This compare to ~60-65% for gas and ~90% for nuclear, so it makes a significant difference: it means to replace X GWh of nuke electricity you need to build 5X GWh of solar.
"My 2022 Calibration" Now that it is fixed it and understandable, would it be correct to say that you really don't have a good understanding of the difference between being 60% confident and 90% confident in your prediction?
I'd liked to see your "Of my 40% predictions" (and 30%, 20%, etc) results, to see if your blind spot is symmetric.
Also how often was did the event happen for all binary predictions? Is there a bias in how prediction questions resolve - for example, mostly they happen or mostly they don't or happening or not happening is random?
While it is true that 40% yes is equivalent to 60% no, there is a framing bias that affects how people evaluate situations. See Kahneman and Tversky et al
The reality is that "prediction", no matter how well it works is often wildly inappropriate for the task at hand. The fact that we are getting better at it makes it all the more dangerous.
A lot of times, we let our brains think we are predicting something, when what we are supposed to be doing is gathering all the actual evidence about a given possibility, and seeing where it stands. The distinction is huge.
Idea for stocks: team (maybe with some outside input) gets together once a year to order all the figures in order of status or influence or whatever. Market is on what the index of figure X will be, from (say) 1-10 if there are 10 stock markets.
It seems quite probable that the "unmoored" status stock eventually won't track the status, but only the perceived future probability of the stock. Very vulnerable if majority of Manifold users at some point decides that is its about "lolz", not Musk popularity, or that small values are now good instead of large values, or something equally silly..
Not sure if the cap at 100% is a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand, it doesn't make obvious sense: One can sort of imagine that a person may have a zero status (lowest possible), but can they have a full 100% status?
On the other hand, a hard cap at 100% might have an useful purpose as an inbuilt check against bubble -> crash behavior. Every market participant must ask themselves "is the current growth sustainable" because at some point it must it hit 100%. And if growth is very fast, it will hit it very soon.
On the third hand, if MUSKSTATUS2000 (launched in 2000) is already at 90%, but you still think Musk will become many times more popular when Mars colony succeeds, is there anything stopping you launching another token, MUSKSTATUS2023, initially trading at 2%
The original sin here is the notion that policy makers objectively choose and promote policies based on transparent public benefit or some such textbook naïveté.
The real world of policy making involving pushing for agendas in conflict with other agendas.
Nobody involved in policy wants accuracy or objectivity or whatever. Only people outside of policy making want to break this monopoly - much like the crypto banking idiots. And much like the crypto banking idiots who refuse to understand that the speed and function of the present system is a benefit to incumbents - not an obstruction for them - their path to resort will never materialize.
As someone who works in policy I mostly agree. The people making policy very often don't really care much about the facts predictions even when they are available.
I sadly, and with grudging admiration, have to agree with your view.
Almost nobody (in government or in their own lives) has clear plans and goals, much less the long attention span to pursue them. Getting employees of any org to look and think beyond their own short-term personal needs requires really good and consistent leadership, with said leadership even accepting that people need some selfish-status-wins for themselves along the way, even if those skirmishes act as drag or barnacles against the overall goals.
I was looking into that, as someone who teaches at Texas A&M and thus spends a lot of time in College Station, TX. I'm not actually aware of anyone who has received a package this way. Maybe this is something I can actually use Nextdoor for, to ask if anyone has, and how it has worked. (Amazon has been mentioning this possibility for months, but I've learned very little from local media, only from national media, and a couple local news stories mentioning the relevant city council approvals going through.)
But the fact that none of the national media stories has even a one-line quote from someone who has received a package this way suggests that maybe they haven't actually figured it out yet, even though they've officially launched.
I don't think we blame normies enough, hating someone over a Halloween costume or something they did as a teenager is a massive moral flaw.
You see it most clearly with women in revenge porn cases, the ex-boyfriend who releases images is rightly seen as the villain but the boss who fires a teacher who is the victim of an abusive ex, isn't seen to have blame.
Normie mobs hating on minor infractions means we can't have nice things like prediction markets on scandals and we should be angry at normie mobs.
You're morally right, but what do you plan to do about it? Blame is a useful thing when you can allocate it to someone you can influence, but we can't influence mobs (I won't even say normie mobs, because I don't think it's exclusive.)
"Normies"? So we are meant to take it from this that you're not a normie, you're smarter and better and superior to the ordinary person?
Yes you are, and no you're not. Haven't there been enough scandals and witch-hunts and throwing under buses within the superior higher-thinking rationalist circles to disabuse you of this sneering snobbery?
Give me a definition of "normie", and don't make it "you know, those 90 IQ midwit idiots".
I know that ordinary people can be dense and terrible (I'm an ordinary person myself) but by the living God, if there's anything that makes me want to take up the banner of Chesterton in defence of the ordinary person, it's this kind of cheap gibe. "Aw wossa matta, it wuz only a joke, you got no sensa huma?"
Strange how it's always the unfunny people who claim that since nobody laughs at their jokes, it's because other people have no sense of humour.
FWIW, my definition of "normie" is a person whose mind is optimized more for maximizing the benefits of human social interaction than for maximizing their understanding of the material universe, as compared to "nerds" who are the opposite. A difference in style of thinking, rather than degree, and there exist both genius normies and midwit nerds.
The benefits of human social interaction being quite large, I would never count "normies" as *generally* inferior. But mobilizing a hate-mob over somebody's adolescent Halloween costume or whatever, is I think a failure mode of normie social status-seeking, and nerds will ignore that nonsense (while finding their own ways to screw things up).
I'm not sure that mobilizing hate-mobs has ever been a good strategy for getting laid. I mean, I assume *someone* is scoring with activist chicks or whatever, but that trades against against scoring with girls who are impressed by the Maserati you bought when you made your first million at twenty-eight, or whatever.
But ignoring *all* of the effective ways to get laid, e.g. making your first million at twenty-eight but still driving an old Camry because flashy cars are "illogical", would be one of the ways nerds are likely to find to screw things up for themselves.
>Having a scandal market on someone incentivizes people to dig up every scandal they’ve ever been involved in or accused of (including false allegations). Outside Encyclopedia Dramatica and KiwiFarms, most people don’t have a convenient list of every embarrassing and reputation-lowering thing they’ve ever done in their lives in one place.
Do I get any points for predicting the existence of scandal market short sellers 3 months ago?
The person who set up Scott's scandal market replied to me and said it would be neat if somebody hired a private detective to stalk people who have scandal markets, but there wasn't enough volume. I feel like we saw entirely different things in this hypothetical!
I think you need to have a very rosily optimistic view of human nature to imagine a scandal market would be a good thing. "This will encourage whistleblowers to reveal abuses and will assure people that they can have confidence in institution, company, or person!"
No, it will encourage reputation shredding. Pick somebody with a good reputation, put it up "Will Dudley Do-Good be involved in a scandal within the next six months?" and while everybody is going "Dudley? That wonderful guy who helps lame dogs over stiles? Of course not!", go digging up the dirt as far back as you like. Even Dudley probably has *something* he said or did, or even guilt by association, that can be used against him.
Put the worst possible interpretation on your cherry-picked items taken out of context and disseminate them amongst the kind of screaming online mobs that can be spun up. Then sit back and profit!, because nobody said the scandal had to be *true*, just that Dudley would be involved in one.
And if you can't find anything, invent something. Same as above.
Because even if it's not true, you have a ready-baked scandal to win on the market. And Dudley's reputation is now ruined, because most people will never hear the retractions or factchecking, all they will have is a vague idea "Oh yeah, isn't that the guy who was supposed to have done X?"
Like the various versions of the story about Lyndon B. Johnson:
"US President Lyndon B Johnson famously told an aide to spread a story about a Congressional rival having a proclivity for pigs. When the aide protested that it wasn’t true, LBJ replied: “Of course it ain’t true, but I want to make the son-of-a-bitch deny it ….”
The scandal doesn't need to be true, you just need Dudley to make a public pronouncement denying he ever did X. and bob's your uncle.
And the end result is increased cynicism and decreased trust, because if Dudley can be accused of X, *anybody* might be a hypocrite or secretly doing/saying/thinking bad things. Now the next time someone puts up "Will Saintly Saint be involved in a scandal within the next six months?" everybody goes "If they're asking this, then there must be something bad about to come out about Saintly".
Re: making stocks more than a Ponzi scheme. It could be tied to some real measurement of the person's "status", e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_Score. The stock would have to be a prediction of some standardized measurement guaranteed to be made at regular intervals by a trusted party.
Each stock represents the question 'will questions in {this list} pay out?'. have a corresponding list of questions relevant to that person. Ex: Elon Musk would have questions such as 'will humans be on mars by 2035' and 'will the twitter deal wind up being profitable', where a more influencer-type might have questions about their follower count etc. The important thing is to break down why each public figure has their social clout, and judge them on those metrics with lower-scope questions.
you can make stocks 'reset' once per year, or devise a new model that pays off 'dividends' but is persistent.
“some people might genuinely need to hedge political events”
There is enough there to last far beyond the next cycle, especially considering the real question of when a derivative is actually second derivative rather than something else.
Here's an idea for “stock ratings” of people, given that percent ratings seem like they would not work.
What about rating them the way the rating agencies do: AAA . . .D? You can anchor each rating with descriptors appropriate to people rather than stocks: “ Reliable,” “clever”, “a good bet,””likely/unlikely to fuck up” etc. There are various ways to turn this ordinal scale into a numerical one — I’m sure many have played around with ways to do this with stock ratings, so as to make them more amenable to calculations of various kinds. Look and see what all those clever people have done.
Seems to me there are 2 factors that are determinants an individual’s “stock,” as we normally think of it: good/bad and strong/weak. (By the way, those are the 2 main factors that fall out of factor analysis of adjectives describing people.)
-Good/bad= right/wrong, kind/cruel, helpful/destructive, sane/crazy etc.The stock rating measure seems like a reasonable approximation of this.
-Strong/weak= how big a deal someone is, how much influence they have, how well known. Seems like things like Google searches and Twitter mentions are a good measure of this.
So maybe use strong/weak as a multiplier of good/bad measure. Makes pretty good intuitive sense. No matter how good or bad someone’s impact is, their personal stock isn’t valuable if they have very little impact.
> Many come up with futuristic hypotheses, as if competing to single out the wildest, and even the most absurd ones.
I would interpret it as mockery of most of these yearly predictions, which (unlike your competition, or something like the GJP) are seeing attention rather than accuracy.
To the point on Congress having created the CFTC to regulate derivatives contracts: let's not forget that there have been exactly two cases where Congress did, in fact, intervene to ban futures contracts explicitly: onions, and motion picture box office ticket sales (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act). Clearly the height of well-considered market regulation.
Is the substack susceptible to spamming? I got this email purporting to be from Astral Codex Ten ( <forum@mg1.substack.com>) regarding Astral Codex Ten replied to a comment on Mantic Monday 1/30/2023.:
"Let's discuss👆I've got something to introduce to you 💚📈 Text㈩[number removed]"
Creators of scandal markets on Manifold could set resolution criteria that attempt to mimic the Character and Fitness process for people applying to be lawyers in the US. This process varies by state.
For example, California has these Moral Character criteria: https://www.calbar.ca.gov/Admissions/Moral-Character/Factors-and-Conduct. Will failing/passing those criteria closely match a yes/no on 'a significant number of Scott's friends, readers, and/or professional aquaintances [sic] are angry at him or want to stop associating with him'? Probably not.
By the way, are any of the blogs in these interlinked communities written by lawyers?
umm ok. This thread stuff is going beyond my marginal computer literacy. I understand email, not so much modern media. No idea whether this will respond to your note.
If you want to have "stocks" on a prediction market, there should be dividends associated with them. The economics of that are clearly going to be easier with fake-money, but a system where the top people in terms of "positive buzz" get a return should be possible.
The problem of getting experts to consider the value of prediction markets strikes me as similar to the problem of getting baseball players to use analytics to improve their game. This came about through two mechanisms:
1. Coaches talked to the statisticians, and figured out how to translate the data into something the players could understand and accept.
2. Younger players grew up in an analytics world, and were more accepting of the data from the start.
I suspect right now prediction markets need to identify the coaching layer, the people in the expert community who understand the data, but speak the language of the experts.
Medvedev's joke (which I found rather droll) might be that there were similar predictions about Russia last year.
To be fair, he only said that all of those predictions *could* happen. I mean... they could. There are lots of parallel Everett branches...
I think that's right. And I think many Russians would find it darkly funny that most Americans can't even recognize the joke.
Yeah I think he was satirizing people like Kamil Galeev predicting the imminent breakup of Russia, or predictions that Russia's economy or army were about to suffer a sharp collapse.
In fairness to Medvedev, 10. Bretton woods system ended decades ago
I am not sure he believes it, but lots of people around him will believe Bizarre Russian propaganda about the rise of the Nazis and secret Polish plots to invade Ukraine. He has a bad information diet and is biased by the fact he was part of secret plot to invade Ukraine.
Yeah well I'm sure Alfred Jodl had some droll remarks about how amusingly the Polish peasants twitched when the Stukas strafed them in September 1939. We'll see if he's just as witty when the rope goes around his neck at wherever this generation's Nuremberg turns out to be.
Do you expect such tribunals to take place after the thermonuclear arsenals are depleted, or to somehow bypass that?
Either. If the former, however, I wouldn't rely on something as kind as hanging.
I assumed it was just wishful thinking. Thus the part about how the UK will join the EU(to stick it to the Brexiters) and then the EU will collapse.(since he doesn't like them either)
This is a scammer/bot pretending to be the blog by starting a new account with the blog name, DO NOT give it any personal information. Hopefully Scott (who comments a 'Scott Alexander' with a tick and a pen-nib symbol indicating the writer of the blog) deletes it soon.
AngolaMaldives! Greetings from Brussels Samoa!
Hello, arch-enemy!
(if you haven't checked qwantz recently, do it, there's been a startling development)
You forgot to change your percents
"Of my 50% predictions, 10 were right and 0 wrong, for a score of 100%"
Thanks, fixed.
In "My 2020 Calibration", the graph is wrong. Your x-axis has 95 inserted between 90 and 100, but the spacing for these gaps of 5 is the same as the spacing for gaps of 10 elsewhere in the graph, making the axis abruptly nonlinear.. Your black line going "straight" from (50, 50) to (100, 100) therefore does not pass through (60, 60) or (70, 70) etc.; in order to do that, it would need to bend sharply at (90, 90) when the x-axis suddenly stretches out.
Also, in the text above the graph, you said "Of my 50%..." over and over, instead of changing the number.
Thank you, fixed.
I came to say the same thing. I wrote this to replot:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
data = {'type':['baseline', 'baseline', 'prediction', 'prediction', 'prediction', 'prediction', 'prediction', 'prediction', 'prediction'], 'x':[50, 99, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 95, 99], 'y':[50, 99, 50, 61, 63, 74, 73, 100, 100]}
df = pd.DataFrame(data)
df1 = df[df['type'] == 'baseline']
df2 = df[df['type'] == 'prediction']
plt.plot(df1['x'], df1['y'], 'r--', df2['x'], df2['y'], 'bo-')
Medvedev seems to be making a bid for the role of the court jester, which was long held by a certain Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who died last year. He'd been decently popular due to his absurd antics (and ultra-nationalist rhetoric), one of the more notable ones was "predicting" in 2002 that elite Iraqi soldiers would rip Bush's army to shreds.
I always found political prediction markets interesting. Suppose you were a generic Republican. Why not ask yourself how much you will need to be ambivalent about Dems winning the next election and put money on them? Either way, you seem to win.
Assuming you manage to correctly calibrate your ambivalence point, won't you always "break even" with this approach? That is: either you're disappointed by the election result but happy with your money or disappointed with your money but happy with the election result.
I think your expected value is the same whether you go for this approach or not, but I could very easily be mistaken. I certainly find it attractive on a gut level...
Repeat plays is the ticket, isn't it?
For one outcome there's reduced impact. For multiple in a row elections, hedging this way makes me win, I think.
( I'm in office, but down money - sweet, I can do my politics!
I'm out of office but up money - sweet, more money means better ability to be elected next time!
I got elected this time - I'm down money but up politics!)
It depends on your utility function(s) but in general it is certainly possible for hedges to be net +EV.
"Stock" status of 0%-100% could work if you conceptualize each person as having good and bad status points. If Elon Musk was sitting at 50% pre-Tesla, I could imagine him post-Tesla with 10x as many good points and 1/2 as many bad points, which by my math would put him at 95%. Someone with no status quanta either way would be undefined, which seems reasonable.
But once Elon is at 95%, if you think he's going to become even more successful (e.g. become President as Medvedev suggested), are you able to make any money betting on that? If not, nobody will want those stocks.
How about have each stock worth an hour of the person's time? Something like this: https://forbes.mc/article/timers-project-will-tokenize-your-time-via-blockchain
Still doesn't work unless the person in question agrees to honor the results, but it could be interesting. I don't see why public figures wouldn't want to sell at least a few hours of their time to the highest bidder, provided it's something convenient like a video call.
The "status points" idea makes me think of a sort of NFT type thing, a trade-able badge that you could put on your Manifold profile. So basically you're making bets about whether people will want to be seen as affiliating with Musk on their Manifold profile.
I still think my sentiment analysis idea downthread is better.
Agree. Also politicians are often rated via “favorability” or the difference between those favoring them and those not. So this a rating system bounded between 100 (everyone likes them) and zero (everyone hates them). It’s pretty close to a “stock” concept and seems to work ok. You could validate the market for “stock” via periodic opinion polls with a binary question such as “do you have overall taking into account all their actions a positive view of this person or not?” removing the no opinions.
I would think a good concrete thing for billionaires would be an instrument that pays out a percentage of their future net worth. Then just track that instrument's value overtime.
Legality of prediction markets. CFTC won't let a commodities market engage in gaming, but, sports betting has leaked out an been legalized pretty much everywhere in the country as is evidenced by the advertisements on NFL games this season. This all occurred because of a Supreme Court overturning a federal ban on sports betting https://www.espn.com/chalk/story/_/id/23501236/supreme-court-strikes-federal-law-prohibiting-sports-gambling
The states responded by enacting legal frameworks for sports betting with the approval and connivance of the major professional sports leagues.
Given the size of that hole in the bans, I would guess that we will see British style omnibus bookmaking in the US in the next few years. Election bets will be a very important product. Could prediction markets be far behind.
Can you describe the essentials of “British style omnibus bookmaking”? I’m not clear on what you are predicting. (I realize this might sound like some kind of meta joke, but it’s not.)
Don't be shocked by the CFTC's behavior. It is pretty typical of the alphabet agencies that I had the displeasure of dealing with when I was active in those fields before retirement.
It is a violation of their charters and of administrative law, but they know that it is extraordinarily expensive and time consuming to hold them to account in the Federal courts.
I'm not sure at all about Hanania's complaints. The CFTC's objections are pretty clear, "We're OK with betting markets as long as the total amount of money involved is small enough, but PredictIt has been growing, and there are a lot of people who want to enter the market and if we treated everybody equally to where PredictIt already is, the market would be too big." Though the CFTC doesn't say it, the default is that they don't want to put in the effort it would take to properly regulate a horde of new, small companies in a protean new type of financial market.
A good summary of this sort of thing is in "A Cynic's Guide To Fintech" https://medium.com/bull-market/a-cynic-s-guide-to-fintech-3cd0995e0da3:
"Fintech business model #5. Assuming that the regulators will be more inclined to listen to your whining than to the incumbents'
"Usually a bad idea in financial services. Regulators basically don't like small financial services companies. There are severe diseconomies of small scale in supervising them, they are more prone to blowing up and they don't do very much for your career. And financial services is an intrinsically regulated industry where consumer protection is often very rigorous for a good reason."
Have we considered the possibility that the CFTC is secretly run by the Vorin church?
What is the chance the Department of Justice will enforce the national mandatory training of police in appropriate ways of handling criminal suspects?
1. Police can't be exempt from prosecution for crimes. James Bond is fiction; no one has a license to kill.
2. Police can't be exempt from prosecution for violating a criminal suspect's civil rights.
If the feds hold individual departments' feet to the fire, and the training they've provided is truly rigorous, departments should support officers following humane and appropriate treatment of criminal suspects, even when they're sued.
If the officers do not follow their DOJ-directed training and handle criminal suspects humanely, the department should have no responsibility to defend them.
What is the chance?
It would be much easier for more and more cities to switch to private security companies that have substantial sompetition and don't have unions, than for those sorts of reforms to come from super-duper watchmen watching the watchmen.
License to kill/qualified immunity; potayto/potahto
Prosecution for violating civil rights? Many of the laws they're supposed to enforce are violations of civil rights.
>Police can't be exempt from prosecution for crimes. James Bond is fiction; no one has a license to kill.
They mostly are not? So many reasonable sounding police reforms are in fact so reasonable sounding that they are already the law/policy. That is what makes it a hard issue. In this latest outrage the police are being charged. Police are regularly found guilty of crimes, particularly egregious killings. Maybe not as often as they should be, but your question framing is spurious.
Cops are regularly tasked with enFORCING the law against a group of people (potential criminals) that includes a hugely disproportionate amount of liars and violent armed people. This is going to lead to beliefs/behaviors in them that are unacceptable when dealing with "regular" citizens. There is not a simple way out of this problem.
You can say "hey officer treat every single situation unique and don't bring any baggage to your calls". And maybe even a decent percentage of them can do that. But 1) they aren't our "best and brightest". And 2) once they are on the 17th domestic violence dispute where guns are being waved around at the same housing complex that year, they very easily might overstep some mundane non gun involving domestic dispute at a neighboring building.
That isn't to say there cannot be improvements, but everyone loves to act like it is a much simpler problem than it is. You got a million people running around with guns and tasers enFORCING hundreds of millions of violations many of them by people also with guns. Shit is going to happen, yes even totally innocent people getting killed in totally unreasonable ways.
Another problem is that major reform bills tend to get bogged down with pretty radical suggestions along with the reasonable ones, so they fail to pass.
> You got a million people running around with guns and tasers enFORCING hundreds of millions of violations many of them by people also with guns. Shit is going to happen, yes even totally innocent people getting killed in totally unreasonable ways.
Which seems to beg for an easy solution, watching from the Eastern shore of the Atlantic: Reduce weapons in the general population ...
Easy to say, hard to legislate.
And then you'd need to enFORCE it, except this medium doesn't allow a font large and bold enough for the "force" in that one.
Seriously, broad gun confiscation is not a thing that is going to happen in the US any time soon.
"These people are waaay too dangerous to be allowed to be armed."
"Removing weapons from these people is a trivial exercise with no negative externalities whatsoever."
" Police are regularly found guilty of crimes, particularly egregious killings. Maybe not as often as they should be, but your question framing is spurious."
Kelly Thomas would say "hi" had he not been beaten to death. On video. By a cop who calmly put on his suspect-beating gloves and said "see these fists? These fists are going to fuck you up." On video. And was acquitted. The fact that the courtroom was filled with uniformed police officers who openly intimidated the jurors had nothing to do with that though.
And? Your reading comprehension is quite poor.
"They mostly are not? " is simply a lie. Sorry to be so blunt about it.
And then compounding it with the lie that they are "regularly found guilty" though I suppose "in a tiny fraction of cases" could be considered "regularly" if you picked your time scales appropriately.
"Police can't be exempt from prosecution for crimes." is the claim.
And they are in fact mostly not exempt. That is literally true. Officers who commit crimes are generally not exempt from prosecution.
Now you might argue they are functionally exempt, though in a large portion of prosecution worthy cases they are tried. Here in Minnesota where police killings are a VERY hot button issue, if you go down the list of them, the breakdown of which ones lead to charges vs which didn't more or less breaks down right along where a reasonable person might want.
You see this claim ALL the time,, "police are never held accountable". yet in Minneapolis literally the last two controversial police killings resulted in convictions. And there were charges in the one before that, but no conviction.
Maybe you would want 20-30% more convictions, but there certainly is NO grounds for claiming they are "exempt from prosecution".
You say "a tiny fraction of cases", but what is your reference class? All killings? Because I hate to break it to you, but the VAST majority of police killings are justified and not crimes.
In terms of the contentious killings, maybe it is 50/50, 30/70 in terms of how many convictions you would want versus how many you get. But that seems pretty normal and reasonable when you have the law enforcement apparatus investigating itself. Officers have the ability to plant evidence etc. and some amount of covering for each other is both good and natural. Police are simply just not be held to as high a standard by the very nature of the beast, hate to break it to you.
Keep in mind that some places (Portland comes to mind) are already short of police officers. Raising the stakes for them will exacerbate this problem, resulting in higher costs.
It is possible to solve this problem just by raising police wages enough, of course.
In general there's been a cultural shift over the past 30-50 years, from valorizing police officers (as in various TV shows back then) to demonizing them (ACAB, etc.), and this makes it more difficult to find people willing to do the job. Indeed it's arguably a bit of a vicious cycle, since it may well disproportionately discourage the kind of people you'd *want* to pursue this line of work from pursuing it.
Shellenberger tweeted a thread about more capable cops walking away. Apparently in St. Louis there is a 7 foot tall pile of uniforms left behind called Mount Exodus - https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/crime/byers-beat/byers-beat-does-st-louis-have-enough-police-officers/63-111da5f2-4054-496f-93ae-a84620a6717c
I remember a while ago in Canada there was a scandal about police in Saskatoon who dropped a repeat offender outside the city in the cold. I thought about my reaction at the time that it didn't make sense to reflexively take the side of police as much as I did. I never would have imagined people literally defunding police departments. The instinct to conserve was based on real social dynamics whether or not it was incorrectly applied to that particular case
> What is the chance?
I dunno man, put up a prediction market
National standardization and training of police is an idea so incredibly bad and dangerous it is explicitly forbidden in the Constitution. it is a serious and real bright line that if crossed requires armed resistance.
The fact that police powers are local, at the city and county level, is fundamental to the entire essence of a Republic. In the US, the highest level of law enforcement even contemplated is a U.S.State, and state-level police powers like National Guard are only ever imagined in major emergencies like natural disasters.
Local control can and will lead to locally horrible outcomes, hopefully not often but there will certainly be abuses. And those problems must be solved by people and government processes within that city or state. Information, reporting, media attention and national outrage (personal outrage, including citizen protests and media) can force local politicians to act, and locals to be ashamed of their culture. All of these things have happened throughout US history,, and generally the grass-roots movements for Civil Rights, Sufferage, Abolitionism, and even Temperance, have moved opinion and society to improvement.
The Federal Government already has far too much influence over local police departments...
Suggestion of an official and permanant Federal role in training and standards and policy for law enforcement nationwide, would be immediately spotted as exactly what it is: A direct path to military dictatorship, prison camps, and mass murder.
I am not exaggerating, Nationalization of Police is one of the "Emergency!" scenarios that all firearms owners understand were the basic reasons for the 2nd Amendment. Any serious moves in that direction are acts of war against the Citizens.
BR
Request to have the 2023 contest results post out before the 2024 contest deadline - being able to learn from my mistakes in last year's contest would be helpful for the next contest, but as is I have to wait a year for that.
(I understand that writing the results post is probably the kind of surprisingly large amount of work post that's hard to write to a short deadline so this may be hard or impractical)
(My self-review post
https://shakeddown.substack.com/p/2022-prediction-contest-performance?sd=pf )
The part about scandal markets reminds me of Robin Hanson's arguments for the legalization of blackmail, as well as some arguments against such a position. "The median scandal is extremely stupid, but can still ruin someone’s life.", I think this is very much true and not said enough, but I'm not sure about how to solve the general problem, that is even without scandal markets, this and other related issues surrounding false allegations and such, are already such a perverse problem. And I don't think its reasonable to expect the general public to raise their epistemic standards especially on such issues. There is also the cost not just to the person who has been accused, but also to people who haven't been accused modifying their behaviour to reduce the chance of being accused.
I don't think Medvedev's joking, I think he's coming up with pleasant stories of what the future holds because anything more realistic is unpleasant for him to think about. "Of course, the EU will collapse and we will come out victorious". It's just desperation.
He starts by setting the context of his predictions as "the wildest, and even the most absurd ones". How can that be anything but a joke?
To understand the context, we would probably need to watch Russian mainstream television. I strongly suspect that some of his predictions resemble, or are a parody of, the propaganda of Putin's regime.
I think the average person in Russia believes that these days people in Europe are starving and freezing in darkness, because everyone is utterly dependent on Russian exports of oil and grain. Which of course means that the collapse of the West is imminent, and the victory in Ukraine is near.
Medvedev is probably just translating the wildest predictions to English so that we can enjoy them, too.
I think if you followed his pronouncements more you would realize he does a lot of trolling like this.
A stock could evaluate to the result of a large survey. "Do you like Elon Musk? Y/N." Then in the same way futures expire quarterly, the stock could expire quarterly by fielding the survey once-per-quarter.
I don't think "percent of people who like" is what we're getting at here. I think it's plausible that more people like [random child actor] than Elon Musk, but [random child actor]'s stock shouldn't be higher. Or to give another example, intuitively Donald Trump's stock should be higher when he was President than when he was running The Apprentice, but plausibly a smaller percent of the population liked him.
Yes, I agree, this is probably the wrong question. But the broader point is that we could use survey data for the expiry value of a future. Designing the questions would be hard. Sadly the stock price would never capture exactly what you want it to because it would necessarily have to reflect any "irrelevant" idiosyncrasies of your question and survey practice.
Did anyone here use Metaculus Prediction Updates for Ukraine, if not, why not (given that you're interested in the topic at all)? If you used it, how, and why ... and how satisfied are you with what you got?
I've gone through phases of: useful, what's going on?, probably not working at all, it's back?, to name some major ones. My previous exposure to PM was limited, and I'd appreciate your thoughts on this.
I basically woke up with this question this morning (not really, but almost), and planned to post it on the next OT, but that just fits too well. :) Congrats to Metaculus.
A year ago I didn't think the war would start, but the market was quite high. I was very impressed with Metaculus getting it right.
I've noticed in manifold that when a market is surely going to resolve YES the percentage gets to something like 90~95% then stops getting better, and then maybe gets to 99+% when it's about to close and resolve. This happens because people have limited mana and would rather put it to use on other markets that would pay better. What I'm saying is very obvious, I realize, but I'm pointing it out as a problem for markets like the one about Coinbase going bankrupt. It could mean 10% is a good estimate, but it could also mean people are not interested in putting their mana in a market that closes in late 2024 for some measly gains. And the closer to the max/min value, the worse it gets.
To what extent does Manifold's loans system fix this problem?
Going from my own experience and what I've seen, the loan system is great for keeping users engaged and does a decent job in encouraging people to invest in longer term markets, but it does not fix this particular problem. Users will rather spend their mana loans in markets that give them better returns.
It's an even more significant factor in the Salem competition, where everyone starts with a fixed $1000 and there are no loans. It's common to see near-sure bets at 10, even 20%.
I kinda dislike the metac.'s "example" - oops it was Scott's ... err, - I still dislike the nuclear strike take here, not that it is wrong, but it's far too short: "a 10% chance of a strike, which comes from a 15% chance if the war in Ukraine continues vs. a 5% chance if it doesn’t. And they think there’s a 50% chance the war will continue, which comes from a 60% chance if the US stops arms shipments and a 33% chance if it doesn’t - and so on." This sounds too much like: we can substantially reduce the chance of a strike if we stop to send arms. - I see the logic, but one might mention the probability that the US/West will be seen as insincere and weak then - with massive rise of risk of worse conflicts in other places, incl. those who might go nuclear + that much bigger chunks Ukraine will be under Russian rule, that decades of unrest in the region will follow, that Putin and his clone (or is it clown) Medvedev will continue their aggressions in other areas of the former CCCP. Even an average-acx-forecaster (as me) might see that "no arms for Ukraine" goes "less peace". - So, not a good example to pick. Sorry, but I am prickly about Ukraine, esp with public support so fickle. Btw: Excellent forecasting by Scott, it was a hard year to forecast.
Cutting off Ukraine would reduce the risk of nuclear war in 2023, while increasing it in 2024-2033. But this prediction market doesn't pay a cent for your accurate estimate of the latter.
Reread it, you have that example backwards - Scott's toy numbers have the war *less* likely to drag on if the US continues arms shipments
You're right, my bad - I re-frame my critique of Scott's example: It manages to be over-complex and under-complex at the same time. Under-complex as decisions of this category have to take a lots and lots of other variables into account - incl. the infamous "known and unknown unknowns". Whether Putin may or may not like to use a tactical nuclear weapon - better call Xi. And over-complex: can one imagine Trump or Biden or ... to study a chart of 50+ interdependent probabilities and do their Bayesian calculations? "some exciting idea(s) for making their product more policy-relevant", indeed. Not holding my breath.
Even restricted scandal markets seem terrible. "Will John Doe be found to have committed fraud?" strengthens the "John Doe <-> fraud" link in people's minds (including subconsciously), in search engines, and in future AIs' training data. It will also contribute to a "no smoke without fire" effect among normies and indeed anyone who stumbles across John Doe's fraud-scandal market in isolation without knowing the broader context.
Not if such markets were there for every more-or-less public figure. Of course there's a chicken-and-egg problem in getting from here to there.
> Current law includes the following provision on event contracts, [banning]:
I think this is a slightly bad / misleading summary. The whole point of that section is that the current law does *not* ban these things, but merely that it gives the CFTC the power discretion / authority to ban contracts which involve these.
With the current summary, the follow-up sentence after the list, namely "So the CFTC may ban certain prohibited categories.", makes little sense.
>If you have a better idea for how to run stocks, leave it in the comments here and they’ll probably see it.
How about sentiment analysis using a hard-to-manipulate source like Google News coverage, highly viewed social media, Wikipedia, etc.?
You could define a "sentiment index" equal to, say, log(sum([content.views * content.sentiment for content in pieces_of_content]))
You could also impute an index by randomly polling users on which things they like better than other things, then backsolve numbers which fit with the rank orderings that users give.
Once you've identified a method to create an index for any person/thing/etc. then you'd need a method to bring its price in line with reality while also allowing speculation. Perpetual futures are one approach. Or overlapping quarterly/annual futures.
Or, idea I just had -- make it so every day, there's an 0.1% chance that the asset gets a 24-hour "liquidity event" where people are allowed to buy/sell an unlimited amount of the person's stock, at their current sentiment index (as computed by an algorithm). Of course, people should be able to set up buy/sell orders in advance to take advantage of liquidity events, so they don't need to log into Manifold every day. You could configure the % daily chance of a liquidity event based on the rough timescale that you'd like to be forecasting on.
BTW, if the Manifold team is reading this -- I actually think that giving people a way to bet on memes could be a way to drive a huge amount of user growth.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MemeEconomy/ has 1.7 million users, and it's not even an actual meme economy, just a joke subreddit. The demand is clearly there.
Basically what you'll want is a way for users to generate arbitrary data pipelines which pull search results from social media/Google News/etc. and compute some sort of index out of it. Or pageview counts from relevant pages on Wikipedia/Know Your Meme/whatever else you can think of.
For meme templates like Socially Awkward Penguin or whatever, the "index value" of the asset could be equal to the log of the cumulative pageviews on, say, Know Your Meme. Since the "index value" only ever goes up, you could make it so people can always sell at the current index value. Then the asset price could be determined by minting and auctioning fresh stock on an ongoing basis. To incentivize the creation of new assets (and build virality into the platform), you could make it so that the person who creates the market gets the proceeds from the auction. (In order to avoid having your site being overwhelmed with assets, maybe they'd have to pay a small fee as a setup cost.)
BTW, Google says the fantasy sports market is valued at over $20 billion, so that's another interesting area that you could potentially expand into.
Actually for memes like Socially Awkward Penguin, I might remove the "log" part and have a different currency that people use to play with memes. Then expect that currency to experience rapid inflation. That's more fun, for people to win really huge when they correctly bet on an obscure meme that manages to gain traction.
To prevent the first big winner from monopolizing all the meme auctions going forwards, you could make it so every user gets to choose a fixed number of freebie memes from the meme auctions on a weekly basis.
Haha thanks for the ideas! r/MemeEconomy is cool -- I have wanted to trade before on my personal sense of what memes are up and coming, or just discover what's trending today in a more legible way.
Fantasy sports is probably a less good fit for us (lots of competition, not in our areas of interest, and doesn't add much value to the world)
Glad to help.
You're probably right about fantasy sports, but it could still be a useful case study to look at. I just searched on google for "fantasy sports market intelligence" and found a few reports which might be worth buying. I think this kind of info could be critical for positioning Manifold to grow to a $1B+ valuation -- my understanding is that the most important tip to succeed in business is to be in a rapidly growing industry. So if you can recreate fantasy sports for some other area like music say, you could make it so forecasting reaches a huge new audience and influences a bunch more people. Just brainstorming here.
Ah, interesting - I do like the idea of placing fantasy trades/investing into upcoming albums, or other kinds of pop culture (tv shows, artists).
Eventually the market gets something right, then you can reach out to journalists and say "hey you know that big hit show the entire internet is talking about? traders on our site predicted it would be a sleeper hit way back in March. here's a link to the shows that traders on our site are betting on currently, tell readers to click if they want to try a show that's obscure and potentially underrated"
If you get big enough, you could sell services to movie execs trying to figure out whether a show should be funded based on a script or pilot episode. The entire business of hollywood is gambling on (heavy-tailed?) entertainment concepts, a 10% improvement in forecasting accuracy has the potential to deliver enormous value, in theory at least.
Wonder what's going on with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Stock_Exchange
Lots of hits for on Google for site:overcomingbias.com hollywood stock exchange
This post suggests that the markets should only be for concepts that haven't been funded yet, or the movie studios will dislike you: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/11/zitzewitz-the-wise.html Maybe the move is to annoy them initially to get their attention, then strike a deal where you pivot to focus on helping them forecast unfunded concepts. I'll bet lots of people would find it fun to play movie exec in their spare time, watching low-budget trailers for hypothetical movies and predicting which ones could be big.
>When I first looked into this a few weeks ago, a few conspiracy-related prediction markets gave pretty high predictions, because people weren’t sure if the market creators would resolve them honestly, which naturally pushes the price towards 50.
Maybe Manifold should add an option so that when you create a market, you can nominate one or more other users to be the resolvers for that market.
At the beginning of your post you mention hostility to prediction markets from communities that handle classified nuclear information. Perhaps germane to this, a (now deceased) friend was a physicist who worked at a government research establishment that handled highly-classified information. He once told me that the quality of the science done in the unclassified part of the institution was FAR higher than that in the classified part, a phenomenon he attributed to the lack of open critique and review.
What does Scott mean by alpha? He's used it in the Bay Area posts a few times as well, but my attempts to get Google to answer this question just get me links about alpha males, which I don't think is relevant.
Google something like "stock market alpha". That should get you things like this https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/alpha.asp
Thank you!
https://twitter.com/search?q=%22no%20alpha%20left%22%20from%3Atszzl&src=typed_query&f=live
The 'What percentage of US electricity will be produced by solar power in 2030' is slightly misleading. It's something that segues into 'What percentage of US energy.....' in many people's minds.
But instead of solar power being four percent of US energy, it is currently nearer one percent.
Solar enthusiasts aren't keen on the distinction, though I think it's important to realise that solar is unlikely to produce more than two percent (of US energy) by 2030. A wild success would be three percent, so its impact will remain trivial, at least for a few decades.
You also sometimes get elisions of the distinction between nameplate capacity -- what the installation could in theory provide, assuming everything works perfectly, the sun is shining all day at the summer solstice -- and what it actually provides, which is typically 20-30% of nameplate capacity for solar. This compare to ~60-65% for gas and ~90% for nuclear, so it makes a significant difference: it means to replace X GWh of nuke electricity you need to build 5X GWh of solar.
Hi Scott and ACX community!
We at Futuur are fans, and created a category of markets inspired by the ACX 2023 prediction contest:
https://futuur.com/q/tag/astral-codex-ten-2023-prediction-contest
These markets are available in both real money (crypto) and play money (note that forecasts
generated for each are independent).
We'd love to hear any feedback folks might have, as well as suggestions for new markets.
Thanks & happy forecasting!
Thank you! I was hoping for a real money market on these questions. I'll mention it in the next Open Thread.
Hey Scott,
Would you be interested in a chat with Polymarkets founder Shayne Coplan?
"My 2022 Calibration" Now that it is fixed it and understandable, would it be correct to say that you really don't have a good understanding of the difference between being 60% confident and 90% confident in your prediction?
I'd liked to see your "Of my 40% predictions" (and 30%, 20%, etc) results, to see if your blind spot is symmetric.
Also how often was did the event happen for all binary predictions? Is there a bias in how prediction questions resolve - for example, mostly they happen or mostly they don't or happening or not happening is random?
Since "40% yes" equals "60% no", I imagine Scott is simply scoring the higher-percentage version of each of his predictions.
Is he?
While it is true that 40% yes is equivalent to 60% no, there is a framing bias that affects how people evaluate situations. See Kahneman and Tversky et al
As far as I can tell, from past prediction events, Scott's almost perfectly calibrated? his calibration line was like, a perfect diagonal
The reality is that "prediction", no matter how well it works is often wildly inappropriate for the task at hand. The fact that we are getting better at it makes it all the more dangerous.
A lot of times, we let our brains think we are predicting something, when what we are supposed to be doing is gathering all the actual evidence about a given possibility, and seeing where it stands. The distinction is huge.
(1) Medvedev on Irish reunification - according to ST: TNG, it'll happen next year:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Irish_Unification_of_2024
(2) Scandal markets cause scandal - whoever could have guessed? Unless you're a tabloid newspaper, this kind of venture makes little sense.
(3) "Instead, we serve as the sole liquidity provider and counterparty." Well, that cannot possibly go wrong!
https://www.coindesk.com/price/ftx-token/
Idea for stocks: team (maybe with some outside input) gets together once a year to order all the figures in order of status or influence or whatever. Market is on what the index of figure X will be, from (say) 1-10 if there are 10 stock markets.
Scott, for a market resolution on Manifold - could you confirm if this is your old mastodon account? https://schelling.pt/@scottalexander
Yes, it is.
It seems quite probable that the "unmoored" status stock eventually won't track the status, but only the perceived future probability of the stock. Very vulnerable if majority of Manifold users at some point decides that is its about "lolz", not Musk popularity, or that small values are now good instead of large values, or something equally silly..
Not sure if the cap at 100% is a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand, it doesn't make obvious sense: One can sort of imagine that a person may have a zero status (lowest possible), but can they have a full 100% status?
On the other hand, a hard cap at 100% might have an useful purpose as an inbuilt check against bubble -> crash behavior. Every market participant must ask themselves "is the current growth sustainable" because at some point it must it hit 100%. And if growth is very fast, it will hit it very soon.
On the third hand, if MUSKSTATUS2000 (launched in 2000) is already at 90%, but you still think Musk will become many times more popular when Mars colony succeeds, is there anything stopping you launching another token, MUSKSTATUS2023, initially trading at 2%
Re: policy
This entire area is nonsense.
The original sin here is the notion that policy makers objectively choose and promote policies based on transparent public benefit or some such textbook naïveté.
The real world of policy making involving pushing for agendas in conflict with other agendas.
Nobody involved in policy wants accuracy or objectivity or whatever. Only people outside of policy making want to break this monopoly - much like the crypto banking idiots. And much like the crypto banking idiots who refuse to understand that the speed and function of the present system is a benefit to incumbents - not an obstruction for them - their path to resort will never materialize.
As someone who works in policy I mostly agree. The people making policy very often don't really care much about the facts predictions even when they are available.
I sadly, and with grudging admiration, have to agree with your view.
Almost nobody (in government or in their own lives) has clear plans and goals, much less the long attention span to pursue them. Getting employees of any org to look and think beyond their own short-term personal needs requires really good and consistent leadership, with said leadership even accepting that people need some selfish-status-wins for themselves along the way, even if those skirmishes act as drag or barnacles against the overall goals.
Amazon is already delivering "some products" by drone.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/amazon-begins-drone-deliveries-in-california-and-texas/
I was looking into that, as someone who teaches at Texas A&M and thus spends a lot of time in College Station, TX. I'm not actually aware of anyone who has received a package this way. Maybe this is something I can actually use Nextdoor for, to ask if anyone has, and how it has worked. (Amazon has been mentioning this possibility for months, but I've learned very little from local media, only from national media, and a couple local news stories mentioning the relevant city council approvals going through.)
But the fact that none of the national media stories has even a one-line quote from someone who has received a package this way suggests that maybe they haven't actually figured it out yet, even though they've officially launched.
I don't think we blame normies enough, hating someone over a Halloween costume or something they did as a teenager is a massive moral flaw.
You see it most clearly with women in revenge porn cases, the ex-boyfriend who releases images is rightly seen as the villain but the boss who fires a teacher who is the victim of an abusive ex, isn't seen to have blame.
Normie mobs hating on minor infractions means we can't have nice things like prediction markets on scandals and we should be angry at normie mobs.
You're morally right, but what do you plan to do about it? Blame is a useful thing when you can allocate it to someone you can influence, but we can't influence mobs (I won't even say normie mobs, because I don't think it's exclusive.)
>but what do you plan to do about it?
COVID-2024!
"Normies"? So we are meant to take it from this that you're not a normie, you're smarter and better and superior to the ordinary person?
Yes you are, and no you're not. Haven't there been enough scandals and witch-hunts and throwing under buses within the superior higher-thinking rationalist circles to disabuse you of this sneering snobbery?
Well that is quite an overreaction.
Try blaming normies more.
Give me a definition of "normie", and don't make it "you know, those 90 IQ midwit idiots".
I know that ordinary people can be dense and terrible (I'm an ordinary person myself) but by the living God, if there's anything that makes me want to take up the banner of Chesterton in defence of the ordinary person, it's this kind of cheap gibe. "Aw wossa matta, it wuz only a joke, you got no sensa huma?"
Strange how it's always the unfunny people who claim that since nobody laughs at their jokes, it's because other people have no sense of humour.
FWIW, my definition of "normie" is a person whose mind is optimized more for maximizing the benefits of human social interaction than for maximizing their understanding of the material universe, as compared to "nerds" who are the opposite. A difference in style of thinking, rather than degree, and there exist both genius normies and midwit nerds.
The benefits of human social interaction being quite large, I would never count "normies" as *generally* inferior. But mobilizing a hate-mob over somebody's adolescent Halloween costume or whatever, is I think a failure mode of normie social status-seeking, and nerds will ignore that nonsense (while finding their own ways to screw things up).
Is it actually nonsense if it helps you get laid?
I'm not sure that mobilizing hate-mobs has ever been a good strategy for getting laid. I mean, I assume *someone* is scoring with activist chicks or whatever, but that trades against against scoring with girls who are impressed by the Maserati you bought when you made your first million at twenty-eight, or whatever.
But ignoring *all* of the effective ways to get laid, e.g. making your first million at twenty-eight but still driving an old Camry because flashy cars are "illogical", would be one of the ways nerds are likely to find to screw things up for themselves.
>Having a scandal market on someone incentivizes people to dig up every scandal they’ve ever been involved in or accused of (including false allegations). Outside Encyclopedia Dramatica and KiwiFarms, most people don’t have a convenient list of every embarrassing and reputation-lowering thing they’ve ever done in their lives in one place.
Do I get any points for predicting the existence of scandal market short sellers 3 months ago?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-twitter-chaos-edition/comment/10616137
The person who set up Scott's scandal market replied to me and said it would be neat if somebody hired a private detective to stalk people who have scandal markets, but there wasn't enough volume. I feel like we saw entirely different things in this hypothetical!
I think you need to have a very rosily optimistic view of human nature to imagine a scandal market would be a good thing. "This will encourage whistleblowers to reveal abuses and will assure people that they can have confidence in institution, company, or person!"
No, it will encourage reputation shredding. Pick somebody with a good reputation, put it up "Will Dudley Do-Good be involved in a scandal within the next six months?" and while everybody is going "Dudley? That wonderful guy who helps lame dogs over stiles? Of course not!", go digging up the dirt as far back as you like. Even Dudley probably has *something* he said or did, or even guilt by association, that can be used against him.
Put the worst possible interpretation on your cherry-picked items taken out of context and disseminate them amongst the kind of screaming online mobs that can be spun up. Then sit back and profit!, because nobody said the scandal had to be *true*, just that Dudley would be involved in one.
And if you can't find anything, invent something. Same as above.
Because even if it's not true, you have a ready-baked scandal to win on the market. And Dudley's reputation is now ruined, because most people will never hear the retractions or factchecking, all they will have is a vague idea "Oh yeah, isn't that the guy who was supposed to have done X?"
Like the various versions of the story about Lyndon B. Johnson:
"US President Lyndon B Johnson famously told an aide to spread a story about a Congressional rival having a proclivity for pigs. When the aide protested that it wasn’t true, LBJ replied: “Of course it ain’t true, but I want to make the son-of-a-bitch deny it ….”
The scandal doesn't need to be true, you just need Dudley to make a public pronouncement denying he ever did X. and bob's your uncle.
And the end result is increased cynicism and decreased trust, because if Dudley can be accused of X, *anybody* might be a hypocrite or secretly doing/saying/thinking bad things. Now the next time someone puts up "Will Saintly Saint be involved in a scandal within the next six months?" everybody goes "If they're asking this, then there must be something bad about to come out about Saintly".
Re: making stocks more than a Ponzi scheme. It could be tied to some real measurement of the person's "status", e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_Score. The stock would have to be a prediction of some standardized measurement guaranteed to be made at regular intervals by a trusted party.
Metaculus stocks as aggregate scores:
Each stock represents the question 'will questions in {this list} pay out?'. have a corresponding list of questions relevant to that person. Ex: Elon Musk would have questions such as 'will humans be on mars by 2035' and 'will the twitter deal wind up being profitable', where a more influencer-type might have questions about their follower count etc. The important thing is to break down why each public figure has their social clout, and judge them on those metrics with lower-scope questions.
you can make stocks 'reset' once per year, or devise a new model that pays off 'dividends' but is persistent.
“some people might genuinely need to hedge political events”
There is enough there to last far beyond the next cycle, especially considering the real question of when a derivative is actually second derivative rather than something else.
Here's an idea for “stock ratings” of people, given that percent ratings seem like they would not work.
What about rating them the way the rating agencies do: AAA . . .D? You can anchor each rating with descriptors appropriate to people rather than stocks: “ Reliable,” “clever”, “a good bet,””likely/unlikely to fuck up” etc. There are various ways to turn this ordinal scale into a numerical one — I’m sure many have played around with ways to do this with stock ratings, so as to make them more amenable to calculations of various kinds. Look and see what all those clever people have done.
Seems to me there are 2 factors that are determinants an individual’s “stock,” as we normally think of it: good/bad and strong/weak. (By the way, those are the 2 main factors that fall out of factor analysis of adjectives describing people.)
-Good/bad= right/wrong, kind/cruel, helpful/destructive, sane/crazy etc.The stock rating measure seems like a reasonable approximation of this.
-Strong/weak= how big a deal someone is, how much influence they have, how well known. Seems like things like Google searches and Twitter mentions are a good measure of this.
So maybe use strong/weak as a multiplier of good/bad measure. Makes pretty good intuitive sense. No matter how good or bad someone’s impact is, their personal stock isn’t valuable if they have very little impact.
Walk into a betting shop in England and you can wager on just about anything sports, horses, elections, what have you.
https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/next-uk-general-election/most-seats
I think Medvedev states what he's doing:
> Many come up with futuristic hypotheses, as if competing to single out the wildest, and even the most absurd ones.
I would interpret it as mockery of most of these yearly predictions, which (unlike your competition, or something like the GJP) are seeing attention rather than accuracy.
To the point on Congress having created the CFTC to regulate derivatives contracts: let's not forget that there have been exactly two cases where Congress did, in fact, intervene to ban futures contracts explicitly: onions, and motion picture box office ticket sales (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act). Clearly the height of well-considered market regulation.
Doesn't Musk doubling move him from 50% (1:1) to 66,(6)% (2:1)?
Is the substack susceptible to spamming? I got this email purporting to be from Astral Codex Ten ( <forum@mg1.substack.com>) regarding Astral Codex Ten replied to a comment on Mantic Monday 1/30/2023.:
"Let's discuss👆I've got something to introduce to you 💚📈 Text㈩[number removed]"
Creators of scandal markets on Manifold could set resolution criteria that attempt to mimic the Character and Fitness process for people applying to be lawyers in the US. This process varies by state.
For example, California has these Moral Character criteria: https://www.calbar.ca.gov/Admissions/Moral-Character/Factors-and-Conduct. Will failing/passing those criteria closely match a yes/no on 'a significant number of Scott's friends, readers, and/or professional aquaintances [sic] are angry at him or want to stop associating with him'? Probably not.
By the way, are any of the blogs in these interlinked communities written by lawyers?
umm ok. This thread stuff is going beyond my marginal computer literacy. I understand email, not so much modern media. No idea whether this will respond to your note.
Most likely Medvedev writes comments for an audience of 1. It's an exercise in predicting what Putin would like to hear.
If you want to have "stocks" on a prediction market, there should be dividends associated with them. The economics of that are clearly going to be easier with fake-money, but a system where the top people in terms of "positive buzz" get a return should be possible.
In other news, I started a prediction market on Biden ending the COVID emergency: https://manifold.markets/AlexPower/will-the-covid-emergency-in-the-us . Once the odds stabilize, I might be interested in real-money action at the betting line.
The problem of getting experts to consider the value of prediction markets strikes me as similar to the problem of getting baseball players to use analytics to improve their game. This came about through two mechanisms:
1. Coaches talked to the statisticians, and figured out how to translate the data into something the players could understand and accept.
2. Younger players grew up in an analytics world, and were more accepting of the data from the start.
I suspect right now prediction markets need to identify the coaching layer, the people in the expert community who understand the data, but speak the language of the experts.
Leaving Robin Hanson’s idea here re status tracking
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2022/12/status-app-concept.html
Thoughts about status stocks.
INTEREST rates are bounded between 0 and 1 for the term of the instrument.
We PAY more attention to (are INTERESTed in) people with higher STATUS.
Short term (~ 2weeks to 11 months) INTEREST instruments are DISCOUNTED.
Long term INTEREST instruments PAY a coupon rate periodically.
The (English) vocabulary of bills, notes, and bonds corresponds more to celebrity status than stocks.