>I think the advantage of iterating it this way is that you can amplify small changes. Suppose that right now, the market thinks there’s a 50% chance that America will beat China in 2100. But I am a great economic analyst who knows things the market doesn’t, which allow me to determine that the real chance is 52%. Leaving money in a market for five years to make 4% return doesn’t sound great. So we could do something like make people bet on whether the 2025 market would be <40%, 40 - 45%, 45-50%, 50-55%, 55-60%, or >60%. This way if you’re even directionally right you can double your money in five years. I bet there are more clever mathematical ways to do this which would give you finer-grained resolution.
Essentially these are stock options with fairly high premiums dated anywhere from one to three years. These exactly solve your issue of amplifying small changes, as the price of an existing options contract automatically reflects changes in market consensus.
As an example, a Ford 01/24 20C will cost you $4.8 https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/f/option-chain in premium, while a 01/23 20C runs you $3.65. If you think Ford will go up more than decay by, say, 06/22 (fairly low over these time periods) you can buy one of these options and, if Ford goes up, sell for more than you bought it for whenever you want to, regardless of the actual expiry date.
There's the possibility for a party-destroying primary in 2024 if Biden walks away. Harris is "in line" and is a treasured symbol to the activist identitarian wing that has taken over so much of the party; she's also one of the least popular politicians in the country. If she's nominated she'll likely be crushed by Ron Desantis or whoever, and it would essentially be a do-over of 2016 - nominating a deeply unpopular candidate who is constantly defended along identitarian lines. But if the opposition coalesces around Buttigieg then you'll get the Bernie Bro vs Hillary Stan war again, only much harsher. Not great!
I need to start checking Metaculus more. I was hoping to find something about Rittenhouse on Polymarket, but it didn't come up. Watching the trial has been rough. I'm not looking forward to the news following the results of the trial.
The networks basically have three classifications (in a 2-person race): Called for A, Called for B, Too Close to Call. They don't want to deal with things like "favored", and given what we saw in the 2020 presidential election, I'm inclined to agree with them. The NBC and ABC decision desks won't call a race unless they're at least 99.5 confident in the winner. PredictIt and Polymarket weren't at that point yet, although prediction markets can be a little wonky around the extremes.
Scary detail in that "Expert forecasts vs. reality" tweet that's easy to miss (and complicates the story of systematic mis-calibration a bit): up through 2008 or so the life expectancy projections consistently erred on the low side. Since then they've consistently erred on the high side.
In fairness to traditional media, part of the issue is that their standards of proof are super high. They make hundreds of predictions per election, and they get one wrong maybe once every decade or so. They probably do know that the chance of a particular candidate winning is 98% (or whatever), but by their standard that just isn’t good enough, because that would lead to many more missed calls.
I have seen the third graphic of XiXiDu from people who claimed that the graphic is nonsense and that XiXiDu got it completely wrong. The many horizontal lines are not predictions. Rather they are summed up plans of governments of various countries on how much solar capacity the governments plan to fund in the next years.
I didn't verify the claim, so if someone can say something about it (or about the other three graphs), that would be nice!
What does the prediction markets say about Trump running for - and winning - the Republican nomination for US president in 2024?
I ask, since back in 2020 I betted a bottle of good italian wine plus a dinner at a nice italian restaurant that he will run & get the nomination in 2024. (Hedging, really)
More generally, I am worried that if none of the sane US political people pick up obviously sensible policy proposals, like immigration control of irregulars & compensating those who lose out of economic globalisation, then a window opens for the insane to take power. Like in Russia 1917 and Germany 1934. Not as dramatic as there, but still.
May sanity prevail among the not-insane in the US. It is important also for Europeans, and everyone else for that matter.
To be honest, I don't see how reciprocal forecasting is supposed to work in game-theoretic sense. Normal prediction market has nice and obvious Nash equilibrium: just predict the probability as best you can. Not so in reciprocal forecasting. From what I can tell, a strategy closest to optimum is to shout at loud as you can "Let's all vote for X" and then vote for X. If it is even possible to do this without communicating with others by forecasting the most trivial outcome, like answer 50% to any question.
Iterative prediction is far more plausible. You don't even need to do the iteration if you ensure two conditions: 1. The stakes are freely tradable at any time. 2. While the prediction stays the same, the value of the stake is growing at least as fast as some default assets like S&P 500. If the second condition is not fulfilled, then unless the market is extremely wrong, long-term it is more profitable to invest in other asserts. This can be achieved by, you guessed it, having the market operator invest the stakes in that very investment product. This could even happen automatically by making the stakes in some cryptocurrency like ETH, if you believe that ETH will continue growing at least as fast as S&P 500.
Biden himself has said some things about being a one term president. Mixed with his age and his low approval ratings, it's not surprising that the markets are looking for alternatives.
It's a sad state of affairs that the candidates available are as poor as they are. I don't think any of the listed candidates can beat Trump, let alone a more solid Republican that doesn't make half the country reflexively convulse at hearing their name. Those that excite the base scare the middle, and vice versa. The fact that Hillary Clinton appears in the group is certainly not a great sign for Democrats. It's early yet, though, and maybe some new candidates or a different consensus candidate can still emerge. Or again, maybe Biden turns things around and doesn't get any health issues and decides to run again. Obviously I'm not expecting that to all happen. Even if he does turn around his approval ratings, that might be a great time to retire with a good track record and leave a legacy, rather than chancing that he'll make it to 85 in one of the most grueling jobs in the world.
Biden would likely lose right now to most Republican candidates, though he has a few years to potentially turn around his unpopularity. Harris is riding her own unpopularity as well as Biden's. Interestingly enough is the recent soft takedown articles from left-leaning mainstream news sources. They don't seem to like her either, and may be paving the way to have another candidate in 2024. Buttigieg is not popular with the farther left, and most of the others are multi-time losers who are even older than they were the last time they ran. AOC is too inexperienced to run a nationwide campaign, and too limited in her popularity to unite the Democrats. She's a darling of the far left and young people, but unless she comes sharply to the center, she's going to scare away a lot of the middle and independents.
I read that list as Democrats being in real trouble in 2024. Trump could be divisive enough to give some of them a chance, maybe, but a better candidate seems like a pretty obvious win for Republicans at the moment.
I'm curious to see if the Reddit prediction feature works. Getting prediction tokens seems like it would be good for clout in a subreddit, but the strength of that incentive probably varies a lot across Reddit. Too bad PredictIt and PolyMarket don't have subreddits. If Reddit can beat a PredictIt market on a question that matters, that would be really surprising, because seeking clout on a subreddit would be a better incentive than money to reveal hidden information and make accurate predictions
>I’ve heard a lot of stuff about the prosecutor really bungling this one, but mostly from conservatives who I would have expected to hate the prosecutor anyway, so it’s good to get objective confirmation that yeah, this isn’t going anywhere.
I'm not saying the prosecutor is doing a great job, but the main disconnect here is between "he did something bad" vs "he did something illegal." The law sets out specific criteria about what counts as self defence, and I think Rittenhouse both was irresponsible and definitely hits the bar for self-defence here.
Think of it as similar to QI things, where people are shocked cops aren't convicted for doing bad things. We wrote laws/made SCOTUS decisions saying you can do *extremely* bad things without it being a crime. I don't think the prosecutor screwed up, I think he's unconvictable on the merits of the law.
Another in the "experts get things repeatedly wrong" category: all the big investment banks have teams of analysts who try to predict how much profit public companies will make in the future. It is well known that these forecasts are consistently wrong -- specifically they are upward biased. Interestingly this bias persists despite there being a significant financial interest in getting the numbers right, since funds often rely on these figures when making stock picks.
One theory for why this is so is that the analysts intentionally publish bullish forecasts to flatter company management, which helps them e.g. get meetings with the executive team.
>and decided the best paper out there was Brauner et al
I'd question whether these kinds of questions can be measured by science (or superforecasters) at all, but I'm a bit confused that "closely correlated estimates" is supposed to be impressive. The point of the estimates isn't to be closely correlated, but to take approximately the same values, no?
"Their solution is to make teams very big and full of smart people, so that it’s unlikely other teams will miss something."
Because I am an incurable smartarse, I can't help feeling about prediction markets as per "The Napoleon of Notting Hill":
“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.”
RE: the media all claiming the Virginia race was too close to call - well, the final result was Youngkin with 50.6% of the vote and McAuliffe with 48.6%, so it was pretty close. But my cynical interpretation was "These are liberal to left media news organisations, naturally they will be biased towards 'No, it cannot be that the uncouth Republican will triumph in Blue Virginia, so we will not give the oxygen of publicity to these threats to American democracy".
I'm going to push back on Erik Hoel's prediction "#17. People and culture will become boring." TLDR: Because it will be possible for a single individual to create entire movies or series in much the same way a single person can create a book right now, so we'll have an explosion of new ideas in media.
He argues:
>The panopticon of social media and state control will lead to cultural stagnation. We already see early hints of this. Consider the remakes of older movies: 2050 will be a stew of remakes of remakes, and familiar and boring intellectual property (like Star Wars) will be king. Creativity vivacity will suffer, especially in the arts and humanities. The coming half-century will be a great one for innovations in finance, engineering, space travel, and artificial intelligence. It will be a terrible one for the arts and basic scientific advancements (like a new physics), for such advancements require iconoclastic and creative lone individuals. This prediction is already augured by judging the 2000-2020 creative period overall in areas like art, music, literature, film, and scientific discoveries, and finding it severely lacking compared to, say, 1950-1970.
I think the reason we've seen less creativity is for economic reasons, not cultural ones. It's just so much money and work to make (and market) a good movie that studios play it safe and mostly stick to works they know will be an economic success.
But by 2050, AI will have made it so a single hard-working individual will be able to create an entire movie by themselves. The computer will render the scenes described and the 'author' will be able to direct changes until their creative vision is fulfilled.
This will make movies like youtube circa 2008 when there's all kinds of new opportunities for creative people and tiny little indie director/authors will go viral. Eventually the movie media will look more like our print media. There will be well established author/directors making a new movie every couple of years in far more genres than exist in current cinema. And it will be much easier to be profitable with creative niche projects so more people will be willing to try them or create them for art's sake or as a hobby. If you only need 20,000 people to purchase tickets to a movie to make it profitable, it opens up the room considerably for more creative media.
At the same time, VR will open up a whole new space for new experiences. It's not a coincidence that early cinema was an age of creativity as it takes a lot of experimentation to figure out what works. VR is going to go through the same process as it slowly becomes a major source of our media.
And so eventually, we'll consider the years from around 2040-2060 to be a golden age of creativity.
"I guess at the limit this is just banning insider trading, which is supposed to be good."
I think most economist think banning insider trading is bad for getting the market to reflect the best guess of where the price should be because it is leaving out a piece of true information held by the insider. So it does make the prediction market work worse.
I think the argument against insider trading is more of a principal agent problem. Should the insider be using his privileged position to be making money of the stock holders who he works for.
"even if you double your money, 100% return over eighty years is a bad investment."
Honestly, this is a problem over even two years--a 10%ish opportunity cost is a lot.
But can't this be resolved by purchasing conditional shares in some portfolio where the shares are traded freely? Like an SP500 index conditional share?
So I purchase a conditional share in a "China GDP 2100 vs. US GDP 2100" SP500 index fund. The value of my share increases in lockstep with the increase in the fund, which over the course of 100 years is a fine return. Unconditional fund shares can also be bought/sold as usual. In 2101 the conditional shares will turn into real shares, or into nothing, depending on whether the condition was met or not.
This seems to solve the liquidity and returns issues both.
(Tax loss harvesting from losers might skew some numbers temporarily, but that's even a good thing in that it provides non-arbitrage liquidity)
But I'm obviously not the first person to think of this, so...why isn't it standard?
The media has a well known incentive to always describe races as closer than they actually are so that people will keep breathlessly reading updates. The same thing happened in the 2012 presidential election.
The biggest weakness in Forecasting today is the unknown unknown, meaning, getting the most relevant questions forecasted in the first place. For instance, it's more relevant to the world to forecast the probability a pandemic will occur in the next 3 years then to predict the level of active Covid cases in 3 months, given a known Covid pandemic. Also would have been extremely useful if forecasters had foreseen the supply bottlenecks 6 months in advance (because then they would have been less likely to have happened, given that forecasting markets had high enough visibility. No, this wouldn't have been a paradox: the odds could have risen and declined over time as the forecasting market spilled information into the market market.
"Prediction markets reached near-certainty about the winner while traditional media was still talking about how un-call-ably close it was. Apparently having hundreds of people all incentivized to give precise probability estimates very slightly earlier than the next guy, works better than having a few journalists who are scared people will make fun of them if they jump the gun."
Compare this to how PredictIt wasn't willing to call the 2020 election for Biden until long, long after it was obvious that Biden had won. I think a better model might just be that PredictIt and some similar markets tend to err in the direction of Republican candidates for contingent historical reasons.
Amplifying small changes can make the smart people lose all their money faster when markets temporarily move against them.
Also, depending on the exact mechanism for resolving each 5-year market, which you don't really explain, the resolution could be manipulated. If there is a lot of open interest on the expiring contract relative to the volume on the new contract, people can profitably manipulate the price of the new contract to manipulate the settlement of the old one.
> Might prediction markets be lurching to a false certainty too soon? I used to think this, I tried betting on that thesis a bunch of times, and I always lost money. I guess realistically we can’t know for sure that they’re not overconfident until we’ve tested their 98% probability fifty times, but I nominate someone else to lose their money for the remaining 40-something experiments.
At the beginning of November last year, Biden was predicted to win probably but low-confidence. On the night of the third they were medium-high confidence (but less than 90%) that Trump would win. By the time they got to 95% on any question I think they were usually right, but they definitely were prematurely confident.
Sanders is vastly overrated. Unless people are taking early cheap bets to score off his small but extant cult base. Warren is immensely overrated as well. They should both be at 1, as should Clinton. AOC is slightly overrated. Buttigieg is underrated. Harris overrated and Biden underrated. The real race is in dark horses who haven't even talked about it yet. Also the PredictIt markets are notoriously poorly moderated/modified.
Regarding Hoel's prediction #14, here's my honest counterprediction:
30% nuclear war by 2030.
I'm not about to bet in a prediction market on this, and I indeed predict that prediction markets will predict against it. This is because all predictions on prediction markets are conditional on the prediction market itself continuing to exist, which is highly correlated with the outcome of some questions. But it's why I don't live in a large city any more.
On street votes, it's worth clarifying that the even most ardent advocates do not think that ‘most’ people will vote for them. Even the Strong Suburbs report linked to in the text above does not estimate an overall take-up rate of more than about 3%. The estimated price elasticities implied that that 3% would exhaust the economic potential for profitable densification. The potential to add more homes well in low-density suburbs is so great that that low take-up can mean the production of a considerably higher volume of new homes than happens under many current zoning systems. Many suburban lots are easily capable of producing 5x (sometimes 10x) the current amount of housing on them, even without going above three or four floors.
There may be an analogy with cryonics here. I think one survey showed that the people who had signed up for cryonics assigned an even lower probability to cryonics working than did the people who had not signed up. The former group had just looked at the numbers and concluded that the potential upside was greater than the downside.
Erik Hoel's prediction #1 (that there will be a Martian colony in 2050) is not only embarrassingly ridiculous, it doesn't even follow his dictum of -
"If you want to predict the future accurately, you should be an incrementalist.."
An incrementalist would look at what proportion of the "getting a human being back from Mars, alive" problem has been solved in the 50 years since we put a man on the moon. And the answer is just a few %. The task, with current technology, is not remotely possible - which is why NASA talks (or fantasizes) about nuclear propulsion in space or setting up a mining industry (remotely, with robots!) on Mars to provide the fuel to power a return journey.
The irony is that after criticizing other smart people for "..imagining a sci-fi technology that doesn't exist" he then goes ahead in his very first prediction and does the same. He simply "imagines" that currently completely unsolvable problems will suddenly become easy-peasy such that there will be "a city on the red planet".
No there won't! There won't be anyone on the red planet in 2050!
I'd add that I think what Elon Musk has achieved with SpaceX over the last 20 years is nothing short of incredible. But he hasn't even begun to solve the really big conundrums that make currently getting to Mars and back (for humans) completely impossible.
Scott has written in 2015 in a short fiction story about (among other things) a person who could see one month into the future:
> You resolve, on the first day of every month, to write down what you see exactly a month ahead of you. But what you will see a month ahead of you is the piece of paper on which you have written down what you see a month ahead of that. In this manner, you can relay messages back to yourself from arbitrarily far into the future – at least up until your own death.
So he has already invented iterative prediction 6 years ago!
P.S. The story is called "...and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes"
“Too close to call” means what, < 99% confidence? Because no media outlet wants to retract a call, ever, and there’s no penalty against being late with a call.
I think a lot of prediction market design problems are already solved in financial markets. Suppose you have a non-dividend paying stcok (say, Google's parent Alphabet Inc.) The fundamental value of this stock is, theoretically, a function of very distant future cashflows, it is the present value of dividends that might be paid in 20-100 years from now, when that company will stop its crazy growth and will start distributing cash to shareholders. This long (and uncertain) horizon does not prevent a liquid market in Alphabet's stock. Indeed, right now this market is able to assign a very tight range of values to this present value, $2978.00/$2979.84.
How does the financial market handle the very real impediments to prediction markets that you describe?
1) Removal of intermediary credit risk. You can be right about your prediction but the probability that a centralised provider of a prediction market will fail grows quickly with time horizon. I would not bet more than even odds that a single current centralised betting market provider will survive until 2100. So one can be right about US vs Chinese GDP in 2010 and still lose 100% on this bet when market for the chained bet #6 fails in 30 years time. This problem can be resolved by DeFI ("can be", not "has been" as I am not sure we can be that certain about existing protocols.)
2) Diverse participants time horizons. For a market to provide a liquid tight price one needs to have participants with diverse time horizons. Market for Alphabet stock is provided by people who intend to hold this stock for less than a second. Plenty of traders hold this stock for less than a day. This should not be a problem in most prediction markets.
3) Availability of leverage. 100% return over 80 years is, indeed, a paltry reward for a correct long-term prediction. This does not create a problem for equity markets for two reasons - the mixed horizons mentioned above and availability of leverage. The money invested in a liquid contract is not frozen until contract maturity. One should be able to borrow against market value of this contract at pretty low interest rate. This is not something available today, but there is no reason for this to be unsolvable by DeFi.
4) Fragmented markets are less efficient. Equity market is much more transparent and efficient than bond and option markets. The main reason for that is that for each corporate there typically only one stock but dozens or hundreds of different bonds and thousands of options traded, so liquidity is spread much thinner. Chained iterated market, especially one with bins would fail on this count quite badly.
Thus, I do not see why a much simpler solution to a prediction market for US/China GDP in 2100 would not work better than an iterated market. On a trustworthy DeFi exchange, create a contract expiring in 2100 and settling at 0/100 depending on the binary outcome. If this contract becomes liquid enough, it will attract traders with diverse time horizons. It will be also relatively stable and it will be possible to borrow against it, so the limited return will not be major problem. To enable higher leverage, somebody might introduce options on this contract, may be even binary range options you are describing, but the contract can be perfectly liquid without them.
Ah ha! I wondered where all those new subscribers were coming from! Really and truly appreciate that shout-out Scott, as I'm a longtime fan. It's also insanely impactful to a smaller substack like mine - I think around a 20% increase in total subscribers in the ~24 hours since this post went up
Is this sarcasm? Or maybe you mean only in abstract theory?
> My only concern is that it doesn’t have the same sort of hits-you-between-the-eyes obviously-there’s-no-way-to-bias-this quality that prediction markets do.
I always thought prediction markets had the opposite quality: that they're super easy to bias. I admit I haven't kept up with the research on this, but prediction markets of real-world events lack of the property that people's predictions have to converge on the actual answer, because:
* people aren't really financially constrained by predicting wrongly, since they can just get money elsewhere and aren't going to go broke on bad predictions, so over time bad predictors will stay in the game
* adding more information (or getting closer to an event) doesn't necessarily make people better at predicting what the outcome will be, due to people's tendency to just.. be wrong, misled, or biased (not a property of some types of predictions, like things that have some random distribution, or where polling or something provides an increasingly accurate prediction of the outcome).
(arguably investment funds have the first property, for comparison, because they deal with quantities of money at which bankruptcy is a real risk.. but the real-life dynamic that old funds go broke and new ones are founded might mean that overall the market is full of funds that won't not survive actual market fluctuations over time; they've not had time to be 'weeded out' yet.)
> If there are a lot of low-quality forecasters in the tournament, then since high-quality forecasters will accurately predict that low-quality forecasters will give a low-quality answer, everyone will converge on the low-quality answer.
> They also admit this incentivizes teams to ignore “secret knowledge” that they have but which they expect other teams won’t. Their solution is to make teams very big and full of smart people, so that it’s unlikely other teams will miss something. I guess at the limit this is just banning insider trading, which is supposed to be good.
Isn't this what Bayesian Truth Serum is supposed to solve?
In the Erik Hoel link, the graph about single parenthood seems to be showing a different statistic than he says it shows (percentage of single adults who have dependent children versus percentage of children raised in single-parent homes; although these are correlated in practice, it would be theoretically possible for one of them to be close to 100% while the other was close to 0%; and both of these are different again from the percentage of children raised in single-parent homes, which the post also mentions). Also, the post refers to a percentage figure that isn't shown on the graph ("In Denmark, for instance, the total percent of single-parent households in 2019 was around ~33%"; even given the previous point and replacing "percent of single-parent households" with "percent of single adults who are parents", the graph shows about 20% of single women and about 8% of single men in 2019 were parents, so about 14% of single adults overall, so I don't know where 33% comes from).
If I saw this in a random place on the internet I'd just assume the author didn't understand what they were talking about (the first issue is similar to the widespread confusion between P(positive test|disease) and P(disease|positive test), and the ~33% could possibly have come about by thinking that the overall percentage comes from *adding* the male and female percentages, which would give 28%, possibly combined with some misreading of the chart axes to get it from 28% to 33%).
But since this was linked from ACX and recommended by Scott, and since none of the other commenters either here or there (who are clearly highly numerate and also nitpicky) have picked up on it, my prior for it being my misunderstanding is much higher.
I commented on the post asking where the figure came from (in case it was from somewhere other than the graph and I was just misreading the post as attributing it to the graph) and he replied saying it was from the graph, but didn't reply to my follow-up comment querying the issues with it.
It could be that there's some formula or heuristic (with, necessarily, a lot of demographic assumptions) that I'm unaware of, that estimates a likely percentage of single-parent households from a percentage of single adults who have children, and that feeding 14% into that gives 33%, but he doesn't mention anything like that at all.
Re the election results. Journalists, particularly 25 hour news channels like CNN have an incentive to frame everything as close as possible because if they say the result the obvious people won't tune into their live coverage. This is fairly easy to do because both campaigns will also say it's close because that encourages their voters to turn out. Nate Silver has talked about this a lot in 538 podcast and his other writing.
Yup, that's a prediction market on whether other crypto investors will buy something. And the exchange is promoting this on Twitter with Pepe the Frog memes and suggesting you missed out on 7x profits.
I don't see how anybody could think that will provide useful information.
"This is near the top of the YIMBY movement’s policy wishlist - they seem to think most people would vote for denser zoning, though I have trouble understanding their optimism."
I don't think Street Votes is near the top of the wishlist. I think that's stuff like removing zoning. But it is near the top of what seems able to pass, especially in the UK. It's not that this will make most people vote for more density, but that it's a lot better than the status quo, where there are far more veto points. I think (80%) that in Israel street votes lead to significantly more housing, largely because it allows citizens to make a load of money having their whole street upgraded at once.
>I think the advantage of iterating it this way is that you can amplify small changes. Suppose that right now, the market thinks there’s a 50% chance that America will beat China in 2100. But I am a great economic analyst who knows things the market doesn’t, which allow me to determine that the real chance is 52%. Leaving money in a market for five years to make 4% return doesn’t sound great. So we could do something like make people bet on whether the 2025 market would be <40%, 40 - 45%, 45-50%, 50-55%, 55-60%, or >60%. This way if you’re even directionally right you can double your money in five years. I bet there are more clever mathematical ways to do this which would give you finer-grained resolution.
Look into https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/leaps.asp
Essentially these are stock options with fairly high premiums dated anywhere from one to three years. These exactly solve your issue of amplifying small changes, as the price of an existing options contract automatically reflects changes in market consensus.
As an example, a Ford 01/24 20C will cost you $4.8 https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/f/option-chain in premium, while a 01/23 20C runs you $3.65. If you think Ford will go up more than decay by, say, 06/22 (fairly low over these time periods) you can buy one of these options and, if Ford goes up, sell for more than you bought it for whenever you want to, regardless of the actual expiry date.
There's the possibility for a party-destroying primary in 2024 if Biden walks away. Harris is "in line" and is a treasured symbol to the activist identitarian wing that has taken over so much of the party; she's also one of the least popular politicians in the country. If she's nominated she'll likely be crushed by Ron Desantis or whoever, and it would essentially be a do-over of 2016 - nominating a deeply unpopular candidate who is constantly defended along identitarian lines. But if the opposition coalesces around Buttigieg then you'll get the Bernie Bro vs Hillary Stan war again, only much harsher. Not great!
I need to start checking Metaculus more. I was hoping to find something about Rittenhouse on Polymarket, but it didn't come up. Watching the trial has been rough. I'm not looking forward to the news following the results of the trial.
See this twitter thread on the paper: https://twitter.com/NunoSempere/status/1458030798255296513 for why the two experiments are not talking about the same thing.
Any thoughts or updates on this question Scott?: Will this question be mentioned in an Astral Codex Ten Post in 2021?
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6554/astral-codex-ten-mentions-this-question/
I do wonder about the incentives going into those expert predictions in Short #2. Do any of them get any benefit from being right?
> (this is just the endogeneity problem, but for the future instead of the past!)
Put differently: It would seem that using conditional prediction markets to make decisions might turn you into an evidential decision theorist...
> "Too close to call", reciprocal scoring, Theranos, Ritterhouse, long-termism
Rittenhouse doesn't seem to be mentioned in the body of the post at all?
Re: “Too Close To Call”
The networks basically have three classifications (in a 2-person race): Called for A, Called for B, Too Close to Call. They don't want to deal with things like "favored", and given what we saw in the 2020 presidential election, I'm inclined to agree with them. The NBC and ABC decision desks won't call a race unless they're at least 99.5 confident in the winner. PredictIt and Polymarket weren't at that point yet, although prediction markets can be a little wonky around the extremes.
NBC: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/nbc-news-decision-desk-how-we-call-races-election-night-n1245481
ABC: https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/the-decision-desk-wont-project-the-winner-of-a-state-until-its-99-5-sure/
Scary detail in that "Expert forecasts vs. reality" tweet that's easy to miss (and complicates the story of systematic mis-calibration a bit): up through 2008 or so the life expectancy projections consistently erred on the low side. Since then they've consistently erred on the high side.
In fairness to traditional media, part of the issue is that their standards of proof are super high. They make hundreds of predictions per election, and they get one wrong maybe once every decade or so. They probably do know that the chance of a particular candidate winning is 98% (or whatever), but by their standard that just isn’t good enough, because that would lead to many more missed calls.
I have seen the third graphic of XiXiDu from people who claimed that the graphic is nonsense and that XiXiDu got it completely wrong. The many horizontal lines are not predictions. Rather they are summed up plans of governments of various countries on how much solar capacity the governments plan to fund in the next years.
I didn't verify the claim, so if someone can say something about it (or about the other three graphs), that would be nice!
What does the prediction markets say about Trump running for - and winning - the Republican nomination for US president in 2024?
I ask, since back in 2020 I betted a bottle of good italian wine plus a dinner at a nice italian restaurant that he will run & get the nomination in 2024. (Hedging, really)
More generally, I am worried that if none of the sane US political people pick up obviously sensible policy proposals, like immigration control of irregulars & compensating those who lose out of economic globalisation, then a window opens for the insane to take power. Like in Russia 1917 and Germany 1934. Not as dramatic as there, but still.
May sanity prevail among the not-insane in the US. It is important also for Europeans, and everyone else for that matter.
The IEA estimates have a huge bias against r
Solar. I won’t speculate on why.
(That said I read, independently of this, their reports on wind which was quite gung ho).
To be honest, I don't see how reciprocal forecasting is supposed to work in game-theoretic sense. Normal prediction market has nice and obvious Nash equilibrium: just predict the probability as best you can. Not so in reciprocal forecasting. From what I can tell, a strategy closest to optimum is to shout at loud as you can "Let's all vote for X" and then vote for X. If it is even possible to do this without communicating with others by forecasting the most trivial outcome, like answer 50% to any question.
Iterative prediction is far more plausible. You don't even need to do the iteration if you ensure two conditions: 1. The stakes are freely tradable at any time. 2. While the prediction stays the same, the value of the stake is growing at least as fast as some default assets like S&P 500. If the second condition is not fulfilled, then unless the market is extremely wrong, long-term it is more profitable to invest in other asserts. This can be achieved by, you guessed it, having the market operator invest the stakes in that very investment product. This could even happen automatically by making the stakes in some cryptocurrency like ETH, if you believe that ETH will continue growing at least as fast as S&P 500.
Biden himself has said some things about being a one term president. Mixed with his age and his low approval ratings, it's not surprising that the markets are looking for alternatives.
It's a sad state of affairs that the candidates available are as poor as they are. I don't think any of the listed candidates can beat Trump, let alone a more solid Republican that doesn't make half the country reflexively convulse at hearing their name. Those that excite the base scare the middle, and vice versa. The fact that Hillary Clinton appears in the group is certainly not a great sign for Democrats. It's early yet, though, and maybe some new candidates or a different consensus candidate can still emerge. Or again, maybe Biden turns things around and doesn't get any health issues and decides to run again. Obviously I'm not expecting that to all happen. Even if he does turn around his approval ratings, that might be a great time to retire with a good track record and leave a legacy, rather than chancing that he'll make it to 85 in one of the most grueling jobs in the world.
Biden would likely lose right now to most Republican candidates, though he has a few years to potentially turn around his unpopularity. Harris is riding her own unpopularity as well as Biden's. Interestingly enough is the recent soft takedown articles from left-leaning mainstream news sources. They don't seem to like her either, and may be paving the way to have another candidate in 2024. Buttigieg is not popular with the farther left, and most of the others are multi-time losers who are even older than they were the last time they ran. AOC is too inexperienced to run a nationwide campaign, and too limited in her popularity to unite the Democrats. She's a darling of the far left and young people, but unless she comes sharply to the center, she's going to scare away a lot of the middle and independents.
I read that list as Democrats being in real trouble in 2024. Trump could be divisive enough to give some of them a chance, maybe, but a better candidate seems like a pretty obvious win for Republicans at the moment.
I'm curious to see if the Reddit prediction feature works. Getting prediction tokens seems like it would be good for clout in a subreddit, but the strength of that incentive probably varies a lot across Reddit. Too bad PredictIt and PolyMarket don't have subreddits. If Reddit can beat a PredictIt market on a question that matters, that would be really surprising, because seeking clout on a subreddit would be a better incentive than money to reveal hidden information and make accurate predictions
>I’ve heard a lot of stuff about the prosecutor really bungling this one, but mostly from conservatives who I would have expected to hate the prosecutor anyway, so it’s good to get objective confirmation that yeah, this isn’t going anywhere.
I'm not saying the prosecutor is doing a great job, but the main disconnect here is between "he did something bad" vs "he did something illegal." The law sets out specific criteria about what counts as self defence, and I think Rittenhouse both was irresponsible and definitely hits the bar for self-defence here.
Think of it as similar to QI things, where people are shocked cops aren't convicted for doing bad things. We wrote laws/made SCOTUS decisions saying you can do *extremely* bad things without it being a crime. I don't think the prosecutor screwed up, I think he's unconvictable on the merits of the law.
Another in the "experts get things repeatedly wrong" category: all the big investment banks have teams of analysts who try to predict how much profit public companies will make in the future. It is well known that these forecasts are consistently wrong -- specifically they are upward biased. Interestingly this bias persists despite there being a significant financial interest in getting the numbers right, since funds often rely on these figures when making stock picks.
One theory for why this is so is that the analysts intentionally publish bullish forecasts to flatter company management, which helps them e.g. get meetings with the executive team.
>generally avaliable
>Right now it’s only in select areas
Isn't there a bit of a contradiction there?
>and decided the best paper out there was Brauner et al
I'd question whether these kinds of questions can be measured by science (or superforecasters) at all, but I'm a bit confused that "closely correlated estimates" is supposed to be impressive. The point of the estimates isn't to be closely correlated, but to take approximately the same values, no?
"Their solution is to make teams very big and full of smart people, so that it’s unlikely other teams will miss something."
Because I am an incurable smartarse, I can't help feeling about prediction markets as per "The Napoleon of Notting Hill":
“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.”
RE: the media all claiming the Virginia race was too close to call - well, the final result was Youngkin with 50.6% of the vote and McAuliffe with 48.6%, so it was pretty close. But my cynical interpretation was "These are liberal to left media news organisations, naturally they will be biased towards 'No, it cannot be that the uncouth Republican will triumph in Blue Virginia, so we will not give the oxygen of publicity to these threats to American democracy".
https://www.270towin.com/states/Virginia
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/01/27/dear-mainstream-media-why-so-liberal/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/gop-grave-threat-american-democracy/618693/
I'm going to push back on Erik Hoel's prediction "#17. People and culture will become boring." TLDR: Because it will be possible for a single individual to create entire movies or series in much the same way a single person can create a book right now, so we'll have an explosion of new ideas in media.
He argues:
>The panopticon of social media and state control will lead to cultural stagnation. We already see early hints of this. Consider the remakes of older movies: 2050 will be a stew of remakes of remakes, and familiar and boring intellectual property (like Star Wars) will be king. Creativity vivacity will suffer, especially in the arts and humanities. The coming half-century will be a great one for innovations in finance, engineering, space travel, and artificial intelligence. It will be a terrible one for the arts and basic scientific advancements (like a new physics), for such advancements require iconoclastic and creative lone individuals. This prediction is already augured by judging the 2000-2020 creative period overall in areas like art, music, literature, film, and scientific discoveries, and finding it severely lacking compared to, say, 1950-1970.
I think the reason we've seen less creativity is for economic reasons, not cultural ones. It's just so much money and work to make (and market) a good movie that studios play it safe and mostly stick to works they know will be an economic success.
But by 2050, AI will have made it so a single hard-working individual will be able to create an entire movie by themselves. The computer will render the scenes described and the 'author' will be able to direct changes until their creative vision is fulfilled.
This will make movies like youtube circa 2008 when there's all kinds of new opportunities for creative people and tiny little indie director/authors will go viral. Eventually the movie media will look more like our print media. There will be well established author/directors making a new movie every couple of years in far more genres than exist in current cinema. And it will be much easier to be profitable with creative niche projects so more people will be willing to try them or create them for art's sake or as a hobby. If you only need 20,000 people to purchase tickets to a movie to make it profitable, it opens up the room considerably for more creative media.
At the same time, VR will open up a whole new space for new experiences. It's not a coincidence that early cinema was an age of creativity as it takes a lot of experimentation to figure out what works. VR is going to go through the same process as it slowly becomes a major source of our media.
And so eventually, we'll consider the years from around 2040-2060 to be a golden age of creativity.
"I guess at the limit this is just banning insider trading, which is supposed to be good."
I think most economist think banning insider trading is bad for getting the market to reflect the best guess of where the price should be because it is leaving out a piece of true information held by the insider. So it does make the prediction market work worse.
I think the argument against insider trading is more of a principal agent problem. Should the insider be using his privileged position to be making money of the stock holders who he works for.
Re. "a few journalists who are scared people will make fun of them if they jump the gun.:" I think media bias is a more likely explanation.
"even if you double your money, 100% return over eighty years is a bad investment."
Honestly, this is a problem over even two years--a 10%ish opportunity cost is a lot.
But can't this be resolved by purchasing conditional shares in some portfolio where the shares are traded freely? Like an SP500 index conditional share?
So I purchase a conditional share in a "China GDP 2100 vs. US GDP 2100" SP500 index fund. The value of my share increases in lockstep with the increase in the fund, which over the course of 100 years is a fine return. Unconditional fund shares can also be bought/sold as usual. In 2101 the conditional shares will turn into real shares, or into nothing, depending on whether the condition was met or not.
This seems to solve the liquidity and returns issues both.
(Tax loss harvesting from losers might skew some numbers temporarily, but that's even a good thing in that it provides non-arbitrage liquidity)
But I'm obviously not the first person to think of this, so...why isn't it standard?
The media has a well known incentive to always describe races as closer than they actually are so that people will keep breathlessly reading updates. The same thing happened in the 2012 presidential election.
The biggest weakness in Forecasting today is the unknown unknown, meaning, getting the most relevant questions forecasted in the first place. For instance, it's more relevant to the world to forecast the probability a pandemic will occur in the next 3 years then to predict the level of active Covid cases in 3 months, given a known Covid pandemic. Also would have been extremely useful if forecasters had foreseen the supply bottlenecks 6 months in advance (because then they would have been less likely to have happened, given that forecasting markets had high enough visibility. No, this wouldn't have been a paradox: the odds could have risen and declined over time as the forecasting market spilled information into the market market.
"Prediction markets reached near-certainty about the winner while traditional media was still talking about how un-call-ably close it was. Apparently having hundreds of people all incentivized to give precise probability estimates very slightly earlier than the next guy, works better than having a few journalists who are scared people will make fun of them if they jump the gun."
Compare this to how PredictIt wasn't willing to call the 2020 election for Biden until long, long after it was obvious that Biden had won. I think a better model might just be that PredictIt and some similar markets tend to err in the direction of Republican candidates for contingent historical reasons.
Amplifying small changes can make the smart people lose all their money faster when markets temporarily move against them.
Also, depending on the exact mechanism for resolving each 5-year market, which you don't really explain, the resolution could be manipulated. If there is a lot of open interest on the expiring contract relative to the volume on the new contract, people can profitably manipulate the price of the new contract to manipulate the settlement of the old one.
Something sorta similar to that happened when oil futures went super negative for a day last year. A firm had contracts to buy a huge amount of oil at a fill-in-the-blank price based on the price of the futures at a certain time. So they manipulated the futures to go negative at that time, and afterwards the futures instantly bounced back up. https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1nf4dxm53536k/The-Mysterious-London-Traders-Accused-of-Manipulating-Oil-Markets-and-the-Anonymous-Hedge-Fund-Rare-Coin-Expert-and-Day-Traders-Who-Are-Fighting-Back
> Might prediction markets be lurching to a false certainty too soon? I used to think this, I tried betting on that thesis a bunch of times, and I always lost money. I guess realistically we can’t know for sure that they’re not overconfident until we’ve tested their 98% probability fifty times, but I nominate someone else to lose their money for the remaining 40-something experiments.
At the beginning of November last year, Biden was predicted to win probably but low-confidence. On the night of the third they were medium-high confidence (but less than 90%) that Trump would win. By the time they got to 95% on any question I think they were usually right, but they definitely were prematurely confident.
Sanders is vastly overrated. Unless people are taking early cheap bets to score off his small but extant cult base. Warren is immensely overrated as well. They should both be at 1, as should Clinton. AOC is slightly overrated. Buttigieg is underrated. Harris overrated and Biden underrated. The real race is in dark horses who haven't even talked about it yet. Also the PredictIt markets are notoriously poorly moderated/modified.
Regarding Hoel's prediction #14, here's my honest counterprediction:
30% nuclear war by 2030.
I'm not about to bet in a prediction market on this, and I indeed predict that prediction markets will predict against it. This is because all predictions on prediction markets are conditional on the prediction market itself continuing to exist, which is highly correlated with the outcome of some questions. But it's why I don't live in a large city any more.
On street votes, it's worth clarifying that the even most ardent advocates do not think that ‘most’ people will vote for them. Even the Strong Suburbs report linked to in the text above does not estimate an overall take-up rate of more than about 3%. The estimated price elasticities implied that that 3% would exhaust the economic potential for profitable densification. The potential to add more homes well in low-density suburbs is so great that that low take-up can mean the production of a considerably higher volume of new homes than happens under many current zoning systems. Many suburban lots are easily capable of producing 5x (sometimes 10x) the current amount of housing on them, even without going above three or four floors.
There may be an analogy with cryonics here. I think one survey showed that the people who had signed up for cryonics assigned an even lower probability to cryonics working than did the people who had not signed up. The former group had just looked at the numbers and concluded that the potential upside was greater than the downside.
Erik Hoel's prediction #1 (that there will be a Martian colony in 2050) is not only embarrassingly ridiculous, it doesn't even follow his dictum of -
"If you want to predict the future accurately, you should be an incrementalist.."
An incrementalist would look at what proportion of the "getting a human being back from Mars, alive" problem has been solved in the 50 years since we put a man on the moon. And the answer is just a few %. The task, with current technology, is not remotely possible - which is why NASA talks (or fantasizes) about nuclear propulsion in space or setting up a mining industry (remotely, with robots!) on Mars to provide the fuel to power a return journey.
The irony is that after criticizing other smart people for "..imagining a sci-fi technology that doesn't exist" he then goes ahead in his very first prediction and does the same. He simply "imagines" that currently completely unsolvable problems will suddenly become easy-peasy such that there will be "a city on the red planet".
No there won't! There won't be anyone on the red planet in 2050!
I'd add that I think what Elon Musk has achieved with SpaceX over the last 20 years is nothing short of incredible. But he hasn't even begun to solve the really big conundrums that make currently getting to Mars and back (for humans) completely impossible.
Scott has written in 2015 in a short fiction story about (among other things) a person who could see one month into the future:
> You resolve, on the first day of every month, to write down what you see exactly a month ahead of you. But what you will see a month ahead of you is the piece of paper on which you have written down what you see a month ahead of that. In this manner, you can relay messages back to yourself from arbitrarily far into the future – at least up until your own death.
So he has already invented iterative prediction 6 years ago!
P.S. The story is called "...and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes"
“Too close to call” means what, < 99% confidence? Because no media outlet wants to retract a call, ever, and there’s no penalty against being late with a call.
on iterated prediction markets
I think a lot of prediction market design problems are already solved in financial markets. Suppose you have a non-dividend paying stcok (say, Google's parent Alphabet Inc.) The fundamental value of this stock is, theoretically, a function of very distant future cashflows, it is the present value of dividends that might be paid in 20-100 years from now, when that company will stop its crazy growth and will start distributing cash to shareholders. This long (and uncertain) horizon does not prevent a liquid market in Alphabet's stock. Indeed, right now this market is able to assign a very tight range of values to this present value, $2978.00/$2979.84.
How does the financial market handle the very real impediments to prediction markets that you describe?
1) Removal of intermediary credit risk. You can be right about your prediction but the probability that a centralised provider of a prediction market will fail grows quickly with time horizon. I would not bet more than even odds that a single current centralised betting market provider will survive until 2100. So one can be right about US vs Chinese GDP in 2010 and still lose 100% on this bet when market for the chained bet #6 fails in 30 years time. This problem can be resolved by DeFI ("can be", not "has been" as I am not sure we can be that certain about existing protocols.)
2) Diverse participants time horizons. For a market to provide a liquid tight price one needs to have participants with diverse time horizons. Market for Alphabet stock is provided by people who intend to hold this stock for less than a second. Plenty of traders hold this stock for less than a day. This should not be a problem in most prediction markets.
3) Availability of leverage. 100% return over 80 years is, indeed, a paltry reward for a correct long-term prediction. This does not create a problem for equity markets for two reasons - the mixed horizons mentioned above and availability of leverage. The money invested in a liquid contract is not frozen until contract maturity. One should be able to borrow against market value of this contract at pretty low interest rate. This is not something available today, but there is no reason for this to be unsolvable by DeFi.
4) Fragmented markets are less efficient. Equity market is much more transparent and efficient than bond and option markets. The main reason for that is that for each corporate there typically only one stock but dozens or hundreds of different bonds and thousands of options traded, so liquidity is spread much thinner. Chained iterated market, especially one with bins would fail on this count quite badly.
Thus, I do not see why a much simpler solution to a prediction market for US/China GDP in 2100 would not work better than an iterated market. On a trustworthy DeFi exchange, create a contract expiring in 2100 and settling at 0/100 depending on the binary outcome. If this contract becomes liquid enough, it will attract traders with diverse time horizons. It will be also relatively stable and it will be possible to borrow against it, so the limited return will not be major problem. To enable higher leverage, somebody might introduce options on this contract, may be even binary range options you are describing, but the contract can be perfectly liquid without them.
Ah ha! I wondered where all those new subscribers were coming from! Really and truly appreciate that shout-out Scott, as I'm a longtime fan. It's also insanely impactful to a smaller substack like mine - I think around a 20% increase in total subscribers in the ~24 hours since this post went up
Is this sarcasm? Or maybe you mean only in abstract theory?
> My only concern is that it doesn’t have the same sort of hits-you-between-the-eyes obviously-there’s-no-way-to-bias-this quality that prediction markets do.
I always thought prediction markets had the opposite quality: that they're super easy to bias. I admit I haven't kept up with the research on this, but prediction markets of real-world events lack of the property that people's predictions have to converge on the actual answer, because:
* people aren't really financially constrained by predicting wrongly, since they can just get money elsewhere and aren't going to go broke on bad predictions, so over time bad predictors will stay in the game
* adding more information (or getting closer to an event) doesn't necessarily make people better at predicting what the outcome will be, due to people's tendency to just.. be wrong, misled, or biased (not a property of some types of predictions, like things that have some random distribution, or where polling or something provides an increasingly accurate prediction of the outcome).
(arguably investment funds have the first property, for comparison, because they deal with quantities of money at which bankruptcy is a real risk.. but the real-life dynamic that old funds go broke and new ones are founded might mean that overall the market is full of funds that won't not survive actual market fluctuations over time; they've not had time to be 'weeded out' yet.)
> If there are a lot of low-quality forecasters in the tournament, then since high-quality forecasters will accurately predict that low-quality forecasters will give a low-quality answer, everyone will converge on the low-quality answer.
> They also admit this incentivizes teams to ignore “secret knowledge” that they have but which they expect other teams won’t. Their solution is to make teams very big and full of smart people, so that it’s unlikely other teams will miss something. I guess at the limit this is just banning insider trading, which is supposed to be good.
Isn't this what Bayesian Truth Serum is supposed to solve?
In the Erik Hoel link, the graph about single parenthood seems to be showing a different statistic than he says it shows (percentage of single adults who have dependent children versus percentage of children raised in single-parent homes; although these are correlated in practice, it would be theoretically possible for one of them to be close to 100% while the other was close to 0%; and both of these are different again from the percentage of children raised in single-parent homes, which the post also mentions). Also, the post refers to a percentage figure that isn't shown on the graph ("In Denmark, for instance, the total percent of single-parent households in 2019 was around ~33%"; even given the previous point and replacing "percent of single-parent households" with "percent of single adults who are parents", the graph shows about 20% of single women and about 8% of single men in 2019 were parents, so about 14% of single adults overall, so I don't know where 33% comes from).
If I saw this in a random place on the internet I'd just assume the author didn't understand what they were talking about (the first issue is similar to the widespread confusion between P(positive test|disease) and P(disease|positive test), and the ~33% could possibly have come about by thinking that the overall percentage comes from *adding* the male and female percentages, which would give 28%, possibly combined with some misreading of the chart axes to get it from 28% to 33%).
But since this was linked from ACX and recommended by Scott, and since none of the other commenters either here or there (who are clearly highly numerate and also nitpicky) have picked up on it, my prior for it being my misunderstanding is much higher.
I commented on the post asking where the figure came from (in case it was from somewhere other than the graph and I was just misreading the post as attributing it to the graph) and he replied saying it was from the graph, but didn't reply to my follow-up comment querying the issues with it.
It could be that there's some formula or heuristic (with, necessarily, a lot of demographic assumptions) that I'm unaware of, that estimates a likely percentage of single-parent households from a percentage of single adults who have children, and that feeding 14% into that gives 33%, but he doesn't mention anything like that at all.
Can anyone help shed any light on this?
I wrote the Street Votes question. I also wrote this question recently on new top charities for GiveWell. (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/8408/givewell-recommend-breastfeeding-promotion/)
If you'd like to pay me to write* questions for your organisation then DM me on twitter (https://twitter.com/NathanpmYoung)
*I can only write questions, I won't approve my own - that has to be done by other moderators.
@Scott As I've said elsewhere, if you want questions writing, please ask. You can have them on the house.
Re the election results. Journalists, particularly 25 hour news channels like CNN have an incentive to frame everything as close as possible because if they say the result the obvious people won't tune into their live coverage. This is fairly easy to do because both campaigns will also say it's close because that encourages their voters to turn out. Nate Silver has talked about this a lot in 538 podcast and his other writing.
In "bad uses of prediction markets", I present https://twitter.com/PolymarketHQ/status/1461461169223393288
Yup, that's a prediction market on whether other crypto investors will buy something. And the exchange is promoting this on Twitter with Pepe the Frog memes and suggesting you missed out on 7x profits.
I don't see how anybody could think that will provide useful information.
I wrote the street votes question. Some comments
"This is near the top of the YIMBY movement’s policy wishlist - they seem to think most people would vote for denser zoning, though I have trouble understanding their optimism."
I don't think Street Votes is near the top of the wishlist. I think that's stuff like removing zoning. But it is near the top of what seems able to pass, especially in the UK. It's not that this will make most people vote for more density, but that it's a lot better than the status quo, where there are far more veto points. I think (80%) that in Israel street votes lead to significantly more housing, largely because it allows citizens to make a load of money having their whole street upgraded at once.
tl;dr It isn't great but it's better.