Post #2381162
2026-05-11 04:23 UTC
Replies (5)
-
@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-05-11 06:23
Turns out sneerclub is the superpredictor. 10/10 on going ‘this is a bad idea’.
-
@FredFig@awful.systems 2026-05-11 16:17
As long as the offer’s open, it will be irresistible. So we need to close the offer. Only another god can kill Moloch. We have one on our side, but he needs our help. We should give it to him. I’d write something here, but there’s nothing funnier I can say.
-
@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-11 17:01
He was also perplexed that a prediction-market bet on “did COVID-19 come from a lab?” has declined from 85% yes in 2023 to 27% yes. If you click through you see its a bet on Manifold so bettors are rats and fellow travellers. Rationalists have spent $46,714 of real US dollars buying play money to bet on this.
-
@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-05-11 17:33
Are prediction markets not actually useful? No, it is the reality who is wrong. Also I want to rant once again about the stupid way these people evade the insider trading problem, because there’s a particular failure at play that I keep finding expressed in new and interesting ways. So the argument goes that while insider trading may be bad for a financial market it actually just allows insiders to add their information to increase the predictive power of the market. Which would be true enough if we assume nothing else changes, but the same would also be true for price discovery in a normal asset market. Clearly we’re missing something. So why is it insider trading bad? Because it turns people without insider info into the dumb money you can take advantage of. And people, very reasonably, aren’t going to participate in a system where their main role is being taken advantage of. Their departure means that the insiders don’t have access to a pool of dumb money to take so they stop interacting with the system, and the market itself breaks down. Now if you assume that the majority of people are “NPCs” or aren’t very “agentic” or whatever then they’re not going to act in systemically meaningful ways no matter how obvious the incentives to do so. You could also cast it as a version of the libertarian-as-housecat notion that markets simply exist as a natural system, rather than being pieces of economic infrastructure that require a lot of management and work to keep functioning at all, even before we get to the question of whether they operate to the public’s benefit.
-
@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-05-12 00:49
Even Scott’s fantasy dream scenario for what prediction markets could be like and what questions they could answer feels… …deliberately naive? …like libertarian brainrot? …disconnected from reality? Ask yourself: what are the big future-prediction questions that important disagreements pivot around? When I try this exercise, I get things like: Will the AI bubble pop? Will scaling get us all the way to AGI? Will AI be misaligned? Huge amounts of money are being dumped into a bubble based on hype, so to hope a predict market would or could make better predictions than the existing business-idiot VCs funding this bubble feels hopelessly naive in a libertarian kind of way. There is already a method of aggregating the wisdom of the crowd and it is failing to incredibly lazy hype and PR. Will Trump turn America into a dictatorship? Make it great again? Somewhere in between? Again, there is already a mechanism for aggregating wisdom of the crowds, its called an election, and its also failed to get a answer predicated on reality or truth, so again, it seems incredibly naive to expect prediction markets to do better! Will YIMBY policies lower rents? How much? I mean, the councils and communities making these decision already ignore or overlook longer-term broader predictions of economic impact in favor of immediate home-owner value, I don’t see why Scott would expect prediction markets to help decision making go better here. Overall, it feels like Scott is overlooking the way decision making often already ignores science and experts. Society doesn’t have a problem making decent predictions compared to the problems it has communicating expert opinions to the public effectively and crafting policy aligned with the public interest.