Post #2454418

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.