Where this sort of idea falls down, is that the Mass Man is an imbecile who has no interest whatsoever in epistemology, and no interest whatsoever in working out what's actually causing the shadows on the wall of the Cave.
For the Mass Man, 'the news' is just a thing that a vaguely-fuckable bleached-teeth dyed blonde reads off an autocue: it's entertainment, not information. It's designed to reinforce a specific weltanschauung - that the best use of a person's time is to participate in the Ant Farm, having half one's productivity transferred upwards to a clique of megalomaniacal sociopaths.
The Ancients understood this (after a fashion) with the strong distinction between _doxa_ and _epistēmē_ ... with doxa being the retarded red-headed stepchild of the cognitive family tree, and (sadly) being where the vast majority of people spend their intellectual lives. (One of the things that makes doxa easy, is that there is no *veridicality requirement*: there is no logical violation involved in believing a thing that is known not to be true).
Epistēmē is a slightly unnatural objective, because it requires an inherent mistrust of one's lyin' eyes (and senses generally) while still relying on the senses to eventually work out where the lies are. It is entirely predicated on a desire to move from belief to knowledge.
Askēsis - [the] discipline/practice/exercise that helps get there - is a process for which the VAST majority of human beings are simply not equipped, but it is the sine qua non for any attempt to live a fact-based life.
It is not enough to say "This is a human. Humans invented all this cool shit, so this one must be equally-capable with the ones who did the inventing... or at least within acceptably-small-δ" - because for an arbitrarily selected individual it's demonstrably, objectively not true.
Prediction-market-based reputation pricing is like the old saw about academic tenure (those who deserve it don't need it; those who need it don't deserve it) - amended such that those who are cognitively capable of navigating such a system, have other, better ways to inform themselves than 'hot takes' on YouTwitFace (a nifty term I stole - a composite of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook).
HOI PLEISTOI ANTHROPOI KAKOI. Most people are shit... so it's no surprise that groupwise they produce cacophony ("shit noise").
Kakoi and kakkao are etymologically related, so if you ever see 'cac-' (or "kak-") as a prefix, just replace it with 'shit[ty]' and you'll not be far from the mark... e.g., kakistocracy - rule by shit.
I met a girl called Alithea once, in a bar. She lied about her age.
I think you discount the potential for those incapable of engaging in the process themselves to form a trust relationship with people who can. Perhaps in an age of affluence there would be little motivation to seek out the individuals that such a system would inevitably highlight, but in an environment of materially declining standards of living, people tend to become motivated to find solutions.
I think the conversation, amongst dissidents in particular, has become far more solutions-oriented over the last few years. Diagnosing the problems and bitching about them is played out; there's fairly wide consensus on what those are. The interesting question now is, how to we fix things?
Sortition gets the system part-way there (by undermining the payoff structure for grifters - including oligarchs), but the last step is the one that the Mass Man will not countenance... viz., that 'public' activities (i.e., 'government', writ large) become a subscription service, where only subscribers ⓐ vote; ⓑ pay tax; ⓒ are liable for 'public' debt.
The reality is that supposed 'market failure' (which can only happen when there are genuine 'publicness' characteristics of the good or service) imposes orders of magnitude less 'social' cost, than its gigantic malformed cousin - GOVERNMENT failure.
If there is a 'market failure' of whatever sort, the "trope" is that output falls to zero (for goods) or rises to ∞ (for 'bads'); the reality is that the output falls (rises) to the economic expected optimum - which will be lower (higher) than a 'perfect' (aggregate social-welfare-augmenting) outcome.
So - the argument goes - we permit 'the system' to drive markets towards the 'perfect', by buggering around with private-sector decisions - without considering the GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM changes in both goods and factor markets that are caused, and without considering if the interventions happen at optimal-cost (including optimal opportunity-cost of financing).
I could bang on about this for a decade, non-stop - my [long-abandoned] PhD was in computable general-equilibrium (CGE) economic modelling... which was, and is, hated by The Left, who prefer to repose their trust in *climate* models which have inherent uncertainty that is several orders of magnitude greater than the uncertainty in economic models.
I abandoned my PhD because it was going to take hundreds of thousands of simulations to properly perform a systematic sensitivity analysis - and each simulation took a day (these days I could run the model several thousand times a day on my phone). Plus, it became abundantly clear to me that any competent person who 'knew the model' could make it yield any desired result by changing the model's inputs in ways that passed statistical scrutiny (that is to say, the vector of exogenous variables could be perturbed by amounts that did not make the entire vector statistically-different from some agreed-upon 'base' forecast based on, say, an F-test).
Thirdly, there was a lot of dotcom money sloshing around, and a FinTech startup backed up the truck just as my 4th scholarship extension was about to expire. Happy days.
There is a METAcognitive problem that - for the Mass Man - undermines any attempt to 'form[ing] a trust relationship' that operates as intended (i.e., has an expectation that the values yielded by the relationship approximate 'truth').
Look at the history of the 'political means' (which I take to include organised religion, in addition to the State).
The median adult will largely submit to the (induced) vicissitudes of their life-trajectory, rather than that exercising their "right, [] their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security".
Wars, economic depressions; periods of mass unemployment... even when they result in revolutions, the Mass Man lets what happens, happen and simply gets on with the new Masters.
Why would that be?
It's because they have been conditioned to a false underlying premise - held as an axiom - viz., that some set of Grifters _MUST_ man the societal helm... otherwise some unspecified 'marauders' will come and pinch everyone's stuff, or a Levantine Storm God (who is keen on foreskins for some reason) will rain fire from the sky.
It has been thus for almost 10,000 years; it won't be like that for the next 10,000, because the (inevitable) advent of Strong AI will be akin to augmenting the median IQ by O(5σ) relative to current. That's the only thing that will undermines the Peak Grifters, long-term.
The other thing that impedes "forming trust relationships" is that key assumptions of information-network 'ground truth as equilibrium' are not satisfied in practice: one of the key assumptions of things like deGroot trust-network models, is that there are no untrustworthy nodes that have any asymptotic weight. Thus the trust network results in true beliefs about things.
In the idealised situation, as the number of information sources approaches infinity, the weight attached to any individual node approaches zero, and the plim of the network's assessment approaches 'truth'.
However if an untrustworthy node retains a non-zero weight in the network, the 'search for truth' is hopelessly stymied.
Now... consider the Mass Man, trying to evaluate the truthiness of any matter of contention - even in a world of rich, almost-free information. (We've seen quite a bit of this lately).
Think - off the top of your head - of all the untrustworthy nodes in HIS network that retain a non-zero presence in a world AWASH with other, more-trustworthy nodes.
Religious leaders; political leaders; "public health" mandarins; mainstream media; TheScience™... basically anyone with a nice haircut and a plausible line of patter crafted by their media spokes-minions.
These grifters retain OBVIOUS asymptotic weight in the trust networks of people considerably more cognitively-endowed than the median.
So the notion that there will be some 'awakening' that reaches down to the cognitive median, flies in the face of the last several millennia of human history, and requires that the trust network-formation of the Mass Man has characteristics that are simply not observed in reality.
(And how strange is this: I say all of the foregoing, while remaining an economic 'rationalist' - it is a sensible premise to assume that economic agents ATTEMPT to form unbiased expectations of future values of variables of interest. They do a piss-poor job of it, but they are actually trying - the stumbling blocks are mostly to do with the Game Theoretic problems of expectations-formation in multi-agent coalitional dynamic games with entire coalitions of 'dishonest' agents).
This deserves additional attention as I'm not familiar with things like asymptotic weight and deGroot trust-network models, but my immediate reaction is that your analysis could use some contribution from your right hemisphere. I think you underestimate the capability of "mass man" to exhibit common sense toward rational self-interest. I think this is especially so in an environment where every mouthpiece of the cathedral has declared openly and loudly predictions that mass man has come to directly experience as false. There are interesting dynamics afoot that aren't captured well by modeling alone. If you'd be willing to explain the stuff that someone without a background in mathematics and programming (e.g. I) might struggle with, that would be appreciated. If not, I'll do some research as most of what I understand from your post I appreciate.
I like that idea. It would be nice to see Substack set up a similar sort of market for tracking purposes, though that is probably too far afield from their mission.
The only real concern I have is the resolution of prediction markets. Too often they rely on "official" sources to declare wins/losses, which means using them to cut through official propaganda can be a real problem. If there is a market about whether or not China stays below 100,000 COVID deaths by 2023, and China says "Nope, no more deaths here, still at 5k!" that tells you nothing about how well someone judges and predicts reality. I don't really know how you get around that issue, but it worries me a good bit.
Yep. That's a definite source of systematic uncertainty. Establishing clear criteria for reliability of the sources used for item resolution is essential to keeping bad actors from gaming the system.
I don't have a good idea for how to prevent that, although one way might be to connect the sources themselves to the market. For instance, bets could be placed on 'the CDC will turn out to full of shit about the number of COVID deaths'. Over time, unreliable sources will be weeded out.
On the other hand, to be very fair to the CDC, no one really disputes eg their IFR numbers. The problem isn't usually that the CDC is being deceptive, it's that the media just ignores the numbers.
The problem of trust is insoluble. Our species evolved to live in very small bands, bound together by genomic affinity and constant interaction and dependence. Our neurocognitive and psycho-affective systems cannot have changed that much in the last few thousands of years of civilization.
Trust (which relies on observed dependability and mutual loyalty) on any scale is always going to be problematic. Civilized man tries to solve things through fantasies about shared values, common ancestry and abstract procedures but after a while it always erodes.
Possibly the closest that industrial society comes to creating high-trust environments are in the military (the platoon is a parody of a mannerbund, parodic because it is never autonomous) but it is clear that genuine and sustainable trust and mutual loyalty are impossible in any mass society, especially ones as transactional and utilitarian as those of the West.
There is no technical or procedural resolution to the problem, but mechanisms for transparency and accountability can mitigate things to a degree. Social networking technology would indeed be vastly useful in demystifying the way the oligarchs and their immediate subordinate strata actually function, especially if it could be integrated with good forensic accounting. We, the people, are already tracked. One day the hunter may become the game. One can only hope.
Excellent suggestion. Enhanced accountability is essential, but the powers that be will move heaven and earth to prevent any progress with that one. Daylight for vampires. In any case, the reality behind politics is always concealed: the experts are just hired to front the regime and read from a script. Politics is infotainment and the neocons (like their rivals) are only there to misdirect the attention of the audience.
The US invasion of Iraq by Bush 2 was not motivated by ideology or a miscalculation over WMD. It was an effect of the weakening of US power. The sanctions regime imposed on Iraq at the end of Gulf War 1 was collapsing thanks to French, German, Turkish, Chinese and Russian sanctions-busting. By the time of 9/11 the US was facing the prospect of being exposed as a paper tiger.
Worst still, Saddam was making noises about shifting Iraqi oil payments away from the dollar. You cannot underestimate the significance of this.
In the 1920s the Iraqi government responded to the UK moving from the gold standard to fiat currency by insisting on payments in monetary gold (bullion or coins). The UK (faced with either paying up or going to war against Baghdad) chose to fold and returned to the gold standard.
This episode is pointedly ignored in the history books because it was so embarrassing for the UK…the first time London was decisively weaker than an imperial client-state. It was a geopolitical inflection point on par with Munich or the fall of Singapore. Saddam was simply playing the same card and Washington chose war.
As for Russia, the Cold War formally ended at the Reagan/Gorbachev summit in Malta. The unacknowledged covert economic war and the military rivalry by the US against Russia never paused for breath.
The decision to take over the Ukraine in 2014 and develop it for NATO was taken in response to the progress Russia had made with hypersonic missiles and the success of the reformed and much improved Russian Army in Chechnya and South Ossetia. The US Air Force also coveted the Crimea, which can be used to project air-power deep into Central Asia.
The Pentagon needs strategic nukes as close as possible to Moscow because this is the only card they can play to counter superior Russian missile technology. The intrusion of US submarines into Russian waters (a year or so one sailed into the Bay of Peter the Great where the Russian Pacific Fleet is based) and the flight of US long range bombers along the Russian border is further proof of just how keen the Pentagon is to test the Kremlin.
The neocon nonsense about Putin, autocracy, aggression is all just misdirection to conceal the real issues: US military hegemony and the ultimate goal of securing Russian energy and mineral resources (Siberia and the Arctic) for the advantage of the US oligarchy.
Thanks for the history lesson. The Iraq/UK gold dynamic in the early 20c was new to me.
No question that geopolitics always ultimately comes down to resource access, strategic choke points, and weapons systems capabilities. The ideological nonsense is largely decorative (albeit not entirely; there are real civilizational consequences to victory in the game).
This is a very provocative article, John. I mean that in the best sense of the word, but I have some doubts. I guess my biggest problem lies with who takes and collects the bets, and by what criteria the winners are judged. (Speaking as a past boxing gsmbler, who always had to factor extreme externalities into s bet).
Yep, that looming question has been pointed out by others in the comments. It's a valid concern.
I think long term, best way is to include sources used to resolve open questions on the prediction market in the prediction market. For instance, say CDC numbers are used to determine if case numbers went down following a given coronavirus intervention. There could also be bets placed on "the CDCs numbers will be shown to be unreliable". Sources that accumulate a record of failing such bets would ultimately be dropped. This could be built in by taking weighted averages of different sources, with the weights being dynamically adjusted on the basis of prediction market confidence that their predictions will be accurate.
There's a possibility of infinite recursion happening admittedly, but the goal would ultimately be to achieve a sort of autocatalytic truth cycle. Similar to how science ideally functions: it's not only a given hypothesis that's subject to testing; the data is subject to testing, the models used to test the hypothesis are tested, and the theory used to generate the hypothesis is tested.
Indeed. Eugyppius called out a tweet from one of the usual suspects today that I think matches the criteria more or less precisely. I made sure to comment with a link back to your piece.
My concern would be accuracy of such prediction efforts. Numerous analysts predict stock prices, and election outcomes, and are all over the map. As Yogi Berra said, predictions are hard. I would also worry about susceptibility of fraud. Computed predictions can be adjusted by the programmer. But they're right that that such tools can be powerful. The most ludicrous outcomes can be made to appear by careful marketing toward those responsible for the outcome. If they believe it will happen, they'll make it happen. As Tom Peters said, perception is all there is.
This is nice in theory but as others have already observed the limitations of political divisions so deeply entrenched in determining the correct outcome of indeterminate events shaded by ideologies and trifling quarrels leaves canyon wide gaps for contestation. Blockchains inability to erase both user and content they create poses huge problems for privacy and the right to be digitally forgotten, erased from existence. A self amending Blockchain that can maintain value and ledger accuracy in the form of a two layered DAG (one for content value creation another for token value distribution) is the best solution to the rot of present attention networks. It could be decentralized and autonomous and powered globally by users instead of Google or Amazon who would quickly shut it down. It needs to be self amending. Users could pay with tokens to permanently delete or alter content or delete their node altogether. The best solution to this social dilemma is a mass exodus from censorious platforms littered with blue check bugmen but even conservatives who have been on the losing end of this charade refuse to leave for financial reasons. Having built a following needed to amplify their performances for financial gain "get 10% off my magic pillow with code blowme" these greedy cretins would rather cash in than show principaled solidarity with their censored and black listed brethren. The second best solution is media literacy which is growing exponentially with the corporate state lies and propaganda. Networks are failing. The corporate press is mocked and derided. People are becoming media literate and awakened. I do appreciate all new creative solutions on this dilemma. Every proposal has something to add and consider. Engineering accuracy and rewarding prescience is most definitely a piece of this puzzle worth considering, if it can be judiciously realized.
As we lay the foundations of Web3+, we're ultimately engaged in governance, and indeed must be careful and judicious. It's a task comparable to that faced by the Founding Fathers: establishing the parameters that will shape civilization for potentially centuries to come, and therefore required to act with a great deal of prudence, considering every aspect of the new systems with caution.
Couldn't agree more vigorously. My only reticence is that the next fad network will take the lead in this endeavor and it will not be at all what is needed to meet the moment. For one, people in the blockchain community don't consider privacy at all in their development of new communities. I still think a digital bill of rights, and Internet 'constitution' is needed to protect those rights of people in the digital sphere from the tyranny of corrupted states and nefarious companies. I suppose most of these do not even respect their own constitutions so we will likely wait until pigs fly.
after the established 'let them eat cake' governing are politically and financially lifeless @ the guillotine. politically & financially lifeless at minimum. more energy, greater focus. do not continue to pour energy and support the unsupportable fact that the greater portion of humanity is better off pre apocalypse.
Well, prediction markets in general have no real issue solving these problems. Almost any prediction can be quantified.
And yes, legacy media pundits could refuse to play. Over time, people would start to wonder why that was, and their informal reputation would be adjusted accordingly.
Another strategy actually could be to just set up proxy accounts. Any anon could set up an account that identifies itself as betting according to the predictions made by a certain pundit; the reputational effect on the pundit would be more or less the same as it would be if he was running the account himself.
You probably don't do it in a way that isn't contestable; but even if it is, it's a headache for the pundit, and the only way to avoid it is to run his own account. That's especially so for a Scott Adams type that bills himself as The Great Predictor. If he's constantly having to defend himself against troll accounts on prediction markets, he leaves himself open to the question of, okay why aren't you just running your own account then?
To a degree that's true, but a big part of why neocons are able to keep running their scam is that their fellow travelers in the corporate press studiously ignore the awkward matter of their less than impressive records. This is made a lot easier to do by the fact that evaluating the record of a given pundit requires a fair bit of work - you have to go through their previous statements, look at them in the context of subsequent events, and build up a comprehensive picture. Right now that work is done by alt-media journalists, and is principally qualitative and as such, open to the critique that it's biased by e.g. cherry-picking.
Establishing a system that subjected all pundits to quantitative reputation tracking would make that grift a lot harder to run.
Where this sort of idea falls down, is that the Mass Man is an imbecile who has no interest whatsoever in epistemology, and no interest whatsoever in working out what's actually causing the shadows on the wall of the Cave.
For the Mass Man, 'the news' is just a thing that a vaguely-fuckable bleached-teeth dyed blonde reads off an autocue: it's entertainment, not information. It's designed to reinforce a specific weltanschauung - that the best use of a person's time is to participate in the Ant Farm, having half one's productivity transferred upwards to a clique of megalomaniacal sociopaths.
The Ancients understood this (after a fashion) with the strong distinction between _doxa_ and _epistēmē_ ... with doxa being the retarded red-headed stepchild of the cognitive family tree, and (sadly) being where the vast majority of people spend their intellectual lives. (One of the things that makes doxa easy, is that there is no *veridicality requirement*: there is no logical violation involved in believing a thing that is known not to be true).
Epistēmē is a slightly unnatural objective, because it requires an inherent mistrust of one's lyin' eyes (and senses generally) while still relying on the senses to eventually work out where the lies are. It is entirely predicated on a desire to move from belief to knowledge.
Askēsis - [the] discipline/practice/exercise that helps get there - is a process for which the VAST majority of human beings are simply not equipped, but it is the sine qua non for any attempt to live a fact-based life.
It is not enough to say "This is a human. Humans invented all this cool shit, so this one must be equally-capable with the ones who did the inventing... or at least within acceptably-small-δ" - because for an arbitrarily selected individual it's demonstrably, objectively not true.
Prediction-market-based reputation pricing is like the old saw about academic tenure (those who deserve it don't need it; those who need it don't deserve it) - amended such that those who are cognitively capable of navigating such a system, have other, better ways to inform themselves than 'hot takes' on YouTwitFace (a nifty term I stole - a composite of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook).
HOI PLEISTOI ANTHROPOI KAKOI. Most people are shit... so it's no surprise that groupwise they produce cacophony ("shit noise").
Kakoi and kakkao are etymologically related, so if you ever see 'cac-' (or "kak-") as a prefix, just replace it with 'shit[ty]' and you'll not be far from the mark... e.g., kakistocracy - rule by shit.
I met a girl called Alithea once, in a bar. She lied about her age.
>I met a girl called Alithea once, in a bar. She lied about her age.
Bro you should have led with that, I cracked up when I read it.
I think you discount the potential for those incapable of engaging in the process themselves to form a trust relationship with people who can. Perhaps in an age of affluence there would be little motivation to seek out the individuals that such a system would inevitably highlight, but in an environment of materially declining standards of living, people tend to become motivated to find solutions.
I think the conversation, amongst dissidents in particular, has become far more solutions-oriented over the last few years. Diagnosing the problems and bitching about them is played out; there's fairly wide consensus on what those are. The interesting question now is, how to we fix things?
Sortition gets the system part-way there (by undermining the payoff structure for grifters - including oligarchs), but the last step is the one that the Mass Man will not countenance... viz., that 'public' activities (i.e., 'government', writ large) become a subscription service, where only subscribers ⓐ vote; ⓑ pay tax; ⓒ are liable for 'public' debt.
The reality is that supposed 'market failure' (which can only happen when there are genuine 'publicness' characteristics of the good or service) imposes orders of magnitude less 'social' cost, than its gigantic malformed cousin - GOVERNMENT failure.
If there is a 'market failure' of whatever sort, the "trope" is that output falls to zero (for goods) or rises to ∞ (for 'bads'); the reality is that the output falls (rises) to the economic expected optimum - which will be lower (higher) than a 'perfect' (aggregate social-welfare-augmenting) outcome.
So - the argument goes - we permit 'the system' to drive markets towards the 'perfect', by buggering around with private-sector decisions - without considering the GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM changes in both goods and factor markets that are caused, and without considering if the interventions happen at optimal-cost (including optimal opportunity-cost of financing).
I could bang on about this for a decade, non-stop - my [long-abandoned] PhD was in computable general-equilibrium (CGE) economic modelling... which was, and is, hated by The Left, who prefer to repose their trust in *climate* models which have inherent uncertainty that is several orders of magnitude greater than the uncertainty in economic models.
I abandoned my PhD because it was going to take hundreds of thousands of simulations to properly perform a systematic sensitivity analysis - and each simulation took a day (these days I could run the model several thousand times a day on my phone). Plus, it became abundantly clear to me that any competent person who 'knew the model' could make it yield any desired result by changing the model's inputs in ways that passed statistical scrutiny (that is to say, the vector of exogenous variables could be perturbed by amounts that did not make the entire vector statistically-different from some agreed-upon 'base' forecast based on, say, an F-test).
Thirdly, there was a lot of dotcom money sloshing around, and a FinTech startup backed up the truck just as my 4th scholarship extension was about to expire. Happy days.
There is a METAcognitive problem that - for the Mass Man - undermines any attempt to 'form[ing] a trust relationship' that operates as intended (i.e., has an expectation that the values yielded by the relationship approximate 'truth').
Look at the history of the 'political means' (which I take to include organised religion, in addition to the State).
The median adult will largely submit to the (induced) vicissitudes of their life-trajectory, rather than that exercising their "right, [] their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security".
Wars, economic depressions; periods of mass unemployment... even when they result in revolutions, the Mass Man lets what happens, happen and simply gets on with the new Masters.
Why would that be?
It's because they have been conditioned to a false underlying premise - held as an axiom - viz., that some set of Grifters _MUST_ man the societal helm... otherwise some unspecified 'marauders' will come and pinch everyone's stuff, or a Levantine Storm God (who is keen on foreskins for some reason) will rain fire from the sky.
It has been thus for almost 10,000 years; it won't be like that for the next 10,000, because the (inevitable) advent of Strong AI will be akin to augmenting the median IQ by O(5σ) relative to current. That's the only thing that will undermines the Peak Grifters, long-term.
The other thing that impedes "forming trust relationships" is that key assumptions of information-network 'ground truth as equilibrium' are not satisfied in practice: one of the key assumptions of things like deGroot trust-network models, is that there are no untrustworthy nodes that have any asymptotic weight. Thus the trust network results in true beliefs about things.
In the idealised situation, as the number of information sources approaches infinity, the weight attached to any individual node approaches zero, and the plim of the network's assessment approaches 'truth'.
However if an untrustworthy node retains a non-zero weight in the network, the 'search for truth' is hopelessly stymied.
Now... consider the Mass Man, trying to evaluate the truthiness of any matter of contention - even in a world of rich, almost-free information. (We've seen quite a bit of this lately).
Think - off the top of your head - of all the untrustworthy nodes in HIS network that retain a non-zero presence in a world AWASH with other, more-trustworthy nodes.
Religious leaders; political leaders; "public health" mandarins; mainstream media; TheScience™... basically anyone with a nice haircut and a plausible line of patter crafted by their media spokes-minions.
These grifters retain OBVIOUS asymptotic weight in the trust networks of people considerably more cognitively-endowed than the median.
So the notion that there will be some 'awakening' that reaches down to the cognitive median, flies in the face of the last several millennia of human history, and requires that the trust network-formation of the Mass Man has characteristics that are simply not observed in reality.
(And how strange is this: I say all of the foregoing, while remaining an economic 'rationalist' - it is a sensible premise to assume that economic agents ATTEMPT to form unbiased expectations of future values of variables of interest. They do a piss-poor job of it, but they are actually trying - the stumbling blocks are mostly to do with the Game Theoretic problems of expectations-formation in multi-agent coalitional dynamic games with entire coalitions of 'dishonest' agents).
This deserves additional attention as I'm not familiar with things like asymptotic weight and deGroot trust-network models, but my immediate reaction is that your analysis could use some contribution from your right hemisphere. I think you underestimate the capability of "mass man" to exhibit common sense toward rational self-interest. I think this is especially so in an environment where every mouthpiece of the cathedral has declared openly and loudly predictions that mass man has come to directly experience as false. There are interesting dynamics afoot that aren't captured well by modeling alone. If you'd be willing to explain the stuff that someone without a background in mathematics and programming (e.g. I) might struggle with, that would be appreciated. If not, I'll do some research as most of what I understand from your post I appreciate.
I like that idea. It would be nice to see Substack set up a similar sort of market for tracking purposes, though that is probably too far afield from their mission.
The only real concern I have is the resolution of prediction markets. Too often they rely on "official" sources to declare wins/losses, which means using them to cut through official propaganda can be a real problem. If there is a market about whether or not China stays below 100,000 COVID deaths by 2023, and China says "Nope, no more deaths here, still at 5k!" that tells you nothing about how well someone judges and predicts reality. I don't really know how you get around that issue, but it worries me a good bit.
Yep. That's a definite source of systematic uncertainty. Establishing clear criteria for reliability of the sources used for item resolution is essential to keeping bad actors from gaming the system.
I don't have a good idea for how to prevent that, although one way might be to connect the sources themselves to the market. For instance, bets could be placed on 'the CDC will turn out to full of shit about the number of COVID deaths'. Over time, unreliable sources will be weeded out.
On the other hand, to be very fair to the CDC, no one really disputes eg their IFR numbers. The problem isn't usually that the CDC is being deceptive, it's that the media just ignores the numbers.
The problem of trust is insoluble. Our species evolved to live in very small bands, bound together by genomic affinity and constant interaction and dependence. Our neurocognitive and psycho-affective systems cannot have changed that much in the last few thousands of years of civilization.
Trust (which relies on observed dependability and mutual loyalty) on any scale is always going to be problematic. Civilized man tries to solve things through fantasies about shared values, common ancestry and abstract procedures but after a while it always erodes.
Possibly the closest that industrial society comes to creating high-trust environments are in the military (the platoon is a parody of a mannerbund, parodic because it is never autonomous) but it is clear that genuine and sustainable trust and mutual loyalty are impossible in any mass society, especially ones as transactional and utilitarian as those of the West.
There is no technical or procedural resolution to the problem, but mechanisms for transparency and accountability can mitigate things to a degree. Social networking technology would indeed be vastly useful in demystifying the way the oligarchs and their immediate subordinate strata actually function, especially if it could be integrated with good forensic accounting. We, the people, are already tracked. One day the hunter may become the game. One can only hope.
Excellent suggestion. Enhanced accountability is essential, but the powers that be will move heaven and earth to prevent any progress with that one. Daylight for vampires. In any case, the reality behind politics is always concealed: the experts are just hired to front the regime and read from a script. Politics is infotainment and the neocons (like their rivals) are only there to misdirect the attention of the audience.
The US invasion of Iraq by Bush 2 was not motivated by ideology or a miscalculation over WMD. It was an effect of the weakening of US power. The sanctions regime imposed on Iraq at the end of Gulf War 1 was collapsing thanks to French, German, Turkish, Chinese and Russian sanctions-busting. By the time of 9/11 the US was facing the prospect of being exposed as a paper tiger.
Worst still, Saddam was making noises about shifting Iraqi oil payments away from the dollar. You cannot underestimate the significance of this.
In the 1920s the Iraqi government responded to the UK moving from the gold standard to fiat currency by insisting on payments in monetary gold (bullion or coins). The UK (faced with either paying up or going to war against Baghdad) chose to fold and returned to the gold standard.
This episode is pointedly ignored in the history books because it was so embarrassing for the UK…the first time London was decisively weaker than an imperial client-state. It was a geopolitical inflection point on par with Munich or the fall of Singapore. Saddam was simply playing the same card and Washington chose war.
As for Russia, the Cold War formally ended at the Reagan/Gorbachev summit in Malta. The unacknowledged covert economic war and the military rivalry by the US against Russia never paused for breath.
The decision to take over the Ukraine in 2014 and develop it for NATO was taken in response to the progress Russia had made with hypersonic missiles and the success of the reformed and much improved Russian Army in Chechnya and South Ossetia. The US Air Force also coveted the Crimea, which can be used to project air-power deep into Central Asia.
The Pentagon needs strategic nukes as close as possible to Moscow because this is the only card they can play to counter superior Russian missile technology. The intrusion of US submarines into Russian waters (a year or so one sailed into the Bay of Peter the Great where the Russian Pacific Fleet is based) and the flight of US long range bombers along the Russian border is further proof of just how keen the Pentagon is to test the Kremlin.
The neocon nonsense about Putin, autocracy, aggression is all just misdirection to conceal the real issues: US military hegemony and the ultimate goal of securing Russian energy and mineral resources (Siberia and the Arctic) for the advantage of the US oligarchy.
Thanks for the history lesson. The Iraq/UK gold dynamic in the early 20c was new to me.
No question that geopolitics always ultimately comes down to resource access, strategic choke points, and weapons systems capabilities. The ideological nonsense is largely decorative (albeit not entirely; there are real civilizational consequences to victory in the game).
This system would certainly direct a lot more attention to people like Chris Martenson and Robert Barnes.
This is a very provocative article, John. I mean that in the best sense of the word, but I have some doubts. I guess my biggest problem lies with who takes and collects the bets, and by what criteria the winners are judged. (Speaking as a past boxing gsmbler, who always had to factor extreme externalities into s bet).
Yep, that looming question has been pointed out by others in the comments. It's a valid concern.
I think long term, best way is to include sources used to resolve open questions on the prediction market in the prediction market. For instance, say CDC numbers are used to determine if case numbers went down following a given coronavirus intervention. There could also be bets placed on "the CDCs numbers will be shown to be unreliable". Sources that accumulate a record of failing such bets would ultimately be dropped. This could be built in by taking weighted averages of different sources, with the weights being dynamically adjusted on the basis of prediction market confidence that their predictions will be accurate.
There's a possibility of infinite recursion happening admittedly, but the goal would ultimately be to achieve a sort of autocatalytic truth cycle. Similar to how science ideally functions: it's not only a given hypothesis that's subject to testing; the data is subject to testing, the models used to test the hypothesis are tested, and the theory used to generate the hypothesis is tested.
Systematic skepticism at every level basically.
Indeed. Eugyppius called out a tweet from one of the usual suspects today that I think matches the criteria more or less precisely. I made sure to comment with a link back to your piece.
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/open-thread-zero-monkeypox-edition/comments?s=r
My concern would be accuracy of such prediction efforts. Numerous analysts predict stock prices, and election outcomes, and are all over the map. As Yogi Berra said, predictions are hard. I would also worry about susceptibility of fraud. Computed predictions can be adjusted by the programmer. But they're right that that such tools can be powerful. The most ludicrous outcomes can be made to appear by careful marketing toward those responsible for the outcome. If they believe it will happen, they'll make it happen. As Tom Peters said, perception is all there is.
This is nice in theory but as others have already observed the limitations of political divisions so deeply entrenched in determining the correct outcome of indeterminate events shaded by ideologies and trifling quarrels leaves canyon wide gaps for contestation. Blockchains inability to erase both user and content they create poses huge problems for privacy and the right to be digitally forgotten, erased from existence. A self amending Blockchain that can maintain value and ledger accuracy in the form of a two layered DAG (one for content value creation another for token value distribution) is the best solution to the rot of present attention networks. It could be decentralized and autonomous and powered globally by users instead of Google or Amazon who would quickly shut it down. It needs to be self amending. Users could pay with tokens to permanently delete or alter content or delete their node altogether. The best solution to this social dilemma is a mass exodus from censorious platforms littered with blue check bugmen but even conservatives who have been on the losing end of this charade refuse to leave for financial reasons. Having built a following needed to amplify their performances for financial gain "get 10% off my magic pillow with code blowme" these greedy cretins would rather cash in than show principaled solidarity with their censored and black listed brethren. The second best solution is media literacy which is growing exponentially with the corporate state lies and propaganda. Networks are failing. The corporate press is mocked and derided. People are becoming media literate and awakened. I do appreciate all new creative solutions on this dilemma. Every proposal has something to add and consider. Engineering accuracy and rewarding prescience is most definitely a piece of this puzzle worth considering, if it can be judiciously realized.
As we lay the foundations of Web3+, we're ultimately engaged in governance, and indeed must be careful and judicious. It's a task comparable to that faced by the Founding Fathers: establishing the parameters that will shape civilization for potentially centuries to come, and therefore required to act with a great deal of prudence, considering every aspect of the new systems with caution.
Couldn't agree more vigorously. My only reticence is that the next fad network will take the lead in this endeavor and it will not be at all what is needed to meet the moment. For one, people in the blockchain community don't consider privacy at all in their development of new communities. I still think a digital bill of rights, and Internet 'constitution' is needed to protect those rights of people in the digital sphere from the tyranny of corrupted states and nefarious companies. I suppose most of these do not even respect their own constitutions so we will likely wait until pigs fly.
Not only do we need that, but we need to do it before the WEF does it for us and gives us such lovelies as 'the right to be free of online violence'.
A place like Substack is probably one of the ideal fora in which to have the global conversation about a Constitution of the Internet.
after the established 'let them eat cake' governing are politically and financially lifeless @ the guillotine. politically & financially lifeless at minimum. more energy, greater focus. do not continue to pour energy and support the unsupportable fact that the greater portion of humanity is better off pre apocalypse.
i dont mean that i dislike hate scorn the greater portion of humanity, not at all. i love us/we and we deserve to be free
i meant better off .... post apocalypse
Well, prediction markets in general have no real issue solving these problems. Almost any prediction can be quantified.
And yes, legacy media pundits could refuse to play. Over time, people would start to wonder why that was, and their informal reputation would be adjusted accordingly.
Another strategy actually could be to just set up proxy accounts. Any anon could set up an account that identifies itself as betting according to the predictions made by a certain pundit; the reputational effect on the pundit would be more or less the same as it would be if he was running the account himself.
You probably don't do it in a way that isn't contestable; but even if it is, it's a headache for the pundit, and the only way to avoid it is to run his own account. That's especially so for a Scott Adams type that bills himself as The Great Predictor. If he's constantly having to defend himself against troll accounts on prediction markets, he leaves himself open to the question of, okay why aren't you just running your own account then?
To a degree that's true, but a big part of why neocons are able to keep running their scam is that their fellow travelers in the corporate press studiously ignore the awkward matter of their less than impressive records. This is made a lot easier to do by the fact that evaluating the record of a given pundit requires a fair bit of work - you have to go through their previous statements, look at them in the context of subsequent events, and build up a comprehensive picture. Right now that work is done by alt-media journalists, and is principally qualitative and as such, open to the critique that it's biased by e.g. cherry-picking.
Establishing a system that subjected all pundits to quantitative reputation tracking would make that grift a lot harder to run.