The recent Siskind substack is full of insane takes (beyond his "class analysis"): Republicans should wage culture war on experts and replace them with prediction markets. Clearly the correct insight based on the American covid experience: we need less expertise.
(https://i.redd.it/vk6k2mzqiqj61.png)
posted on February 26, 2021 02:42 AM by
u/DELETED
Lol, “unbiasable,” as though having money in the prediction market wouldn’t incentivize all kinds of shit. Make a killing both literally and figurative by starting a war with any random country!
and credentialed expertise would still greatly sway whatever prediction market, so you haven’t even solved the problem you set out to but rather just set up a wealth-driven opinion poll as your oracle of the future
You silly sneerers, Scott titled this “A Modest Proposal” which means it’s satire. He obviously doesn’t believe everything here.
What does he believe? The stuff I like of course. Everything else is a joke.
Do you think he’s ever sat down and read any basic political texts in his life? Like even a textbook or something like that. All his opinions are cobbled together from his garbled misreadings of blogs his friends linked him and satirical texts from the 80s or whatever.
How does this man’s brain work?! He’s like a savant for shit takes.
has there ever actually been any proof that prediction markets are good
Haven’t republicans already waged a war on experts? You don’t get credit for suggesting things that they’ve already done.
Also, political betting markets were giving a non-zero chance that Hillary Clinton would be the 2020 DNC nominee. Anyone who legitimately thinks that is too stupid to operate a motor vehicle, let alone make serious decisions on the behalf of a major superpower.
One thing that actual academics do that Scott is not doing here: check whether the mechanism behind why something might work (here, prediction markets) works more generally, or just in some specific cases.
Prediction markets rely on self-selection: consistently wrong predictions lead to exiting the market. This says nothing about how wrong you’re allowed to be as a break-even condition: if you place big bets on obvious things, and smaller ones on unknown unknowns, you can look “reliable” but generate no new knowledge whatsoever. You can be wrong 45% of the time by chance if your bets are all equally large but still stay in the market. Is that better than expertise?
I suspect that the salience of expert failure relative to ordinary failure is part of what has led fans of prediction markets to oversell their virtues - but wait, isn’t that Availability Bias? Wasn’t this all about Overcoming Bias and being Less Wrong? … never mind.
Scott: I am the 25%
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Btw, this is idea of ‘fire 75% of experts’ is stupid for a lot of reasons, and one of the reasons is that any rule like this will instantly be manipulated. People love to bring up stuff like ‘experts are bad due to goodharts law’ (sidenote, you would hope they base their ideas on this idea, but actually naming biasses and systems is sadly not that common, so consider this my steelman), but then they propose a system which is also going to be goodhart lawed, but which is even easier to manipulate (in this case, people with money will have it a lot easier if they can just manipulate prediction markets, and don’t have to setup ideological research institutes and pay those people).
E: Scott not thinking about that fits with his misreading of that book, which name I forgot, about how you can’t count and plan for certain things. Somebody prob knows what article I’m talking about.
This seems as good an excuse as any to revisit Siskind’s worst blog post and check his predictions (at the bottom):
2015: 5,850 incidents
2019: 7,314 incidents (125.03%)
Wow, so close!
At least for his initial nominations out of the gate, before all the turnover, the number by Siskind’s definition appears to be 4 out of 24 (17%).
Kinda hard to assess because they went up from 2009 to 2013 then crashed hard 2013 to 2016, but the overall drop from the beginning to the end of each period appears to be pretty close. I think when it starts getting as low as it is, though, you bottom out and it’s hard to go any lower. Weird definition anyway.
Whoops!
Does a ban count as a registry?
D’oh!
Someone go through this and do the math to update our confidence in his predictions. Is Siskind in the top 25% of experts? Is anyone who predicts anything with 99% confidence?
How exactly would outperformance in a speculation based market prove anyone right or wrong?
And how would it be populist if entry to the market was determined by wealth available to gamble and its main drivers were participants with big money?
If a tree falls in the forest and there is no market speculation on the quasi-commodity of such event, did it fall and was there even a tree? Price as thing in itself. Yes, I’m American, how could you tell?
I don’t read Moldbug as a rule but am I wrong in thinking this is much closer to nrx or at least ancap talking points than anything on SSC five years ago?
Imagine fellating prediction markets just weeks after the GME incident.
I just can’t get past the idea that republicans who hate experts would understand and trust prediction markets
He’s wrong about a lot of things here and yet I really, really yearn for someone to talk about how there are a lotta white-upper-class Democrats who really do look down on and arguably hate the specific “type” of poor and middle class people that he describes here. There is a multi-racial working class that a good number of liberals think of as stupid. It’s not just the white working class. (edited to fix wording)
instructions unclear, tried assembling “decentralized, populist, credentialism-free, market-based alternative to expertise,” got gamestonks