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Forecasting and prediction markets are very different and should not be conflated. On Manifold Brier Score is basically irrelevant. The folks working at the CIA aren’t getting performance reviews based on their mana balance at the end of every month.

The central flaw of almost all philanthropy is it degenerates into virtue-signaling, and ineffective/counter-productive interventions. Similar criticisms could be applied to many political movements—somehow the “ends” are always acquiring power and the “goals” not being achieved at all are then used as excuses for more control.

Without some grounding in the real world, many fields likewise become feel-good echo-chambers with no papers replicating and no testable predictions.

More to the point—prediction markets on “which project will produce the best results if funded for >$X” is testable, resolves quite swiftly, and the information gleaned in trading may be quite informative.

To the extent there are a lot of people asking for money, and certain people have better grounding in the real-world to predict what might result—and these resolve swiftly and aren’t rare events, then markets are vastly underrated.

Nothing cited in the post is particularly novel. And misses the “perhaps people who are good at predicting many things predict similar things well” plus low-collateral futures, drift as new events occur, and a dozen other reasons that “prediction markets can’t resolved 1 in 10,0000 events centuries from now” is just trivial straw-manning at best, and wrong on the facts, more likely.

@Gigacasting You need to think 2nd, 3rd, 4th order to appreciate the ways predictions can help mitigate long term risk. I don’t see much of that in this post.

This statement is like saying derivatives are overrated in finance. Prediction markets are underrated generally, but are somewhat closer getting the attention they deserve in EA though far from being overrated. If anything prediction markets are part of the identity of EA as a movement and will be one of the key ways EA bleeds over into and influences adjacent communities and movements.

Good summary of the main limitations but I don't know how much this is news to people.

Buying up: I think prediction markets are great, but manifold users probably systematically overrate that hypothesis?

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Featuring to announce the existence of the Criticism and Red Teaming Contest markets! Also because this one is especially topical for Manifold, haha