This is a "cultural forecasting" market. Low fertility rate is currently a "right wing" issue in the culture war. Bringing it up in left wing spaces functions as a kind of "blasphemy" (it is seen as you legitimizing bad things from the other side, like white supremacy / great replacement theory etc).

I saw Hank Green (popular youtuber with a left wing audience) make a video last week where he tries to explicitly change this. This market is my attempt to give us a mechanism to register our predictions about whether this change in culture will be successful (and potentially influence it).

How I expect people to make their predictions

1. I expect the initial most likely outcome to be "NO", because this would be a significant cultural shift & the likelihood of it happening over the next 2 months should be low.

2. If you watch the video, and the reaction of it in the comments, you may be convinced that the persuasion method he uses is effective & scalable, and that if other nodes in the culture adopt it (like Ezra Klein) it may work. Then it's just a matter of it getting visibility / the message being remixed & reused.

3. Alternatively you may conclude that it was ineffective, unlikely to trigger a significant cultural shift (perhaps by testing it with your friends or with your internet audience).

My personal position

This prediction market is an attempt to test my ability to make accurate cultural forecasts. My actual prediction on whether this shift will happen in the next 2 months is currently maybe ~20% chance, but with this prediction market I raise that to be ~70%. Because I think Hank's video demonstrates a persuasion technique that is very effective and can be reproduced, & if others want this change to be amplified, this is the toolkit for how you do it.

The important pieces of the video from a memetics perspective is:

• He spends the first half of the video explaining how we often form opinions due to ideological reasons, not because the thing is actually good or bad, or true or false

• He explains that not everything has to be polarized. There are no ideological battles around heat pumps, everyone just knows they are efficient & good

• He then constructs a new narrative around the fertility crises (calls it "demographic change") so that blue tribe adopt it as an issue without the framing of the red tribe. This is necessary because if caring about the issue implies you are pro-conservative-traditional-families etc, then it will be rejected.

I'm running this market because I want to prototype ways we can do "open memetics" that are transparent, safe, and pro-social. This is in light of the University of Zurich scandal where they did an experiment on human subjects without disclosing it. Disclosing it would have altered the results, but I think this can be used as a "feature, not a bug". When you create a cultural forecasting market, it has the potential to accelerate the thing, if people actually want the change to happen.

TODO: resolution criteria

I'm trying to think of good, rigorous resolution criteria. I assume everyone accepts my premise (that fertility crises is a right wing issue). If it changes I think it will be fairly obvious (should be something that would reach IRL/normie circles). We could just resolve it with a poll? Alternatively can make a list of milestones of it being a talking point in specific outlets.

I think I want it to only resolve to "YES" if the belief of the average person in blue tribe shifts from "this is not a real problem" to "demographic change is a real problem we'll have to factor into how we design cities or how we plan our future". It should be overwhelming enough that most people would notice someone in their circle updating to this belief.

cc @MingCat @bens

• Update 2025-05-03 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Resolution is based on collective perception, not the creator's personal perception.

Even if major media outlets (like the NYT) run stories on the topic, the market will resolve NO if the stance of "normal" people (average members of the blue tribe) regarding the fertility issue does not noticeably shift towards recognizing it as a real problem. A change only within specific media outlets or some pockets of the population, without broader grassroots change, is insufficient for a YES resolution.