Prediction #6 in my "Great Logging Off" market
Blog post:
https://www.fortressofdoors.com/ai-markets-for-lemons-and-the-great-logging-off
This resolves YES, if, by the end of 2027, in my sole opinion:
Societies that, compared to overall average American society at large, prioritize family, community, regular face-to-face human interaction, strong social support networks, and especially those that have a built-in system for helping young people find spouses and which support them in raising families, are generally doing better than those that don't.
I'll look to various metrics that judge the following:
Population growth
Happiness / well-being
Health/disease
Economic success
As one further condition, I will need to see evidence that shows that the MOST online societies have worse overall outcomes (controlling for income/education/etc).
Note that this market isn't testing whether extreme neo-luddites outcompete everybody else -- the spirit of the market resolution is just whether being terminally online, and increasingly so, turns out to be bad for you.
Dec 27, 2:14pm: Will relatively "offline" societies show signs of out-competing "online" societies? → Will relatively "offline" societies show signs of out-competing "online" societies by the end of 2027?
Related questions
What makes this an interesting question, for you? Worthy of a market?
The correlation is glaringly obvious for today's most popular online social technologies, but we could also easily imagine a different suite of technologies leading to healthier outcomes (matchmakers that work, better forums, email correspondence, education software), so it isn't about online or offline. And when VR arrives it will start to pull at the definition of in-person communities and face to face meetings, and potentially reverse the correlationon, but by 2027 it wont have had enough time to mature, so it would only muddy the results.
How do you plan to resolve if these factors go in opposite directions? I'm particularly interested in the case where offline societies have greater population growth, happiness, and health but lower economic growth.
Actually, perhaps each of these factors should be a different market.
@brp I’ll make a subjective call using them all as evidence together, if the net result seems positive. But splitting them out could be useful!
@LarsDoucet Push come to shove, I’ll go Darwinian - who is reproducing their population and culture more effectively? If you’re net happy and healthy and wealthy but are dwindling in numbers and influence then you’re losing by this market’s standards. If the result is truly ambiguous and controversial I’ll resolve N/A. But in the event they’re not clearly outcompeting society at large, I’ll resolve NO.
@LarsDoucet I think my real question is: do you consider the US to be the most terminally online at this moment, and if not, then who?
@Nps I don’t think the US is THE most terminally online for no other reason than it’s large size limits how extreme it can score on that metric, but it’s a good well measured baseline with lots of data to compare against.
The “MOST online society” additional criteria means a subset population with a coherent culture and whose onlineness is significantly higher than the baseline.
Relatively offline societies have to do better than average Americans, and relatively online societies have to do worse than average Americans, in other words.