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MANIFOLD
Will I update towards a more positive view of the Consensus auto-scientific-literature-analysis system in the next six months?
1
Ṁ100Ṁ100
resolved Feb 20
Resolved
N/A
Consensus is a website/app that has a goal of "mak[ing] getting information from rigorous, evidence-based sources as easy and consumable as a Google Search or a Quora query". They kindly offered me the chance to test an early version of their product last summer - the results were http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/consensus_masks.png and http://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/consensus_ketamine.png , which I was not very impressed by. Since then, their team has continued to be very nice to me, answer my questions, and put another eight months or so of work into their product, which I have not yet checked. They recently launched a public beta, which you can see at https://consensus.app/blog/introducing-consensus/ . My current guess is that automating literature review doesn't work (even hiring PhDs to do literature review barely works!) and that this project will operate as a slightly higher-tech Google Scholar that's not worth sacrificing the familiarity and simplicity of the latter. This market will resolve as positive if, on 8/19/2022, my opinion of Consensus is significantly more positive than the above. I would certainly resolve it positive if I routinely used Consensus instead of Google or Google Scholar when investigating (some subset of) scientific questions, or if I heard buzz from researchers that they did this and really appreciated it. I expect that the Consensus team will continue to let me assess their product free of charge, but if not, the amount I will pay for a subscription in order to resolve this prediction market will be a function of what the prediction market predicts - higher probability of me liking it = more money I will spend in order to test this. This could produce weird behavior, but I think it's more likely they'll continue to let me test it for free and this won't come up.
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