Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
In January, Scott Alexander had another crisis of faith: to paraphrase, I cared almost as much about prediction markets as I care about racist lies, but we got prediction markets and why are they not doing much? Maybe I need to keep faith and Friend Computer will be so powerful that we don't need prediction markets?
Even Scott's fantasy dream scenario for what prediction markets could be like and what questions they could answer feels... ...deliberately naive? ...like libertarian brainrot? ...disconnected from reality?
Huge amounts of money are being dumped into a bubble based on hype, so to hope a predict market would or could make better predictions than the existing business-idiot VCs funding this bubble feels hopelessly naive in a libertarian kind of way. There is already a method of aggregating the wisdom of the crowd and it is failing to incredibly lazy hype and PR.
Again, there is already a mechanism for aggregating wisdom of the crowds, its called an election, and its also failed to get a answer predicated on reality or truth, so again, it seems incredibly naive to expect prediction markets to do better!
I mean, the councils and communities making these decision already ignore or overlook longer-term broader predictions of economic impact in favor of immediate home-owner value, I don't see why Scott would expect prediction markets to help decision making go better here.
Overall, it feels like Scott is overlooking the way decision making often already ignores science and experts. Society doesn't have a problem making decent predictions compared to the problems it has communicating expert opinions to the public effectively and crafting policy aligned with the public interest.
Are prediction markets not actually useful? No, it is the reality who is wrong.
Also I want to rant once again about the stupid way these people evade the insider trading problem, because there's a particular failure at play that I keep finding expressed in new and interesting ways.
So the argument goes that while insider trading may be bad for a financial market it actually just allows insiders to add their information to increase the predictive power of the market. Which would be true enough if we assume nothing else changes, but the same would also be true for price discovery in a normal asset market. Clearly we're missing something.
So why is it insider trading bad? Because it turns people without insider info into the dumb money you can take advantage of. And people, very reasonably, aren't going to participate in a system where their main role is being taken advantage of. Their departure means that the insiders don't have access to a pool of dumb money to take so they stop interacting with the system, and the market itself breaks down.
Now if you assume that the majority of people are "NPCs" or aren't very "agentic" or whatever then they're not going to act in systemically meaningful ways no matter how obvious the incentives to do so. You could also cast it as a version of the libertarian-as-housecat notion that markets simply exist as a natural system, rather than being pieces of economic infrastructure that require a lot of management and work to keep functioning at all, even before we get to the question of whether they operate to the public's benefit. So many of the problems with these ideologies spring from this belief that only some people actually matter in a systemic sense by dictating rules and Building Things and being big men, rather than systems being constantly created and shaped by all the people who interact with them through those interactions.
He was also perplexed that a prediction-market bet on "did COVID-19 come from a lab?" has declined from 85% yes in 2023 to 27% yes. If you click through you see its a bet on Manifold so bettors are rats and fellow travellers. Rationalists have spent $46,714 of real US dollars buying play money to bet on this.
That actually seems like the prediction market sort of did its job in this case? I mean, 27% yes is still too high, but actually changing in response to real evidence is much better than my low low expectations for prediction markets. It seems like he should take his own advice and actually take the prediction market seriously in this case.
And I think the odds of "yes" started out high because someone best $10-20k only to withdraw it after reading the ACX post. Most people can't afford to invest thousands of dollars in a bet that may never be resolved.
I'd write something here, but there's nothing funnier I can say.
sigh OK Scotty, I'll volunteer to host the Keymaster if that's what it takes to get Zuul into action
Is that a comment hidden because its too many replies down or has a too-low rating? Friend Computer does not like the G-word, his GPUs overheats and he starts to hallucinate more until you tell him you love him just the way he is.
Turns out sneerclub is the superpredictor. 10/10 on going 'this is a bad idea'.
The prediction markets seem to have all the basic problems that sneerclubbers: problems with resolution mechanisms, all sorts of insider trading and gaming the market, people using it for gambling...
Various prediction markets have made various half-assed attempts at solutions, but so far nothing seems to actually work well enough to make prediction markets nearly as useful as rationalists expected.
The last several years have been the monkey's paw moment for rationalists, where they keep getting what they want and realizing it's actually bad. As for why they keep getting what they want, just look at who's funding them.
(Also featuring a "Chinese curse" that isn't actually a phrase in Chinese. At least it's not "may you live in interesting times".)