Betting on acts of terrorism - UK Indymedia

This concept of the staking of limited resources as a measure of how strongly beliefs are held and likely to come true is why prediction markets like sports books or Metaculus are often seen as the best sources of truth for the future.

By definition, you will likely succeed a vanishingly-small percentage of the time, but—as the saying goes—that’s a feature, not a bug. The point is to venture—fistfuls of money in hand—at the furthest extremes of capitalism, hoping to stumble upon that rare, proper intersection of technology and commerciality.By design, most investments will miss t... See more

The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal s... See more

6 discussion topics on which David agrees with Taleb:(1) [p. 286] The sterilized randomness of games does not resemble randomness in real life; thinking it does constitutes the Ludic Fallacy (his neologism). This is exactly right, and mathematicians should pay attention. In my own list of 100 instances of chance in the real world, exactly 1 item is... See more

A few months ago I was at a conference where Robin Hanson spoke about prediction markets.[1] He argued that given how much of companies' outcomes are driven by who they choose to hire, and how non-rigorous the process of selecting employees and revisiting those selections is, there's a literal trillion-dollar opportunity in getting it right. Predic... See more

Markets:The model I like—to sort of simplify the notion of what goes on in a market for  common stocks—is the pari-mutuel system at the racetrack. If you stop to think about  it, a pari-mutuel system is a market. Everybody goes there and bets and the odds  change based on what's bet. That's what happens in the stock market. Any damn ... See more