variety is the spice of life

Anything meaningful takes five years to do, whether that’s getting a company off the ground or mastering a skill.If we start working at 20, that’s 60 productive years — or 12 five-year blocks to do new things, then move on.Instead of living one life or career, why not live a dozen instead?This ebb and flow of interest and desire feels natural to me... See more

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon (news - web sites) is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits.

As desire for single-origin coffees spread, shops would sell 10 or even 20 different coffees. With only two or three brewed coffees for sale, café goers wouldn’t be able to sample most of the offerings

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

In the last post, I detailed that collecting texts may become a tempting replacement for obtaining real knowledge, but also that collecting in itself doesn’t get us anywhere. I called this the “Collector’s Fallacy”.

In a prediction market, it is relatively more difficult: maybe you are trading with someone who has natural exposure to a Russian invasion and is just looking for a hedge, but more likely your counterparty is, like, a guy who speaks Russian and is in dozens of Telegram groups waiting for just the right moment to trade against your resting order.

Internal prediction market