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

he previously mentioned research finds that an investor with $100,000 in an equity mutual fund has the equivalent of a $2,500 bet on the election already.

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

The top-performing miners in September were those who hedged early. Miners who hedged USD revenues in April earned 40% more, and those who hedged Bitcoin production earned 27% more.

Oftentimes with surprisingly little liquidity, prediction markets prove highly accurate and robust in the face of interference. The "wisdom of crowds" phenomenon ensures that these markets frequently outperform traditional forecasting tools like polls. For instance, the University of Iowa operates the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM) as a research pro... See more

The solar panel is wizardry manifest. It literally prints energy from free shit that falls out of the sky.

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.

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”.