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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Prediction markets correctly noted that Winter's Bone would lose, because it did not satisfy the Oscar voters' biases in the way that King's Speech does. The problem was that prediction markets were very effective at tracking the outcome, but the outcome was produced because of unjust status-signaling. In the same way, a futarchy might correctly estimate increases in GDP without correctly estimating GDP+.

If the metric that the futures market is looking to predict is faulty (Oscar votes, straight GDP) prediction markets will correctly predict that faulty result. So there's a lot of room for valuable work on perfecting GDP+, though such work is much less sexy (less status-oriented) than some other things.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

To give a lazy critique, Robin seems to be echoing the "uppity urban liberal elites look down on salt-of-the-earth country folk" complaint. H.A would give some theory about him performing a quasi-conservative role (as with his defense of the rich) of deriding the cultural elite for hypocrisy from a minor position within it. Thursday has the more realistic take.

nelsonal, Robin made the same observation here.

Joshua A. Miller, I don't see the connection between this post and GDP+. As for why there's not much work on that, Hanson proposes leaving that to democracy (our current system) and persuading people why they should prefer particular metrics is not his forte.

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