Imagine someone said: Of course I believe in science – I’m no nut job. I’m a modern guy. But scientists sometimes get it wrong, so we can’t just believe everything they say – we have to use our judgement. For example, my judgement tells me that astrology just makes sense. Well not today – today’s horoscope suggests I drink less, while I know I can handle my benders. But usually my horoscope feels right. And usually I feel no objection to what scientists say. Which is what I mean when I say that I believe in science.
Intellectual integrity != confidence interval. I can say "I believe X will be next president", and be totally honest about it but once you bring in accountability, then we will see just how much. There are very few opinions I'd put a lot of money on, because I know just how easy it is to be wrong.
If you are going to talk about these tribal beliefs all day, then maybe you could post some peer-reviewed research, possibly yours? It is easy to say that "oh, only people with more money than sense bet there" out of Stetson. Maybe instead post some research made by people who study prediction markets and know the dynamics of them.I never said you should adopt beliefs that offer greatest monetary return. People just respond to incentives, and making them (monetarily) accountable usually makes them a lot more rational.
Both the Oxford English Dictionary (for BrE) and the online Merriam-Webster (for AmE) permit "judgement" as well. M-W (and, I think, most US usage) prefers "judgment"; OED (and, I think, most UK usage) prefers "judgement"; neither is *wrong* in either variety of English and there is no reason to think that Robin needs to "learn to spell" the word.
Somebody should start such a weighted index so I can buy it. Or if it already exists, who offers it and just what is its track-record compared to the market?
Nothing but my intellectual integrity, which I place an extremely high value on.
Virtually everyone places higher value on the status obtained by subscribing to certain tribal beliefs, which is the only reason there are tribal beliefs that contradict reality.
That is one of the major points of Robin's writings, that people put more value on status than they do on having beliefs that match reality. Of course people have a hard time admitting that, even to themselves, but sometimes it happens.
To those who believe they should adopt what ever beliefs offer them the greatest monetary return, then if tribal beliefs do that, then they will adopt what ever tribal beliefs do that.
The marginal benefit to society that I could do by spending my resources making prediction markets more accurate is tiny. My time and effort generates more benefits doing other things. People with tribal beliefs are not going to change them simply because they are shown to be wrong. That is the whole point of tribal beliefs. They hold the tribe together in the face of adversity and even reality.
How many believe that Obama was born in Kenya? Or that Obama is a Muslim? Or that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old? Or that there were WMD in Iraq? Or that AGW isn't happening? Or that allowing gays to marry will destroy heterosexual marriages? Or that Obamacare has death panels in it? Or that Obama has expanded the size of government? Or that golden tablets were dug up on a farm in NY in 1823 containing the religious history of one of Israel's Lost Tribes? None of these beliefs have any data to support them, they were arrived at in the absence of data. Data may have been cherry-picked to try and support these beliefs, but that is simply lying by another name. What is interesting is that members of the tribe rarely appreciate that they have been lied to, and if they do, it doesn't change their beliefs, and it certainly doesn't turn them against the tribal leaders that did the lying and who promote and foster those false beliefs (for their own benefit).
I don't really pay attention to what other progressives are trying to do, so I am not so much caught up in progressive tribal beliefs. I do think the anti-genetic modification stuff is nonsense, as is the pro-organic stuff. I think growing organic food is a waste of farmland. People can do it as a hobby, but growing enough food to feed people requires industrial efficiency and industrial scale. Some pesticides are ok, but the EPA does a lousy job of regulating out the ones that are not ok, such as the neonicotinoids that are causing colony collapse disorder in bees and the triazine herbicides.
I don't consider myself to be a member of any tribe. I am extremely liberal and I only know of one person who is as liberal as I am, and none that are more liberal. I feel that is because reality has a liberal bias and I want to go with reality, not any kind of tribal belief.
I actively seek out other sources of information. This blog is not exactly a hotbed of progressive activism promoting progressive tribal beliefs.
There's a special problem with using prediction markets to predict judicial opinions, particularly the ACA decision. FArrovian cycling can occur in Supreme Court opinions. To some extent, the potential for cycling is constrained by precedent, but the ACA decision was a matter of first impression. So there's cycling, which is inherently unpredictable.
A related problem is that there might be logrolling, but, absent insider info, there's no way to know.
This doesn't mean that prediction markets aren't the best publicly available predictors of Supreme Court court opinions. They probably are.
With your superior knowledge of the effect of tribal beliefs on prediction markets, shouldn't you be able to make a killing betting in such markets (and therefore, improve the accuracy of their prices)?
We now know one winning bet would have been "the "individual mandate will not be found constitutional under the commerce clause." We also know that a losing bet would have been "one of the judges subject to changing his mind will not change his mind based on his stated desire to find the individual mandate, slightly rewritten, consitutional under some clause besides the commerce clause". To take your small-cap analogy to heart, that second bet could only have been placed in a third tier small-cap market, i.e. a market not only smaller than the big market "constitutional or not", but also smaller than the less-big market "not struck down on some basis widely publicly discussed" (which would add in jurisdiction but would not add in the rarely discussed taxing power issue); a prediction markets winner in this case would be most like someone who bets on the "field" at a horse race.If I were in charge of going back in time and setting up a more optimal prediction market on this, I would phrase the bet as "which argument set forth in one or more law review articles or briefs most closely approximates the winning result", but that would have taken a lot of work to set forth the multiple distinguishable possibilities and would have discouraged everyone from betting unless they had done possibly excessive research (according to one source I have read = at Eugene Volokhs group blog = there is exactly one law review article, out of dozens or more, which set forth an argument closely tracking the winning argument)
I agree with almost everything you're saying. Prediction markets (especially liquid and deep ones) I am sure are orders of magnitude more informative than even the average expert.
The question that you don't seem to directly address is do experts offer any marginal information to in addition to prediction markets. On this I'm inclined to say yes. You wouldn't want to equal weight the two, but at some non-zero weight you might want to use experts.
The experience with many prediction systems, e.g. Netflix, shows that even crappy, but diverse, predictors have small amounts of marginal information to add.
To take this back to prediction markets, look at the most liquid, robust and deep prediction markets we have today: equity markets. Over long periods of time this prediction market has been systematically wrong with regard to a few simple rules. Low P/E stocks out perform high P/E stocks on average, momentum stocks out-perform, and small cap outperforms.
Not that you want to ignore the prediction market in favor of these things, but you want to tilt what the prediction market is telling you (a market-cap weighted index) in favor of value, growth and small-cap. This indicates to me that there's additional predictors that can still generate marginal improvement in addition to prediction markets.
"Growing enough food to feed people requires industrial efficiency and industrial scale" seems like a start.
I took the intrade market as more evidence for the claim that Roberts changed his mind at the last minute.
Intellectual integrity != confidence interval. I can say "I believe X will be next president", and be totally honest about it but once you bring in accountability, then we will see just how much. There are very few opinions I'd put a lot of money on, because I know just how easy it is to be wrong.
If you are going to talk about these tribal beliefs all day, then maybe you could post some peer-reviewed research, possibly yours? It is easy to say that "oh, only people with more money than sense bet there" out of Stetson. Maybe instead post some research made by people who study prediction markets and know the dynamics of them.I never said you should adopt beliefs that offer greatest monetary return. People just respond to incentives, and making them (monetarily) accountable usually makes them a lot more rational.
Both the Oxford English Dictionary (for BrE) and the online Merriam-Webster (for AmE) permit "judgement" as well. M-W (and, I think, most US usage) prefers "judgment"; OED (and, I think, most UK usage) prefers "judgement"; neither is *wrong* in either variety of English and there is no reason to think that Robin needs to "learn to spell" the word.
Somebody should start such a weighted index so I can buy it. Or if it already exists, who offers it and just what is its track-record compared to the market?
Claims about tiny improvements aren't very interesting, or testable.
I'd be very interested in seeing Robin's or others' responses to this.
Learn to spell judgment. J-u-d-g-m-e-n-t.
Nothing but my intellectual integrity, which I place an extremely high value on.
Virtually everyone places higher value on the status obtained by subscribing to certain tribal beliefs, which is the only reason there are tribal beliefs that contradict reality.
That is one of the major points of Robin's writings, that people put more value on status than they do on having beliefs that match reality. Of course people have a hard time admitting that, even to themselves, but sometimes it happens.
To those who believe they should adopt what ever beliefs offer them the greatest monetary return, then if tribal beliefs do that, then they will adopt what ever tribal beliefs do that.
The marginal benefit to society that I could do by spending my resources making prediction markets more accurate is tiny. My time and effort generates more benefits doing other things. People with tribal beliefs are not going to change them simply because they are shown to be wrong. That is the whole point of tribal beliefs. They hold the tribe together in the face of adversity and even reality.
How many believe that Obama was born in Kenya? Or that Obama is a Muslim? Or that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old? Or that there were WMD in Iraq? Or that AGW isn't happening? Or that allowing gays to marry will destroy heterosexual marriages? Or that Obamacare has death panels in it? Or that Obama has expanded the size of government? Or that golden tablets were dug up on a farm in NY in 1823 containing the religious history of one of Israel's Lost Tribes? None of these beliefs have any data to support them, they were arrived at in the absence of data. Data may have been cherry-picked to try and support these beliefs, but that is simply lying by another name. What is interesting is that members of the tribe rarely appreciate that they have been lied to, and if they do, it doesn't change their beliefs, and it certainly doesn't turn them against the tribal leaders that did the lying and who promote and foster those false beliefs (for their own benefit).
I don't really pay attention to what other progressives are trying to do, so I am not so much caught up in progressive tribal beliefs. I do think the anti-genetic modification stuff is nonsense, as is the pro-organic stuff. I think growing organic food is a waste of farmland. People can do it as a hobby, but growing enough food to feed people requires industrial efficiency and industrial scale. Some pesticides are ok, but the EPA does a lousy job of regulating out the ones that are not ok, such as the neonicotinoids that are causing colony collapse disorder in bees and the triazine herbicides.
I don't consider myself to be a member of any tribe. I am extremely liberal and I only know of one person who is as liberal as I am, and none that are more liberal. I feel that is because reality has a liberal bias and I want to go with reality, not any kind of tribal belief.
I actively seek out other sources of information. This blog is not exactly a hotbed of progressive activism promoting progressive tribal beliefs.
There's a special problem with using prediction markets to predict judicial opinions, particularly the ACA decision. FArrovian cycling can occur in Supreme Court opinions. To some extent, the potential for cycling is constrained by precedent, but the ACA decision was a matter of first impression. So there's cycling, which is inherently unpredictable.
A related problem is that there might be logrolling, but, absent insider info, there's no way to know.
This doesn't mean that prediction markets aren't the best publicly available predictors of Supreme Court court opinions. They probably are.
Speaking of tribal beliefs, do you actually disagree with a "typical American progressive" on any testable question with political overtones?
With your superior knowledge of the effect of tribal beliefs on prediction markets, shouldn't you be able to make a killing betting in such markets (and therefore, improve the accuracy of their prices)?
Your interpretation? Or scientific study of prediction markets?
Easy to say when you have nothing on the line...
We now know one winning bet would have been "the "individual mandate will not be found constitutional under the commerce clause." We also know that a losing bet would have been "one of the judges subject to changing his mind will not change his mind based on his stated desire to find the individual mandate, slightly rewritten, consitutional under some clause besides the commerce clause". To take your small-cap analogy to heart, that second bet could only have been placed in a third tier small-cap market, i.e. a market not only smaller than the big market "constitutional or not", but also smaller than the less-big market "not struck down on some basis widely publicly discussed" (which would add in jurisdiction but would not add in the rarely discussed taxing power issue); a prediction markets winner in this case would be most like someone who bets on the "field" at a horse race.If I were in charge of going back in time and setting up a more optimal prediction market on this, I would phrase the bet as "which argument set forth in one or more law review articles or briefs most closely approximates the winning result", but that would have taken a lot of work to set forth the multiple distinguishable possibilities and would have discouraged everyone from betting unless they had done possibly excessive research (according to one source I have read = at Eugene Volokhs group blog = there is exactly one law review article, out of dozens or more, which set forth an argument closely tracking the winning argument)
I agree with almost everything you're saying. Prediction markets (especially liquid and deep ones) I am sure are orders of magnitude more informative than even the average expert.
The question that you don't seem to directly address is do experts offer any marginal information to in addition to prediction markets. On this I'm inclined to say yes. You wouldn't want to equal weight the two, but at some non-zero weight you might want to use experts.
The experience with many prediction systems, e.g. Netflix, shows that even crappy, but diverse, predictors have small amounts of marginal information to add.
To take this back to prediction markets, look at the most liquid, robust and deep prediction markets we have today: equity markets. Over long periods of time this prediction market has been systematically wrong with regard to a few simple rules. Low P/E stocks out perform high P/E stocks on average, momentum stocks out-perform, and small cap outperforms.
Not that you want to ignore the prediction market in favor of these things, but you want to tilt what the prediction market is telling you (a market-cap weighted index) in favor of value, growth and small-cap. This indicates to me that there's additional predictors that can still generate marginal improvement in addition to prediction markets.