26 Comments

"Even so, most don’t support them, and feel awkward about not being able to say why."

I think the reason is very simple. The reasonableness of each proposal is obvious to anyone who accepts the well-established premises it derives from. Scholars have failed to spread acceptance of those premises to the general public, sometimes for generations or centuries. Proposing institutions based on them and expecting buy-in now is putting the cart before the horse.

Please, please tell me how to get the public to accept, really deeply accept, basic ideas like "If you make things more expensive people will buy less of them, and if you cap prices below the market clearing price, there will be shortages." Let's start there, because in my experience the most successful organizations whose job is to influence and improve policy despair of ever achieving it and instead focus on couching approximations of good ideas in other peoples' preferred nonsensical framings. Then, we'll need about a dozen or two election cycles to implement all the regulatory and institutional improvements that trivially follow from such premises. That's when enough people will look back and go, "Oh, this is what Robin was trying to get us to do!" to actually get things done.

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I think most people don't consider using prediction markets to monitor local authorities because (A) that could be a lot of work, and cost money they don't have, and (B) it's hard enough to find people willing to /be/ local authorities. (And I don't even know who the elected local authorities are in my town. The school board and the mayor, I guess.) In about half of US cities, there's only 1 candidate for mayor (Marschall..Williams 2017, "Who runs for mayor in America?", https://leap.rice.edu/sites/g/files/bxs3221/files/inline-files/Who_Runs_for_Mayor.pdf), partly because there aren't 2 people who want the job. (~3% of the time there are no candidates.)

I think the explanation of your observations is not that most people are okay being ruled by elites who have little accountability, but that most people aren't interested in prediction markets. They don't understand them and don't see anybody anywhere in the world using prediction markets for anything important. Early adoption of any technology depends more on seeing other people adopt it than on logically convincing yourself of its utility.

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I should elaborate on my claim that "Early adoption of any technology depends more on seeing other people adopt it than on logically convincing yourself of its utility." Some studies of the diffusion of innovations concluded that it's useful to think of 2 different categories of innovations (High Adoption Potential: important and clearly advantageous; versus Low Adoption Potential: not obviously important or advantageous), and 2 categories of networks (modern: adopting new ideas is high-status; versus traditional: adopting new ideas is low-status). For HAP innovations in modern cultures, opinion leaders will be the first adopters, and then others will follow. For LAP innovations in traditional cultures, low-status people will be the first adopters, followed by opinion leaders, followed by everyone else.

From /Network Models of the Diffusion of Innovations/ by Thomas Valente, 1995, p. 34-38:

"Generally, individuals wait until the most influential members of the group adopt an innovation... [summaries of 3 studies which showed a correlation between early adoption by and opinion leadership of individuals ranging from 0.17 to 0.23]. From this data it is not possible to say whether early adoption influences opinion leadership or vice versa. ... Because individuals tend to nominate [as opinion leaders] those of higher socioeconomic status (SES) and higher SES is associated with earlier adoption, the correlation may be a spurious effect of this counfounding variable. ... Other diffusion studies showed that marginal individuals were more likely to be earlier adoptors of innovations. ... Becker (1970) ... showed that more advantageous innovations (HAP) are likely to be adopted earlier by central figures in the network or those receiving many network nominations. In contrast risky innovations (LAP) were more likely to be adopted earliest by marginal members of the network, that is, those receiving the fewest network nominations. ... In some groups (or cultures) adopting new ideas is a sign of modernity which is highly valued, whereas for other groups or cultures new ideas are considered deviant and more value is placed on tradition. These group norms have a strong influence on adoption behavior."

Marginal people can't be the first adopters when it comes to monitoring authorities, because they don't have the power to do anything about it. So adoption won't happen unless the benefits are clear enough that the high-status person won't be taking a risk.

Political change would presumably be much harder to bootstrap, because no one can choose on their own to be the first adopter. There must be a consensus. I know of no studies of the diffusion of political innovations.

Also, in this case, the highest-status people will be the very people whom the process is supposed to monitor, and they probably prefer not being monitored.

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There's a good reason why we don't use democratic methods of accountability for lower-level organizations: "voice" works much worse than "exit". But our states are too large for "exit" to work as well.

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Yes. "Voice" can get you in trouble and -- if you are only one voice among a large number -- will usually be ignored. Exit can be a real pain but has a stronger effect. So long as there are still places to exit to. (Bring on space colonies!)

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I feel like you are trying to raise money for an ambitious idea, but you are pitching college students and audiences, rather than the sort of people who might write a check.

You say "it is possible at low cost to add the new accountability mechanism of prediction markets to check on leader claims". Is there some way to demonstrate that this would be useful, at a tractable scale? How much money would it take?

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Or to mount another challenge: assume we have robust and more or less reliable prediction markets. What evidence do we have that people will use this information to make better political and policy decisions?

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"Most people can be shown that it is possible at low cost to add the new accountability mechanism of prediction markets to check on leader claims"

Sure, show me. I'm genuinely interested. The entire rest of this article sounds like the sour grapes of a poor salesman blaming his audience rather than his product, but I'm not actually seeing the case FOR the product here. Go ahead and give me the pitch.

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I've been doing that for 35 years. I get to talk about other stuff sometimes.

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Shrug. Sure. That wasn't sarcasm, I'm genuinely interested in the topic, I just seem to have dropped by at the wrong time for it then. Drop me a link whenever you get back around to it. Catch you then

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I disagree with the assumption (which is what I think it is) in your first paragraph. I think most people, even most "intellectuals", eagerly welcome further study of UFO phenomena not currently explicable, even while tending to guess that those we don't understand now will eventually be explained conventionally. After all, the effort to understand what we don't currently know increases our knowledge.

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Try putting up a proposal for a research grant on UFOs. You might get one up on studying it as a social 'hallucination' phenomenon, but try one as a serious study of aliens and see how far you get.

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This thread made me realize that I'd set my own attitude towards UFO research (that it shouldn't be done except for what is required of the Air Force, Space Force, & NOAA to investigate all strange atmospheric phenomena) under the assumption that all research must be funded by the government. This is a terrible assumption. I have no objection to private individuals studying UFOs. It's better than buying yachts or summer houses. We shouldn't adopt the surreptitious assumption that all research is publicly funded, or we'll end up in a world where all research is publicly funded.

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Andrew Gelman, an intellectual who contributed to this blog long ago, thinks all this talk of UFOS is a distortion caused by dysfunctional elite media: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/?s=UFO

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When it comes to overthinking, I'd rather do my own, thank you.

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We do allow betting on some things. The stock market and national lotteries, for example. Does this illuminate the widespread gambling drought? Maybe. There's a significant gender split in approval of gambling. I think that women do not want their men being given opportunities to gamble (which they otherwise like to do) - with practical exceptions for areas where there is substantial public good, or the government can get in some taxation. The women don't want their men spending their housekeeping funds on rare, high-payoff gambles. They are concerned about loss - and they are concerned that any large winnings would be spent on other women. Then, politicians promise the disapproving women related policies. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gambling_in_the_United_States

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Well, did you see such instability in the admittedly few instances (you know of) in which internal prediction markets were enabled?

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FELICES

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There's a lot of truth in what you're saying about how people are hardwired or conditioned to look to authorities for approval of any innovation.

For prediction markets specifically I think what you need is a success story. If somebody founded a company governed using prediction markets, and this company became majorly profitable and publicly credited prediction markets for its success, then a lot more people would take it seriously.

Lacking that, the tendency to be skeptical of new ideas is overriding.

I think a company governed using prediction markets could be successful. The big challenge would be to keep the payouts from becoming corrupted, and also to keep the overhead of the process low enough compared to a traditional management structure.

Perhaps you could combine prediction markets with a hierarchical management structure, where each manager would be responsible for creating prediction markets and judging their outcomes within that manager's assigned area of responsibility. That way, the payout judgments wouldn't be any more corrupt than how managers typically assign credit and blame. And those higher up in the management hierarchy could have the power to overrule the payout judgments of those lower, if petitioned to do so by the bettors. The final authority for payout judgments would be the owner of the company, who presumably has an interest in the company functioning well.

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Typos: high enough change of success, to be precede, want more accountably for national leaders

Markets are generally wonderful, agreed, and prediction markets seem less fraught than more direct mechanisms.

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FELICES ROBIN HANSON

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One big problem with UFOlogy is that it is heavily (predominantly) populated by kooks and schizos, not high openness/disagreeableness intellectuals like yourself. This does not apply to cryonics or futarchy.

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Not disagreeing, just commenting--

One big problem with the public and the elite is that neither of them can distinguish high-openness intellectuals from kooks and schizos.

(On reflection, I'm not sure that I can either. There have been many first-rate geniuses who made well-validated scientific advances, /and/ had kooky, schizophrenic, or just stupid ideas.)

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If I understand your premise, it is that masses defer to elite authority because it's easier, and I would agree that the complexities of daily existence make that a preferred choice for most. However, there was little downside for most regardless of which brand of elites was calling the shots, unless you were of draft age.

The Pandemic changed the calculus because everyone was now affected by the bad decisions fausted on them by the elites. Don't get jabbed loose job. Get jabbed maybe get real sick or even die. All justified by what are now known by most rational people as lies.

The sleeping giant is now awake and asking for accountability which will not be denied. The disproportionate reach of alternate media vis a vis the dieing legacy media illustrates that the rules have changed. I for one, am looking forward to the process.

Dick Minnis removingthecataract.substack.com

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There may be some kind of psychological aversion to prediction markets, as you suggest. But I also wonder how much of it is simply timescale. Most "leader accountability" questions take a long time to resolve and don't change much day to day. The whole thing needs to be more exciting (like sports prediction markets are, or the equities markets) and give the possibility of quick riches. I.e., it's a marketing problem.

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Yes, and instability is indeed something to fear!

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