33 Comments

If the USA and Russia were about to break diplomatic relations, all the gold and refugee tickets would be confiscated by those in power. The judges who would be supposed to enforce such contracts might change their ethical priorites and so on...

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Robin, point made, I apologise for criticising without first learning enough to know if my criticism has any merit. (While trying to be aware of the bias of learning overly specific lessons).

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Maybe have a handy link to a FAQ about it? People who aren't completely clear on the concept might not understand why prediction markets inevitably summarise all the best information, discard the common disinformation, and weed out the misinformed-but-confident gamblers.

A quick link to the FAQ each time would be even easier than a 2-line comment saying why you won't explain.

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Si, why should I summarize the concept of and evidence for prediction markets on each and every post that mentions them? I've already written lots on that subject elsewhere.

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Quite a lot of Robin Hanson's posts have this kind of feel to them:

1) Find complex problem2) Wave hands and cast "markets" at problem (see also: "emergence", "complexity")3) Information appears from nowhere, problem is solved.

Where would the accurate information about the probability of catastrophe upon which the ticket buyers are acting come from? If people watch the news and are more afraid of a pandemic of brain tumours caused by cellphone use, that doesn't seem to tell us anything about the real likelihood of such a pandemic, or ways to avoid it...

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I don't get what the resort is for.

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Robin Hanson, we could just as easily figure out just how to avoid the vampire threat with a few ticket holders that way. We could have a retreat that's stocked with lots of garlic and stakes and silver bullets, and you have to show your reflection in a mirror before the security guards let you in....

Why would one market predict better than the other?

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J, it should be obvious that in equilibrium only a very tiny fraction of humanity would hold tickets at any one time. So of course tickets would not seem a good deal to most people. But we just need a few actual ticket holders to create a market and get market prices to inform us about how to avoid disaster.

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Kaj, this just seemed like an implausible sort of lottery. You invest your money, and if your ticket wins you get to sit in a shelter and get the dubious advantages of living through a giant catastrophe assuming the catastrophe happens in one particular six month period. You put your life on hold for this.

If the catastrophe does come then you find out how well the shelter is prepared to survive it. Not something that can be properly tested ahead of time though if you know precisely what kind of catastrophe to expect you can make some reasonable guesses.

If you have the funds you can outbid everybody else two or three or four times in a row. Then if you're pretty sure the catastrophe will happen within the next two years, you win. You will be in the shelter when it happens. If you miscalculate you might not have the funds available to win the fifth time, and then after two years of sitting in the shelter waiting for the end, you get thrown out -- maybe a week before the catastrophe actually comes.

Something about this behavior just doesn't fit human nature as I observe it. I could more easily see sending your *children* to a shelter for 6 months. One that's stocked with great teachers and the accumulated knowledge of the ages. I could see sending a son there when times look a bit perilous. I'd hesitate to send a daughter if too many other girls have come back pregnant, though.

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J Thomas:But the idea does have possibilities, with some modification. How about this -- each 6 months hire 30 Hollywood starlets who're willing to take 6 months off from their search for the big time, and install them in the shelter. Then 30 men would have six months to try to seduce them, knowing there were only 29 competitors.

I'm not entirely sure if I understand what's meant here, but it gave me the idea of a series of shelters that were funded by a reality TV series. After all, we already have reality shows where the participants are confined into an isolated environment for a long time, so why not do it somewhere that's isolated in reality? You could then keep the shelter constantly occupied, with a new show starting each time the old one ended.

Of course, you couldn't tie this into prediction markets, as the prices would reflect people's willingness to be on TV, not their estimate of an existential risk being near. It's also questionable whether a competitive environment such as the one in most reality shows would be a very good thing in a community that might end up needing to rebuild humanity. Most "isolated environment" reality shows also, AFAIK, rely on a format where contestants are gradually eliminated one by one, bringing the late-season population to a non-sustainable level - but that could be fixed by coming up with a better format. As an additional plus, the tasks given to the contestants could be one that trained the skills they'd need in case of a collapse.

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I have never heard a plausible argument explaining why trading in conditional sports tickets is not in violation of the wire act or UIGEA or state laws. Has anyone? The tickets are things of value and the participants are at risk. Best that I can tell, the FBI just has better things to do.. like preventing disasters.

In some scenarios, those refuge ticket prices are going to track with handgun prices.

Also, the "uncomfortable question" isn't much of a challenge unless you assign a very high probability to successful re-animation (and don't care much about your contemporaries).

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Robin, the sort of fallout shelters you dig into your garden aren't especially long-term (cf. the Cuban missile crisis). Also, you could probably do a trend analysis of canned food sales (and canning equipment), gun sales, survivalist magazine circulation, first-aid kit and antibiotic sales, the gold spot price, etc, and get a good short term estimate. In fact, there will be existing market data covering a range of time horizons (imprecisely, but them's the breaks) given the particular product/service and whether the contract is immediate or for a time in the future.

My point: you probably have plenty of data already to chew on!

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Tom, yes refuge tickets are probably not self-funding, though who knows. Yes of course prices would vary with other factors, but noisy estimates are better than no estimates. On timing, there is a tradeoff between long periods to protect from long-lead pandemics and short periods to track events nearer to doomsday. Multiple refuges with staggered entry times could mitigate this.

Julian, shelter construction prices are very long delay estimates - refuge tickets let you get closer in time to doomsday.

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Historical market data surely already exists for sales of personal nuke shelters and survivalist-themed periodicals.

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Robin Hanson,I kind of understood that this was about avoiding regulation and meant to mention it, but it wasn't really clear to me and you should take that as a comment on clarity. The aspect of using prediction markets for large disasters swamped it in my mind.

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Unkown, good question. Here's my best answer:I suppose I'm not convinced at a gut level of proof-in-concept. It's a no-brainer that cryonics seems to maximize my reanimation odds once I'm dead, but before then it becomes less clear.So I don't think it's clear yet whether cryonic suspension is better than trying one's best to wait out improvements in regenerative medicine and safety-proofing out living environment. But I think more analysis on this is useful. I could see myself being persuaded and choosing cryonic suspension while still alive and healthy. But I'm not there (possibly because the critical thought hasn't been put into a careful, comparative analysis of the two options yet).

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