I contemplated this when I got my daughter vaccinated. She hated it, she screamed, she cried, etc. But I told her: "Darling, I know this might hurt now, but one day you'll wake up and say: 'Hey, I don't have Rubella! Thanks, daddy!"
But, at the same time, I refused to get her ears pierced as an infant, despite her mother wanting that. But what's the difference, really? Vaccines and ear-piercings are both painful, but the pain is not permanent. They both would be done without her permission. So what's the difference? The ear-piercings would be for purely aesthetic reasons but vaccines could possibly save her life?
I'd definitely see that working for gender transition of minors.
Let people trade on whether the individual would regret his/her transition in 5 years. The legal system should then take that into account when deciding to approve or reject medical procedures.
I'd see both trade at the individual level (possible by psychologists) and at a bundle level.
I don't think we "already know". On both sides of the aisles, people I talk to are deeply convinced that their position is the correct one. So for an external observer not having studied much the topic, it's hard to know if it's good or bad for them and I'd genuinely would want markets to give me info on this.
Intuitively, we care about OUR children, is because we want to have joy from OUR grandchildren. Gender transition would abort the whole idea. Besides, it is explicitly forbidden by the Holy Scripture.
"explicitly forbidden by the Holy Scripture" you can argue it being forbidden, but you will have a very hard time arguing it being "explicitly forbidden" in documents from a time where gender transition wasn't even a possibility. + some religious (some protestant churches, Judaic denominations, some Islamic scholars) leaders tell that gender transition is allowed.
But now we are moving the conversation toward the domain of "values", some domain where futarchy has very little applications.
If your rejection of gender transition is for the good of the kids, then your beliefs should be able to be readjusted through evidence (markets on the short term and their results on the long term), but if it is due to religious points of views, there is little I can bring.
Personally I don't care at all about religious views on gender transition, the only thing I care is "Is it good for children?". If the answer is YES, we should allow it, if the answer is NO, we should prohibit it (and there may even be some SOMETIMES middle ground).
(1) It is explicitly forbidden to castrate. Even animals. Obviously, it is a much more serious crime, when done to a human. (Lev 22:24)
(2) It is ALSO forbidden to cross-dress (Deut 22:5)
(3) Sexual relations between two men are considered a capital offense. Obviously, this also holds if one of them is castrated (Lev 18 and 20).
So yes, I would stand by "explicit".
Is it good for children to go transgender? In what way is it good if someone is no longer able to procreate? Or say a child no longer wants to see, or hear, or speak and demands the removal of eyes, inner ears or tongue? In what way is it good?
(1) Is a reference to animal offering. So castration wouldn't be a problem there unless the person was intended for human sacrifice (which would violate so many other biblical laws).
(2) and (3) only work under the assumption that transgender people are of their original gender. Which is not addressed at all in the bible (the closest would indeed be eunuch which are accepted, but do not intend on being of the feminine gender).
Now the second part of the post is more on the rational side.
Would you be ready to take a significant position that if we were to make a study on transgender regret rate, the regret rate would be high?
Whatever action has been taken for me (and whatever my personal preferences), after the fact I would express the opinion of the side which pays me more money.
You basically mean being a corrupted oracle (asking people with positions on your markets to give you a bribe).
There are two answers to that:
- First, don't make people themselves the oracle but have a decentralized oracle (like Kleros) which has to rule on regret. (Regrets, Don't regret, Unknown)
Most of the time people would express their true regret, and the oracle would simply report them. But if people try to game the system or don't report, mark it as unknown an everyone is reimbursed.
- Second, you have to imagine that in a world full of individual prediction markets (your movie recommendations are prediction markets, the restaurants you see on the map apps are recommended though prediction market, etc).
If you appear to be an untrustfull reporter, agents will stop trading your markets and you would lose all the benefits of them. Probably not worth it for a few bucks. We are here in a iterated prisonier dilemma kind of situation and defecting all the time is a suboptimal strategy.
The Oracle can perfectly report "regret", not "official expression of regret". Sure you can lie, but even if you manage to convince people of your lies, you need to keep the lie or lose social capital.
Moreover you would need to take bribes from market participants which is hard to do stealthily.
The market doesn't need to be "robust" in the "we need to mind read people". Amount traded can be small such that trying to abuse the market isn't worse it for most people.
The legal system does make estimates of people mind all the time (intent for a crime, insanity or not). Sure the ressources likely to be deployed by the oracle are expected to be lower, but so would the incentive to lie.
I'd be happy to prove you wrong about regret markets. I'm gonna soon launch an experiment with ratings of movies I may watch (here reporting 0 would be expressing regret for watching a movie). Sure I could just buy one side and report 100 or 0 to game the market. But by doing so I would:
- Hurt my own principles of truth telling.
- Lose on social capital.
- Forgo the opportunity of markets informing other life decisions.
In your experiment, you are the one setting up the market and the oracle.
I can believe that you have an incentive to make your experiment successful.
In the scenario the post we are commenting on points out, parents would set up the market and some petulant teenager would be the oracle.
What logistical problem are you seeing with bribes? The market participants know who the subject is that they have to bribe, so they can just contact her.
If the sums are trivial, then I don't think the prediction market will be much better than just asking your friends and family for advice without pretending there's any money on the line.
All my skepticism aside, I would hope to see more applications of prediction markets succeed. And I wish you the best of luck with your experiment.
Either you succeed, or you fail and can learn something.
Also with your post yesterday - I don't understand how prediction markets are supposed to handle predictions about individuals as a general matter. There are billions of individuals; vastly more than market participants. Who is going to trade on what one particular individual will decide in the future? I don't get it. Can you explain or point at your explanation?
If we make many markets on many individuals, traders can focus on trading bundles of individuals who have common features. They don't have to focus on individuals.
OK, then why should we expect the prediction market to be a good predictor of what any individual would want in advance? Isn't that the intent in your post here?
Some issues with single-person-action markets like this:
* Individuals close to the subject have far more information available than distant traders. If insider trading dominates the market, that reduces the possibility of those with expertise profiting. Additionally, this can create financial incentive for those close to the subject to influence the outcome directly.
* Privacy concerns: All traders, close and distant, have an incentive to extract information about the subject. The market itself also necessarily makes public certain data about the subject.
* If you mandate privacy by somehow anonymizing the markets (prohibit insider trading, only allow trading by broad categories, regulate data collection), you reduce the risks at the expense of accuracy. The market becomes a very blunt instrument, rather than providing any advanced analysis.
How do you make sure all the incentives are compatible?
If the eventual after-the-fact expressed choice of your subject has no impact on what decision was original taken (and we can't reverse anything here), what would keep the subject from just expressing the opinion of whoever bribes them enough?
If you are smart enough, there's probably some way to fix this problem either in general or for important special cases that matter in practice.
Existing prediction markets have time limits so the market can be resolved. Time discounting exists, so people aren't willing to place bets indefinitely off into the future.
Could you a give a concrete example of how a "repudiation market" might work?
I contemplated this when I got my daughter vaccinated. She hated it, she screamed, she cried, etc. But I told her: "Darling, I know this might hurt now, but one day you'll wake up and say: 'Hey, I don't have Rubella! Thanks, daddy!"
But, at the same time, I refused to get her ears pierced as an infant, despite her mother wanting that. But what's the difference, really? Vaccines and ear-piercings are both painful, but the pain is not permanent. They both would be done without her permission. So what's the difference? The ear-piercings would be for purely aesthetic reasons but vaccines could possibly save her life?
I'd definitely see that working for gender transition of minors.
Let people trade on whether the individual would regret his/her transition in 5 years. The legal system should then take that into account when deciding to approve or reject medical procedures.
I'd see both trade at the individual level (possible by psychologists) and at a bundle level.
Knowing what we already know about children, gender transition for minors is an abomination.
I don't think we "already know". On both sides of the aisles, people I talk to are deeply convinced that their position is the correct one. So for an external observer not having studied much the topic, it's hard to know if it's good or bad for them and I'd genuinely would want markets to give me info on this.
Intuitively, we care about OUR children, is because we want to have joy from OUR grandchildren. Gender transition would abort the whole idea. Besides, it is explicitly forbidden by the Holy Scripture.
"explicitly forbidden by the Holy Scripture" you can argue it being forbidden, but you will have a very hard time arguing it being "explicitly forbidden" in documents from a time where gender transition wasn't even a possibility. + some religious (some protestant churches, Judaic denominations, some Islamic scholars) leaders tell that gender transition is allowed.
But now we are moving the conversation toward the domain of "values", some domain where futarchy has very little applications.
If your rejection of gender transition is for the good of the kids, then your beliefs should be able to be readjusted through evidence (markets on the short term and their results on the long term), but if it is due to religious points of views, there is little I can bring.
Personally I don't care at all about religious views on gender transition, the only thing I care is "Is it good for children?". If the answer is YES, we should allow it, if the answer is NO, we should prohibit it (and there may even be some SOMETIMES middle ground).
(1) It is explicitly forbidden to castrate. Even animals. Obviously, it is a much more serious crime, when done to a human. (Lev 22:24)
(2) It is ALSO forbidden to cross-dress (Deut 22:5)
(3) Sexual relations between two men are considered a capital offense. Obviously, this also holds if one of them is castrated (Lev 18 and 20).
So yes, I would stand by "explicit".
Is it good for children to go transgender? In what way is it good if someone is no longer able to procreate? Or say a child no longer wants to see, or hear, or speak and demands the removal of eyes, inner ears or tongue? In what way is it good?
(1) Is a reference to animal offering. So castration wouldn't be a problem there unless the person was intended for human sacrifice (which would violate so many other biblical laws).
(2) and (3) only work under the assumption that transgender people are of their original gender. Which is not addressed at all in the bible (the closest would indeed be eunuch which are accepted, but do not intend on being of the feminine gender).
Now the second part of the post is more on the rational side.
Would you be ready to take a significant position that if we were to make a study on transgender regret rate, the regret rate would be high?
Whatever action has been taken for me (and whatever my personal preferences), after the fact I would express the opinion of the side which pays me more money.
You basically mean being a corrupted oracle (asking people with positions on your markets to give you a bribe).
There are two answers to that:
- First, don't make people themselves the oracle but have a decentralized oracle (like Kleros) which has to rule on regret. (Regrets, Don't regret, Unknown)
Most of the time people would express their true regret, and the oracle would simply report them. But if people try to game the system or don't report, mark it as unknown an everyone is reimbursed.
- Second, you have to imagine that in a world full of individual prediction markets (your movie recommendations are prediction markets, the restaurants you see on the map apps are recommended though prediction market, etc).
If you appear to be an untrustfull reporter, agents will stop trading your markets and you would lose all the benefits of them. Probably not worth it for a few bucks. We are here in a iterated prisonier dilemma kind of situation and defecting all the time is a suboptimal strategy.
I don't see how your indirection helps here?
No matter my personal feelings, I can choose whether to publicly express regret or not. And that's what the oracle reports on.
> If you appear to be an untrustfull reporter, agents will stop trading your markets and you would lose all the benefits of them.
Yes, no market for regret prediction will trade. A different way to express my original sentiment.
I don't see a way to build a robust market for regret prediction.
The Oracle can perfectly report "regret", not "official expression of regret". Sure you can lie, but even if you manage to convince people of your lies, you need to keep the lie or lose social capital.
Moreover you would need to take bribes from market participants which is hard to do stealthily.
The market doesn't need to be "robust" in the "we need to mind read people". Amount traded can be small such that trying to abuse the market isn't worse it for most people.
The legal system does make estimates of people mind all the time (intent for a crime, insanity or not). Sure the ressources likely to be deployed by the oracle are expected to be lower, but so would the incentive to lie.
I'd be happy to prove you wrong about regret markets. I'm gonna soon launch an experiment with ratings of movies I may watch (here reporting 0 would be expressing regret for watching a movie). Sure I could just buy one side and report 100 or 0 to game the market. But by doing so I would:
- Hurt my own principles of truth telling.
- Lose on social capital.
- Forgo the opportunity of markets informing other life decisions.
https://x.com/clesaege/status/1937207593275130343
https://x.com/jnptzl/status/1940731319006515561
In your experiment, you are the one setting up the market and the oracle.
I can believe that you have an incentive to make your experiment successful.
In the scenario the post we are commenting on points out, parents would set up the market and some petulant teenager would be the oracle.
What logistical problem are you seeing with bribes? The market participants know who the subject is that they have to bribe, so they can just contact her.
If the sums are trivial, then I don't think the prediction market will be much better than just asking your friends and family for advice without pretending there's any money on the line.
All my skepticism aside, I would hope to see more applications of prediction markets succeed. And I wish you the best of luck with your experiment.
Either you succeed, or you fail and can learn something.
Also with your post yesterday - I don't understand how prediction markets are supposed to handle predictions about individuals as a general matter. There are billions of individuals; vastly more than market participants. Who is going to trade on what one particular individual will decide in the future? I don't get it. Can you explain or point at your explanation?
If we make many markets on many individuals, traders can focus on trading bundles of individuals who have common features. They don't have to focus on individuals.
OK, then why should we expect the prediction market to be a good predictor of what any individual would want in advance? Isn't that the intent in your post here?
Because people are in fact similar to each other in many predictable ways.
AI (and automation in general) could solve this problem.
Some issues with single-person-action markets like this:
* Individuals close to the subject have far more information available than distant traders. If insider trading dominates the market, that reduces the possibility of those with expertise profiting. Additionally, this can create financial incentive for those close to the subject to influence the outcome directly.
* Privacy concerns: All traders, close and distant, have an incentive to extract information about the subject. The market itself also necessarily makes public certain data about the subject.
* If you mandate privacy by somehow anonymizing the markets (prohibit insider trading, only allow trading by broad categories, regulate data collection), you reduce the risks at the expense of accuracy. The market becomes a very blunt instrument, rather than providing any advanced analysis.
How do you make sure all the incentives are compatible?
If the eventual after-the-fact expressed choice of your subject has no impact on what decision was original taken (and we can't reverse anything here), what would keep the subject from just expressing the opinion of whoever bribes them enough?
If you are smart enough, there's probably some way to fix this problem either in general or for important special cases that matter in practice.
But I don't see them right now.
If prediction markets got to make decisions for my kids instead of me, I wouldn't have kids.
The prediction markets merely try to forecast your kids' future opinions.
You are already allowed to disregard your kids' opinions (under some circumstances), and nothing would change here.
There would obviously have to be some time limit for these. How might that acceptable limit be determined?
They can't repudiate after they are dead. Why do we need shorter time limits than that?
Existing prediction markets have time limits so the market can be resolved. Time discounting exists, so people aren't willing to place bets indefinitely off into the future.