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Douglas Knight's avatar

What is a "contest"? What are these contests popular among academics?

Yes, simpler is better, so I prefer an open contest to a curated contest, but I'd expect anything that honestly deserves the name "contest" to be most of the way there. I think the most important details are keeping track records and actually being adversarial.

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Peter Gerdes's avatar

The context really matters. One of the big issues with curation is that the more influence someone's recommendations have on real world power etc the stronger the incentives to tilt your views to present a common front. Yes, in general the fear that your opponents are being tricksy so you can't afford to acknowledge or raise drawbacks in your positions as they surely wouldn't is a problem. However, the more you are part of the buisness of governing the relatively greater those incentives are since whether or not you tow the line has much more influence on both the laws passed and your own future.

So I'm happy using a curated prediction market in circumstances where I don't feel the curators have much stake in anything besides good outcomes. Tetlock's superforecasters is a good example as they predicting events the are largely abroad and he is no obvous way any position would benefit curators over others (apart from accurate pred). I think in some corporate contexts it would be like this...in many others and government it has all the features that raise risks you give a good description of

Note that I don't think it's quite that the stakes aren't high. Rather it's just that the defenses are strong against the threats. The CIA uses some of these methods so I'm sure ppl could benefit by affecting them but no more so than gov agents generally and it would be impractical to infer just what answers would benefit them.

So it's not just when things are low stakes. It's when it's hard to gain by offering corruption since defenses high, the outcomes you want predicted hard to identify and you have easy contact with experts.

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