- Just a remark, if I may. In my view, Robin Hanson (who was the guy in charge of the targeted area) made the mistake to focus on the Mid-East, an area of the world which the American traders have not the first clue about.
- I wonder what kind of information aggregation PAM would have gotten. Probably not much. A more secure choice would have been to target North America, but, as you know, there hasn’t been terrorist attacks within the U.S. since 9/11 —so there weren’t much to divine (we know that now).
- The fact that PAM was killed before its grand opening propelled this DARPA program into stardom (and Robin Hanson into martyrdom), but, just like with any other human projects, the first versions always reveal problems —that would have been the case for PAM, too.

The takeaway of the DARPA PAM program has been Robin Hanson’s Market Scoring Rules, which is a design many people tell me great things about. I’m in despair to see Robin Hanson spamming any PM conference he is invited in with his concept of decision markets (a market-generated automatism that nobody needs and, thus, nobody gives the first fig about) instead of educating the crowds about MSR.

There is great need to talk about MSR —both in a didactic way (for triple morons like me) and in a technical way (for PM-interested software architects and exchange managers).

- I was intrigued about prediction markets by some MSNBC.com coverage on PAM —end of July 2003, thus. I heard of the book, “The Wisdom Of The Crowds”, well after. (((I’m not implying that I’m the incarnation of the “tipping point”.)))

Jason Ruspini, when and how did you come into prediction market land?

Same question for the others, if they wish to take this non-scientific poll.

One interesting sidenote to the whole PAM discussion is that I actually wrote a column for The New Yorker in March of 2003 that talked about DARPA’s plans to use what I then called “decision markets” to improve intelligence forecasting, and the reaction to the idea both in-house and from readers was quite positive. That’s always made me think that what killed PAM was really the way it was spun by Wyden and Dorgan — and by the newspapers the next day — rather than any inherent flaw in the concept. (Although, to be fair, my column focused more on the idea of using prediction markets internally than on opening them to the public at large.)