Monthly Archives: June 2009

Mike Linksvayer *himself* is to blame for the non-liquidity of his Wikipedia prediction markets.

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Mike Linksvayer:

Prior to the Wikipedia community vote on adopting CC BY-SA it crossed my mind to set up several play money prediction market contracts concerning the above outcomes conditioned on Wikipedia adopting CC BY-SA by August 1, 2009, for which I did set up a contract. It is just as well that I didn’t — or rather if I had, I would have had to heavily promote all of the contracts in order to stimulate any play trading — the basic adoption contract at this point hasn’t budged from 56% since the vote results were announced, which means nobody is paying attention to the contract on Hubdub.

Blame yourself, Mike. I blogged 10 times about the concept of &#8220-X group&#8221- &#8212-the symbiosis between a set of prediction markets and a set of bloggers.

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Why Google don’t want to hire research scientist David Pennock

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A recruiter who left Google last year says that the company [= Google] had maintained a “do not touch” list of companies including Genentech and Yahoo, whose employees were not to be wooed to the Internet search giant.

That revelation could be significant in light of this week’s disclosure that the U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether Google, Yahoo, Apple, Genentech and other tech companies conspired to keep others from stealing their top talent. […]

Amazing.

Were prediction markets useless during the H1N1 breakout?

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Lance Fortnow:

Might this be an instance where prediction markets greatly out-performed the experts? In short, no. There were relevant markets but two big problems:

  • No one thought to create a market for the number of flu cases over a couple of thousand.
  • Prediction markets require a verifiable outcome so they were based on CDC confirmed cases. But after the flu turned out not to be that dangerous, the CDC stopped confirming most cases and there were less than 7500 confirmed cases by the end of May.

Google Squared is a big piece of crap.

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Try &#8220-prediction markets&#8221- and &#8220-collective forecasting&#8221-.

Gimme Wolfram instead.

Technologizer:

[Wolfram] Alpha, while imperfect, is ready to do all sorts of useful things right now. Squared feels more like the initial proof of concept for something that may take years to get right.

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Are good blogs driven by author personalities or by well drilled topics?

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Justin Wolfers has escaped the Overcoming Bias purge, it seems. Justin Wolfers&#8217-s 4 posts (published in 2007) remain archived on what is now Robin Hanson&#8217-s QUOTE personal blog UNQUOTE. By contrast, Eliezer Yudkowsky&#8217-s posts written for Overcoming Bias now redirect to locations at Less Wrong.

Justin Wolfers now blogs at Freakonomics (which is under the New York Times umbrella). By comparison to Overcoming His Bias, Freakonomics is a real group blog success. Years later after his creation, Freaknomics has a high degree of participation by his co-bloggers, and some brand-new guest bloggers were recently invited. Freakonomics is a sustainable group blog which develops one unique thematic &#8212-economics. Sorry to burst our Master Of All Universes&#8217-s bubble, but Freakonomics is the case-in-point that debunks the hypothesis that says that &#8220-blogs are best defined not by topic but by lead author personalities&#8221-.

As for Midas Oracle, who cares about Chris Masse&#8217-s personality, as long as one gets his/her prediction market dope on a daily basis?

UPDATE:

Robin Hanson:

Chris, Eliezer was not “purged.” He requested to have his old posts moved to Less Wrong. No one else has made any similar request.

Eliezer was not “expelled”– he choose to move in order to build a community at Less Wrong using fancy comment karma software. The folks who wrote software for his new site also wrote the code at my new site.

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They love coding too much.

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– The people that Robin Hanson expelled from his blog are coding their own blogging software.

– As for Our Master Of All Universes, he codes his own WordPress theme (overcomingbias.com/wp-content/themes/overcoming-bias/) and inserts his own hacks into it.

UPDATE:

Robin Hanson:

Chris, Eliezer was not “purged.” He requested to have his old posts moved to Less Wrong. No one else has made any similar request.

Eliezer was not “expelled”– he choose to move in order to build a community at Less Wrong using fancy comment karma software. The folks who wrote software for his new site also wrote the code at my new site.

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Prediction markets are a zero-sum game.

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Did you lose money betting on InTrade, lately? Well, your money ended up in the pocket of that guy:

check

UPDATE: There was nothing about &#8220-hating the game&#8221- in my post. It was just a reference to the &#8220-sheep and wolves&#8221- concept floated by Robin Hanson. (See also the Iowa Electronic Markets research on their traders.)

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