Spot the 3 men on the right-side of the photo:
- In blue, our good friend Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons;
- In red, the Google guy in charge of open-source software;
- In grey, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress.
So, my question to Mike:
- Do you sense that prediction markets could be a topic at the Singularity University, or do you think that they couldn’t care less?
UPDATE: See the comments by Mike and a guy at that University…
Prediction markets and mechanisms generally certainly ought to a topic. I’ll ask when I see one of the people involved again.
Relatedly, it sounded like they were using a polling mechanism to rank a large number of potential class projects, and debating whether to add a question about expertise in certain fields so as to weight responses. Obviously for a situation like that prediction markets have some nice properties, but also high costs.
In its ten tracks Singularity University (SU) tries to cover as much as possible of a vast amount of material. The specifics are steered by the track chairs, with a lot of input from both the students, the teaching fellows, and also sometimes from the outside. The Futures Studies & Forecasting track does indeed cover prediction markets, and yes, if not a proper market, tasks, ideas, and group activities are often evaluated using group raking tools within SU.
David
David Orban
Advisor & European Lead, Singularity University
NASA Ames, Bldg 17 Moffett Field, CA 94035, USA
http://www.singularityu.org/david