Monthly Archives: August 2008

FAMOUS SCIENTIST TO ROBIN HIGH IQ HANSON: Science, which is a very long-term endeavor, does not need your stickin idea about scoreable predictions and track records. Please, go back to minding economic issues in your Ivory Tower, and let us run science our way, on our timing. Thanks. Appreciated.

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Overcoming Whatever:

I don&#8217-t really think the comparison with sports/business/weather forecasters really holds up, for a prosaic reason &#8212- in particle physics, the timescale for experiments is years and decades, not days. There is no way to efficiently grade/reward people on the accuracy of their predictions, and correspondingly no real incentive for anyone to make very quantitative predictions.

On the other hand, it&#8217-s not as if there is no incentive to be right. If you devote your life to working out the ramifications of low-energy supersymmetry and it&#8217-s not there, you won&#8217-t get fired (if you have tenure), but on the other hand your life&#8217-s work will be useless. Which is a pretty big incentive.

Posted by: Sean Carroll [from Cosmic Variance] | August 11, 2008 at 12:25 PM

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Sean, I don&#8217-t understand the relevance of the timescale to the efficient grading of predictions. Given enough forecasts we can see a signal of accuracy above the noise of luck in individual forecasts. I agree that the longer the timescale the weaker are incentives from any given reward tied to scoring. But I&#8217-m not really focused on incentives in this post – I&#8217-m focused on whether it is reasonable for folks to crow about being vindicated when they weren&#8217-t willing to make scoreable forecasts.

Posted by: Robin Hanson | August 11, 2008 at 12:35 PM

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Scientists don&#8217-t want to make scoreable forecasts.

Hence, it is impossible to collect track records.

Period.

Robin Hanson&#8217-s idea has no application &#8212-over than vanity blogging.

Let&#8217-s go back to our prediction markets (where traders work, for free, as info collectors).

Let&#8217-s not waste our precious time on fruitless ideas.

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Track Record Collecting vs. Prediction Markets

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Robin Hanson&#8217-s false good idea: collecting track records.

But his post is the living proof that he is wrong:

  • Prediction markets incentivize traders in researching issues (reading the experts&#8217- works), making probability bets, and delivering a collective verdict-
  • Experts don&#8217-t like to state publicly their home-made probabilistic predictions &#8212-as his post shows.

And if experts are not used to express scoreable forecasts, then, by essence, you can&#8217-t collect anything. Hence, the superiority of the prediction market method.

Another false good idea from Robin Hanson.

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Thinking they would fight poverty and solve the 2 Americas problem, the John Edwards donors ended up giving (thru his political action committee) $114,000 to his mistress (a de facto prostitute whom he said he didnt love) on the pretext of producing 4 YouTube videos (on a mere 2 1/2 minutes long).

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I want John Edwards to disappear in his own ass, and I don&#8217-t want to hear anymore about that bastard.

I have updated my previous post with the relevant links &#8212-for those of you who are just surfacing from an Afghan cave.

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PS: I made a killing at HubDub, shorting down that f*****g bastard. :-D

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On top of the $114,000 given to her by John Edwards political action committee, $15,000 a month has been paid to Rielle Hunter (Lisa Druck) by Fred Baron, who was John Edwards national finance chair -so that the mistress (a de facto deluxe prostitute) shuts up her face about the affair and the baby.

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So, John Edwards&#8217- friend would pay about $180,000 each year for her &#8212-if I understand well.

What kind of R.O.I. did Fred Baron expect on that investment? That&#8217-s what the &#8220-free&#8221- Press should be asking.

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Google&#8217-s cached webpages of the National Enquirer about John Edwards – Click on &#8220-Cached&#8221-.

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John Edwards is a liar and a hypocrite. Video


Edwards infidelity
envoye par dollarsandsense123

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John Edwards&#8217- statement

Dallas Morning News + New York Times + Robert Scoble + CBS News

Elisabeth Edwards + Huff Post

CNN + ABC News + VIDEO + LA Times

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Emile Servan-Schreiber was so right. I feel better now that I made a killing at HubDub shorting that f*****g bastard of John Edwards.

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UPDATE: API + NewsWeek

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UPDATE: The ex mistress rules out a paternity test. So, now we know what the big money is buying: her silence on the fact that the child is John Edwards&#8217- one.

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UPDATE: American Spectator + Huff Post + Huff Post

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UPDATE: ABC News

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UPDATE: Radar + Radar

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UPDATE: CNN

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UPDATE: Cleveland Leader

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Video

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • SocialPredictor is a piece of crap.
  • I met with Alan Greenspan. He reads Midas Oracle on a daily basis. I have the photo to prove it. Take a look.
  • You know what I thought I first saw that picture (little Fogarty planted next to Master Of Credit Alan Greenspan)?… I thought, well, it’s about time that the prediction market industry does the “product endorsement by celebrity” marketing thing. BetFair premiered that with John McCririck.
  • CHIC TOILET: Bo Cowgill, like all the Google employees in California, has the option to wash his delicate rear area, wash his precious front area, dry, perform something called “wand cleaning”, and so much more.
  • Equity Financing Documents For Prediction Market StartUps (like Inkling or HubDub)
  • Look at the inconsistency between the two faces. Mat Fogarty is jubilant like if he had just stolen a big client from Inkling. Alan Greenspan, on the other hand, has a constipated look that conveys that he is fed up with all those conference co-speakers asking him out for a photo op.
  • Prediction Market Proposal

Why the BetFair model is partially obsolete

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I like BetFair and the BetFair people very much. I was the only blogger to talk up the BetFair starting price system and the BetFair brand-new bet-matching logic. But the other face of the coin is that 2 aspects of their model are rotten to the core.

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BetFair was created in 1999 and started off in 2000. Since that time, 2 major things arrived on the world scene. Number one, we have seen the emergence of the prediction market approach. Number two, the Web has taken our lives, and Google has become the dominant Internet search engine. Here are how these 2 major trends are affecting BetFair negatively.

  1. Decimal Odds (a.k.a. Digital Odds). – The prediction market approach means that we attack the public with the news and their associated probabilistic predictions, expressed in percentages, where high prices mean high probabilities of happening. BetFair, at the contrary, approach the public with a betting universe and an arcane vocabulary (&#8221-backing&#8221- and &#8220-laying&#8221-) where low prices mean high probabilities of happening. That is totally counter intuitive.
  2. Non-Indexable Prediction Market Webpages. – Like it or not, Google is now the world&#8217-s #1 media. We &#8220-google&#8221- anything, first thing in the morning. None of the BetFair prediction market webpages can be indexed by Google and the other Internet search engines. That means that BetFair is missing out, in my estimation, on hundreds of thousands of Google visitors each year. Those Google visitors will favor other prediction exchanges (e.g., HubDub) whose prediction market webpages are indexed naturally by the Internet search engines.

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The British, who drive on the wrong side of the road, don&#8217-t have the 2 most important keys of the future.

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Too much seed money could kill HubDub -and the other prediction market startups.

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QUESTION: Why did Monitor 110 fail?

ANSWER: Too much money.

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  1. The lack of a single, &#8220-the buck stops here&#8221- leader until too late in the game-
  2. No separation between the technology organization and the product organization-
  3. Too much PR, too early-
  4. Too much money-
  5. Not close enough to the customer-
  6. Slow to adapt to market reality-
  7. Disagreement on strategy both within the Company and with the Board.

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Personally, my view is that the concept should be excellent.

Being first on a market helps.

Hiring visionaries and leaders helps.

Picking up and developing the right technology helps.

But the key is the concept.

Nigel Eccles got the concept right.

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Why InTrade CEO John Delaney, TradeSports acting CEO John Delaney, BetFair CEO David Yu, HubDub CEO Nigel Eccles and NewsFutures CEO Emile Servan-Schreiber should supplicate me to develop my prediction market journalism project

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– 200 web visitors (coming from Google) reached my John Edwards post, published yesterday afternoon (ET).

– 10% of them followed my links to the 2 HubDub prediction markets on John Edwards.

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Remember that those web stats count only the web visitors, not the feed subscribers &#8212-who are more numerous, and whom I focus more on.

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TAKEAWAY: A popular PMJ website, which would associate fresh news and betting recommendations, would send many people to the prediction markets.

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The mainstream media and the classic bloggers will never deal with real-money prediction markets the way they should be dealt with &#8212-for multiple reasons (moral, ethical, legal, etc.). And for other reasons, they will never link to the play-money prediction markets.

Look Justin Wolfers at the Wall Street Journal: He is the most excited about prediction markets. Yet, he does not link to InTrade directly. He does not link to the InTrade real-money prediction markets. Hence, his blah blah blah does not translate into more revenues for InTrade.

What it takes is a brand-new media organization, entirely devoted to prediction markets, and run by die-hard prediction market people.

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Please, guys, help me.

  • cfm |-at-| midasoracle |.|-com-|
  • chrisfmasse |-at-| gmail |.|-com-|

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