Well, there’s fairphone. And farmers markets.
Honestly, most of the things people buy are things they don’t even need… housing, cars, and insurance excluded.
Bottled Water by Nestle? ❌
Learning to love the taste of your local tap water? ✅
I think most of us are on-board with police body cameras. The fundamental difference is that they are recording things in the presence of the police, and that they have the measurable benefit of holding the police accountable to their actions (sometimes).
Rats are good people
$60 per kilo
That’s not bad for a prototype! With lab-growth meat, the initial cost was $2.3 million / kg. It’s come down since then because of process and scale improvements, but when it starts off that high, it’s going to be a while for it to become affordable.
A quick non-AI figure is $0.60 per kilo to recycle plastic… so we just need improvement by a factor of 100 which is quite realistic.
Given the global response to the situation, I would bet they probably realize that you don’t think they’re significant.
Then again, there’s a chance they’re just focusing on food and water and shelter and medicine and not-getting-blown-up… rather than worrying about the opinions of people who couldn’t even pretend to be significant.
But China isn’t going to sell my data to Uncle Sam to help deport my family (who are legal citizens). So there’s that.
OK, let’s see the evidence for that assertion.
Using prediction markets to estimate the reproducibility of scientific research - PMC
There’s one.
But obviously it’s not a guarantee if you don’t know what you’re doing. We also have documentation on where these methods fall short, such as when it’s based on exponential growth, rare events, or something else that humans are bad at understanding. Infectious Disease Forecasting.
But again, good statisticians are prepared to address those things.
And you have no idea of the mechanisms that shape that market.
That’s even better. If I don’t understand the mechanisms shaping the market, I won’t be able to correctly identify predictive variables for my model. In that case, I would be better off trusting the prediction market.
Obviously it would be better if the person building the model understood the mechanisms… but that takes time and money. If you’re managing 30 models, that might not be worth it.
If the contract isn’t something that meets the criteria for an efficient market, then yeah, it’s not something that can be used to give reasonable probabilities.
But for something like, winner of the democratic presidential primary, or the proce of gold in a month… then it’s genuinely a better predictive model than what a statistician would be able to come up with.
It doesn’t provide anything beneficial to anyone but its owners.
For statistics purposes, it gives me something incredibly beneficial. Simply by knowing the price of a contract, I can know with decent accuracy how likely something is to happen.
If you’re not in the field, you wouldn’t necessarily appreciate how valuable that is.
Well, it’s the aggregated opinion of people who use the site. Kalshi doesn’t set the price; people making the bets set the price based on the odds others are willing to accept.
There’s a sampling bias for sure, but since the odds given for this bet are based on how much people are willing to pay for that bet, this gives a very good approximation for how people actually feel about something.
It actually ends up being more reliable than most opinion polls in that way.
That’s not how that works. A smart person would recognize that there are degrees of smartness and degrees of immunity. Even if we accept that smarter people are less susceptible to propaganda, there is no threshold of smartness that grants immunity to propaganda.
The most important service one can provide to a kind-of-smart person is to tell them when they’ve said something stupid. I’m happy to provide this service. Please rate 5 stars.