Intelligence is correlated with experimentation and drug usage (and generally do-what-you-will with your body political attitudes).
Some discussion on the phenomenon here:
"We know that intelligent people have more self-control and make better decisions in general — they’re less likely to play the lottery, more likely to follow medical advice, less likely to die in accidents. As a consequence, they tend to flourish in an environment free of normative constraints. They may experiment with drugs without ever getting addicted. They may dabble in polyamory without wrecking their marriage. They may coast on their achieved identity, dismissing traditions as stifling or unnecessary."
It's nice to have a lot of small web content laid out like this! Some suggestions to make discovery more palatable:
- 1-2 sentence summaries for the content. most titles are not sufficiently descriptive and clicking on something un-interesting a few times is a sure fire way to get folks to churn
- checks for included feeds that they are correctly configured and the resources load in-browser (not download a random file to my computer)
I am broadly in favor of the existence of prediction markets. They are powerful tools for forecasting complex events that can help enrich and empower folks from across a range of backgrounds.
The article has two core points, but fails to go deep enough in addressing either. This leads to a _somewhat_ incorrect scapegoating of prediction markets rather than acknowledging head on some more core issues with the state of American journalism. Bullet (1) addresses this core issue while bullet (2) tries to suggest some ways in which these prediction markets can better harnessed to serve the interests of journalists and readers/viewers. IMO the first point is far more important than the second to understand the broader challenges.
1. The centralization and roll-up of American media has led to a dangerous monoculture where truth and accuracy risk being compromised by pressure from big business as well as politicians.
This is by design. It is important for folks to recognize that these are systematic efforts to denigrate and marginalize critical/skeptical voices by individuals with tremendous amounts of wealth and power. A prime non-journalism example of this is the persecution and harassment of short sellers (like Andrew Left) in public markets.
2. Prediction markets are not being described / addressed with sufficient uncertainty. The article touches on this, but fails to go so far as to suggest a fix. Prediction markets should, as the editors/implementers at orgs in the article suggest they do, serve as another data point rather than the whole story.
They should be addressed with the skepticism applied to any source (a lot of "journalists" don't even do this anymore though) with the source, values and market depth questioned.
Editorial standards need to be improved to accommodate this (don't report on very thin markets, acknowledge high amounts of uncertainty, signs of manipulation, and provide a bit of market structure analysis education to readers. All of this is more feasible than ever with good analysis tooling that can be re-appropriated from what professional market analysts (and gamblers) use to assess their odds.
If journalists want to add market information to their reporting then great, just do it responsibly instead of yeeting some number from strangers on the internet.
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Fight back by voting with your dollars and speak up in favor of the truth. Boycott garbage sources and platforms that are trying to one-shot your friends/parents and support strong investigative and local journalism with your money. Talk to your friends and family and encourage them to do the same. Voting with your dollars and presence is one of the most powerful tools you have in our heavily market based society.
It might be gambling for some, but prediction markets are impressively accurate, in a way that I think merits OPs comment that the information they produce can improve lives. (Other lives will surely be destroyed by gambling...)
There's quite a bit of interesting research done on the accuracy, here's a great resource:
What value does an accurate prediction market bring? I.e. how can this information be used to improve lives (other than the person winning the bet)? I.e. even if it is sorta accurate, is this valuable to anyone?
Great for the person who has insider knowledge, probably not so great for Google.
I wouldn't be surprized if some companies start cracking down on their employees making bank off unannounced company actions.
Your response is very dismissive in that it doesn't engage with any of the other parts of my comment that provide a lot of nuance and analysis for the issues presented.
My description, and appreciation, for these types of tools and their trade-offs comes from reading about their early proposals. I don't trade or engage with any of them in their current form.
Recommend reading early work on them by Phillip Tetlock, as well as the many criticisms and responses that came about at the time and basically covered all of the ground we're retreading today in these discussions.
An underappreciated point here is: fund/subscribe your local papers. They are willing to do work and investigations that national outlets just don't have the capacity or stomach for. The more concentrated/centralized journalism is the higher the risk it can get censored/leveraged.
Absolutely, it is an embarrassment that we design systems that continue to neglect this fact and, worse still, we judge and punish folks who have to interact with them at the "attention" end for mistakes.
In some critical attention places it is possible to "engineer" a bit more reliability into human systems with crutches like shifts and incentives (the military sometimes succeeds at this for mission critical applications), but in most it is a failure of system designers and software developers.
Governance creates markets -> markets create innovation. These things have feedback loops into governance, but the tail ultimately does not wag the dog.
Engineers-- especially in the Bay where discussion of such is written off as mental illness-- often dismiss politics and governance as nonsense subjects that lack rules and are run by the mob/emotions. The reality however, is that these societal constructs have their own "physics" and operate like a (very complex and challenging to study) system just like everything else in the natural world.
The attitude itself is of course something has been designed and implemented into engineering culture by precisely the leaders you contend are scape goats to society. POSIWID.
> The attitude itself is of course something has been designed and implemented into engineering culture by precisely the leaders you contend are scape goats to society. POSIWID.
I don’t know if this particular statement is true or not, but the number of smart people I know who thinks they’re not affected by propaganda is wild. We’re all affected by propaganda.
I am not sure this is necessarily the case, at least historically. We have good evidence of long distance trade from the Stone Age, and even some Neanderthal sites contain stones whose origin can be traced to distant regions (over 100 km, IIRC, which is far away in a primordial roadless countryside).
I would agree that markets cannot grow beyond a certain size without a government, though.
Those games operate far more probablistically and high dimensionally than programming and I suspect engineers would rather dismiss them as “dumb” than accept they are simply inferior players in those games.
Primary multi agent multi dimension probabilistic resolution problems model human and crowd interaction better than “code do this every time”.
I’ve spent a long time in the valley and I’ve come to the personal conclusion that engineers are often the dumbest (and most narrowly useful) in the room not the smartest. And the rest of them let them think they are very smart (tm) so they do what we say.
All LLM-search tools are slathered in ads already via LLM-SEO hacking.
The only difference here is that they will be providing a direct paid channel in this case and will get a cut instead of paying for compute. If it's responsibly disclosed it may even lead to a net more transparent shopping experience for the average user.
There are companies out there re-building / replicating the graph as we speak. Think they have to wait until it has a strong network effect / tipping point dynamic before it can come out publicly as such though.
Some discussion on the phenomenon here:
"We know that intelligent people have more self-control and make better decisions in general — they’re less likely to play the lottery, more likely to follow medical advice, less likely to die in accidents. As a consequence, they tend to flourish in an environment free of normative constraints. They may experiment with drugs without ever getting addicted. They may dabble in polyamory without wrecking their marriage. They may coast on their achieved identity, dismissing traditions as stifling or unnecessary."
- via: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/why-are-intelligent-people-...
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