Twitter could implement a play-money prediction market just like metaculus or manifold markets—they could even consider buying one of these teams. Ideally, starting or voting on a prediction market would be as easy as running a Twitter poll. (Reddit recently did something similar.) Having large, metaculus-style prediction markets on newsworthy events might directly help important online conversations become more productive, more reality-based, and less polarized. And in the long run, familiarizing people with how prediction markets work might also encourage/legitimize the further adoption of prediction markets as information sources to inform decisionmaking.
I personally don’t know (here is a not-super-informative article about it), although Facebook seemed to launch their project as a totally separate app unconnected to Facebook-the-website? I’d guess they simply struggled to attract users to the new app.
I think that one ultimate goal of prediction markets is to break out of the “enthusiast crowd” of rationalists and Phil Tetlock types who are excited about prediction markets for their own sake, and instead become a wider social norm among journalists, experts, politicians, etc, that if you aren’t willing to take a stand on prediction markets, you might be full of BS. The enthusiast crowd might flock to apps like Metaculus and Polymarket, but the wider “pundit crowd” might have to have prediction markets somewhat forced upon them, as something they must engage with if they want to build/maintain their reputation.
Since Twitter is already such a dominant platform for journalists, breaking news, political debates, and celebrity figures like politicians and founders, Twitter seems like a natural fit for this purpose. People already care deeply about Twitter metrics like their follower count and bluecheck status, much more than they care about karma points on a random new app like Forecast. If you could earn your way to a bluecheck by doing well enough on predictions, or if all the cool smart pundits showed their prediction score on their profile, that could provide a lot of motivation to get normal people thinking more rationally about political debates and current events.
Ideally it might be best if Twitter could try to focus people’s attention to a smaller number of higher-volume prediction markets in a more centralized, Metaculus-y way, rather than “everyone can start their own market” in the style of Facebook’s Forecast, Reddit’s Predictions, and Manifold Markets. For example, imagine if instead of fighting Covid “misinformation” by directing people towards a bunch of official CDC proclamations, they instead directed people towards a page more like Metaculus’ fortified essays, with CDC bullet points mixed in with live prediction markets on questions like “how much do the vaccines reduce covid risk?”. Similarly, Twitter could host high-volume markets on breaking news events like the invasion of Ukraine. But a big downside of this might be that by centralizing the prediction markets more, Twitter would face more political pressure and controversy. And of course it would be a difficult task to constantly create new markets on breaking-news topics.
I think that one ultimate goal of prediction markets is to break out of the “enthusiast crowd” of rationalists and Phil Tetlock types who are excited about prediction markets for their own sake, and instead become a wider social norm among journalists, experts, politicians, etc, that if you aren’t willing to take a stand on prediction markets, you might be full of BS. The enthusiast crowd might flock to apps like Metaculus and Polymarket, but the wider “pundit crowd” might have to have prediction markets somewhat forced upon them, as something they must engage with if they want to build/maintain their reputation.
Yeah I discuss this ToC a bit in this thread, under “Forecasting as a general epistemics intervention.” I do think it’s plausible that this is great, but I don’t (currently) think it is the highest impact outcome of forecasting, relative to talent recruitment, early warning forecasting, or prediction-evaluation setups to improve research or grantmaking.
Hell yeah! Glad to see experiments with this kind of thing. I think one of the potential routes to impact here is (of course) becoming a kind of rationalist-twitter for EA discussion. Another path to impact worth keeping in mind is just that, by testing and proving out a bunch of innovations, your project could help influence actual Twitter (and other social media sites) to adopt similar features.
Twitter could implement a play-money prediction market just like metaculus or manifold markets—they could even consider buying one of these teams. Ideally, starting or voting on a prediction market would be as easy as running a Twitter poll. (Reddit recently did something similar.) Having large, metaculus-style prediction markets on newsworthy events might directly help important online conversations become more productive, more reality-based, and less polarized. And in the long run, familiarizing people with how prediction markets work might also encourage/legitimize the further adoption of prediction markets as information sources to inform decisionmaking.
Do we know why the Facebook prediction platform failed?
Quartz wrote a good piece on it, can’t remember off the top of my head if it covers it: https://qz.com/2069284/facebook-is-shutting-down-its-experimental-app-forecast/
iirc, the project lead left for a startup.
I personally don’t know (here is a not-super-informative article about it), although Facebook seemed to launch their project as a totally separate app unconnected to Facebook-the-website? I’d guess they simply struggled to attract users to the new app.
I think that one ultimate goal of prediction markets is to break out of the “enthusiast crowd” of rationalists and Phil Tetlock types who are excited about prediction markets for their own sake, and instead become a wider social norm among journalists, experts, politicians, etc, that if you aren’t willing to take a stand on prediction markets, you might be full of BS. The enthusiast crowd might flock to apps like Metaculus and Polymarket, but the wider “pundit crowd” might have to have prediction markets somewhat forced upon them, as something they must engage with if they want to build/maintain their reputation.
Since Twitter is already such a dominant platform for journalists, breaking news, political debates, and celebrity figures like politicians and founders, Twitter seems like a natural fit for this purpose. People already care deeply about Twitter metrics like their follower count and bluecheck status, much more than they care about karma points on a random new app like Forecast. If you could earn your way to a bluecheck by doing well enough on predictions, or if all the cool smart pundits showed their prediction score on their profile, that could provide a lot of motivation to get normal people thinking more rationally about political debates and current events.
Ideally it might be best if Twitter could try to focus people’s attention to a smaller number of higher-volume prediction markets in a more centralized, Metaculus-y way, rather than “everyone can start their own market” in the style of Facebook’s Forecast, Reddit’s Predictions, and Manifold Markets. For example, imagine if instead of fighting Covid “misinformation” by directing people towards a bunch of official CDC proclamations, they instead directed people towards a page more like Metaculus’ fortified essays, with CDC bullet points mixed in with live prediction markets on questions like “how much do the vaccines reduce covid risk?”. Similarly, Twitter could host high-volume markets on breaking news events like the invasion of Ukraine. But a big downside of this might be that by centralizing the prediction markets more, Twitter would face more political pressure and controversy. And of course it would be a difficult task to constantly create new markets on breaking-news topics.
Yeah I discuss this ToC a bit in this thread, under “Forecasting as a general epistemics intervention.” I do think it’s plausible that this is great, but I don’t (currently) think it is the highest impact outcome of forecasting, relative to talent recruitment, early warning forecasting, or prediction-evaluation setups to improve research or grantmaking.
It’s funny, I came with the same idea and implemented it in the social network I’m building https://nmkbs-aaaaa-aaaam-aadfa-cai.ic0.app/post/740#main.
I’m also planning to make it EA aligned at the core.
Hell yeah! Glad to see experiments with this kind of thing. I think one of the potential routes to impact here is (of course) becoming a kind of rationalist-twitter for EA discussion. Another path to impact worth keeping in mind is just that, by testing and proving out a bunch of innovations, your project could help influence actual Twitter (and other social media sites) to adopt similar features.