It’s listed in the list of software projects above, but I really think that Coordination Software (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/vz9Zrj3oBGsttG3Jh) has a lot of potential, if only somebody could find the right angle—how to define the group that is voting to change its norms or take an action, what killer applications of the software or particular audiences would be a good place to start, etc...
I think that remote-working software is very positive for civilization; allowing people to work on top tech projects while not living in exploitative NIMBY cities (or even living in the developed world at all!) will do a lot to increase economic growth and distribute more resources to poorer areas. Of course after covid everyone is working on this, but almost none of the efforts are targeted overseas. Combine Wave-style currency transfer with translation and other tools, and maybe the right legal framework to make it easy for US companies to hire/outsource to people abroad, and you’ve created a kind of “virtual immigration” allowing thousands of people in India or Latin America to work remotely and get paid western wages for working on software projects.
There are a lot of good prediction market angles. One of the best remaining unexplored niches, IMO, is creating flexible software that corporations can use to set up their own internal prediction markets and forecasting tournaments (and ideally integrate those with other tools like their scrum boards and issue tracking and etc). See this link for more detail on my idea about creating “the Gitlab of prediction markets”: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dQhjwHA7LhfE8YpYF/prediction-markets-in-the-corporate-setting?commentId=eaLBFJJJgiDGY5QHM
Sounds relatively promising, thank you! I also think prediction market ideas are a good candidate to focus on
Things I don’t understand about this idea
That I hope someone more expert can help with
I offered this to a company (w ~500 employees) that I worked for
If I remember their replies correctly:
It will take time from the employees
The main people who know how to make this prediction are already in charge of it
From a “lean startup” mindset, I’d hope to find a few concrete suggestions for prediction markets that a few concrete companies would be interested in running. Before that, can you imagine a question like that? [Expert advice needed!] Are we imagining, for example, Facebook (Meta) opening a prediction market on how many people will buy VR headsets next year?
I internally predict that founders will be extremely uninterested in this, but there’s only one way to find out.
Maybe founders from our community would be willing to do some user research, but again, I don’t even know what kind of companies would be early adopters.
Ok, sounds super promising, thank you very much! This is currently my top candidate
Make an easy-to-use tool for companies to set up internal prediction markets or forecasting tournaments, so that even medium-sized companies can freely experiment with in the technology (rather than just Google/Microsoft/Facebook/etc), and it’s easy for employees to use so you get plenty of engagement. Thus addressing what Nuno considers the #1 most important challenge to prediction markets in a corporate setting, “maintaining a prediction market given current technologies”. Individual companies shouldn’t have to do all the work themselves and reinvent the wheel; they should be able to buy prediction market tech as a service!
Maybe some high-quality tutorials, UX design, and demo examples to help employees understand what prediction markets are and help companies understand how to use them (how to write good questions, what business functions might benefit from getting predictions, etc). Thus attempting to address challenge #2, “Writing questions that are both informative for decision-making and attractive to traders.”
With a bit of experimentation, I feel like it should be simple enough to tune the sweet spot of challenge #3, “attracting enough predictors to get accurate forecasts while also preventing the market from taking up too much of the employees’ time and attention”. Should the market just be run on fake internet points like Metaculus? Fake internet points plus prizes for top predictors? Stock bonuses based on performance? Varying amounts of real money? Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to find the right knobs to turn so that companies can incentivize their employees to participate the right amount on average. This is another benefit of offering a service to many companies—experiment once and then offer that expertise to each customer, rather than forcing each new internal prediction market initiative to jump in blind and risk wasting a bunch of employee time if they mess up the rewards structure.
An external tool means companies get to use advanced features (like conditional prediction markets) right away, but (like Gitlab and other software-developer tools) they also have lots of control to self-host and customize the software if they want for their specific needs. (This is different from most prediction market software today where, at best, you can create private markets for your organization and that’s it; no customizability or ownership.)
Instead of a weird standalone experiment, offer integrations with other sales/marketing tools (like salesforce business software) so that the prediction markets can be seamlessly integrated with sales targets/quotas, advertising and A/B testing analysis, financial models, etc. Do the same with software developer tools like git, issue tracking, kanban boards, schedule tools… all the usual Jira / Asana stuff. That way, the act of predicting how long a product will take to come to market can be directly integrated with schedule & issue tracking tools to spot problems and reallocate resources. Prediction markets shouldn’t just be standing weirdly off to one side of everything a company does, but should become another tool in the integrated management/productivity toolkit of philosophies like “scrum”, “agile”, etc. I think this would greatly help companies find a use case for prediction markets and other forms of forecasting in their existing workflows.
As for a roadmap of who the early-adopters are going to be—I think your first market is probably going to be “medium-sized tech companies of the sort that regularly attempt to use prediction markets (and maybe have a CEO who happens to be excited about the idea), but smaller than Google/Microsoft/Facebook and thus would benefit from an external pre-packaged solution”. You could probably get some EA funding as initial seed money, and some of the larger EA/rationalist orgs might be willing to help out and experiment with the system internally, in order to get a better sense of which use cases you should focus on. (For-profits like Wave might be especially valuable to get feedback from—are prediction markets more useful for comparing marketing strategies and maximizing sales, or to predict software dev timelines, or for high-level strategy questions like “which direction should we take the company” / “will this product flop”?) Then build your integrations towards whichever application (sales vs dev vs strategy) seems to be getting the most traction, and roll out the product to more normal tech companies and eventually non-sillicon-valley non-tech companies.
Alternatively (caveat: this is a weird idea), maybe early on you could pitch prediction markets as a good way for especially loose/decentralized teams to get agreement on some debated issue. Like cryptocurrency projects looking for consensus on adopting a change to their protocol (easy to raise a lot of money if your project has a light coat of crypto-paint, perhaps!), or as a way for two companies considering a partnership to jointly and fairly asses the value that each brings to the table (seems to go against every rule of negotiation but might just be crazy enough to work??), or as a tool that helps build agreement on big questions of company direction and get employees more mission-aligned around key initiatives at otherwise large, dispersed, slow-moving organizations like General Motors or Boeing.
This is such a great idea, I really hope someone does it! My company is small (~80 person startup), but might be an example of a potential customer type—we’re an infectious disease intelligence company, so we’re literally trying to predict epidemics/disease events/operational disruption and an internal PM could be a useful way to organize our ongoing analysis and judgment.
Generally anyone working in the risk/critical event/threat intelligence/OSINT space might have a similar use case around collecting and coordinating their internal experts’ assessments.
Also, this may be taking the Gitlab comparison more literally than you intended but the ‘/estimate’ quick action has always seemed like a juicy UX for collecting predictions!
I would have thought so too, but I’ve been mystified by how few of the pandemic-remote-work efforts have been aimed towards “virtual immigration” tools that make it easier for US companies to outsource software developer tasks. Maybe there are legal obstacles to hiring overseas employees (but surely there are lots of easy ways to get around this by having them be “contractors” or something)? I fear that it’s not happening simply because places like India or Latin America are poorer than the USA so it’s a less lucrative potential market than selling Zoom/Teams licenses to Fortune-500 companies.
The pieces are all there but there seems to be a dearth of explicitly “virtual immigration” oriented companies who are trying to cobble said pieces together:
Flexible options for companies to post bounties for work, hire short-term contractors or freelancers, or have an on-ramp for hiring someone as a permanent employee. (ie just replicate the basic functionality of existing freelancing sites)
Hook into an international payments system like Wave to make it easy for companies to pay overseas freelancers wherever they live.
Maybe partner with companies in the target countries; ie partner with an Indian company who can provide offices with good computers/internet and vetted coders, and you help match them to employers in the USA and smoothly integrate them into their USA developer team by making it easy for the employers to adopt remote-working best practices.
But maybe there is some logical reason why this seemingly solid plan is not happening, or maybe it is happening but I haven’t noticed yet because the startups are still scaling up.
I fear that it’s not happening simply because places like India or Latin America are poorer than the USA so it’s a less lucrative potential market than selling Zoom/Teams licenses to Fortune-500 companies.
This sounds maybe true!
I can totally imagine it being false, because it’s still a big enough market in theory so supposedly it’s worth fighting over. But I also understand why it wouldn’t be the ideal first market for a typical company.
Regarding the specific reasons that it is harder there: this would be the job of a good product person to start talking to potential customers, I think. But that seems solvable
Seems like something that requires an extreme expertise, which falls into the category of “I wish a CEO would say they want to back this project (and answer questions about it)”
This topic does interest me so I’ll read the sequence, thanks :)
Though if you have something to add, please tell me beforehand, because these people won’t remain available for long
It’s listed in the list of software projects above, but I really think that Coordination Software (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/vz9Zrj3oBGsttG3Jh) has a lot of potential, if only somebody could find the right angle—how to define the group that is voting to change its norms or take an action, what killer applications of the software or particular audiences would be a good place to start, etc...
I think that remote-working software is very positive for civilization; allowing people to work on top tech projects while not living in exploitative NIMBY cities (or even living in the developed world at all!) will do a lot to increase economic growth and distribute more resources to poorer areas. Of course after covid everyone is working on this, but almost none of the efforts are targeted overseas. Combine Wave-style currency transfer with translation and other tools, and maybe the right legal framework to make it easy for US companies to hire/outsource to people abroad, and you’ve created a kind of “virtual immigration” allowing thousands of people in India or Latin America to work remotely and get paid western wages for working on software projects.
There are a lot of good prediction market angles. One of the best remaining unexplored niches, IMO, is creating flexible software that corporations can use to set up their own internal prediction markets and forecasting tournaments (and ideally integrate those with other tools like their scrum boards and issue tracking and etc). See this link for more detail on my idea about creating “the Gitlab of prediction markets”: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dQhjwHA7LhfE8YpYF/prediction-markets-in-the-corporate-setting?commentId=eaLBFJJJgiDGY5QHM
Internal prediction markets for organizations:
[I ended up rambling here, sorry]
Sounds relatively promising, thank you! I also think prediction market ideas are a good candidate to focus on
Things I don’t understand about this idea
That I hope someone more expert can help with
I offered this to a company (w ~500 employees) that I worked for
If I remember their replies correctly:
It will take time from the employees
The main people who know how to make this prediction are already in charge of it
From a “lean startup” mindset, I’d hope to find a few concrete suggestions for prediction markets that a few concrete companies would be interested in running. Before that, can you imagine a question like that? [Expert advice needed!] Are we imagining, for example, Facebook (Meta) opening a prediction market on how many people will buy VR headsets next year?
I internally predict that founders will be extremely uninterested in this, but there’s only one way to find out.
Maybe founders from our community would be willing to do some user research, but again, I don’t even know what kind of companies would be early adopters.
Ok, sounds super promising, thank you very much! This is currently my top candidate
The comment I linked (laying out my “Gitlab of prediction markets” idea) is replying to a very high-quality post by Nuno Sempere and pals which examines exactly these questions of what stops corporations from enthusiastically adopting prediction markets / forecasting. My “gitlab” idea is an attempt to address some of the potential bottlenecks to wider adoption:
Make an easy-to-use tool for companies to set up internal prediction markets or forecasting tournaments, so that even medium-sized companies can freely experiment with in the technology (rather than just Google/Microsoft/Facebook/etc), and it’s easy for employees to use so you get plenty of engagement. Thus addressing what Nuno considers the #1 most important challenge to prediction markets in a corporate setting, “maintaining a prediction market given current technologies”. Individual companies shouldn’t have to do all the work themselves and reinvent the wheel; they should be able to buy prediction market tech as a service!
Maybe some high-quality tutorials, UX design, and demo examples to help employees understand what prediction markets are and help companies understand how to use them (how to write good questions, what business functions might benefit from getting predictions, etc). Thus attempting to address challenge #2, “Writing questions that are both informative for decision-making and attractive to traders.”
With a bit of experimentation, I feel like it should be simple enough to tune the sweet spot of challenge #3, “attracting enough predictors to get accurate forecasts while also preventing the market from taking up too much of the employees’ time and attention”. Should the market just be run on fake internet points like Metaculus? Fake internet points plus prizes for top predictors? Stock bonuses based on performance? Varying amounts of real money? Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to find the right knobs to turn so that companies can incentivize their employees to participate the right amount on average. This is another benefit of offering a service to many companies—experiment once and then offer that expertise to each customer, rather than forcing each new internal prediction market initiative to jump in blind and risk wasting a bunch of employee time if they mess up the rewards structure.
An external tool means companies get to use advanced features (like conditional prediction markets) right away, but (like Gitlab and other software-developer tools) they also have lots of control to self-host and customize the software if they want for their specific needs. (This is different from most prediction market software today where, at best, you can create private markets for your organization and that’s it; no customizability or ownership.)
Instead of a weird standalone experiment, offer integrations with other sales/marketing tools (like salesforce business software) so that the prediction markets can be seamlessly integrated with sales targets/quotas, advertising and A/B testing analysis, financial models, etc. Do the same with software developer tools like git, issue tracking, kanban boards, schedule tools… all the usual Jira / Asana stuff. That way, the act of predicting how long a product will take to come to market can be directly integrated with schedule & issue tracking tools to spot problems and reallocate resources. Prediction markets shouldn’t just be standing weirdly off to one side of everything a company does, but should become another tool in the integrated management/productivity toolkit of philosophies like “scrum”, “agile”, etc. I think this would greatly help companies find a use case for prediction markets and other forms of forecasting in their existing workflows.
As for a roadmap of who the early-adopters are going to be—I think your first market is probably going to be “medium-sized tech companies of the sort that regularly attempt to use prediction markets (and maybe have a CEO who happens to be excited about the idea), but smaller than Google/Microsoft/Facebook and thus would benefit from an external pre-packaged solution”. You could probably get some EA funding as initial seed money, and some of the larger EA/rationalist orgs might be willing to help out and experiment with the system internally, in order to get a better sense of which use cases you should focus on. (For-profits like Wave might be especially valuable to get feedback from—are prediction markets more useful for comparing marketing strategies and maximizing sales, or to predict software dev timelines, or for high-level strategy questions like “which direction should we take the company” / “will this product flop”?) Then build your integrations towards whichever application (sales vs dev vs strategy) seems to be getting the most traction, and roll out the product to more normal tech companies and eventually non-sillicon-valley non-tech companies.
Alternatively (caveat: this is a weird idea), maybe early on you could pitch prediction markets as a good way for especially loose/decentralized teams to get agreement on some debated issue. Like cryptocurrency projects looking for consensus on adopting a change to their protocol (easy to raise a lot of money if your project has a light coat of crypto-paint, perhaps!), or as a way for two companies considering a partnership to jointly and fairly asses the value that each brings to the table (seems to go against every rule of negotiation but might just be crazy enough to work??), or as a tool that helps build agreement on big questions of company direction and get employees more mission-aligned around key initiatives at otherwise large, dispersed, slow-moving organizations like General Motors or Boeing.
This is such a great idea, I really hope someone does it! My company is small (~80 person startup), but might be an example of a potential customer type—we’re an infectious disease intelligence company, so we’re literally trying to predict epidemics/disease events/operational disruption and an internal PM could be a useful way to organize our ongoing analysis and judgment.
Generally anyone working in the risk/critical event/threat intelligence/OSINT space might have a similar use case around collecting and coordinating their internal experts’ assessments.
Also, this may be taking the Gitlab comparison more literally than you intended but the ‘/estimate’ quick action has always seemed like a juicy UX for collecting predictions!
Hey!
[I somehow missed this comment from 6 months ago!]
Are you still interested in something like this?
I am! Would love to discuss, will DM you!
Remote-working software:
I assume there’s a huge financial incentive to get this right, so there’s no added value for an EA to do it. (no?)
I would have thought so too, but I’ve been mystified by how few of the pandemic-remote-work efforts have been aimed towards “virtual immigration” tools that make it easier for US companies to outsource software developer tasks. Maybe there are legal obstacles to hiring overseas employees (but surely there are lots of easy ways to get around this by having them be “contractors” or something)? I fear that it’s not happening simply because places like India or Latin America are poorer than the USA so it’s a less lucrative potential market than selling Zoom/Teams licenses to Fortune-500 companies.
The pieces are all there but there seems to be a dearth of explicitly “virtual immigration” oriented companies who are trying to cobble said pieces together:
Flexible options for companies to post bounties for work, hire short-term contractors or freelancers, or have an on-ramp for hiring someone as a permanent employee. (ie just replicate the basic functionality of existing freelancing sites)
Use tools like Google Translate and Grammarly to make it easier for people to communicate and transact fluently across cultures. (How about something as simple as a video-call service where you’re auto-translating what people are saying in near-real-time?) Here’s a startup who implemented this feature and got bought by Zoom, so I guess it’s coming, but I don’t yet see it in any of the actual products I use.
Hook into an international payments system like Wave to make it easy for companies to pay overseas freelancers wherever they live.
Maybe partner with companies in the target countries; ie partner with an Indian company who can provide offices with good computers/internet and vetted coders, and you help match them to employers in the USA and smoothly integrate them into their USA developer team by making it easy for the employers to adopt remote-working best practices.
But maybe there is some logical reason why this seemingly solid plan is not happening, or maybe it is happening but I haven’t noticed yet because the startups are still scaling up.
TL;DR: Strong upvote, thank you!
This sounds maybe true!
I can totally imagine it being false, because it’s still a big enough market in theory so supposedly it’s worth fighting over. But I also understand why it wouldn’t be the ideal first market for a typical company.
Regarding the specific reasons that it is harder there: this would be the job of a good product person to start talking to potential customers, I think. But that seems solvable
Coordination software:
Seems like something that requires an extreme expertise, which falls into the category of “I wish a CEO would say they want to back this project (and answer questions about it)”
This topic does interest me so I’ll read the sequence, thanks :)
Though if you have something to add, please tell me beforehand, because these people won’t remain available for long
(Thank you!)