Hi all,
I’m the CEO over at Ultraworking. I’ve been adjacent to the broader Effective Altruism communities for a long time — I ran a 100% volunteer nonprofit called GiveGetWin a decade ago, where we did cool charity projects and funded experimental potential high impact philanthropic innovations. Part of the rationality community for a long time.
After Caroline really liked the Pentathlon personally and for her team when she was at CHAI before Oxford, she asked if we could do something custom for people in EA at large — and the answer is of course yes, very grateful and appreciative of the opportunity to help and support people in longtermist communities.
If there’s answer questions, happy to answer. If there’s ever anything I can do to help, please let me know—sebastian at ultraworking.com—really happy to take some time out if there’s anything that’d be helpful. If anyone doing good work in EA is just starting out and if anything we’re doing isn’t affordable, let me know and we’ll set up you at no charge. Likewise if you’re running a group or even and we can facilitate a little bit on some productivity/coordination side of things—our whole team cares about the work that’s happening in EA / X-Risk / AI Safety, and happy to help in any way we can.
Counterargument: the internet had its theoretical underpinnings start approximately 1959-1960, with first grants for ARPANET in 1966-1969.
The whole thing was then not very useful until the 1990′s.
You could pick earlier dates for theroetical underpinnings of the internet if you wanted, too.
I think prediction markets are more similar to the internet than to cryptocurrency: they require a mix of technology and infrastructure but also a change in human habits. Theoretically, you’d always expect this type of very different systems technology to be a multi-generational thing before there’s widespread societal payoffs on it.
It’s not exactly a 1-for-1 comparison, but the similar date for prediction markets in a comparison to the internet is probably 1988 with the Iowa Prediction Markets. So, it’s been 38 years. It seems to me that it’s right on schedule to be a useful systems technology for society. We’re now in the “Wild West” days of it and it’s going to be messy, like when the internet was emerging into the mainstream.
I do agree about the “feels useful but isn’t” criticism — I got very into finding mis-priced bets and arbitrages on PredictIt a few years back. It can be a terrible time sink due to being so interesting and intellectually engaging. And the type of person who can do a good job at this (I’m one of them, not on your level but also pretty good) — is certainly capable of doing much more high impact work with that same type of cognition.
So I agree with that criticism on an individual level, but I don’t think it’s right to extrapolate that to the emerging systems technology. A cautionary note that if you’re a skilled forecaster it might be a dangerous time sink I’d fully agree with, but I don’t think it makes sense to throw the baby out with the bathwater as to whether this will have societal-level impact over time.