Published on May 28, 2025 8:26 PM GMT
TLDR: Lesswrong should have it's own private prediction market so we can test just how well Lesswrongers stack up against the rest of the world which would build up the sites credibility, test and improve our arts of rationality and help address the burnout and disillusionment plaguing the rationalist movement.
a common question amongst rationalists especially on lesswrong is "why aren't rationalists winning?" or more generally "why are we not seeing clear benefits of rationality in real life?",this question has been discussed a lot on this site and has probably led many to become disillusioned with Lesswrong or the rationality movement all together.
rationalist seem to be suffering for the same problem as psychologists and sociologists, slow feedback loops and a lack of clear metrics for success (which often results in people defaulting to the standard strategy of establishing a "school of thought" and measuring their success by how many people they convince to their side, but thankfully we mostly avoided that failure mode) so i propose a method to resolve the issue, let's make a private prediction market where only Lesswrongers could participate and see how well our "maps" stacks up against the "territory".
for those who are new to prediction markets, they are markets where participants bet on the outcomes for a particular event (say an election), once the outcome of the event is resolved the losers pay out the winners.
it is a way to force people to "put their money where their mouth is" and one of the few reliable ways to test someones models of the world since it is a task you can't do well at consistently if you aren't rational .
here are the benefits i predict form this proposal:
- improving our skill at prediction through training.establishing a clear unambiguous metrics for success.allowing users who are good at predictions to establish a reputation.improve the credibility of the site and maybe the entire rationalist movement.having fun.
this proposal has many possible implementations mainly differing in the method of payment each with its pros and cons, i don't know which one is the best but i will list three ranked from least to most favorite to kick start the discussion:
money based system: betting with actual money like a online sports gambling.
Pros:
strongest incentive.
very hard to sabotage.
cons:
would likely be subject to online gambling laws and other regulation.
high barrier for entry.
hard to implement.
karma based system: betting the the users karma.
pros:
lower barrier of entry.
easiest to implement.
somewhat good incentives.
cons:
it would be hard to tell someones betting performance based entirely on their karma.
the barrier while low, is not that low, you still have to build up some karma first.
somewhat vulnerable to sabotage.
zero-sum reputation system: something like manifold where we use "points" to track the user performance, everyone starts with say 100 points, anyone above 100 is doing better then average and anyone below that is doing below average.
pros:
lowest entry barrier.
very easy to track the users performance.
cons:
very vulnerable to sabotage.
this is by no means an exhaustive list, in fact as i was writing this i realized that proposals 3 and 2 can be greatly improved with a few amendments plus their is the problem of which questions should we ask on the market, but this isn't meant to be a comprehensive proposal just a primer to start a discussion on this topic.
one last note, this would probably be one of those "this might work but no one is gonna bother implementing it" kinda post, there isn't much i can do about this other then laying out my best arguments and pointing out that Lessworng has an entire graveyard of forgotten but promising ideas that never got past a couple dozen comments and upvotes because we failed to coordinate around it (of course, none of this applies if this idea is actually terrible).
Discuss
