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Re:Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Ar... by Kinnard on Thursday December 31, 2015 @04:30PM (#10819796)
This is awesome! Have you heard of Augur? It's a decentalized prediction market: http://augur.net I wonder if the guys there would be interested in this.
Re:Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Ar... by ozgooen on Thursday December 31, 2015 @04:32PM (#10819800)
Definitely, keeping a close eye. Have long been interested in prediction markets. It would be nice to tie data from them and the Good Judgement project into tools like Guesstimate so people could make forecasts using other strong forecasts.
Re:Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Ar... by joshuahhh on Thursday December 31, 2015 @06:37PM (#10820349)
Pulling data from prediction markets into Guesstimate is an exciting idea. A few thoughts:

* Prediction markets are usually for binary outcomes. I imagine the most useful role of binary variables in Guesstimate would be to mix two different distributions. "If Clinton wins, student debt in 2018 will look like distribution A; if Sanders wins, student debt in 2018 will look like distribution B".

* I'm not sure how Augur (or any other market) reports likelihoods, but it's good to keep in mind that market prices do NOT generally reflect any sort of average belief. See https://www.aeaweb.org/assa/2006/0106_1015_0703.pdf.

Re:Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Ar... by ozgooen on Thursday December 31, 2015 @07:14PM (#10820493)
That makes sense. It would be very useful to see estimates of how well Presidential candidates would do if they got elected.

In the future, one idea would be to keep track of people's metric estimates in Guesstimate, and later score and rank them on how well they do. So if Charles always reports a 90% confidence interval that's far too optimistic, we could help adjust it automatically next time. This would also allow us to aggregate different opinions directly, essentially being like a mini prediction challenge. This would be a ways off though, and it really depends on what direction the product goes.

Re:Introducing Guesstimate, a Spreadsheet for Things That Ar... by PaulCapestany on Friday January 01, 2016 @11:59AM (#10822359)
The guy who's work was originally the basis for Augur has some interesting things to say about that project (and is working on his own implementation of a Bitcoin-based prediction market): http://www.truthcoin.info/faq/