Re:Introduction to Augur, an open-source, decentralized bett...
by arthur_pryor on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @02:30AM
(#17807485)
> > Some economists hope that we could use prediction markets to make difficult political decisions.
> Political decisions aren't verfiable fact questions, so they aren't really subject to prediction markets. You could use them as a tool to get possible answers to fact questions supporting policy decisions, but there is no real compelling case for them being better than the best available other methods in most domains for that, and in any case getting answers on fact questions related to policy decisions isn't even the hard part of getting good policy decisions.
i wish this comment/POV had gotten more traction in this thread. i am increasingly of the opinion that building consensus on values and goals is more of a problem in politics than is building consensus on facts.
A prediction market is an attempt to leverage a hypothesized predictive power of aggregated betting, so being used for being is essential to being prediction market.
> Some economists hope that we could use prediction markets to make difficult political decisions.
Political decisions aren't verfiable fact questions, so they aren't really subject to prediction markets. You could use them as a tool to get possible answers to fact questions supporting policy decisions, but there is no real compelling case for them being better than the best available other methods in most domains for that, and in any case getting answers on fact questions related to policy decisions isn't even the hard part of getting good policy decisions.