I am surprised that this post appeared on OB, and even had (independently) a comment about staking money on predictions and a comment written by Robin Hanson, without eliciting a mention of ideas futures. So I’ll go ahead: if you actually care about predicting the future—or just getting people not to listen to silly predictions—I suggest creating and consulting a market. If social and institutional barriers make this proposal infeasible or unhelpful, I suggest chipping away at them (or at least thinking about how effectively you could chip away at them).
I would suggest just plain writing down your predictions and keep track, or even just predicting on an existing corpus. Waiting for prediction markets is letting the perfect be the enemy of the better.
I am surprised that this post appeared on OB, and even had (independently) a comment about staking money on predictions and a comment written by Robin Hanson, without eliciting a mention of ideas futures. So I’ll go ahead: if you actually care about predicting the future—or just getting people not to listen to silly predictions—I suggest creating and consulting a market. If social and institutional barriers make this proposal infeasible or unhelpful, I suggest chipping away at them (or at least thinking about how effectively you could chip away at them).
I would suggest just plain writing down your predictions and keep track, or even just predicting on an existing corpus. Waiting for prediction markets is letting the perfect be the enemy of the better.