For prediction markets, I’m fine if they’re consistently inaccurate because I, knowing their inaccuracies, would gain a bunch of money. But because there are smarter people than me who value money more than me, I expect those people will eat up the relevant money (unless the prediction market has a upper limit on how much a single person can bet like PredictIt). This is probably more of a problem for things like GJ Open or Metaculus, since their forecasts rely a bunch on crowd aggregations, so either they’d need to change the algorithms which report their publicly accessible forecasts, or in fact be less accurate.
In general, I think if NYT starts reporting on (say) Manifold Markets markets, I expect those markets to get a shit ton more accurate, even if NYT readers are tremendously biased.
As an example of how Manifold reacted to a (crude) attempt at manipulation:
Dr P (a Manifold user) would create and bet yes on markets for “Will Trump be president on [some date]?” for various dates where there was no plausible way trump would be president. Other users quickly noticed and set up limit orders to capture this source of free money. Eventually Dr. P’s bets were cancelled out quickly enough that they had little to no effect on the probability, and it became hard to find one of those bets profit from. Eventually Dr P gave up and their account became inactive. (There was some uncertainty about what would happen if Dr P misresolved the markets. Today I would expect false resolutions to be reversed. Various derivative/insurance markets were set up.)
For prediction markets, I’m fine if they’re consistently inaccurate because I, knowing their inaccuracies, would gain a bunch of money. But because there are smarter people than me who value money more than me, I expect those people will eat up the relevant money (unless the prediction market has a upper limit on how much a single person can bet like PredictIt). This is probably more of a problem for things like GJ Open or Metaculus, since their forecasts rely a bunch on crowd aggregations, so either they’d need to change the algorithms which report their publicly accessible forecasts, or in fact be less accurate.
In general, I think if NYT starts reporting on (say) Manifold Markets markets, I expect those markets to get a shit ton more accurate, even if NYT readers are tremendously biased.
As an example of how Manifold reacted to a (crude) attempt at manipulation:
Dr P (a Manifold user) would create and bet yes on markets for “Will Trump be president on [some date]?” for various dates where there was no plausible way trump would be president. Other users quickly noticed and set up limit orders to capture this source of free money. Eventually Dr. P’s bets were cancelled out quickly enough that they had little to no effect on the probability, and it became hard to find one of those bets profit from. Eventually Dr P gave up and their account became inactive. (There was some uncertainty about what would happen if Dr P misresolved the markets. Today I would expect false resolutions to be reversed. Various derivative/insurance markets were set up.)