Your points are well-taken. And thanks for pointing out the ambiguity about what problems can be overcome. I will clarify that to something more like “problems like x and y can be overcome by subsidizing markets and ensuring the right incentives are in place for the right types of information to be brought to light.”
I had already retitled this section in my doc (much expanded and clarified) ‘Do Prediction Markets Help Reveal The Map?’ which is a much more exact title, I think.
I am curious about what you mean by create ‘a collective map’, if you mean achieve localized shared understanding of the world, individual fields of inquiry do it with some success. But if you mean to create collective knowledge broad enough that 95% of people share the same models of reality, you are right, forget it. There’s just too much difference among the way communities think.
As for the 14th c. John Buridan, the interesting thing about him is that he refused to join one of the schools and instead remained an Arts Master all his life, specializing in philosophy and the application of logic to resolve endless disputes in different subjects. At the time people were expected to join one the religious orders and become a Doctor of Theology. He carved out a more neutral space away from those disputations and refined the use logic to tackle problems in natural philosophy and psychology.
What do I mean by “pessimistic about our ability to create a collective map”? Maybe I should not have said “pessimistic,” but instead used “cynical.” There are lots of places where we claim to have consensus and I think that those claims are false. I gave lots of examples of very small scale failures to communicate, like one department of a medical school lying about the work of another medical department. If we revere certain people as experts, it behooves us to find out what they claim. Finding that out would count as promoting a collective map.
Your points are well-taken. And thanks for pointing out the ambiguity about what problems can be overcome. I will clarify that to something more like “problems like x and y can be overcome by subsidizing markets and ensuring the right incentives are in place for the right types of information to be brought to light.”
I had already retitled this section in my doc (much expanded and clarified) ‘Do Prediction Markets Help Reveal The Map?’ which is a much more exact title, I think.
I am curious about what you mean by create ‘a collective map’, if you mean achieve localized shared understanding of the world, individual fields of inquiry do it with some success. But if you mean to create collective knowledge broad enough that 95% of people share the same models of reality, you are right, forget it. There’s just too much difference among the way communities think.
As for the 14th c. John Buridan, the interesting thing about him is that he refused to join one of the schools and instead remained an Arts Master all his life, specializing in philosophy and the application of logic to resolve endless disputes in different subjects. At the time people were expected to join one the religious orders and become a Doctor of Theology. He carved out a more neutral space away from those disputations and refined the use logic to tackle problems in natural philosophy and psychology.
What do I mean by “pessimistic about our ability to create a collective map”? Maybe I should not have said “pessimistic,” but instead used “cynical.” There are lots of places where we claim to have consensus and I think that those claims are false. I gave lots of examples of very small scale failures to communicate, like one department of a medical school lying about the work of another medical department. If we revere certain people as experts, it behooves us to find out what they claim. Finding that out would count as promoting a collective map.