Cool post! Daniel Kokotajlo and I have been exploring somewhat similar ideas.
In a nutshell, our idea was that a major social media company (such as Twitter) could develop a feature that incentivizes forecasting in two ways. First, the feature would automatically suggest questions of interest to the user, e.g., questions thematically related to the user’s current tweet or currently trending issues. Second, users who make more accurate forecasts than the community will be rewarded with increased visibility.
Our idea is different in two major ways:
I. First, you suggest to directly bet on Tweets whereas as we envisioned that people would bet/forecast on questions that are related to Tweets.
This seems to have some advantages: There would only be one question related to many thousands of Tweets. Rather than resolving thousands of Tweets, one would only have to resolve one question. Most Tweets are also very imprecise. In contrast, these questions (and their resolution criteria) could be formulated very precisely (partly because one could spend much more time refining them because they are much fewer in number). The drawback is that this might feel less “direct” and “fun” in some ways.
II. Second, contrary to your idea, we had in mind that the questions would be resolved by employees and not voted on by the public. Our worry is that the public voting would dissolve in easily manipulated popularity contest that might also lead to increased polarization and/or distrust of the whole platform. But it is true that users might not trust employees of Twitter—potentially for good reason!
Maybe one could combine these two ideas. Maybe the resolution of questions could be done by a committee or court that consists of employees and members of the public (and maybe other people that enjoy a high level of trust such as maybe popular judges or scientists?). Members of this committee could even undergo a selection and training process, maybe somewhat similar to the selection and training process of US juries which seem to be widely trusted to make reasonable decisions.
Cool post! Daniel Kokotajlo and I have been exploring somewhat similar ideas.
In a nutshell, our idea was that a major social media company (such as Twitter) could develop a feature that incentivizes forecasting in two ways. First, the feature would automatically suggest questions of interest to the user, e.g., questions thematically related to the user’s current tweet or currently trending issues. Second, users who make more accurate forecasts than the community will be rewarded with increased visibility.
Our idea is different in two major ways:
I.
First, you suggest to directly bet on Tweets whereas as we envisioned that people would bet/forecast on questions that are related to Tweets.
This seems to have some advantages: There would only be one question related to many thousands of Tweets. Rather than resolving thousands of Tweets, one would only have to resolve one question. Most Tweets are also very imprecise. In contrast, these questions (and their resolution criteria) could be formulated very precisely (partly because one could spend much more time refining them because they are much fewer in number). The drawback is that this might feel less “direct” and “fun” in some ways.
II.
Second, contrary to your idea, we had in mind that the questions would be resolved by employees and not voted on by the public. Our worry is that the public voting would dissolve in easily manipulated popularity contest that might also lead to increased polarization and/or distrust of the whole platform. But it is true that users might not trust employees of Twitter—potentially for good reason!
Maybe one could combine these two ideas. Maybe the resolution of questions could be done by a committee or court that consists of employees and members of the public (and maybe other people that enjoy a high level of trust such as maybe popular judges or scientists?). Members of this committee could even undergo a selection and training process, maybe somewhat similar to the selection and training process of US juries which seem to be widely trusted to make reasonable decisions.