I think it’s worse than that. Suppose we’re in a futarchy and there’s a proposal to build an innovative new kind of nuclear reactor in the heart of Cardiff. According to our state-determined utility function, this has positive utility if and only if the risk of meltdown within 10 years is less than .00001. But regardless of what people actually think, the price of CardiffReactor.Meltdown.Before2022 has a hard floor: the price where it’s not worth it to anyone on the planet to short-sell, because there are better investment opportunities elsewhere. If this floor is greater than .00001 (and how could it not be?), the market provides no usable information.
The difficulty here is one of constructing markets and, critically, derivatives that make trading based on that sort of information feasible. This is the sort of thing that would require infrastructure in place to allow large amounts of complicated trading. If we were actually in a serious futarchy this kind of thing could and probably would be traded on, albeit indirectly in a huge sea of conditional probability payoff systems.
For us, given that we are not in a mature futarchy (and do not otherwise have access to an advanced and heavily traded prediction market), we are of course unable to use a market to directly answer that kind of question.
I think it’s worse than that. Suppose we’re in a futarchy and there’s a proposal to build an innovative new kind of nuclear reactor in the heart of Cardiff. According to our state-determined utility function, this has positive utility if and only if the risk of meltdown within 10 years is less than .00001. But regardless of what people actually think, the price of CardiffReactor.Meltdown.Before2022 has a hard floor: the price where it’s not worth it to anyone on the planet to short-sell, because there are better investment opportunities elsewhere. If this floor is greater than .00001 (and how could it not be?), the market provides no usable information.
The difficulty here is one of constructing markets and, critically, derivatives that make trading based on that sort of information feasible. This is the sort of thing that would require infrastructure in place to allow large amounts of complicated trading. If we were actually in a serious futarchy this kind of thing could and probably would be traded on, albeit indirectly in a huge sea of conditional probability payoff systems.
For us, given that we are not in a mature futarchy (and do not otherwise have access to an advanced and heavily traded prediction market), we are of course unable to use a market to directly answer that kind of question.