I have an extremely crazy idea—framing political and economic arguments in the form of a ‘massively multiplayer’ computer-verifiable model.
Human brains are really terrible at keeping track of a lot of information at once and sussing out how subtle interactions between parts of a system lead to the large-scale behavior of the whole system. This is why economists frequently build economic models in the form of computer simulations to try to figure out how various economic policies could affect the real world.
That’s all well and good, but economic models built in this way usually have two major downsides:
They have very limited scope. They basically consist of all the different factors that the authors know about, which, even for the most dedicated model-builders, is a pretty small fraction of reality.
They carry the author’s own biases.
Now the ‘standard’ resolution of this in economics is: “Reproduce the model and modify it if you think it’s flawed.” But reproducing models is an extremely time-wasting effort. It doesn’t make sense to reproduce a huge model if you just want to make a few modifications.
What I’m proposing is to instead have a monolithic large-scale economic model residing on the internet, written and displayed in a graphical format (nodes and interconnection between nodes) that “anyone can edit”—anyone can add interactions between nodes and others can review these modifications until a ‘consensus’ emerges over time (and if it doesn’t, some level of agreed-upon ‘uncertainty’ can be introduced into the model as well).
So basically, what I’m proposing is a combination of wiki-style editing freedom and economic models. Imagine being able to insert and play around with factors like the cost of healthcare and the probability that the average person will develop some kind of rare disease, or factors like the influence of tax rate or cost of labor on the decision-making processes of a company. Imagine if instead of endless political debates in various public forums, various sides could just stick in their numbers in the system (numbers that hopefully come from publicly-verifiable research) and let the computer ‘battle it out’ and give a concrete answer.
I think this is an interesting idea in theory. And if you connect it to prediction markets, then this could be some sort of computational collaborative futarchy.
The biggest issue (aside from computational cost) is definitely how to reconcile conflicting models, although no one would ever be editing the entire model, only small parts of it. I hope (and I could be wrong) that once the system reaches a certain critical mass, predicting the emergent behaviour from the microscopic details becomes so hard that someone with a political agenda couldn’t easily come up with ways to manipulate the system just by making a few local changes (you can think of this as similar to a cryptographic hashing problem). Other large-scale systems (like cryptocurrencies) derive security from similar ‘strength in numbers’ principles.
One option is to limit input to the system to only peer-reviewed statistical studies. But this isn’t a perfect solution, for various reasons.
Using a connection to prediction markets (so that people have some skin in the game) is a nice idea, but I’m not sure how you’re thinking of implementing that?
Well, models generally rely on parameter values which can be determined empirically or reasoned about more theoretically or the model could be fitted to data and the parameters inferred by some form of optimisation algo such as monte carlo markov chains.
Anyway, suppose two people disagree on the value of a parameter. Running the model with different parameter values would produce different predictions, which they could then bet on.
This sounds like a larger implementation of the models pathologists use to try and predict the infection rate of a disease. Considering the amount of computing power needed for that, such a service might be prohibitively expensive- at least in the near future.
I’m wondering if there would be a way for participants to place some skin in the game, besides a connection to prediction markets.
Same as what happened when 4chan discovered wikipedia. I suspect there will be vandalism but also self-correction. Ideally you’d want to build in mechanisms to make vandalism harder.
I have an extremely crazy idea—framing political and economic arguments in the form of a ‘massively multiplayer’ computer-verifiable model.
Human brains are really terrible at keeping track of a lot of information at once and sussing out how subtle interactions between parts of a system lead to the large-scale behavior of the whole system. This is why economists frequently build economic models in the form of computer simulations to try to figure out how various economic policies could affect the real world.
That’s all well and good, but economic models built in this way usually have two major downsides:
They have very limited scope. They basically consist of all the different factors that the authors know about, which, even for the most dedicated model-builders, is a pretty small fraction of reality.
They carry the author’s own biases.
Now the ‘standard’ resolution of this in economics is: “Reproduce the model and modify it if you think it’s flawed.” But reproducing models is an extremely time-wasting effort. It doesn’t make sense to reproduce a huge model if you just want to make a few modifications.
What I’m proposing is to instead have a monolithic large-scale economic model residing on the internet, written and displayed in a graphical format (nodes and interconnection between nodes) that “anyone can edit”—anyone can add interactions between nodes and others can review these modifications until a ‘consensus’ emerges over time (and if it doesn’t, some level of agreed-upon ‘uncertainty’ can be introduced into the model as well).
So basically, what I’m proposing is a combination of wiki-style editing freedom and economic models. Imagine being able to insert and play around with factors like the cost of healthcare and the probability that the average person will develop some kind of rare disease, or factors like the influence of tax rate or cost of labor on the decision-making processes of a company. Imagine if instead of endless political debates in various public forums, various sides could just stick in their numbers in the system (numbers that hopefully come from publicly-verifiable research) and let the computer ‘battle it out’ and give a concrete answer.
No-one would agree on what models to use.
I think this is an interesting idea in theory. And if you connect it to prediction markets, then this could be some sort of computational collaborative futarchy.
The biggest issue (aside from computational cost) is definitely how to reconcile conflicting models, although no one would ever be editing the entire model, only small parts of it. I hope (and I could be wrong) that once the system reaches a certain critical mass, predicting the emergent behaviour from the microscopic details becomes so hard that someone with a political agenda couldn’t easily come up with ways to manipulate the system just by making a few local changes (you can think of this as similar to a cryptographic hashing problem). Other large-scale systems (like cryptocurrencies) derive security from similar ‘strength in numbers’ principles.
One option is to limit input to the system to only peer-reviewed statistical studies. But this isn’t a perfect solution, for various reasons.
Using a connection to prediction markets (so that people have some skin in the game) is a nice idea, but I’m not sure how you’re thinking of implementing that?
Well, models generally rely on parameter values which can be determined empirically or reasoned about more theoretically or the model could be fitted to data and the parameters inferred by some form of optimisation algo such as monte carlo markov chains.
Anyway, suppose two people disagree on the value of a parameter. Running the model with different parameter values would produce different predictions, which they could then bet on.
This sounds like a larger implementation of the models pathologists use to try and predict the infection rate of a disease. Considering the amount of computing power needed for that, such a service might be prohibitively expensive- at least in the near future.
I’m wondering if there would be a way for participants to place some skin in the game, besides a connection to prediction markets.
So what happens when 4chan discovers it?
Same as what happened when 4chan discovered wikipedia. I suspect there will be vandalism but also self-correction. Ideally you’d want to build in mechanisms to make vandalism harder.