So, you get the best possible person to run your company, and they’re incentivized to do their best,
The details on this one didn’t fit together.
Betting that someone will live is equivalent to putting a price on their heads;
Unless there’s more details. Betting person X will not die of cancer might create an incentive for a cancer assassin, but that’s different then killing someone using any means. (The issue of how the bets are cashed out might be important—are we betting on the truth, or using a proxy like the announced cause of death?) Though betting someone will die of cancer might be an incentive to save them from dying that way, or killing them another way. (Cancer might be unusual w.r.t how hard preventing that method of death would be.)
Predict-O-Matic runs on a local search which only represents a single hypothesis at a time, and modifies the hypothesis.
The inner optimizer was a surprise—one doesn’t usually think of a hypothesis as an agent.
Betting person X will not die of cancer might create an incentive for a cancer assassin, but that’s different then killing someone using any means.
Yeah, everything depends critically on which things get bet on in the market. If there’s a general life expectancy market, it’s an all-method assassination market. But it might happen that no one is interested in betting about that, and all the bets have to do with specific causes of death. Then things would be much more difficult for an assassin.
However, the more specific the claim being bet on, the lower the probably should be; so, the higher the reward for making it come true.
[1] Whoever gets control of the share gets control of the company for one year, and gets dividends based on how well the company did that year. [2] Each person bids based on what they expect they could make. [3] So the highest bidder is the person who can run the company the best, and they can’t be out-bid. [4] So, you get the best possible person to run your company, and they’re incentivized to do their best, so that they get the most money at the end of the year.
[3] doesn’t seem to follow. The person who wins an auction is usually the person who bids the most on it.
Ah, yes, OK. I see I didn’t include a line which I had considered including, [1.5] Assume the players are bidding rationally. (Editing OP to include.) The character is an economist, so it makes sense that this would be a background assumption.
So then, the highest bidder is the person who expects to make the most, which is the person actually capable of making the most.
Of course, you also have to worry about conflict of interest (where someone can extract value from the company by means other than dividends). But if we’re using this as a model of a training process, the decision market is effectively the entire economy.
The details on this one didn’t fit together.
Unless there’s more details. Betting person X will not die of cancer might create an incentive for a cancer assassin, but that’s different then killing someone using any means. (The issue of how the bets are cashed out might be important—are we betting on the truth, or using a proxy like the announced cause of death?) Though betting someone will die of cancer might be an incentive to save them from dying that way, or killing them another way. (Cancer might be unusual w.r.t how hard preventing that method of death would be.)
The inner optimizer was a surprise—one doesn’t usually think of a hypothesis as an agent.
Yeah, everything depends critically on which things get bet on in the market. If there’s a general life expectancy market, it’s an all-method assassination market. But it might happen that no one is interested in betting about that, and all the bets have to do with specific causes of death. Then things would be much more difficult for an assassin.
However, the more specific the claim being bet on, the lower the probably should be; so, the higher the reward for making it come true.
I don’t know what objection this part is making.
[3] doesn’t seem to follow. The person who wins an auction is usually the person who bids the most on it.
Ah, yes, OK. I see I didn’t include a line which I had considered including, [1.5] Assume the players are bidding rationally. (Editing OP to include.) The character is an economist, so it makes sense that this would be a background assumption.
So then, the highest bidder is the person who expects to make the most, which is the person actually capable of making the most.
Of course, you also have to worry about conflict of interest (where someone can extract value from the company by means other than dividends). But if we’re using this as a model of a training process, the decision market is effectively the entire economy.