You use the analogy with sports betting multiple time in this post. But science and sports are disanalogical in almost all the relevant ways!
Notably, sports are incredibly limited and well-defined, with explicit rules that literally anyone can learn, quick feedback signals, and unambiguous results. Completely the opposite of science!
The only way I see for the analogy to hold is by defining “science” in a completely impoverished way, that puts aside most of what science actually looks like. For example, replication is not that big a part of acience, it’s just the visible “clean” one. And even then, I expect the clarification of replication issues and of the original meaning to be tricky.
So my reaction to this proposal, like my reaction to any prediction market for things other than sports and games, is that I expect it to be completely irrelevant to the progress of knowledge because of the weakness of such tools. But I would definitely be curious of attempts to explicitly address all the ambiguities of epistemology and science through betting mechanisms. Maybe you know of some posts/works on that?
The only way I see for the analogy to hold is by defining “science” in a completely impoverished way, that puts aside most of what science actually looks like.
I mean, the hope is mostly to replace the way that scientists communicate / what constitutes a “paper” / how grantmaking sometimes works. I agree that most of “science” happens someplace else!
Like, I think for the typical prediction market, people with questions are dramatically underestimating the difficulty in operationalizing things such that they can reliably resolve it as ‘yes’ or ‘no’. But most scientists writing papers are already running into and resolving that difficulty in a way that you can easily retool.
You use the analogy with sports betting multiple time in this post. But science and sports are disanalogical in almost all the relevant ways!
Notably, sports are incredibly limited and well-defined, with explicit rules that literally anyone can learn, quick feedback signals, and unambiguous results. Completely the opposite of science!
The only way I see for the analogy to hold is by defining “science” in a completely impoverished way, that puts aside most of what science actually looks like. For example, replication is not that big a part of acience, it’s just the visible “clean” one. And even then, I expect the clarification of replication issues and of the original meaning to be tricky.
So my reaction to this proposal, like my reaction to any prediction market for things other than sports and games, is that I expect it to be completely irrelevant to the progress of knowledge because of the weakness of such tools. But I would definitely be curious of attempts to explicitly address all the ambiguities of epistemology and science through betting mechanisms. Maybe you know of some posts/works on that?
I mean, the hope is mostly to replace the way that scientists communicate / what constitutes a “paper” / how grantmaking sometimes works. I agree that most of “science” happens someplace else!
Like, I think for the typical prediction market, people with questions are dramatically underestimating the difficulty in operationalizing things such that they can reliably resolve it as ‘yes’ or ‘no’. But most scientists writing papers are already running into and resolving that difficulty in a way that you can easily retool.