Robin, I agree that the main difficulty is figuring out how to pay off the bets, but it seems to me that—given such a measure—playing a prediction market around the measure makes the game more complex, and hopefully more of a lesson, and more socially involving and personally intriguing. In other words, it’s the difference between “Guess whether it will rain tomorrow?” and “Bob is smiling evilly; are you willing to bet $50 that his probability estimate of 36.3% is too low?” Or to look at it another way, fewer people would play poker if the whole theme was just “Estimate the probability that you can fill an inside straight.” I think Anissimov has a valid fun-amplifying suggestion here.
Robin, I agree that the main difficulty is figuring out how to pay off the bets, but it seems to me that—given such a measure—playing a prediction market around the measure makes the game more complex, and hopefully more of a lesson, and more socially involving and personally intriguing. In other words, it’s the difference between “Guess whether it will rain tomorrow?” and “Bob is smiling evilly; are you willing to bet $50 that his probability estimate of 36.3% is too low?” Or to look at it another way, fewer people would play poker if the whole theme was just “Estimate the probability that you can fill an inside straight.” I think Anissimov has a valid fun-amplifying suggestion here.