A parallel problem with prediction markets: at non-financial-industry scales: they’re used as signals of confidence. How often do you see, after someone makes a bold claim, a response saying to “put your money where your mouth is.” But just the act of signalling confidence can be intrinsically valuable to the person making a claim. In bet-capped places like predictit, this can make equilibrium that are different from optimal, because there are non-monetary incentives at work.
wangscarpet
Karma: 44
This is a good and valid question—I agree, it isn’t fair to say generalization comes entirely from human beliefs.
An illustrative example: suppose we’re talking about deep learning, so our predicting model is a neural network. We haven’t specified the architecture of the model yet. We choose two architectures, and train both of them from our subsampled human-labeled D* items. Almost surely, these two models won’t give exactly the same outputs on every input, even in expectation. So where did this variability come from? Some sort of bias from the model architecture!
So interesting that I thought you were going to go the opposite direction at the end. I have felt slight amounts of imposter syndrome before, and it came from feeling like a well-liked and well-respected person whose skills did not fully back up my reputation. So, I was high on the social hierarchy but I perceived it coming from dominance and not prestige.