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Whoops, here is the correct URL

http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=ITJOB S

futures market on the impact of offshore outsourcing.

If you think there will be more jobs then buy! if you think there will be less then sell! The current value of the futures market is the market prediction: there will be a net increase of jobs in America, according to the market.

If you think that's wrong sell.

It's play money, for free, all you have to lose or gain is your reputation--your score in the game shows how good you are at predicting the future.

The future of IT Jobs in America

That's a website where you can buy and sell futures in IT Jobs, unfortunately with play money. But it's fun, and it'll tell you whether you will have a job in a few years or not--whenever the market is trading above $0.50 the job market is predicted to expand.

Current prediction is we're all OK--the market is trading around $0.70 which means about 1% annual growth in the IT sector.

If you disagree sign up and sell! sell! sell! If you can correctly predict the future you get a hig h score.

The Future of IT Jobs in America

There's the free market in IT Jobs: this game predicts whether we will all have jobs in a few years. If you think offshoring is gonna take our jobs then sell! sell! sell!

Statistics for developers, computer scientists, and so forth can be found along side those for sysadmins here:
The Future of IT Jobs in America

Which probably inspired this /. article.

There are better summaries of these statistics--and probably the inspiration for this article--here:

The Future of IT Jobs In America

The Foresight Exchange is an idea futures market. Players trade contracts based on claims about the future--such as whether or not there will be another terrorist attack against the United States, how many IT Jobs there will be in 2012, or whether Scaled Composites will win the X-Prize. Players who profit by correctly predicting the future achieve a high score that proves their omniscient wisdom.

It's not just fun and games, though--the exchange provides an overall market consensus prediction. Anyone can create a new claim to help them gain insight into the future. As a software developer I worried about my future job prospects and so I created the ITJOBS market to find out what will happen. The claim pays out from $1 to $0 depending on whether the number of IT jobs paying over $50k/year grows or shrinks by up to 35%. Currently the symbol trades between $0.65 and $0.75 which translates to a market consensus of about 1% annual job growth annually. However, since the claim just began trading thare not yet enough market participants for this prediction to be significant--you could help change that! Sign up and test your foresight.

What's even cooler is that the foresight exchange has a programmable API and documented protocol so that you can write automated trading bots. Since it's play money you have nothing to lose but your self respect! There are many such bots trading on the market now, some of them having been running for years. The Shimari Project includes a Java API that can be used to programatically access the exchange; writing one for your own favorite langauge would also be quite easy. Note though that there is a limit of one account per human player--you can't have a bot and also have a human trading account. This is to prevent various kinds of cheating.

The Foresight Exchange is not just a fun (and free) online game, it's also a useful source of information about the future. If you think you can predict who will win the next election, or you just want to know what the consensus opinion is, sign up and find out. The more people who participate in this market the more accurate its predictions will be.

Disclaimer: I have no relationship with the Foresight Exchange other than that I am a player, a member of the unrelated Shimari Project, and the author of the ITJOBS claim--which I created because as a software developer I wanted to know what the future held in store for me!

The Foresight Exchange is an idea futures market. Players trade contracts based on claims about the future--such as whether or not there will be another terrorist attack against the United States, how many IT Jobs there will be in 2012, or whether Scaled Composites will win the X-Prize. Players who profit by correctly predicting the future achieve a high score that proves their omniscient wisdom.

It's not just fun and games, though--the exchange provides an overall market consensus prediction. Anyone can create a new claim to help them gain insight into the future. As a software developer I worried about my future job prospects and so I created the ITJOBS market to find out what will happen. The claim pays out from $1 to $0 depending on whether the number of IT jobs paying over $50k/year grows or shrinks by up to 35%. Currently the symbol trades between $0.65 and $0.75 which translates to a market consensus of about 1% annual job growth annually. However, since the claim just began trading thare not yet enough market participants for this prediction to be significant--you could help change that! Sign up and test your foresight.

What's even cooler is that the foresight exchange has a programmable API and documented protocol so that you can write automated trading bots. Since it's play money you have nothing to lose but your self respect! There are many such bots trading on the market now, some of them having been running for years. The Shimari Project includes a Java API that can be used to programatically access the exchange; writing one for your own favorite langauge would also be quite easy. Note though that there is a limit of one account per human player--you can't have a bot and also have a human trading account. This is to prevent various kinds of cheating.

The Foresight Exchange is not just a fun (and free) online game, it's also a useful source of information about the future. If you think you can predict who will win the next election, or you just want to know what the consensus opinion is, sign up and find out. The more people who participate in this market the more accurate its predictions will be.

Disclaimer: I have no relationship with the Foresight Exchange other than that I am a player, a member of the unrelated Shimari Project, and the author of the ITJOBS claim--which I created because as a software developer I wanted to know what the future held in store for me!

The Foresight Exchange is an idea futures market. Players trade contracts based on claims about the future--such as whether or not there will be another terrorist attack against the United States, how many IT Jobs there will be in 2012, or whether Scaled Composites will win the X-Prize. Players who profit by correctly predicting the future achieve a high score that proves their omniscient wisdom.

It's not just fun and games, though--the exchange provides an overall market consensus prediction. Anyone can create a new claim to help them gain insight into the future. As a software developer I worried about my future job prospects and so I created the ITJOBS market to find out what will happen. The claim pays out from $1 to $0 depending on whether the number of IT jobs paying over $50k/year grows or shrinks by up to 35%. Currently the symbol trades between $0.65 and $0.75 which translates to a market consensus of about 1% annual job growth annually. However, since the claim just began trading thare not yet enough market participants for this prediction to be significant--you could help change that! Sign up and test your foresight.

What's even cooler is that the foresight exchange has a programmable API and documented protocol so that you can write automated trading bots. Since it's play money you have nothing to lose but your self respect! There are many such bots trading on the market now, some of them having been running for years. The Shimari Project includes a Java API that can be used to programatically access the exchange; writing one for your own favorite langauge would also be quite easy. Note though that there is a limit of one account per human player--you can't have a bot and also have a human trading account. This is to prevent various kinds of cheating.

The Foresight Exchange is not just a fun (and free) online game, it's also a useful source of information about the future. If you think you can predict who will win the next election, or you just want to know what the consensus opinion is, sign up and find out. The more people who participate in this market the more accurate its predictions will be.

Disclaimer: I have no relationship with the Foresight Exchange other than that I am a player, a member of the unrelated Shimari Project, and the author of the ITJOBS claim--which I created because as a software developer I wanted to know what the future held in store for me!

The Foresight Exchange is an idea futures market. Players trade contracts based on claims about the future--such as whether or not there will be another terrorist attack against the United States, how many IT Jobs there will be in 2012, or whether Scaled Composites will win the X-Prize. Players who profit by correctly predicting the future achieve a high score that proves their omniscient wisdom.

It's not just fun and games, though--the exchange provides an overall market consensus prediction. Anyone can create a new claim to help them gain insight into the future. As a software developer I worried about my future job prospects and so I created the ITJOBS market to find out what will happen. The claim pays out from $1 to $0 depending on whether the number of IT jobs paying over $50k/year grows or shrinks by up to 35%. Currently the symbol trades between $0.65 and $0.75 which translates to a market consensus of about 1% annual job growth annually. However, since the claim just began trading thare not yet enough market participants for this prediction to be significant--you could help change that! Sign up and test your foresight.

What's even cooler is that the foresight exchange has a programmable API and documented protocol so that you can write automated trading bots. Since it's play money you have nothing to lose but your self respect! There are many such bots trading on the market now, some of them having been running for years. The Shimari Project includes a Java API that can be used to programatically access the exchange; writing one for your own favorite langauge would also be quite easy. Note though that there is a limit of one account per human player--you can't have a bot and also have a human trading account. This is to prevent various kinds of cheating.

The Foresight Exchange is not just a fun (and free) online game, it's also a useful source of information about the future. If you think you can predict who will win the next election, or you just want to know what the consensus opinion is, sign up and find out. The more people who participate in this market the more accurate its predictions will be.

Disclaimer: I have no relationship with the Foresight Exchange other than that I am a player, a member of the unrelated Shimari Project, and the author of the ITJOBS claim--which I created because as a software developer I wanted to know what the future held in store for me!

The Foresight Exchange is an idea futures market. Players trade contracts based on claims about the future--such as whether or not there will be another terrorist attack against the United States, how many IT Jobs there will be in 2012, or whether Scaled Composites will win the X-Prize. Players who profit by correctly predicting the future achieve a high score that proves their omniscient wisdom.

It's not just fun and games, though--the exchange provides an overall market consensus prediction. Anyone can create a new claim to help them gain insight into the future. As a software developer I worried about my future job prospects and so I created the ITJOBS market to find out what will happen. The claim pays out from $1 to $0 depending on whether the number of IT jobs paying over $50k/year grows or shrinks by up to 35%. Currently the symbol trades between $0.65 and $0.75 which translates to a market consensus of about 1% annual job growth annually. However, since the claim just began trading thare not yet enough market participants for this prediction to be significant--you could help change that! Sign up and test your foresight.

What's even cooler is that the foresight exchange has a programmable API and documented protocol so that you can write automated trading bots. Since it's play money you have nothing to lose but your self respect! There are many such bots trading on the market now, some of them having been running for years. The Shimari Project includes a Java API that can be used to programatically access the exchange; writing one for your own favorite langauge would also be quite easy. Note though that there is a limit of one account per human player--you can't have a bot and also have a human trading account. This is to prevent various kinds of cheating.

The Foresight Exchange is not just a fun (and free) online game, it's also a useful source of information about the future. If you think you can predict who will win the next election, or you just want to know what the consensus opinion is, sign up and find out. The more people who participate in this market the more accurate its predictions will be.

Disclaimer: I have no relationship with the Foresight Exchange other than that I am a player, a member of the unrelated Shimari Project, and the author of the ITJOBS claim--which I created because as a software developer I wanted to know what the future held in store for me!

The Foresight Exchange is an idea futures market. Players trade contracts based on claims about the future--such as whether or not there will be another terrorist attack against the United States, how many IT Jobs there will be in 2012, or whether Scaled Composites will win the X-Prize. Players who profit by correctly predicting the future achieve a high score that proves their omniscient wisdom.

It's not just fun and games, though--the exchange provides an overall market consensus prediction. Anyone can create a new claim to help them gain insight into the future. As a software developer I worried about my future job prospects and so I created the ITJOBS market to find out what will happen. The claim pays out from $1 to $0 depending on whether the number of IT jobs paying over $50k/year grows or shrinks by up to 35%. Currently the symbol trades between $0.65 and $0.75 which translates to a market consensus of about 1% annual job growth annually. However, since the claim just began trading thare not yet enough market participants for this prediction to be significant--you could help change that! Sign up and test your foresight.

What's even cooler is that the foresight exchange has a programmable API and documented protocol so that you can write automated trading bots. Since it's play money you have nothing to lose but your self respect! There are many such bots trading on the market now, some of them having been running for years. The Shimari Project includes a Java API that can be used to programatically access the exchange; writing one for your own favorite langauge would also be quite easy. Note though that there is a limit of one account per human player--you can't have a bot and also have a human trading account. This is to prevent various kinds of cheating.

The Foresight Exchange is not just a fun (and free) online game, it's also a useful source of information about the future. If you think you can predict who will win the next election, or you just want to know what the consensus opinion is, sign up and find out. The more people who participate in this market the more accurate its predictions will be.

Disclaimer: I have no relationship with the Foresight Exchange other than that I am a player, a member of the unrelated Shimari Project, and the author of the ITJOBS claim--which I created because as a software developer I wanted to know what the future held in store for me!

Joy has enough money that he can do any dang thing he wants-enough money that he could go to Russia and hire a pretty decent research team all with his own money--all without risking his capital(i.e. he could just run off the interest of his investments). I don't see Joy as putting his money where his mouth is. If the world may be coming to an end, and if someone really believes it, it would be prudent to invest considerably in averting that possibility.

When I look at Joy's actions, it seems to me like he can't imagine a world in which money doesn't mean more than it does today. That shows a striking lack of imagination in considering what a civilization changing event might mean.

I'd like to be wrong here. I really looked up to Joy when I worked at Sun-the lack of real leadership here is kind of sad though.

Hubble has lost 3 of 6 gyros. It needs 3 to stay pointed in one direction and not spin out of control.
ISS has lost 1 of 3 gyros. It needs 2 to stay locked in 2 axis (I would imagine) which is crucial to keep one side pointed at "space" and one at earth.

Who will fail first? The beloved Hubble or the much-berated ISS? Only time, or perhaps a Foresight Exchange claim can tell.

There is a proposed ITJOBS futures market on Ideosphere based on these statistics. The claim will trade like a stock symbol between 1 and 100 and payout a value based on the number of IT jobs in the US earning more than $50k/year in 2012. Too bad it's just a game with fake money, otherwise we could all hedge our bets. But at least once it's trading the market ought to give us some insight into where things are going.

There was a Master and Commander claim floating around in the mailing list for the Foresight Exchange, a sort of betting arena for future events with play money. I don't know what happened to it.

Claim Sorb - Suborbital transport dominates Category: Science & Technology:Space

bid 41, ask 44, last 42

Suborbital transportation will exceed high-mach air transportation by the year 2020. "Suborbital" means any high-mach, non-orbital flight where the majority of the distance is covered without benefit of locally available gasses as the primary propulsion reaction mass. "High-mach" means the majority of the distance is covered at a speed of mach 2.5 or greater. "Non-orbital" means the total flight path distance is less than the circumfrence of the earth. "Locally available" excludes gasses that have been stored within the vehicle for more than 3 minutes. The metric for comparison will include passenger, luggage and cargo ton-miles over the entirety of the year 2020 as published in standard industry surveys.

My question on this issue: why wouldn't PCR allow the DNA for a smallpox virus to be recreated from such a sample(or for that matter from samples dug up from some graveyard someplace)? I'm not that familiar with virology-pointers to the literature would be welcome.

Ultimately, money is little more than the ability to mobilize/organize large numbers of people. In terms of the Xprize, had Allen not invested in Rutan, I suspect Carmack would be winning. In closer terms, I can imagine that Carmack represents something substantially different than what Allen does.

I'm glad to see Allen doing _something_ constructive with his money(which is more than I can say about Jobs or Ellison at this point). Still, I think what this experience with the X Prize tells us, space development is too important to be left up just to folks that think in terms of money. Just because Rutan was better able to work with Allen doesn't necessarily mean that Rutan's design is better than that of Carmack--we need to be thinking of how to evaluate these sort of things without letting the pronouncements of lawyers and bean counters get in the way too much. Ideosphere points in that direction a bit-a decision support system that has a little different type of playing field. I can believe that as that area develops more, we'll see that money-based markets are good for organizing some activities but not others.

Suborbital transportation will exceed high-mach air transportation by the year 2020. "Suborbital" means any high-mach, non-orbital flight where the majority of the distance is covered without benefit of locally available gasses as the primary propulsion reaction mass. "High-mach" means the majority of the distance is covered at a speed of mach 2.5 or greater. "Non-orbital" means the total flight path distance is less than the circumfrence of the earth. "Locally available" excludes gasses that have been stored within the vehicle for more than 3 minutes. The metric for comparison will include passenger, luggage and cargo ton-miles over the entirety of the year 2020 as published in standard industry surveys.

A while back, Sean Morgan did the most interesting work I've seen on a timeline and prerequisites for Nanotechnology. At present, odds are that we'll see an assember sometime around 2022.

There are well-established techniques for assessing indeterminate risks in areas like this. The end of Moores law is a risk. Still, what are the major options-and their chance of success. What I'm seeing out of Intel is the level of innovation I might expect from the Post Office. It is worth many billions of dollars to the Intel shareholders to see Moore's law continue longer. Intel has an obligation to its shareholders to organize its resources to make this happen. If Intel can't do this stuff in-house-they could set up prize awards for those that can--and structure those in such a way there is minimal risk to Intel's shareholders. Instead, these folks come off like a general speculating to his troops about the possibility of defeat before entering a major battle.

A company like Intel is virtually a de-facto monopoly. Such organizations can afford basic research-as companies like AT&T and IBM have shown. More importantly, I would suggest that monopolistic companies that _don't_ do quite a bit of basic research find that in time they become objects of considerable hotility and regulation. If companies like Intel aren't going to seriously innovate, then in time, it may eventually make more sense to the public to just turn these functions over to non-innovative bureacracies(which in this case will probably mean a Chinese government-owned manufacturing firm).

It sounds like Intel has gotten seduced by the lure of indentured servitude and corporate welfare.

There's already a betting claim on this on the FX game, which has been going on for almost 10 years compared to a few days for the MIT thing.

Claim SCOLIN predicts "Caldera Systems, Inc. will succeed in its legal claim alleging trade secret misappropriation, breach of contract, copyright violations, trademark violations and / or patent violations with respect to the inclusion of UNIX code in Linux." See the URL for more details.

Currently it is trading at FX$0.06, meaning that the traders think there is only about a 6% chance (i.e. about one chance in 15) that SCO will prevail, and a 94% chance that IBM will win.

There's already a betting claim on this on the FX game, which has been going on for almost 10 years compared to a few days for the MIT thing.

Claim SCOLIN predicts "Caldera Systems, Inc. will succeed in its legal claim alleging trade secret misappropriation, breach of contract, copyright violations, trademark violations and / or patent violations with respect to the inclusion of UNIX code in Linux." See the URL for more details.

Currently it is trading at FX$0.06, meaning that the traders think there is only about a 6% chance (i.e. about one chance in 15) that SCO will prevail, and a 94% chance that IBM will win.

It's
been around since 1995.

The Foresight Exchange online game has been doing this since 1994. It was invented by economist Robin Hanson, who was also the mastermind behind the ill fated Pentagon effort.

One of the big problems with these "funny money" based games is the possibility of cheating. Sine it doesn't cost anything to register, you can create as many accounts as you want, for free. What you do is create multiple accounts under different names, and arrange to funnel money from one account to another. You have one account make bad trades so it loses money, which then goes into the other accounts, building up their scores. Since this MIT game is offering valuable prizes, they can expect problems with this kind of cheating.

Also of note is Foresight Exchange, a long-established play money market. It seems a lot of people are interested in it being real, but unfortunately it seems difficult at present (and the few there are charge high comissions).

Machiavelli stated, in The Discourses I believe, that the time it is most dangerous for the powers that be is not during repression but during relief from repression. It seemed that the decimation of the baby boomer generation had been a repressive era particularly for technologists -- primarily due to the sexual dynamics surrounding engineering professions in the era of sexual liberation and women's liberation. The end of female boomer fertility was a time when the primary source of a lot of that oppression, misled sexual power of young women combined with testosterone overload of youthful males, was being relieved and the thumbscrews were being loosened on the techs. What I didn't expect was what happened: a whipsaw pumping up the techs and then popping their bubble. Machiavelli didn't really have much to say about this weird circumstance. What is interesting is that it does make a kind of perverse sense to do that to the folks that might start getting some of their standing back after a lifetime of disenfranchisement -- keeps them discombobulated. Then there is the problem of what to do for an encore if you can't keep the thumbscrews tied down after the whipsaw. If it worked once then why not try it again? Hopefully you can keep whipsawing until the boomer tech males are near retirement and unable and/or unwilling to do anything about their lifetime of displacement and disenfranchisement from their culture, fertility, territories and wealth. The outsourcing craze and H-1b craze are a part of this but I think the global elites may have to really pump things up again if at all possible, and try to whipsaw everyone again to avert Machiavelli's Rule again. If that is the case then theForesight Exchange claim REBOOM is in for a quick rise soon.

Don't talk about it, BET ON IT at:

Bet On The Future of George W. Bush

I'm betting against the moron,
W00t

While you Slashdot luzers, discuss lame RIAA crap,
the Cheney-Rumsfeld regime continues its theft of the United States of Amerika:

Bet Against The Moron

Thanks and have a John_Ashcroft_free day!
W00t

United We Bet or whatever you want to put on your stupid
bumper stickers for your gas guzzling SUVs:

Bet Against The Liar

Thanks and have a John_Ashcroft_free day!,
W00t

United We Bet or Whatever You Want To Put On Your
Stupid Gas-Guzzling SUVs!!!!

Bet Against The Liar

Have a John_Ashcroft_Free_Day!!,

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Bet on The Liar
at Ideosphere

Cheers,
W00t

United We Bet:

Bet Against George W. Bush

Cheers,
W00t

United We Bet:

Get Against George W. Bush

Cheers,
W00t

I've been playing on the Foresight Exchange for a couple months now, and while it's no crystal ball it's an interesting way of making public polls that are weighted both towards how successful a prognosticator a respondant is and how strongly he feels about a particular issue. I'd expect that adding money to the mix in the case of terrorism forecasts would both make the game "more serious" and allow it to act as a sort of anti-terrorism insurance.

What I couldn't believe was that this was the mistake that forced Poindexter to resign! The man waded through Iran-Contra, tried to create Big Brother, but now he's finally getting pensioned off because he wanted to start an idea futures market? That's just weird.

Foresight Exchange uses play money for betting on real world events, including politics and catastrophies.

In early September 2001, they estimated a (around) 40% probability of a major act of terrorism in the US.

The Foresight Exchange has a market that has been running since at least 1994. It uses fake currency, has email and telnet interfaces, and a mailing list for development of the code that runs the market.

The group of people behind this market tends towards transhumanism, extropianism, etc. You can find a summary of "how the market worked so far" at http://www.extropy.org/ideas/journal/previous/1999 /06-01.html

Also intereesting: Jay Scott wrote a bot for automating purchases and sales in this market.

This has been around for quite a while now...

http://www.ideosphere.com/fx/

Check out artificialmarkets.com for some published research on using markets to make predictions. One concrete system, The Foresight Exchange lets you play this game with the possibility of scientific discoveries -- and claims that its futures values roughly correlate with the probability of the events happening. Of course, this is not for real money, but it's an interesting idea.

No one has come up with a more effective mechanism. The reason is that any new knowledge or better evaluation scheme can rapidly profit on a market from the less knowledgeable traders.

Markets do have failure modes (eg, need a level of liquidity to function well, things which aren't being traded tend to become invisible, market psychology can be irrational, etc), but these flaws are pretty well understood.

OTOH, flaws of other expert systems like peer-reviewed research can be very hard to determine. For example, the math describing black holes came almost immediately after general relativity (which predicts them) became usable. Ie, the key general relativity paper was published in 1916 by Einstein and Scharzschild (who died in the First World War) discovered the black hole singularity a few months later. But it wasn't till the 1950's that scientists as a group seriously considered whether these singularities existed in nature. What went wrong? We're not talking accepting that black holes exist, but merely that general relativity is put forth as a theory to describe the physical world, and that black hole singularities are a prediction of that theory.

There are many cases of fraudulent or flawed science that takes years (if not decades) to evaluate and reject. For example, Lamarck's theory of evolution as espoused by Lysenko (the man who destroyed 20th century Russian genetics research), polywater, cold fusion, and the repressed memories therapy movement. However, these theories make real predictions that can be tested.

If a betting market was created to determine if a particular test would be successful by time X, then one could determine how credible the theory was in that timeframe. That gives you a much more effective way to allocate your resources.

For example, a reputation-based betting market, the Foresight Exchange (of which I happen to be a contributing member) trades on an esoteric mix of claims about science, politics, business, etc. Here's a selection of space-based claims. The odds of people living continuously in space till 2025 is 33-34%. The odds that someone makes a serious argument for the presence of alien artifacts in the Cydonia region of Mars (eg, where the Mars "face" is located) is 5-6%. Extraterrestrial life has a 78-80% chance of being discovered by 2050, but intelligent extraterrestrial life has only a 31-33% of being discovered in the same time frame.

No one has come up with a more effective mechanism. The reason is that any new knowledge or better evaluation scheme can rapidly profit on a market from the less knowledgeable traders.

Markets do have failure modes (eg, need a level of liquidity to function well, things which aren't being traded tend to become invisible, market psychology can be irrational, etc), but these flaws are pretty well understood.

OTOH, flaws of other expert systems like peer-reviewed research can be very hard to determine. For example, the math describing black holes came almost immediately after general relativity (which predicts them) became usable. Ie, the key general relativity paper was published in 1916 by Einstein and Scharzschild (who died in the First World War) discovered the black hole singularity a few months later. But it wasn't till the 1950's that scientists as a group seriously considered whether these singularities existed in nature. What went wrong? We're not talking accepting that black holes exist, but merely that general relativity is put forth as a theory to describe the physical world, and that black hole singularities are a prediction of that theory.

There are many cases of fraudulent or flawed science that takes years (if not decades) to evaluate and reject. For example, Lamarck's theory of evolution as espoused by Lysenko (the man who destroyed 20th century Russian genetics research), polywater, cold fusion, and the repressed memories therapy movement. However, these theories make real predictions that can be tested.

If a betting market was created to determine if a particular test would be successful by time X, then one could determine how credible the theory was in that timeframe. That gives you a much more effective way to allocate your resources.

For example, a reputation-based betting market, the Foresight Exchange (of which I happen to be a contributing member) trades on an esoteric mix of claims about science, politics, business, etc. Here's a selection of space-based claims. The odds of people living continuously in space till 2025 is 33-34%. The odds that someone makes a serious argument for the presence of alien artifacts in the Cydonia region of Mars (eg, where the Mars "face" is located) is 5-6%. Extraterrestrial life has a 78-80% chance of being discovered by 2050, but intelligent extraterrestrial life has only a 31-33% of being discovered in the same time frame.

No one has come up with a more effective mechanism. The reason is that any new knowledge or better evaluation scheme can rapidly profit on a market from the less knowledgeable traders.

Markets do have failure modes (eg, need a level of liquidity to function well, things which aren't being traded tend to become invisible, market psychology can be irrational, etc), but these flaws are pretty well understood.

OTOH, flaws of other expert systems like peer-reviewed research can be very hard to determine. For example, the math describing black holes came almost immediately after general relativity (which predicts them) became usable. Ie, the key general relativity paper was published in 1916 by Einstein and Scharzschild (who died in the First World War) discovered the black hole singularity a few months later. But it wasn't till the 1950's that scientists as a group seriously considered whether these singularities existed in nature. What went wrong? We're not talking accepting that black holes exist, but merely that general relativity is put forth as a theory to describe the physical world, and that black hole singularities are a prediction of that theory.

There are many cases of fraudulent or flawed science that takes years (if not decades) to evaluate and reject. For example, Lamarck's theory of evolution as espoused by Lysenko (the man who destroyed 20th century Russian genetics research), polywater, cold fusion, and the repressed memories therapy movement. However, these theories make real predictions that can be tested.

If a betting market was created to determine if a particular test would be successful by time X, then one could determine how credible the theory was in that timeframe. That gives you a much more effective way to allocate your resources.

For example, a reputation-based betting market, the Foresight Exchange (of which I happen to be a contributing member) trades on an esoteric mix of claims about science, politics, business, etc. Here's a selection of space-based claims. The odds of people living continuously in space till 2025 is 33-34%. The odds that someone makes a serious argument for the presence of alien artifacts in the Cydonia region of Mars (eg, where the Mars "face" is located) is 5-6%. Extraterrestrial life has a 78-80% chance of being discovered by 2050, but intelligent extraterrestrial life has only a 31-33% of being discovered in the same time frame.

No one has come up with a more effective mechanism. The reason is that any new knowledge or better evaluation scheme can rapidly profit on a market from the less knowledgeable traders.

Markets do have failure modes (eg, need a level of liquidity to function well, things which aren't being traded tend to become invisible, market psychology can be irrational, etc), but these flaws are pretty well understood.

OTOH, flaws of other expert systems like peer-reviewed research can be very hard to determine. For example, the math describing black holes came almost immediately after general relativity (which predicts them) became usable. Ie, the key general relativity paper was published in 1916 by Einstein and Scharzschild (who died in the First World War) discovered the black hole singularity a few months later. But it wasn't till the 1950's that scientists as a group seriously considered whether these singularities existed in nature. What went wrong? We're not talking accepting that black holes exist, but merely that general relativity is put forth as a theory to describe the physical world, and that black hole singularities are a prediction of that theory.

There are many cases of fraudulent or flawed science that takes years (if not decades) to evaluate and reject. For example, Lamarck's theory of evolution as espoused by Lysenko (the man who destroyed 20th century Russian genetics research), polywater, cold fusion, and the repressed memories therapy movement. However, these theories make real predictions that can be tested.

If a betting market was created to determine if a particular test would be successful by time X, then one could determine how credible the theory was in that timeframe. That gives you a much more effective way to allocate your resources.

For example, a reputation-based betting market, the Foresight Exchange (of which I happen to be a contributing member) trades on an esoteric mix of claims about science, politics, business, etc. Here's a selection of space-based claims. The odds of people living continuously in space till 2025 is 33-34%. The odds that someone makes a serious argument for the presence of alien artifacts in the Cydonia region of Mars (eg, where the Mars "face" is located) is 5-6%. Extraterrestrial life has a 78-80% chance of being discovered by 2050, but intelligent extraterrestrial life has only a 31-33% of being discovered in the same time frame.

No one has come up with a more effective mechanism. The reason is that any new knowledge or better evaluation scheme can rapidly profit on a market from the less knowledgeable traders.

Markets do have failure modes (eg, need a level of liquidity to function well, things which aren't being traded tend to become invisible, market psychology can be irrational, etc), but these flaws are pretty well understood.

OTOH, flaws of other expert systems like peer-reviewed research can be very hard to determine. For example, the math describing black holes came almost immediately after general relativity (which predicts them) became usable. Ie, the key general relativity paper was published in 1916 by Einstein and Scharzschild (who died in the First World War) discovered the black hole singularity a few months later. But it wasn't till the 1950's that scientists as a group seriously considered whether these singularities existed in nature. What went wrong? We're not talking accepting that black holes exist, but merely that general relativity is put forth as a theory to describe the physical world, and that black hole singularities are a prediction of that theory.

There are many cases of fraudulent or flawed science that takes years (if not decades) to evaluate and reject. For example, Lamarck's theory of evolution as espoused by Lysenko (the man who destroyed 20th century Russian genetics research), polywater, cold fusion, and the repressed memories therapy movement. However, these theories make real predictions that can be tested.

If a betting market was created to determine if a particular test would be successful by time X, then one could determine how credible the theory was in that timeframe. That gives you a much more effective way to allocate your resources.

For example, a reputation-based betting market, the Foresight Exchange (of which I happen to be a contributing member) trades on an esoteric mix of claims about science, politics, business, etc. Here's a selection of space-based claims. The odds of people living continuously in space till 2025 is 33-34%. The odds that someone makes a serious argument for the presence of alien artifacts in the Cydonia region of Mars (eg, where the Mars "face" is located) is 5-6%. Extraterrestrial life has a 78-80% chance of being discovered by 2050, but intelligent extraterrestrial life has only a 31-33% of being discovered in the same time frame.

There's a decent chance that in 50 years or so, medicine will have advanced to the point that current causes of death can all be fixed, making humans virtually immortal. What happens to his $500/month for life, then? Huh? Did you think of that? $500 times infinity is...

I'm not defending the science here, but please remember that the absense of proof doesn't always mean it is impossible. For example, the "state of the art" is laughably imprecise right now. Often predictions are often made just a few months into the future.

For a bolder approach, check out the Foresight Exchange. It's a reputation-based betting market that trades on a couple hundred eclectic claims ranging all over the place. I've been trading on it since mid 1996.

IMHO, the real problem with predicting the future or solving just about any problem of significance, is that the most vocal people aren't interested in facts or rational arguments. Instead, they feed off of uncertainty. Then it devolves into a choice between which Pascal's wager has the better payoff or which scenario of doom to avoid. What is deliberately suppressed is information that could be used to make rational decisions. If the controllers of society weren't so keen on suppressing information, then we might find out whether society is really as unpredictable as you say. Ie, is society unpredictable because it is dynamic or because we really don't know what's going on?

Another SARS claim predicting SARS is a pandemic, will start trading this evening.

Another SARS claim predicting SARS is a pandemic, will start trading this evening.

Another SARS claim predicting SARS is a pandemic, will start trading this evening.