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Technology Review Launches Futures Market
prostoalex writes "MIT Technology Review launched a futures market, allowing people to bet on ideas. A similar concept was at some point introduced by the Pentagon, but later the project was shut down. Currently you can bet on major stock indices, on answers to yes/no questions ('Will Oracle acquire PeopleSoft Inc before March 31st, 2004?') and technological achievements ('When will there be a commercially available electronic device using ultrawideband technology?')" Although the game doesn't use real money, the prizes are pretty swell. I like to think of it as the nerd's version of sportsbook.
what's the over/under on the amount of time until emacs becomes self-aware?
No betting on when a time machine will be invented. Because the person who guesses when, is probably the bastard that did invent it.
If this post didn't make your head spin on your shoulders and implode, then you have a better temproral mind than I.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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).
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.
It looks a lot like Long Bets, which has been around for quite some time. It was launched as a spin-off of Danny Hillis's Long Now Foundation. Other interesting projects of theirs include the Rosetta Project and the 10,000 year clock.
siener's youtube channel
Assuming you had an infinite amount of money/debt you could go into, there is a probabalistically certain way to win a given finite amount. Simply keep raising the bet (that amount + the sum of all your previous bets) each time you bet. As n->infinity, the sum of n of some finite value of the probability of winning will converge to 1, i.e. your probability of winning if you wait forever is nearly certain. So you will eventually win back that finite amount more than you've already bet.
Of course, this assumes an infinitely long competition and an infinite amount of debt you can go into before Fat Tony smashes in your kneecaps.
What I disagree with is this statement later in the article:
Real markets (and the "terror market" which the US proposed earlier) contain information because people work very hard to make sure their investments perform well and that they don't suffer financial losses. In stock market games, on the other hand, participants aren't penalized for losing money, only for winning huge amounts of it. (The article even prevents you from going bankrupt: "When your account's net worth is below a certain levelThe bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
I think the poster was misremembering a classic stock scam. What he *really* meant was this:
(1) Identify 2^n gullible people as "marks."
(2) Send each mark an email predicting the outcomes of the next n successive events (I'm assuming the outcomes are all yes/no). Each mark gets one of the 2^n possible sets of predictions.
(3) Wait for the n events to unfold.
(4) Identify the one mark who got an email with all correct predictions, and persuade him to subscribe to your "amazingly accurate" prediction service for a hefty fee.
(5) Abscond.
In the original version of the scam, the events were that a particular stock would go up or down on each of a succession of days.
An amusing idea. Supposedly one can get a correct answer to an unknowable question, simply by polling enough people with enough knowledge of the subject to have an opinion. I loved Brunner's description of it:
"Even though nobody knows what's going on around here, everybody knows what's going on around here."
Oh come on, you're misrepresenting and oversimplifying the issues and you know it.
/. first (yada yada, insert "you must be new here" and get +5 funny for it... I'm just too lazy to create an account, but if I did, you would get modded down hardcore-style)
The terrorist futures market (your "U.S.A" futures market) was to allow people to bet real money on when/where the next terrorist attack was going to occur. This creates an incentive for those trading in those futures to help make sure the attacks happen so as to cash in on their investment. People would literally be betting on other peoples' lives; a rather morbid idea, don't you think? Especially considering that the terrorists themselves could (if the program were expanded to allow more than just select govn't individuals) bet on their own plans.
MIT's futures market is not betting on human life, and for that matter, does not even involve real money. You might as well be playing Monopoly; the real value gained from participating is the same (except that with the MIT futures market, you might see cool new stuff developed as a result of the interest of people who think it likely that a given idea will come to fruition).
One market bets on life, using real money. The other bets on ideas/concepts, using fake money.
Look, I'm a seriously tax-hating, free-market loving, communist-hating "economics-drives-everything" libertarian, and still I oppose(d) the terrorist futures market on the grounds that it creates financial incentive to end human life.
I read a report in some business magazine (Fortune? Forbes?) about the creator of that market - a PhD economics professor. His intentions were excellent, but the problem is that he is so far out of the loop from the rest of society that he didn't realize that people would find such a market morally-repugnant.
"Get it straight"? Speak for yourself. Get your issues straight before committing them to
From what you say, it sounds as though this kind of thing is much less common in the US than in Britain (where I am). Here in the UK, where gambling is much more legally, and socially, acceptable, bookies (high street gambling shops) take bets on most things that can be bet on. Huge amounts of money change hands during the general elections. And in political reporting, for example with the recent leadership challenge to the leader of the opposition, it's very common for the reporters to quote the odds given to various outcomes by the big bookies.
Other non-sports bets include:
Celebrity and royal marriages / breakups.
The Booker Prize (a bit like your national book award, I think)
Outcomes of television programmes such as Big Brother
The weather on Christmas day (snow / not snow).
I even heard a science programme about SETI on the radio where they got a big bookie to give odds on the discovery of alien intelligence.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!