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Google Putting Crowd Wisdom to Work
daveperry writes "The Google Blog has a post about their use of prediction markets to forecast certain events that are relevant to their business. From the article: "Our search engine works well because it aggregates information dispersed across the web, and our internal predictive markets are based on the same principle: Googlers from across the company contribute knowledge and opinions which are aggregated into a forecast by the market. Sometimes, just feeling lucky isn't enough, and these tools can help." In related news, some software was recently open sourced that enables people to set up their own prediction markets."
use of prediction markets to forecast certain events that are relevant to their business.
Nothing to see here....hmmmm...bet they didn't see that one coming.
I just recently started participating in it. Doesn't seem too complicated, though I'm still a bit unclear as to the relevancy of the predicitions it generates. It seems to me that for this sort of thing to work right, you'd need a much larger sampling (which maybe Google is hoping to get), but then, maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about?
And once again John Brunner wins. Can't believe the Shockwave Rider was written in 1975... compensated abstinence zone in New Orleans anyone?
We also found that the market prices gave decisive, informative predictions in the sense that their predictive power increased as time passed and uncertainty was resolved.
This is why I like Google. The use of intelligence to develop accurate results in a predicative system, and keep it all flowing -- it shows not only wisdom -- it shows an early level of omnipotence, which has to be the key ingredient to success today! If God is supposed to be omnipotent, why not try it? (haha I'm not a religious nut, FYI... just like to use the data available)
Consider the alternative solution to success and you really must put your investment dollars where you have the most faith. Google stock can only go up, thus breaking the law of Gravity. Only a supra-genius (Wyle E. Coyote) knows how to bend the laws that govern market economy to their favour. Are you really going to bet against that kind of mindpower?
Being geeks, we naturally used information theory to measure the entropy of our probability distributions:
This is a demonstration of wisdom. Knowing the rate of market decay is a HUGE BENEFIT for all Google stockholders. Google keeps proving that time and time again: being a geek puts you in the best position for the continuation of the species, even if you're not getting laid *today*, you will get laid PLENTY when you get lots of money, and therefore sire many children and overwhelm the market with clones of yourself. Then improve the genome of your clones in modular functionality, so that parts become interchangeable. You can now patent genes, so you don't have to patent actual clones to profit.
Seriously, at this rate, I see this coming as the next logical step for Google. Bioharvesting of nerds for fun and profit. Especially nerdy gamer chix!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
This seems to be the way for Google to kill Microsoft. :)
exit();
Want a tip on when a stock is going to move? Monitor the number of times your users send email to one another containing the stock's symbol in the message. When the number goes up, activity is sure to follow.
But they wouldn't do that, right? Because...
Because...
Exactly.
--
You didn't know.
1. Predict Market
2. Act on Prediction
3. Cause Market Impact
4. Need New Prediction!
World is quickening
Hmm... prediction markets... Ahh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market
Wonderful, Google realizes that many people think they're absolutely wonderful and finds a way to put those people to work for them. As for the possible MSN/AOL deal about to occur and "kill" Google, with ideas like this and a willing user base Google isn't threatened at all.
Support alternatives to Paypal: http://www.e-gold.com
GoogleAstrology
The markets were designed to forecast product launch dates, new office openings, and many other things of strategic importance to Google. So far, more than a thousand Googlers have bid on 146 events in 43 different subject areas.
So the prediction for a new office opening gets more accurate when you discover that there are less workspaces than people in the office. A production launch date more accurate when the people working on the project are occupying those workspaces all the time and really start to smell bad?
Is this not like a thousand monkeys trying to type Hamlet, but now with just a bit of brain and input from the surrounding?
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Project Idea Futures
A web-based prediction market (Idea Futures) system. In prediction markets, the commodities traded are claims about future events; the market price gives a consensus probability about the event's likelihood of coming true.
http://ideafutures.sourceforge.net/
The package said "Windows XP or better. Pentium Class Processor or better"... So I got a Mac with OS X
"Group wisdom" is a misnomer for "herd mentality."
I predict that when you herd sheep from field A to field B, they will eat whatever is in field B rather than return to field A.
Read any good sonnets lately?
Making money in the stock market is easy.
Buy some stock, and when it goes up sell it.
If it doesn't go up don't buy it.
- Will Rogers
that this story will be duped by the end of the week
With all due respect to the Good Doctor and Tripmaster Monkey, psychohistory isn't involved. Read Marc Stiegler's Earthweb . (Note: the web page is out of date; for example, the contest is over.) It's set in a world where idea futures markets are commonplace (and periodically save the world).
(If you happen to have read his David's Sling (and if you haven't, you should), you'll recognize the world of Worldweb as the society that Nathan Pilstrom envisions at the end of that book, where the Zetetic Institute's ideas and methods have become commonplace. Reggie Oxenford is what Bill Hardie was trying to become.)
Reminds me of E.T. Jaynes's "Honest Weatherman" example in his book, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (section 13.5). By making a weatherman's salary proportional to a certain function (logarithm of the probability he predicts, or entropy, or something, I forget), the weatherman has an incentive to make the best possible predictions: his salary will be directly proportional to the quality of his predictions, being maximized when his rain forecast probabilities match the actual probabilities of rain. You could set up a "free market betting system" this way, rewarding the quality of people's guesses regarding the likelihood of various outcomes.
I'm doing my best to ensure it does.
with terrorism? It's too bad people got all pissy since this method of prediction works fairly well.
Predicting involves extrapolating from a current ** sample** of data to predict the future based on one own interpretation /recognition of patterns.
The better your size and quality of your sample combined with a finely tuned pattern recognition the better your forecast (I won't go into exceptional events which by definition are exceptional).
So what do we have here? A larger sample of better quality for starters.
Also do not underestimate the power of the masses. If your sample=population size this is no longer forecasting (i.e. extrapolation) but the writing on the wall! (as long as people do as they say they are going to do).
So if your sample size increases dramatically, with better quality (smart employees) things will tend to happen as per the survey!
I know I am oversimplifying but but these are the basics of neural networks (or in this case a neural network of neural networks). Look it up.
Of course, predicting is not extrapolating if it is purely a random guess.
Have fun!
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
I've started playing Yahoo! Buzz games for a few months now (I dropped a virtual packet on FireFox). It's called Yahoo! Buzz game. These folks seem to gather their data from Yahoo ! search queries and from the logs on who clicked what. Which is why it seems to really follow the non-geek popularity levels too well - Google is what the geeks use (which is why I almost always seem to lose there).
This is just Google calling Market surveys by another name. I'm sure I can dig up a couple of WalMart papers about the same thing in the real world. Sort of vote with your money approach vs tell us approach (demand vs desire).Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
On the Brunner novel "The Shockwave rider" is described the "Delphi pool" and that was the first thing that came to my mind after reading TFA...
1
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=66
This is really cool, but I hope they control for two of the less-than-ideal behaviors of markets.
1) There are two ways to "be right" in a market. First, I can make the right choice as to the actual ending outcome. This a buy-and-hold strategy. Or, second, I can make the right choice as to the direction of price movements in the market. This is the speculator's buy-and-sell strategy. The first strategy means the the market converges on the "true" expected value. The second strategy leads to bubbles and crashes that don't provide as much useful data on the actually variable being modeled by the market. Google wants to encourage the first type of trading, but not totally suppress the second type of trading because speculators provide liquidity in markets.
2) Manipulators can "cause" events to occur in the way that maximizes their return, but suboptimizes Googles performance. If I bet that a given project will be done in October and it looks like its getting done early, what stops me from causing a small delay? Of if the project is being delayed too much, what stops me from descoping the project or doing a fast, low-quality job to complete the project within my chosen time frame. In either case, I can manipulate the outcome to win in the market, but hurt Google.
Note that I don't include insider trading in the list problems. Google doesn't really care if the market is fair, only that it provides accurate predictions. In fact, Google might encourage insider trading as a way to encourage communication inside the company. The more people that share their "inside" information on upcoming strategic, the better.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowieki.
I'd recommend it, unlike a lot of popular science books it does actually cover the material reasonably accurately and its quite engagingly written as well.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
... they do correctly predict:
- launch date of MS Vista;
- launch date of Ballmer's furniture;
- which 'feature/bug' will be dropped from the Vista release.
Disclosure: I'm stupid
(1) Create a predictive survey with quantitative questions
(2) Graph the responses, and calculate entropy using information theory (or, just calculate variance)
(3) Measure the change in variance/entropy over time
(4) Conclude that as a product gets closer to release date, people have more consistent ideas of the price.
The difference between this and traditional quantitative market prediction surveys? Google gets its sample from "Teh Internets".
Nothing to see here, please move along.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Does anyone find it weird that Googlers read "MSN Search Weblog":P
Carpe Diem: Seize The Day!
Hey, I wonder what Google's doing today, I haven't heard anything about them lately.
The Pentagon was ahead of its time I think.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
MS has totally different work culture. Trust me moving MSN into Products and Platforms means, they are now under direct supervision of Bill. MS has aggressive work culture while AOL is packed with laid-back typical corporate Americans. Bill will first fire ballmer if he bought AOL or they will buy AOL minus it's lousy employees.
will it finally be able to tell us when Duke Nukem Forever will be release?
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
The Encyclopedists are already hard at work, and are moving out of the path of catastrophe as needed.
The classic example of "crowd wisdom" is the jellybeans-in-the-jar experiment, often used in introductory MBA classes to convince people that open markets value securities (basically) fairly. The experiment goes like this: the professor brings a jar of jellybeans and asks everyone to guess how many there are in the jar. The individual estimates may vary quite a lot, but the average of the estimates in the class is usually close, in fact often closer than the closest estimate of any of the students depending upon the size of the class. That is in a situation where the students have very little information about the jar and perhaps no experience with such estimates. If there were greater experience and/or they were allowed more information then presumably the individual and average estimates would be even closer. Basically, this can be described as the "Central Limit Theorem" in action- that the standard deviation of averages is smaller than the standard deviation of the individuals by a factor of the square root of the sample size, as illustrated in this applet or in this Mathworld description. The CLT actually says more- that as the sample size increases, the distibution of averages approaches that of the normal ("bell curve") distribution, so the distribution of avergaes is roughly normal, and then techniques designed to analyze the normal distribution can be applied with greater certainty.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Its "well documented" that financial markets are not normal. They are "fat-tailed"--extreme events happen with regularity. This attempt has been tried thousands of times by people with far more at stake than google. They also had more money, more PhDs, etc. And they failed. They always fail at some time or another. There is no algorithm for the financial markets.
Those who doubt had best read the story of Long Term Capital Management. wikipedia link
What Google is doing is interesting, but it's no magic bullet. And I'm not even sure I'd use this system to place money on the markets. Fads come, fads go. Neural Networks. Genetic Algorithms. Fibonacci numbers. Eliiot Waves. what-have you. They're all nonsense. The big ol boys still make their money the old fashioned way: graft, theft, and deceipt.
Anyone honestly think Google knows something that the trillion dollar financial industry doesn't? They have far more at stake that Google. They have their fair share of MIT PhDs, economic nobel prize winners, sparc computers, access to nearly every price in the world at any time. And they still make the majority of their cash through commission.
Call me a cynic, but the math says this can't work. And I'll trust the math before I trust a company that doesn't even pay dividends any day.
Not just the Pentagon. Strategypage runs a prediction market with this type (terrorism, and national security/defence-related in general) of events.
Yup - as soon as I saw this piece, I immediately thought of EarthWeb. Cheesy story, but great forward thinking - I love it.
This is incredible, Google has grown from a small search engine to a huge technology group. This new software seems like a great idea. I predict that Google is going to soon be one of the leading technology companies out there, if it isn't already
Does anyone know what meteorologists mean when they say "x% chance of weather event"? Does this just mean "given current circumstances, we have seen x% chance of said event occurring in the past" or is it some other silliness? For instance, I love the NHTSA star-rating system which says "this vehicle has an x% chance of a rollover in an accident" which is meaningless without ancillary information about accidents (for instance, in any particular accident the vehicle will either roll or not roll). In any weather event, the event will either happen or not happen. In the vehicle instances, I'd be more pleased with "these conditions will make this vehicle roll over, and those conditions occur x% of the time in all the accidents we've measured"; For instance, "If your vehicle is subject to lateral accelerations of 1.7g, it will roll" and "out of all the accidents we see, 1.7g is experienced x% of the time"; the difference between accident statistics and weather statistics, though, is that accident statistics are descriptive while weather statistics are predictive.
I don't know how to determine if social polls are descriptive or predictive; it probably depends on the subject matter in question (weight of an ox is predictive, chance of social event Q is descriptive).
[end off-topic ramblings...]
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
"certain events that are relevant to their business" suggest that these are external non-Google events. As Google is a company which likes to mystify itself in a fog of rumors, they could use this toy as a market study rather than predictive tool.
... (I'm sure the whole alphabet will follow), they would easily see for which services there is a higher demand and which at the moment could be the new hottest platform for their content based ads to multiply their income. Something which appears first as a neutral game, might be another clever way to tap the brains of somebody else. It's just loyal to its own principle: "Organize the information, but don't create it yourself."
...) may generate the primary income, but the infrastructure around it (ads, services, support, ...). Something the RIAA doesn't realize maybe, but what Google for sure is doing. If they mean organize, they mean in fact organize in such a way that consulting generates money. It's a hidden market with still a lot of land to be conquered. It's time that other companies catch this up, otherwise Google will be granted a monopoly and we all know what that mean$.
Suppose Google in the past included events like Gmail, Google Talk/Wifi/Earth/Print
Times are changing. No longer the selling of products (content, books, music, videos,
Yes, this is similar if they are using common futures market methods. That event illustrated more than most what a collection of barely-single-celled organisms humanity is. People here on Slashdot we're foaming at the mouth thinking there was going to be actual money wagered of terrorist events, even though that should fail to get past even rudimentary BS detectors. Even mainstream news media was incorrectly reporting that. I remember it made me want to start lobbing Ebola bombs or start stabbing people at random, despite the fact I was already a complete misanthrope and thought I could not be disappointed by people anymore.
I used to work for a company that did market forecasting using stuff like fractal theory, etc. I remember that one of our CERN physicists (we didn't have an economists on staff) did a correlation analysis of implied volatility versus actual volatility. Implied volatility is calculated from option prices and, according to the Black-Scholes model, indicates what the market as a whole thinks the future volatility of the underlying will be. He found there was absolutely no correlation between what the market expected the volatility to be and what it actually turned out to be (using all the tools in our toolbox). Though there was correlation between the price curves themselves and the future volatility. So while the seeds of predictability were in the data, people didn't seem to have much ability to make use of it.
Devon
http://zocalo.sourceforge.net/
Great realtime prediction market, written in python, uses ajax for updates, very slick. (Disclaimer: I was an intern with zLabs over the summer and chatted with the developers often, very smart people)
Yahoo has launched one of these to the public back at in March of 2005 at the O'Reilly Etech conference. They actually had a contest where the top performer got a Mac-mini.
sigs are a waste of space
I see all these dismissals, as if this is a joke. But might I suggest that the researchers at Google aren't trying to get an acceptable sample-size, as many people here are naively suggesting. It seems much more likely that Google is researching the thought-process of prediction itself. It also seems likely that a number of fairly intelligent industry-insiders also believes they're close to figured out how to create a prediction engine that is accurate (ahref=http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/22 /1229238&tid=109&tid=120&tid=217rel=url2html-6813h ttp://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/22/1229238 &tid=109&tid=120&tid=217>)...
Think about it; If they have enough information (IE the web), they can hone it by feeding it past events to "predict" other past events and then comparing their prediction to what actually occurred. If it's able to predict events that have occurred given what came before those events, then there's a good chance that it will work with current data to predict future events.
Feel free to label me a wacko... Perhaps I've seen "Terminator" too many times. But I've also worked with a number of freakishly intelligent people; the kind that Google has been hiring right-and-left without any apparent reason. I've always said that technology could someday facilitate society's return to bondage... It may seem far fetched, until one considers the sheer breadth of people that hate "western" culture. Given the past as a predictor, I would be inclined to believe that few Middle Eastern leaders would hesitate to use technology to exterminate as much of western culture as they could... Folks, its not unrealistic to recognize the likelihood that technological-advancements will make sudden and drastic changes to our way of life... This ought to give us pause. What balances are essential to our culture? What imbalances will end it? Someday, somewhere, somebody is going to come up with a way to utilize technology to facilitate his/her agenda. Maybe we don't have to worry about Google, since the magnitude of the consequence is, at least in part, proportionate to the magnitude agenda of the individual(s). But things such as this should be cataloged in our brains as evidence that this mode of societal-failure is plausible.
Ok, flame away. But I hope I never have to say I told you so.
Didn't John Poindexter propose something similar as a way of predicting terrorist attacks? Didn't the community beat up on him until DARPA was glad to drop the idea? What's different now?
I don't think "Bomb the brown people, because the people who bombed us were also brown" is quite the sort of prediction method that the article describes.
I know, I know. -1 Flamebait.
If you need me, I'll be in my corner.
Some potential gain or loss based on predictions is required for any kind of accurate forecast in a prediction market. Betting markets were recently shown to be more accurate than opinion polls in predicting election results. Accuracy here will only follow from the "put your money where your mouth is protocol" this will eliminate predictions based on politics, humour, indifference, ignorance etc.
Interest in prediction markets usually increases in years after major elections (elections are the killer app for prediction markets). There is a good directory of prediction market software (free and otherwise) here.
the madness of crowds...
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
You should read "Content is not King" by Andrew Odlyzko who was as AT&T at the time (2001).
n ications2.pdf
o /
pdf : http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/history.commu
html : http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_2/odlyzk
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
isn't this how foundation started?
Why is this modded as funny? Is that just some poor sarcasm on the part of the local audience, or are that many slashdotters that ignorant of the fact that the Pentagon actually DID put together exactly such a system, and that statisticians and other analysts thought it was a great idea. That the Stupid Media(tm) could only bring themselves to report on it in terms of "people betting on next terroris targets" (thus leading shrill lefty bloggers to screech about how craven the DoD is, how much they think of fighting terrorism as just a games, blahditty-blah-blah and other FUD) was, of course, completely predictable. That they had to abandon (or, rename) the project just because people are so anxious to find anything they can identify as politically correct (no matter how much they completely misunderstand it on the face of it) that they can distort into more Cindy Sheehan-esque rants is a damn shame.
The DoD and intelligence sectors do some truly ambitious and cutting edge things with analytical and predictive modeling, and lives are at stake. It's great that Google's doing the same (or even better, on more horizons), but funny how just moving the same research/technologies into a different venue makes slashdotters all drooly, instead of raving about Haliburton.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Thats not really what the main part of the book is about.
Its about distributed decision making. Its not a book about making money from the stockmarket, its about optimal decision making by the market. Indeed, the whole point is that markets are "smarter" than any individual who participates in them. Its actually an idea in opposition to the view that individuals can stand to "beat" the market by rejecting conventional wisdom. But furthermore, the fact the market makes "wise" decisions doesn't necessarily equate with anyone getting rich or otherwise getting what they want either.
I don't think you've actually read the book.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
Stock prices have been known to move before exceptional events are announced by firms.
Insider information leaks out, and rumours form. If google could harness the data on the net, people's emails, search queries and google talk and make sense of it - by weighting certain sources accordingly - they may be better able to predict such events.
Google may make more money some day through market research than any other business line.
"The DoD and intelligence sectors do some truly ambitious and cutting edge things with analytical and predictive modeling, and lives are at stake."
And on the other end, you have Project Stargate. I'm generally impressed by the US military, however I can't believe that *any* money is still wasted on remote viewing and "psychic" intelligence. We might as well have a dowsing and alchemy development team.
I've wondered myself about what the percentage means when it comes to rainfall. What someone finally suggested to me is that a 70% chance of rain means that 70% of the area is expected to receive rain. I'm not sure I buy it, but it's sure simpler, and it makes it more understandable if my city doesn't get rain, but the one south of me did.
My pretty worthless 2 cents.
http://www.ideosphere.com/
We have many players and you can have a lot of fun trying to beat the market. These markets don't always get things correct though... The market bet a 20% chance that Gas would hit $3 per gallon in the US. I always thought the chance of that to be far higher.
Hence, these markets don't always predict things as well as people suspect. If the majority is wrong, the market will have a bias. Some have given guessing ox weight as proof of the market's efficiency. But if the ox was made of rubber foam, everyone's guess would be incorrect. Markets, like people, can be wrong.
FreeMarket is another open source prediction market that was recently released. It's written in PHP and uses MySQL (because you can do anything with php and mysql). It's geared towards somewhat smaller markets.
This actually has nothing to do with the CLT. The CLT is a statement about the distribution of a sample average in relation to the population average.
OTOH, TFA is about information markets, which concerns comparisions between the average of people's forecasts of events, and the "true" (or natural) frequency of events. We are not comparing a sample average to a population average. (In other words, to apply the CLT here, we'd make a statement comparing the average forecast of 100 people to the average forecast that would be made by all the people in the population. We're absolutely not doing that.)
Instead, the concept to discuss here is what is sometimes called calibration. This is a concept used to measure the accuracy of forecasters (such as meterologists). It works like this: say we look at all the days a weatherman said "chance of rain is 30%". Then, we'd hope to see rain on around 30% of those days in order for that kind of prediction to be accurate. Calibration (roughly) asks: How accurate were all such statements that were made by the weatherman? (I.e., check "chance of rain 0%", 10%, 20%, etc... looking at each subsample of his forecasts.)
Here (pdf) is a randomly chosen article on this kind of calibration.
For those that read TFA, did you see the graph? Calibration asks for those two lines to overlap. Whether they do or not has nothing to do with the Central Limit Theorem.
Can you say "psycho-history"? See, I knew you could!
--Harry Seldon, Encyclopedia Galactica Institute
Terminus
This is the basis of a theorem in math called the Central limit theorem. The central limit theorem says that data which are influenced by many small and unrelated random effects are approximately normally distributed.
Do u have any idea of what u re talking about?? The argument in favour of this gForecast is not based in the central limit theorem or in the assumption of normal (or even symmetric) distributions. Doing this will require the obviously wrong assumption that, in "average", we know the answer to the event. The real idea is somewhat based in Arbitrage Pricing Theory. We asume that people that don't know about something will (in average) avoid betting on it. So people that DO know about the event and the true facts / probabilities around it will bet and the estimate of this group of people will be around the real probability. You can say "but wait! what if people that don't know still bet! like in the dotcom boom!". Well, if they bet, there will be further incentives for the more informed users to bet even more against them, so any "BIAS" in the prediction made by the market will tend to be corrected. ---------- No sig for u!
I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Business Experiment.
Their new business will be selling "crowd wisdom!"
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
CmdrTaco has been trying to do this for years with his comment moderation system. I think a key problem is that he dosen't use a big enough sample size. It only takes a few people to moderate a comment up to the highest level. The rules of crowd wisdom state that the larger your sample size, the more likely you are to arrive at the "correct" answer. Granted, with something like a story comment, there is no "correct" answer, only interesting and relevant responses. CmdrTaco's goal was not to tease out the interesting comments though, it was to filter out the irrelevant and wasteful spam.
In essence, CmdrTaco had no choice. Spam was starting to choke slashdot comments and making them less than useful. The moderation system saved the comment system, but didn't, as many people assume that it should have done, make the comments more interesting.
I believe that if the prevailing attitude among slashdot developers is to "weed out the spam", we'll see a slow decline of slashdot's popularity until it's made irrelevant by RSS feed aggregators.
IMHO, the attitude *SHOULD* be to exploit slashdot's major differentiator over simple aggregators, which is the community it has created. In other words, they should invert the "weed out the spam" attitude into a "make the comments more interesting" attitude. It's a subtle difference and, on the face of it, it would appear that one begets the other. I contend that weeding out spam does not make comments more interesting and conversely, making comments more interesting won't weed out the spam. Thus we come to the root of the problem, two crosswise goals.
CmdrTaco has to worry about the system from a performance standpoint. Weeding out the spam means less bandwidth and storage costs. That's immediate ROI, and a good thing on many levels. The community, however, needs more than 1,2,3,4 or 5 to determine what comments to read and which to ignore, to make them interesting. I can conjecture at a few ideas that would make it better, but I do not know the ultimate solution, and I doubt anyone else does either. I believe the problem requires more than just CmdrTaco playing whack-a-mole with ideas, meta-ideas and meta-meta-ideas etc. It requires serious PhD dissertation level study.
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
Indeed, that's why when running human experiments in psychology or sociology, you generally aim to find those who are "naive" to the area you are studying, because they are less biased with previous training. We want to arrive at a "natural" human response
What market prediction is, is essentially a human sociological experiment. An investigator in this area will want to know what are the most basic choices that people make, and that means avoiding those who have expertise and training in marketing.
I also believe that even those with expert training in this area will tend to make the same findings that non-experts make to some extent, when they are not conscious of their training.
Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon. -Orson Scott Card
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The date of the next Debian release!
Crowd and Wisdom? Together? Please. Is that what they're calling Mob Mentality these days? This is the biggest load of euphemistic and post-modern bullshit I've heard in a long time (which is why I'll have to take time to read up on it. Like Intelligent Design or Moral Relativism, it's an idea that has the tempting appearance of plausibility, but falls apart under even rudimentary scrutiny.).
Well, I'll trust Hal Varian before I trust you. He's the well-respected UC Berkeley economics professor that helped google set it up.
On one hand you say that groups are so wise that they would be able to predict security threats, but at the saem time you're complaining about groups of people being so stupid because they don't understand.
So would the Stupid Media(tm) and shrill lefty bloggers be able to predict a terrorist attack? Or would they be excluded from participating in this system? How do you decide which groups are wise and which groups are Stupid(tm)?
It must be a scary experience to be in commercial competition with Google. Not only do they know literally everything about you, right down to where you grandmother buys porn, but they can predict you before you move. It must be rather like fighting the Kwisatz Haderach.
Google is the singularity. You will want to be be assimilated.
Owise.com looks very cool! I had a similar idea, which I called MemeTrade.com. (get it? rhymes with E*TRADE :) I wanted to create a "fantasy stock market" community similar to BlogShares, where people could busy and sell "memes", i.e. word frequencies from the many news and blog sites that my memetrade web crawler would crawl every 15 minutes. For example, the meme "RITA" might have a rising value today as more news and blog stories are written about hurricane Rita, while other words would be losing value as fewer news and blog stories are written. Using individual words as the "atomic unit" of memes, more complicated "meme funds" would be created that bought/bundled multiple related words (such as HURRICANE, KATRINA, and RITA).
:)
I put my MemeTrade hobby project on hold when I later found Yahoo Buzz. Maybe I will revisit the idea thanks to inspiration from Owise!
cpeterso
On one hand you say that groups are so wise that they would be able to predict security threats, but at the saem time you're complaining about groups of people being so stupid because they don't understand.
Not at all. I'm saying that people who spend their lives dealing with security related issues, intelligence analysis, foreign affairs, law enforcement, diplomacy, and international economics are the components of a group that certainly will have something useful to say about terrorism hotspots.
I'm also saying that people who leap to their blogs (or to slashdot) to fire off a comment about "wagering on terrorism" being some sort of old-boy-network parlor game for the unfeeling military industrial complex elites are, well, wrong. People with a political or philosophical axe to grind are not the group to be tasked with forming any sort of consensus about the statistical and foundational validity of a futures/wager-type predictive system being applied to a particular, very specialized area about which they, by definition, are poorly informed. This would be just as true about plasma physics, meteorology, or any other complex area about which the Average Jane/Joe (no matter how technical in their own area - say, administering Linux boxes, writing video drivers, what have you) cannot authoritatively comment. Sure as hell the average journalist, as can be seen in the circumstance I first cited, handled the job miserably.
So would the Stupid Media(tm) and shrill lefty bloggers be able to predict a terrorist attack?
If the information that would drive their ability to actually do so was within their area of direct experience and knowledge, then yes. For example, people of that political persuasion might be more able to specualate on when or where ELF might next burn down someone's business.
How do you decide which groups are wise and which groups are Stupid(tm)?
I suppose the best way is to use analysis of past predictions combined with some rational up-front filtering of participants. It's pretty much like the mod system here - Taco won't let just anybody be an editor... he personally has to analyze their worth for that role. But the mod and meta-mod system at least approaches the job of providing weight to those that are shown to be germane to the discussion. Of course real decision making systems wouldn't be treated like quite the circus that slashdot is, and there's always the risk of someone with an agenda spamming the collective consensus somehow. The expectation would be that the more important the actions that will be based on collective analysis (like, where do you put an aircraft carrier, or which port do you watch, or where should the CDC station antibiotics at what time of year), the more experts have to shepherd the engine that processes the input.
Does this seem less ironic to you, now?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It's a damn shame there are so many dumb moralist laws about "gambling," so that there aren't really very many options for real-money markets.
(Yeah, I really want to play for an iPod. Seriously, Apple ought to fuck off just for all the asinine come-ons they've spawned. Their over-priced products -- in terms of value, not in terms of what the idiot market will pay -- are a whole other story.)
Fuck it
Yup. It was called the Policy Analysis Market, which was essentially a prediction market for forecasting the future of the middle east and how possible policies might impact the region.
Slashdot had a story on it back in 2003, titled Pentagon lets you bid on terrorism?
It's quite interesting to see how your typical slashdotter reacted to it back then. Some quotes (all from comments moderated +4 or higher):
"In any event, while I support innovative ways of fighting terrorism (as opposed to wiretapping everyone and giving the president imperium, etc) the idea of making money off of death is exceptionally disturbing."
"The reason why this is sick is because next time you read that some coward terrorist decided to blow himself up on a Tel Aviv bus, killing him/herself and 15 schoolchildren, a gambler somewhere will go make himself a cool $50 because he "bet" on this."
"Holy Crap. That's disgusting. And, on a lighter note: Think of the money you can make taking exotic vacations and causing havok! Insider trading laws be damned, this could be a wonderfully abusable system. God, I hope this is a joke."
View a creative take on one possible future for Google at: http://www.broom.org/epic/
You can also try http://www.zapfuture.com/ . Thanks
I can see some value to such a system, but all value is lost if you make it public. If an enemy can read that you're predicting an attack next week, he'll probably just postpone his attack until the week after next.
Also it seems to me that statistics will only work if you have a large number of people "in the know" participating in it. But what happens if only a very few people are "in the know"? What if a single agent was told by the second cousin of some terrorist that he overhead something in some cave in pakistan. One guy out of a few thousand won't get heard.
Then there's the converse. What if an Iranian double agent is feeding you with misinformation about conditions in a country leading many to believe that if you invade, you will be welcomed as liberators? Take the "what if" off the previous sentence, because that really happened.
What is needed right now isn't some fancy statisics. What we need is good old fashioned human intelligence. And for that, you need some intelligent humans. Not a beowulf cluster of dumb humans. A few people who know the truth from a lie. You need to talk to people, ask questions. Learn the power structures. Know your enemy.
Yeah the statistics may help you in determining that you you have enemies. But we already know that. What we want to know is where our enemies are and what they're up to. Stats aren't going to tell you what cave people are in and what they are talking about in that cave.