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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."
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.
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You didn't know.
Our philosophy is: why bother with all the trappings of the "market". It just confuses people, and leads to all kinds of gamesmanship that has nothing to do with what you're trying to predict. We simply ask people what they think the outcome will be, and we use a mathmatically correct way of ranking their accuracy (called a "proper scoring rule" for those of you who like math).
People who are right get higher weights in our system, can win prizes like Amazon gift certificates, and gain "titles" such as "Senior Political Analyst, Level 3". Bloggers can use our data graphs free, just don't nuke our watermarks. The system has already been more accurate than experts at some predictions, although we are just starting out and need a lot more people.
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.