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> [Prediction markets] only work for the part of truth that can be eventually verified and objectively confirmed/disproved but it's a start. Requires an arbite

> [Prediction markets] only work for the part of truth that can be eventually verified and objectively confirmed/disproved but it's a start. Requires an arbiter/judge, otherwise you'll just end up with one of the two sides refusing to sign the multisig payout transaction. For truly objective determination you could do zkSNARKs and zero-knowledge contingent payments, I guess: https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-contingent-payments-announcement/ https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/02/26/zero-knowledge-conting...

saint_fiasco 9y ago
Requiring an arbiter isn't a bad thing. The arbiter should be the person who cares about that particular truth, the one who sponsored the market in the first place. Say you want to know how long it will take to develop some project (people famously always get this wrong due to optimism bias). You could sponsor a prediction market, ask people to make predictions. Then when the project is or is not finished you will decide who gets the money, since you are the one who will be upset at the people who predicted wrong.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  That approach has no defense against people who want to declare something true for ideological reasons.
  - kanzure 9y ago
    Yes, so you end up having to select a person that is mutually agreeable between the parties or something, and that person is then responsible for judging the evidence. In my experience the problem has been that finding a mutually agreeable person is quite difficult, especially when one side makes a pre-emptive threat to make false allegations about a judge that rules against them :(. I literally ran into this problem in rbtc: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/589nlj/someone_asked_me_today_whats_the_best_way_to/d8yvydi/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/589nlj/someone_asked_m... (although, again, zk-snarks and formal verification might be workable, but only in situations where all parties can forego making false accusations about who backdoored what or who has secret knowledge about formal verification holes or whatever...)
    - kanzure 9y ago
      > or who has secret knowledge about [SNARKs vulnerabilities and/or] formal verification holes or whatever http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/snarks/A%20Note%20on%20the%20Unsoundness%20of%20vnTinyRAM's%20SNARK.pdf http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/snarks/A%20Note%20on...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- bsder 9y ago
  > Say you want to know how long it will take to develop some project (people famously always get this wrong due to optimism bias). Actually, I find that people are, in fact, quite reasonable at predicting projects. If I ask for two points, 50% and 85% probability of completion of task, and then I put everybody's tasks together I get a really remarkably good prediction of the project timeline. Anybody doing a task for enough time gets a really good feel for schedules. Oddly. Sometimes you even wind up with great heuristics ("2 weeks per engineer per schematic" is one of my favorites). The problem is that management wants a 95% probability point. Unfortunately, the variance/standard deviation goes flying to the moon, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to convince people that is correct in spite of mountains of evidence both theoretical (really, every statistics book ever) and practical (gee, all of those "late" projects could be the fact that your people are incompetent/liars OR it could be that you are willfully abusing statistics. Things that make you go, "Hmmmmmmm.") So, that 95% probability point is WAY longer than anybody is willing to agree to. From a political perspective, it's better to play schedule chicken and pray that a lower probability point comes home, that you can blame somebody, or that everybody is now sufficiently invested that they are willing to continue to the real 95% point. I actually did this for 2 different large projects where I put the estimates together, ran some random Monte-Carlo modeling of different task chainings, and posted the timeline on my wall. Everybody attacked the schedules--engineering and management. The projects came in at the 62% point and the 75% point. And that was with changes (which always cause schedule extension). Both of these are less than a SINGLE standard deviation late--by quite a bit (Yes, I know I'm horribly abusing the notion of "normal distribution", but I have no hope of explaining anything even slightly more complicated to business types). Management asked me not to do this for the third project because people were actually paying attention. I left shortly thereafter.

saint_fiasco 9y ago

Requiring an arbiter isn't a bad thing. The arbiter should be the person who cares about that particular truth, the one who sponsored the market in the first place. Say you want to know how long it will take to develop some project (people famously always get this wrong due to optimism bias). You could sponsor a prediction market, ask people to make predictions. Then when the project is or is not finished you will decide who gets the money, since you are the one who will be upset at the people who predicted wrong.

thaumasiotes 9y ago
That approach has no defense against people who want to declare something true for ideological reasons.
- kanzure 9y ago
  Yes, so you end up having to select a person that is mutually agreeable between the parties or something, and that person is then responsible for judging the evidence. In my experience the problem has been that finding a mutually agreeable person is quite difficult, especially when one side makes a pre-emptive threat to make false allegations about a judge that rules against them :(. I literally ran into this problem in rbtc: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/589nlj/someone_asked_me_today_whats_the_best_way_to/d8yvydi/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/589nlj/someone_asked_m... (although, again, zk-snarks and formal verification might be workable, but only in situations where all parties can forego making false accusations about who backdoored what or who has secret knowledge about formal verification holes or whatever...)
  - kanzure 9y ago
    > or who has secret knowledge about [SNARKs vulnerabilities and/or] formal verification holes or whatever http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/snarks/A%20Note%20on%20the%20Unsoundness%20of%20vnTinyRAM's%20SNARK.pdf http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/snarks/A%20Note%20on...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
bsder 9y ago
> Say you want to know how long it will take to develop some project (people famously always get this wrong due to optimism bias). Actually, I find that people are, in fact, quite reasonable at predicting projects. If I ask for two points, 50% and 85% probability of completion of task, and then I put everybody's tasks together I get a really remarkably good prediction of the project timeline. Anybody doing a task for enough time gets a really good feel for schedules. Oddly. Sometimes you even wind up with great heuristics ("2 weeks per engineer per schematic" is one of my favorites). The problem is that management wants a 95% probability point. Unfortunately, the variance/standard deviation goes flying to the moon, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to convince people that is correct in spite of mountains of evidence both theoretical (really, every statistics book ever) and practical (gee, all of those "late" projects could be the fact that your people are incompetent/liars OR it could be that you are willfully abusing statistics. Things that make you go, "Hmmmmmmm.") So, that 95% probability point is WAY longer than anybody is willing to agree to. From a political perspective, it's better to play schedule chicken and pray that a lower probability point comes home, that you can blame somebody, or that everybody is now sufficiently invested that they are willing to continue to the real 95% point. I actually did this for 2 different large projects where I put the estimates together, ran some random Monte-Carlo modeling of different task chainings, and posted the timeline on my wall. Everybody attacked the schedules--engineering and management. The projects came in at the 62% point and the 75% point. And that was with changes (which always cause schedule extension). Both of these are less than a SINGLE standard deviation late--by quite a bit (Yes, I know I'm horribly abusing the notion of "normal distribution", but I have no hope of explaining anything even slightly more complicated to business types). Management asked me not to do this for the third project because people were actually paying attention. I left shortly thereafter.