The podcast with Sam Harris was great. I especially like the idea that "truth is provisional". So, why not a retrodiction market to allow people to place bets on their "hindcasts"? See: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4323607
I decided to reach out when you mentioned "social media for truth".
I'm a founder of the Canonical Debate Lab (https://canonicaldebatelab.com/), and we have been working on ideas for this, and especially principles of trust.
It's a bit out of date, but unfortunately the principles and approach are EVEN MORE relevant in this post-AI world, in which LLMs can make hallucinations (or biases) sound authoritative.
If you have a free moment, it would love to go quickly over some of these principles that I think you might find helpful, and could help spread.
Wow, I saw the link to your white paper and found it fascinating! What about adding to "Canonical Debate" a retrodiction market, where debaters could place bets on their "hindcasts"? See: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4323607
After having read it, I find the idea very interesting, but find some of the objections problematic and hard to surmount. I also see perhaps a few more objections not listed explicitly:
* Market integrity problem 2 - The market very nicely incentivizes interested parties to dig deep into the evidence to support their side. Unfortunately, it actually incentivizes MORE evidence, and not necessarily BETTER evidence. Given the asymmetrical nature of fake news (easier to produce than verify) that already plagues social media, I'm not sure a profit motive would cure so much as aggravate the problem.
* The truth alignment problem - Maybe this is a restatement of the beauty contest problem. In practice, anyone considering a pure financial motivation for buying contracts is expressing not a belief in the fundamental claim, but rather a belief in the broader public opinion on the claim. It's perfectly rational for someone to believe the world is flat, but buy "world is round" belief contracts just to make a profit. Likewise, if you know something is true, but don't think others will believe it, you have no incentive to buy the T contracts.
* The acceptability problem (?) - How likely are people to accept the weighting of a belief contract as representative of the truth? Current stock market behavior does not seem to reflect business fundamentals the way they have traditionally (eX-Twitter valuation, Truth social valuation, meme stocks like GameStop). If this can't be overcome, it begs the question of what is the point in the first place.
Regarding the use of AI, it's a fantastic application, but I see serious danger there. Fundamentally, most of the members of the Canonical Debate Lab (CDL) believe that machines should not be deciding truth. For one thing, there's no way to convince people the machines are right, no biases, no bugs. I'm more than sure they'll do an excellent job (even a better job) than humans in most cases. But therein lies a bigger danger: the more one trusts an arbiter or method of determining the truth, the more harm that can be caused when they are wrong (e.g. a faulty DNA test, or a source of infallible provenance that gets hacked). AI should help us figure out the truth, but shouldn't be doing the job for us IMHO.
I have some comments regarding the formulation of the contracts that might be interesting to discuss at some point - at the CDL we've spent a lot of time focusing on the relationship between claims and definitions, for example, and what would be the relationship between, say, a contract that stated "Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a conspiracy to assassinate JFK" versus another that says "Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a Soviet conspiracy to assassinate JFK".
Lastly, I'd be interested to know why you chose to weight contracts by the price paid versus simply weighing the T vs. F contracts purchased, regardless of price.
All in all a great read. Let me know if you'd be interested in discussing it some time.
Excellent observations; I will think them over and report back soon; in the meantime, I have been working with Steve Kuhn on a modified version of my original retrodiction market idea; see here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4880722
Great! I'll post it in my group. One of our members is especially interested in tracking success of predictions as a proxy for expertise. I'll be honest - I'm personally opposed to relying on expertise as a proxy for truth in any solution, but I'm in the minority, I think. My argument is that I'm not against expertise per se - I believe it's the best we can do until we have a better system - but relying on expertise is too susceptible to vectors of attack ("do your own research", "Big Pharma" (or Soros or...)). So is majority opinion ("sheeple").
I've only skimmed the topics so far, but it looks very interesting, and readable. I'm reading now.
Frankly, I don't think it will be long before our Canadian and European "betters" start mocking us for our 1A absolutism like they do on our 2A "absolutism".
Oh great. Let’s hear from Sam Harris, mouthpiece of our Jewish Mafia Overlords. Maybe he has something demoralizing and nihilistic to eat from the goyim trough.
I am unsure what Sam being jewish has to do with the content of his podcast or ideas .... but I'll bite.
I've found Sam's perspective on Oct. 7 to be clarifying. As you may know, Sam is concerned with (and has been paying attention to this for 20+ years) Islamic extremism and their goal of a worldwide caliphate. Simply put he sees this as a battle between western-style open democracy (including things you might believe are important....like free speech) and an oppressive, radically perverse, and religious-based society.
I assume, within this context and lens, you might believe Sam Harris is doing important work?
If you are 21 to 33 years old, Harris would appeal to you. I studied his works from 2007 and read and reread his books for a period of time. One day, you may discover that he is and Hitchens was Neocons. Islam is our enemy across the room. Judaism is the enemy raping our daughter.
Can you explain your Islam and Judiasm analogy in real world terms? We might agree that religions are unnecessary and can be dangerous. But it appears as though islamic extremism is a threat to open societies and progress, but (within this lens), I am not sure how Judiasm is a threat to things I care about (open society, democracy, freedoms (thought, speech, etc.))
Also, if you are a "jews control the weather and media", no need to reply. I doubt we'll find common ground to argue in good faith.
PEN canada was supposed to do that but has been partisan for a long time. The justice centre for constitutional freedoms is doing more. Pen will defend pedophiles ‘on principle’ but not a peep in defence of jordan peterson or any other classical liberal academic under fire.
Great Video!
The podcast with Sam Harris was great. I especially like the idea that "truth is provisional". So, why not a retrodiction market to allow people to place bets on their "hindcasts"? See: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4323607
Great talk with Sam. Thank you for sharing. Keep banging the drum!
Excellent!
I decided to reach out when you mentioned "social media for truth".
I'm a founder of the Canonical Debate Lab (https://canonicaldebatelab.com/), and we have been working on ideas for this, and especially principles of trust.
If you have a minute, please skim our whitepaper: https://github.com/canonical-debate-lab/paper/blob/master/README.mediawiki
It's a bit out of date, but unfortunately the principles and approach are EVEN MORE relevant in this post-AI world, in which LLMs can make hallucinations (or biases) sound authoritative.
If you have a free moment, it would love to go quickly over some of these principles that I think you might find helpful, and could help spread.
Wow, I saw the link to your white paper and found it fascinating! What about adding to "Canonical Debate" a retrodiction market, where debaters could place bets on their "hindcasts"? See: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4323607
After having read it, I find the idea very interesting, but find some of the objections problematic and hard to surmount. I also see perhaps a few more objections not listed explicitly:
* Market integrity problem 2 - The market very nicely incentivizes interested parties to dig deep into the evidence to support their side. Unfortunately, it actually incentivizes MORE evidence, and not necessarily BETTER evidence. Given the asymmetrical nature of fake news (easier to produce than verify) that already plagues social media, I'm not sure a profit motive would cure so much as aggravate the problem.
* The truth alignment problem - Maybe this is a restatement of the beauty contest problem. In practice, anyone considering a pure financial motivation for buying contracts is expressing not a belief in the fundamental claim, but rather a belief in the broader public opinion on the claim. It's perfectly rational for someone to believe the world is flat, but buy "world is round" belief contracts just to make a profit. Likewise, if you know something is true, but don't think others will believe it, you have no incentive to buy the T contracts.
* The acceptability problem (?) - How likely are people to accept the weighting of a belief contract as representative of the truth? Current stock market behavior does not seem to reflect business fundamentals the way they have traditionally (eX-Twitter valuation, Truth social valuation, meme stocks like GameStop). If this can't be overcome, it begs the question of what is the point in the first place.
Regarding the use of AI, it's a fantastic application, but I see serious danger there. Fundamentally, most of the members of the Canonical Debate Lab (CDL) believe that machines should not be deciding truth. For one thing, there's no way to convince people the machines are right, no biases, no bugs. I'm more than sure they'll do an excellent job (even a better job) than humans in most cases. But therein lies a bigger danger: the more one trusts an arbiter or method of determining the truth, the more harm that can be caused when they are wrong (e.g. a faulty DNA test, or a source of infallible provenance that gets hacked). AI should help us figure out the truth, but shouldn't be doing the job for us IMHO.
I have some comments regarding the formulation of the contracts that might be interesting to discuss at some point - at the CDL we've spent a lot of time focusing on the relationship between claims and definitions, for example, and what would be the relationship between, say, a contract that stated "Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a conspiracy to assassinate JFK" versus another that says "Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a Soviet conspiracy to assassinate JFK".
Lastly, I'd be interested to know why you chose to weight contracts by the price paid versus simply weighing the T vs. F contracts purchased, regardless of price.
All in all a great read. Let me know if you'd be interested in discussing it some time.
Excellent observations; I will think them over and report back soon; in the meantime, I have been working with Steve Kuhn on a modified version of my original retrodiction market idea; see here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4880722
Great! I'll post it in my group. One of our members is especially interested in tracking success of predictions as a proxy for expertise. I'll be honest - I'm personally opposed to relying on expertise as a proxy for truth in any solution, but I'm in the minority, I think. My argument is that I'm not against expertise per se - I believe it's the best we can do until we have a better system - but relying on expertise is too susceptible to vectors of attack ("do your own research", "Big Pharma" (or Soros or...)). So is majority opinion ("sheeple").
I've only skimmed the topics so far, but it looks very interesting, and readable. I'm reading now.
Frankly, I don't think it will be long before our Canadian and European "betters" start mocking us for our 1A absolutism like they do on our 2A "absolutism".
Marxists and their utterances are hateful. Let's throw them all in jail...or worse.
If that's how it's going to work...
Shall we play a game?
Anyone up for Mutually Assured Destruction?
I get an error message when I click the permanent injunction link.
Oh great. Let’s hear from Sam Harris, mouthpiece of our Jewish Mafia Overlords. Maybe he has something demoralizing and nihilistic to eat from the goyim trough.
I am unsure what Sam being jewish has to do with the content of his podcast or ideas .... but I'll bite.
I've found Sam's perspective on Oct. 7 to be clarifying. As you may know, Sam is concerned with (and has been paying attention to this for 20+ years) Islamic extremism and their goal of a worldwide caliphate. Simply put he sees this as a battle between western-style open democracy (including things you might believe are important....like free speech) and an oppressive, radically perverse, and religious-based society.
I assume, within this context and lens, you might believe Sam Harris is doing important work?
If you are 21 to 33 years old, Harris would appeal to you. I studied his works from 2007 and read and reread his books for a period of time. One day, you may discover that he is and Hitchens was Neocons. Islam is our enemy across the room. Judaism is the enemy raping our daughter.
Can you explain your Islam and Judiasm analogy in real world terms? We might agree that religions are unnecessary and can be dangerous. But it appears as though islamic extremism is a threat to open societies and progress, but (within this lens), I am not sure how Judiasm is a threat to things I care about (open society, democracy, freedoms (thought, speech, etc.))
Also, if you are a "jews control the weather and media", no need to reply. I doubt we'll find common ground to argue in good faith.
Something tells me that the word “offensive” is graded on a curve in Canada. Government employees and socialists will get the benefit of the doubt.
PEN canada was supposed to do that but has been partisan for a long time. The justice centre for constitutional freedoms is doing more. Pen will defend pedophiles ‘on principle’ but not a peep in defence of jordan peterson or any other classical liberal academic under fire.