Tl;dr: Legalize prediction markets, make civilization adequate.
Spend a lot of money on ad campaigns and lobbying, and get {New Hampshire/Nevada/Wyoming/Florida} to nullify whatever federal anti-gambling laws exist, and carve out a safe haven for a serious prediction market (which does not currently exist).
You could alternatively just fund the development of a serious prediction market on the Ethereum blockchain, but I'm not as sure about this path, as the gains one could get might be considered "illegal" in some jurisdictions. Also, a fully legalized prediction market could rely on courts to arbitrate market resolution criteria.
In order for a prediction market to be "serious", it has to allow epistemically rational people to get very very rich (in fiat currency) without going to jail, and it has to allow anyone to create and arbitrate a binary prediction market for a small fee. Such a platform does not currently exist.
If you offer a large monetary incentive for people to be epistemically rational, they will become more epistemically rational.
Regular people will be able to Google questions like "what are the odds that Donald Trump will bring gas prices below $3/gallon in his first year if he's elected" and "what are the odds that Proposition 23, if passed, will reduce unemployment in the next six months". Normal people will actually be able to get real answers to these questions.
Political incentives shift. Legislation is now more likely to pass if it achieves its stated goals, so effective legislation now actually gets written. Presidential candidates that the markets say will improve {GDP/unemployment/poverty/violent crime} have an advantage over their opponents. Prediction markets let people call politicians on their bullshit, so they can't afford to bullshit as much anymore.
A prediction market hosted in the USA can also predict foreign elections. Decision markets on China's economic growth over Xi Jinping's successor emerge, and the Central Committee pays attention to them. American decision markets are a global public good, providing priceless intelligence to government officials of all nations. The honest conditional forecasts provided by prediction markets make world governments more effective and less Mazelike.
Institutions become adequate. American healthcare costs 10x less and works much more smoothly. Land value taxes are phased in, income taxes are phased out, a voucher system replaces public schools, government research grants actually fund innovation, the economy booms, the median salary grows, millions are lifted out of poverty, et cetera. It is very hard for me to forecast what an actually effective government would look like (because it's hard to predict something smarter than me), but I'm sure it would be good. Not exactly Dath Ilan, but in the right basin of attraction.
I'm highly dubious that prediction markets would fix all our problems by themselves. At the very least, we'd need to go through several generations of prediction markets to work out all the inevitable problems that would come up.
Which we can't do, as you've pointed out, when they're currently effectively illegal to experiment with.
Oh, for sure the first generation of prediction markets won't be enough. However, market forces will automatically take care of iteratively improving prediction market platforms for us (where "us" = "people concerned about x-risk"), and all "we" need to do is push to make them legal.
As long as entrepreneurs are allowed to make money by building better prediction markets (+ adjacent services), they will.
For some more detail on what this plan might look like, my 2nd-place-winning entry in the Future of Life Institute's "A.I. world-building" competition, was all about how humanity uses prediction markets and other new institutional designs to increase its level of civilizational adequacy, becoming strong/wise enough to manage the safe development of transformative AI.
See my lesswrong post here (which focuses on the details of how AI development is controlled in my team's fictional scenario), or the whole entry here (which includes two great short stories by...
This seems like the kind of thing that could be hosted in a place like Próspera. I believe the ZEDE law was very recently repealed, but I have yet to hear that the Próspera project is stopping and the constitutional amendment could be repealed next year. Próspera claims it will be proceeding and international law/treaties and it's 50 year stability agreements protect it. https://prospera.hn/news/press-releases/built-to-last-legal-stability-in-the-zede-framework
It seems too early, but if Próspera survives this most recent political shift in Honduras, then i...
Mu.
The unpopular answer is that Dath Ilan is a fantasy setting. It treats economics as central, when economics is really downstream of power. Your first question implies you understand that whatever "econoliteracy" is, it isn't a stable equilibrium. Your second question notices that governments are powerful enough to stop these experiments which are a threat to their power.
My background assumption is that any attempt at building prediction markets would either:
a) ...have little effect because it becomes another mechanism for actual power to manipulate procedural outcomes, most likely through selective subsidies, manipulation of the monetary supply, or education or social pressure resulting in all right minded people voting the way power centers want (ie, how things work today).
b) ...be used as a coordination points for a Point Deer Call Horse style coup (see also: how publicly betting in cockfights can be more about signaling alliances, not predictions).
c) ...devolves into Jim Bell's Assassination Markets because there actually isn't a way for power elites to prevent some markets from being made (and we should expect any general way to prevent some markets being made to go back to (a)).
Honestly, I think the easiest way to do what you’re asking is to solve alignment, build an aligned AGI, and ask for it to help you.
Partially, I think this because I think alignment is actually a lot more tractable than most people assume. The other reason is that “build real Dath Ilan, but real and stable” seems like a strictly harder version of the alignment problem.
To build a stable version of Dath Ilan, I think you (roughly) need to establish a environment of microeconomic incentive gradients that robustly select for agents that are cooperative, powerful, friendly and rational. I think this is a similar problem to establishing literal gradients that select for the same in the circuits of an ML system.
However, doing so in a real economy is much harder because you have less control over a real economy and because other people can interfere with your efforts.
My inner simulation of Yudkowsky says, roughly:
So maybe the easiest way to solve alignment is to fix civilizational inadequacy first, and then let our adequate civilization figure out the rest.
And maybe the easiest way to solve civilizational inadequacy is by legalizing prediction markets.
I think you'd need to start with different humans. Or a filter to remove a whole lot (billions) of the least-capable-of-cooperation existing humans. It's not JUST economic illiteracy, it's actual misalignment and short-term limited-moral-circle goals.
I don't know if this necessary condition (better people) is sufficient. It may still be impossible without significant baseline changes in the individuality and very deep-seated psychological drives in most people.
[The comment this was a response to has disappeared and left this orphaned? Leaving my reply up.]
But there's no reason to believe that it would work out like this. He presents no argument for the above, just pure moral platitudes. It seems like a pure fantasy.
As I pointed out in the essay, if I were running one of the organizations accepting those donations and offering those prizes, I would selectively list only those targets who I am genuinely satisfied are guilty of the violation of the "non-aggression principle." But as a practical matter, there is no way that I could stop a DIFFERENT organization from being set up and operating under DIFFERENT moral and ethical principles, especially if it operated anonymously, as I anticipate the "Assassination Politics"-type systems will be. Thus, I'm forced to accept the reality that I can't dictate a "strongly limited" system that would "guarantee" no "unjustified" deaths: I can merely control my little piece of the earth and not assist in the abuse of others. I genuinely believe, however, that the operation of this system would be a vast improvement over the status quo.
Bell's organization acts as (a) where Bell's organization can dictate who is and is not a valid moral target. If we are talking about purely anonymous uncontrolled markets (and I assume we both are, since I separated them from (a) and you're referring to anonymous markets on Ethereum), then we should instead expect them to be used to usher in hell.
It seems worth pointing out that dath ilan isn't just econoliterate and its advantages over earth aren't supposed to be consequences just of much greater economic literacy. In particular, they depend on 1. a population that is smarter than that of earth, and 2. widespread appreciation among that population of a way of thinking that is mathematically valid and automatically motivates those who understand it to act in better-coordinated ways than we do.
#1 is imaginable but obviously difficult to achieve. I'm not quite sure whether Eliezer thinks the way of thinking in #2 exists (and equals "timeless/updateless/logical/functional decision theory") or not, but to me it is not at all clear that any way of thinking actually has those properties.
I think part of the deal with Dath Ilan is that there was a deliberate eugenics program to bring about #1 (I'm not sure if the world is supposed to have a single-point-of-departure from earth or be quite different in many ways, and whether the baseline intelligence was higher)
It's deliberately vague, and there's a lot of authorial leeway due to that screening off of all but the most recent history in the setting. The continents correspond and the humans are indistinguishable on casual observation from Earth humans physically, medically, and behaviourally, so it should be some sort of alternate history Earth. Whether any divergence is 200 or 20k years ago is hard to say (and Eliezer may not yet have decided).
I sometimes get a little bit melancholic when I read about Dath Ilan. Humanity could be so much better off, but due to economic illiteracy, we can't have nice things.
Better to light a small flame than to curse the darkness. So if you had to build a model econoliterate city on earth, how would you go about it?
There's lots of micronations projects out there. What I'm interested in is:
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my pen sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Dath Ilan,
In this earths green & pleasant land.