Forecasting meetup network (a) looking for volunteers. If you want to host a meetup in your city, send an email at forecastingmeetupnetwork@gmail.com.
Caroline Pham moves up to Chairman of the CFTC. She is much friendlier to prediction markets and has spent years writting dissents againsts regulatory overreach.
“Yunaplan for liquidity” makes subtle but very neat mechanism change for Manifold cash markets.
Prediction markets and forecasting platforms
The Yunaplan for Liquidity (a) is a proposal on Manifold to subtly replace the default of (moving probabilities in a market maker or order book) with (placing a short-lived limit order which bots can then fill). I’m not sure to what extent this will work, but this is a subtle but very clever UI and mechanistic improvement, particularly since Manifold has cultivated a good bots ecosystem.
The State of Metaculus (a) is a pretty high signal edition of their newsletter. They have gotten many more users with recent tournaments, were mentioned by the US CDC, benchmarked AI forecasters against users, hosted workshops. And my friend Molly has an AI readiness index (a), potentially one of many to come.
Kalshi has initially got a temporary advantage over competitors by setting regulators on competitors, but that initial advantage was easy to replicate by Interactive Brokers, Crypto.com, etc. Now they have added Donald Trump Jr. to their board of advisors, which is more difficult to copy.
Kalshi gained some market position via offering sports betting on Robinhood (a), but these were just halted. Kalshi also has prediction markets on the 2028 republican (a) and democratic (a) candidates: these are possible because Kalshi is offering interest on positions.
The folks at the American Civics Exchange (a) would like me to remind readers of their existence. They are open to US traders with a bankroll of >= $10M, or >= $1M for “hedging purposes”. If you sign up here (a) I may get a small bonus. It could be worth signing up in advance in case one wants to actually trade when things are happening, rather than having to sign up then. But on the other hand, if you are a millionnaire your time is pretty valuable, so not sure that completing sign up flows is a good use of it.
Polymarket is looking for writers (a) for their publication The Oracle, with 55K subscribers.
New platforms
Glimt (a) is a forecasting platform for predicting the Ukraine war, paid for by the Swedes as part of their aid package to Ukraine. It is built by Hypermind (a).
pump.science adapts the degenerate gamblers concept to predicting replications. You can see some live rats here and bet on whether a particular compound will enhance their endurance.
Govex is an attempt to have decision markets for corporate governance, a la futarchy. Sadly they didn’t get much traction.
Prognoze (a) is a prediction market with up to 10x leverage.
The regulators section of this newsletter has gotten much longer during the Biden administration. Hopefully it’ll become shorter as regulators step back and let platforms innovate more easily.
The CFTC sent a subpoena to Coinbase (a) in their case against Polymarket. I guess that by triangulating Coinbase accounts with Polymarket users one could see if and how many Americans are using Polymarket with a VPN.
PredictIt is trying to expand the scope (a) of their complaint against the CFTC.
Lawsuit against DraftKings (a) on misleading advertising over “risk-free bets” or “no sweat bets”, where “DraftKings attempts to instill long-term gambling habits in new users by forcing them to make many bets to comply with the fine print”.
We at Sentinel continued to look for precursors of large scale risks. You can read (or skim) our weekly minutes for January here, here, here and here. I thought that China building amphibious assault barges was particularly eye catching:
A small number of what appear to be special purpose bargeshave been spotted in Guangzhou Shipyard in Southern China. Experts suggest that they are tailor-made for an amphibious assault on Taiwan, with unusually long road bridges that could be used to offload tanks onto Taiwanese roads. Forecasters think it is very likely (~80%) that they are being built with an invasion of Taiwan in mind. And while they think that a short-term invasion attempt of Taiwan by China is fairly unlikely in the short term (~2% in 2025, range 0.5% to 3%), it grows more likely over the medium term, with an aggregate of 32% (range 13% to 65%) by 2030.
We also posted an article about scaling up wargaming with AI; we find it useful to improve our hypothesis space.
if we think the peaceful-psychology hypothesis is more likely than the violent-psychology hypothesis, we might think that the future has high expected value. We might thus consider it important to avert extinction events like asteroid impacts, which would knock out worlds “on average”. But we might oppose efforts like the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which disproportionately save violent-psychology worlds.
Over on LessWrong, an incredibly decoupling discussion (a) over at LessWrong on the principle of indifference applied to shooting a terrorist that is holding a kid. And someone argues for the suspension of judgment (a) and imprecise probabilities over arbitrary best guesses. One interesting somewhat practical feature of indeterminate judgments is that they are indifferent to “mild sweetenings”.
Odds and ends
The Forecasting Meetup Network (a), which started in DC but is now expanding, is looking for volunteers to organize meetups in other cities. If you want to host a meetup, send an email at forecastingmeetupnetwork@gmail.com. They are initially organizing a meetup in Berlin (a).
Friend of the newsletter Nathan Young has birdflurisk.com (a), which shows a dashboard with various bird flu risk indicators.
Here (a) are some good Ramblings on Event Markets.
Bitcoin is no longer legal tender (a) in El Salvador. Previously entities had to accept it in payment for goods and debts. The change was a condition for an IMF loan. Sad news for utopian market experiment revolutionary hopefuls.
A startup (a) by some ex-DeepMind people got $610K (a) in funding from Open Philanthropy (and more from others) to automate forecasting.
I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man.—attributed to Al Capone (a)
This newsletter is sponsored by the Open Philanthropy Foundation.
