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- Hacker News
- I kinda like Taleb’s take on forecasters; get another job.by estetlinus
- This is not even dumb. Unbelievable coming from act....by pfortuny
- So this person was known for thoughtful blog posts, but has since become a total AI booster. It's probably a gonzo-like effect through the various subcultures he aims to explore, but it paints a very bad picture of them. Imagine if Louis Theroux became a scientologist.
- Given a powerful enough AI with enough outlays (eg. a Playwright instant), can an AI cheat by influencing the real world and self-fulfil its prediction?
Eg. Is corp ABC's stock price going to go down by 10% in 30 days?
Orchestrate a disinformation campaign on the 29th day to tank ABC's stock price.
by guardiangod - In theory but in this specific example you can make a lot more money on the stock market instead if it's that doable.
In general you should judge different prediction markets differently and read the fulfilment criteria though - some are very ripe for abuse, AI or no, while others are much more ironclad.
by Tenoke - For Pete’s sake lets outlaw prediction markets already instead of hyping them in crappy greed-posts like this one
I am embarrassed this “rationalist, I’m so much smarter than you, so I know better” asshole Scott Alexander hasn't been skewered yet for promotion of gambling (prediction markets) that people like Trumps son are making millions of on
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/...
by AIorNot - What a strange and scoldy thing to say. I find speaking in terms of concretere predictions the best way to discuss things. It bypasses hyper moralists and scoldy type of people (your post reminds me of such) and directly jumps to truth.by simianwords
- We elected con man so we're becoming a swindler nation. In a just world the Andreesen David Sacks types would be in jail stripped of all their money.by guelo
- Prediction markets are just the new ICO, NFT, SPAC etc scam/gambling(scambling?).
Play if you want, and call yourself a genius if you win, but only with money you can afford to lose.
by largbae - There’s something of a footnote in here that - raises a moral or even spiritual question.
Scott says that one of the great things about superforcasters is that some people who regularly make bad decisions will be able to make better decisions by asking superforcasters questions like “Is this marriage likely to end in divorce.”
And there’s a number of profound questions in here about - what are we all here for?
There’s something of a philosophical horseshoe theory here which is like - I might argue - this sounds like astrology or other metaphysical forms of divination.
And the counter argument would be something like - no it’s completely different because this is true. Which is of course what all the spiritual traditions say about each other.
So it begs the question - is it the solution or the process.
Is using a super forecaster better because it’s “real”; or like I think I could make the argument it’s worse for that reason. Asking your grandmother or spiritual advisor is part of a process of existence. You ask multiple people, you have the experience, maybe you marry the wrong person, you learn and you grow.
But when you outsource that decision making.
by mikgp - It feels like Scott is taking the bull case here - but like “perfect” information will pervert markets in bizarre ways.
As soon as the prediction market says “this path here has a 25% chance of curing cancer” all sorts of money is moved away from other things.
It will absolutely cause political outcomes not just predict them.
And then of course there’s the cheating element. Anything that’s feasible to change the outcome.
Maybe this just contributes to efficient markets? Or maybe the continued quests towards utopia have dystopic externalities.
by mikgp - But Scott's point is more: why even have markets? Once you have the superforecasting available on the questions you care about, why do you need to publish it for everyone to also react to?by ddp26
- Is there a future where AI takes all of these no-value arbitrage games to their limit and there is no longer a market for this type of behavior?by jrowen
- This new forecasting industry is pushed by very dirty people.by alecco
- I used AI to forecast that AI forecasters won't beat the market. We can move on now.by glimshe
- Almost by definition, once AI forecasters are in the market, they won't (all) be beating the market.
But why evaluate AI forecasters by beating the market? Do we evaluate deep learning by whether hedge funds make money from it in the markets? These things have far, far more utility outside of finance.
by ddp26 - If the forecasting models were so good that people were actually consistently beating prediction markets, they wouldn't be starting startups to be selling it.
And even if it is good enough, once you're shelling out thousands of dollars a year in research costs, does that give you any remaining alpha?
- If you had a tool that would be capable of writing all software better than a human, why would you price it by the word (token)? Why wouldn’t you take a percentage?
(This is one of the more interesting questions that came out of Alex Karp’s televised borderline psychotic break rant the other day and it has stuck in my mind even though he is clearly unstable)
by dofm - The reason is, customer might care a lot more about the prediction than you do, or anyone else does.
For example, your customer might really care a lot about some niche prediction like the number of car break-ins in Walmart parking lots. In practice you won’t have sufficient liquidity in a prediction market to actually profit off of that prediction. But a security company might really want to know the answer to it.
by janalsncm - If a model demonstrates being good by winning on prediction markets I may want to ask the same model questions which are too niche to have markets. That said I don't know if niche questions are enough of a revenue stream to be interesting for model providers.
Perhaps they may enforce a knowledge cut-off for information retrieval and price the service based on how recent the cut-off is, and also use the cut-off as a way to guard their advantage on the markets.
by povik - The market of trading is smaller than the market of business. I don't think most people have ever actually tried trading for real. The frequency with which you can put in a buy/sell order and nothing happens. Then you raise/lower the price several times and nothing still happens because nobody wants to buy or sell at a price that makes you money is much higher than you would imagine. If you've never tried it yourself.
That said, the very concept of selling such information means that it would eliminate any edge and become zero profit anyway.
by citizenpaul - Agree, to an extent. The link certainly smells like an ad. If the predictions are on lower volume markets (i.e. no institutional investors with actual quants behind) the compounding power stops. Also that means it can't beat institutional investors. So the reasonable option is to monetize what you can.by fer
- > And even if it is good enough, once you're shelling out thousands of dollars a year in research costs, does that give you any remaining alpha?
That's precisely why you would want to make a startup to get investment now rather than self-fund and bootstrap. That alpha isn't going to last forever, especially because everyone has access to the frontier LLMs, which keep getting better, and will eventually beat your fancy harness or specialized finetune.
And also, perhaps more importantly, so you can start developing an alternative to prediction markets and become the new PM; as Scott notes, with superforecaster AI, it's unclear why you really need Kalshi or Manifold or anyone else, with all their fees and overhead. Leave them to the degens, and carve off the socially useful part to do much more efficiently - tokens are cheaper than transactions! This is the big prize, but you need to start now before someone else does it better or commoditizes it.
by gwern - You got it (I was going to say "nailed it" but that's becoming an LLM marker).
This is exactly what I feel about a lot of the paid investment advice out there. Compounding can make any decent alpha worth a ton, to the point that these people would be investment bankers and not advisors if they knew what they were talking about.
by glimshe