Lost opportunities: Tyler Cowen on Advisory Board; Powered by Stripe.
Deadweight Loss as a Service
11–20 of 77 posts
Re: Deadweight Loss as a Service
#12Lost opportunities: Tyler Cowen on Advisory Board; Powered by Stripe.
You should start a prediction market on which companies and individuals should be included in the next draft!
(but seriously, it's pretty on point already. I was primed to post that I looked forward to seeing the Overcoming Bias entry taking this idea seriously, but they got around to namechecking Robin Hanson in the penultimate paragraph)
Re: Deadweight Loss as a Service
#13Reminds me of antistocks [1]: "We sell antistocks.” “Antistocks? Is that like . . . shorting a stock?” “Shorting is barbaric. Think how nice and simple going long is. And then with shorting you have to borrow from some specific person for some specific amount of time, and deal with margin calls and short squeezes and all that garbage. We asked ourselves - how can we make shorting as simple as going long? Antistocks a…
It’s a joke but it’s also essentially how binary prediction markets work: you have two contracts, each of which resolves to $1 or $0 depending (oppositely) on whether X happens. You then solicit bids on both. When the sum of the offer price of both exceeds $1, you sell one of each, and put the dollar you collect aside to pay out to whichever bet comes true.
Re: Deadweight Loss as a Service
#14There's at least one learning tool where you pick a charity you hate and it donates your money if you don't do your weekly lessons.
More to this idea, paying micropayments to remove money from articles would be interesting.
It would flatten bias. Reporters don't want to piss people off, reporting true facts would minimise this.
It'd be interesting to see what style of article would emerge.
(And people can't be bother paying micropayments to support authors but they sure as hell will be bothered to hurt them)
Re: Deadweight Loss as a Service
#15I believe you may have something with Anti-dollar. Joking aside, there’s almost always a company on the other side of the coin. Boycotting or otherwise public outcry’s and cancel culture would look a whole lot different if it were a value-based voting platform where competing interests vie for the value. Add reporting for government agencies on what’s “hot” and it sends a clear picture on what the national sentiment…
If all proceeds went to charity, it could work as a snarky way to raise money for some other charity that’s boring but uncontroversial. It reminds me of the publicity stunts that Cards Against Humanity would do.
Re: Deadweight Loss as a Service
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know this is a joke, too, but I worry that you aren't seeing the joke if you think there is something here. This is a setup to take in dollars from everyone and arbitrage the sentiment difference across the userbase, effectively meaning they don't have to pay anything and just take the dollars home. That's the joke. And anyone who actually would put in dollars are who the joke would be being played upon were it rea…
Yeah but imagine if there was something like this for real, only the dollars weren't greedily kept, but spent in some way that people on both sides support. Like, maybe pro-choice and anti-abortion supporters would both support the excess money going to support new mothers or adoption programs.
Then imagine the incentives for campaigners to skip the two-sided prediction market and just spend their money on advertising directly to voters and lobbying politicians.
Or the implications of implementing the only way to make this actually work by taking the pesky voters out of the decision process altogether and just letting the money decide the outcome...
Re: Deadweight Loss as a Service
#17I believe you may have something with Anti-dollar. Joking aside, there’s almost always a company on the other side of the coin. Boycotting or otherwise public outcry’s and cancel culture would look a whole lot different if it were a value-based voting platform where competing interests vie for the value. Add reporting for government agencies on what’s “hot” and it sends a clear picture on what the national sentiment…
> Add reporting for government agencies
Way ahead of you—we're licensing Praxis Vector™ technology to Palantir. Thiel didn't buy a board seat for nothing.
Re: Deadweight Loss as a Service
#18I believe you may have something with Anti-dollar. Joking aside, there’s almost always a company on the other side of the coin. Boycotting or otherwise public outcry’s and cancel culture would look a whole lot different if it were a value-based voting platform where competing interests vie for the value. Add reporting for government agencies on what’s “hot” and it sends a clear picture on what the national sentiment…
This is what lawyers are for. Instead of two companies actually competing, each spends a bunch of dollars on lawyers to fight in court. The one who spends the most dollars on lawyers wins.
Just to be clear, there is a lot of sarcasm here. But I think there is a bit of truth too.
Re: Deadweight Loss as a Service
#19I believe you may have something with Anti-dollar. Joking aside, there’s almost always a company on the other side of the coin. Boycotting or otherwise public outcry’s and cancel culture would look a whole lot different if it were a value-based voting platform where competing interests vie for the value. Add reporting for government agencies on what’s “hot” and it sends a clear picture on what the national sentiment…
cancel culture is a meaningless phrase , it's just culture.
Re: Deadweight Loss as a Service
#20Being Rickrolled just doesn't have the same feels now that Youtube will immediately blast an add in your face before you can enjoy the classic.