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arbimote comments on Open Thread: February 2010 - Less Wrong
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According to some people we here at less wrong are good at determining the truth. Other people are notoriously not.
I don't know that Less Wrong is the appropriate venue for this, but I have felt for some time that I trust the truth-seeking capability here and that it could be used for something more productive than arguments about meta-ethics (no offense to the meta-ethicists intended). I also realize that people are fairly supportive of SIAI here in terms of giving spare cash away, but I feel like the community would be a good jumping-off point for a polling organization.
So I guess this leads to a few questions:
-Is anyone at LW currently involved with a polling firm?
-Is anyone (else) at LW interested in doing polls?
-Is LW an appropriate place to create a truth-seeking business, such as a pollster or a sponsor for studies?
None of these questions are immediate since I am a broke undergrad rather than an entrepreneur.
Here's an idea for how a LW-based commercial polling website could operate. Basically it is a variation on PredictionBook with a business model similar to TopCoder.
The website has business clients, and a large number of "forecasters" who have accounts on the website. Clients pay to have their questions added to the website, and forecasters give their probability estimates for whichever questions they like. Once the answer to a question has been verified, each forecaster is financially rewarded using some proper scoring rule. The more money assigned to a question, the higher the incentive for a forecaster to have good discrimination and calibration. Some clever software would also be needed to combine and summarize data in a way that is useful to clients.
The main advantage of this over other prediction markets is that the scoring rule encourages forecasters to give accurate probability estimates.