Yeah, I know what prediction markets are, but I'm not sure what James' proposal is, exactly.
There are lots of ways of setting up a prediction market, here is the simplest: Imagine that it will soon be objectively determined whether X=1 or X=0. There would be a separate section in LessWrong for karma bets. In this section you could offer a bet, i.e. I give you 20 karma if X=1 and you give me 10 karma if X=0. One would click on this bet to accept. The sum total of all your karma bets couldn't, at the time you made a bet, exceed your total karma.
An administrator would have to decide what events could be bet on, and which side won each bet. I would be happy to do this, although of course Robin Hanson would be the best person for this job. I don't have the skills to help you with the programming.
In the next month, the administrators of Less Wrong are going to sit down with a professional designer to tweak the site design. But before they do, now is your chance to make suggestions that will guide their redesign efforts.
How can we improve the Less Wrong user experience? What features aren’t working? What features don’t exist? What would you change about the layout, templates, images, navigation, comment nesting, post/comment editing, side-bars, RSS feeds, color schemes, etc? Do you have specific CSS or HTML changes you'd make to improve load time, SEO, or other valuable metrics?
The rules for this thread are:
BUT DON’T JUMP TO THE COMMENTS JUST YET: Take a few minutes to collect your thoughts and write down your own ideas before reading others’ suggestions. Less contamination = more unique ideas + better feature coverage!
Thanks for your help!