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badger comments on Exploiting the Typical Mind Fallacy for more accurate questioning? - Less Wrong Discussion

31 Post author: Xachariah 17 July 2012 12:46AM

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Comment author: badger 17 July 2012 02:55:51PM 2 points [-]

Prelec's formal results hold for large populations, but it held up well experimentally with 30-50 participants

Witkowski and Parkes develop a truth serum for binary questions with as few as 3 participants. Their mechanism also avoid the potentially unbounded payments required by Prelec's BTS. Unfortunately the WP truth serum seems very sensitive to the common prior assumption.

Comment author: DanielVarga 17 July 2012 06:13:57PM *  0 points [-]

Prelec's formal results hold for large populations, but it held up well experimentally with 30-50 participants

Wait, wait, let me understand this. It's the robust knowledge aggregation part that held up experimentally, not the truth serum part, right? In this experiment the participants had very few incentives to game the system, and they didn't even have a full understanding of the system's internals. In contrast, prediction markets are supposed to work even if everybody tries to game them constantly.

Comment author: badger 17 July 2012 06:46:05PM 1 point [-]

Manipulability is addressed experimentally in a different working paper. The participants weren't told the internals and the manipulations were mostly hypothetical, but honesty was the highest scoring strategy in what they considered.

In some sense, it's easy to manipulate BTS to give a particular answer. The only problem is you might end up owing the operator incredibly large sums of money. If payments to and from the mechanism aren't being made, BTS is worthless if people try to game it. I should have a post up shortly about a better mechanism.