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philh comments on Open Thread, April 27-May 4, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

0 Post author: NancyLebovitz 27 April 2014 08:34PM

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Comment author: Viliam_Bur 29 April 2014 08:58:40AM *  4 points [-]

CFAR (in 2012, at least) had a market where your scoring was based on how much you updated the previous bet towards the truth. I really enjoyed the interactional nature of it.

Unfortunately, this would be easy to abuse online. Create a sockpuppet account, make a stupid prediction, and then quickly fix the prediction using your real account. This is equivalent to moving bits from one account to the other.

At CFAR workshop all participants were real people. But they still missed an existing opportunity to abuse the system: there were rewards for winning, but no punishment for losing. So two people could agree to transfer a lot of bits from one to another, and split the price afterwards.

Maybe a system more difficult to abuse can be designed, but a direct copy of algorithm used at CFAR isn't it.

Comment author: philh 29 April 2014 01:47:16PM *  0 points [-]

But they still missed an existing opportunity to abuse the system: there were rewards for winning, but no punishment for losing. So two people could agree to transfer a lot of bits from one to another, and split the price afterwards.

I raised this possibility, but an instructor said they'd use human judgment to stop us from doing that.

(My actual idea was along the lines of "if two of us decide that we aren't going to come to agreement on a market, we can just repeatedly alternate our bets, and each expect that we're getting arbitrarily many points from this". The instructor said something like, they'd just ignore all but the final bets if they thought we were doing that.)