raydora comments on Open Thread, Dec. 28 - Jan. 3, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm interested in talking to people knowledgeable in decision theory/bayesian statistics about a startup that aims to disrupt the $240,000,000,000 management consulting market. it's based on the idea of prediction polls, but done on the blockchain(the same thing bitcoin uses) in a completely decentralized way.
I'm particularly interested in people who can help me out with understanding/choosing alternative scoring rules besides Brier scoring.
I can't pay you for your time, but I can virtually order you a pizza or buy you a beer :).
edit: Here's the (still very rough) elevator pitch:
For a long time companies relied on a pretty fuzzy metric: People who seemed to be better at making good decisions got to make them. This worked out decently well, but led to one undesirable result: People who were good at making excuses about their decisions ALSO got to make decisions.
The thing was, we didn't really have a better way to do it. That is, until the data revolution. Suddenly, companies had access to tons of data that they could use to ACTUALLY make better decisions. The problem was, they weren't politically set up to make use of this data, because all the people in power were those who could make good excuses.
This is were management consulting companies came in. For really big decisions, the management consulting companies would come in as outsiders, charge a bunch of money, and use their clout to use the data to make big decisions (like how many people to fire). This industry rapidly grew to the 240 billion dollar industry it is today.
But there's a huge problem with the industry - there's no objective way to tell which companies are actually good at making decisions. This leads to a case where the only way to tell which companies are good is their name and reputation - which means a monopolistic signalling market where the very few who got in early and made a name for themselves get to overcharge for their name, and new cheaper players find it very hard to enter the market.
The solution: An objective metric(bayesian scoring rule) that shows how good an organization or individual is at predicting the future. The entire history of how the company got this score is available on the blockchain, so you avoid the signaling problem by making everything auditable and therefore not having to put your trust in any one brand or company.
Not only can this allow us to take over all the big problems that management consulting currently handles, but it opens up a whole class of smaller decisions that were simply cost prohibitive in the management consulting model, and creates a new paradigm for management as a result.
Edit 2: If you're effectively altruist minded, it may be of interest to know that the reason I'm interested in doing this is to drastically reduce the cost of impact assessments.
I'm deeply interested in this problem.
I've got to ask, though.
Isn't this a niche filled by 'business intelligence' and 'data science'? They call it a lot of different things, sure, but they seem to be operating in the same space- at least, they may seem to, to a non-technical executive. An exception is mid-to-small business - I don't think there's a lot of penetration there.
Theoretically, yes.
In practice, most companies with BI dashboards and data science analytics experience more information overload than before, because they don't have the human capital to make sense of all that information.
There are limited cases (e.g. weather reporting and website split testing) where the niche is narrow enough that the computer can basically do everything on it's own, but computers aren't at the point yet (and likely won't be for a long time) where they can use generic data to make complex decisions.