A special event can bring people together, but most games of Poker don't happen in the setting of a tournament.
Oh, absolutely. But the big events are great PR and lead to lots of private games. So if there's a big event for prediction I think that helps people start to think in probabilities and conscious handling of prediction on other occasions.
Poker has the advantage of being able to be played casually with low feedback circles. Adrenalin rises while you play and you don't have to wait a year to see whether or not you win.
I think we need games like the credence game that have tight feedback loops.
That would be cool. I have a hard time imagining them though. Maybe a group of players could watch a video together, pause every couple of minutes and place percentages on a set of predictions on what happens next?
As long as you have an existing set of questions with known answers that are unknown to participants of the game you can have instead feedback.
Public knowledge that you can find on Wikidata works if you have an offline tournament. For an online tournament, it can use data from nonpublic experiments. The CASP tournament for protein structure prediction uses that method. For our purposes, I think surveys make good experimental data.
So, I've been thinking about prediction markets and why they aren't really catching on as much as I think they should.
My suspicion is that (beside Robin Hanson's signaling explanation, and the amount of work it takes to get to the large numbers of predictors where the quality of results becomes interesting) the basic problem of prediction markets is that they look and feel like gambling. Or at best like the stock market, which for the vast majority of people is no less distasteful.
Only a small minority of people are neither disgusted by nor terrified of gambling. Prediction markets right now are restricted to this small minority.
Poker used to have the same problem.
But over the last few decades Poker players have established that Poker is (also) a sport. They kept repeating that winning isn't purely a matter of luck, they acquired the various trappings of tournaments and leagues, they developed a culture of admiration for the most skillful players that pays in prestige rather than only money and makes it customary for everyone involved to show their names and faces. For Poker, this has worked really well. There are much more Poker players, more really smart people are deciding to get into Poker and I assume the art of game probably improved as well.
So we should consider re-framing prediction the same way.
The calibration game already does this to a degree, but sport needs competition, so results need to be comparable, so everyone needs to make predictions on the same events. You'd need something like standard cards of events that players place their predictions on.
Here's a fantasy of what it could look like.