Related to: Eliezer's Sequences and Mainstream Academia, Intellectual insularity and productivity, I Stand by the Sequences, Why don't people like markets?
Looking at some of the more recent arguments against them showing up in discussions I've been quite disappointed, they seem betray a sort of lack of background knowledge or opinions built up from a bottom line of "markets are baaad therefore prediction markets are baaad". The casual arguments for them are lacking as well. I will say the same of other discussions on economic, since it is apparently suddenly too mind-killing or too political to talk about markets and similar things at all. We didn't use to have tribal alerts flying up in our brains discussing such matters.
The Overcoming Bias community started with an assumption of certain kinds of background knowledge, this included economics and things like game theory. In the early days of LessWrong/Overcoming Bias Eliezer did a whole sequnece on filling in people on Quantum mechanics which despite his claims to the contrary doesn't seem that vital (if still important).
We now have a different demographic that we used to. Not only that, we now have young people basically using the sequences as their primary source for education on matters of human rationality, quite different from the autodidacts exploring the literature on their own terms who where common in previous years. We've recognized this to a certain extent. We wrote a series of introductory sequences and articles to fill in such background knowledge explicitly such as Yvain's recent one on Game Theory. Also part of the reason we now have a norm of more citations that EY originally did is to give study and research aids to people. Indeed I think adding comments to old articles featuring more citations or editing those in would be wise so as to avoid misconceptions.
I think we need several sequences on economics, and a good one to start would be one systematically investigating prediction markets. To a certain extent just reading Robin Hanson's relevant posts on this topic would do much the same, but unfortunately we don't have an organized series of sequences by him (beyond the tags he uses on his articles). I still hope Karmakaiser or someone else will one day undertake a project of writing up summary articles that organize links to RH's posts into sequences so new members will read them as well.
I'd write these myself but I just don't have a good background in what works and studies influence the positions of early key LW authors on economics and its relevance to rationality. I'm also only beginning my studies in that area since my background is in the hard sciences with only some half-serious opinions formed from Moldbuggian insights and 20th century social science.
There is this strange relationship between politics, mindkilling, and education...
When a topic becomes political, people get mindkilled about it. Then they tell many stupid things. And the sane person, who wants to avoid discussing with idiots or even the risk of being pattern-matched as one of the idiots, avoids the topic. But if sane people avoid the topic, all information is replaced by noise. And if people are uneducated about the topic, but they still think parroting a phrase of their leader makes them smart, of course politicians will use the topic for their advantage.
You cannot use "2+2=4" as your party banner, if everyone agrees with that. And you also cannot use "2+2=5" as your party banner, if everyone disagrees with that. But you can use "evolution" or "free market", because people are divided about this topics, because many of them just lack the basic knowledge. Of course by using these topics as party banners, the education becomes more difficult; or more precisely it becomes trivially easy to label people as "parrotting their party line" even in those situations where they just honestly evaluate the evidence. Also, such environment makes honestly evaluating the evidence more difficult for humans.
Sometimes I feel like smart people avoiding the mindkilling topics indirectly contribute to the topics being mindkilling, by leaving the politicians of various kinds unopposed. Though of course I understand the motive to avoid toxic things. Also I understand that there are too many things fucked up with this world, and one has to pick their battles. But we really should educate people at least about the basic, easiest to understand stuff. Because many of them didn't hear even some trivial ideas; or they heard them once and then forgot.
Raising the sanity waterline while avoiding sensitive topics -- maybe it's like trying to clean your room without entering the room.
Let's just take each topic as far as we have solid evidence. Just like there is no "conservative" or "liberal" position on whether 2+2=4, we could try to see how far this neutral region of knowledge can go.
http://xkcd.com/263/ (read the tooltip text). (Anyway, didn't Ayn Rand use “A=A” or something like that as a slogan?)