Hardly surprising that markets are more accurate predictors. They are effectively weighted polls (where the size of the investment reflects confidence in the prediction) with financial rewards for accuracy and penalties (and in extreme cases exclusion from future polls) for the inaccurate.
As with market economies (vs communism), it works because greed is a more powerful motivator for people than is altruism or morality.
Posted by DigbyT at January 27, 2005 07:58 AMThere's been a play-money implementation of this idea around for years, at http://www.ideosphere.com - The Foresight Exchange (FX). It's had some interesting crypto and security predictions and I think it's been pretty accurate on the whole. Here are some current predictions:
When will 8 GHz CPUs be commercially available? Sometime between March and October of 2007.
What will be the largest number which has been factored by a quantum algorithm, by the end of 2005? This one has been stably predicting between 4 and 5 bits, for the last three years.
What is the chance that a 128 bit key will be brute-force cracked before 2020? 30%.
What is the chance that a 1024 bit number (i.e. RSA modulus) will be factored before 2010? Also 30%.
Will we have a collision in SHA-1 by the end of this year? Not likely, odds are only 7 to 11 %.
Not sure I agree with all of these but they are interesting data points.
Posted by Cypherpunk at January 27, 2005 05:36 PMDoes anyone play any of these markets for real value? I'm talking about tradesports.com rather than the fx-market where virtual money is used.
Posted by Darren at January 28, 2005 10:01 AMHi --
Information Markets Summit in Chicago, June 7, 2006.
See: http://www.pmcluster.com/CHI.htm
-j
http://kmblogs.com/public/item/120651