Wisdom of the crowd has some fatal flaws that are especially important when it comes to things like IPOs.
- Most significantly, most scientific research focuses on things that are actually amenable to guesses with a normal distribution, like "amount of jellybeans in a jar" or "length of the border between country A and country B". An IPO is a binary choice where it either goes public or not. There is no correct value to converge to.
- It has been shown that as bettors gain more information about the bets of others, predictions lose accuracy and bettors converge to a consensus value instead. It seems to me that online prediction markets would be extremely prone to this as the bets of other people are all there in the market price.
- Prediction markets generally become more accurate as the diversity of the bettor pool grows. The users of polymarket and Kalshi heavily skew towards young men from certain socioeconomic groups, who may be biased towards one or the other outcome.
In the case of an OpenAI IPO, it seems likely multiple of these would converge as people start to fall prey to groupthink because "everybody knows that they'll IPO soon" in their local media bubble.
The question isn't "will they IPO" the question is "when will they IPO" which is not a binary question. The rest of your point about Polymarket users now being mostly degenerate gamblers is true though.
The relative timing, valuations (and float sizes) of the expected SpaceX, Anthropic and then OpenAI IPOs would still be highly correlated. Even allowing for moral degeneracy among most of the gamblers on this particular Polymarket market.
It’s two binary questions about whether they will IPO by specific dates. It’s not obvious to me that this maps to a more granular “when will they IPO?” question.
> It has been shown that as bettors gain more information about the bets of others, predictions lose accuracy and bettors converge to a consensus value instead.
This makes intuitive sense to me; is there a name for this phenomenon?
A prediction platform’s biggest value is publicising information from possible insiders, who at some point will work harder to maintain secrecy not to lose their informational advantage. So all that remains are people gambling on public info.
That said, greed from insiders looking to make a quick buck will always skew the price towards ‘truth’
> An IPO is a binary choice where it either goes public or not. There is no correct value to converge to.
Of course there is - they are betting on the "when".
> It has been shown that as bettors gain more information about the bets of others, predictions lose accuracy and bettors converge to a consensus value instead.
I dunno how to reply to this - that is exactly my point, but it appears (to me, anyway) that you are saying this in disagreement?
Let me clarify - my point is that wisdom of the crowd converges on to a value that is quite near the actual value.
> In the case of an OpenAI IPO, it seems likely multiple of these would converge as people start to fall prey to groupthink because "everybody knows that they'll IPO soon" in their local media bubble.
Sure, if everyone is in the same local media bubble, that once again, that is unlikely, because these are people who don't make money from the result, they make money from correctly predicting it, hence they are exactly the demographic that will seek out more and more information outside of any bubble they may be in.
It's one thing when proponents of $FOO spend time boosting their PoV/wishes/hopes on a forum. It's quite another when they have to put their money where their mouth is: then they are open to new information!
if you can identify where and how prediction markets are wrong, why aren't you applying that and making millions?
> - Prediction markets generally become more accurate as the diversity of the bettor pool grows. The users of polymarket and Kalshi heavily skew towards young men from certain socioeconomic groups, who may be biased towards one or the other outcome.
Citation? If your small population is high IQ, accurate predictors and you diversify to average IQ population, won't the accuracy go down not up?
You could do this whole plan without needing to do the assassination part, as long as you are willing to throw Ukraine under the bus. Conversely, even if the assassination scheme goes exactly as planned, there is no way of guaranteeing that the new Russian leader would be willing to restart gas deliveries until the war in Ukraine has wrapped up. Given that especially the eastern EU countries have absolutely no intention of allowing Ukraine to lose, this seems like a very tall order.
Finally, both Nordstream 1 AND Nordstream 2 still have a gaping holes in them from the bombings so restarting deliveries will probably take several years at least.
All in all, this plan gets only a 2 out of 10 for being impractical, too slow AND depending on factors outside our control. 1 point because it does at least sound spy-ish and proactive.
The problem for Europe is that they have nothing to trade with Russia. They can get better prices elsewhere.
Before 2022 we had the big EU auto companies in Russia, we also had nice handbags, shoes and outfits to sell to Russia. Plus we could have them hide their money in London property. Machine tools were also a brisk trade.
Nowadays Russia needs nothing from Europe. Nothing apart from peace and their 300 billion back. But we have gone past that stage. The Russians have never broken any energy contracts in this, the West has cut themselves off.
Regarding the EU not wanting the former Ukraine to lose, there is a difference between what the officials want and what the people want. From Finland to Portugal I am sure most people would want no war and cheap energy, however, their 'leaders' are just doing what Washington tells them to do.
Delusional. In Europe people want not to just see Ukraine win, but also Russia to lose. It's the leaders that are timid, the people would like to see much wider ranging support for Ukraine.
The Russian energy will not be accepted again in Europe for the foreseeable future, ending the war will not change that.
Huh? Even in the US the majority are sympathetic to Ukraine in every survey. Sure we all want no war - but we are not really in favor of no war at any price.
I agree, but also find it funny that by that standard the DRM in the original Google video streaming product was not hacked before the service was shutdown, after about 2 years :)
It was unhackable while it mattered. It was hacked 5 years after it no longer mattered. And all but the effectively beta release remain unhacked even now.
To the community it was unhackable, until very recently.
It's security measures held up so long that it appeared to be unshakable. There were no obvious flaws.
In hindsight it was hackable, but keep in mind how long it took. This console has long been obsoleted.
Well obviously? It's literally being broadcast in the news when diplomats talk to each other. What do you think they are talking about if not policy discussions?
So it seems normal that a bunch of politicians, in the current climate, got together and decided that the weakest form of age verification imaginable absolutely had to get passed everywhere?
I'm not saying there's definitely no coordination, but nobody had to get together to decide that 2026 was the year for 90s fashion to make a comeback. Human society is very prone to fads in all areas.
> They found previously unknown race conditions. Not in obscure corners of the codebase. Not in exotic edge cases. In the kind of code that every Erlang application depends on, code that had been running in production for years.
If these race conditions are in code that has been in production for years and yet the race conditions are "previously unknown", that does suggest to me that it is in practice quite hard to trigger these race conditions. Bugs that happen regularly in prod (and maybe I'm biased, but especially bugs that happen to erlang systems in prod) tend to get fixed.
True. And that the subtle bugs were then picked up by static analysis makes the safety proposition of Erlang even better.
> Bugs that happen regularly in prod
It depends on how regular and reproducible they are. Timing bugs are notoriously difficult to pin down. Pair that with let-it-crash philosophy, and it's maybe not worth tracking down. OTOH, Erlang has been used for critical systems for a very long time – plenty long enough for such bugs to be tracked down if they posed real problems in practice.
Erlang has "die and be restarted" philosophy towards process failures, so these "bugs that happen to erlang systems in prod" may not be fixed at all, if they are rare enough.
As of now, the post you're replying to says "bugs that regularly happen ... in prod"
Now, if it crashes every 10 years, that is regular, but I think the meaning is that it happens often. Back when I operated a large dist cluster, yes, some rare crashes happened that never got noticed or the triage was 'wait and see if it happens again' and it didn't happen. But let it crash and restart from a known good state is a philosophy about structuring error checking more than an operational philosophy: always check for success and if you don't know how to handle an error fail loudly and return to a good state to continue.
Operationally, you are expected to monitor for crashes and figure out how to prevent them in the future. And, IMHO, be prepared to hot load fixes in response... although a lot of organizations don't hot load.
That is obviously true but doesn't mean as much as you seem to think. Washing laundry is also not much work but it adds up to a lot over the years, especially if you skip a few weeks of laundry every once in a while. That is not an excuse to not do it.
The answer is the same in both cases: acquire some discipline and treat maintenance with the respect it deserves.
Why not become a skilled craftsman and make a much better wage than in food service or retail? Every western country I've ever been in seems to have everlasting shortages of skilled plumbers, electricians and welders and prices have risen to match.
The skilled trades are better than unskilled work. Better than retail or food service, but they certainly aren’t a replacement for white collar jobs.
The median salaries for skilled trades aren’t great. You can make good money if you are willing to work a ton of overtime, or if you can manage to get one of the very limited union spots in the right city. Or if you become a business owner (and accept the corresponding risk) and mostly manage other skilled employees.
It’s also not a viable solution for more than a small percent of the population. Let’s say AI comes along and forces 25% of the white collar workers out of a job, there is only enough room in the skilled trades to handle a tiny fraction of those displaced workers.
That’s ignoring what massive unemployment does to salaries in the trades. And the fact that to make decent money in the trades you need years of working for peanuts first. And if you think age discrimination is a problem in tech, try breaking into the trades as a gray beard. The entry level jobs are built on the assumption that you are 20 years old and can do 12 hours of hard physical labor without needing a week off to recover.
Again it’s not impossible, it’s just not a solution at any kind of scale.
> Let’s say AI comes along and forces 25% of the white collar workers out of a job
Yeah, this is not going to happen. New job positions will open up instead, and white collar workers will be well placed to fill them since supervising an AI agent swarm is not that different from supervising the work of other humans - which is what white collar workers do as their job.
I disagree. Not all white collar workers are managers, and while I do think AI-supervision will be a growing field, it won't generate anywhere close to enough roles to replace how many ICs are going to be displaced. Companies are going to hit capital & scope resource limits (especially as model companies start extracting more value) way before they hire thousands of laid off white collar workers as additional AI supervisors.
I'm equally dubious about other white collar roles filling the gap, but I'm willing to hear out any arguments. To be honest I'm kind of desperate to hear one that would convince me otherwise..
Putting aside the obvious distinction of labor vs office work, are you sure about this? Like, sure as in you have tried to find a stable, well paying job in any of those trades?
The un-politically correct answer is that many college educated people perceive those working in the trades to be socially beneath them. And they often have different opinions on social issues than the typical tradesperson, which is apparently really important if you’re a plumber but not if you work at BigCo.
I think that’s more of an urban/rural divide than anything else. Most of tech workers living in the sticks have plumbers and electricians and contractors in our social circle because that’s who has money in the boonies.
But until you get to the very top of those professions, the work environment is worse in every way.
You’re working 2x as many hours for 1/4 the pay, you go back to work the day after your kid is born. Your knees are just absolutely fucked. It’s in no way an equivalent job. That’s the primary reason tech workers don’t want to do it.
It seems to me that there's a strong Pareto law inclination to this. 99% of non-profits are going to the local volley ball club type organizations that indeed don't make any money at all, or maybe a few hundred at most. I am in the board of a local chess club and you should see the amount of discussion that sometimes happens around a budget of no more than the equivalent of several hundred USD. I honestly can't imagine anyone is using us to launder money. (How, even? Yearly contribution is less than 100 EUR and even major sponsors for tournaments etc are easily traceable local companies that contribute <1k EUR each)
Then there's a relatively tiny amount of organizations that processes the vast majority of funds. Universities, hospitals, big FOSS organizations, etc. Those are the ones that are actually interesting.
I don’t agree but I take your point. After seeing the recent scandals regarding US AID etc. I have very low confidence that the majority of nonprofits have altruistic motives.
I also don’t buy the “most of our money goes to staff and directors salary and expenses because what we do is organize volunteers”. Why? Why can’t the staff and directors be volunteers too? Why do they need to even have any funding if it’s just volunteer coordination? We do lots of complex things with just volunteers- Linux, for example.
And I’m unable to differentiate the behavior of most nonprofit hospitals from for-profit hospitals, with only a few exceptions.
- Most significantly, most scientific research focuses on things that are actually amenable to guesses with a normal distribution, like "amount of jellybeans in a jar" or "length of the border between country A and country B". An IPO is a binary choice where it either goes public or not. There is no correct value to converge to.
- It has been shown that as bettors gain more information about the bets of others, predictions lose accuracy and bettors converge to a consensus value instead. It seems to me that online prediction markets would be extremely prone to this as the bets of other people are all there in the market price.
- Prediction markets generally become more accurate as the diversity of the bettor pool grows. The users of polymarket and Kalshi heavily skew towards young men from certain socioeconomic groups, who may be biased towards one or the other outcome.
In the case of an OpenAI IPO, it seems likely multiple of these would converge as people start to fall prey to groupthink because "everybody knows that they'll IPO soon" in their local media bubble.
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