Prediction Wish List

[psztorc]

I'm just going to list some predictions it would be nice for society to have, in no particular order. Please contribute!

Finance
(TRU/USD exchange rate on t1), t2, t3,...

A healthy quantity of these markets would allow individuals to make and sustain a reliable investment denominated in USD, and pegged to the dollar's value. They would also allow individuals to "bet in" US Dollars, currently a more reliable store of value (ie, less likely to experience severe decreases in purchasing power).


Conditional CEO
(Stock price on GE) x (GE's CEO fired)   
(Stock price on GE) x (GE's merger/de-merger)

The stock market provides an optimal metric (share price) for targeting. With conditional markets we may be able to send economic growth soaring.


Conditional on Questionable Laws
(GDP 5 years from now) x (Repeal laws against insider trading)
(GDP 10 years from now) x (Balanced Budget)
(Life Expectancy) x (Single-payer health insurance)
(Unemployment Rate) x (Minimum wage increase)
(Inflation) x (Fed Policy)

Conditional on Candidates
(GDP) x (Candidate Y elected)
(War Casualties) x (Candidate Y elected)
(Budget Deficit) x (Candidate Y elected)

As a society, it is very difficult to vet the best laws/candidates. What's the point, of spending one's own efforts if others cannot be convinced of your research? Essentially, the real challenge is not knowing what's best (although that is hard) but establishing the common knowledge required for us to coordinate our votes effectively (ie, the paradox no one likes Congress, yet no one will "throw a vote away" on a third party).


Ethics / The Long Arc
(Will country X still practice Slavery?) X (Will Slavery be considered to be, by widespread consensus, immoral?)   [ Example ]
(....Family Court without a Jury?)    [50 years from now]
(...income tax?)
(...religion?)
(...separate branches of government with different levels of funding?)
(...balanced federal budgets?)
(...term limits for elected officials?)

Sometimes its easy to know Right from Wrong, but other times it is more difficult. In general, however, the task gets easier with time (to quote MLK: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice").


Science
(Study Z chosen at random for audit) x (the Reputable Audit Firm to replicate the results of Study Z)

These would require that a "reputable auditing firm" be established.


Private Decision Support
(Will I die?) x (Disease Treatment)
(Will I lose my job?) x (Choice of degree/major/training/industry/firm)

Some of this is already being done: https://www.crowdmed.com

[zack]

The following prediction market could be made separately to expire on every year for the next 50 years.
(global average temperature) x (atmospheric concentration of CO2)
(global average temperature) x (atmospheric concentration of methane)
(average sea level) x (global average temperature)
(average sea level) x (concentration of CO2)
(average sea level) x (concentration of methane)

[psztorc]

Good ones.

(US Government to make all public pension payments on time and in full)
(some kind of Monsanto seed disaster)
("supervolcanoes" or other epic natural disasters)

[Bitcoinfan]

Would have thought there would have been more contributors to this list.  Guess its not fair to put that on everyone, when I haven't given a list neither!  Here are some things I've been noting as useful as of late.

Weather Related derivatives have been one of the fastest growing financial instrument types.  Although they seem to be specific and deal with payoffs based on temperatures and less on insurances on scenario type events.  These will be particularly useful out of the gate.  Some examples detecting Or Predicting Major Weather Or Natural Event that will probably be entered into Truthcoin:

Drought in California ends in year 2XXX.

Category 5 hurricane makes landfall in New York by the year 2020.

San Francisco Bay area will face one major earthquake >8.0 on the richter scale by 2030.


Other:

Currently Nuclear power plants cannot be insured, so a good prediction market for this might be the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plan (America's largest power plant by net electrical generation) will be forced to shutdown for good for whatever reason (maintenance issues, catastrophic event, political seizure, etc).

Manhattan will suffer power outage in summer that will last greater than 24 hours.

California will split into 5 states by the 2024.

[darkmatter7]

How about a market for the output of a pure function:

This is trivial of course for functions whose outputs can be easily computed, but what happens in the case that it is not?

[zack]

darkmatter7
check out "funding a public good" section in the docs.

[evand]

GDP futures generally.

Stock index futures. (Interesting for the same reasons as dollar futures, mostly. Generally, investing in long-term predictions carries opportunity costs, and markets that let me avoid those are useful.)

When it comes to minimum wage, (unemployment) x (min wage) is far from a complete picture. Some more complex stuff is interesting:
(Min wage) x (unemployment) x (GDP)
(Min wage) x (percent below poverty line)
(Min wage) x (Gini coefficient)
Also, it tends to be tied up in a confounding mess with other things. So:
(Min wage) x (election result) x (pick your favorite outcome metric)
Except that the case of "Party X gained power and then went against their usual min wage rhetoric" has strong confounds of "all kinds of other things are weird", you might want:
(Min wage) x (outcome metric) x (some other partisan policy)


(GDP, stock index, or other macro indicator) x (Climate change events)

(Gun control policy options) x (gun-related deaths, total violent deaths, mass shooting deaths)

(Policing reform options) x (Police-involved deaths)

(Automotive deaths) x (stuff about self-driving cars) x (stuff about self-driving car regulation)

(Stock price of $company) x (large-scale data breach at $company)

Something about student loan availability, college tuition, subsidies, etc. I'm not quite sure what I'd do here, but something related to questions like "will paying for people's college tuition make tuition prices go up".

[MattGoldenberg]

Private Decisions:
Job Title X Expected Average Salary for New Graduates in 4 Years
Area X Expected Change in Property Value in 5 Years
Area X Expected Change in Rent in 5 Years

Philanthropy:
Additional Money Invested X Expected Change in QALYs (as measured by someone like Givewell)