A system for evaluating specialist expertise through the tracking of scientific predictions
See a detailed explanation here.
See a detailed explanation here.
An information market is a place where people can place wagers on future events. The approach has sometimes proven accurate in predicting the results of presidential elections.
For more information, see this.
For more information, see this.
The comments box is broken.
Every day, people go online to inform one another about their scientific worldview.
Many thousands of people do this online today because there's essentially no cost to do so ...
... and by cost, I don't just mean that Internet access is ridiculously cheap; I also mean that there's just no penalty for being wrong.
This creates an amazing amount of noise insofar as the loudest voices are not necessarily accurate; they're there to teach you about their worldview -- not to accurately predict the future.
The savvy information consumer must sort through all of that noise for the best arguments for a particular claim, with few recourses to differentiate ideology from accurate prediction.
This process can be extremely time-consuming, and most people give up at the first rebuttal to an extraordinary idea -- as if the argument always stops just a single level deep.
It sometimes seems online that the science comments box is all ugly babies ...
Everybody's got a pet theory, and nobody knows how to make any sense of it without quitting their day job.
The ones that don't even have that are mindlessly defending modern science, going on and on about scientific method and peer review.
A science futures market can cut to the chase. It can become a place where people put-up or shut-up.
And I believe that the first version -- with which the kinks will be ironed out -- should be used to evaluate specialist expertise on a social network dedicated to scientific controversies.
The unintended benefit of setting this system up to identify the true experts would be that it would -- more importantly -- reveal the few generalists, the unicorns of scientific thought.
This repo is a placeholder for the API gateway to this science futures market.
(Please note that this is not the only system for scientific prediction that can be constructed; there are also plans to create a user bio questionnaire which will dual as a system to track changes in worldviews over time.)