2025-01-20
For the first time, I’m more seriously fiddling with prediction markets: Metaculus, Kalshi, Manifold, PredictIt, Polymarket. Metaculus has a Prediction Resources at the bottom of their page, from which comes a pointer to the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute that maintains a few different software tools: Guesstimate, a little spreadsheet or flowchart like thing with Monte Carlo sampling; Squiggle, a little programming language for the same but that tries to avoid MC sampling; Squiggle AI, an LLM playground where it writes the models for you. This stuff is neat, but seems to be the product of a small and maybe overly insular team that’s not well versed in larger software ecosystem. A comment on LessWrong says basically, why not just use Marimo notebooks with PyMC? So, checking out PyMC, it’s still going strong, but also geez, they started with Theano and forked it after deciding that Tensorflow and PyTorch weren’t going to work for them for reasons that aren’t clear, then something happened with the Theano fork and they forked it again to PyTensor, the solution currently in use in PyMC version 5. And now they target JAX on the backend, so why again were TF and PyTorch not good ideas? Hard to see this as something other than ignorance of the space or not-invented-here syndrome.
What have I bet on today? Will Luigi Mangione be convicted of murder, before 2026? | Manifold was trading at about 50%, which seems too low — as far as I can tell, there’s no question that he did in fact murder the CEO; the reason for thinking he might not be convicted is presumably due to a sympathetic jury, and I’m betting that CEOs everywhere will shadow-fund a public influence campaign to get the guy convicted. Ah, no, see, I didn’t read the comments ahead of time. The reason to think this will resolve No is because it takes forever to prosecute a murder.
Manifold’s interesting; they’re really pushing to get more engagement with these “don’t break your streak” reminders and “+M5 for copying a share link” things. The markets generally seem less well-written than Metaculus. But, you can bet real money, so that’s something.