Distroid Issue 29: Metaculus
Human-centered content discovery platform and newsletter sharing ideas from the frontiers
Introduction
Welcome to Issue 29 of the Distroid Newsletter!
This Issue was curated and edited by Charles Adjovu, Ledgerback.
Outline
Introduction
Outline
Profiles
Metaculus
Roundup
Highlights
Glossary
Tweets
Profiles
Metaculus
Founded in 2015 by Anthony Aguirre, Max Wainwright, and Greg Laughlin, Metaculus is “an online forecasting platform and aggregation engine working to improve human reasoning and coordination on topics of global importance.”
Metaculus solicits predictions from its community of forecasters on objective questions about the world. Forecasters earn Metaculus Points for successful predictions. The amount of points earned “depend[s] on [the user’s] prediction, what actually happens, and what the rest of the community predicted.” Metaculus Points acts as a reputation score for forecaster’s ability to make successful predictions.
Metaculus is similar to a prediction market in the sense that Metaculus “directly solicits predicted probabilities from its users, then aggregates those probabilities,” but where Metaculus differs is that Metaculus does not use “real or virtual currency, […] to buy and sell shares in ‘event occurrence.’“
Metaculus Tournaments
Metaculus hosts tournaments sponsored by organizations interested in using Metaculus’s community of forecasters to supplement their decision-making. Metaculus offers cash prize pools and other rewards to forecasters for accurate forecasts in tournaments.
Two recent tournaments of interest are the Nuclear Risk Tournament and Keep Virginia Safe Tournament I. The Nuclear Risk Tournament is run in partnership with Rethink Priorities to forecast on questions related to the risk of a nuclear conflict in the near to medium future. The Keep Virginia Safe Tournament I was run in partnership with Public health officials in Virginia to forecast on questions related to the COVID-19 Pandemic from April 2021 to April 2022.
Beginner Tournament
Metaculus runs a beginner tournament for new forecasters to familiarize themselves with the Metaculus platform and practice their forecasting skills.
Images
Videos
Roundup
The roundup for Issue 29 can be found here.
Highlights
In A proposal for fractional property ownership and collective governance in local development, Helena Rong discusses how Web3 technologies, such as DAOs and token engineering, can be applied to real world assets to enable democratized fractional ownership, with an example use-case for investing in distressed commercial properties.
If you like this paper, I suggest reading Platoon Co-ops by Beth McCarthy and Daniel Shavit.
Today, the so-called “Web3” movement emerges as a reaction against the growing concentration of power to information in the hands of a few and instead proposes an open, trustless, and distributed iteration of the Internet that rests on visions of interoperation, decentralization, democratization, and user-controlled monetization. Many Web3 technologies such as tokens (both fungible and non-fungible), smart contracts, and new human coordination models such as DAOs are laying out the critical foundation to accomplish the cooperative ideal at scale – to fundamentally address the wealth gap in the real world. These tools can be applied to real world assets, ideally enabling more accessible and democratized forms of fractional ownership of assets such as real estate properties at scale. This paper proposes a model for fractional funding, democratically governing, and community-engaged investing in distressed commercial properties using DAOs and token engineering.
In A Philosophy of Subtraction, Saffron Huang investigates the Ethereum Foundation’s practice of self-minimization, a counter-growth strategy to direct value accumulation and task allocation to other actors in the Ethereum ecosystem.
In an age that prizes exponential returns, maybe this “philosophy of subtraction” sounds ridiculous. Our canonical metrics never yearn for shrinkage. A country’s doing well if its GDP is increasing; a company is thriving if it increases shareholder returns and captures greater market share. Everyone seems to want to go from 0 to 1, or from 1 to 100—to bring something into existence, and thereafter make it as large as possible. We believe that bigger is better, whether it’s burgers, impact or Net Promoter Scores. The tech industry is particularly obsessed with winner-take-all growth. Who better than Peter Thiel, the instigator of the 0 to 1 meme, to insist in his book that every successful business is a monopoly?
In What Do We Mean When We Talk About “AI Democratisation”?, Elizabeth Seger dissects the various meanings of AI democratization, to reach the underlying purpose of AI democratization, which is “introducing processes to facilitate the representation of diverse and often conflicting beliefs, opinions, and values into decisions about how people and their actions are governed.”
However, importantly, the democratisation of AI governance involves the introduction of democratic processes. Democracy is not about giving every individual the power to do whatever they would like. Rather it involves introducing processes to facilitate the representation of diverse and often conflicting beliefs, opinions, and values into decisions about how people and their actions are governed. Indeed, very often democratic decisions place restrictions on access and individual choice. Such is the case, for instance, with speed limits, legal restrictions on firearm ownership, and restricted access to certain medications.
Accordingly, the democratisation of AI governance is not necessarily achieved by improving AI model accessibility so that everyone has the opportunity to use or build on AI models as they like. The democratisation of AI governance needs to involve careful consideration about how diverse stakeholder interests and values can be effectively elicited and incorporated into well-reasoned AI governance decisions.
Glossary
Aviv Ovadya
governance of the people, by the people, for the people—except within the context of a digital platform instead of a physical nation.
Tweets
/1 Bubblemaps discusses a16z’s heavy concentration of voting power in Uniswap
/2 Karma investigates delegate activity in DAOs and the early results are not good.
/3 Jacob Joaquin suggests that ChatGPT may be copying code without the proper permissions.
/4 Kofi discusses the decline of royalties in NFT marketplaces as OpenSea seeks to remain competitive with newcomer, Blur. I recommend also reading The Royalty Wars by Joel John and Siddharth Jain to learn more about this topic.