You might want to check your dates, do your homework, Nuno. Or simply review Tim Oliver's comments on that very same thread:
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TimOliver: Curious: You say the 2015 Seth Goldstein "unpublished document" was "used to justify the famous 'Supers are 30% better than the CIA' claim."
The linked story doesn't cite another paper, so it's hard to guess their actual source. Generally, academic research takes a while to be written and get published; the 2015 version of the paper seems to be the latest draft in circulation. It's not uncommon to share and cite papers before they get published.
Reply
[-]Tim Oliver1mo
Thanks for the clarification, @Misha-Yagudin. So to be clear, in his November 1, 2013 article, David Ignatius had access to forecasting data from the period August 1, 2013 through May 9, 2014!! (See section 5 of the Seth Goldstein paper underlying your analysis). That, my friend, is quite the feat!!
To be clear, are you saying that on the first of November 2013, Ignatius published data about forecasting questions that were only closed and scored in May 2014?
Is it possible that there were multiple studies? Some "leaked" to Ignatius in the fall of 2013? Then others, including a study that ran through May 2014?
No. I am saying that on the 1st of November, Ignatius could have had data about the sample of forecasting questions from the period August 1, 2013 to November 1st 2013
Douglas Campbell, founder of Insight Prediction, here. Thanks for the clarification. So, obviously, I am quite biased on Insight being "not nice to use", but I'm curious why you find Insight Prediction on the same level as as Augur! and polymarket! on this dimension, and much worse than manifold markets. It's true that at Insight Prediction, as at Poly, a few hundred dollar bet can move the market. But, at Manifold Markets, you can't bet anything if I'm not mistaken.
Also, my personal experience at Polymarket was much better than at Augur. That said, in my view, trading at Polymarket is complicated, and it takes at least 20x more time than a transaction at Insight Prediction. If you'd like to buy something at Polymarket, you must: (1) first add liquidity, (2) remove the liquidity you just added, and then (3) sell the cheaper shares. That's a 3 step process, and each step takes at least 10-15 seconds to process if not more. Sure, if you happen to be buying the cheaper shares, or if you don't mind paying more in fees, you can just do this in one step. But, if you are buying the more expensive shares, and you care about fees, doing that 3 step process will typically result in at least one error message. I would say this happens to me at least 50% of the time (typically on pulling liquidity). I would also argue that it's easier to deposit and withdrawal at Insight Prediction than at Polymarket, where you are forced to use the Matic chain. We have many different ways of depositing at Insight Prediction. For the crypto-cautious, if you reach out to us we can also help you deposit via Paypal or a bank transfer.
However, if anyone has specific feedback, or ways that we can make Insight Prediction even nicer to use, I'm all ears. I do like they way at Manifold Markets that you can trade on many different markets from one screen. Indeed, in our original plans, we had a screen where you could trade in a number of different markets at once. We are certainly planning to implement this feature, but I would also not call it a first-order element in ease of use.
On liquidity, I'll just share that we have a number of features we are designing now to provide more liquidity. The most important of these is a variety of different trading, liquidity, and arbitrage bots, which are getting much closer to going live. One is already in testing, and I think two more will be tested next week. Second, we'll move to a system of differential maker vs. taker fees. Third, we'll implement Predictit's negative risk adjustment for multi-outcome markets (which encourages trading generally). Fourth, we'll include a "leach protection" feature for some markets, that trades placed after market-deciding news drops can be canceled, to encourage people to provide liquidity. Betmoose has this feature already, and it seems to work quite well in practice there.
Yeah, probably not as bad as Augur. But there is still something off about the design of Insight, something that rubs me the wrong way, even if I find it hard to say what. The placement of the markets, which have small borders and asymmetrical footers, having only two small columns for the Popular markets (compare the spacing with https://manifold.markets/markets?s=most-likely or https://metaforecast.org/). These should be easy to fix, though.
Overall, I'm just more confident in the design being qualitatively worse than Manifold. I also don't think that this should be particularly worrying as long as you don't fall to Hypermind levels; having a comparative advantage on having interesting real-money markets seems *fine*.
This is super helpful. Totally agreed on the "popular markets" width. Yes, the two columns for the "Popular" markets section is something which is on the list of things to fix -- might be worth bumping it up the to-do list, along with some 3 dozen other formatting issues we'd like to fix. Still, offering more markets with more liquidity and not having any trading glitches are probably the big things, but cleaning up formatting glitches is also important.
An update here. There are now three columns for the "Popular Markets" section on our homepage, and now you can scroll down a bit further so that all of our markets are viewable from the same page. https://insightprediction.com/ There are more formatting issues to come though, as I don't like the vertical centering of our text within a tile, for example. We'll have a look at the "small borders" issue as well.
A second update. Yesterday we made a slight alteration to our tiles, improving the vertical centering, and now include slightly more information. I see this as a slight improvement. We still haven't looked into potentially thicker borders for our tiles, but, seems like a 2nd or 3rd order type of UI issue?
Wasn't this the basis of the 30% claim, not the separate paper that came out several years later? https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-more-chatter-than-needed/2013/11/01/1194a984-425a-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_story.html
Apparently the results of the paper were leaked to Ignatius: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qZqvBLvR5hX9sEkjR/comparing-top-forecasters-and-domain-experts?commentId=Yuyx5EWouw6bk5GqX
You might want to check your dates, do your homework, Nuno. Or simply review Tim Oliver's comments on that very same thread:
***
TimOliver: Curious: You say the 2015 Seth Goldstein "unpublished document" was "used to justify the famous 'Supers are 30% better than the CIA' claim."
But that was reported two years earlier, in 2013: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-more-chatter-than-needed/2013/11/01/1194a984-425a-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_story.html.
So how was the 2015 paper the justification?
Reply
[-]Misha_Yagudin1mo
The linked story doesn't cite another paper, so it's hard to guess their actual source. Generally, academic research takes a while to be written and get published; the 2015 version of the paper seems to be the latest draft in circulation. It's not uncommon to share and cite papers before they get published.
Reply
[-]Tim Oliver1mo
Thanks for the clarification, @Misha-Yagudin. So to be clear, in his November 1, 2013 article, David Ignatius had access to forecasting data from the period August 1, 2013 through May 9, 2014!! (See section 5 of the Seth Goldstein paper underlying your analysis). That, my friend, is quite the feat!!
[-]Misha_Yagudin1mo
Good catch, Tim!
Preliminary data. It happens.
To be clear, are you saying that on the first of November 2013, Ignatius published data about forecasting questions that were only closed and scored in May 2014?
Is it possible that there were multiple studies? Some "leaked" to Ignatius in the fall of 2013? Then others, including a study that ran through May 2014?
No. I am saying that on the 1st of November, Ignatius could have had data about the sample of forecasting questions from the period August 1, 2013 to November 1st 2013
Douglas Campbell, founder of Insight Prediction, here. Thanks for the clarification. So, obviously, I am quite biased on Insight being "not nice to use", but I'm curious why you find Insight Prediction on the same level as as Augur! and polymarket! on this dimension, and much worse than manifold markets. It's true that at Insight Prediction, as at Poly, a few hundred dollar bet can move the market. But, at Manifold Markets, you can't bet anything if I'm not mistaken.
Also, my personal experience at Polymarket was much better than at Augur. That said, in my view, trading at Polymarket is complicated, and it takes at least 20x more time than a transaction at Insight Prediction. If you'd like to buy something at Polymarket, you must: (1) first add liquidity, (2) remove the liquidity you just added, and then (3) sell the cheaper shares. That's a 3 step process, and each step takes at least 10-15 seconds to process if not more. Sure, if you happen to be buying the cheaper shares, or if you don't mind paying more in fees, you can just do this in one step. But, if you are buying the more expensive shares, and you care about fees, doing that 3 step process will typically result in at least one error message. I would say this happens to me at least 50% of the time (typically on pulling liquidity). I would also argue that it's easier to deposit and withdrawal at Insight Prediction than at Polymarket, where you are forced to use the Matic chain. We have many different ways of depositing at Insight Prediction. For the crypto-cautious, if you reach out to us we can also help you deposit via Paypal or a bank transfer.
However, if anyone has specific feedback, or ways that we can make Insight Prediction even nicer to use, I'm all ears. I do like they way at Manifold Markets that you can trade on many different markets from one screen. Indeed, in our original plans, we had a screen where you could trade in a number of different markets at once. We are certainly planning to implement this feature, but I would also not call it a first-order element in ease of use.
On liquidity, I'll just share that we have a number of features we are designing now to provide more liquidity. The most important of these is a variety of different trading, liquidity, and arbitrage bots, which are getting much closer to going live. One is already in testing, and I think two more will be tested next week. Second, we'll move to a system of differential maker vs. taker fees. Third, we'll implement Predictit's negative risk adjustment for multi-outcome markets (which encourages trading generally). Fourth, we'll include a "leach protection" feature for some markets, that trades placed after market-deciding news drops can be canceled, to encourage people to provide liquidity. Betmoose has this feature already, and it seems to work quite well in practice there.
I really prefer Insight Prediction too. Thanks for making it available!
Yeah, probably not as bad as Augur. But there is still something off about the design of Insight, something that rubs me the wrong way, even if I find it hard to say what. The placement of the markets, which have small borders and asymmetrical footers, having only two small columns for the Popular markets (compare the spacing with https://manifold.markets/markets?s=most-likely or https://metaforecast.org/). These should be easy to fix, though.
Overall, I'm just more confident in the design being qualitatively worse than Manifold. I also don't think that this should be particularly worrying as long as you don't fall to Hypermind levels; having a comparative advantage on having interesting real-money markets seems *fine*.
This is super helpful. Totally agreed on the "popular markets" width. Yes, the two columns for the "Popular" markets section is something which is on the list of things to fix -- might be worth bumping it up the to-do list, along with some 3 dozen other formatting issues we'd like to fix. Still, offering more markets with more liquidity and not having any trading glitches are probably the big things, but cleaning up formatting glitches is also important.
Btw, here's an important market about the war with a lot of liquidity, on whether Russia will take the Donbass: https://insightprediction.com/markets/206
An update here. There are now three columns for the "Popular Markets" section on our homepage, and now you can scroll down a bit further so that all of our markets are viewable from the same page. https://insightprediction.com/ There are more formatting issues to come though, as I don't like the vertical centering of our text within a tile, for example. We'll have a look at the "small borders" issue as well.
A second update. Yesterday we made a slight alteration to our tiles, improving the vertical centering, and now include slightly more information. I see this as a slight improvement. We still haven't looked into potentially thicker borders for our tiles, but, seems like a 2nd or 3rd order type of UI issue?
What about Kalshi?
Hard to say as a non-American