Essay: Difference between opinion/desire and prediction of fact
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
years, but it was just this morning when I got them stuck in my
mind at the same time and was conflicted between them. But suddenly
I realized clearly for the first time the essential difference
between their premises hence that there really is no conflict in
their solution. They address different questions so of course they
have different answers:
-1- expressions of opinion about what we should do
-2- predictions of future events or future-revealed truth about
present or past events or situation
When we express our *opinion* about what we would like to see
happen, we are't predicting that it *will* happen, we're merely
saying we wish it would happen, and might *attempt* to make it
happen.
But when we say we believe something will or is likely to happen,
unless we are deluding ourselves with "wishful thinking" (imagining
that anything we want to happen will in fact happen, imagining that
the world is going to turn out "good" per whatever we believe would
be "good" to happe), if we're honest in separating this from
opinions/wishes, then we're making an *estimate* of what we
understand really is likely to happen in the future, or be
discovered in the future to have already happened.
Now a lot of our wishes/desires are in fact preferences along some
kind of scale. There are extremes in both directions, and we would
prefer some happy balance between them, where perhaps different
people have different preferences where this happy balance should
be. For example, some people want the NASA budged doubled or
tripled, while others wish the NASA budged to be reduced or
eliminated. So the amount of the NASA budget is a value along a
scale from zero to 100% of the entire GNP.
Voting for appropriations, such as the NASA budget, or for
punishments suitable for crimes, such as 2 or 5 years in prison, or
for the legal speed limit, or for age of consent, etc. suffer from
a problem that no single viewpoint has a majority, and consequently
various viewpoints must team up with a compromise in order to have
a majority to defeat the other viewpoints. This results in voting
"paradoxes" where *nobody* likes the result of the majority vote,
not even the people who voted with the majority, and they only
teamed up to achieve a majority to prevent an even worse result.
Several years ago I realized the solution to such point-on-scale
votes is to use median voting. Each voter expresses his/her
preferred point along the scale, and then the median of all such
preferences is the choice of the voting group. (With an even number
of voters, there would be two votes closest to median, and if they
don't agree then some extra party with "half a vote" comes in to
break the tie by choosing any point between those two
near-medians.)
On the other hand, in recent years I've been favoring a "futures
market" for predictions. Whenever somebody claims a certain
probability of a future event, or future revealing of present or
past event, that person must be willing to accept wagers with odds
based on that claimed probability, the idea of "put your money
where your mouth is". People who make bad predictions lose money on
bad bets and eventually go bankrupt and must start from scratch,
and meanwhile have virtually no influence. People who make good
predictions get richer and richer, allowing bigger and bigger
gambles, and providing more and more influence.
But a problem with current financial markets is that only people
who *already* have lots of money at the start of the process have
the priviledge to invest, locking out the rest of us. Those of us
who aren't born in riches or very very lucky in business *never*
during our entire life have the $200,000 needed to get permission
to open a margin account with a Wall Street broker. The result is
that those with money *already* have undue influence on the
markets, and the rest of us have no influence whatsoever, so the
market doesn't represent an expression of smart people making good
predictions so much as it represents the ability of the very few
riches people to gang together to manipulate the market to suck
money out of any lesser-funded person who tries to get involved in
the market.
http://TinyURL.Com/TruFut will allow *everyone* almost equally to
invest their *time* in a future's market, possibly actually
favoring an unemployed person over a person who is busy doing a job
or running a business, because the unemployed person has more time
to invest in the market. Thus TruFut will better represent the
probability of the claims turning out to really be true, by a broad
cross-section of society making their estimates of truth
probability and the best predictors winning the wagers and thus
growing in funds and hence more influencing the concensus
probability of any claim.
Summary: Note the clear distinction between estimates (predictions)
of what *will* happen (or will be discovered to have already
happened), regardless of whether we like it or not, vs. what we
*want* to happen and will try to make so.