[cba9]

> "The beauty of the market is that we allow people to be Bayesian"

Yes, this is the critical piece. The results of the Reproducibility Project were not remotely a surprise to Bayesian observers. People like Gelman have been pointing out for ages (and I mean back to the 1960s) that the prior probabilities in these fields is low and necessarily a lot of the results were false positives. With the rise of meta-analyses, it is possible to have informative priors for particular fields of psychology or for psychology as a whole, which would let you make much better predictions about whether a result was real. But you can't use these in papers - authors are heavily biased towards using procedures or flat priors which are uninterpretable or grossly overestimate the evidence, and if you try to use any of the informative priors or more advanced models, they'll nag you to death with a thousand objections and complain about double standards and subjectivity and how this time is different and (ironically) bias. So for the most part, there's not much to gain in academic research.

But in a prediction market, you don't have to listen to the self-serving excuses or explain your reasoning, and there's something to make it worth your while.