[Glyptodon]

So I will admit the idea of "maybe you could make some guesses about the future and if you're right it's worth something" sounds appealing - like if I guessed people would get perfect nutrition by IV and not bother with eating and it came true and I made money from it, or the same about making money speculating on when the first Mars colony is founded, etc. But what I don't get, taking a step back, and never have, is what society and the world get out of having more accurate guesses about this. Even setting the obvious negatives (if you have your retirement savings sitting against a Mars colony before 2030 maybe you have some incentive to sabotage a launch in early 2029) aside, what are the positive values supposed to be? And I've never really understood this.

[fwipsy]

If we knew the COVID pandemic was coming, we could have prepared better. If we knew what AI would look like in 5 years, we could write laws for that proactively rather than reactively. The Fed could look at prediction markets to decide whether to raise the interest rate.

Basically, it depends on there being competent, good-willed people in power using them to inform their decisions. That feels like a bit of a joke right now, but things weren't always this way.

[qlte]

What would the COVID pandemic market have been before COVID existed, and what information would have been available to steer the market towards a useful prediction?

“Will there be another coronavirus mutation resulting in a pandemic in 2005, 2006, 2018, 2019…” doesn’t seem like it would have been helpful, except in the like two month or so window after detection and the WHO announcement when alarm bells were already going off but it still hadn’t diffused into popular consciousness yet.

[fwipsy]

Knowing whether a major pandemic has a 2% chance vs. 0.2% chance per year has major policy implications. Just like the difference between a 100-year floodplain and a 500-year floodplain has important insurance implications, even though you probably won't get flooded on any given year.

[Ferret7446]

It was quite clear covid was potentially a danger months before the "full outbreak". There were short news articles "in the margins" about a disease in Wuhan, with conspiracy theorists talking it up. It would plausibly have given us a month early notice. Hard to say how much that would have helped, but it might have improved the total outcome somewhat.