Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 11:49 AM, Trei, Peter wrote: Tim May[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 09:26 AM, Bill Stewart wrote: Also, NYT Article was http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html?th But it sounds like they've chickened out, because various people freaked about the implications. (And they only got as far as it being an incentive to commit terrorism, without getting to a funding method for terrorism or to Assassination Politics.) Not to mention the obvious problems with letting government agents bid on things like when various unwanted foreign leaders would be assassinated. Over on Dave Farber's IP list, it's been pointed out that there is a pre-existing, live, real-money market in futures on these types of events. Go over to www.tradesports.com, and click on 'Current Events' under 'Trading Catagories' on the left. Drill down and you'll find things like 'WMDs will be found in Iraq on or before Sept 31', the value of which has dropped from 80 to 25 over the last few months. Yes, a bunch of ideas futures markets have existed for nearly a decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect several efforts with varying degrees of success). And several years ago some companies actually tried to built real markets around these kinds of predictions. Maybe one of them is the contract company (pun intended) on this latest DARPA fantasy. The problem is not with the idea of using markets and bets and Bayesian logic to help do price discovery on things like when the Athlon-64 will actually reach consumers, or when the new King of Jordan will be whacked, and so on. The problem is, rather, with _government_ establishing a monopoly on such things while putting suckers like Jim Bell in jail basically for espousing such ideas. And, as I noted, there are significant problems with government employees in a betting pool (gee, aren't even office baseball pools technically illegal? Haven't they prosecuted some people for this? Yep, they have) where they also have control over the outcome. Jim Bell used this as a payoff mechanism for assassinations (Alice bets $1000 that Paul Wolfowitz will be murdered with his family on August 10, 2003)...the same logic applies to the government's dead pool. --Tim May That government is best which governs not at all. --Henry David Thoreau
Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 04:20 PM, John Young wrote: Tim May wrote: Yes, a bunch of ideas futures markets have existed for nearly a decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect several efforts with varying degrees of success). Yes, Robin Hanson worked on DARPA's PAM program. Here's his e-mail about it in May 2003: Too bad, as he should have seen the shitstorm which would materialize as soon as this actually reached the public radar screen. Now that's gone public and been deep-sixed less than 24 hours later, it will likely be the end of this particular thing. An official, above-board version is likely to be ipso facto illegal for the same reason office baseball pools are illegal: illegal gambling. If the Pentagon can run a betting pool for its employees on when some event will happen, office workers can bet on the outcome of the World Series, and anyone can bet on the numbers revealed by the Mob. --Tim May
Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 03:24 PM, Steve Schear wrote: At 16:20 2003-07-29 -0700, John Young wrote: Tim May wrote: Yes, a bunch of ideas futures markets have existed for nearly a decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect several efforts with varying degrees of success). Yes, Robin Hanson worked on DARPA's PAM program. Here's his e-mail about it in May 2003: Looks like Robin may have to concentrate on a commercial venture if he wants to see his ideas put into practice. And use an offshore nexus, and good anonymity and digital cash tools...just as predicted many years ago. Doing this aboveboard, and doing it with the collusion of the actors who can alter the outcome, is asking for trouble: * violation of gambling laws...as I said in other articles, betting on the death of the King of Jordan is not different from betting on the winner of the World Series. * distortion of markets by players who see more benefit in adjusting the expectations than in spending some relatively small amount of money (If Chances that weapons of mass destruction being found in Iraq by Nov. 1 is being de-rated, in a relatively thin market of a few dozen players, then someone with an interest in altering the odds can probably do so with relatively little money...especially if the money is from a Black Budget and comes from money taken at gunpoint from taxpayers.) (I can't resist mentioning that I was able to massively distort/sabotage the market in reputations that the Extropian list experimented with in 1993. I did this by buying play money (extro-dollars or whatever they were called) from other players in an out-of-band transaction. A mere $20 in U.S. money gave me a huge amount of additional spending money in this reputation market. Naturally, my reputation rose. Likewise, if Paul Wolfowitz wants the market to assess a grave danger that Norway is financing terrorism, he can use out-of-band methods to get a bunch of ringers (cut-outs, co-conspirators) to start bidding up the market. As the penalty for not guessing correctly is not clear until the outcome, and inasmuch as the money is provided by agencies, the opportunities for mischief are obvious.) * Insider trading. Letting government employees benefit from their inside information is like letting IBM or Intel employees engage in a wagering system based on KNOWLEDGE THEY ACTUALLY HAVE. (Not that insider trading is unknown in commodity or stock markets, including futures markets. But these markets have traditionally been heavily regulated and insider trading is forbidden, at least nominally. In the case of this DARPA market, the players are by definition the insiders, with various amounts of very non-public information about plans and contingincies. Duh.) And so on. So many attacks on this system. Anyway, there _already_ are very real, hard to manipulate markets in information. We call them markets. Markets for real estate, for corn, for copper, etc. If a lot of residents of Jordan think a collapse is coming, real estate prices in Amman will fall. If a lot of technologists think a return to copper wiring is coming, copper prices will rise. And so on. Betting on contrived propositions with relatively small amounts of money (toy systems) and/or with play money is not very interesting. --Tim May
Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
Also, NYT Article was http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html?th But it sounds like they've chickened out, because various people freaked about the implications. (And they only got as far as it being an incentive to commit terrorism, without getting to a funding method for terrorism or to Assassination Politics.) July 29, 2003 Pentagon Said to Abandon Plan for Futures Market on Terror By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon will abandon a plan to establish a futures market to help predict terrorist strikes, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Tuesday. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said he spoke by phone with the program's director, and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped. Warner announced the decision not long after Senate Democratic Leader Thomas Daschle took to the floor to denounce the program as an incentive actually to commit acts of terrorism. Warner made the announcement during a confirmation hearing for retired Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, nominated to be Army chief of staff.
