Answering a question by predicting what the answer is going to be sounds like pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. Where does this predictor get the information it needs to be able to make its predictions?
To be a bit more specific, it’s answering a question by having other people predict which answer you will choose; but yes, it’s very bootstrap-y.
I consider this proposal an alternative to decision markets and prediction-augmented evaluations, so I don’t think this system suffers from the challenge of information more than those two proposals. All are of course limited to a significant extent by information.
One nice point for these systems is that individuals are often predictably biased, even though they are knowledgeable. So in many cases it seems like more ignorant but less biased predictors with a few base rates of a problem can do better.
I imagine that if there were a bunch of forecasters doing this, they would eventually collect and organize tables of public data of the base rates at which agents make decisions. I expect the public data to be really good if it were properly organized. After that, agents could, of course, select to provide additional information.
Answering a question by predicting what the answer is going to be sounds like pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. Where does this predictor get the information it needs to be able to make its predictions?
To be a bit more specific, it’s answering a question by having other people predict which answer you will choose; but yes, it’s very bootstrap-y.
I consider this proposal an alternative to decision markets and prediction-augmented evaluations, so I don’t think this system suffers from the challenge of information more than those two proposals. All are of course limited to a significant extent by information.
One nice point for these systems is that individuals are often predictably biased, even though they are knowledgeable. So in many cases it seems like more ignorant but less biased predictors with a few base rates of a problem can do better.
I imagine that if there were a bunch of forecasters doing this, they would eventually collect and organize tables of public data of the base rates at which agents make decisions. I expect the public data to be really good if it were properly organized. After that, agents could, of course, select to provide additional information.