I’ve come to believe (~65%) that Twitter is anti-informative: that it makes its users’ predictive calibration worse on average. On Manifold, I frequently adopt a strategy of betting against Twitter hype (e.g., on the LK-99 market), and this strategy has been profitable for me.
I was comparing it to base-rate forecasting. Twitter leads people to over-update on evidence that isn’t actually very strong, making their predictions worse by moving their probabilities too far from the base rates.
For hype-topics, this is almost certainly true. For less-trendy ideas, probably less so. I suspect this isn’t specific to twitter, but to all large-scale publishing and communication mechanisms. People are mostly amplifiers rather than evaluators.
I’ve come to believe (~65%) that Twitter is anti-informative: that it makes its users’ predictive calibration worse on average. On Manifold, I frequently adopt a strategy of betting against Twitter hype (e.g., on the LK-99 market), and this strategy has been profitable for me.
Is Twitter literally worse than flipping a coin, or just worse than… someone following a non-Twitter crowd?
I was comparing it to base-rate forecasting. Twitter leads people to over-update on evidence that isn’t actually very strong, making their predictions worse by moving their probabilities too far from the base rates.
For hype-topics, this is almost certainly true. For less-trendy ideas, probably less so. I suspect this isn’t specific to twitter, but to all large-scale publishing and communication mechanisms. People are mostly amplifiers rather than evaluators.