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// Source: yazılar/*.md  ·  2026-05-24T13:11:14.365Z

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    g01: {
      id: "g01",
      fmt: "saha",
      category: "teknoloji",
      title: "Örnek Makale: Yeni Dünyada Cloudflare Mimarisi",
      lead: "Cloudflare Pages ve Git tabanlı sistemlerin haber sitelerinde nasıl kullanılabileceğine dair kısa bir inceleme.",
      writer: "kerem",
      date: "25 Mayıs 2026",
      readMin: 1,
      imageLabel: null,
      cover: null,
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      body: [
        "Yeni Bir Medya Altyapısı",
        "Geleneksel veritabanı destekli CMS sistemleri yerini yavaş yavaş statik, Git-tabanlı sistemlere bırakıyor. Cloudflare Pages gibi sistemler sayesinde, sunucu yönetimi tarih oluyor.",
        "Haber metni sadece bir markdown dosyası. Hem versiyonlanıyor, hem de saniyeler içinde yayına alınıyor. Eski sistemlerde \"haber silindi mi\" derdi varken, burada her şey Git geçmişinde. Ayrıca makaleler feed'den (akıştan) hiçbir zaman kaybolmuyor!"
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        original_title: "Örnek Makale: Yeni Dünyada Cloudflare Mimarisi",
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    g02: {
      id: "g02",
      fmt: "yorum",
      category: "kültür",
      title: "Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It",
      lead: "EA and rationalists got enamoured with forecasting and prediction markets and made them part of the culture, but this hasn’t proven very useful, yet it continues to receive substantial EA funding. We should cut it off.",
      writer: "ceviri",
      date: "20 Mayıs 2026",
      readMin: 55,
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        "EA and rationalists got enamoured with forecasting and prediction markets and made them part of the culture, but this hasn’t proven very useful, yet it continues to receive substantial EA funding. We should cut it off.",
        "My Experience with Forecasting",
        "For a while, I was the number one forecaster on Manifold. This lasted for about a year until I stopped just over 2 years ago. To this day, despite quitting, I’m still #8 on the platform. Additionally, I have done well on real-money prediction markets (Polymarket), earning mid-5 figures and winning a few AI bets. I say this to suggest that I would gain status from forecasting being seen as useful, but I think, to the contrary, that the EA community should stop funding it.",
        "I’ve written a few comments throughout the years that I didn’t think forecasting was worth funding. You can see some of these here and here. Finally, I have gotten around to making this full post.",
        "Solution Seeking a Problem",
        "When talking about forecasting, people often ask questions like “How can we leverage forecasting into better decisions?” This is the wrong way to go about solving problems. You solve problems by starting with the problem, and then you see which tools are useful for solving it.",
        "The way people talk about forecasting is very similar to how people talk about cryptocurrency/blockchain. People have a tool they want to use, whether that be cryptocurrency or forecasting, and then try to solve problems with it because they really believe in the solution, but I think this is misguided. You have to start with the problem you are trying to solve, not the solution you want to apply. A lot of work has been put into building up forecasting, making platforms, hosting tournaments, etc., on the assumption that it was instrumentally useful, but this is pretty dangerous to continue without concrete gains.",
        "We’ve Funded Enough Forecasting that We Should See Tangible Gains",
        "It’s not the case that forecasting/prediction markets are merely in their infancy. A lot of money has gone into forecasting. On the EA side of things, it’s near $100M. If I convince you later on in this post that forecasting hasn’t given any fruitful results, it should be noted that this isn’t for lack of trying/spending.",
        "The Forecasting Research Institute received grants in the 10s of millions of dollars. Metaculus continues to receive millions of dollars per year to maintain a forecasting platform and conduct some forecasting tournaments. The Good Judgment Project and the Swift Centre have received millions of dollars for doing research and studies on forecasting and teaching others about forecasting. Sage has received millions of dollars to develop forecasting tools. Many others, like Manifold, have also been given millions by the EA community in grants/investments at high valuations, diverting money away from other EA causes. We have grants for organizations that develop tooling, even entire programming languages like Squiggle, for forecasting.",
        "On the for-profit side of things, the money gets even bigger. Kalshi and Polymarket have each raised billions of dollars, and other forecasting platforms have also raised 10s of millions of dollars.",
        "Prediction markets have also taken off. Kalshi and Polymarket are both showing ATH/growth in month-over-month volume. Both of them have monthly volumes in the 10s of billions of dollars. Total prediction market volume is something like $500B/year, but it just isn’t very useful. We get to know the odds on every basketball game player prop, and if BTC is going to go up or down in the next 5 minutes. While some people suggest that these trivial markets help sharpen skills or identify good forecasters, I don’t think there is any evidence of this, and it is more wishful thinking.",
        "If forecasting were really working well and was very useful, you would see the bulk of the money spent not on forecasting platforms but directly on forecasting teams or subsidizing markets on important questions. We have seen very little of this, and instead, we have seen the money go to platforms, tooling, and the like. We already had a few forecasting platforms, the market was going to fund them itself, and yet we continue to create them.",
        "There has also been an incredible amount of (wasted) time by the EA/rationality community that has been spent on forecasting. Lots of people have been employed full-time doing forecasting or adjacent work, but perhaps even larger is the amount of part-time hours that have gone into forecasting on Manifold, among other things. I would estimate that thousands of person-years have gone into this activity.",
        "Hits-based Giving Means Stopping the Bets that Don’t Pay Off",
        "You may be tempted to justify forecasting on the grounds of hits-based giving. That is to say, it made sense to try a few grants into forecasting because the payoff could have been massive. But if it was based on hits-based giving, then that implies we should be looking for big payoffs, and that we have to stop funding it if it doesn’t.",
        "I want to propose my leading theory for why forecasting continues to receive 10s of millions per year in funding. That is, it has become a feature of EA/rationalist culture. Similar to how EAs seem to live in group houses or be polyamorous, forecasting on prediction markets has become a part of the culture that doesn’t have much to do with impact. This is separate from parts of EA culture that we do for impact/value alignment reasons, like being vegan, donating 10%+ of income, writing on forums, or going to conferences. I submit that forecasting is in the former category.",
        "At this point, if forecasting were useful, you would expect to see tangible results. I can point to you hundreds of millions of chickens that lay eggs that are out of cages, and I can point to you observable families that are no longer living in poverty. I can show you pieces of legislation that have passed or almost passed on AI. I can show you AMF successes with about 200k lives saved and far lower levels of malaria, not to mention higher incomes and longer life expectancies, and people living longer lives that otherwise wouldn’t be because of our actions. I can go at the individual level, and I can, more importantly, go at the broad statistical level. I don’t think there is very much in the way of “this forecasting happened, and now we have made demonstrably better decisions regarding this terminal goal that we care about”. Despite no tangible results, people continue to have the dream that forecasting will inform better decision-making or lead to better policies. I just don’t see any proof of this happening.",
        "Feels Useful When It Isn’t",
        "Forecasting is a very insidious trap because it makes you think you are being productive when you aren’t. I like to play bughouse and a bunch of different board games. But when I play these games, I don’t claim to do so for impact reasons, on effective altruist grounds. If I spend time learning strategy for these board games, I don’t pretend that this is somehow making the world better off. Forecasting is a dangerous activity, particularly because it is a fun, game-like activity that is nearly perfectly designed to be very attractive to EA/rationalist types because you get to be right when others are wrong, bet on your beliefs, and partake in the cultural practice. It is almost engineered to be a time waster for these groups because it provides the illusion that you are improving the world’s epistemics when, in reality, it’s mainly just a game, and it’s fun. You get to feel that you are improving the world’s epistemics and that therefore there must be some flow-through effects and thus you can justify the time spent by correcting a market from 57% to 53% on some AI forecasting question or some question about if the market you are trading on will have an even/odd number of traders or if someone will get a girlfriend by the end of the year.",
        "A lot of people still like the idea of doing forecasting. If it becomes an optional, benign activity of the EA community, then it can continue to exist, but it should not continue to be a major target for philanthropic dollars. We are always in triage, and forecasting just isn’t making the cut. I’m worried that we will continue to pour community resources into forecasting, and it will continue to be thought of in vague terms as improving or informing decisions, when I’m skeptical that this is the case.",
        "Type here! Use '/' for editor commands.",
        "93 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 11:45 PM",
        "During the 2016 election, many prominent media outlets presented odds of ~99% for a Hillary Clinton victory, and then defended such claims after the election by saying things like \"well, 1-in-a-100 events do still happen.\" In my experience, people have mostly stopped doing this and present more reasonable figures, and I attribute this largely to the rise of prediction markets, which many news outlets have started citing directly.",
        "They have clearly \"raised the sanity waterline,\" one of the famous goals of at least the rationalists, if not EA.",
        "In October, PredictIt and PredictWise had Clinton at 83 and 91 cents respectively.",
        "The night before the 2016 election, WCNC published the next-day forecasts by the NY Times, 538 (when Nate Silver was still running it) and the Huffington Post, which gave odds of Clinton winning of 84%, 68%, and 98% respectively.",
        "The Princeton Election Consortium‘s model developed by data scientist Sam Wang forecasted 99% for Clinton. Wang ate a cricket on live TV.",
        "Reuters/Ipsos forecasted 90% Clinton.",
        "Overall, seems like prediction markets were in the same ballbark of wrongness as the media forecasts. Admittedly, the forecast dates here are not identical - a more rigorous breakdown would be welcome.",
        "But in this bunch, the best result was obtained by a professional data scientist, Nate Silver, not by a prediction market.",
        "There’s been a huge amount of discourse around the failed 2016 forecasts, and they all attribute it to failure to take correlated polling errors into account (which Silver did model, explaining his less wrong prediction). There might have been underlying partisan bias or conformity warping modeling decisions, but those biases also exist in prediction markets. Money and reputation is on the... (read more)",
        "Markets can be better or worse depending on eg liquidity. My guess would be that today’s markets are better. (The large difference between 83 and 91 cents failing to disappear from arbitrage is an indication that at least one of those markets weren’t so great, though I haven’t checked how current markets look on that metric.)",
        "3DirectedEvolution24d",
        "Either way, they were in the same ballpark as the other forecasts. Even if both were poor markets, that only strengthens the argument that they shouldn’t receive credit for “raising the sanity waterline” around the 2016 election.",
        "Shankar's original claim was that the 2016 election was BEFORE functional prediction markets, and that the bit of \"raising the sanity waterline\" in question happened between then and today.",
        "I really don't think PredictIt should count as a prediction market at all in this context, I recall that they had crazy rules that made it basically impossible for serious people to make serious money by correcting even blindingly obvious market errors. (Don't know anything about PredictWise.)",
        "Yes, at the time the limit at Predictit was $850 per user per market. When the CFTC originally issued its no-action letter to Predictit, it was on the basis that it was for research purposes.",
        "4DirectedEvolution24d",
        "But this argument relies on an alternative history, like \"functional modern high-volume prediction markets would have called the election better than Nate Silver, had they existed at that time.\" But that's an (implicit) assertion without evidence. The confident calls for Clinton weren't by bloviating pundits making obviously wrong calls, they were by professional data-driven forecasters with methodological disagreements and oversights. If people want to argue that prediction markets have \"raised the sanity waterline\" by preventing disastrously bad forecasts about high stakes events, they need to point to examples of where functional modern prediction markets have directly competed with i.e. boutique models published by media outlets. Define the comparison! Now, that said, I can put forth a different reason they've raised the sanity waterline in specific areas. Taking hotbutton issues, breaking them down into empirically verifiable factors, and getting a money-backed continuously updating estimate on those factors is genuinely helpful when I'm specifically interested in a relevant issue. Even if I think the estimate is wildly wrong, it's useful to see where the consensus lies. But I've read extensively on them, participated in them, and have a pretty deep knowledge of their mechanics, limitations, etc. But I also think there are some underappreciated dangers in prediction markets. Of course, we're now seeing how they are being used for insider trading, providing a mechanism for information leaks, and are genuinely being used as something approaching an assassination market. They're motivating harassment of journalists whose articles are being used to resolve the markets. That's directly counterproductive to raising the sanity waterline. They also take some real sophistication to interpret -- particularly understanding how to parse the volume, individual bet sizes (whale activity), participant selection effects, and resolution criteria. They're optimized for betti",
        "Can you elaborate on this please?",
        "9DirectedEvolution22d",
        "In general, there's all kinds of insider trading apparently going on inside the Trump admin in prediction markets whose outcome is heavily determined by US gov actions. We also have of course the case of Emanuel Fabian, who's been receiving death threats for accurately reporting on a missile attack in ways that unfavorable to one faction of polymarket gamblers. There's an investigation into whether an airport thermometer used to resolve a polymarket bet waas tampered with. Obviously none of these are literal assassination markets, which is why I said \"something approaching\" rather than \"precisely an assassination market.\" The general principle is people are taking destructive actions (tampering, indirectly leaking classified information through their betting behavior, threatening journalists) or are betting on while being directly involved in violent actions (the soldier) that are attached to prediction markets. And on a deeper level, we have to ask whether the fraud opportunities that prediction markets present are then going to become a systemic generator of fraud. Big picture, the combination of prediction markets, crypto, and gambling becomes an unregulatable, permanent fraud coordination mechanism. It incentivizes a set of bad social roles: \\ People who can come up with situations that sound outlandish to one segment of the population, who like to gamble and who believe there's another segment of the population that's just dumb. \\ People who realize that they're in a position to influence that outlandish situation into being. They'd never have done so if there wasn't an easy opportunity to make money on it, but there is, so they do. What these markets point toward is a future in which the world just becomes more chaotic, because for any outlandish situation you might consider and create a market for, you've now incentivized people to make that situation happen (or not happen), just because you asked the question and got people's attention. They become g",
        "Insider training seems to me like a different category than assassination markets. The concept of assassination markets seem to me to suggest that someone takes harmful real world actions to make a prediction happen. A short seller releasing a dossier about fraud in a company for which he holds shorts looks to me more \"assassination market\" like than a soldier who has no choice about whether or not to capture Maduro because he has to follow the chain of command making an insider trade.",
        "This is a really compelling point.",
        "I dont think its true that the news media is now more rational than it used to be. Outlandish nonsense is still said all the time. Its also not clear to me that it would matter that much, even if it were true",
        "Why do you attribute this largely to the rise of prediction markets? My perception is that news outlets started citing prediction markets roughly when they became an effective vehicle for hard-to-regulate sports gambling, I don't think this has ~anything to do with the 2016 election, and indeed, directly following that election, significantly prior to the rise in cultural salience of prediction markets, data scientists and pollsters were in crisis for several months trying to figure out why the polls were so wrong. They did a much better job in the 2018 midterms and this is certainly not attributable to prediction markets, rather to directly addressing the methodological gaps in polling that had recently become salient.",
        "are you sure this isn't just the evolution of your own information diet and circle of friends? do you think if you asked a random american \"do you know who nate silver is? -> do you think he got it mostly right or mostly wrong in the last few elections?\" do you think they'd say \"he was mostly right\" or \"nate silver is always wrong because he's \\[too woke\\]/\\[not woke enough\\]\"? prediction markets are allegedly a way to bring empiricism to fields that had none before, and your best defense of them is \"the vibes feel better now\"",
        "FWIW, I refer to Manifold Markets and prediction-markets every week in my decision-making. My guess is this mundane utility generalizes. I am kind of confused why you think people don't use these for decision-making, they seem really useful in lots of circumstances.",
        "Some random example markets I referred to recently: — That weird futures market on the Anthropic IPO price (can't find the link but saw it reference on Twitter a bunch) — This market on Anthropic making another big revision to their RSP — This market of mine on Anthropic security commitments — Basically all of the election betting odds markets — Markets on nuclear war",
        "What decisions do you think this has affected and what would you estimate the differences in outcomes to be as a result? Or, say, the most important impacts?",
        "You may be thinking of Ventuals. Best wishes, Less Wrong Reference Desk",
        "Basically just +1 on what Michael said. How are you using markets on nuclear war in your decision making? Very concretely, can you name a decision you made differently due to these markets?",
        "Yes, I used them to set a threshold for evacuation protocols at Lighthaven, together with decisions on emergency supplies, how many bugout bags to have, etc.",
        "(I had also built a small website called \"hasRussiaLaunchedNukesYet.com\" which would send everyone who signed up a text message if the probability of a nuke being launched was above 90% according to the markets, which would then be a natural time to get out and escape)",
        "FWIW, this does not change my mind on my OP, though this is interesting.",
        "Cynically speaking, even if you do not see the value in this information per se, you should appreciate that people who care about these things can now look at one specific URL, say \"okay\", and not waste much more time trying to do their own research.",
        "There is a fairly well known discussion point in quant trading circles that says you should always bet against the end of the world. If the logic is not immediately obvious to you, it goes something like this: if the world doesn't end, I make money, and if the world does end, it won't matter that I lost money. I don't know what the conditional probability of the world being \"destroyed\" is (defined here loosely as lots more nuclear weapons detonate, massive environmental damage, all world governments collapse, money is worthless) if one major city is destroyed by a nuclear weapon, but I would think its at least 25%. All this to say, if you are making any decisions based on the implied odds of that market, its probably rational to consider them as higher, since we are really looking at the odds of \\[nuclear weapon goes off AND the world doesn't end\\].",
        "What scope do you have in mind when you refer to forecasting? Is it specifically Tetlockian forecasting / prediction market style forecasting where most of the value is a forecasted number answering a well-defined question, and the methdology often involves aggregating a bunch of people’s views, each who didn’t spend much time?",
        "If so, then I agree directionally and in particular agree the current track record isn’t great, though I think this sort of forecasting will be plausibly quite useful for AI stuff as we get more close to AGI/ASI, and thus it may be easier to operationalize important questions that don’t require long chains of conceptual thinking, there will be lots of important sub-questions to cover, some of which may be more answerable by superforecaster-like techniques as we have better trends / base rates to extrapolate since we are closer to the events we care about. And also having a bunch of AI labor might help.",
        "But overall I am at least currently much more excited about stuff like AI 2027 or OP worldview investigations than Tetlockian forecasting, i.e. I’m excited about work involving deep thinking and for which the primary value doesn’t come from specific quantitative predictions but instead things like introducing new frameworks (which is why I switched what I was working on). I’m not sure if AI 2027 or OP worldview investigations work is meant to be included in your post.",
        "I am mostly talking about Tetlockian forecasting. I am talking about other versions of it too, though, including AI 2027.",
        "I didn't want to argue against AI 2027 type stuff in this post but on net, I think AI 2027 made some very aggressive predictions, that will turn out to be wrong (even if you give double the time for them to occur) and I think that AI safety people will end up looking silly, like the boy who cried wolf.",
        "For two concrete examples:",
        "\"By early 2030, the robot economy has filled up the old SEZs, the new SEZs, and large parts of the ocean. The only place left to go is the human-controlled areas.\". This one is easy to operationalize. I would bet that by the end of 2032, less than 20% of the current Earth's oceans will be taken over by the \"robot economy\".",
        "\"June 2027: Most of the humans at OpenBrain can’t usefully contribute anymore.\"",
        "Yup, I'm also quite worried about this. I'm very uncertain though about the magnitude of the issue. e.g. if most humans at OpenBrain not contributing happens in 2030 (so taking a bit more than 2x longer to happen than predicted), I'd guess that many people will not discredit us / safety people because of AI 2027 and may still give some credit. Certainly not all people! But I've been pleasantly surprised by the discourse thus far on evaluating AI 2027, which (as far as I remember, might be wrong) has often focused on feeling like reality is unfolding in a way that is directionally toward AI 2027 compared to what the person previously thought, or whether AI 2027 is closer to reality than what the person had thought. And many people seemed to understand that it was not a confident prediction of any specific timeline. (I guess there was a blow up about Daniel updating his timelines later / having a median longer than AI 2027, but I'm talking about the reactions relating to how reality has compared to the scenario) (edit: You might worry that the reception has been good so far only because reality actually has looked pretty similar to the scenario, and that will change soon. That seems very reasonable. Also, to be clear, even if the crying wolf effect is large, I think there will remain large positive effects, especially if the takeoff looks recognizable relative to the takeoff in AI 2027 in terms of the overall dynamics even if it substantially later or slower.) \\[...\\] I'm also less than 50% on this, maybe ~33%? You can generally see my views at https://www.aifuturesmodel.com/forecast/eli-04-02-26, they're somewhat less aggressive than Daniel's. (Obviously I can't fully speak for Daniel but I think his response to your comment would be further in the direction of sticking by AI 2027's predictions are likely to be close to right.)",
        "Yeah, I just don't agree that reality has played out like AI 2027 in any meaningful way that isn't very obvious. It's too early to say. Basically, no meaningful predictions are made until the end of 2026, so we are too early to say. It's just too early to claim victory. I have been meaning to write up my critiques of AI 2027 but I have too many of these kinds of posts to write up and I'm a slow writer.",
        "Makes sense. For what it's worth, we've had people tell us and seen people post on Twitter that they've taken scenarios like AI 2027 more seriously because so far reality has played out more like AI 2027 than they thought it would.",
        "\\[Relevant context/COI: I'm CEO at the Forecasting Research Institute (FRI), an organization which I co-founded with Phil Tetlock and others. Much of the below is my personal perspective, though it is informed by my work. I don't speak for others on my team. I’m sharing an initial reply now, and our team at FRI will share a larger post in future that offers a more comprehensive reflection on these topics.\\]",
        "Thanks for the post — I think it's important to critically question the value of funds going to forecasting, and this post offers a good opportunity for reflection and discussion.",
        "In brief, I share many of your concerns about forecasting and related research, but I'm also more positive on both its impact so far and its future expected impact.",
        "A summary of some key points:",
        "1. Much of the impact of forecasting research on specific decision-makers is not public. For example, FRI has informed decisions on frontier AI companies' capability scaling policies, has advised senior US national security decision-makers, and has informed research at key US and UK government agencies. But, we are not able to share many details of this work publicly. However, there is also public evidence that forecast",
        "I'm not sure the norms here but I will just copy over my reply from the EA forum. Hi Josh, thanks for the response. I hate to do this, especially at the start, but I want to point out for you and others who have jobs related to forecasting that it's difficult to convince someone of something when their job relies on them not believing it. I think you should assume that you will think forecasting is more useful than it is. As for your points, I'll respond to some of them. 1. If you want to DM me, I can sign an NDA, and I may update my opinion depending on what these non-public uses of forecasting are. 2. I don't think this is all that relevant. I'm not sure what forecasting research has really elicited on AI timelines. I agree that talk about timelines creates a lot of \"buzz\" around AI but depending on your views, this is good or bad. 3. I agree that the impact of measurement-oriented research is difficult to measure, but importantly, not impossible. OWID for example should count how much their work is being cited and looked up. Conversely, I think it would be good to estimate, for FRI, how much $$ the change of the decision was worth and by what amount/percentage did FRI make that change more likely. I don't think you really gave a good reason that FRI should be funded over anything else that simply has very diffuse benefits. 4. When do you think it's reasonable, if ever, for the EA community to \"give up\" on funding more forecasting work? 5. If I'm being cynical, almost every field can say \"AI will transform the field\" though I'm not sure how much this is worth debating.",
        "I'd be curious if @mabramov you'd respond to @Josh Rosenberg's points about comparative evaluation of impact for other grant-based non-profits generating research and public information. How valuable do you think the four examples Josh gave: Epoch, Our World In Data, GovAI, and IAPS have been? Do you think the grants for these orgs have a good ROI compared to forecasting research?",
        "I liked and agreed with @Scott Alexander 's recent tweet on the benefits of prediction markets, though I would have a hard time saying how much of a monetary investment into them that justifies:",
        "> It's hard to say on a society-wide level because I don't know who's using them or how users are changing their minds/actions, but just for me they were very helpful during the beginning of the Iran war. People were saying things like \"the regime will fall within days\", and I didn't know enough about geopolitics to know whether this was reasonable or not, so it was helpful to be able to check p(regime falls). I also used them as a sanity check for oil price futures which seemed to be having weird herd dynamics in the actual markets. And I've used them to get some sense of the likelihood of various upcoming election-related violence and foul play and to discuss this with friends who are more worried than I am. Also, I've also used other markets (not Polymarket/Kalshi, before then) to know how worried I should be about upcoming potential natural disasters and COVID flareups. > > I think a good comparison point would be the social utility of newspapers (let's say excluding investigative journalism, w",
        "The Biden/Kamala example makes me think the value of prediction markets is not the uncovering of little-known info, but making things so blatantly obvious they can't be denied by those who are deceiving themselves.",
        "Yes, but there are also some examples of uncovering little-known info, e.g. insider trading giving advance warning of stuff. Consider: Suppose that someone tries to assassinate POTUS by running up with a suicide vest on. Suppose that it appears they were a random ideologue acting alone, but then analysis of the markets reveals a suspicious spike in bets on POTUS death starting a few hours before the attack. This suggests that this person didn't act alone; it suggests that at least one other person knew about it beforehand. Indeed it suggests that many people knew, because if it was just a few people then the odds that someone would leak are low. This is some interesting info that wouldn't otherwise have been uncovered! (And if the Secret Service is monitoring the markets, they might actually be able to protect POTUS from such attacks more effectively!)",
        "I'm not disagreeing, but I do have a question - How would we distinguish new knowledge form random speculative spikes? E.g. some predictors might think that other predictors have a greater degree of knowledge than they actually do, and that creates a bubble.",
        "We probably don't have a foolproof way to distinguish but there would be various other bits of evidence we could look for, e.g. how capable are the AIs actually getting, what's the gossip in SF, how long and sustained has the spike been, etc.",
        "Since I was cited, and since I updated some from followup conversation, I want to close the loop here... Buck read an entire book on this, and it sounds like the key movers and shakers were oblivious to the prediction markets but very interested in polls? But he didn't mention the authors of the book specifically ruling out influence. In general, I tend to think that staffers have a lot of collective cultural sway, and they care about \"who can pull donor money to pay for staffers\" a lot and George Clooney was both famous and a big donor and the author of this, and I would expect their shared Inner Ring's Overton Window to track things (1) like Clooney and also (2) prediction markets. Also that channel of information would plausibly not end up in a book (which is likely to focus on the narrative swoop of second order famous people, rather than the third and fourth tier staffers and their watercooler gossip and whether that gossip mentioned prediction markets or polls)? Anyway. Hearing from @Buck about the book lowered my credence on \"Prediction Markets changed history there\" from maybe 70% to maybe 42%? I was surprised, but it was surprise from hearing confident well-informed posteriors, so all I can do is reason via aumancy, from thin summaries of thick data.",
        "This explanation is plausible to me, and has the added benefit of explaining why @mabramov thinks prediction markets are less valuable than they are (if indeed they are less valuable than they are) - many people are prone to believing things that are obviously wrong, the main skill of good forecasters (beyond being generally well-informed) is that they are immune to this particular insanity, and so people who are not good forecasters benefit from access to insanity-immune opinions. This comment is the closest among existing comments to convincing me that prediction markets can have broad social utility. Still, I don't think this explanation really says that 40% chances are 40% chances, it says you can safely dismiss claims that 40% markets represent probabilities below like 10% or higher than like 80%. It's still possible that these markets are not particularly-good information aggregators and that superforecasters are not particularly good at producing actionable insights across domains - calibration is not the optimization target. Thus I still update, based on the original post, towards prediction markets being worse, and perhaps significantly worse, than advertised, in their current incarnations.",
        "The most recent Tetlockian forecasting style thing I've spent substantial time on is the 2025 and 2026 AI forecasting surveys, in which hundreds of people each year have made predictions a year out on benchmarks, and other indicators such as revenue.",
        "The theory of change is to (a) establish common knowledge about how fast things are going relative to people's expectations (and we collect data on people's overall views on when AGI will be reached so we can sort of see if we're \"on track\" for that), and (b) identify which people seem to be making the most accurate predictions. Importantly, it is not to elicit predictions that are directly useful for important decisions.",
        "I've observed some evidence of this working, e.g. re: (a) establishing common knowedge, Anson of Epoch wrote an analysis that I've seen referenced a few times. I'm glad to have a data point against the common refrain of \"people underpredict benchmark scores and overpredict real-world impact\" from revenue outpacing people's predictions (though it is a narrow and single data point).",
        "Re: (b) identifying who is making the most accurate predictions, I found it informative that in Anson's analysis (footnote 1), forecasters wit... (read more)",
        "I've long had some sense like this, though not the expertise to make a claim like this.",
        "My impression is that a lot of the conceit of forecasting and prediction markets boils down to — People can learn to think better via the real-world feedback of predictions; — You can find people or groups that are good at forecasting, e.g. through prediction markets; — Then you can somewhat rely on their predictions — And you can learn how they made their predictions and thereby get better world models in general",
        "Have things like this happened? E.g. — Are there important strategic X-derisking decisions that have been made based on finding someone who's good at forecasting in general and then asking them to make predictions? (And do those seem like good decisions / for the right reasons?) — Have some people discovered through markets gone on to have a bunch of useful thoughts due to their forecasting skills / world models? Were they signal boosted in advance because of their known prediction market success?",
        "I'd love to see this argument expanded further but also appreciate what you've written here.",
        "You sort of mention this, but it strikes me that the argument doesn't need to be \"are prediction markets useful for doing good\" but just needs to be \"does the improvements to prediction markets and infrastructure made by EA money and resources actually meaningfully increase the amount of good prediction markets do?\"",
        "Lastly, may I suggest cross-posting this to the EA forum?",
        "Anything in particular you want expanded upon? I think this is most of what I have to say on the matter. I've been saying some form of this opinion for about 3 years now and I'm happy this is finally out there. Yea, my point is that the bar for EA money needs to be very very high. It's on the EA forum. Was posted at the same time!",
        "I find it hard to tell how much impact widespread forecasting has. You go into the lack of tangible impact in the post but it's hard to prove a negative (forecasting has had no impact). It's also hard to prove real but intangible impact. I trust your opinion as an expert forecaster more than mine but I'm confused here.",
        "One personal forecasting impact I've observed is the ability to point to existing prediction market. For example, someone writes a post about China definitely invading Taiwan in 2026. It's hard for me to tell how good their argument is. With prediction markets I can find that market and get a more objective take. I can ask the post author how much money they put into the market, seeing they stand to make a lot of money correcting it.",
        "This isn't knock down argument against your post. I'm just giving a specific example of less tangible impact. Multiplied over many people making slightly better decisions that might be high impact. It can both be true that this impact is real and EA effort should go elsewhere.",
        "I wrote a whole response to this :-)",
        "As I understand Marcus's argument, his central thesis is that we haven't seen the benefits of this past forecasting funding, but I think the opposite is true! Here are just a few examples: — It's hard to measure the value of \"epistemic infrastructure,\" not just for forecasting sites but also things like Wikipedia and OurWorldInData. That doesn't mean that value isn't there. Has Wikipedia been a good return on investment? Obviously! Manifold is far less impactful than Wikipedia, but Wikipedia gets about $200 million per year between returns on its endowment and donations. The return on investment in Manifold is probably still way higher than Marcus seems to believe. Hundreds of thousands of people have made incrementally better decisions; hundreds of thousands of people have learned to think about the world a little more concretely and quantitatively. I'm one active user of thousands on Manifold and I'd personally value its impact on my life quite highly, as I'd wager Marcus might too. — Giant companies like Kalshi and Polymarket have grown in part because of research around how to best leverage crowdsourced forecasting. Inasmuch as th",
        "1\\. I'm not sure I understand the point. A lot of people have donated money to Wikipedia and now they have a big war chest. I agree Wikipedia has been valuable but I'm not sure how you are computing the value. I don't see any proof that hundreds of thousands of people are making incrementally better decisions though. My point is that this was the hope but it is sort of just asserted without evidence. I'm happy you've enjoyed Manifold, I don't think that means EA money should go to it. There is a very very high bar to clear for EA money. 2. I'm not sure I understand your point. I agree that Kalshi and Polymarket are big and have attracted users and investment. My point is that they haven't given this outpouring of social returns that people claim they are to have. They are just good businesses (charging fees on gambling). 3. I don't think you can claim millions of dollars from community growth but I'm sure this ROI would then be negative. 4. I agree that forecasting has been somewhat useful for identifying talent/nerd-sniping. I don't think very much of this has happened though. I think less than 25 people (to be conservative) have roles due to their forecasting prowess where they were unknown before. 5. This has been discussed elsewhere. 6. There is no proof here. Would you say today's epistemic environment is much better than 20 years ago?",
        "1\\. I guess I didn't bother to make a case for why something like Wikipedia provides value because I thought it was pretty obviously providing such high levels of societal surplus through its existence that the specific amount clearly dwarfs the costs of running it, irrespective of Wikimedia foundation stuff (not an argument for why one should donate money to it now but rather why whatever money it initially took to get it up and running was clearly very well spent). Same for Manifold. IIRC they probably got investments of somewhere in the ballpark of $2 million (I could be off by a lot)? This seems like a great amount to have paid to create the societal surplus that Manifold now provides! 2. Sure, but like... if you invested in Kalshi or Polymarket early on, then you'd have 100x-ed your return, just on a purely financial level, so that's clearly a \"good investment\" from the perspective of EA orgs, since now you can turn around and put that money towards EA goals. 3. ... why would growing the base of people making charitable donations to EA causes \"negative ROI\" from the perspective of EA orgs? 4. 25 is a lot of ppl! 5. - 6. Of course impossible to directly quantify but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist! Aren't you a forecaster :P",
        "1\\. Manifold I think had $6M or so of investment and given the state of Manifold, clearly the market disagrees with you that this was money well spent. Perhaps they will turn things around but this is Manifold DAUs. 1. I agree that investing in Polymarket or Kalshi in the early days would have been a good investment. I think its really hard to make the case that they have been good for society; we basically got more sports betting. 2. I'm saying that if you were to compute the amount the EA community has spent on forecasting and the amount donated that got into the community through forecasting, I think the ROI would be very negative. 3. 25 is not that many people for this and I was being very generous saying 25. I think a more fair number is like 5-10. 4. . 5. I did the forecasting stuff to show that I could do it, yes. I remain unconvinced it has been very useful to the world. I feel like above all, I want to stress that EA dollars should meet a really high bar. You can save a child's life for about $5000. You can get a chicken out of a cage for 10 years for about $1. You can apparently build a play money prediction market website for about $6000/DAU.",
        "I guess I'd just like to point out that reducing the likelihood of any interstate conflict by 0.1% is probably valued at about $1 billion / year. I think the forecasting ecosystem as it stands probably does that. Unfortunately you can't measure this in an RCT so we'll never know I guess.",
        "At the heart of this discussion seems to be the issue of whether it makes sense to miss out on good \"investment\" opportunities just because you can't quite measure the impact. I'm an outsider so make of this what you will but it seems to me that EA is bound to have a measurability bias to it because, if not, then it starts to look like old school charity Obviously what you'd really want to do is give a lower bound of how much benefit society might be getting and see if the numbers work out when comparing to alternative uses This discussion is going nowhere without that last kind of analysis imo, and even then it might just be endless but I'd rather see someone try",
        "I think a primary question I want an answer to here was what went so wrong with OpenPhil's attempt to fund superforecasters on AI questions -- why they were eg so much wronger than either of myself or Paul about the probability of a 2025 IMO gold medal win, as wrong (wronger?) than Holden Karnofsky on AGI timelines, etc. Do we know what went wrong? Is it fixable? Has it been fixed? If people with biases can get \"superforecasts\" that match their biases, and attempts to read the market entrails divine that markets in 2023 don't think AGI is on the way, and we can't get extinction-related prediction markets for settlement reasons, then there may not be much for AI people to do with prediction markets.",
        "The rest of humanity should keep trying to get good at prediction markets in order to someday get a little closer to dath ilan, and I think non-real-money markets like Manifold are important for experimenting with that. (Manifold's brief ill-fated attempt to become a real-money market was unfortunate.)",
        "Personally I had updated they were substantially doing reference class forecasting, and that most people (forecasters included) have historically sucked at picking a reference class for AGI.",
        "7Eliezer Yudkowsky22d",
        "I currently have no better historical account, but it's a sharp lesson about how all the bowing and scraping about deferring to superforecasters was just Modesty and \"Outside View!\"ing in disguise all over again, in the sense that the \"superforecasters\" who got hired somehow managed to end up being those without any inside view of AI.",
        "fwiw, I think on AI related questions, Metaculus has chosen Pros who are much more bullish than what I've seen superforecasters do. I don't want to say too much about private projects but some Pros were directly involved in the AI ecosystem. It's not a head-to-head but there is also a significant vibe difference between FRI's report on work and Metaculus Labor Hub where Pros have taken a much more dramatic position. When I'm wrong on AI forecasts it's more often due to things going a bit slower than I expected rather than too fast (although that has happened too) and I know I'm not the only one, there's at least Haiku among the regular Pros who's very \"bullish\". (as in, very worried)",
        "The most well-funded prediction markets in human history did not seem to think either Nvidia or OpenAI was worth particularly much before 2022. Might these just be rare things to anticipate if you are not literally at the eye of the storm?",
        "This is like if lebron james wrote a post about how basketball is stupid and should receive less attention",
        "Thanks for writing this! Some reasons I would steelman continued funding towards tetlockian or PM-style forecasting: — Source and screen for talent. There sure is some correlation between forecasting well and doing important things in EA. Just picking some people I know: Joel Becker, another former #1 Manifold trader, went on to join METR and then do their famous uplift studies. Eli Lifland went on to help make AI 2027. Peter Wildeford started Rethink Priorities, now IAPS. And some of your own track record in making good early-stage EA grants is here.",
        "Beyond that, a bunch of smart and interesting people have expressed a lot of interest in forecasting, from banner bearers like Scott Alexander and Vitalik Buterin and Robin Hanson, to surprising cases like Anthony Giovanetti (of Slay the Spire) to <anon famous AI researcher who DM'd me> to Sam Altman. I do think there's some amount of intellectual fashion-ism going on here, but also, you should fish where the fish are.",
        "When funding is abundant, one bottleneck becomes finding (and building consensus around) talent; if the only thing that a bunch of money spent on forecasting does is to identify good people, that may be worth it. — Fast,",
        "Do you have any reason to think those people succeeded in other areas as a result of the screen from forecasting success ? Did someone give them opportunities they wouldn't have had without being a top forecaster?",
        "My guess is this is just positive selection.",
        "Sorry for the late reply but I have an anecdotal example: myself. I'm a lawyer by trade and there's no way I would have been able to get involved with Epoch AI had it not been for me being one of the best Metaculus forecasters. The most notable thing I did was writing How Fast Could Robotics Production Scale Up? with JS Denain. I know some of the top forecasters have worked for hedge funds although their backgrounds may have helped there? Not very knowledgeable about this and it's possible that you're right overall and it's anecdotal but there's at least one example.",
        "No offense, but your example is using a track record in forecasting to get a job where you post forecasts. I asked about success in other areas.",
        "Did you look at the report? I know the title is very forecasting related but most of it is not forecasting unless you consider all of the research and data collection as purely forecasting. I don't think that's the same thing even if there's overlap in the skills, I wouldn't consider what OWID does with their data collection (not the opinion articles) as forecasting. Here we did mix both but the report has value in itself without the forecasting part, imo.",
        "Potential other example: the Bridgewater Contest on Metaculus. They're supposedly reaching out to top contestants. A lot of finance students are invited but apparently some from schools they wouldn't usually try to get interns from. I know a few of the top students have gotten internships but I have no idea if forecasting ends up being a matter in the recruitment process. They're going through the trouble of organizing it (and paying for) for the third year now, so I guess that must at least matter a little? To be clear, I'm not weighing in on whether this was a good argument or not but bringing examples that might fit the bill seems relevant.",
        "9the gears to ascension24d",
        "Does forecasting asymmetrically favor people trying to do good things? my impression is that it's a general fuel and what it ends up being useful for is highly contingent on who knows what.",
        "I agree that forecasting is an ok way to find talent but not much of this has been done. I agree that in chaos, they are useful but I don't think they hit the bar for EA funding. Sure, it's speculative. If the AIs will use them, then they will also make them and we can just relax for now on the forecasting and let them do it in the future.",
        "I liked this post. Strong upvote. I'm neutral on the funding/not funding issue but the points you make about not starting with the tool to solve some problem but with the problem and then selecting the tool(s) is so very important. I frequently see that as a problem in so much public debate and policy making.",
        "(Copied my comment from the EA Forum and related to my post)",
        "I don’t disagree with some of the fundamentals of this post. Before diving into that, I want to correct a factual error:",
        "“the Swift Centre have received millions of dollars for doing research and studies on forecasting and teaching others about forecasting”",
        "The Swift Centre for Applied Forecasting has not received millions in funding. The majority of our earnings have been through direct projects with organisations who want to use forecasting to inform their decisions.",
        "On your wider argument. I think... (read more)",
        "I think part of the lack of use is institutional inertia. To use a concrete example, politicians (generally) believe that the things they are doing will be successful, popular, and beneficial to their reelection odds. In the past, the only immediate counter-evidence was polling, and this could be dismissed, often rightly, as push-polling intended to apply pressure rather than accurately predict results. Some of that skepticism has carried over to mechanisms that don't have that problem.",
        "The age of our current political class, rather set in its ways, mean th... (read more)",
        "I think politicians to plenty of things that they believe to be mostly ignored by most voters and not directly affect reelection odds. Dominics Cummings had a lot of trouble getting politicians in the UK to do the kind of things that would likely be good for reelection odds instead of campaigning on the pet issues of those politicians. When it comes to efforts of politicians that are targeted at convincing voters, focus groups are a key tool that's used in addition to polling.",
        "Focus groups have their own issues. Easy to subvert through any number of underhanded means, and also accidentally through errors in sampling. They also don't meaningfully indicate issue pertinence. Suppose I really like Trump's policy on road sign renaming, and I really hate his policy on highway median resizing. I might talk passionately about either in a focus group where I'm being paid for my opinion on those issues, but neither is likely to influence my voting behavior. Prediction markets are valuable in that they can cleanly separate issues that are popular/unpopular but electorally insignificant from ones that make or break a campaign.",
        "I think you aren't factoring in that focus groups are lead by people that are not stupid. You can ask questions in a way to get answers about what people care about. Regime Change #2: A plea to Silicon Valley - start a project NOW to write the plan for the next GOP candidate by Dominics Cummings is a good read for what focus groups can do.",
        "At best, a focus group is directed by well-intentioned people who may not know every pertinent correlation value needed to ensure a representative sample of the public. The conventional wisdom is that focus groups are typically used and designed by people who are somewhat out of touch, and this isn't entirely false. At worst, a focus group is directed by people with an interest in showing a certain outcome to a certain set of people. Using the earlier example, AIPAC lobbyists might want to downplay the political damage caused by the Iran War, and can alter candidate selection and discussion framing in order to do so when given authority over study design. Moreover, participants often want to please the experimenters, and will, consciously or otherwise, speak differently depending on what they think they want. Put simply, you end up with all the same issues as polling. Potential for bias, design error, and unreliable subjects.",
        "> People have a tool they want to use, whether that be cryptocurrency or forecasting, and then try to solve problems with it because they really believe in the solution, but I think this is misguided.",
        "It is true that this (almost) never works, and has resulted in many, many wasted investment dollars.",
        "Unfortunately it is also true that when a problem comes along, it is very convenient if someone else has already partially developed the underlying technology that can be repurposed to solve it. Cuts years off the timeline to a solution. Use of blockchain for crit... (read more)",
        "The list of problems with mineral traceability has never really included someone tampering with the data already in an external database. What it does include is the data entered into the database being false to begin with, while many participants of the projects have economic incentives to cover it up, and there are indeed geochemical fingerprinting attempts to fix that problem but they are entirely orthogonal to the issue of the data storage and access. From what I know, I see no significant advantages of a blockchain against a public, well-audited relational database maintained by an independent NGO (like a special body under a UN mandate) besides maybe a geopolitical one (the NGO has to be based somewhere after all), but quite a few disadvantages like not being able to correct the fraud which has been discovered (very convenient for the fraudsters indeed, also no one to blame for that!), trickiness from an engineering/interoperability point of view etc.",
        "This is a good point and that probably wasn't the best or cleanest example I could have picked. Last year I spoke with several blockchain company founders that pivoted to that application as part of a project at work. For the most part, they agreed that data entry is the biggest security hole in any such system. And the sense I got was that so many companies were dragging their heels on complying with passport mandates that have upcoming deadlines it would basically have to be a software product because there would not be time to implement the other options.",
        "I think this is a good point. I don't think it makes up for the ~$125M or so that EA has put into forecasting.",
        "That's fair. Totally reasonable to say EA should stop.",
        "I express no position on the object level, but you may be arguing for something that has already largely happened, see here:",
        "> As of March 30, the Forecasting Fund is no longer active, though we continue to make key forecasting grants through other funds, such as Navigating Transformative AI. This page will be maintained until the end of 2026 as a record of the fund’s work.",
        "They will still be funding lots of forecasting, just not through a dedicated fund.",
        "Once, Robin Hanson made a post on his blog about what he'd do with $1M: try to get prediction markets used in companies. The theory of impact is that they are more likely to actually use the markets, and that it is more impactful than political discourse or prop bets. He suggested making a market of the form \"If X CEO steps down and is replaced by Y, the stock price will go up by Z\", then trying to get a company to take its advice and end up proving it right, and then to try to make it something shareholders demand of any company.",
        "Current markets have lande... (read more)",
        "Prediction markets, or at least judgemental forecasting, has been used in companies before though? At least Google had a pretty substantive internal forecasting platform at some point.",
        "And they tended to be quite successful, yet not get used or get shutdown, which Hanson attributes to cognitive biases and upsetting social hierarchies. But it's possible for such things to get adopted - e.g. hospitals do hand washing now, and even checklists have spread. Thus the idea is to get some more high profile showcase of its usefulness, and for decisions that are worth much more.",
        "How do you rate the educational benefit to participating in prediction markets for about a year? You mention that trivial/gambling markets on short-term BTC movements don't sharpen skills, what about non-trivial markets? How does it compare to other educational/community activities like commenting on LessWrong or attending meetups?",
        "I think from the time I started to the time I stopped, I didnt get any better. I was just as reasonable at both points in time",
        "\\[COI: I work at the Swift Centre as a forecaster, I have worked for a prediction market, I am very involved in forecasting. It is not my current work however, which is on community notes\\]",
        "A few things points attempting to say things other commenters haven't, though I largely agree with the critical comments and the things they agree with Marcus on:",
        "I agree that the $100M doesn't seem super well allocated. Not because forecasting is useless, but because the money flowed to big institutions and platforms rather than smaller, weirder, mechanism-design bets. I l... (read more)",
        "I'll ask a different question than I did on the EA forum. Do you think you work in and are interested in prediction markets/forecasting because they are interesting or because they are the best thing you can do for the world?",
        "I don't work primarily in prediction markets/forecasting. I work trying to build AI community notes. The forecasting work (maybe like 5-10hrs a week) I do is paid at a rate I am happy to work for it.",
        "I think you're measuring the right thing (decisions changed) but blaming the wrong cause. I think the field underperformed because:",
        "1. The questions are at the wrong altitude. \"P(AGI by 2027)\" is fun to trade but hard to act on. The decision-relevant questions (e.g., will this research direction work, will this eval saturate first, will this intervention move its metric) rarely get asked because they're too narrow and poorly funded to attract pro-forecasters. Moreover, such narrow questions usually rely on internal information that is difficult to attain for t",
        "There should be a parallel approach to forecasting research. Currently, it's all in silos, when parameters do not act independently",
        "I am intrigued by the 'solution seeking a problem' framing. Unlike blockchain, there are a number of domains and decisions that would analytically benefit from more accurate predictions about the future (e.g. issue prioritisation, campaigning decisions in politics, domestic policy decisions, geopolitical actions) even if they have practically not adopted forecasting widely. Better forecasts can prevent worse counterfactual worlds, e.g. by preventing planning mistakes leading to rapid inflation, encouraging better resilience planning, etc.",
        "The claim that 'F... (read more)",
        "On the solution seeking a problem, I think proponents of blockchain say similar things about how useful it would be if our financial system were predominantly on the blockchain and how much benefit there would be, in particular to the unbanked. They do, in fact, say this. I never said that forecasting cannot be useful. I think it hasn't been useful to the tune of the money thrown at it, and I'm skeptical that further investment is going to pay off in usefulness. I was somewhat expecting the defenses of forecasting to be better than they have been. The best one was probably this one by @habryka or another reply by Eva Vivalt on the EA forum. It's possible we haven't been funding the right thing within forecasting. Maybe this weekend I will tally up every grant and investment made into forecasting, but I think it is ~$100m. That said, I think basically any poor funding decision will have people saying something similar to this: \\[...\\] When a startup says that their product hasn't taken off and all they really need is better marketing to do so, you should run. I think we should say the same thing here, too. If you need to focus on distribution and try to force your product into being used, it probably isn't that useful. When something is very useful, it gets adopted at extreme speed. The AI companies aren't spending a lot on marketing. For example, people adopted LLMs, chatbots, and other products extremely quickly, and they were more or less just announced. Furthermore, prediction markets have been adopted, so it's hard to say it's an issue of marketing. Almost everyone important has heard of Polymarket and Kalshi at this point and know how PMs work. And none of them has decided that they would be very useful. It just so happens that they are useful for sports gambling primarily and not for making better decisions.",
        "But... aren't prediction markets one of the fastest growing industries in the world right now?",
        "On the usefulness of blockchain, I think the analytical case for our financial system being on blockchain is significantly weaker than the analytical case for better forecasts being useful for policymaking. With my original comment, I was implicitly drawing a distinction between 'cannot be useful' and 'has not been useful': 1. If forecasting simply has not been useful, then it leaves us with two possibilities: (1) it cannot be and we should stop funding it; (2) it can be and we should redirect funding to efforts that figure out and solve why it hasn't been (e.g. distribution). I feel like the analytical case for at least attempting (2) is pretty strong. I will admit that this may validate skepticism to the tune of, 'We should reduce funding and seriously consider our theory of change'. 2. If the argument is that no amount of additional funding will justify the ~$100m we've already spent, I would argue that it doesn't need to. Any additional funding only needs to be useful enough to justify itself. Even if the overall forecasting program ends up being overfunded and unjustified, we should treat future funding as independent of any potential bad decisions in the past. For example, if the program is currently giving us $10m of value (for $100m of funding), and spending an additional $10m would increase that to $30m of value, then we should spend it. Even if the overall program remains a failure, our $10m has given us a 2x return. Wrt the startup analogy and LLMs, I am not sure it is reasonable to claim that all useful technologies get adopted at this extreme speed, re: seatbelts, childproof medical caps, vaccinations, drunk driving laws, helmets, indoor smoking bans, etc. which all required significant distribution efforts. To clarify 'distribution', I think there's a difference between 'everyone has heard of prediction markets' and 'we have the right tools to allow policy/decision-makers to adopt prediction markets in their decision-making",
        "Fair critique for many markets, but weather forecasting on Kalshi actually has tangible verification via NWS monitor data. I use Kumo (joinkumo.co/weather-analytics) to check multiple forecasts before betting. It provides real, measurable accuracy metrics not just vague \"epistemics.",
        "Curated and popular this week"
      ],
      source: {
        url: null,
        outlet: "LessWrong",
        original_title: "Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It",
        original_lang: null
      }
    },
    g03: {
      id: "g03",
      fmt: "yorum",
      category: "dünya",
      title: "How AI turbocharged Donald Trump’s ‘slopaganda’ machine",
      lead: "At 5.20pm on May 9, Trump posted to his 12.6mn Truth Social followers an image of himself standing on the deck of a boat, peering through binoculars at burning warships. The image was generated using AI.",
      writer: "ceviri",
      date: "20 Mayıs 2026",
      readMin: 5,
      imageLabel: null,
      cover: null,
      sourceCoverUrl: null,
      body: [
        "At 5.20pm on May 9, Trump posted to his 12.6mn Truth Social followers an image of himself standing on the deck of a boat, peering through binoculars at burning warships. The image was generated using AI.",
        "Nine seconds later came another: a caricature of Illinois governor JB Pritzker surrounded by piles of fast food with the caption, “JB is too busy to keep Chicago safe!”",
        "Over the next 16 minutes, Trump shared a continuing cascade of AI-generated images: Iran’s navy at the bottom of the ocean; a UFC fight staged on the White House lawn; the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool coloured an impossibly bright blue.",
        "These images were part of a cavalcade of AI-generated images Trump posted in recent weeks. An FT analysis of his Truth Social posts this year shows the number of AI images has surged sevenfold in May.",
        "Trump had taken “a headfirst dive” into what was becoming known as “slopaganda”, said Henry Ajder, an expert on AI and deepfakes, describing the approach as a “systemic embrace” of this “new means of communication”.",
        "AI has allowed him to produce faster, more resonant posts that attack opponents, dramatise policy ideas and mythologise himself. The images have turned his feed into a rolling stream of AI-generated spectacle: imagined military victories, religious iconography and fantasy infrastructure projects.",
        "“It is an extension of his verbal rhetoric . . . it aggrandises him and it denigrates those he opposes,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.",
        "Source: truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump",
        "Trump has posted more than 2,700 times on Truth Social in 2026 — equivalent to more than 19 posts a day — with almost half of these containing images or videos, helping him dominate the attention economy outside of formal media appearances.",
        "At least 75 of those appear to have been generated using AI, according to an FT analysis of his feed, using a conservative methodology that is likely to undercount the true number. But 57 of those posts came in just the first three weeks of May, compared with eight for all of April.",
        "The White House said Truth Social was one way that Trump “communicates directly and authentically with the American people and the world. The American people have never had a president as transparent as President Trump, who shares his thoughts with them in real time on all the important issues of the day.”",
        "It is unclear how much of the feed is written or posted by Trump himself, by his team or a combination of both.",
        "White House communications have shown Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp helping to write a social media post and then handing out printouts of it to visiting European leaders. Harp often presents him with draft printouts of proposed messages, sometimes repurposed from other accounts, according to the Wall Street Journal.",
        "He posts throughout the day, with the most popular period between 9pm and 10pm Eastern time.",
        "In some posts, Trump depicts himself as an action hero. In January, he shared an image of himself planting the American flag in Greenland. In another, he faces the camera with a machine gun in hand, under the caption “NO MORE MR NICE GUY”.",
        "“It’s as if you had a mental readout of his fantasy life and a projection of what he’d like to be seen as,” said Hall Jamieson.",
        "Many posts use fantastical scenarios to degrade his opponents. In October last year during the “No Kings” protest, Trump posted an AI video of himself dropping brown waste on protesters from a jet.",
        "Your browser doesn't support HTML5 video.",
        "Source: truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump",
        "Such motifs were common in authoritarian regimes’ state media, said Henk van Ess, an expert in online research methods.",
        "“Two moves recur. One glorifies the leader: strong, calm, historic. The other constructs an enemy: a criminal, a threat or something less than human,” he said, explaining that AI had made it possible to present this messaging at much greater speed. “This is the Russian playbook with an American accent.”",
        "Trump often crosses the line between humour and offence. In February, he posted and subsequently deleted a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The clip was at the end of a video containing claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election. Trump said he “didn’t see the whole thing”, “didn’t make a mistake” and refused to apologise.",
        "Source: truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump",
        "Last month, Trump faced backlash from some of his most prominent allies on the religious right when he posted an image of himself as a Jesus-like figure. He defended the post, saying, “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better. And I do make people better. I make people a lot better.”",
        "It was not the first religious-themed image he had posted. He has also depicted himself as the Pope and shared an image of himself hugging Jesus. AI gives Trump a frictionless way to claim symbolic identities — warrior, healer, pope, redeemer — without needing rallies or speeches to do it.",
        "“Even when people are told that certain realistic AI-generated content they viewed is fake, it can still change the way they see someone,” said Ajder.",
        "Source: truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump",
        "Trump has also regularly shared fake imagery showing infrastructure projects or imagined futures.",
        "Last year, Trump posted a video highlighting his radical proposals to redevelop the Gaza Strip. More recently, he shared an image of a Trump Tower on the moon and renders of his new “TRIUMPHAL ARCH” monument.",
        "The posts show how Trump is using AI to visualise political fantasies and promises long before they exist in reality.",
        "On Sunday evening, Trump turned his attention to space. He posted AI imagery of himself firing missiles from a spaceship and then another walking side-by-side with an alien shackled in chains.",
        "If Trump’s first presidency was defined by meme warfare, experts say AI has supercharged that strategy into a vast visual ecosystem. “What has become very clear is that whether you like it or not . . . it is resonant. AI-generated content is just consistently some of the most viewed content now online,” Adjer said.",
        "Totals are as of May 19. The data for Trump’s Truth Social posts came from the trump-truth-social-archive on GitHub. The FT analysed posts published in 2026 and manually identified content that appeared, with high confidence, to have been generated using AI. The resulting dataset is likely to undercount the true number of AI-generated images and videos."
      ],
      source: {
        url: null,
        outlet: null,
        original_title: "How AI turbocharged Donald Trump’s ‘slopaganda’ machine",
        original_lang: null
      }
    },
    g04: {
      id: "g04",
      fmt: "saha",
      category: "dünya",
      title: "Lithuanian leaders rushed to bunkers as drone violates country’s airspace",
      lead: "Lithuania’s president and prime minister were rushed to underground bunkers and residents of the capital, Vilnius, urged to take shelter during a warning issued after a drone violated the country’s airspace.",
      writer: "ceviri",
      date: "20 Mayıs 2026",
      readMin: 3,
      imageLabel: "Closeup of hand holding a phone screen, with the alert notification on it",
      cover: "covers/lithuanian-leaders-rushed-to-bunkers-as-drone-viol.jpg",
      sourceCoverUrl: "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3a18f341c119fbdb81b92f13b8842b4415e86281/0_0_4365_2910/master/4365.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none",
      body: [
        "Lithuania’s president and prime minister were rushed to underground bunkers and residents of the capital, Vilnius, urged to take shelter during a warning issued after a drone violated the country’s airspace.",
        "Air and train traffic in and around the city was suspended after the mobile phone “take shelter” alert, the first issued in an EU and Nato country since the start of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.",
        "“Air raid alert! Go immediately to a shelter or a safe place, take care of your family members and wait for further instructions,” read the defence ministry’s warning, which was sent at about 10.20am on Wednesday and lasted for about an hour.",
        "Schools brought children to designated shelters, people in office and apartment buildings went down to basements, and Lithuania’s president, Gitanas Nausėda, and prime minister, Inga Ruginienė, were rushed to bunkers along with cabinet members and MPs.",
        "The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said after the alert that Russia and Belarus had been directly responsible for a spate of drone incursions into EU and Nato countries’ airspace during recent weeks.",
        "Russian electronic jamming has been blamed for the Ukrainian drones crossing into Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all of which border Russia. A Nato jet shot down a drone over Estonia on Tuesday, while Latvia’s prime minister resigned last week over the incursions.",
        "“Russia’s public threats against our Baltic states are completely unacceptable,” von der Leyen said on social media. “Russia and Belarus bear direct responsibility for drones endangering the lives and security of people on our eastern flank.”",
        "The defence ministry’s warning, which was sent at about 10.20am on Wednesday. Photograph: Mindaugas Kulbis/AP",
        "Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, said on Wednesday that even if drones crash-landing in the Baltic states had been launched by Ukraine, they were “not there because Ukraine wants to send a drone to Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia. They are there because of the reckless, illegal, full-scale attack of Russia.”",
        "Some EU and Nato members said a more forceful response might be necessary. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said on Wednesday: “The Ukrainian-Russian war may soon lead to a situation where we will have to react firmly.”",
        "Lithuania’s army said a radar signal “typical of an unmanned aerial vehicle” had been detected in Belarusian airspace. Vilmantas Vitkauskas, the head of the National Crisis Management Centre, said a drone had been spotted in the Vilnius area.",
        "“Based on the parameters we saw, it’s most likely either a combat drone or a drone designed to deceive systems and lure targets,” Vitkauskas said. “The electronic countermeasures here can’t tell us whether an explosive device detonated or not.”",
        "Lithuania’s defence minister, Robertas Kaunas, said the drone had come from Latvia and that it was not known whether it had crashed or left Lithuania’s airspace. Nato fighter jets had been unable to locate it, authorities said.",
        "Russia’s ambassador to the UN caused outrage on Tuesday by claiming Kyiv would soon launch drones at Russia from the Baltic states and telling Latvia that Nato membership would “not protect you from retaliation”.",
        "Lithuania’s foreign minister, Kęstutis Budrys, on Tuesday accused Moscow of “deliberately redirecting Ukrainian drones into Baltic airspace while waging smear campaigns” against all three Baltic states.",
        "Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said on Wednesday that Russia’s military was “closely monitoring the situation” regarding drones flying through the Baltic states’ airspace, and was formulating an appropriate response."
      ],
      source: {
        url: null,
        outlet: "The Guardian",
        original_title: "Lithuanian leaders rushed to bunkers as drone violates country’s airspace",
        original_lang: null
      }
    },
    g05: {
      id: "g05",
      fmt: "yorum",
      category: "ekonomi",
      title: "Oil drops nearly 6% as two China-bound supertankers cross Strait of Hormuz",
      lead: "Oil drops nearly 6% as two China-bound supertankers cross Strait of Hormuz Brent crude falls to about $105 a barrel as Asia-bound vessels raise hopes of resumption of energy flows",
      writer: "ceviri",
      date: "20 Mayıs 2026",
      readMin: 4,
      imageLabel: null,
      cover: null,
      sourceCoverUrl: null,
      body: [
        "Oil drops nearly 6% as two China-bound supertankers cross Strait of Hormuz Brent crude falls to about $105 a barrel as Asia-bound vessels raise hopes of resumption of energy flows",
        "Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.",
        "Two supertankers carrying Iraqi oil to China passed through the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, raising hopes of a partial opening of the vital chokepoint for Middle Eastern energy and sending crude prices tumbling.",
        "Shipping data showed the two ships traversing the strategic waterway. A third supertanker transporting Kuwaiti oil to South Korea was also shown to be in the strait before its transponder was switched off.",
        "Collectively, the three ships are carrying 6mn barrels of oil, potentially the largest volume to exit the Gulf in a single day since the US and Israel started the conflict with Iran at the end of February.",
        "The supertankers steered through the northern side of the strait, following a route designated by Iran. “It is most likely that there was a deal done with Iran,” said Matthew Wright, lead shipping analyst at data company Kpler.",
        "Analysts at shipping data company Windward said the passage of the ships, two days after Iran launched a new agency to administer permits and charge tolls, suggested the strait “is no longer a closed corridor but a contested and tiered-access environment”, shaped by US and Iranian enforcement.",
        "To boost the credibility of its new agency, Tehran also on Wednesday said 26 vessels had passed through the strait over the previous 24 hours, although it was not possible to verify the claim using ship-tracking data.",
        "Brent crude settled 5.6 per cent lower at $105.02 a barrel as traders reacted to the optimism over the crossings, the prospect of further negotiations between the US and Iran, and the latest US data showing better than expected stocks of petrol and diesel.",
        "The fall in oil prices sparked a rally in global bond markets, which had sold off sharply over the past week on fears that the prolonged closure of the strait was fuelling a surge in inflation. The 10-year Treasury yield fell 0.1 percentage points to 4.57 per cent.",
        "On Monday, Tehran announced the creation of the Gulf Strait Authority (PGSA), describing it as the “legal entity and representative authority for managing the passage and transit through the Strait of Hormuz”.",
        "Wright said the new body was “a formalisation” of Iran’s previous requests for vessels to seek permission and pay fees for passage.",
        "The supertankers’ transit came after US President Donald Trump said he was holding off on renewing attacks on Iran, while claiming “serious negotiations” with Tehran were taking place.",
        "He added Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates had asked him to suspend the military assault. Riyadh and Doha are supporting mediation efforts to build on a fragile ceasefire and secure an agreement to end the war.",
        "Trump on Wednesday repeated his warnings that the US could hit Iran “even harder” if Tehran does not agree to a deal.",
        "Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan earlier on Wednesday said the kingdom “highly appreciates” Trump’s decision to “give diplomacy a chance”.",
        "“Saudi Arabia looks forward to Iran seizing the opportunity to avoid the dangerous implications of escalation, and urgently responding to the efforts to advance the negotiations leading up to a comprehensive agreement to achieve lasting peace in the region and the world,” Prince Faisal said on X.",
        "However, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliament speaker and influential wartime leader, said in an audio message on Wednesday that the US had not abandoned its military objectives and was seeking a “new round of adventurism and war”.",
        "Iran brought the strait to a standstill in the early days of the conflict by threatening to fire on any vessels, while the US imposed its own naval blockade in mid-April to prevent ships entering or leaving Iranian ports.",
        "Meanwhile, the shipping industry issued new guidance on how to safely transit the strait on Wednesday. In a 22-page document for shipowners and crews, a group of industry bodies outlined when to consider a crossing, when not to and how to proceed.",
        "It warned all routes through the strait carried elevated risk, that ships should take into account reports of mined areas and that there had been incidents on the northern and southern routes.",
        "Shipping traffic through Hormuz has been sharply curtailed since the conflict began, although crossings have not stopped altogether. A small number of vessels have passed through the strait each day.",
        "According to Kpler, six other supertankers have transited Hormuz this month bound for Asia, and a total of almost 17mn barrels of crude have passed through the strait. Gulf exporters shipped almost 28mn barrels through it during April.",
        "Wright cautioned against interpreting Wednesday’s movements as evidence of a broader reopening of Gulf oil flows.",
        "“What we have seen is a handful of negotiated transits. Fundamentally, nothing has changed,” he said. “The real test will be whether we see more Chinese or Korean-bound vessels going forward.”"
      ],
      source: {
        url: null,
        outlet: "Financial Times",
        original_title: "Oil drops nearly 6% as two China-bound supertankers cross Strait of Hormuz",
        original_lang: null
      }
    },
    g06: {
      id: "g06",
      fmt: "yorum",
      category: "dünya",
      title: "Россия и Китай договорились ускорить строительство газопровода «Сила Сибири-2»",
      lead: "Владимир Путин едет в Китай вслед за Дональдом Трампом. Визит пройдет с 19 по 20 мая, сообщили в Кремле. Поездка приурочена к 25-летию подписания Договора о добрососедстве, дружбе и сотрудничестве.",
      writer: "ceviri",
      date: "20 Mayıs 2026",
      readMin: 3,
      imageLabel: null,
      cover: null,
      sourceCoverUrl: null,
      body: [
        "Владимир Путин едет в Китай вслед за Дональдом Трампом. Визит пройдет с 19 по 20 мая, сообщили в Кремле. Поездка приурочена к 25-летию подписания Договора о добрососедстве, дружбе и сотрудничестве. Лидеры РФ и КНР обсудят отношения между странами, поговорят о главных мировых событиях и, как ожидается, подпишут совместное заявление на высшем уровне, а также другие документы.",
        "На этой неделе Пекин посещал американский президент. Он провел там три дня, с 13 по 15 мая. По итогам стороны, по сообщениям самого Трампа, заключили ряд «фантастических сделок». И вряд ли можно считать совпадением скорый визит в КНР Владимира Путина, отметила президент Ассоциации Евро-Атлантического сотрудничества Татьяна Пархалина:",
        "«Оба лидера, и китайский, и американский, оставили за рамками разговоры о многополярности, совершенно явно всем дав понять, что речь идет о новой биполярности. Если говорить об итогах этого визита, то они не впечатляющие. На этом фоне Китаю очень важно продемонстрировать, и Вашингтону, и всему миру, что Пекин соблюдает баланс. Я думаю, поэтому после визита американского президента следует визит российского. Будут обсуждаться вопросы двустороннего сотрудничества, экономического и военно-технического. Неизбежно станут обсуждаться вопросы, связанные с российско-украинским конфликтом и касающиеся Ирана и разблокировки Ормузского пролива.",
        "«Фантастические сделки» Дональда Трампа, и что они означают",
        "При этом обо всех итогах мы знать не будем. Я не исключаю, что на декларативном уровне, чтобы показать, что Китай имеет другую игру, контрбаланс в отношениях с Соединенными Штатами, Пекин покажет готовность к более тесному сотрудничеству с РФ. Возможно, в связи с тем, что Трамп и его администрация хотели оторвать ее от Китая или Китай — от России.",
        "Сейчас уровень заинтересованности Москвы в углублении сотрудничества по разным линиям, и экономической, и военно-технической, с Пекином очень высок.",
        "Визит важен и для ЕС, поскольку европейцы очень боятся, и об этом пишут некоторые комментаторы, раздела мира, так сказать, на троих. Но этого не будет. Но они тем не менее этого опасаются и поэтому не следуют призывам Трампа объявлять торговую войну Китаю».",
        "Визит президента США в Китай завершился: оценки мировых СМИ",
        "За время своего президентства Владимир Путин посещал Китай около 20 раз. Предыдущая поездка состоялась в конце августа-начале сентября прошлого года. Тогда стороны подписали больше 20 документов, в том числе и меморандум о строительстве газопровода «Сила Сибири-2». Этот проект планируется с 2006-го, но его строительство откладывалось, потому что стороны еще не договорились о коммерческих условиях, напомнил независимый эксперт нефтегазового рынка Дмитрий Лютягин:",
        "«Если говорить про энергетику, считаю, что в большей степени этот визит будет формальным. Скорее всего, проработают и вынесут на стол переговоров отдельные вопросы, связанные с дальнейшим развитием трубопроводного газового маршрута по \"Силе Сибири-2\". Там, напомню, еще пока нет согласованных коммерческих условий по поставке газа по этому маршруту. Именно это и притормаживает активную стадию строительства этого трубопровода.",
        "Президент США уехал из Китая довольным, но с неопределенными итогами визита",
        "Лидеры смогут обсудить ход строительства и развитие атомной электроэнергетики. Напомню, там сейчас возводятся две атомные электростанции. И третьим вопросом может стать именно аспект, связанный с поставкой жидких углеводородов, в частности, нефти. Надо понимать о том, что Китай сегодня находится в некоем рисковом положении в связи со сложностями в Ормузском проливе. Ему необходимо иметь гарантии запитки своей экономики энергетикой. Такими источниками могут быть как американская нефть, о которой как раз отчитывался Дональд Трамп, так и увеличение поставок из России».",
        "Между тем в Кремле отметили, что Москва пока не получала от Пекина информацию о переговорах Дональда Трампа и Си Цзиньпина, но рассчитывает на обмен мнениями на будущей встрече."
      ],
      source: {
        url: null,
        outlet: "Kommersant",
        original_title: "Россия и Китай договорились ускорить строительство газопровода «Сила Сибири-2»",
        original_lang: null
      }
    },
    g07: {
      id: "g07",
      fmt: "yorum",
      category: "teknoloji",
      title: "‘I don’t worry about a robot takeover’: AI expert Michael Wooldridge on big tech’s real dangers (and occasional blessings)",
      lead: "Michael Wooldridge is like the teacher you wish you’d had: approachable, able to explain difficult things in simple terms, neither dauntingly highbrow nor off-puttingly cool, and genuinely enthusiastic about what he does.",
      writer: "ceviri",
      date: "20 Mayıs 2026",
      readMin: 13,
      imageLabel: "Two teenagers look at a computer screen with a huge video of bank of missile warning screens above them.",
      cover: "covers/i-don-t-worry-about-a-robot-takeover-ai-expert-mic.jpg",
      sourceCoverUrl: "https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c6366ea54137c9ce5686738245aeb2684724182e/0_205_2130_2388/master/2130.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none",
      body: [
        "Michael Wooldridge is like the teacher you wish you’d had: approachable, able to explain difficult things in simple terms, neither dauntingly highbrow nor off-puttingly cool, and genuinely enthusiastic about what he does. “I love it when you see the light go on in somebody, when they understand something that they didn’t understand before,” he says. “I find that incredibly gratifying.”",
        "He comes across a regular sort of guy, which, as an Oxford professor with more than 500 scientific articles and 10 books to his name, he clearly isn’t. Typically, his favourite work is his contribution to Ladybird’s Expert Books – an update of the classic children’s series – on artificial intelligence. “I’m very proud of this,” he says, as he hands me a copy from his bookshelf. We’re in his study in the University of Oxford’s somewhat municipal computing department on a sunny spring day. Maybe it’s the campus setting, but our discussion almost takes the form of a seminar.",
        "Wooldridge is an adept public communicator, especially on artificial intelligence – a field he has worked in for more than 30 years, but about which he retains a healthy scepticism. In his 2023 Christmas lectures for the Royal Institution, titled The Truth about AI, he brought in a robotic dog and asked his school-age audience to vote on whether they’d whack it with a baseball bat. And, to explain reinforcement learning, he recreated the classic 80s movie WarGames, in which a young Matthew Broderick averts nuclear catastrophe by getting the US military computer to play noughts and crosses with itself (until it concludes there is no real way to win). “Matthew Broderick was in London at the time. We tried to get him to come on the Christmas lecture, but he couldn’t do it,” says Wooldridge. “So we called our computer BrodeRick in his honour.”",
        "WarGames is actually pretty close to the subject of Wooldridge’s latest book, Life Lessons from Game Theory: The Art of Thinking Strategically in a Complex World. He’s taught the subject to his students for more than 15 years, he says. Now it’s our turn. There’s no maths in Wooldridge’s book; instead he translates game theory into 21 digestible scenarios, incorporating everything from Atlantic cod fishing, to Pepsi v Coca-Cola, to the existence of God.",
        "Prescient stuff? Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy in WarGames, 1983. Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Alamy",
        "“It is surprising how many global events can be explained by a relatively small number of game theoretic models,” Wooldridge says. One of the simplest is the game of “chicken”, which he illustrates in his book using a scene from the James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause (none of his students had heard of it, he admits). Two teenagers drive their cars towards a cliff; the first to jump is the “chicken”, and loses the game. If both jump at the same time, it’s a draw; don’t jump at all and you’ve lost the game pretty badly (spoiler alert: that’s what happens in the movie).",
        "The theory lesson here is about Nash equilibriums (we won’t get into the details) – but, practically, we see this game playing out in real life all the time. The Cuban missile crisis used to be the go-to example, but another one is unfolding as we speak: the US-Iran war. “You’ve got two sides with ever-escalating threats against each other; somebody’s got to back down at some point,” says Wooldridge. “The danger is, if neither backs down then you’ve passed a point of no return and you get the worst-case scenario for everybody.”",
        "Is there any way out of this? “Well, one of the ways that a game can get changed is if a third party comes in and provides some incentive for one of the parties to behave in a different way.” Another option is to circumvent the game by communicating with your opponent. That’s what happened in the Cuban missile crisis, but it feels less likely here. “Although, I have to say, Iran seems to be playing it a lot more cannily, in the sense that the US side is very, very unpredictable. Now, being unpredictable is a classic game theoretic strategy as well, but it makes it very hard for somebody on the other side to know how to respond. If you really are playing against an irrational player then one of the things game theory says is you just hedge your bets against the worst-case scenario.”",
        "This is not just about warfare, or even games, Wooldridge stresses. He defines game theory in the book as “a mathematical theory that aspires to understand situations in which self-interested parties interact with one another”. That, he argues, could apply to all manner of situations: social, political and philosophical.",
        "Genuinely enthusiastic … Wooldridge in 2023. Photograph: Paul Wilkinson",
        "The concept of the “zero-sum game”, for example, has become a mainstream term (partly thanks to WarGames), even if it’s widely misunderstood. A zero-sum game is not simply one where one side gains what the other side loses; it is one where the incentive is to make your opponent lose as badly as possible, Wooldridge explains. So, technically, chess is not a zero-sum game because you’re just trying to win, not to destroy or humiliate your opponent. There’s a socio-political dimension to this. “This zero-sum mentality is very damaging. It’s a very male trait,” he says. “And the evidence is that, not only do you end up not necessarily doing as well in life as you could do, but actually you end as a more miserable person. You feel like you have less agency in your affairs. One of the important lessons from game theory is that, actually, the majority of interactions that we’re in are not zero-sum.”",
        "This adversarial worldview is the engine of populist politics – in the “migrants are coming to take your jobs” sense. You are losing because others are winning. One of Wooldridge’s favourite games encourages us to think the opposite: the Veil of Ignorance was devised in 1971 by the philosopher John Rawls and the premise is that you can design society in any way you want, but afterwards, you will be placed randomly within it. Wooldridge describes it as “a beautiful thought experiment … It incentivises a socially desirable outcome, but people are still following their self-interest.” Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were both fans, he adds.",
        "It’s not initially clear how game theory fits with AI, but the former is a big part of the latter these days, Wooldridge explains, especially in his primary area of interest, which is multi-agent systems – programs that interact with one another and act on your behalf. “So if I want to arrange a meeting with you, why would I call you up? Why doesn’t my Siri just talk directly to your Siri?” These types of interactions are embedded in our online life. Online auctions such as those on eBay, for example, where you’re trying to slip in the winning bid at the last moment. “If my agent is going to interact with your agent and my preferences are not necessarily aligned with yours, then the theory that explains how you should think about those interactions is game theory.”",
        "A Tandy TRS-80 PC, Wooldridge’s first machine. Photograph: Photology1971/Alamy",
        "When Wooldridge started out, AI was almost an abstract concept. He entered computing via amateur enthusiasm. Growing up in rural Herefordshire, the son of a middle manager at the local cider company, it was a big event when Wooldridge’s local electronics shop had a home computer for sale, in about 1980. “This sounded ridiculous because computers were multimillion pound things in my mind.” The shop owners generously let him have a go on it (it was a Tandy TRS-80). “I went back week after week and taught myself to program. I was literally sat in the shop window on the computer.” He went on to study computing as an undergraduate, began a PhD on AI in 1989, then did an internship with Janet (the Joint Academic Network), which was basically the UK branch of the early internet.",
        "The technology has moved on astronomically since then, but essentially, Wooldridge says, “the core techniques that drove the current AI revolution were invented by the mid-80s”. He mentions Geoffrey Hinton, pioneer of artificial neural networks – the mechanism that now underpins machine learning. “The only obstacle standing in the way of the AI revolution in the 1980s, really, was that computers weren’t powerful enough and we didn’t have enough data.”",
        "When it comes down to it, Wooldridge says, the breakthrough success of GPT-3 in 2020 was largely “based on a bet that OpenAI made that if they did the same thing, only 10 times bigger, that would deliver results. A lot of people at the time, including me, were very sceptical about it. I’m a scientist; I would like to see advances through scientific development, not just by throwing more computer power at it. But it turned out that, actually, that was a very successful bet.” Does that suggest OpenAI boss Sam Altman and his ilk are not the tech geniuses they’re taken to be? “I’ve never met Sam Altman; I don’t know,” he says diplomatically. “He’s clearly delivered something remarkable.”",
        "Geniuses or not, these AI pioneers may be reaching their limits. A few years ago, the likes of Altman and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis expected to achieve AGI – human-level artificial general intelligence – within a few years. “I personally think they’re overoptimistic,” Wooldridge says. You can talk to ChatGPT about quantum mechanics in Latin, he points out, “but at the same time, we don’t have AI that could come into your house, that it had never seen before, locate the kitchen and clear the dinner table” – something a minimum-wage human worker could do.",
        "“The limits are the computer power and the data that you’re able to throw at it. And data is now a real constraint.” The whole of Wikipedia made up just 3% of GPT-3’s training data, he says. “Where do you get 10 times more data from next time around?” Data is becoming a valuable resource for that reason, and some organisations possess a potential trove of it. “The NHS is sitting on a huge amount of data about human beings. That’s the most valuable kind of data imaginable.” Private corporations would pay dearly for it, he says, “but I suspect that whoever signed off on such a deal would live to regret it”. He imagines a dystopian future scenario where “you’re only able to have access to the NHS if you agree to be wired up to wearable tech that monitors you on a regular basis … I think we are very quickly going to a world where the next generation of online influencers basically agree to have all of their life experiences, everything they say and do and see, harvested to provide data for AI.”",
        "San Jose: the capital of Silicon Valley. Photograph: Steve Proehl/Getty Images",
        "From an academic standpoint, Wooldridge resents the way Silicon Valley has come to dominate the AI field, both in terms of resources (“GPT-3 required 20,000-odd AI supercomputers to train; there are probably a couple of hundred in the whole of the University of Oxford”) and the public discourse. “We have seen the narrative stolen by Silicon Valley, which is promoting a version of AI \\[profit-driven, job-replacing and almost entirely focused on large language models\\] that certainly me and an awful lot of my colleagues have no interest in promoting or building,” he says. “It’s kind of depressing, as somebody who’s spent their career trying to build AI to make a better world and to improve people’s lives.”",
        "He continues: “If you take in the broad picture, then there are a huge range of benefits to AI that often just don’t get noticed because large language models suck all the oxygen out of the room.” He mentions a team in Oxford that is developing an AI-assisted tool that can analyse a heart scan done using a simple ultrasound and sent to your GP via mobile phone. “This is the kind of expensive stuff that the NHS struggles to provide, all of a sudden available at negligible cost.”",
        "In 2025, Wooldridge won the Royal Society’s prestigious Faraday prize for his expertise in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms. His accompanying lecture, given in February, was titled This Is Not the AI We Were Promised. Around the same time, Wooldridge speculated on AI having a “Hindenburg moment” – the Hindenburg crash killed the airship industry overnight. “It’s entirely plausible that we could see some similar AI-related disaster,” he says. “Computer programs go wrong in all sorts of ways and we are totally reliant on a computing network infrastructure where AI is increasingly embedded.” Having said that, when it comes to existential risks, “AI is not high on my list of things that keeps me awake at night,” he says. “I don’t worry about a robot takeover. At least, it’s not in my top five.” The fact that he considers nuclear war a greater threat is hardly reassuring, mind you.",
        "Considering the future … Michael Wooldridge. Photograph: Philippa James/The Guardian",
        "If he could, though, he would slow the pace of AI development, “just so that we have more time to understand what’s going on”. It is, he points out, a classic “prisoner’s dilemma”, one of the foundational parables of game theory. In the standard scenario, two prisoners must separately decide whether to confess to a crime they have jointly committed, or keep quiet. If one confesses and the other doesn’t, only the confessor will be freed. If both confess, they will each serve a shorter term. If both keep quiet, they’ll serve even shorter terms. So they’d do better if both agreed to keep quiet, but neither knows what the other prisoner will do. Counterintuitively, perhaps, game theory concludes that the smartest option is to confess.",
        "By the same logic, AI companies are locked in a race to get ahead. Their competition means even more expenditure, resources and energy-hungry datacentres, with no net increase in benefit for humanity. But here we are. “We’ve got a small number of very, very wealthy companies that are busy pursuing AI, while at the same time saying that they are afraid that something’s going to go horribly wrong with it. So why are they busy pursuing it? Because they think if we back down and we don’t pursue it, somebody else will.”",
        "Was he ever tempted by Silicon Valley himself? “There are a few points at which that could have happened, I suspect,” he says. “But I’m 60 this year and it’s a young person’s game right now.” Some have argued there’s no point in studying at all these days, now that AI is predicted to replace so much of human activity. Wooldridge doesn’t see it like that. “I didn’t get into computing because I thought it was going to give me a good job. I got into it because I was just really interested in it.” He gets a lot of parents asking him what their kids should study at university, he says, “and the answer is: ‘Let them study something that they’re really passionate about.’ I think that’s the most important thing by far.”",
        "Life Lessons from Game Theory: The Art of Thinking Strategically in a Complex World by Michael Wooldridge is published on 21 May (Headline, £25). To support the Guardian, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com"
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        original_title: "‘I don’t worry about a robot takeover’: AI expert Michael Wooldridge on big tech’s real dangers (and occasional blessings)",
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