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This Developer’s
Life: Intrade
Dear Reader:
Sorry for being gone so
long. I’ve been on lockdown doing “the
thing with the TV cameras”. I still can’t
talk about my bizarro adventures in Hollyweird, but I promise, the second the “instant
death from a spy satellite” clause in my contract (I think right after the
thing airs) I’ll let you know all about it.
But a lot has happened
since I left. Atomic went under, Lionhead
started cryptically telling us it’s revolutionary (again), and seniors are out
fighting against health care reform… The
end times, they are upon us.
But really, I don’t want
to talk about any of that, at least not right now. I’d much rather talk about this:
https://www.Intrade.com/
I know that about half of
our community is already using Intrade, but I see it discussed so infrequently
here that I thought it was worth a week’s worth of blogging...
For those of you who don’t
know, Intrade is basically a futures market with a twist (it can also be seen
as a sportsbook without the sports). On Intrade
users buy long or short contracts on actual events. For example, you might buy a long contract on
a Public Healthcare Option Passing the House by December 31st 2009 (meaning
that you’re betting that the event will occur), or a short contract on District
9 Grossing $30 Million in its Opening Weeked (i.e. you’re betting that it won’t
gross $30 million). What makes this
unique is the fact that these contracts, rather than being a straight bet, can
be bought and sold by the users at any time, making them function like
stocks. For example:
If I had a short contract
betting against Sarah Palin getting the republican nomination in 2012, and on
the day she resigned the value of the stock tumbled because people felt as
though she was less likely to get the nomination I could sell my contract then
and make money, even if she did eventually get the nomination.
Ok, so now you get what
it is, I guess the question becomes “why do we
care?” We care because Intrade has served
as a shockingly accurate predictor of future events: two days before the
capture of Saddam the Intrade contract on his capture began to spike, political
analysts and even the Pentagon have used it for a predictor.
For a long time we’ve
heard about the serious and potentially experimentally valuable nature of video
games, but until Intrade I hadn’t seen one that reliable demonstrated the
wisdom of crowds or our ability to harness the aggregated intelligence of a
large number of people. This is fascinating
to me as it is done in Intrade in a very direct, very apparent way, which is, I
believe, a limiting factor.
Through many of the
standard video game tricks I think we could make this process more exciting and
more palatable. I believe we could bring
in many more people and explore hypothetical, rather than simply current events
with the medium. I believe we could do
so in a way that would give us enormous insight into the human psyche and allow
us to better understand the actions of we take en masse. This sort of game could be an invaluable tool
in avoiding many of the blunders we make as a society (or even as humanity in
general), but could (and more likely would) be used as a terrible device for better
control of masses.
Either way, I’m pretty
sure it’s achievable, and that means someone’s going to do it. Anyone have any thoughts on how to steer this
sort of project away from its more insidious uses?
Shoot me your thoughts at
jportnow@gmail.com or hit me up on
twitter at JamesPortnow
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