faceh
12d ago
One possible solution is that you have people pay to have questions answered, and as part of that payment, they pay people to act as oracles who have good reputations.
Yeah, this was part of how Augur's system worked. Reward people who end up on the 'right' side of a final resolution question consistently AND anyone who is answering the question has to stake some portion of their reputation on the outcome they're judging. Eventually 'bad actors' (who are either malicious or are too stupid to reliably interpret contracts) lose out and the correct/consistent oracles accumulate more wealth so they can have more influence over future resolutions.
It helped settle into an equilibrium where it was usually not worthwhile to try to exploit an apparent ambiguity, while knowing that wealthier oracles will ignore said ambiguity and you'll lose money directly by trying to challenge them.
I've been blown away by how bad otherwise intelligent people are at writing and interpreting resolution criteria.
Yep. There are plenty of bright line rules for resolving ambiguity in legal contracts, and it can be permissible to pull in outside evidence to interpret them, but you have to think about the ENTIRE document in a systematic way, you can't just glance it over and interpret it based on vibes.
And glancing at things and going with your gut is how so, so many humans operate.
The problem is there's always a tradeoff when you try to get as precise as possible with your wording, in that it both makes it harder for laypeople to easily understand what the terms say (and less likely to read it all) and, paradoxically, can open up a greater attack surface because there's more places where ambiguities can arise.
This is where I imagine LLMs would have a role, if they are given a set of 'rules' by which all contracts are to be interpreted, and they can explain the contracts they read to laypeople, and everyone agrees that the AI's interpretation is final, then you at least make it more challenging to play games with the wording.
faceh
14d ago
in practice you don't need 99.9, you need better than alternatives in at least some cases.
Agreed. And thus I strongly support prediction markets as a concept for making personal decisions, hedging risks, and predicting important events.
Just noticing that centralized prediction markets are yet another sort of institution that can be captured and/or sabotaged if they become important to guiding/controlling society.
Would really hope we have robust competition between them to ensure no player ever becomes fully dominant in the space.
faceh
19d ago
The booze-and-meth of the masses. Get 'em all riled up and take away inhibitions so they get distracted brawling each other.
faceh
20d ago
Well, when you put it like that…what’s the alternative?
I think in the hypothetical ideal in my mind, the payment processors/financial system are 'forced' to be agnostic as to the source of funds they receive, even if they themselves will decline to send money out to certain uses or to take certain types of people or businesses as customers. Money is money when it comes in, as long as all else is legal and fraud protections are cleared.
I suppose it should in theory be 'impossible' to have your funds locked away from you, and your funds should always be withdrawable to some base physical currency or transferable to a different bank, so you will never have to forfeit money sitting in your account because the bank determines it came from some sketchy source.
Government doesn't like this because people will evade taxes and launder money and pay for activities the government dislikes.
Society at large might dislike this because various vices are enabled by an open payment process.
But the point is that if you are operating in sketchy-but-legal industries and you have a contract with a payment processor to help you receive money from your customers, you should not be getting 'debanked' completely without warning and should be able to know you can get those funds out of the bank without too much hassle, even if they ultimately decide to stop processing your payments.
faceh
21d ago
Got some of those in the 'leadership' positions independently wealthy.
Yes, and the Augur 2.0 solution was to add in an option for people to bet on whether a market was invalid in the market itself.
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