Shuttle-disaster futures market

In the recent thread about John Poindexter's terrorism-
futures fiasco, I'm surprised nobody proposed the on-topic
sequel: space-shuttle disasters futures.

I played around with the online Foresight Exchange a few
years ago, and the most valuable lesson I learned was that
I'm a terrible forecaster. It was a little creepy betting,
eg, on how long Castro would live, but I think for anyone
whose job is forecasting, whether for the CIA or NASA, the
experiment is very educational.

Imagine that a private market was conducted by NASA in
which engineers bet on the sorts of problems likeliest to
occur in each Shuttle mission. Payoffs would be based on
who guessed right, and those who missed would be forced to
recalculate based on realworld feedback.

If this had been going on for past Shuttle missions, don't
you think the foam problem would have gotten much more
attention?

The item being bet on wouldn't necessarily have been "crew
lost on re-entry"-- just "leakage of plasma into wing"
would have been foreseeable based on the Atlantis precedent.

With regard to terrorism, though, I admit the equations are
rather different. If one wanted to do a cost-benefit
analysis from the terrorists' viewpoint, I'd wager that
phony anthrax-letters have a terrific payoff in terms of
tying government systems in knots, with almost no cost or
risk. Yet as far as I know nobody is bothering anymore.

Still, as an in-house educational tool, I think
Poindexter's plan makes great sense overall, because of the
concrete feedback it would enforce.

Jorn Barger wrote:

The item being bet on wouldn't necessarily have been "crew
lost on re-entry"-- just "leakage of plasma into wing"
would have been foreseeable based on the Atlantis precedent.

The problem with these kinds of schemes is that there really are people
out there sick enough to deliberately cause problems for money, or
collude with people to cause these kinds of problems for money. Giving
people incentives to do 'the wrong thing' is really a non starter.

In article ,
(Jorn Barger) wrote:

Still, as an in-house educational tool, I think
Poindexter's plan makes great sense overall, because of the
concrete feedback it would enforce.

maybe on first blush. but think about it. terrorists could bet on when the
next terrorist attack would be, then make a lot of money when they made it
happen. not a good thing.

maybe by "in-house educational tool" you mean something that isn't actually
ever put in practice. like a think-tank thing. then I could agree a bit
better, sure.

however, if the stock market can't be predicted (according to Modern
Portfolio Theory, if one accepts that), I'm not so sure that things like
terrorist attacks can be either when couched within similar
stock-market-like models. even if it seemed successful, then there'd be all
the criticism that applies to stock market timing models, i.e., is it truly
predictive or just "chance" that some event "predicted" by the model
happened to coincide with some "random" event. so on and so forth. these
things are hashed and re-hashed a zillion times a day in various forums and
no one can agree.

in short, even from my layman's viewpoint, I can see a whole lot weird with
this little endeavor that Poindexter was trying to implement. a lot of
unanswered questions about use, accuracy, and such. sounds like less of a
deliberate, measured method and more of a half-ass pet scheme.

On Wed, 06 Aug 2003 02:30:51 GMT, sam grey wrote:

In article ,
(Jorn Barger) wrote:

Still, as an in-house educational tool, I think
Poindexter's plan makes great sense overall, because of the
concrete feedback it would enforce.
snip

in short, even from my layman's viewpoint, I can see a whole lot weird with
this little endeavor that Poindexter was trying to implement. a lot of
unanswered questions about use, accuracy, and such. sounds like less of a
deliberate, measured method and more of a half-ass pet scheme.

Just the idea of betting on other people's misforture is offensive.

Dale

err, I meant "misfortune", not "misforture". My eyes are going fast...

Dale

sam grey wrote in message . net...
[...] terrorists could bet on when the
next terrorist attack would be, then make a lot of money when they made it
happen. not a good thing.

These are two basic design-issues: who can bet and how much
they can bet. My point is that it's a useful discipline for
professional forecasters, so non-professionals can be
excluded. The payoff only has to be enough to make the
players _care_ whether they win or lose-- even just getting
their name in the in-house newsletter might be enough.

I don't know how big Poindexter's payoffs were supposed to get,
nor who he was going to let in, but 99% of the brouhaha might
have been avoided by defining these very narrowly in advance.

however, if the stock market can't be predicted (according to Modern
Portfolio Theory, if one accepts that), I'm not so sure that things like
terrorist attacks can be either when couched within similar
stock-market-like models.

Certainly, terrorism is infinitely harder to guess than
Shuttle problems, but in either case, there _are_ professionals
whose job it is to make such predictions, and if they have an
efficient mechanism for sharing and testing their guesses,
they're bound to learn from it.

Regarding terrorism, it could at least centralise the
statistics on the sorts of attacks being made, so if there
were patterns emerging, many eyes would be trying to spot
them. This is obviously already supposed to be happening,
but failing badly at both the CIA and NASA.


Ian Woollard wrote:
The problem with these kinds of schemes is that there really are people
out there sick enough to deliberately cause problems for money, or
collude with people to cause these kinds of problems for money. Giving
people incentives to do 'the wrong thing' is really a non starter.

You are assuming worst-case values for rewards and for
who's included. If NASA or the CIA have employees who'd
cheat to win a gold star, they're in very serious trouble,
and any mechanism that brings this out will be useful for
that alone.


Dale wrote:
Just the idea of betting on other people's misforture is offensive.

Doing autopsies is pretty offensive, too, but we've
learned to recognise the advantages. If I were an
astronaut, I'd not only want such a 'market' to exist
for the engineers, I'd follow it closely and talk to
them about why they bet as they did.

On 6 Aug 2003 01:00:18 -0700, (Jorn Barger) wrote:

Dale wrote:
Just the idea of betting on other people's misfortune is offensive.

Doing autopsies is pretty offensive, too, but we've
learned to recognise the advantages.

I have no objection to doing autopsies when needed.

If I were an astronaut, I'd not only want such a 'market'
to exist for the engineers, I'd follow it closely and talk
to them about why they bet as they did.

I'd prefer that they simply do their jobs, be able to freely
communicate any concerns they may have, and have
those concerns addressed before launch.

Do you expect people to sign off on launches even after
they've "bet" against success? If I were an astronaut,
I wouldn't want people like that supporting my mission.

Dale

I wrote in message . com...
Imagine that a private market was conducted by NASA in
which engineers bet on the sorts of problems likeliest to
occur in each Shuttle mission. Payoffs would be based on
who guessed right, and those who missed would be forced to
recalculate based on realworld feedback.

Changing the labels on these concepts might make them more
palatable to superficial critics:

Instead of 'betting on' disasters, you could call it a
safety-engineering game, and give each player 100
'hours' to allocate to areas the engineer thinks need
more attention.

BEFORE launch, this feedback could be used to assign
last-minute checkups, and after the mission players
who foresaw problems that others missed could be
rewarded.

The principles are exactly the same, but by rewording
it, the hysterical kneejerk reactions are defused...

On 6 Aug 2003 01:52:00 -0700, (Jorn Barger) wrote:

BEFORE launch, this feedback could be used to assign
last-minute checkups, and after the mission players
who foresaw problems that others missed could be
rewarded.

For doing their jobs...

The principles are exactly the same, but by rewording
it, the hysterical kneejerk reactions are defused...

LOL

Dale

(Allen Thomson) wrote:

(Jorn Barger) wrote

In the recent thread about John Poindexter's terrorism-
futures fiasco, I'm surprised nobody proposed the on-topic
sequel: space-shuttle disasters futures.


Speaking of which, this slightly related article just showed up:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2086811/

The "futures" here seem to be not actually on prospects for launch
success, but on the outcome of accident enquiries.

The article and the abstract make me a little uncomfortable. They
seem to have worked from a conclusion to the evidence.

D.
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