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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. |
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Shuttle-disaster futures market
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. |
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Shuttle-disaster futures market
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 |
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Shuttle-disaster futures market
err, I meant "misfortune", not "misforture". My eyes are going fast...
Dale |
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Shuttle-disaster futures market
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. |
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#8
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Shuttle-disaster futures market
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... |
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Shuttle-disaster futures market
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