Marketwise, the english edition

Same newsletter, different language.

Yet Another Newsletter?!

I’m doing a (free) newsletter (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like Astral Codex Ten) for prediction market enthusiasts. Does the world need that? There are already people like Scott Alexander, Robin Hanson, superforecasters, and other luminaries who write about prediction markets and they are much more popular.

That was what I thought two weeks ago.

Then there was this conference/festival/event/whatever organized by the worlds most active prediction market platform. For one weekend, they all gathered there and discussed the state of the prediction market world. (They wouldn’t just play card games, jump into ball pits, and have orgies, right?)

I had never before attended a business conference with a 28 percent chance of an orgy. –NYTimes

Anyways, only a few days later, a Co-founder of this platform wrote me this:

As a sidenote, I would be extremely happy if you'd switch over to English, or crosspost an English version done by Google Translate or sth; there isn't a weekly English newsletter about prediction markets afaict.

🤔

Austin just met basically everybody relevant in the prediction market community and he still thinks there could be a niche.

So here we are.

What is this Newsletter about?

This is just a continuation of the german newsletter Marktweise in a different language with hopefully a bigger audience. My goals are essentially the same, but this is a good opportunity to rephrase them:

• News; not about last week, but about the future.

• Preach the goodness and usefulness of prediction markets.

• Explore how we can make better decisions.

Let me expand a little on the last one: I consider decisions are a great focal point for many activities. Predictions (and prediction markets) should primarily serve as an input to decision making. As a society we have not figured out how to really do that. We have some theory (e.g. Futarchy) but we are not using it much in practice yet. If this newsletter can help to push the world towards that a little, I believe it would be good and a success.

“Prediction markets - They freaking work!” says James and I agree.

So I’m here to write about this good news and if you agree, you can inform your english-speaking friends about this newsletter.

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Probably until next week, lovely readers! 😊