Nate Silver: belief

Transcript context

…Why do businesses not seem to care that much about most predictions? Surely this has puzzled you. For 20 years, I’ve been waiting for prediction markets to take off. Obviously in politics, sports, it’s more than up and running, but in most areas, they’re pretty weak. What’s the actual problem on the demand side? I think this may be changing. One of the things I did in trying to figure out my next steps after FiveThirtyEight/Disney is, I talked to different financial firms and hedge funds and Wall Street firms about different types of consulting arrangements. Clearly, there are players in the market who are thinking carefully about political risk and other types of risks that you can price adequately by prediction markets. I think there probably is some notion of critical mass when you have enough liquidity and enough volume to have relatively efficient pricing. I think we may now be at that threshold, but we weren’t four years ago or something like that. Take a truly important commercial question, like will China invade Taiwan, or when will they invade? I’ve looked at different markets or pretend markets on that. I just don’t take those seriously. It’s not that I feel I have a better estimate, but they don’t cause much updating for me.…

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