What Speaks Silence?
I joined 23 economists more distinguished than I to make a joint statement in support of legalizing certain kinds of prediction markets. Freakonomics author Steven Levitt explains why he didn’t sign:
I never sign any letter of this kind. … If you sign one them, it becomes harder to say no to [others] … I didn’t think the letter went far enough. It attempts to draw a sharp distinction between prediction markets created by academics for research and other kinds of markets. A subtle implication of that distinction is that the government has some legitimate role in restricting access to prediction/gambling markets more generally.
I replied:
Signing a statement in favor of legalizing A, when both A and B are now illegal, does not mean that one favors keeping B illegal. Not every statement can or should address every issue.
Fear of meta-signals clearly adds noise to such signals. Perhaps we need a website full of statements which we can each browse at our leisure to choose the ones we will publicly endorse or oppose.
Shameless self-plug, specifying what such a system should be:http://optimizelife.com/wik...
I propose an alternate, or possibly supplementary suggestion. I would like to see an overcoming bias version of an argument diagramming website. Something like what Argunet has done here http://www.denkartist.de/ar... (Select the Climate Policy debate in the upper left and then view the entire debate in the drop-down to the right.)
I see this as providing a means to revisit an old debate more easily while limiting the rehash of already exhausted points. It also alleviates some of the problems with using plain English for debates as it visually clarifies exactly which premise is being attacked and for what reasons.
Argunet is promising an open source version release this month, but perhaps something already exists.