Slack tool: predict

March 17th, 2017
predict, tech
I wrote a Slack tool that implements a CFAR-style prediction market:

/predict create rain-2017-03-18 "it will rain tomorrow" tomorrow 40%
/predict rain-2017-03-18 70%
/predict rain-2017-03-18 80%
/predict resolve rain-2017-03-18 true

A contract is some proposition that isn't known now, but will be known later, at which point it can be resolved true or false. When you create a contract, you give some details about how you'll resolve it, a time when it will close and stop taking new predictions, and some "house odds". These odds try and start the predicting in a reasonable place, so no one gets a big windfall from noticing things first.

When the market closes, people earn points in proportion to how much they improved the group consensus. [1] This isn't a traditional prediction market in the sense of having buyers and sellers. The downside is that it offers windfall profits to the first person to react to news, but the upside is that anyone can make a prediction at any time without needing to have a counterparty.

The code is on github. I've been using heroku to host it, but it can run anywhere. If you're having trouble adding it to slack let me know.


[1] Specifically, you get (or lose) points in proportion to the log of the ratio of your prediction to the one before. So if you predict 60%, I predict 70%, and it's resolved true, then I earn log(70/60) points. If it's resolved false we recast these predictions as if they were predicting the opposite, so 30% and 40%, and I earn (lose) log(30/40) points.

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Tuberculosis Considered As Dating Strategy

Against some evopsych

via Thing of Things July 8, 2025

Retrospective on life tracking and effectiveness systems

I’ve been doing life tracking for around 10 years, and this post is looking back at some things I learned from the data (since my previous retrospective in 2017). Highlights include what I get out of the Oura ring, correlations between sleep and deep work…

via Victoria Krakovna July 4, 2025

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

more     (via openring)