Talking about... ethics.

30 Jul 2003 | § 9 Johno

"I'm talkin' about friendship. I'm talkin' about character. I'm talkin' about--hell, Leo, I ain't embarrassed to use the word--I'm talkin' about... ethics."

Trivia: name that film!!

One further hint: "Take your flunky and dangle."

I bring up ethics because it occurs to me that my main objection, such as it is, to the Great Leader Board of Terrorism is an ethical one.

That is, I don't participate in dead pools, and find them distasteful. To be on, much less profit from, the date of someone's death, dances on the line between macabre and cruel. So with the DARPA Terrorism Futures Market. The good part about the aforementioned list of nutty predictions cited by Ross at Spiral Dive is that, if they come true, a thousand flowers of democracy bloom, puppies roll in daisy patches, and nobody gets blowed up.

But in the DARPA process, anonymous speculators would bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups. Winners would win based upon the deaths of people. Period. Say more air attacks happen, and such an event has been on the Big Board. Some people would collect winnings from a government-sponsored program because they were "lucky" enough to bet on the date of the next 09/11/01. Policy considerations aside, that is positively grotesque, no matter how predictive such a futures market may be.

For that reason, I'm very glad that DARPA has cancelled the program. Their brand of heady, amoral weirdness is better left out of the light of day.

Please note that I do find the general idea appealing, and the potential is fascinating. I'm rather excited to see what Ross can put together in the way of a sample system using less macabre predictions. But the government should not be in the business of sponsoring dead pools.

Posted by Johno

on Wed 30 Jul 2003 | § 9

§ 9 Comments

Of course, no one would

Of course, no one would profit from ours, at least not in a monetary sense. We, unlike DARPA, would get screwed if we tried to pay people if they won.

30 Jul 2003 | 19:14 Buckethead

Natch.

I also think it's funny that the federal government just came within days of opening its own gambling operation.

30 Jul 2003 | 19:18 Johno

You know, everyone is

You know, everyone is focusing WAY too much on questions like, "will X get assassinated?". There are thousands of other interesting questions, like "will three countries X, Y, and Z form an alliance?". Too many people discount this mechanism out of hand as soon as they hear one bad question. The technique itself has nothing wrong with it, and there is NOTHING unethical about it. The ethics like solely in the questions being asked.

30 Jul 2003 | 19:59 Ross

Ross, exactly. Also, you can

Ross, exactly. Also, you can address other issues, like will x legislation be enacted in a certain period of time, and so on.

You can even get around some of the moral quandaries by restating the question - for example, "Will Arafat be removed from power" doesn't speak to the method of his removal.

I am not convinced that speculating (in the non-monetary sense) on things like terrorist incidents is immoral. If this is a mechanism to try and predict, then actions can be taken based on knowledge gleaned from the movement of "prices" on a market like the PAM. The price mechanism merely forces people to be serious about their predictions, for if they are wrong, there is a consequence.

30 Jul 2003 | 20:14 Buckethead

But what about our brand of

But what about our brand of heady, amoral weirdness?

30 Jul 2003 | 20:17 Buckethead

True, my objection to the

True, my objection to the system lies not in the mechanism itself, but in the morality or ethical dilemmas introduced by buying call options on whether terrorists blow up the Chrysler Building.

The other questions, such as, "will NATO dissolve in calendar year 2004?" are more morally neutral.

I realize I am skating back and forth here between ethics and morality, and I hereby acknowledge that my "dead pool" objections above are as much or more moral as they ethical.

And I will have you know, Buckethead, that my brand of heady weirdness is eminently moral. Upright, even.

30 Jul 2003 | 23:01 Pythagosaurus

perfidy