Scott Alexander

Maybe the problem is that probabilities don't matter?

Maybe there's some State Department official who would change plans slightly over a 20% versus 40% chance of Khomeini departure, or an Iranian official for whom that would mean the difference between loyalty and affection, and these people are benefiting slightly, but not enough that society feels revolutionized.

Maybe society has been low-key revolutionized and we haven't noticed?

Very optimistically, maybe there aren't as many, obviously the protests will work, only a defeatist doomer traitor would say that they have any chance of failing, no, obviously the protests will fail, you're a neoliberal shill if you think they could work, takes, as they used to be.

Maybe everyone has converged to a unified assessment of probabilistic knowledge and we're all better off as a result.

Maybe Polymarket and Kaoshi don't have the right questions.

Ask yourself, what are the big future prediction questions that important disagreements pivot around?

When I try this exercise, I get things like, will the AI bubble pop?

Will scaling get us all the way to AGI?

Will AI be misaligned?

Will Trump turn America into a dictatorship?

Make it great again?

Somewhere in between?

Will YIMBY policies lower rents?

How much?

Will selling US chips to China help them win the AI race?

Will kidnapping Venezuela's president weaken international law in some meaningful way that will cause trouble in the future?

If America nation-builds Venezuela, for whatever definition of nation-build, will that work well or backfire?

Some of these are long horizon, some of these are conditional, and some of these are hard to resolve.

There are potential solutions to all these problems, but why worry about them when you can go to the moon on sports bets?