Rashomon - A newsbetting site

post by ideasthete · 2024-10-15T18:15:02.476Z · LW · GW · 8 comments

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Hello Rationalists!

A while ago I created a concept to evaluate political biases that I call "newsbetting" and made a demo site at rashomonnews.com.  Essentially, one receives a news article stripped of identifying information (so stuff like title, author, news source, etc) so that they only get the text of the news article. The reader then places a bet on what they believe the political bias of the news source is - far left, left, center, right or far right. The news source evaluations were taken from allsides.com, but the plan was to eventually have users vote on what they believed the bias was for each news source. 

I kind of consider the project closed for the time being, but I wanted to share my results with the community here. There's more data and analysis based off of an initial demo of the site with ~70 users, mostly friends and family. 

I understand that "politics is the mindkiller" but I'm hoping it's obvious why this idea is so suited towards rationalists. This idea was directly based on Robin Hanson's famous quote "We vote on values, we bet on beliefs" and combines or potentially could have combined many mainstay ideas found in rationalist communities - betting markets, cryptocurrencies, bayesian statistics, a preoccupation with quantification and bias. I'm hoping to hear feedback from the community that inspired the idea, nothing more. It's a free to use demo site, there's no actual money involved, it's just a way to quantify you biases. Obviously, it's possible to cheat, but I'm hoping this community approaches it in the spirit it was meant to be used in. 

Thanks, hope to hear more from the Bayesian perspective regarding this idea. 

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