Considering my options for following without needing to remember to check the site: what gets posted into the newsletter, and how frequent are the updates? Is there an RSS feed?

Very cool, and useful.  There's another news innovation I've been enjoying - https://www.newsminimalist.com/ is chatgpt-ranked news stories, filtered to most novel, important, and credible.  It does have links to sources, in addition to summaries. 

I would LOVE to see a combination prediction market and news source.  Either AI-generated links to relevant news stories, or better yet, links to prediction graphs relevant to news stories identified as interesting by some criteria.

↑ comment by vandemonian · 2023-06-11T14:06:28.690Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The goal of The Base Rate Times is to be a combination of prediction markets and news aggregator. Right now on the site there are links to the latest stories with AI-generated bullet-point summaries.

I've been trying to link news stories to prediction markets, but still figuring out a more systematic way of doing it.

I am currently testing how to make AI article summaries even better. My goals are for AI to:

• find historical data to contextualise the story
• advise forecast updates based on the story
• make counter-arguments
• translate articles from e.g. Chinese
• detect bias & cross-reference claims

Yes, I love News Minimalist and check it everyday! But I don't want to just directly rip them off!

I've been thinking about how to use AI for news curation in a way that's original and specific to The Base Rate Time's mission (news via prediction markets).

I don't see a way to click into individual charts to be able to zoom / see them in more detail. They're a bit crammed on the main page, which is fine for a summary but not great as the only way to view them.

In general it's a bit weird to have a news website with no way to click into a headline and see more information. Maybe that's OK for now, but it is surprising as a user. Perhaps you could link to or quote comments from the prediction market websites, or recent related news articles?

Are you using the same fonts as NYT? Probably better to use different ones to distinguish your site.

You've got various little weirdness with your borders and formatting. E.g.: the gray vertical lines between columns start at different points near the top. The spacing between the icons next to "Follow" and "Newsletter" is too close.

This is a very cool project, hope it continues!

Curated.

I've heard people vaguely wishing for this sort of product for a few years, and I feel pretty excited looking at the potential here. 

There's a lot of room for improvement, some of which is UI here, and some of which depends on how individual predictions and prediction-market-communities turn out to evolve. But I think the current product is above the bar of worth taking a look at and signal boosting. I hadn't consciously thought through the lens of "[Prediction], platforms’ UX is orientated towards forecasters, not information consumers", which seems like an obvious font of potential innovation.

I think this is a great project! Have you considered adding a donation button or using Patreon to allow readers to support the project?

I do have one big issue with the current way the information is presented: one of the most important things to take into account when making and interpreting predictions is the timeframe of the question. For example, if your are asking about the probability that Putin losses power, they the probability would likely be twice as high if you consider a 2 year timeframe compared to a 1 year time frame, assuming the probability per month does not change much.

Currently, the first 5 top-level headlines all ignores the timeframe, making the headlines meaningless: “Putin >90% likely to remain in power, no change” “Odds of ceasefire ~15%, recovering from ~12% low” “Russia ~85% likely to gain territory, up from ~78%” “Crimea land bridge ~30% chance of being cut, no change” “Escalation: ~5% risk of NATO clash with Russia, down from ~9%”

The last one is particularly misleading. It compares the probabilities from start April to the probabilities now (start June). But one of the markets have deadline on June 12th and the other prediction have deadline July 1, so it is not surprising that the probability is down!

In order to conclude that the risk is decreasing, the question should have a moving deadline. I’m not aware of any prediction sites that allows questions with a moving timeframe, although it would be a great feature to have.

I'd encourage not relying on Twitter as your source of advice. perhaps user polling might be appropriate?

Nitpick: None of the listed sources except for Polymarket, Insight, Kashi, and maybe Manifold are technically prediction markets (I may have missed an exception), since they don't include a betting aspect, only a forecast accuracy metric they apply to the forecasters.

I think it probably makes sense to use less artificial intelligence to put things into context, and instead focus on providing information with high quality instead of information with high quantity. I guess you could use AI to provide high quality information, but I also guess that by default you end up providing a large quantity, since that's a lot easier to do.

If I want a fire-hose of information, I can just use ChatGPT myself (or google, or wikipedia, or read the comments on the prediction market websites, etc.). And I anticipate I'll just be kinda annoyed if you provide me with the same type of info, but less useful since I wasn't the one who wrote the ChatGPT prompt.

Or maybe you spend a bunch of time on prompt engineering and I don't get annoyed, in that case, go right ahead and use AI, and it will probably turn out fine.

Very cool! Personally, I currently avoid the news because it's not really relevant to my life, actionable, or something that tends to make me happy. The Base Rate Times doesn't seem to change any of that - fundamentally it's still news - and so I wouldn't use it.

Of course, not everyone is like me. Many people currently read/watch/consume the news. A lot of that is probably social positioning though, like watching CNN or reading NYT to better fit in with friends and family. I don't think The Base Rate Times would appeal to them.

But it does feel to me like there is some demographic for whom it would appeal to. Eg. rationalists and rationalist-adjacent people. To me it seems like an important step forward would be to figure out who these people are, where they hang out (physically or digitally), and what acquisition channels might work for them. The product honestly seems fine to me at the moment for the purpose of getting some sort of sign ups and feedback; my hunch is that it'd make sense to spend 70%+ of your time on marketing and user research.

I like the MVP!  One comment re the idea of this becoming a larger thing in journalism, in relation to Goodhart's Law ("Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be useful as a measure"):

• Affecting policy and public opinion is a "target"
• "Real" journalism affects both public opinion and policy, and thus is a "proxy target"
• If "real" journalism started being affected by prediction markets, then prediction markets would also become a proxy target
• This would destroy their usefulness as measures

For example, even now, how much of the "85% chance Russia gains territory" is pure "wisdom of crowds" placing bets based on knowledge, and how much is the Kremlin buying "Russia gains territory" shares, in an effort to convince people that things will go well for them?  If the NYT and the Washington Post -- and then Senators -- regularly quoted prediction markets, you can bet the latter would go into overdrive.

I like this conceptually - might be nicer to aggregate all the prediction markets into an average by default (to make for cleaner graphs), and only split them up as an option.

This is a fantastic project! Focus on providing value and marketing, and I really think this could be something big.

The LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.

Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?

A bit silly perhaps, but: I’m really not a fan of the font choices and general look of it? Doesn’t look different enough from the NYT, even assuming that you did it on purpose, and the motto sounds weirdly pompous? But the layout itself seems quite clear.

Maybe also make the articles themselves more visible somehow? 
I’m the kind of weirdo who rarely reads the news but enjoys having just the charts on how the situation’s evolving, and in that case, looking for info directly on prediction markets’ websites does the trick, right? What you bring is that you give both the articles explaining the situation in detail, and the info on how important it is. And that’s great, because one should care about both! But I guess it makes me think the articles could be a tiny bit more prominent. The idea of having article summaries, though, is great, since a lot of most articles tends to be filler anyway.

Anyway, wonderful idea! I’ll be reading that website often.

This is very much what I want my headlines to look like.  

Personally, preferred mode of consumption would be AM email newsletter like Axios or Morning Brew.

The resolution dates on the markets seem important on several of the headlines and were noticeably missing from the body.

"Crimea land bridge 22% chance of being cut [this year/campaign season], down from 34% according to Insight"

Notice how different that would read with the time horizon on there vs leaving unqualified.  The other big question an update like that begs is "what changed?"

I'm super excited for this! First impressions of site:

• The colorful graphs are eyecatching and fun. Some graphs have too much going on, with all the markets and different resolution criteria. Some visual simplification desired.
• It seems that platforms get different colors in different graphs? I desire each platform to have a consistent style.
• Icons rather than platform names all over the place would feel good
• I love the "China position paper" annotation. I want to see lots of that.
• On the US debt graph, one of the vertical line annotations is probably not displayed correctly: 'In 'In pri...
• Some underlined text is an actual link to another site, but other underlined text is an expandable section, which causes me confusion.