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Project summary

The Base Rate Times is a nascent media company that incorporates prediction markets prominently into its coverage.

You can find the current iteration here: https://www.baseratetimes.com/
And here: https://twitter.com/base_rate_times

• Replace pundits with prediction markets:
  The Washington Post = "As campaigning ends, outcome of France’s presidential vote is uncertain".
  The Base Rate Times = "As campaigning ends, prediction markets give Macron an 80% chance of winning".

• Gap in the ecosystem: There are numerous prediction platforms now, but their forecasts have not been extensively used by the media and content creators. The Base Rate Times seeks to bridge this gap by sharing insights from prediction markets in an engaging way.

• Novel approach: To date, attempts at using forecasts to influence decision makers have focused on consultancy (e.g. Good Judgement) or internal markets within organizations. The Base Rate Times tries something new, tackling the news cycle and 'Overton window' that influences leaders.

Roadmap

The Base Rate Times is currently a news aggregator website with a Twitter feed. The funds will be used to deliver an ambitious roadmap, including:

• Short-form video and image-based news across all social media (best explained with an example: https://www.instagram.com/thedailyaus/)

• AI-enhanced article summaries (can AI contextualize stories with historical data, make counter-arguments, etc.?)

• Adversarial collaborations between top forecasters to create models of major events

Project goals

The Base Rate Times is a moonshot bet on embedding prediction markets into mainstream media, mirroring the success of FiveThirtyEight in popularizing prediction polls.

• Popular epistemics: The media informs people's models of the world. Popularizing forecasts will help improve belief formation/revision and raise the quality of public debate.

• Early warning system: What if there was a major newspaper consistently reporting a 1 in 3 risk of a global pandemic before COVID-19?

• Influencing decision makers: Dominic Cummings, former chief advisor to the UK PM, tweeted “Govt is run by [the] PM listening to random news stories at 9am & blurting ideas”. What if instead of just ‘random news stories’, the PM also reacted to prediction markets?

While The Base Rate Times’ goals have a longshot probability of success, the likelihood of making a meaningful contribution at the margin is much higher.

How will this funding be used?

• $90k: my pre-tax salary (below market rate)

• $120.3k: freelancers + tools of trade + 'true cost of employment'

• $32.7k: product development + content creation

• $5.5k: business administration

• $78.2k: buffers (e.g. for planning fallacy)

How could this project be actively harmful?

As prediction markets grow more prominent, the incentive for interference increases. A political candidate, for instance, might try to manipulate market odds to improve public perceptions about their chance of success.

What other funding is this person or project getting?

None to date.