Paul G. Silva writes:
> 1. Thank you for the detailed reply. It was very helpful!
> 2. The more I study futarchy, the more I realize I was NOT a finance
> major back in college. By coincidence I am doing research, for the
> first time, in commodities futures - so the same terms are appearing
> in two places in my life of late :). But either way, it takes some
> work to understand.
> 3. Your explanations make it appear much safer to use futarchy - thank
> you.
>
> And on to my next question...
>
> All this theoretical discussion is fun, but how can we start testing
> these ideas? Robin clearly showed how we need not convince government
> to try futarchy as a first step - we can try it in corporations.
>
> In a past life I was the lead game designer at a little online game
> company. It was my exposure to the online game world that revealed to
> me the potential to use games as experimental platforms for all manner
> of interesting things - and places where you can work without worry of
> anti-gambling legislation (so long as the currency being bet is in-
> game currency vs real world money).

Interesting idea. I assume you mean a MMORG?

What sort of utility function could you have?

> My little company is still alive and kicking, and if we had some
> resources to burn (I look forward to that day :)), I'd LOVE to run
> futarchy experiments in it. One could imagine futarchy as a powerful
> means to determine which new features/changes should be made to an
> online game by letting the players bet in-game currency on various
> proposals.

By new features/changes, do you mean that a dev team implements the new
features that a decision market likes best? ISTM that brings in some side
issues. I can easily imagine a market loving a programming-intensive idea
and the dev team refusing because it's too much work.

It strikes me that one might have a more accurate microcosm. Make
proposals contain exactly the code that is to be added (or run in a
priveleged manner). I'm thinking of one of those reprogrammable MUDs like
LambdaMOO that had their own mini-languages.

Of course there's a possibility of that crashing the game - presumably
that's exactly the sort of thing we want to find out about, whether
futarchy can make disastrous choices that "destroy the world".

> Are there other places people see as ripe for cheap experimentation?
> What do people think of using online games as a testing platform?


Tom Breton (Tehom)