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News through prediction markets

$499raised
$500,000funding goal
$500valuation
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Moonshot bet on mainstreaming prediction markets

  • The Base Rate Times is an early-stage news company that prominently incorporates prediction markets into its coverage.

  • Our ambition is to become a mainstream media source, mirroring the success of FiveThirtyEight in popularising prediction polls.

  • Think “like 538, but for prediction markets”!

10x solution to fake news & vague verbiage

  • For example, one headline reads: “German spy chief sees no 'cracks' in Putin system”. Another contradicts: “Putin 'dead man walking,' former CIA chief says”.

  • By contrast, multiple prediction markets all show Putin >90% likely to stay in power (as neatly summarized on BRT).

  • Glancing at a single chart of forecasts is more informative than reading ten articles.

Mainstream headlines optimise for storytelling, not accuracy

  • For example: “Taiwan braces for China's fury over Pelosi visit”. Great clickbait, but ambiguous about the risk’s magnitude.

  • By contrast, BRT’s headline: “China-Taiwan conflict risk 14%, up 2x after Pelosi visit”.

  • This is an actionable insight - it can inform your expected value calculations on whether to flee Taiwan, for example.

Fills gap in the ecosystem

  • There are numerous well-funded prediction platforms now, but their forecasts have not been extensively used by the media and content creators.

  • BRT seeks to bridge this gap by sharing insights from prediction markets in an engaging way.

  • The money will be used to create compelling content across X/Twitter, YouTube, TikTok and other major social media platforms.

Describe why you think you're qualified to work on this

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Harvey Powers

8 months ago

Tracking this and plan to bookmark the site / add to my news reading.

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I like learning about news through prediction markets, even though it seems like progress has stalled a bit on this I think it's still worth funding at a certain level. I could imagine something like this about some events that a lot of people are following being interesting even to people who don't want to deal with betting on things or making predictions themselves. ESPN prominently displays a win probability tracker for most sports, NYT has "The Needle," I think there's definitely a lot of people who want to know the probabilities of things.

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David Glidden

8 months ago

Love this. Tried something similar at thepredictionpost.substack.com and got good feedback, just didn’t have the time to continue it.

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Alyssa Riceman

8 months ago

This strikes me as a long shot, but as a long shot worth funding. The website does a good job of concisely displaying useful information; you've done a good job building an initial audience; and, if you did manage to continue scaling up into mainstream popularity, that'd likely be pretty good from an increased-popularization-of-prediction-markets standpoint, and thus appeal to the sorts of longtermist funders who are pushing for that. My main concern is a lack of clear understanding of how the process of growing-in-popularity works and thus of how the money will help; but I'm willing to put some money in, nonetheless, on the basis that it's presumably helpful somewhere, to fund your continued time-expenditure on the site if nothing else.

(And then, separately, a more pettily-selfish question mostly unrelated to my funding decision: is there any way you could add support for some manner of RSS-based or newsletter-based following of the site's numbers over time, e.g. weekly or monthly snapshots? Manual polling is awkward, as is following on social media platforms I'm not preexistingly in the habit of tracking things on, but the site's readouts are nice enough that I would like to follow it, which is a rare distinction among sites-about-mainstream-news-topics.)

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Osnat Katz

9 months ago

More thoughts from me:

  • BRT is really interesting, and I want to see + learn more

  • I also booked a call with Marcel on March 13, and will update

astrosnat avatar

Osnat Katz

9 months ago


@astrosnat OK I have my little update from a brief call with Marcel. Some thoughts:
- My understanding is that part of the bottleneck is that the intersection between "makes news headlines" and "has enough people forecasting/has enough liquidity in the market" can be smaller than ideal
- Integration between metaforecast + seeing what people are talking about on social media is not easy

IMO these are solvable problems. So looking forward to seeing where BRT goes in the future

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Saul Munn

9 months ago

quick thoughts:

  • the "full" version of BRT — one as polished as i wish BRT were — is awesome, and where i hope a large chunk of the prediction market/forecasting community goes.

  • however, it doesn't seem like BRT has made much progress over the last ~6 months. this might be because of a lack of funding (which, hopefully, funding through ACXG/Manifund would work to resolve), but i'd be keen to learn more here about why progress hasn't happened.

  • i don't see anyone else trying nearly so hard or doing nearly so well at exactly the thing that BRT is doing. the swift newsletter seems like the thing that's closest in the reference class, but it's quite clear that BRT fills a different niche from swift (long-form qualitative pieces with some forecasting to back it up, released ~1ce/month vs quick, quantitative summaries of where the prediction markets & forecasting aggregation platforms stand on a number of topics, released pretty frequently; e.g., the New Yorker vs the NYT).

  • this seems well within the bounds of what ACXG25 would be interested in retrofunding, probably within the bounds of what the LTFF is interested in retrofunding, and maybe within the bounds of what the SFF is interested in retrofunding. definitely outside what i'd expect EAIF to retro fund.

  • i've booked a meeting with marcel tomorow (friday, march 8), and i'm interested to hear his thoughts on what's preventing BRT from being awesome, and where he wants to take it. i'll drop more thoughts on this project after the meeting.

astrosnat avatar

Osnat Katz

9 months ago

@saulmunn Hi Saul - how did your meeting with Marcel go? Would be interested in hearing your thoughts about BRT

saulmunn avatar

Saul Munn

9 months ago

@astrosnat well! here are the notes :)

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nihal m

9 months ago

Base rate times is great! I look forward to see where you take it from here!