CosmoCoffee

[Adam Amara]

Seeing polls in cosmocoffee on 'what is dark energy' was a bit strange and to be honest I'm not sure these polls are useful. But, after thinking about it a little I realised that there clearly is some information in the polling, but it isn't being mined very well. Now, I'm not a big expert but from what I can gather markets can be highly efficient at extracting loads of little bits of information from many sources. Ok, its not a fisher matrix but it seems to work in the real world.

This may have been suggested before but I can't find a discussion in the suggestions so here goes. This may go against the ethos of "the purity of science", and I'm not sure if the community is big enough BUT why not set up a futures market for cosmology? People could trade on things like the cosmological parameters and cosmological constant vs varying w. I'm sure some body out there is more of a financial/market wizz then I am so should be able to say if this is technically possible or not. Assuming it is feasible would people be interested in trading in science?

Adam

[Sarah Bridle]

Quite a whacky idea Adam! Not sure I know enough about how futures work to comment much. But I'm assuming that you can make money by correctly guessing the right model.

What if David Spergel were to put millions on zre=17? How would this affect our reception of the WMAP2 results? Seems a bit worrying re "conflict of interests".

On the other hand, could it be a great way to fund future experiments?

[Adam Amara]

Hi Sarah, I'm glad I'm not disappointing you on the wacky ideas front. As far as David Spergel putting millions on WMAP results,
i) I suspect that with any well developed betting system, as more people bet the odds change, so I suspect the system will balance itself out.
ii) Are you advocating some kind of penalty again insider trading?
iii) My feeling is, if this is a way of sneaking out some information about the second year data, then you've just given a very strong reason why we should have markets.

I'm not sure, there might needs to be a regularity body that makes pots of money. If this happens then I totally agree that this could be turned into a revenue stream for things like future projects. Where you can have a good idea of what you should fund from what "shares" are doing well. Obviously lensing shares would be doing well at the moment.

Adam

[Hans Kristian Eriksen]

[Adam Amara]

[Benjamin Wandelt]

I'm all for it. If nothing else it would settle the Bayesian vs Frequentist debate (or what's left of it) once and for all.