This echoes some of the conversation with @llamaonthebrink on the @Truemarketsorg podcast when we discussed “how do we know anything?”

All our beliefs about the world have an epistemic scaffolding around them, but very rarely do we explicitly articulate what it is, or how it works.

Here, Jay is waging a campaign for people (mainly on Wikipedia) to recognize that the Truro Cathedral in the UK has four spires, not three.

Wikipedia here is a good proxy for an epistemic funnel with poor scaffolding. Jay and others had uploaded pictures showing clearly that there are four spires (not three) but the editors refused to accept it unless it came from a good source. This gets things entirely backwards—this is like someone in Syria refusing to believe they were in a war zone unless three major television networks announced that there was a war, or with an official declaration of war by the Syrian government.

And this is the type of thinking that should go when we’re thinking about prediction markets not just as a weird cousin of perp-trading, but as a totally different, more “true” source of information to help us cut through the AI slop plaguing social media, and the censorship manufactured consensus in traditional media.

This is what made Polymarket such a success during the election. The entire media apparatus told you that Trump was trailing and would lose. Where do you get your truth?

You can get it by doing your own research, as Theo the whale did, and betting on it. This information then gets broadcast to the rest of the world.

But outside of these specific sports or political contests the epistemic scaffolding problem returns. 

In our everyday life we have:
- our own sensory observations
- observations/reports by trusted relationships
- trusted authorities (the news, governments, academia etc)
- experience/intuition/wisdom/introspection
- reports by trusted tools and instruments (temperature readings, sensors)
- aggregated information (markets)
- disaggregated information (social media)

One issue we have today in the world is that trusted authorities have basically ceased to function properly. They are supposed to carry through certain families of incentives to produce truth—investigative journalism, adversarial justice, bureaucratic discipline, scientific method, intellectual rigor.

But the sociology of the state, academia, and journalism have decayed so much that none of these truth-seeking practices work sufficiently well.

So we rely now more on disaggregated information, which AI is turning into toxic sludge.

The goal of True Markets is to use AI to vastly expand the availability of tooling to provide reports about the world, and hopefully also turn our own sensory observations into more broadly accepted types of information.

I would hope that in the future prediction markets will accept images and video as partial evidence for resolving a market—ideally these videos and pictures will have cyrptographic signatures, such as those pioneered by the Exodus phone to make sure they’re not AI slop.

I would hope any prediction market worth its salt would be able to tell you whether a cathedral has three or four spires, without requiring a newspaper article to declare it so. Wouldn’t you? Otherwise, can we really say that have a better way of knowing?