Tinfoil hat reason for disclosure happening now

That post about Ryan Graves podcast led me down a rabbit hole. I was going through the episodes picking what to listen to and episode 9 is with a guy called Robin Hanson who coined the term “Great Filter” for the Fermi Paradox and pioneered prediction markets for private companies and eventually DARPA for their FutureMAP program. Prediction markets are markets where you bet on future world events, with the idea that the crowd as a whole will be better at predicting events like wars or regime turnovers than traditional methods. The Iowa Election Market is a current example of a prediction market for presidential outcomes. It is often more accurate than polls. The National Weather Service uses prediction markets in weather models by incorporating the cost of say orange juice to predict long term weather outlooks. The idea being people that know a lot about orange juice farming bet on it smartly, and oranges are susceptible to certain weather events. There are many applications, these are just two.

FutureMAP was the US governments version of a prediction market that was cancelled because it gained the notoriety of predicting events like assassinations in the middle east, which didn’t sit well with some senators. An assassination market. But it was more than that, here’s the CIA autopsy report on FutureMAP (https://www.cia.gov/static/23949579e301b067561bbf2faef57c0b/Prediction-Markets-Enhance-Intel.pdf).

My tinfoil hat theory is that something like FutureMAP exists now. I would be surprised if more autocratic countries like China didn’t do this. They are known to collect as much information about people and relationships between people as possible and have no political will to end that like in the US. My theory is that the US either has it’s own secret prediction market that was kickstarted recently with the advent of real AI in the public domain, or they somehow found out about China’s and need to catch up, which would presumably be relatively easy because they could build off FutureMAP. When it comes to disclosure, the rest of the tinfoil theory is that the prediction market is predicting something to do with mass disclosure out of governments hands, so are promoting some kind of soft disclosure now.

Ok back to work.