Trace

Solomon Sia

individual

Other existential risk

Received
$138,000
from 1 funders
Grants
1
Funders
1
Years active
2022

Grants over time

$0$50K$100K$150K2022

Biggest funders

Long-Term Future Fund$138,000100%1

Reviews

Linch Zhang · Long-Term Future Fund · full post · Aug 2, 2023

$71,000 · 6-month stipend for providing consultation and recommendations on changes to the US regulatory environment for prediction markets.

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  • Solomon Sia wants to talk to a range of advisers, including industry experts, users, and contacts at the CFTC, to see if there are good improvements in ways to regulate prediction markets in the US, while simultaneously protecting users and reducing regulatory risk and friction.
  • This was an exploratory grant for seeing how it’s possible to improve the US regulatory environment for prediction markets with a resulting written report provided to EA Funds.
  • I think this is a reasonable/great option to explore: I think my position on prediction markets is somewhat more cynical than that of most EAs in the forecasting space, but still, I’m broadly in favor of them and think they can be a critical epistemic intervention, both for uncovering new information and for legibility/common knowledge reasons.It seemed quite plausible to me that the uncertain regulatory environment for prediction markets in the US is impeding the growth of large real-money prediction markets on questions that matter.Solomon seemed unusually competent and knowledgeable about the tech regulations space, a skillset very few EAs have.Cultivating this skillset and having him think about EA issues seemed valuable. A potential new caveat is that in 2023 as AI risk worries heat up, it seems increasingly likely that we might be able to draw from a diverse skillset of experienced and newly interested/worried people.The for-profit motivations for this work are there but not very large, as unless a company is trying very hard to do specific regulatory capture for their company (which is bad and also practically very difficult), easing prediction market regulations has collective benefits and individual costs.(weakly held) I thought trying to nail this during the Biden administration is good because it seemed plausible that the current CFTC will be more predisposed to liking prediction markets than average for the CFTC.One interesting update is that EA connections are likely a mild plus in 2022, and a moderate liability in 2023.NB: Solomon and his collaborator think a) that the EA connection is still a mild to moderate positive b) it’s now unclear whether the Biden administration is better or worse than a counterfactual Republican administration.
  • I’ve thought about this grant some afterwards, and I think even with the benefit of hindsight, I'm still a bit confused about how happy I should be about this grant ex-post.One thing is that I’ve grown a bit more confused about the output and tractability of interventions in this domain.The successes(?) Kalshi had confused me and I haven’t had enough time to integrate this into my worldview.My current impression is that CFTC is fairly open to informed opinions from others on this matter.I continue to believe it’s a good grant ex-ante.

Grants received

Date ↓FunderViaAmountCauseSourcePurpose
Jul 2022Long-Term Future FundEA Funds$138,000Other existential riskea_funds6 month salary to improve the US regulatory environment for prediction markets