Comment by thrance
5 days ago
At this point, just go to a casino. The last thing our world needs is more gambling and fruitless speculation.
5 days ago
At this point, just go to a casino. The last thing our world needs is more gambling and fruitless speculation.
Speculation with positive expected return is a good thing. So the question is, does fusion have positive expected return?
The world spends 10% of global GDP on energy, about $10 trillion per year. The world will spend something like a quadrillion dollars on energy this century, possibly more as the world gets wealthier and per capita energy use increases. A billion dollar investment is just one part in a million of that. Fusion doesn't have to be very likely to succeed to make such speculation worthwhile.
I was talking about prediction markets, not fusion.
It’s not that I want to bet, but that I want a good probability estimate about whether commercially viable fusion power will be around by such and such date.
No, we'd simply get another financial product completely detached from any real economic value, of which we have plenty already.
What more insight could gamblers provide about nuclear fusion that expert physicists and engineers can't? Why and how would their predictions be more accurate than industry leaders?
Prediction markets are known to have an optimism bias when it comes to stuff like this.