A bid by Darwinists to acquire rights to the Expelled documentary on the ID theorists has failed. From TOAF:
Combined with the funds the Foundation already had on hand, we had just over $50,000 available to bid on the film (and pay the 10% buyer’s premium). The winning bid, however, was $201,000. Because all of the bidders were anonymous, we do not know identity of the winning bidder.
Update, just in: Walt Ruloff and his associates, who were the original producers of EXPELLED, won the auction. More later.
Talk origins were trying to buy Expelled “The reason given is so they can then release unpublished material, but equally they could prevent future sales of the film.”
There is a hiatus in significant coverage at this point because the companies that owned various aspects of Expelled lost touch with the people featured in it – for reasons still unexplained – despite the fact that the film was doing well.
1 May 2008 Stanford Fair use project to defend Expelled’s use of Imagine. Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s widow, was suing.
19 April 2008 Some watch Expelled while buying ticket for another movie, to cause apparently lower sales.
17 April 2008 Did Expelled movie rip off John Lennon’s music? Major media hold forth on the question.
10 April 2008 Expelled plagiarizing Harvard? However, 11 04 2008 Bolinski backs down on plagiarism claim. (Note: Mark Mathis told Denyse O’Leary that all new art had been commissioned.)
21 March 2008 Richard Dawkins crashes Expelled screening The producer personally booted PZ Myers because, as he told Denyse O’Leary, years later, he wanted the fellow to know what being Expelled felt like.
27 September 2007 Expelled makes front page of New York Times “Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s Origin”
19 September 2007 Expelled: The movie attempts to interview Baylor president John Lilley “regarding the removal of Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab from Baylor”
28 August 2007 Can Ben Stein’s Expelled be sued by angry Darwinists? “That’s the warning I received from an anonymous “wellwisher” (?)”
27 August 2007 Randy “Flock of Dodos” Olson thinks trailer for Expelled is great I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that is an excellent trailer they have produced.”
27 August 2007 Mild-mannered scientist Rick Sternberg to appear in film: “I was viewed as an intellectual terrorist”
Just wait until someone tries to sell the rights to evolutionism’s “documentary”- The Island of Dr Moreau– don’t laugh they really do think it’s a documentary…
I would be genuinely curious to see a comparison of both ratings and box office receipts for Expelled versus, say, Religulous or anything by Dawkins.
A couple of years ago I wrote the following article about whether or not the Internet has changed the Fundamentals of Marketing, and since then I have read many articles relating to this topic and I have had many conversations with both professional colleagues and students about whether these fundamentals still apply and whether the Internet needs its own set of Fundamentals. I recently found a site touting the 10 fundamentals of online marketing and while the information was sound, much of it was very familiar in the sense it could be found in one way or another in the Fundamentals of Marketing and the rest were not really what I would consider fundamentals but more basic marketing common sense. I encourage you to click on the link above and read them, and then read on what I have written and you decide.
The question remains has the Internet changed The Fundamentals of Marketing? The fundamentals of marketing are still taught in business and marketing classes in Universities everywhere and are a very real part of business today. Let’s start with a quick refresher of what those fundamentals are and what they mean.
·Marketing Mix – Also known as the Four P’s of marketing is the combination of product, place (distribution), promotion, and price. (1) Product – The features of the product (or service). (2) Place – Where the product is being sold. “Distribution Channels” Location of customers and potential customers, how to get to them. (3) Promotion – The actual marketing of the product/Service through advertising, publicity, promotions. (4) Price – The price the product/service is being sold for.
I have debated with other marketing professionals who claimed that the fundamentals are a set of traditional fundamentals and that while they still apply to traditional marketing, that e-marketing need and deserve its own set of fundamentals. I disagree. To begin with traditional, e-marketing, the line is becoming blurred as the Internet and Internet technology becomes entangled into the fabric of everyday life, personal and business alike.
A year or so ago when I first researched this information BabyCenter, LLC, released research results of a study called “The 21st Century Mom ™ Report” that revealed that having a baby changes purchasing behavior of women. The report shows significant increases of moms’ use of Social Media, up 462 percent from 2006 and the use of cell phones up 348 percent. They use Social Media for recommendations on brands and products and 73 percent felt they find trustworthy information about products and services through online communities and to get advice from other Moms going through the same experiences (babycenter.com, June 2009). In more recent research that is more broad in its scope; Compete’s Summer 2012 Online Shopper Intelligence Survey relayed by eMarketer suggests that most industries can improve website traffic and conversions by building a better presence on the internet. The report focused on industries most frequently associated with the B2C sector and found that more than half of consumers access different forms of web content to research their purchases in the grocery, health and beauty, household essentials and pet supply industries. (brafton.com) Brafton also recently cited data from an About.com study that found more than 80 percent of consumers won’t buy from companies they don’t trust. Many of these consumers said they hold more favorable views of companies that provide information demonstrating authority within their industries.
The Internet is being used to advertise traditional products and services and traditional media is being used to advertise websites and online businesses. So does this change the fundamentals of marketing, do they stay the same, does their meanings change or are they evolving? I believe that how they are applied may be different, but the fundamentals themselves are the same; the vehicle that is being used to market doesn’t change the fundamentals, if they did there would be a different set of fundamentals of marketing for TV/Radio, a different for print, and another for outside media like billboards, but there’s not. Let’s look at the fundamentals of marketing from an online perspective;
Value Proposition; is a product or service’s value changed because it is now being marketed online? In most cases the answer would be no, unless the value proposition is because of the Internet, like Amazon.com who doesn’t have an offline presence, their value is convenience and price.
This entry was posted in Business, Marketing and tagged Business, digital marketing, e-marketing, email marketing, four P's of marketing, fundamentals of marketing, Joe Melle, marketing mix, online marketing by Joe Melle. Bookmark the permalink.	
Mencius Moldbug and Robin Hanson are debating Robin's intriguing idea of "futarchy", which has attracted many fans. The basic idea of futarchy is "when a betting market clearly estimates that a proposed policy would increase expected national welfare, that proposal becomes law."
Robin and Mencius both make some great points in this debate -- for example, Mencius observes that GDP and similar estimates of "national welfare" are poor criteria for decision-making, analogous to a corporation making decisions to maximize revenue instead of profits. GDP in the United States, for example, rose dramatically during World War II, but its standard of living was probably significantly lower for most people than in the Great Depression due to rationing, death, and other traumas of war.
But both Mencius and Robin have misconstrued or vaguely glossed over two of the biggest problems with zero-sum decision markets, especially when applied to government decisions. First an observation: all prediction markets are decision markets unless the resulting prediction is so useless that nobody ever makes a decision based on it or some government somehow bans all possible kinds of decisions based on those markets. The distinction Robin and Mencius make between the two serves to obfuscate those issues that are problems with real decision markets rather than with theoretical or play prediction markets. Two of the biggest problems are:
1. The problem of "morons' money", deemed by Mencius to be the money of some less-informed fraction of players who are disincentivized to play the zero-sum prediction game, actually means the money of anybody with information worse than the best player's information. Since it's a zero-sum game, and much less entertaining than sports betting, any money that is stupider than the average money has a disincentive to play -- in sharp contrast to normal positive-sum markets. But when the less-informed half of the players leave the market, we have a new half of the market that has a disincentive to play, and so on. There's only one person left for whom it would be rational to play, if there were any market left. Prediction markets can work in an experiment only because students of the professor or fans of the idea feel they have a duty to play, or want to signal to fans that they like the idea, or because there are a few people who, like the much larger population of sports bettors, find it genuinely entertaining and thus worth wasting some time and/or money on. Robin I believe has tacitly recognized this problem in his proposals to goose these markets with subsidies. But how big subsidies are needed? It's a high-risk market, so you need to guarantee a high rate of positive return to the average player to compensate for the risk if you want good information entering the market.
2. Moral hazard: As I stated, prediction markets are also decision markets. We're right now going through major economic problems that stem from neglect of moral hazard. Selling securities, insurance, or betting without the investors/bettors or their agents or regulators exercising due diligence and control creates pathological incentives for people to do things like, as we've seen in the mortgage market, give cheap loans to bad credit risks because there were a bunch of number-crunchers with woefully incomplete models buying or insuring these loans who didn't understanding that most kinds of markets create additional risk by creating moral hazard, that this moral hazard must be well controlled if the market is to work, and that controlling moral hazard is usually far from straightforward.
In these betting markets, which are decision markets, people inside and outside government will make their own decisions based on the market. Coercive decisions will have an especially pathological effect: they turn the zero-sum market into an overall negative-sum game. For example, a market predicting the death of someone can, as Tim May long ago observed, readily be used as an assassination market. That's why, for example, PAM, a since-abandoned effort by the U.S. Department of Defense to try out Robin's ideas for prediction markets, had a market for predicting the death of Yasser Arafat but not of George W. Bush. Since these are markets for government decisions, the decisions it drives will, like assassinations, be primarily coercive in nature, for example to wage war on country X or to tax one group of people in order to subsidize another. If the decisions resulting from such a market were voluntary, you could just go onto a voluntary market to satisfy your needs instead of bothering with deciding that government must make some decision and then betting on its outcome. Furthermore, Mencius, although waxing entirely too rude behind his pseudonymous mask, is probably quite right that these markets will reflect the demand for desired decisions far more than a "supply" of information about how to best make that decision: per (1.), there is little to no incentive to supply such information without huge subsidies to give the markets an overall positive rate of return comparable to other high-risk markets.
For example the market for "if the U.S. gives $20 billion to GM the U.S. GDP will rise by 1.1% or more [instead of the expected consensus by some group of economists of 1.0%]" will be dominated by GM, its unions, its dealers and suppliers, and so forth goosing it to a "probably true" prediction, not by people betting on the extremely uncertain, practically lost in the random noise, outcome of the proposition. If GM thinks it can sway the odds of a decision in its favor by 5% by, increasingly as the time for decision approaches, investing up to nearly $1 billion in the market, it will do so. GM has far more to gain by the gift of other people's money than arbitragers making risky bets with their own money have to gain from arbitraging the market back down to whatever they believe to be the true odds of the GDP rising 1.1%. If GM is banned directly from participating in the market, there are numerous other parties with similar stakes in the outcome and they can't all be banned. GM and its allies also have much to gain by lobbying the government to set up this kind of market for direct subsidies instead of futarchic markets for more generic decisions you might find more useful, such as a "remove the President if the GDP doesn't rise 1.1% or more" market. Futarchy thus becomes little more than an auction for government favors, like the time the Praetorian Guard auctioned off the emperorship to the highest bidder.
It would be interesting to try straightforward government-by-the-highest-bidder. We'd probably discover why historians have equated this kind of process with corruption, but it would be well worth the suffering of some hapless residents in some small county somewhere to try the experiment and learn from it. It would of course be interesting to try out futarchy in a similarly real but small scale, restricting the players as well as the victims of the market to our guinea pig jurisdiction since there are no big GM-subsidy stakes at play.
Of course, some would argue that we are living in this kind of experiment anyway, just under a blizzard of euphemisms instead of a straightforward honest auction. Others would argue that democratic voters bring no more information to governmental decisions than "moron money" would in these markets. I have no ready refutations for these arguments, but they don't prove futarchy is better than either what we have now or other possible alternative reforms.
In summary, fans of prediction markets in general, and futarchy in particular, need to actually specify how to deal with moral hazard, as insurance companies and their regulators have, rather than mysterious hand-waving about the supposed "several ways to deal with it", as well as to acknowledge the need to subsidize these markets and figure out how to fairly distribute these endowments.
It would be interesting to try straightforward government-by-the-highest-bidder.What if people were allowed to sell their votes? Theoretically, that would lead to a Pareto optimal state. Vote buyers would bid up the price of votes, so that government dollars would actually end up flowing back to the people.
Nick, I've published a number of papers on theory and lab experiments about manipulation; you seem to think them completely irrelevant, since you ignore them and go on to construct your own analysis. Why?
I get the impression the idea that Mencius considers to be "retarded" is that a firm commitment is made that the policy adopted will be the one the prediction market indicates will lead to a more favorable result. If the prediction market is just one factor, then there is much less risk. In particular, if there is almost no participation in a prediction market, it seems much more reasonable to ignore the "prediction".
Nick, yes zero-sum speculation would unravel to no trade if not for four factors: hedging, irrational traders, manipulators, and direct trading subsidies. And yes any market that influences any decision may attract manipulators. But for markets that influence important decisions, the temptation to manipulate is plenty to produce a thick market.
Robin, we see prediction markets which are less than zero-sum (Intrade takes a cut, I believe) not withering to zero. I am going to assume hedging is not an issue. Do you think they do not wither away to zero because of irrational investors and the rare cases of manipulation?
Some people just play because they enjoy the game. But I think that is much more likely to be the case for betting on literal horse races than on most policy issues.
George, the lack of ability to credibly commit to choosing the "most favorable" market does indeed sound like another big problem with futarchy, but it does seem quite related to the lack of ability to define a firm formula for judging the "most favorable", which in turn is quite related to the moral hazard of, to go back to my example, GM goosing the "GM bailout" market (what Mencius is calling "bears", which I define as people trading because they have a large stake in the decision and thus willing to lose a lesser expected amount of money in the decision market in order to win a greater expected amount of benefit from a favorable decision).
Incidentally, "bears" is a preposterously misleading metaphor, as is the "wolves" label for mere arbitrageurs, since the "bears" are the real predators in this market for coercive decisions, while the "wolves" are providing the benefit of useful information. When one sees thoughtless metaphors like this being thrown around like this and not criticized, one can tell that there is much light that needs to be shed on this subject.
If to return to our example the GM bailout contract is trading at 0.02% above the economists' consensus GDP growth, and the Tesla Motors bailout contract at 0.01% above, should we pick the GM bailout over the Tesla bailout contract (assuming we only have budget for one bailout), or do legislators get to make a judgment call that the GM premium reflects their much lobbying power than Tesla and pick the Tesla bailout? If the numbers are reversed, can our legislators decide that it is completely irrational to suppose that a tiny company like Tesla can have a bigger impact than a behemoth like GM and again ignore the market's seeming judgment?
Robin: I've published a number of papers on theory and lab experiments about manipulation; you seem to think them completely irrelevant, since you ignore them and go on to construct your own analysis. Why?
Robin, you've made a proposal that would coercively impact me if implemented. I am under no obligation to undergo intellectual hazing exercises before critiquing it.
Your proposal is straightforward enough; understanding it does not require the reading the highly obscure justifications you have written for the target audience of journal referees from a particular academic school of thought. Big political ideas like this should be addressed from many different sets of assumptions before being tried on a large scale. It is often far more efficient and useful to just approach it from my angle, or for Mencius to approach it from his, than trying to reverse-engineer your particular set of hidden assumptions from your obscure papers.
Since your more intelligible summaries and blog posts seem to clearly reflect some bad assumptions (such as idea that there is such a thing as a useful prediction market that is not also a decision market, or that the distinction between coercive and voluntary decisions is not only not crucial and central to the whole debate, but is not even worth commenting on, or your lack of discussion of moral hazards such as the assassination market problem), I have no reason to believe your papers justifying futarchy don't make the same bad assumptions.
Robin: ... zero-sum speculation would unravel to no trade if not for four factors: hedging, irrational traders, manipulators, and direct trading subsidies.
Do you mean all four factors have to be present, or any one of them, or just a sufficient weighted sum of them? As for the irrational traders, the entertainment value that motivates the play in OnTrade etc. that TGGP observes would be utterly dwarfed by the vast financial resources and incentives of those impacted by government decisions. (It may even be the case that some OnTrade contracts are already dominated by "bears" and bear arbitrageurs if some decisions of government officials are already being influenced by these estimates).
This is economics gone horribly wrong. A decision market to decide between a GM bailout and a Tesla bailout?
Or, you know, you could let each person decide for themselves whether to send their money to GM or Tesla. Does this sound familiar?
Nick, I never said there are prediction markets that don't influence decisions. On modeling factors to get trade existing, I mean any one factor is enough. On coercivity, I proposed a mechanism for governance, and described how it can be applied in both voluntary and coercive contexts. I get that you hate coercive governance, and want me to rail against it, and refuse to offer it any assistance, but I didn't discuss that because it isn't directly relevant. I have discussed moral hazard; if you refuse to read my publications, how can you know what I have or haven't commented on?
Robin: I get that you hate coercive governance, and want me to rail against it, and refuse to offer it any assistance, but I didn't discuss that because it isn't directly relevant.
This grossly mischaracterizes my position and my reason for raising the subject. In fact I have written that coercion is quite necessary for legal procedure. (Notice that I am providing links rather than vague general claims that I dealt with this issue somewhere, and you have to root through all my old obscure papers to find where I did). My objection here is not ideological, it is that when you add coercion to an economic transaction, the outcome is usually quite different than a voluntary transaction. You can't model them the same way. Standard economics assumes voluntary transactions and I have found that economists usually make gross errors when modelling coercive transactions. You are sweeping this crucial factor entirely under the rug in the explanations you've written for the general public -- if you are also, as it's quite reasonable to suspect, neglecting this crucial factor in your papers, the output from these Holy Writs, without having read which Thou Shall Not Comment on the straightforward political proposal allegedly justified therein, the conclusions reached by these vaunted works are likely to be wrong.
As for those publications, I have read your *public* publications on futarchy, i.e. those written for the general intelligent public and not just for specialists who share your particular set of hidden economic assumptions. I've also read enough of your technical papers on other subjects to know that this is not a very worthwhile way to figure out what you're up to. Like most academics, you are very poor at stating your assumptions -- you have a set of hidden or tacit assumptions and hidden special meanings of words, presumably shared with the journal referees, which cannot be readily reverse-engineered by the intelligent layman. So, like most of the supporters of your proposal, I read your clearer restatements, in the form of blog posts and summaries. In the case of futarchy, the proposal you are making is clear enough, it is the justifications that are obscure. And in your statements to the general public from what I've seen you have not dealt at all with coercion or moral hazard, nor have you answered any of my objections here. If you had seriously dealt with these problems before it shoudn't be so hard for you to answer my objections now, but instead all we're getting from you is ad hominem argument.
The difference is that the stock market is positive-sum -- the average return is positive, the average investor has made a profit over almost all 15-year periods. Not so in an unsubsidized event betting market -- the average bettor makes nothing minus transaction costs.
Again, this has nothing to do with prediction or decision markets of the kind we are discussing here.
Actually, I picked the example straight out of this year's headlines, and it is one of the *less* extreme bailouts we've seen recently. $20 billion is very small potatoes in Washington D.C.
But nobody knows what the "proper" valuation is supposed to be. If the GM bailout market predicts a 0.05%/yr greater growth of GDP over the next 10 years if the bailout is enacted, (a) nobody knows (as opposed to merely believes) that this is not the proper price, (b) it is far within the noise of expected GDP growth, making a bet against it very close to a 50/50 proposition even if you have some special knowledge, and (c) if it beats the projections from competing policies, under futarchy rules it should be enacted.
Time is also a crucial factor here. What is the decision based on, the last price, the last month, or the last year? Whichever you choose, the "bear" can choose to goose the price over just that particular period.